The Butcherbird Stories Read online

  He did not believe her. It was the disease and it was the medication and she must have seen the doubt because she reached out a hand and didn’t offer him a caress that put a lie to this implacable anger. Her nails hadn’t been cut for weeks and she found a ruthless force within her spine that made her rigid and then snapped her forward so she could drag three deep lines through his face, from forehead across a closed eye and down to his chin. He left that room and walked out of the hospital bleeding. She died a week later, unconscious to her last moment.

  Music outside his window. Murmuring and then the sound of dinner and drinking—voices, cutlery, crockery and glass. Conversation getting louder. He doesn’t look outside the window. He knows the black-haired woman next door is having a party. They begin an unsynchronised counting, “ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five,” a drunken chorus getting more ragged as they approach zero. Fireworks pop and ratatat in the distance. Cars honk their horns on nearby streets.

  He lifts the curtain open a little and sees her on the back porch giving and getting kisses from her family and friends. A smile on her face sloppy with drink, pretty even when wasted. Abandoned to the hectic, clustering sense of time crashing in a waterfall and then flowing on again, all of us in a Niagara Falls barrel together or alone. Perhaps just the way he is thinking at the moment. This room—his barrel going over and over in a freefall before it crashes down into the watery turbulence of tonnes of falling time. Is it only what he sees or is the exuberant happiness in her face also an expression of a woman struggling for her next breath? He drops the curtain he’s been holding up with his forefinger.

  A knock on his door. A quiet knock that will not be repeated. When he opens the door the old woman is quietly walking back down the hallway, her husband a few steps down on the stairs, standing there in the hope that his son’s bedroom door would not be opened tonight and he need not venture any further. Duty and propriety in his face, even if he blinks and everything in his mind rolls away down the stairs in fear. Both of them very quiet, holding plastic glasses with flat champagne.

  “Happy New Year,” says the woman. Her husband raises his own glass a centimetre. She returns and offers him the champagne. A few bubbles jostle to the surface.

  He holds up a palm to indicate he doesn’t want the champagne. “What day of the week is it?” he asks.

  “Monday.”

  When he wakes, a postcard is sitting on the floor beside a bowl with two hard-boiled eggs in it, shells already removed. No message on the back of the postcard and no postage stamp. There’s an image of the Winged Victory of Samothrace. He notices the snow globe has been taken away. He leaves the postcard where he found it. Stands in the middle of the attic room, takes two steps to the window and walks back to the door and stops again in the centre. He’s delighted by the postcard; even so he takes his morphine. He eats the two hard-boiled eggs in four bites and stares at the postcard. He’s seen the statue itself a number of times in Paris—goes on staring at the image of it on the card, a photo taken in 1970, then puts the postcard into his suitcase.

  The ancient Greek sculpture gives him a sense of time, not of what it took to carve out each feather of Victory’s wings but the sense of an entire span of life as slow as his own, a person living under the same sun, so long ago the dust from his bones has been blown away until not a particle remains of the man on that Greek island who carved an image of a winged woman from stone. The small breasts, the belly with its navel, hips and thighs, pressed into the marble, the time of that love stretched long over that vanished lifetime, love for the art in the woman and the woman in the art, more than anything for a sense of love carved into his own soul, so astounding in its power after centuries it has not entirely crumbled away with the rest of his civilisation. She is all the more precious now for disfigurement. She is more sublime the closer she comes to demolishment.

  He wakes after a few hours of sleep. Not sure what time it is—well before dawn. He climbs down the stairs and walks to the bathroom. The old couple are sleeping. He’s not worried about whether they’ll wake or not. Knows they’ll stay in their room and whisper across their pillows until he’s gone.

  He uses scissors to cut his beard and the shaver behind the mirror to shave his face. He doesn’t see the three lines across his face, his wife didn’t scar him, yet if he looks at himself long enough he knows where her marks started and where they ended and the space between each sharp fingernail, her pinkie not reaching flesh as did her forefinger, her index finger and her ring finger.

  He uses the newer of the two toothbrushes in the cup by the basin, brushing his teeth twice before he feels they’re clean again, then throws the toothbrush into a bin. His left canine has been wobbling since he arrived. It’s worse now—as is the pain in the left side of his face. He pulls the loose canine out easily and the pain diminishes as though he’s extracted a thorn rather than a tooth. He glances at the long, single-rooted tooth in his palm, white with little sign of decay, and throws it into the bin beside the basin as well.

  He gets into the shower and washes his hair and then his limbs and torso. Some bruises are gone and others have almost faded away. He has brought fresh clothes from the suitcase in his attic room, dresses and looks at himself again. In the mirror he is fresh-faced with clean hair almost dry already, a well-dressed man. He is ready. A clock on the wall tells him it is 2:30 a.m. He turns off the overbright bathroom fluorescent. He stands there not moving, blinking uselessly, the contrast to the fierce light creating a new depth of darkness.

  The light is on in the hallway. It’s left on every night, so he passes through the back garden, barely pausing, knowing it does not mean that either the black-haired woman or her son is awake. They feel safer with a light on. Sleeping in separate rooms, the light in their hallway is also a way to keep two bodies connected that are otherwise surrendered to the separation of night and unconsciousness. That might be why they keep the light on, he thinks, but the house is silent and it need not have much meaning, nothing more than a light left on in the hallway because it is easier leaving it than turning it off. He walks down the illuminated hallway and it’s not difficult to be quiet walking over the deep pile carpet.

  There had been a time when he would return late in the evening and enter his own family home and he’d enjoy the thought of his wife safely asleep behind the locked gates and closed doors of their house and bedroom. Late at night, the air inside would have a weight, every room’s captured air from the day just passed, and there was a welcome in the aroma of home, the way a house contained in curtains and carpets the lingering smells of many shared meals and caught their exhaled breaths. Different in this house, yet within minutes he feels himself slowing down, breathing through his nose until he sighs. A place to burrow down and curl up or roll over and stretch every last joint in feet and knuckles, where open-mouthed with a trickle of drool a person would still know themselves even while lost in the deepest abyss of sleep.

  He opens a door and there’s the boy sleeping face down at the other end of his bed, one foot on his pillow and the other foot hanging over the edge. As old as twelve and outgrowing his first bed. Tennis racquet and guitar on the floor amid magazines and books, sneakers, socks and a half-light fish tank glowing emerald with water weed and silver-orange-and-blue fish. He stands in the doorway and sees his own reflection in a wrought-iron mirror affixed to the opposite wall—a father looking in on his sleeping son.

  In the kitchen there are dirty pans on the stove and the benchtops are a chaos of dinner preparation. Plates have been left on the dining room table as if the diners simply stood up when finished, no-one cleaning up the slightest thing. Guests over tonight, five places set around the table with meals not fully finished, leftovers of pasta and salad and garlic bread and sticky toffee pudding with vanilla custard in bowls and on plates. He sits down and doesn’t need a clean plate or cutlery. He’s eaten in far worse conditions and in far less pleasant places. Food doesn’t become rubbish to him simply because it
was near another person’s mouth or has gone cold. He eats everything that is left from dinner and he can make two glasses of good red wine from what’s at the bottom of the glasses and bottles. It’s the first time his stomach has been full in weeks and for a moment he feels overcome with sleep. He closes his eyes and sways in his seat at the head of the dining room table.

  When he opens his eyes he notices a picture of the black-haired woman on the wall with her son when he was an infant. He’d thought she was pretty but didn’t know she’d been a beauty. Her son was about six months old in the picture, of an age at least where he was yet unable to sit unassisted. His face did not much resemble the lad hitting tennis balls on the court. Faces changed; never stopped changing from day one. He can see his own face reflected in the sliding doors that open onto the back patio and he doesn’t recognise the thin man in the black glass, sitting alone at a large mahogany table. He puts down the knife and fork onto his plate quietly. He gazes at the silver-framed picture of mother and child on the wall again—a lovely woman who had done everything she could to hang on to her figure and her looks and the baby had grown and grown, and was still growing.

  In the lounge a clock on the wall tells him it’s ten past four in the morning. A neat, tidy room. There’s a terrarium on a low table by the large picture window—a very large jar with orchids growing from the miniature fern and moss landscape as though they were trees. A small temple almost overgrown with vines, off to the side, gives the miniature panorama a sense of living scale.

  On the windowsill overlooking the garden is a metal statuette of Shiva Nataraja. A meaningless memento in this household, a frivolous spiritual nod to all things Eastern, about as significant as the yoga mat rolled up and tucked away between the sofa and the lounge room wall. An accessory to her exercise and yet the statuette isn’t a cheap trinket—it is a well-made, hand-crafted example of the Nataraja. It reminds him of sculptures he’s seen of the Trimurti, the three-headed god: Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva. While Vishnu is life and sustenance, the ongoing world, there are sects devoted to Brahma the creator and innovator, the birthing principle. And there is Shiva the destroyer. A devil in most other cultures, here he is in the middle of the night, stomping within a circle of flame on a windowsill, glorious in his destruction of everything that is tired and complacent, inert and weak, clearing and renewing the world in a blazing dance.

  He pushes open another door, ajar to the illuminated hallway, her bedroom. The black-haired woman is asleep, covered to her shoulders with a white sheet and an orange mohair blanket. He stands in the doorway very briefly and moves to the bed. He moves closer. He wants to smell her hair. Closer and he can feel her breathing on his face. Closer, until their noses almost touch, he closes his eyes and sways. I could love you. His lips move but he’s not giving the words any air. Would either of us want that now? No, of course not. I know. You already are beautiful without me. Not quite as young, it’s all the deeper in you, that loveliness showing up bruised wherever it was touched. I feel you. And I have heard you sweeping away the leaves, sweeping away dead time. A sweet sound— the sound of that sweeping, the careless rhythm of each stroke across the wood. The calm movement, an empty dance to the quietest music in the world. I have heard you singing under your breath. He sways, his head spinning with thoughts, and almost falls forward onto the sleeping woman. Open eyes, standing and catching a hold of her bedhead to stop himself from tumbling forward. They touch. She turns over. He waits for her breathing to return to its deeper rhythm before moving again.

  Her sleeping pills are on the nightstand beside a glass of water. Clear and reflective and very still. He taps the glass twice to see the water ripple. Watches it settle back to a motionless skin, thick enough to be a membrane. The tink, tink of his nail against the glass doesn’t wake her. The sleeping pills have a date printed on the side of the bottle. The same date that he arrived next door. The bottle is almost empty already. The prescription label on the bottle also has her name: Inez Beecher. Inez Beecher is still wearing her wedding ring and she’s beginning to snore in her new position on her back, mouth slightly open.

  He lies down beside her on the bed. Doesn’t close his eyes. It’s a small room but three times the size of the attic room. He sees himself reflected in a freestanding wrought-iron mirror near the wall. At night he and his wife would talk before sleep took them away. He allows his lips to move noiselessly as he speaks. In Kashmir I heard a story about a sleeping god and how the world is his dream. You and me, your Shiva dancing or the Winged Victory of Samothrace, all the gods and all the animals, everything living, every bit of life on this planet, images flitting through God’s dreaming mind. I had this thought that, were we able to observe Him sleeping, we would worry at every twitch and night movement—that our tired God might wake and dispel existence from His dreaming mind. I’ve found myself thinking the world must become a nightmare, that we should welcome the horror so our dreaming God startles and is roused awake. Then He, and everything within His mind, can be set free.

  He stands and takes from his pocket the last of his morphine with a drink of water from the glass by the bed. He closes the door when he leaves the room and walks down the illuminated hallway. The son’s door is wide open. The toilet flushes and the son emerges into the hallway. With half-closed eyes, mostly asleep, he knows there’s a stranger in the corridor. Fear stuns him. A sharp intake of breath—no noise otherwise. All he can do is blink his eyes before he has the man’s hands around his throat, has the legs kicked out from under him and is lowered down quietly to the thick carpet, is pushed down, down another millimetre, and another, his windpipe squeezed shut and crushed. They wait for the last air in his lungs to grow old.

  He carries the body of the boy in his arms out of the house and up the wooden stairs and to the empty attic room. Lays the boy down on the bed. He’s not warm, he’s still not cold as he will be. He has paled yet the flesh of his face hasn’t fallen. Plump. It springs back after being touched. His eyes are closed and he appears unconscious. Children go to death easier. An older man will cling more desperately and the strain of that clinging is wrought in his every expression, even in the corners of a smile. It strikes him as pathetic, that obstinance, as though any one life should be the sole exception to the rule of the cosmos. Never as peaceful as this boy to whom harm never came close before his last moment, going into it as if waking for a moment and then falling back into another dream.

  He takes his suitcase and makes sure it is locked and ready to travel. The suitcase had been so difficult and heavy he had dragged it up the stairs when he first arrived—that’s how enfeebled and battered he’d been. The suitcase is light and feels empty, as full of air as a ball. It is the contrast with carrying the boy’s weight out of the black-haired woman’s house and up the stairs. And it’s the morphine beginning to work in his blood.

  He stands in the middle of the room and waits for the old man downstairs to turn his car on, to warm the engine. It’s not a long wait. He picks up his suitcase and leaves the attic room. Before going he remembers the plastic sheet the old couple use to stop dust and throws it over the boy on the bed.

  Butcherbird

  The girl asks where the shadows have gone. Her father pulls her along without answering the question. How to explain the ferocity above and the way it kills shade everywhere except directly below their feet? It bleaches the concrete footpath they are walking along, ricochets in billions of points off the whitewashed walls and blazes from metal and glass. “Sorry,” he says. “I didn’t know how far it was. I thought it was a fifteen minute walk.” Another thing he wasn’t expecting is how quickly the day would begin to roar with heat. He’s pulling along his three-year-old daughter, her arm high and outstretched. Feels her wilting from second to second. Her skin is red despite the hat and sunscreen—a deep blush of heat.

  It’s not yet ten in the morning on the third day of their holiday up north. They walk off the footpath and away from the road, down a slope of dead grass to
a small gazebo with a table. He has a cookie he was going to surprise her with later. When they sit on the wooden benches he places the cookie before her on the table the way a croupier might a hundred-dollar casino chip. She doesn’t smile. Tells him she’s thirsty. “I’m sure we’re not far away,” he says. “I’ll get you a lovely glass of cold apple juice when we get there. For now, try the cookie please.” She doesn’t touch it.

  Small white birds with flecks of black live in the roof of the gazebo. Their twittering suggests they have registered the presence of a man and a little girl, yet he’s not sure how he knows that. Interpreting the noise birds make is foolish. He’s never seen this breed before. He heard his wife mention butcherbirds yesterday on a boat cruise. “I thought you liked cookies,” he says to his daughter.

  Remarkably few flies—back in Melbourne flies or gnats were a problem on a hot summer’s day. He detested the sight of a black insect alighting on his daughter’s face. In their holiday apartment they could leave the windows open all day and night and there were no flying insects, not even mosquitoes.

  A large magpie is standing on the grass outside the gazebo, ready for crumbs. He flitter-hops up onto the table and is very close—considering the food on the table. The man’s daughter is too dazed to do much more than gaze at the magpie. She thinks all birds are as harmless as pigeons and seagulls. He waves at the magpie. Says shoo. The bird doesn’t move. They are famous for swooping passers-by, of course, but he’s read that they have been known to attack through an open car window.

  “The nasty magpie will snatch it away if you don’t at least hold the cookie in your hand, honey.” She says, “OK,” yet doesn’t move for another moment. She picks it up and takes a bite, looking at the malevolent creature as though she doesn’t even have the beginnings of a thought or feeling about a threatening bird. It reminds him of the expression Buddhist artists carved into the stone faces of their divinity.