What the Birds See Read online

  Adrian gazes up at her. “Uh-ha.”

  “Birds shouldn’t have to suffer. They shouldn’t have to do what everyone else does.” She gives a ragged sigh, and glances sideways at him. “Thank you for your help, whoever you are.”

  He says, “I’m Adrian.”

  “Adrian?” Her mouth twists. “That’s a funny name. I’ve seen you in your garden. I live across the road from you.”

  He nods quickly. “In Mr Jeremio’s house.”

  “Is it?” She gives another fragile sigh. “I don’t know.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “That’s not your business. Nicole.”

  She starts to walk away but he stays where he has stopped, unsure what she wants him to do. He suddenly feels the wind again, how numb his feet have grown. She is walking in the opposite direction from the one which would take them home. When she’s ten strides down the path she spins to look at him. She’s wearing a poncho striped with a dozen colours; the stripes churn when she moves. “What’s up there,” she calls, “behind that fence?”

  Above the treetops, high on a low hill, can be seen the silvery peaks of a wire fence. Adrian hurries to catch up to her. “It’s the swimming pool. It’s shut for winter.”

  “I want to look,” declares Nicole.

  The children leave the track and weave through the man-made forest. Where the trees are thick no grass grows, and the ground is brackeny: Adrian has found nests here, and fallen fledglings, and once he found a dead rat. He peeks fleetingly at his companion, sensing she’ll be offended if she catches him. From each of her dark eyebrows spreads a scattering of hairs which scout the way ahead. Rain from days earlier drips from the shaggy canopy, spattering their clothes. The land rises steeply and their shoes slide beneath them as they climb, their hands get grubby saving themselves. Finally they reach the top of the hill, where the trees abruptly give way and the wire fence rises to the sky. Nicole, breathing heavily as the bird had done, threads her fingers through the diamond-shaped holes. Before them, laid out tidily as a child’s tea-set, is the local baths.

  There are three pools, each a different size and depth. Surrounding them is an apron of concrete and manicured lawn. The kiddies’ pool is shaped like a kidney. The middle pool is square. The last and biggest, the adults’ pool, is rectangular, with blocks at one end for diving. The two smaller pools have been drained for the off-season and their tiled walls glint with the rain. The big pool wears the blue cover which is its winter coat. The cover is in four pieces, each of the pieces laced with rope to the sides of the pool and laced to one another, too, so the giant pieces fit with hardly a gap – just a bead of wetness escapes the joins. The cover lies flat and still, like a shell of thick ice. It is hard to believe there is water below.

  On the distant side of the lawn are the kiosk and changing rooms. There are tall metal umbrellas and some topiary shrubs, but no trees. There’s a concrete cactus for children to climb, and high poles to which megaphones are attached. In summer the voice of the pool attendant barks orders across the suburb. No running, no dunking, no bombing, a locker key has been found.

  Adrian stands beside his neighbour, the wire biting into his forehead. Nicole stares in silence while she catches her breath. She tilts her chin to see the top of the fence, squinting at the washed-out sky. “We could climb over,” she suggests.

  Alarmed, he yelps, “Don’t!”

  She holds tight to the fence and leans back on her heels, and the wire bounces her. The wind is impossibly colder on top of the hill, licking the chill off the concrete and tiles. Nicole is smiling, contemplating the crime, and to distract her he asks, “Do you go to school?”

  She looks at him as if he’s mad. “Of course I go to school!”

  “Which one?”

  He thinks she might have enrolled at his own, as it is one of the nearest. But Nicole only says, “It’s none of your business.”

  He ducks, embarrassed. She seems infinitely older and smarter than he – he wonders if he will ever understand what is and isn’t anyone’s business. Tentatively he tries again, asking something he already knows so it won’t matter if she does not deign to reply, he’ll still have some sort of victory. “Do you have brothers and sisters?”

  “What’s it to you?” She glowers from beneath the eyebrows. “Do you have any?”

  “…No.”

  “Then why are you asking me if I do?”

  Adrian swallows; for a dreadful moment he thinks he’s going to cry. He feels, again, the weightlessness of the bird, its velvety chest feathers. “I have to go home,” he whispers.

  “All right, go.”

  He turns and picks his way down the hill, using the eucalypt trunks to stabilize his journey. As he steps out onto safe flat land he hears, from above him, “Thank you for caring about my bird.”

  Beattie, in the kitchen, suddenly thinks of the Thin Man. She has sent Adrian outside to play and he has been, since then, very quiet; it’s an instant that squeezes the air from her lungs when she realizes he’s gone not into the garden, as she had intended, but across the street to the park. Adrian is alone in the park, and the Thin Man is on the prowl.

  She rushes to the front door, flour clouding from her. She sees him snatched, broken, killed. She hasn’t felt such terror since her own children were young – since the police knocked with news of Rory’s accident – but it’s a terror as recognizable as her reflection. She flies through the door and out to the veranda, which offers a view of rooftops for miles. Immediately she sees him, drifting along the footpath with his hands in his parka pockets, and even as painful relief fills her she thinks of the damage he’s doing to the pockets’ stitching, she feels the stretching of seams. Driven by forces beyond her control she rushes down the steps and across the garden, and when Adrian sees her charging towards him he’s so startled that he does not move. She grabs him by the hood of the parka and shakes him, swatting at his head. She is not old, and she’s strong, and she hits hard enough to know he’ll be hurt. “I told you not to go to the park!” she shrieks, aware she said no such thing. She shakes and batters him regardless, wanting him to share her fear. Adrian flails; he is shaken out of his parka and falls to his knees on the lawn. He cringes, and she looks down at him – down and down, as if she’s grown to be a giant. Mud is flecked across his nose, he is blinking frightened grey eyes. The whites of his eyes are so stainless that they are almost blue. She’s furious enough to kick him, repentant enough to howl. “Inside!” she splutters. “Inside with you!”

  He is on his feet and haring up the drive. Beattie wipes her palms on her apron, wringing her fingers. She glances around the street, hoping no one has witnessed this spectacle. It is undignified to raise one’s voice in public, the kind of thing a fishwife would do. The neighbouring houses are full of the elderly, most of whom have nothing better to do than pry and spread gossip like a virus. Her hand smarts from thumping his skull. She notes the cold breeze and looks up at the sky. Soon it will rain. It was time he came in.

  She crosses the lawn, dampness rising around each step. She had not meant to be so rough on him – she had meant to be relieved. But what she feels is sometimes hard for her to express – she was brought up to despise weakness. Much of what is best in her is warped on the voyage from within to without. Concern emerges disguised as cruel rage, and breeds a corrosive, truculent remorse. She will not ever say sorry. As she plods on leaden legs back to the house Beattie acknowledges yet again that, although still young, she is too old and tired to be bringing up a child.

  On Monday the substitute teacher is waiting for them. She’s older than their regular teacher, and much more disturbing. She points to a child at random, and shouts out a word to be spelled. Adrian quavers over tomato, is staggered to get it right. When one boy’s attention dawdles, she smacks a ruler on his fingertips to hurry it along.

  “What’s this?” she asks, dangling Horsegirl’s bridle like a repellent rag.

  “It’s mine!” Horsegir
l snarls, baring a trapdoor of teeth. Adrian, for a flicker, is reminded of Nicole, her temper. He has scoured the schoolyard in a futile search for his neighbour. Meanwhile the other children are coming to Horsegirl’s aid, driven less by sympathy than by dread of a scene. “She’s allowed to have her reins,” babbles the most motherly of the girls. “Our proper teacher lets her.”

  The disgusted tyrant seems unconvinced but she drops the reins over the back of Horsegirl’s chair, from where they slide gracefully to the floor. “Leave it!” she brays, as Horsegirl bends to fetch them. “They’re perfectly safe there.”

  Horsegirl straightens in her seat, pink-faced, muttering demonically. She chews her knuckles and cracks them.

  At lunchtime Adrian takes his pocket money to the tuckshop and buys a Wizz Fizz. He doesn’t see the tiny spoon and tarries in the undercroft, poking around in the sherbet, disappointed. When he eventually arrives back at the haunt by the toilet block, Clinton is no longer there. Adrian stares across the playground, forgetting the missing spoon, and spots his best friend on the far side of the yard. He is deep in conversation with the lanky scholar of their grade, Paul. Another child might have run to join them, but Adrian lingers where he stands. Self-conscious, reserved, he feels a miserable foreboding. Rather than lurk unwanted on the edge of the discussion he sits against the bricks to wait, and does his best to appear intensely involved in every speck of sherbet.

  That week, at school, small changes are made. Playground duty is done not by one teacher, but two. At the end of each day there are more mothers than usual waiting at the gate – a nun comes to collect the children of St Jonah. Siblings gang together before embarking on the walk home. Kids on dragsters ride side by side. The children are told they must look out for one another. Many of them have already forgotten why.

  They put the parents on television. People look up from what they are doing to watch, silent. It is as if a hush drapes over the world, as if monumental anguish smothers sound. The two sit at a plain table and flashbulbs flare against their faces. The mother’s skin looks tissue-thin, she has holes where her eyes have been.

  “Please,” she says. “Please, please.” It’s as if she has forgotten having other words.

  The father clutches her hand so hard it must ache. He doesn’t look doughy now, but taut; his eyes are jumping from flash to flash, he has the look of an anxious cat. He bends close to the microphone which sits on the table pointing reproachfully at him. “We don’t care who you are,” he splutters. “We don’t want anything to happen to you. We only want the children. Just – let them go, let them walk away.”

  The mother says, “My loves…”

  “They’re good kids,” says the father. He is grappling with something unseen, reasoning with the unreasonable. “We miss them. We want them home.”

  The mother moans, “Have mercy…”

  “There’s something suspicious about the father.” Beattie is standing at the den’s door holding Adrian’s bowl of ice-cream. Rory glances at her. He has sat all day in the same chair. He has not yet switched on the lamp, and darkness has gathered in the corners of the room. The TV throws a multicoloured sheen across his face.

  “You think he took his own kids?”

  Beattie sticks stubbornly to her guns. “He’s strange.”

  Her son scoffs dismissively, and turns back to the screen. The warm light of the radiator makes his curls look like rich chestnuts in a bowl. “Maybe having all your kids abducted turns you peculiar.”

  The mother says “Please” one last time, as though repetition is the key. The television cuts away to images of the children. Veronica, Zoe, Christopher – they are becoming as recognizable as friends. A policeman is shown saying that vigilantes will not be tolerated. Then the newsreader appears, introducing a warehouse fire. A week and a half after their disappearance, the Metford children are the lead news item only if there’s something new-minted to say. They are slipping away, and the mourning parents cling to the edge of the table as if struggling to halt the slide. Beattie crosses the room and sets the bowl on the carpet beside Adrian’s knee. “Dinner’s served,” she tells Rory, and leaves the room.

  “What’s a vigilante?” Adrian asks his uncle.

  “A rabid dog.” Rory levers himself from the grip of the chair and shambles into the hall. Adrian sees slavering hounds on the streets, their jagged yellow fangs. He picks up the bowl and begins to mash the ice-cream with the spoon. He keeps hearing, in his mind, the mother saying please. He remembers the tragic cat-face of the father. Their loss is eroding them, they seemed only as solid as paper. Adrian thinks of the dying bird, how insubstantial it had been. If they can’t get their children back, then the parents are likewise destined to vanish, just empty skins left behind, walking, talking, breathing, hollow. Veronica, Zoe, Christopher: it seems foreign and amazing, to Adrian, to think that someone might need someone else so very very much.

  FOUR

  He stands before his grandmother’s dressing table, wincing intermittently as the comb drags through his hair. The crystal-backed brush and mirror glimmer enticingly, but he doesn’t reach for them. In his hand is folded a shiny red plastic disc that’s designed to clamp to the spokes of a bicycle wheel and lend some decoration. At breakfast Adrian had fished in the newly opened box of cereal, plucking the disc from the crumbly depths. He doesn’t have a bike, but Clinton does. Adrian had hoped to retrieve, from the cereal, a toy or gadget for himself, but the spoke tag is good enough. As a gift, it will fix Clinton’s friendship more firmly to the ground.

  “Head up, Adrian.”

  He lifts his chin, scowling. In the dresser mirror he’s projected back at himself, uniformed for school, his grandmother fussing over him, harried. She wields the comb as though it is a plough – he feels like he’s being scalped. He watches her thick arm’s reflection chop up and down as if working a hatchet. His sharp young eyes see wattles of skin wobble at her throat. His gaze wanders beyond her, into the glassy replica of the room. Behind his grandmother, tidily made, is the bed in which Adrian’s grandfather died. He wonders how she can bear it, sleeping where a dead man lay. Simply being in the room gives Adrian the heebies.

  His memories of his grandpa are sparse, and daily sparser. He has a muzzy recollection of his mother, Sookie, laughing at something the old man had said; he has another of standing by the bed looking down at the dying man and his father telling him he needn’t kiss the pallid face if he didn’t want to. He remembers Saturday newspapers spread across the kitchen table and the whoosh of the plane gliding down a length of wood; he remembers best the black mole on his grandfather’s forehead which, when pressed with a thumb, would cause the gentleman to utter a sonorous beep. No matter how enthusiastically Adrian applied his thumb, the grandfather had never tired of the beeping, and neither had the grandson.

  “Stand still, Adrian.”

  It is physically impossible to stand any stiller than he’s doing, given that the grooming buffets like a gale. He spreads his feet as if the floor below him is a roiling sea. Watching his grandmother, he remembers his grandpa’s funeral. There had been a lot of people in the church – most of them were old. The long mahogany casket stood on a delicate skeleton of steel. The casket lid was open but from a distance all Adrian could see of the interior was the pleated ivory lining. His gran had taken his hand and led him past the pews, down the aisle, closer.

  Peering over the wall of the casket, Adrian had been relieved to find his grandfather looking harmless. He didn’t, of course, look anything like a living man, but neither did he look like something filled with the inexplicable darkness of death. He looked only like something whose existence was done. He’d looked, Adrian realized with some surprise, content. He had slipped his hand from his grandmother’s grip and reached out to touch the mole. His grandpa’s skin was completely cold. The instant Adrian’s thumb pressed down, his grandfather bolted upright in the casket. His eyes flung open, his head jerked sideways, the face had leered at him. “Bee
p!” the corpse had screeched. “Beep! Beep!”

  “There, you’re done. Have you brushed your teeth?”

  Adrian glances up, his imagination romping off like a pup. “Not yet.”

  “Well, get a move on. I’ll meet you in the car.”

  He scrubs his teeth, grabs his bag, runs through the house and down the driveway without letting go of the red spoke tag. This morning his gran’s manoeuvring of the tank is faulty from the moment she exits the garage, and the vehicle must be driven forward and straightened four aggravating times. Adrian waits on the footpath, dampening in the morning drizzle. He can hear his grandmother’s frustrated squawks as the car veers insistently for the house. He shuffles about, chilled and faintly panicked – the vehicle misbehaving inevitably summons forth Grandmonster.

  A sound from beyond his shoulder makes him turn, his jaw trembling with the shivers. Across the road, in the concreted yard of Mr Jeremio’s handmade house, stands Nicole. Bustling around her are a younger girl, a tiny boy, and a tall man. The man is directing the children into the rear seat of a car, the wide flat muzzle of which has not yet emerged from the garage, reluctant to greet the day. The smaller girl and the boy have the same flyaway black hair as Nicole; the man is nearly bald. Both the girls are carrying a rucksack, but they aren’t wearing school uniforms – rather, they’re wearing bright weekend clothes, as if none of their days are serious ones. Adrian waves, and Nicole, who’s frowning over the fence at him, lifts a solemn hand. The man says something to her and she swings away, climbing quickly into the car. Adrian glimpses white as the soles of her sneakers disappear. The tank eases alongside him, billowing vapour, and he hauls open the slab of door.

  Marta comes over for dinner, her weekly ritual. She has lived out of home, sharing a flat with a friend, for the past couple of years. There is something about her visits that feels like an inspection. Beattie always sets the table with her best linen and silverware. She and Rory typically eat at the speckled laminex table in the kitchen; when Marta visits, the three of them eat in the dining room, the flames of two uneven candles pulsing in their eyes. On these nights, Beattie worries about her cooking in a way she never did when Marta lived at home.