The Butcherbird Stories Read online

  Avulsion

  Swimming in early summer is a particular pleasure. Sunlight through the high windows lasts past eight in the evening. Not too many people around. I’m going well when I see something drifting along the bottom and it could be a bandaid, yet it is not, and it should be anything else but it’s a finger.

  I swim up the lane, come back. I really don’t want to see it again. I’d rather it was a hallucination. I’ve always been curious about what kind of experience that would be. Too practical a mind. Too dominated by logic for such geysers of imagination. I’m already thinking about the bother instead. A finger means I’ll have to stop ten minutes after I started and I need my hour in the pool to have a good night’s sleep. Without a long swim my legs will buzz, my blood will hum.

  The lane ropes guide me over and past the finger. Not at the shallow end where it would be within easy reach. Not at the deep end either, where it would be more a thing to nudge away with the foot. I see it’s a thumb. It wobbles left and right as it registers the motion of my arms through the clear, chlorinated water.

  I keep swimming.

  Let me think about it, I tell myself. Panic is often unnecessary. Have I ever experienced panic that merited that response? I don’t think I have. A few moments is all a person needs to see that everything falls into the usual patterns of life, into tidy sequences of expected experience. After a few seconds we see we are mistaken. Our perceptions are fallible and our reasoning often faulty.

  There’s no foretaste of doom. Our tragedies stun us. A storm slips through a crack in an open sky. The whole world a glass sphere, falling down in shards. A mind will explode as if it were the bullet that broke everything open to begin with. Catastrophes never need a trigger. No warning. No inkling. No panic. And no reason for me to do anything other than go on in my unshattered world, enjoying how the sun makes its way through the windows high up above so late into the evening. Sunset stained glass colours remind me of a cathedral. Not tonight. Tonight the air is a clean white—it draws the night in as though it is an inhalation. I imagine myself swimming right through the darkness of the evening on one breath held long … and then released with an exhalation of light when the new day moves across the water.

  It doesn’t matter how grandiose I allow my mind to become—every time I pass the spot, I see the thumb. I can close my eyes but can’t avert my head. I take a breath. There it is again when I breathe out a stream of air below me. I don’t want to stop for that thumb. It’s farcical, isn’t it? Keep on going, don’t pull over for the hitchhiker. That gesture of the hand asking for a ride. A few bubbles escape me in a chuckle. I keep myself from laughing.

  I had been flowing, fish-smooth through water—flat and calm and blue, unbroken except where there are a few swimmers in lanes on the other side of the pool. I’ve lost my flow now, though I don’t want to admit it. I’m struggling for breath and all my movements feel mechanical yet I’m sure I can find rhythm again. I should be able to slip back into it with another lap or two. There it is again, the nail nicely clipped back. It belonged to a well-groomed man.

  Flow is rare for a person who wasn’t taught how to swim as a child. I was only taught how not to drown and there’s a big difference. I will always feel as though swimming has come too late to be natural—as natural as it might be if mastered along with dancing and running. It’s never occurred to me before that I’m much better at swimming; I can’t remember the last time I ran or danced. It might have been decades since I did either and I don’t know when I’ll have occasion to dance or run again. Maybe never. All I have now are these imperfect liquid balances of my body stretched out in what is an oddly productive flailing.

  No matter how hard I try, I can’t distract myself. There it is, in the same spot, every time. Every thought founders. A thumb on the bottom of the pool. How long has it been there? I didn’t notice it the first few laps. I’d enjoyed seeing the edges of the green and white disks flash along and turn red as I drew towards the end of the lane and readied myself for the turn. The red fading away as the ropes indicated smooth sailing again with the interchanging sections of green and white, green and white, green and white, each float fitting sharply into the next, reminding me of the discs in a human spine and the way they slotted and jostled, loose enough to move with the skin of the pool’s surface.

  The thumb isn’t bloody. I don’t stop swimming because it occurs to me that it must be fake. No-one sees a thumb lolling about on the bottom of a pool as though it’s a lost barrette. So this must be a prank. Or it is a test. I’m not happy with either of those possibilities so I keep swimming, looking to find my flow again, uselessly since I’m getting angrier and angrier.

  This is what I’ll do (when I finally choose to stop). I will stand up, do my usual stretches, and I will look around, deadpan, glance casually at those who threw a thumb in the pool to play with an old man’s mind. And, in fact, I swim longer than I usually would to keep those bastards waiting. It’s only when I touch the wall to finish that I feel a serrated pain in my own hand.

  Dead Sun

  He enters the house at night and is taken up to a bedroom that hasn’t been used since the death of a son. He expects to walk into a room of toys and picture books and bright clothes in small sizes and images of jungle animals tacked to the walls. Everything has been packed away in a garage or given to extended family or thrown away, leaving an empty chest of drawers and a bed covered over with a clear plastic sheet to stop dust. Impressions in the carpet show where other furniture stood and marks on the plaster where pictures once decorated the bare walls. Outside the dead room is the sound of a car’s engine turning over.

  If it weren’t for the dust on the plastic sheet he might have thought the room had been cleared for his arrival. He waits in the doorway, struggling to stay on his feet. His knees buckle twice as he waits for the plastic to be removed. The bed is made with fresh linen and he is told to stay put. Don’t open the curtain. An open curtain would reveal that the dead boy’s room was being used again. He is not to risk revealing himself.

  The overhead light is not turned on when he’s led into the room. A lamp is plugged into a socket and left on the floor with a globe offering minimal illumination. It won’t leak at the edges of the curtain. Sun-yellow clouds in the blue plastic surface of the lamp, the kind suitable as a night light for a child—not so bright that it would keep the child awake.

  He wonders how the boy died. The man and woman who own this house are reluctant to talk to him. The woman said the child was ‘gone’. The man amended this a moment later and said he was dead and they did not look at each other and did not look at him.

  As he was taken up the stairs to the attic room he thought he could see the difference between ‘gone’ and dead. His mind is so befuddled by lack of sleep, he told himself he was himself dead yet he wasn’t gone and soon he’d be gone but not dead. It’s also the morphine affecting his thinking. His vision blurs and he can’t keep his eyes open.

  He walks into the room from the doorway. The mother closes the door a moment later. She has not slammed the door—not quite. It startles him like a gunshot would a dog. She walks down the short hallway, talking loudly enough for him to hear her voice, not her words, loud enough for the anger in her tone to be clear. He hears her thump-thump-thump down the wooden stairs and he hears the hiss of her husband for her silence. Both very quiet, perhaps whispering.

  He sleeps through the night and the next day and wakes disorientated, wondering at the night now as before, as though he’s travelled to a place that doesn’t know the sun. No clock to gauge how long he’s slept. His facial hair tells him it’s been a good while since he’s shaved.

  Food on the floor, within the circle of light from the lamp. A can of tuna on a plate with a fork. A bag of bread. A bottle of water and no glass. Next time it’s a tin of baked beans and a fork. No plate and no glass. He has the bread from the previous day. He need only pick off a few spots of mould. In the late evening she brings a glass
of cold milk and a warm croissant.

  He takes one of the morphine pills from his suitcase. He’s stretched the pills out—allowing the pain to grow— now he feels overcome even by the mild discomfort beginning to emerge. He needs the pain to be beaten back to a deep obliteration. He takes a second pill with the milk and lets the brittle crust of the croissant soften and dissolve in his mouth as he waits for the morphine. He eats every crumb from the plate. Leaves the plate and empty milk glass outside his door and when he walks back he stands in the middle of the room. The walls of the attic room slant to his left and right. This is the only place in the room he can stand upright.

  He closes his eyes and feels an instant disintegration— dead and gone. Even with open eyes he finds it difficult to keep his balance.

  A flash from outside and then the noise of thunder. Distant. It takes a few minutes for the rain to come. He had pushed aside the curtain upon waking in the middle of the night, spinning with vertigo simply lying in bed. He doesn’t see much outside the window, continues to stare at the ripple of black leaves on the dark limbs of a tree running with rainwater. There’s a cat’s-eye on the windowsill in the groove of the window track. He plucks out the marble and closes the curtain. The old couple would have been young when their child died.

  Asleep, he becomes aware of a noise without waking. Shoosh, shoosh. A gentle sound that works its way into his dream about a woman removing clothes. She is dropping layers of fabric from her body—clothes as heavy as curtains. Feels his initial excitement turn to dread as he listens to the shoosh, shoosh of the woman in his dream letting fall her dresses and gowns to the dusty ground. A barefoot queen, not sure really what she is but that her feet are dancing over brocade and silk, heels beating the brilliant fabric down into a dirt floor, alluring and frightening at the same time.

  He is able to turn from his left side onto his back and then onto his right side. Slowly. The bruises on his body have become less painful. The first day or two he’d only been able to sleep on his back and it was a question of tolerating the pain. When he urinates in the toilet downstairs the water in the bowl is tinged with blood, nowhere near as red as the first time he used the toilet. The pain in his kidneys and ribs can still be sharp so he is careful even when unconscious.

  The sound outside continues, a shoosh, shoosh that might be the noise of cars passing on a nearby road. More asleep than awake, he imagines it’s the sound of a bird flying. The narrow child’s bed is near the window. The glass is loose in the rotting wooden frame. In the evenings he can feel the cool of the night waft past his ears. It is calm and quiet now and there’s nothing, only that distinct noise. Cars passing on a wet road perhaps but that shoosh, shoosh might be the sound of wings.

  The large wings of an albatross that can fly across the ocean without needing to stop, for years gliding, diving and picking up fish from the waters below and sailing again high into the sky, flying on and on—the sound of those wings moving air past and below and rising. Shoosh, shoosh and then the silence of a long gliding progress up and down along tumbling currents of wind. His wife had told him that story, about years of flight over vast and hostile water. And he was told a while after she died that when the wind fell to nothing, the albatross, whose wings were too long to seagull-flap-and-flutter, would have to sit bobbing with every ripple of the ocean for hours and maybe days waiting for a gust of wind strong enough to lift it into the air again.

  When he awakes more fully he realises it’s not the sound of cars on wet bitumen or a bird in flight and he’s already forgetting the falling fabric of the queen in his dream. He identifies the shoosh, shoosh easily enough as the sound of sweeping. He moves the curtain only enough to see outside. There’s a thin woman. Pretty. Nearing fifty. Clearing leaves from her back porch with a broom. Black hair past her shoulders. Small breasts, lovely. Long arms and legs. Strong-limbed, surefooted. Slow and rhythmic. She lifts her head and he is not sure whether she has caught a glimpse of him in the window watching her as she sweeps.

  In the bottom of the chest of drawers, pushed to the back, he finds a snow globe from a fun park. Within the swirl of snowflakes is a roller-coaster with a carriage halfway down a descent. In the carriage are two people, arms raised and mouths open in happy screams.

  He shakes the globe and watches the white flakes float around. One of those gifts that might have given the boy a moment of entertainment before getting shoved into the back of the bottom drawer. Prior to that it might have been kept on top of the chest of drawers for a year or two, to be given an occasional shake by a visitor. He turns it upside down above his face as he lies on the bed—lets the flakes collect in the bulb of the snow globe.

  His wife had hung on to many such mementos. She didn’t get to travel as much as she wanted to but when young had spent time in Mesoamerica exploring pyramids and ruins. An obsidian knife from Belize had been a prized possession in their home. Not authentic to the Maya, yet it was well made and a tool capable of ritual heart extraction. His wife told him the reason for the human sacrifices was a way of feeding death, of satiating a great devouring maw that had to have its daily fill so it would not need to feed on the Mayan high priest and those he loved or wanted to protect. It was a way of offering a substitution, someone else for me, this heart for my heart.

  His wife told visitors that the reason she kept the obsidian knife was to ward off death from her household. He knew she wasn’t superstitious in any real way so the obsidian knife had been more of a talking piece to set out on the bookshelf in the front hallway. Their guests were always surprised by how sharp it was and she told them that you could buy scalpels with obsidian blades much sharper than any made of surgical metal.

  A snow globe would have been a better memento, at least more fitting for their home, since his wife had a series of miscarriages over the years of their marriage and was never able to bring a living child into the world. Another shake of the globe and he places it on the windowsill. He lies down on the bed and watches the last flake of snow settle.

  Outside he hears the sound of a car engine turning over. The owner of the house believes in warming up the engine of his car for a few minutes before he drives. Early every morning. From the attic room he can hear him return from the garage to the kitchen, where his wife tells him to finish his cup of tea. Stone cold or piping hot, he says he likes it either way, not lukewarm. Then gets into his car, puts it into gear and drives away, leaving a silence deeper for the lack of an idling motor.

  Lying in this bare room might have been a difficult confinement. He hasn’t unpacked his suitcase. Leaves it sitting on top of the chest of drawers. He’d imagined that the week or two in this room would be impossible, yet the months have been so turbulent, the years overseas have been so hard, that everything shuts down in this room and he lies on the bed in an unusual torpor. Pins and needles break out over his whole body at times.

  The next door neighbour’s boy plays tennis just beyond the attic room window. When he didn’t have a friend over yesterday, a machine fired tennis balls at him and he practised his shots, a grunt for every ball he hit. With his friend over today there’s the sound of laughter and boisterous boys in competition.

  To the old couple who live in this house the sound of laughter, of boys at play, growing so slowly … how torturous a sound are those outstretched voices in racing excitement and free laughter. The old couple move about their house quietly, rarely talking. The woman downstairs coughs. She turns on the tap in the kitchen and the plumbing rattles through the walls of the house as water passes through.

  The voice outside calls: love–fifteen, love–thirty, love– forty. The score is called out for each point the boy plays his friend and he is winning easily. The woman downstairs coughs again and flushes the toilet. The plumbing ceases its rattling in the walls and the game outside concludes when the black-haired woman next door calls her son in for dinner.

  He lies in the bed knowing there’s only so much longer he can stay now that his body does
n’t limp down stairs or flare awake with agony because of a bad movement while sleeping. Only so much longer will he be able to sit in this dead room and listen to life outside the window or below the floorboards. It makes him think about his wife and how she had lain in a bed waiting for him to return from Caracas.

  He’d tried to get home as soon as feasible, even so it was months longer than he’d intended. He arrived to find her in her hospital bed, unconscious much of the time; she’d gone from receiving treatment in recovery to being moved to palliative care. Not merely in pain—agonised without the liquid painkiller entering her bloodstream via a drip. Dreamy and soulless in her drug-drowned eyes. Catching a hold of her writhing hands and trying to calm her and wishing he could sink his teeth into her neck like a vampire and suck out the diseased blood that was destroying her body.

  He didn’t leave the hospital for days, hoping to get one more lucid moment with his wife. Hour after hour passed and he began thinking it would never happen. He woke with his body half over the hospital bed, face down with her hand on the back of his head, her fingers across his ear. He didn’t move for a moment and let that caring hand lightly hold him down to the place in her body where she had tried to give him a child many times. Lifting his face to her, to tell her he was sorry, he loved her, something … saying nothing when he saw the pain that was rushing up to obliterate her. She didn’t speak softly and of love; pain had given her no patience for easy sentiments.

  The anger was clearer. Fury that he had been absent when she needed him. Always overseas. Absent so often in their lives. Absent when she had been raped in their home. No point telling him when he came back from Kashmir a year later. But that had been the real reason she’d sold the house, their first home together. Afraid to tell him about the rape, of course—then again, so much of her heart had been eaten up by fear that there was nothing left of affection, only the boiled-down residue of black metal hate.