Fiona McFarlane - The High Places - Stories

Mr Kidd, laughing, unleashed a bubble of watery snot; he attended to it without embarrassment, using one of his laundered handkerchiefs.

‘Now, Violet was only seventeen, so we had to wait, and we were touring all the time, not always to the same places — she’d be in Grafton and I’d be in Bendigo, say — and along comes the war and I’m called up, but they turned me down for service on account of my asthma and I end up running errands for the War Damage Commission, which is how I got into insurance.’

The bird shifted on Christopher’s knee, as if to remind Mr Kidd to get on with it.

‘So finally the war’s over, Vi’s twenty-one, and on our wedding day she shows up with her mother’s blue parrot on her arm. It’s a wedding present. She carries it down the aisle, it sits on her shoulder all through the wedding breakfast, and finally we’re alone in this little hotel in Brisbane and here’s this bird. And I say, “Look, Vi, I can’t do it with a bird in the room” — there was no cage, see, to cover over. So she put it in her suitcase, and I said, “Won’t it die? No air?” and she just shakes her head at me and that’s that, my mind wasn’t on the bird, let me tell you. What a night.

‘In the morning, Vi opens her suitcase and out comes the bird, right as rain. And I say, “Shouldn’t we feed it?” and she laughs at me and says, “No need.” Then she tells me the strangest thing. “This bird,” she says, “has been in my family since 1851.”’

Mr Kidd paused. The bird picked discreetly at its chest feathers. ‘Knock,’ it said matter-of-factly. Christopher listened for sounds that the maid might have returned to his room.

‘She says, “Bob, we’re married now and I’ll tell you everything. A Chinaman made this bird for my great-grandmother, and it isn’t real.”’

‘Not real?’ said Christopher, looking at the bird, which hopped on his knee.

Mr Kidd rubbed his hands together. ‘I told you I had a model for you, didn’t I?’ he said, and his pleasure in saying it seemed to make his eyes water a little; he touched them with his handkerchief.

‘Well, I was a newly married man, I was ready to agree to anything, but I couldn’t wrap my head around it — the thing looked so real, you can see for yourself, and here she was saying it was clockwork. An “automaton” is the word, but you’ll know that with your thesis.’

‘Yes,’ said Christopher. ‘There was a duck that ate and defecated, the Vaucanson duck, right in my time period.’

Mr Kidd nodded. ‘So I asked her to show me its insides, and she said no, taking it apart would break it forever and there was nothing else like it in the world. And my Violet said to me, “Bob, by god, if you ever doubt this bird I’ll walk out the door and never come back.” She’s saying this, mind, without a stitch on, and she looked so serious — what could I do? I made a vow more solemn, I reckon, than our marriage. Tell me you would’ve done any different, Chris, faced with a beautiful naked woman.’

‘No, of course not,’ said Christopher, although he thought instead of a beautiful man with a bird on his bare shoulder; and, as if startled, the bird flew to the top of the wardrobe, where its tail tipped up and down like a little lever. But only like a lever, thought Christopher; really, just like a bird.

‘She kept it up all through the honeymoon — we only drove down the coast — all through setting up the house, and when I said, “Let me buy it a cage, shouldn’t it have seeds to eat, shouldn’t it drink?” she said, “I told you, Bob, it isn’t real and it can’t eat — ask me another question like that and I’ll be out the door.” For the longest time, you know, I thought she fed it on the sly. There was no mess. And of course I was gone all day at work, then for days at a time, weeks eventually, out on the road. The boys came along pretty early, two boys, but the third baby was stillborn, and after that it was a string of miscarriages, very hard, and one day she says to me, “I don’t mind, we have our boys, except I wanted a girl to take the bird, it’s supposed to be a girl.”’

‘Does it have a name?’ asked Christopher, because only now did it occur to him that Mr Kidd hadn’t mentioned one.

‘She wouldn’t name it,’ said Mr Kidd, ‘on account of it not being real. Anyway, by this time I’d forgotten about it being an automaton and all that, it was just The Bird, and she didn’t make a big song and dance about it, except she told the boys to take care when they were playing. But when she said the bit about wanting a girl for the bird, I thought, Hang on, that thing must be getting a bit long in the tooth, how many years does a budgie live for anyway? I asked at a pet shop and they said seven or eight, maximum ten. Well, we’d been married for seven, and I figured old Gladys had been replacing the bird on and off and she probably got a fresh one to give Vi, so our time with this bird was nearly up and then we’d see.’

‘Ah,’ said Christopher. Mr Kidd’s nose had begun to well, but he didn’t seem to have noticed. He rubbed his thighs with his fists. A strange high hum entered the room; it took Christopher a moment to realise it came from next door and was a vacuum cleaner. The bird, as if insulted by the noise, ducked its head and said, ‘Violet! Violet!’

‘But a year passed, and a few more, and the bird was still with us, the bloody thing. I’d inspect it whenever I got home from a trip and wonder if it was the same bird or if she’d gone out and got herself a new one. But they all looked the same to me. One day she sees me peering at it and asks what I’m up to. I thought fast, Chris, and I said, “I’m trying to figure out where you wind it up.” She gave me a kiss for that.

‘So the boys grew up, and when the first one got married I asked Vi if she was going to give him the bird, and she said no, and I asked if it was because he wasn’t a girl. And she said it was because he didn’t believe it was mechanical. I was glad to hear it, but I said to her, “You told me you’d be out the door if I didn’t believe you,” and she said, “I’m his mother, not his wife.” And the second boy got married and he didn’t get the bird either, but I knew better than to ask. All this time, it’s still going into the bath with her, sitting on her shoulder all day. It’d perch on the telly at night while we watched. It wasn’t till after both boys left home that it started to talk — Hello! Knock! All of that, and her name too. So I figured she’d finally bought a smart one.’

‘Violet! Violet!’ said the bird.

‘It used to come on holiday with us, camping and road trips, but then we planned a trip to England — Vi always wanted to go to England — and I found her putting it in her suitcase. So I said, “You can’t do that,” and she said, “I have to, they won’t let it on the plane with us,” and then it all came out, Chris — that I’d never believed her, that I thought it was a game, that she fed it in secret and bought a new one every ten years. She was spitting mad, and I said to her, “Well, take it apart, show me its insides, prove it ,” and she refused to go on the trip, shut herself in the bedroom, and wouldn’t come out. It was all I could do to make her eat. The boys came over and talked her out of it, but it was never the same after that, she never really forgave me.’

‘But she didn’t walk out the door?’

‘That’s what she couldn’t forgive, she said it one day — “Bob, I’ve left it too late, I could walk out the door but there’s nowhere to go,” and I tell you, I could’ve killed that bird, but she wouldn’t leave it alone with me. She died later that year, unexpected, never saw England, and I still remember coming home after the funeral and there’s the bird sitting on the back of a kitchen chair. I hold out my hand for it to come over, I was ready to snap its neck. But I got to thinking about something she’d said when we had the fight. “Have you ever heard it sing?” she said, and I thought, Nope, not a note. Budgies don’t sing, do they? But it gave me pause, and next day I went off to a pet shop and listened to all the budgies squawking and chattering and chirping away, and it was true, I’d never heard the bird make a single sound like that. So what I did was, I bought a cage and some seed from the shop, I took it all home and set it up, and waited to see what happened.’