What the Birds See Read online

  He hangs back, frozen by the knowledge of sickness in the room. Joely has gone to the side of the bed, close to where her mother is propped on pillows. On the wall around the bedhead are splashes of colour on crinkled paper, paintings done by the girls. On a bedside table is a photograph of the children. The mother’s voice is like a bird’s wing brushing glass. “Adrian,” she whispers, “it’s nice to meet you.”

  He shuffles closer, and her eyes follow him. “Hello,” he mumbles: he doesn’t know what’s wrong with her and isn’t sure what to say. He stops where her ankles must be, unwilling to go nearer. Glancing up fleetly, he sees how boneless she is, how she lacks a living thing’s quick energy. Her lips are silver and peeling. She wears a floral nightdress and, round her shoulders, a fussy crocheted shawl. Her fingernails have been lacquered sun-red, as if she hasn’t forgotten happier things.

  Her voice is slow, a record playing at wrong speed. “What’s the day like, Adrian?”

  “It’s cold.” He hesitates before resting his hands on the blankets, a gesture he hopes seems friendly. Cold is unimaginative, and he wonders what she would prefer to hear, this lady who can’t leave the room. “The birds are hiding,” he says.

  Her eyes go crescent. “Poor things. Which is your favourite?”

  He thinks. “I like the black and white ones.”

  “Magpies?”

  “No, smaller—”

  “Larks?”

  He nods. “Larks.”

  “I like larks too.” She smiles at him, and Adrian smiles.

  “Do you want a drink, Mum?” Joely asks her.

  There’s something tender and private about the little girl holding a plastic mug to the lips of her mother, and Adrian looks away. The curtains have been drawn across the window, so recently that they sway. In one corner stands a metal trolley designed to slide neatly above the bed. On its tray are a bowl and a coffee cup. Tucked into the gap between the cupboard and wall is a folded-up wheelchair. It has an unused, retiring look.

  Joely dabs dry her mother’s chin. The woman coughs and says, “Excuse me.”

  Her feet, snowed in under the blankets, make only the slightest bulge. Her hands are white and fragile as flour. Although she is not gaunt, she hardly dents her pillow. “I’m told you live with your grandmother, Adrian.”

  “Yes.” He wishes she wouldn’t speak; every word sounds scoured out of her. She smiles again, and even that must hurt.

  “How lucky you are. I would have loved to live with my grandmama, when I was a little girl.”

  He nods again, at the carpet. The room is so quiet that he hears the blankets sigh. He feels the woman’s hazel consideration of every inch of him; then she takes pity and looks away. “You’d better get home for dinner,” she suggests. “Your grandmother will be worried.”

  He nods, his head loose on his neck. “It was nice meeting you,” he says, and he means it, though he never wants to return. Part of him understands why Nicole would claim to have lost her mother; another part thinks that, were this lady his own mother, he could never bear to leave her side.

  Once outdoors, in gloomy light, he breathes as deep as he can. He runs up the sloping driveway, feeling the magic workings of his muscles and bones. He arrives late for tea, and Gran is displeased. To punish his tardiness, she won’t discuss ailing neighbours with him. Exasperated, she says, “Tell me why you have to know everything?”

  Aunt Marta comes for dinner that night. Adrian is, as usual, made unwelcome at the dining table. He sits in the lounge room, on the overstuffed couch. The couch’s hide is golden velvet, and sitting on it makes him feel like a prince. He thinks back on his strange day – of Horsegirl on the iron roof and pawing through the sand, of Nicole dancing round the liquidambar, of her mother’s gauzy voice in the room. He feels as though he lives between sheets of glass, unable to touch the things that happen around him. Everyone and everything exists in a world he cannot quite comprehend. He glimpses only the residue, scrapes the surface of happenings. He wonders if, when he’s older, he will better understand things, or if he is doomed to live for ever as someone struggling to see.

  But he can’t relax or get comfortable, wary of grime jumping from himself to the pristine couch. He has come here to touch the holy relic, the cherub bowl, but his eyes are drawn along the mantelshelf to the lanky porcelain figurine which stands at the far end regarding the bowl disdainfully, a saluki peering down at a toad. The figure’s name is Royal Doulton, which means she’s a princess or queen, and she has patronizing ways. She carries a closed parasol like a rifle on her shoulder. The bowl squats, scowling; the willowy porcelain lady knows her own loveliness and flaunts it, her sultry face, her glossy glaze, her delicacy of build. Adrian slips off the couch and goes to her. Maybe Nicole’s mother had looked like this lady; maybe Gran once had. Perplexingly, Royal Doulton looks a little bit like Horsegirl.

  As soon as he lifts her off the mantel, she slithers like an eel from his hands. There’s something sly and traitorous in the way she shatters to pieces on the bricks of the hearth. There is a shriek behind him – a bloodcurdling scream, really. He hears cutlery dropped and the glass door flung back and as he feels his grandmother bearing down like a train he crosses himself superstitiously, awaiting the sting of the slap.

  She’s still furious the next morning, and Adrian can’t find his school shoe. He has hobbled about all morning, searching frantically. When Gran’s reversing the tank down the drive Adrian is underneath his bed, scouting the dustiest shadows. The first time she blares the horn, a squeak of dismay escapes him. The second time, frustrated tears fill his eyes. He runs lopsidedly to the den, although he’s already looked there. His grandmother leans on the horn as he crouches on the carpet, cheeks scorching, unable to think. He faces the prospect of wearing his sneakers – perhaps his slippers – to school, when anything but black lace-ups is strictly forbidden. A salty tear slinks past his nose and he wretchedly smears it away. Suddenly, salvation: he remembers reading National Geographic in bed and, growing sleepy, dropping the magazine to the floor. He charges to his room, kicks Geographic aside, and there it is, the prodigal shoe.

  In the car, driving to school, his grandmother doesn’t say anything, except to curse the traffic. Adrian cowers like a dog that’s been thoroughly thrashed. When he finally dares to glance at her, he sees she’s grown fins and horns, fangs and claws.

  Things surely cannot get any worse, but that evening they do. His homework demands the use of black ink, so he goes to Rory’s bedroom to dig out a pen. He doesn’t like Rory’s bleak, odoriferous room and nor is he particularly welcome within it, so he hurries, eager to be out. Rory’s easel stands empty so there’s no reason for Adrian to think the spats of wayward paint on it should be wet – but some of them must be, for as he ducks by the easel a dab of British racing green touches the elbow of his jumper. He stares at the spot in abject horror. His grandma nags him to change out of his uniform when he gets home from school, but Adrian is lazy and always reluctant to swap warm clothes for cold, so he disregards this decree when he can. Now there’s green paint on his school jumper and the jumper is new, not even one year old: his grandmother, already angry about Royal Doulton and the shoe, will certainly murder him.

  He rummages through Rory’s painting stuff for a rag, dousing it with turpentine. He rubs the rag determinedly on the stain, and the wool of the jumper darkens and frays. The small green splat spreads to become a noticeably large teal smudge. Adrian gulps down air, mortified. He scuttles to the bathroom, hooking the latch through the eye. He wriggles from the jumper, which reeks of turpentine. He holds the sleeve under the hot tap, gouging soap through the wool. The soap foams and water spits, and the jumper’s sleeve is soaked: still the stain remains. The hot water burns him, the soap’s smell of flowers rises in the air. Adrian flops on a chair, weak with defeat and melancholy. “You dumb kid,” Rory will chortle later; the boy’s grandmother will be less amused. To her, who grew up poor, the ruining of good clothes is t
enfold more disgraceful than the manslaughter of a china girl: even though he doesn’t try, Gran says, “Don’t talk to me, Adrian, don’t say a word!”

  That night he sleeps with his hands clamped between his knees, waking abruptly several times. He wonders what will become of him, a useless, hopeless boy.

  On the way to school the following morning, he tentatively speaks up. “Can I stay the night at Clinton’s on the weekend, Gran?”

  She skewers him in the rear-view mirror. “Has Mrs Tull invited you?”

  “…No.”

  “Then I don’t suppose you can, if you haven’t been invited.”

  He looks out the window, his eyelids fluttering. His jumper smells of turps and lavender, and the sleeve isn’t thoroughly dry. Paint still marks the elbow like a broad grass stain. As the car pulls up outside the school he murmurs, “If I ask, and his mum says yes, then can I go?”

  She eyes him severely, sunlight slanting on her glasses. “I suppose so,” she sighs, and spares him a miserly smile. “Have a good day.”

  The tank heaves away from the gutter and Beattie looks in the mirror to see him standing where she’d left him, his hair a mess, children bustling past him, the straps of the satchel tangled round his fingers. She has an urge to stop, run back, straighten his uniform, tidy his hair, tweak some colour into his cheeks, but he’ll never learn discipline if she babies him, so she drives resolutely on.

  As soon as they’ve wished her good morning, before they’ve even sat down, the substitute teacher tells them that Sandra won’t be returning to class. The children look blank – they don’t immediately equate Horsegirl with the demureness of Sandra. She’s been absent from the classroom since the incident on the rooftop, a day and a half ago. Her classmates have assumed she’s resting, letting her battiness subside; now they realize she isn’t going to return, that her desk will stay empty for ever. “What’s gonna happen to her?” one child, bolder than the rest, their ambassador, demands to be told.

  “Sandra’s going to a special place. A place that can care for children like her.”

  “Crazy kids, you mean?”

  Someone might have dropped an iceblock down her dress, for the teacher jolts a bit. “No, not crazy kids. It’s unkind to call people names. Sandra is your friend. She has some problems, but that’s all right. All of us have problems now and then, don’t we?”

  The children mutter, refusing to commit. None will admit to having problems if problems lead to rooftops and assorted special places. “Sandra’s going somewhere they can take proper care of her,” says the teacher, and to her mind the pupils accept the explanation and sit down in cheerful readiness to begin their day. But Adrian is not the only child who is fervently praying Please don’t let me be like that please don’t let me be crazy I am not the same as her I’m wanted someone wants me I don’t belong to St Jonah—

  The moment he can he asks Clinton if he might stay Saturday night at his friend’s house. Clinton is easygoing, he doesn’t need his mother’s permission for anything. “Yeah,” he says. “Bring the Slinky.”

  See, thinks Adrian, see?

  The newspaper carries an item in a corner of a page, no more than two or three paragraphs long. It’s a story that is perhaps too poignant to be mentioned on TV. A witness to the vanishing of the Metfords has been taken to hospital to have her stomach pumped. This is the housewife who was second to see the children on their journey to the milkbar, the woman shaking crumbs from a mat. The woman’s husband says his wife keeps seeing the children as she saw them, so briefly, two and a half weeks ago. Veronica holds Christopher’s hand, young Zoe dawdles behind: after them strides the Thin Man, silent as a fox. The husband says his wife will probably never forgive herself for letting them just walk on.

  SEVEN

  He loves Clinton’s house, cluttered as it is like a Christmas tree, where the heating and the television are always turned up high. Clinton’s mother is massive and prone to hollering, occasionally at her kids and her husband but mostly at everything else in the world, which irritates her no end. It is always easiest to do what she wants, to believe whatever she says. Her husband never does anything without first asking her if it’s right that he do so; he exists in his house unobtrusively, a tiny spider sharing the web of a giant. She adores her two children in a heavy-handed way, and informs others of how magnificent they are; in her opinion they’re cut from angelic cloth, and her days revolve around them; she seems to float without purpose, like a gaudy balloon, when they step out from her expansive shadow. Now that both Clinton and his sister are at school she lurks around the staffroom, volunteers for tuckshop and library duty, supervises excursions. Adrian sees that she doesn’t realize how her presence embarrasses her son.

  She likes Adrian because he is so harmless: it’s beyond the boy’s capabilities to lead Clinton astray.

  The house is filled to bursting point with plates and ornaments and china-faced dolls, with commemorative statues and porcelain creatures and silk flowers under bell jars, with the great hordes of tackiness which are advertised in women’s magazines and which Mrs Tull is unable to resist. Every second day another parcel arrives, every other day she’s writing a cheque. Glass cabinets make insecure cages for herds of cavorting unicorns and Baby Animals of the World; on a high shelf in the hallway mope doll-sized replicas of Marilyn, Buddy, JFK and Jimmy Dean, members of the incomplete collection of Those Taken Before Their Time. A genuine Swiss cuckoo clock regularly strangles the lounge-room air; talkback radio dominates the kitchen, and an irate dachshund pretends to doze on the sunroom couch. On the weekend Mrs Tull lets her children eat Fruit Loops for lunch. Clinton has never been smacked in his life, and the whole family gathers to nitpick their way through their favourite TV shows. Once, the dachshund had bitten Adrian, and Mr Tull had encouraged the boy to bite the dog right back. He’d been disappointed when Adrian refused.

  His gran drops him off soon after lunch and waits, engine thrumming, until Mrs Tull has opened the front door. Privately, Mrs Tull thinks Beattie has a face like a thunderclap; Beattie has her own opinion of Mrs Tull, including the prognosis that the woman will be deservedly dead from a heart attack before she’s forty years old. Face to face, the ladies are impeccably polite.

  “Clinton’s in the garage, honey.” Adrian likes the way she takes his coat and bag from him, as if he’s someone important. He tells her that Beattie has sent over a packet of Tic-Tocs, and Mrs Tull forages for them in the bag. Every one of the biscuits will be gone before sunset, and Mr Tull will complain of a gooby stomach.

  He knows the house well; it is friendly to him. He likes the multitude of mail-order goods – he likes the plate that, wound on its base, tinkles the tune of “Silent Night”, he likes the thimbles shaped like woodland animals. Throughout the house the television competes noisily with the radio; in the hallway he’s blown sideways by the heater’s parching gale. He slips through the back door and trots down the path to the garage. Clinton comes out of the darkness, shading his eyes from the white sky. His glasses and his shoes are coated in a fine smoky dust. He asks, “Did you bring the Slinky?”

  “It’s in my bag, inside. Will I get it?”

  “No, later. We’re breaking things.”

  Adrian blinks. His friend is not typically destructive: he has much, so he wastes things and loses things, but he doesn’t usually ruin them. “What are we breaking?”

  Clinton turns on his heels. “Not you,” he says. “You only just got here.”

  Adrian slopes after him, into the garage. Neither Mr nor Mrs Tull likes to throw much away, and their garage, like their house, is a repository for the many things they will never need. There’s no lightbulb, and daylight angles only with difficulty past the barnlike doors. At first, Adrian sees just murk. Then his eyes find their way through the pitch and he sees, heaped in corners, the hundreds of boxes that brought the mail-order goods to their new owner unscathed. The boxes leak plastic and screwed-up balls of paper. His gaze climbs down them t
o the floor, where the remains of a wooden chest of drawers lie splayed on the concrete. Ugly and cheaply made, the drawers have been banished out here long enough to be laced with web and specked with mildew. Now they’re wreckage, a broken-backed jumble of timber and nails, remorselessly smashed to pieces. Adrian, staring down at it, sees a worried daddy-longlegs fumbling in search of a safer home. “How did you do it?” he asks, for he would have had no clue where to begin.

  “With this.” Clinton hefts a cricket bat not much shorter than himself.

  Adrian crouches, touching a finger to the tips of a wrenched staple. The way the chest of drawers lies there, its frame flattened, disembowelled, it’s clear its death was torture. The cavernous quiet of the garage makes Adrian’s ears ring; the dimness is a strain to see through. “Why did you do it?” he wonders, for it seems so wanton, so unlike anything Clinton’s ever done.

  “For fun,” his friend says blithely. “It was fun.” He glares through the glass which enlarges and liquefies his eyes, challenging Adrian to dispute the claim – wanting and daring and encouraging Adrian to dispute it, so his churlishness may take flight. And Adrian shuffles warily, for Clinton is not usually like this. “I’ve got a surprise for you,” his friend informs him.

  “…What?”

  Clinton smirks, and slings the bat into a city of boxes. The impact sends beach chairs, paint tins, plant pots tumbling down. From the midst of the crashing cascade jumps a spritelike, triumphant boy. With the noise and swirling dust and the darkness, it takes Adrian a moment to recognize Paul. “Hi,” he mutters, affable enough despite his shock, despite the fact that he’s queasy inside, despite feeling like he could cry. Clinton has thrown his head back and is laughing raucously, spine arched, cackling, the sound scraping off the iron roof. Paul pounces through the remnants of the chest of drawers, kicking the fragments across the floor. “You should see what we’ve got planned for the Slinky!” he bays.