Peter Carey - Collected Stories

She would have astonished him with the news, made him laugh and made him furious all at once. Here, she would have said, we have the romance of space and pointed to the burnt ugly hulk of an interstellar cargo ship lowering itself onto the earth like a dirty old hen going down on its nest. Space had yielded no monsters, no Martians, no exotic threats or blessings. The ship roaring bad-temperedly on the platform would contain nothing more beautiful than iron ingots, ball-bearings, and a few embittered workers who were lucky enough to have finished their stint in the untidy backyards of space.

It wasn’t funny unless you made it funny and Lilly, four months pregnant, with twenty dollars in her purse, a car that needed two hundred dollars and a husband who was fighting against three million unemployed to get a job, had no real choice but to make it funny.

“C’est la bloody guerre,” she said, holding up her knitting and reflecting that two hundred miles of dusty roads had not done a lot for the whiteness of the garment.

Fuck it, she thought, it’ll have to do.

When the face appeared in the open window by her shoulder she got such a fright she couldn’t remember whether she’d said “fuck” out loud or just thought it.

“I beg your pardon,” she said to the bombed-out face that grinned crookedly through the window.

“Pardon for what?” He was young and there was something crazy about him. His black eyes looked as sleepy as his voice sounded. He was neglected and overgrown with wild curling black hair falling over his eyes and a bristling beard that was just catching up to an earlier moustache.

“I thought I may have said something.”

“If you said something,” he said, “I didn’t hear it. I am definitely at least half deaf in one ear.”

“I probably didn’t say it then,” she said carefully, wondering if he was going to rob her or if he was just crazy. “Are you looking for a lift?”

“Not me.” He stood back from the windows so she could see his white overalls with their big Kennecott insignia. He was tall and thin like a renegade basketball player. “This,” he gestured laconically to include the whole area of car park, administration building, docking platforms and dry parched earth, “this is my home. So,” he paused for a moment as if what he had said had made him inexplicably sad, “so I don’t need a lift, thank you.”

“Any jobs in there?”

“Let’s say there are an awful lot of people in there waiting to be told no.”

Lilly nodded. “Yeah, well …”

“You want to see something?”

“Well, that depends what it is.”

He walked smoothly back to a little white cleaner’s trolley he had left marooned a few yards from the car and trundled it back, whistling like one who carries rare gifts.

“If anyone comes,” he whispered, “you’re asking me directions, OK?”

“OK.”

“This,” he reached a large hand into the white cart, “is really something special.”

He was not exaggerating. For what he now pushed through the window and onto her lap was the most beautiful bird that Lilly Danko had ever dreamed might be possible, more exquisite and delightful than a bird of paradise, a flamingo, or any of the rare and beautiful species she had ever gazed at in picture books. It was not a large bird, about the size of a very big pigeon, but with a long supple neck and a sleek handsome head from which emerged a strong beak that looked just like mother of pearl. Yet such was the splendour of the bird that she hardly noticed the opaline beauty of the beak, or the remarkable eyes which seemed to have all the colours of the rainbow tucked into a matrix of soft brown. It was the bird’s colouring that elicited from her an involuntary cry. For the feathers that ran from its smooth head to its graceful tail were of every blue possibly imaginable. Proud Prussian blue at the head then, beneath a necklace of emerald green, ultramarine and sapphire which gave way to dramatic tail feathers of peacock blue. Its powerful chest revealed viridian hidden like precious jewels in an aquamarine sea.

When she felt the first pulse of pure pleasure she imagined that it came from the colours themselves and later when she tried to explain this first feeling to Mort she would use the word “swoon”, savouring the round smooth strangeness of the word.

“Don’t it feel nice when you touch it?”

“Oh yes.”

And even as she answered she realized that it was not the colours that gave such pleasure, but that the feeling was associated with stroking the bird itself. “It’s like having your back rubbed.”

“Better.”

“Yes,” she said, “better. It gets you right at the base of the neck.”

“It gets you just about everywhere.” And something about the way he said it made her realize that he wasn’t showing her this bird out of idle interest, but that he was going to offer it for sale. It was an exotic, of course, and had probably been smuggled in by some poor miner looking for an extra buck. If the crew-cut Protestants who had begun the push into space with such obsessive caution had seen the laxness of the space companies with quarantine matters they would have shrieked with horror. But NASA had wilted away and no terrible catastrophe had hit the earth. There were exotic shrubs which needed to be fed extraterrestrial trace elements to keep them alive, a few dozen strange new weeds of no particular distinction, and a poor small lizardish creature raised for its hallucinogenic skin.

But there had been nothing as strange and beautiful as this and she calculated its value in thousands of dollars. When she was invited to make an offer she reluctantly handed it back, or tried to, because as she held it up to the man he simply backed away.

“You’ve got to make an offer. You can’t not make an offer.”

She put the bird, so placid she thought it must be drugged, back on her lap and stroked sadly. “OK, I’ll be the bunny. How much do you want?”

He held up two hands.

“Ten dollars?”

“Is that cheap or is it cheap?”

“It’s cheap, but I can’t.”

“You should have made an offer.”

“I can’t,” she said hopelessly, thinking of Mort and what he would say. God knows the world pressed in on him heavily enough. Yet the thrilling thought that she could own such a marvel, that she need never hand it back, crept into her mind and lodged there, snug and comfortable as a child sleeping beneath a soft blanket.

“I can only offer five,” she said, thinking that she couldn’t offer five at all.

“Done.”

“Oh, shit.”

“You don’t want it?”

“Oh yes, I want it,” she said drily, “you know I want it.” She put the bird down on the seat, where it sat waiting for nothing more than to be picked up again, and took five of their precious dollars from her handbag. “Well,” she said, handing over the money, “I guess we can always eat it.” Then, seeing the shocked look on the wild young face: “Just joking.”

“If you don’t want it …”

“I want it, I want it. What does it eat? Breakfast cereal and warm milk?”

“I’ve got feed for it, so don’t sweat.”

“And the feed is extra, right?”

“My dear Dolores,” he said, “where this bird comes from, the stuff it eats grows on trees. If you’d be nice enough to open the boot I’ll give you a bag of it and our transaction, as they say, will be finito.”

She opened the boot and he wheeled round his cleaner’s trolley and hoisted a polythene sack into the car.

“What do I do when it’s eaten all this?”

But he was already gliding across the car park towards the administration building. “Well, then,” he giggled over his shoulder, “you’re going to have to eat it.”