The Butcherbird Stories Read online

  The man stands up and slams his hand down on the table at the bird’s feet, raising his voice into a real threat. “Get the fuck out of here! Get, go on!” The magpie drops down to the grass, not frightened. Shouldn’t every living thing above the level of insects on this planet by now know to tremble at the possibility of human violence? The magpie barely moves, he is beady with ruthless patience.

  “I’m sorry for swearing,” he tells his daughter. “It’s the heat that’s making Daddy angry.” She looks at him with the same empty expression. He leans over the table and removes her hat. Her hair is wet with sweat. She’ll soon be feeling better in the shade of the gazebo. He’s already recovered and is beginning to feel impatient. She turns her head and takes another nibble of her cookie.

  She’s not interested in the lagoon only a few metres away. Apartment blocks and houses shoulder each other along the bending bank and reach for the water on external stairways, each with its own tiny pier. Shabby dinghies, listing houseboats, rust tubs—and a ragged pelican making his cumbersome way to the water and dropping down with disconsolate slowness—all give the impression of a disused back alley rather than a view onto the tropical daydream of a lagoon.

  The white birds above, roosting on the beams of the gazebo, have been content to shuffle around in communal cooing. One of them starts to sing. Sharp sounds that have a cutting melody—crystalline and penetrating. Notes that race across an octave in an improvised scale and higher into a register no instrument would be able to reach, dropping and rising, and carrying the music to a brief crescendo, calmly returning to noise and up again into the delicate crescendo, reprising the improvisation, until the man is compelled to lift his head and look up at the singing bird.

  Not as small as he first thought, mostly white, with a few black feathers on its wings and a black head. Generic, of course—a sequence of noises that marks out territory or a call to prospective mates, yet for a moment he wonders how much of the beauty of the song he could attribute to this singular bird. It feels idiotic to even contemplate the little creature, let alone consider how responsible for music it is. It’s simply an instinctual program, as sophisticated as a phone’s ringtone program. It isn’t sensible to think of the bird’s tune bearing any relation to the way a composer might create music—scratching out his dots and dashes across five evenly spaced lines. Perhaps it’s just as foolish to think the composer isn’t creating music from the hidden impulses of his own species.

  He wipes sweat from his face with a handkerchief. Leans over the table again and ruffles his daughter’s sweaty head to help her hair dry. Breathes out heavily when he settles back on his bench. A waitress at the restaurant last night said the way she dealt with the heat was by living in an air-conditioned flat, driving an air-conditioned car and working in an air-conditioned restaurant. He imagines the pretty young woman smiling within a perfectly air-conditioned bubble as she bobbles around from place to place—never flustered by the heat and never needing to wipe away a single drop of sweat from her forehead.

  He takes out his phone to check for messages. There isn’t anything new. He scrolls down the list of emails to one he received three days ago. It had come through overnight but he didn’t read it until he got out of a shivering 5:00 a.m. shower, amid the rushing around suitcases and last-minute bags to be packed, a wife and child arguing in the toilet over the need to do wee-wee, now, not later, as he organised a taxi to take them all to the airport.

  He found this email telling him that a girlfriend he had loved, and with whom he had lived for two years in a crappy flat near their dismal university, happy and content for all that, daydreaming of children and the names they might give them, had died, and his friend wondered in the email if they could go to the funeral together. His friend didn’t want to turn up alone and she assumed he already knew about Cassie going through a red light at a busy intersection at 8:30 on a Wednesday morning. Quick and almost painless.

  Maybe they’d already lowered Cassie into the hole this morning and soon they would make their way to the service and no-one would really care whether he showed up or not. He deletes the email from his mobile.

  “So, are you ready to go, sweetie?” he asks. His daughter nods and says, “Yep”. She takes another bite of the cookie and throws the other half to the magpie.

  Lights within the water turn his legs and arms blue. His fingers and toes wrinkle white. It’s cool rather than cold but his teeth chatter and he will have to go inside soon. The resort is a set of connecting apartments around the pool, a pleasing open-air lattice of external stairways, landings and balconies, rising up around him five storeys high and leaving a kidney-shaped view of the stars. When he’d planned the trip he imagined celestial powder adrift in an oceanic cosmos—yet there were the same pinpricks of light through a grey blanket that he would have seen in Melbourne’s night sky. Either he would have to get further away from the electric lights of coast life or the atmosphere might clear in the next few days.

  “What are you looking at?” A young woman is paddling along near the opposite edge of the pool. He has his back to the tiled wall, water moving at his sternum; in such a daze that he didn’t notice her get into the pool. He blinks at her wordlessly. She kicks along, chin under the waterline. “Anything up there?” It’s quiet and her voice laps with the water, as intimate as the whisper of a sweetheart.

  “A wooden crate at the end of a parachute.” His face is lifted, as if watching it drift downwards. Then looks at her. “A zoological delivery from my friends in the Congo.” She glances up into the sky and smiles at him when she lowers her face.

  “What’s in the Congo crate?” She takes her time getting to the end of the pool.

  “You’ll have to wait and see.” He reaches up a wet hand and wipes it down over his face—a cooling gesture if he’d made it during the heat of the day.

  “I’m worried it’ll be a crate of mamba snakes.” She places her arms behind her and with a kick she hoists herself out of the pool to sit on the edge. “Mamba snakes swim like you wouldn’t believe.”

  She is wearing a white bikini. Maybe fourteen but she has developed quickly—a rush into raw beauty. Braces on her teeth give her age away, as does the tilt of her head when she smiles. She locks her elbows behind to lean back, extending her legs before her, wriggling them as mambas might do were they to fall in the resort’s pool. Her toenails are painted magenta.

  “Past your bedtime, isn’t it?” he asks and looks away.

  “It’s past everyone’s bedtime.”

  He watches the water rippling out across the chlorinated blue surface. He’d almost been asleep with his eyes open. It has to be after two in the morning, since it was well past one when he gave up on sleep. He’d taken one of his wife’s sleeping pills; to little effect. All he could do afterwards was walk from one room to another in the resort apartment, his wife and his daughter indistinct shapes in the unfamiliar beds, lying quiet and motionless in the darkness—moving close enough to hear them both breathing. So quietly taking air, his own heart was louder in his ears. He stood by their beds for long moments to convince himself he wasn’t imagining the barely noticeable noise of their lives.

  The idea had been to go to the pool and see if he could clear his head. If he could manage to calm himself he might still find an hour or two of sleep, and the new day need not be a fatigue wreck. He shakes his head at the word “wreck”.

  She shakes her head at him in playful mimicry. “What?”

  “You run into things even when you’re going in the opposite direction.”

  “Run into what? Me?”

  “Running into walls,” he says, palms out. “Like a sleepwalker.”

  “They don’t crash into walls. Sleepwalkers open doors. They look into fridges without seeing anything, cut onions, turn on the stove and start preparing a meal, leave it half done and go back to bed. They can drive cars and murder their wives. Probably not at the same time,” she says with a grin that reveals both tracks of de
ntal braces. “My parents found me wandering around the house in the middle of the night a few times when I was little. I don’t think I ever did anything interesting.” Her eyes blink and shine—she is doing something interesting now.

  It is a game, as make-believe as a crate from the Congo floating down on a parachute. Perhaps this girl has snuck out of her holiday apartment while her parents are asleep, an opportunity to play dress-ups with her older sister’s bikini in the middle of the night. Play-acting with her new body the same as a wondrous new dress—with a safe man she’s seen around the resort, a husband and the father of a child. Looking up into the night sky, face tilted back, a body in bloom offered to his gaze. Maybe even his touch. Clenching his teeth, he lowers himself into the water with open eyes, all the air in his lungs breathed out in one seething mass.

  He surfaces in the centre of the pool with his face raised, wiping away the water from his eyes. An ember falls from above. He watches the crimson spark make its way down five flights. Dropping into the bushes surrounding the pool, instantly lost in the dark foliage. Up above, on a fifth-floor balcony, a man lights another cigarette—leans over the railing with a bottle of beer in his hand and looks down at the pool while blowing out tobacco smoke. He draws back on his cigarette with an ugly grimace. Entirely bald, bare-chested and very white, as though he’s just arrived from somewhere bitterly cold, like a long New York winter of concrete and ice.

  The girl tilts her head further back to look at the man on the balcony and then returns her gaze to the water. He swims to the edge of the pool and pulls himself out in one fluid motion. Stumbles when he gets to his feet outside the water. Lands on his knee. Gets up easily enough but he’s grazed his knee on the rough poolside surface. The sleeping pill has thrown off his sense of balance. In the minimal lighting it wouldn’t be clear to the girl that he’s hurt himself and he needn’t feel too embarrassed as he walks away. He picks up the towel he left on the sun chair and stands there a moment as he dries his hair and arms.

  “Better get back,” he says. Hides the limp as he walks to the gate and begins climbing the stairs that will take him to his apartment. He stops at a landing to wipe the blood from his knee with his beach towel. The girl lies down, her long black hair surrounding her face like a deep shadow, looking up into the night sky by the pool. In a moment she’ll decide it’s time to head back; for now, she closes her eyes as though the tropical sun were blazing away above. Her feet paddle the water and he can still see those pretty magenta nails.

  At the top of the stairs, on the fifth floor, he looks across to the opposite balcony. The smoking man is gone. The empty apartment behind him is illuminated and the light is striking in the surrounding darkness. The bottle of beer he was drinking is balanced on the railing with two other bottles. If one fell it wouldn’t shatter poolside, it would fall into the bushes the same way as the thrown cigarette.

  Blood is running down his shin. There’s a first-aid kit in the bathroom. He’s not seeing clearly as he cleans his knee and applies a couple of bandaids. His vision blurs in the bright bathroom—fluorescents above the mirrors and recessed downlights in the ceiling. He blinks in the resort’s mirror and sees himself as the girl in the pool might have seen him. A familiar unknown in the shape of father/brother/lover/husband. A shape in the moving liquid darkness. Not a body blindly driven by unseen impulses. Sleepwalking. Crashing. A barely known reflection gazing back, as calm as a deleted email. When he leaves the bathroom he hears a commotion outside the apartment. Harsh shouts—a woman and then a man. Raised voices muffled quickly.

  And then he hears the sound of his daughter crying. A nightmare. She’s babbling when he sits on the edge of her bed to comfort her. Not sure what she’s saying until he’s able to calm her down and it turns out a butcherbird flew into her room while she was asleep. “No,” he tells her. “The butcherbird was the songbird, despite the nasty name. Was it a magpie you were dreaming about?” She nods and tells him that there was more than one, she heard the magpies ruffling their feathers in the shadows and she wasn’t able to see the mostly black birds in the black room even when she opened her eyes. “Are they still in the room,” she asks. “How can you be sure that they aren’t, Daddy?”

  He closes her window. There’s a view of the pool and that lovely pure blue liquid light it emits—empty and perfectly still now. He drops the blinds and returns to her and puts his lips to her forehead and breathes her in. Places a calming hand on her chest, sings a long lullaby. He leaves her bedroom door open so the light from the hallway will keep her from total darkness.

  Amy in #12

  The bird keeps plucking its own feathers. Amy can’t get it to stop. She buys another canary and puts her in the cage with him and they are happy for a few days. But it doesn’t take long before they’re both exhibiting the same disturbing behaviour. Amy plays them soothing music on her stereo and moves the cage from one room of her apartment to another because she’s not able to figure out the source of their unhappiness. Eventually the canaries are living out on the third-floor balcony where there’s plenty of air and some autumn sun. The bird continues to pluck out his feathers, the female follows suit. Until she’s dead—on the bottom of the cage one morning. Amy puts on dishwashing gloves to extract the pathetic little corpse.

  Amy’s not good with the small cooing noises most people use to communicate with babies or animals, so she talks to the bird, though in fact Amy knows as she’s speaking that she’s talking to herself. She moves her lips close to the bars of the cage, near the cluster of silver bells at the top, and says, “There’s a way in which this feels as if it’s supposed to be me. You’re pointing out how below the kind of general happiness I think is mine, in actuality, what I’m doing is plucking away at my own feathers as well. It’s not true. I am happy. As content as anyone, if we can admit that no-one’s really completely happy. Is that even the goal? I’m certainly not suffering. That’s my point. I’m happy enough. I don’t know why you’re not. I suppose you’re just a stupid bird that doesn’t know when he’s got it good. Is it freedom you want? Because, honestly, a canary can’t make it out there. You see any canaries cruising the air outside? Have a look. All you’ll see are magpies and pigeons. Only scavengers make it in the suburbs. What I’m saying is that it’s a world built for ordinary people, not some paradise for exotic birds to flash their feathers and chirp music at each other. I’m not sure where the Canary Islands are, somewhere in the Atlantic, I guess. I’m certain there’s an ideal little ecosystem out there for you. And yet if someone didn’t pluck your ancestor off that island, some conquistador or whatever sailing home from the New World, you wouldn’t have been hatched. There’s been a long line of birds bred by generations of people so that you could live with me, and by now you should be genetically adapted to be happy enough with your fresh seed and water, the tiny mirror and the view from my balcony. The city is lovely this time of year. Leaves falling from the trees, radiant hues of red, like flakes drifting down from a burnt-out sun. As though you have a notion of beauty, anyway. Or more importantly, a memory to recall even some basic sense of satisfaction. If you were released and had the time of your life you’d forget within a few hours and you’d be back in your cage plucking your feathers and driving me crazy with this relentless suffering. What does it fucking mean?”

  The bird opens his wings with a quick shake, and settles, missing so many feathers he is no longer able to flitter from his bar to the floor of the cage. Instead he climbs around, using feet and beak to navigate the wire hemisphere of his world. Amy begins to wish David would simply die as his mate had done. She buys a cover for the cage and drapes it over him when friends come to visit. No, it’s not a secret she’s hiding. Amy has been talking about the bird plucking out its feathers for months. Her friends wish she wouldn’t mention it again. David’s barely got any feathers left and there are beads of blood now that are terrible to see on that small shivering body. None of her friends can offer Amy a solution, and clearly they
don’t care. “It’s a fucking canary,” her oldest friend from primary school tells Amy. “Get rid of it.” The simplest thing in the world. A bit of rubbish you can chuck away. “I can’t actually kill him,” Amy explains. “What would I do—poison his water? Go on a holiday while he starves? Wring his neck? I’d be squashing David’s little throat. It’d be disgusting.” “You shouldn’t have given it a man’s name,” Amy is told. “I didn’t,” she says, “it was that Leonard Cohen lyric about the secret song that David sang, ‘and it pleased the Lord’.” Amy has forgotten how it goes and she admits she doesn’t listen to Leonard Cohen. A spur of the moment name because someone told Amy when she was a child that canaries were birds with the most beautiful song in the world. They used to be collected by monks, kings and queens, for monasteries and palaces. Amy’s friends hear David singing from within the covered cage. “It doesn’t sound as though it’s suffering,” they tell Amy. “That’s a pleasant noise, even if it’s not hallelujah.” They don’t ask her to lift the cover to see the naked, blood-flecked bird.

  Among the Ruins

  Anyone who cannot come to terms with his life while he is alive needs one hand to ward off his despair over his fate ... but with his other hand he can note down what he sees among the ruins.

  Journal entry for 19 October 1921

  Franz Kafka

  The patient was told he would be dead within weeks. It was possible he might live for as long as a few months, yet his doctor wanted him to understand that there was indisputable evidence of severe cardiac dysrhythmia. As he delivered this prognosis, the doctor was looking at a set of papers that confirmed the patient’s heart was, in fact, perfectly healthy.