BIRD
Bird. Trying to find her wings, so she can break free of her past. And fly.
short story
Artwork: Artist L7M, Brazil, 2015
1
The Turret
“Tell me Bird,” says Blu. “Tell me, way up there in that turret, what do you see?”
The turret is a world, high above, that looks over a river. It has arches opening to the sky, a small cupola supported with Corinthian columns sprouting from a wide ledge. Beneath the dome, a painted heaven—cobalt blue pricked with silver lights. The floor is a mosaic of stone tiles and the first night my sister Neela and I stayed in the apartment with its own private turret, a secret hideaway, I arranged tea lights on it, a mirror world for the stars above. That night I sat on a worn tapestry cushion, listening to the scudding flow of car tyres streaming on the four-lane road below, the other river, silent.
As we walk towards the Botanical Gardens, I find my voice. “The sky,” I say. “It’s a blue that’s thin, almost white. The clouds. The trees. And the river.”
“What does it feel like?”
“The sky?” Blu nods. “Pure and true and out of reach.”
I’m not looking at him when I say it, but he gets my meaning and stretches out his arm.
“Touch me,” he says, and I do. “See, I’m here. I’m real.” I don’t need to feel him to know that. He’s here. For now.
His eyes are steadfast. “I came back for you, Bird.” It doesn’t come out romantic, just straight, a statement of fact. I don’t ask for how long. Time won’t stretch long enough for how much I want Blu to stay.
Blu’s eyes are startling, a deep, deep blue, not of the sky or sea. I struggle to pinpoint a time of day when the light gets to a place where the blue just pitches to black, because that’s the closest to the depth of his eyes. But that’s not why he’s called Blu. When he was born his dad said he came out all blue and hollering. They christened him Samuel, but the nickname stuck. When he told me this, I said his name was beautiful. Blu’s laugh was brittle bleak. “He thought I looked blue because he was hung over from going on a bender. Nothing beautiful about it, Bird.”
The turret was the first place I took him when he arrived from Sydney. From the moment I heard his voice on the intercom, my mind and body had disconnected; what I willed it to do, it could only stumble towards. The slick sweat of my palm as I opened the door, the electric pulses across my skin as he blotted the light.
“Bird?” he said gently as if coaxing me from the wild. My head nodded loosely, each action hung by a thread. My hand reached in greeting, or searching across the void that seemed impossible to breach. He dumped the black canvas duffle bag near me, and pushed the door shut with his freed hand. Each movement punctuated time like the tick of a clock. I registered sound, vibration and his looming presence. How he filled a space that had been absent for too long.
He grabbed at my hand to pull me closer, but I was pulling him towards a doorway that, when I’d first visited this apartment, I thought led to a closet. And the magic once opened was seeing the footfalls of a tiled staircase. With each step I climbed in wonder of to a space that wasn’t a room or a deck, and my mind travelled to meet the vista that overwhelmed me.
This was where I brought Blu.
Blu walked up the stairs as I followed. For a moment he stopped, stunned by the view surrounding us. His eyes softened, half closed to focus. He leaned his forearms on the turret’s ledge and I mimicked him, my body his shadow.
And I was thinking:
How can this be? He shouldn’t be here.
Our faces touched air and sky. Blu’s eyes closed, but mine were wide with the view. Mostly of Blu.
My gaze must have burned him like a hot sun, his eyes opened to look at me and they were sheen flat with the hit of light, unseeing, then he squinted, honing in as I turned away.
“Let’s go,” he said finally. “Before the garden gates shuts.”
His voice propelled me to move. We didn’t touch although I felt him like prickly heat infusing my skin.
My body descended the staircase, weighted with a plumb line centring me to feel the sudden gravity of this place, this day, and the significance of why Blu was here.
2
The Gardens
In the Botanical Gardens, we’re lying with our backs to the sky, a high bright light, stomachs pressing into a grassy bed.
Our faces and hands are close, fingers almost touching, but talk and silence fill the space between us. We haven’t seen each other in a year. Blu left just before he turned nineteen as if nearing the end of our teens was a harbinger for change.
My eyes keep resting on his lips.
They’re strange and new and familiar. The shape, wide and full. The way the skin of his bottom lip frills. I remember the feel of it, my tongue catching on loose skin. From the moment I opened the door to find him suddenly there, my eyes keep straying to his lips wondering who now knew them the way I once had.
Even here, a place that meant so much to both of us, I can’t escape the truth. He’s not here simply because he wants to be. It’s a pall shrouding every movement, word, every thought and memory.
After Mum left, I called him. Too numb to speak with any coherence, I barely got the words out to say what happened. Blu wanted to come back that night but I said no. He called every day after that as if his voice could fill the void of her leaving.
Two months later and a week after Neela and I moved into Mum’s old apartment, I called Blu late one night. All the words I’d been swallowing stuttered into tears; sobs that ripped up from my stomach like I was vomiting grief. He held on, listening to me cry the emptiness out and when I stopped, all I heard was his breathing. He didn’t try to comfort me. No useless words except, “I’m coming. Hold tight, Bird. I’ll be there soon.” I didn’t believe him until he was standing in the doorway. I should have known better. When Blu said he’d do something, he did it.
Blu flops over onto his back, arms splaying as his eyes close against the sun. “Don’t get why you moved in there.”
“It’s convenient,” I say, the words false on my tongue.
Blu snorts. “Convenient? Right. That’s crap. How are you going to move on living in her apartment?”
I roll onto my back. “She wanted it to be my home, too. And it’s not hers—it’s Coco’s.” I don’t want to say outright how doubt still clouds any reason to be there. Words like convenient foil all that Neela and I keep from saying.
He crosses the invisible barrier, his hand searching, his fingers lacing with mine. There are calluses on each finger and his palm. The first time he kissed me he could barely touch my face. “Your skin’s so soft,” he whispered close to my ear and a shiver ran along my spine, a plucked cord that vibrated from the crown of my head, shooting to the soles of my feet. “I’m scared I’ll be too rough.” I held his hand and placed it against my cheek, scraping the pads of his fingertips across my skin. They were abrasive, but warm. “See, not so fragile,” I said and then I kissed the centre of his palm and after that, he wasn’t scared.
“Bet Neela’s freaking out.” He’s right, but what I don’t say is she was the first to agree to our grandmother Coco’s suggestion it might be good for both of us to move into the apartment. Coco and her second husband, the Colonel, owned it, and she offered it to us rent-free. That bagged it for my sister Neela, although she still had reservations. The offer came a month after Mum had left, but time couldn’t distance our thoughts from Mum’s presence in that space.
“We’ll see how we go here,” said Neela the day we officially moved in, eyeing the empty rooms, weary with thoughts of all we must do. I’ll see how long I can live here, she was truly saying. Out of the two of us, she looked the most like Mum: hair a curling red brown she wore to her shoulders; eyes a liquid honey set like almonds in an oval face. She looked like a 1930s movie starlet, with a sultry smile and petite features that were a foil for a stubborn nature. She could be a bully and on this occasion she set me to clean while she laid out a plastic drop sheet and the bags weighted with brushes, rollers and paint.
Neela wanted nothing of Mum’s. Coco decided to give all the furniture to the Salvation Army. Mum had taken her clothes, and that was all. The furniture barely filled half a truck, but what Mum truly valued, her artwork, was stored at her art dealer, Raymond’s gallery. Coco had contacted Raymond after she got Mum’s letter. I think she wanted to confirm the fact Mum had actually left to live with him in Sydney before she dared speak to her daughter. It was the shock. We’d all felt it. I was still reeling from it.
“Take it all,” Neela said the day the Salvos came for the furniture. She stood at the threshold, the scent of citrus cleaner from the professional cleaners held hot and sickening in the closed apartment. “I want nothing of hers.” As if words had the power to push everything away. Neela never asked me what I wanted. That was normal. Being a couple of years younger, nearly twenty years old, meant my opinion didn’t count for much. Never had. I went to the sash windows in the living room and opened them, and the French doors leading to the balcony that touched the tops of trees. I stuck my head out of the second bedroom window, painted a vivid blue that Mum said would be mine whenever I came over. I slept in it once.
I kept two things she left behind. A wooden box, a daisy chain carved delicately into the lid. It had been placed on her bedside table. Blu made it and I gave it to her as a jewellery box. The other was a tapestry cushion the size of a pillow. A unicorn and a knight stood in a glade. A princess was at their centre, one arm outstretched to the unicorn, her other hand holding the knight’s. It smelled funky with dust and damp but it was a fairy tale picture of innocence, hope and love.
“Neela says she’s getting used to it,” I say wondering whom I was trying to convince. I can feel Blu’s stare. Most likely incredulous. He knew Neela well enough.
“Getting used to it isn’t the same as feeling at home, Bird.” His hand grips tight then releases to a cradling hold.
My voice threatens to leave me, but I find it. “I don’t think it’s ever felt like a home. It was never a home for Mum. It was a place to stay after she and Dad split up. God, what’s home, Blu?”
That’s when I dare to look at him only to see his mouth open, on the verge of speech, but the words are lost as he presses his lips together. My stomach squeezes into my chest and the lead of my lungs makes it hard to breathe.
Once he would have answered me without hesitating¼
“Home,” he’d said smiling as he bent to whisper in my ear. “That’s you, Bird. For me, you’re home.” His breath had tickled my ear so I was laughing and he quickly snatched the laughter from my mouth with his.
It had been as true for him as for me. With Blu I’d felt safe. I’d felt loved. In that way I could be whoever I wanted to be. Like I was free.
Now, it’s a truth that cannot be spoken, and I match his silence with my own.
3
Bird
Blu’s thumb strokes a lazy circle into my palm. All my attention focuses on this. In the afternoon sun, I’m thawing from the core out.
“I never found a place like this, up there,” Blu says. His voice drifts, wafts to me on the soft breeze. I inhale it deeply.
“I thought you were near the beach?”
“Yeah. But near the harbour, there’s the Royal Botanic Gardens. It’s beautiful. I’d sit there and look out at the water. The closest I got to this. Here it’s a lake, but there, it’s water from the sea.”
I hesitate. “Are you happy there?” I’ve never dared ask. If he said yes, it would mean he’s happy not being here. Happy not to be with me.
I can feel his head turn, eyes open and looking my way, while my eyes are shut, the veins of my lids, a veil of red.
“I’m happier with me, Bird. Not the same thing.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know why I left. If I didn’t, I would have killed it—what we had.” Now I turn, eyes wide to take in the shadows under his unfathomable blue eyes. He took an overnight train from Sydney to get here. Didn’t sleep well. His thick, almost black hair is lank, cut short, spiky. There’s stubble on his chin and cheeks that I want to scrape my fingers against. I keep my hand entwined with his.
“Have you been able to work out what you needed to?”
He surprises me, reaching over with his other hand, his touch so light I can barely feel the rough pad of his finger as he draws a line following my cheekbone, to the corner of my mouth, resting on my chin. I flinch, enough for him to notice, his touch too intimate after so long. I want it and can’t bear it all at once. A reminder of what I’ve lost. His hand falls away.
“I think so. The work has been good. Mick, I’ve told you about him, he’s taught me a lot. Says I’m a natural. Got me doing basic furniture—from designing a piece to completion. I’m also helping with finishing commissioned pieces for clients. He has me going out looking for timber, says I’ve got an eye for what can be made from it.” He’s answering my question obliquely. Bypassing a tertiary course and getting a paid apprenticeship as a furniture maker was one reason for the move, but he could have done that here.
“Are you still making your own stuff?”
“Yeah, there are lots of off-cuts. I’ve been carving, even selling pieces. Kendra’s got a stall at Paddington Markets selling her jewellery, so it’s worked out nicely.” He says it casually and I tense. Every part of me. My fingers are stiff in his hand and I begin to pull away, but he won’t let me.
When he found the share flat in Bondi I could hear the hesitation as he told me it was with a girl called Kendra. She was three years older and studying gold and silver smithing while selling her own work through shops and her stall. That was after he’d been away for two months. When he left he’d thought it might be best we didn’t contact each other. I was too numb to protest, mired in a sinkhole of inertia. In the end he rang me, couldn’t stop himself, said he was being a fool. We may not have been together, but completely letting go seemed impossible. Still, he didn’t come home.
“Bird?” I can’t speak. When emotions take hold I lose words. My mouth is a clamshell. What I want to ask, what I’ve never asked and we’ve never spoken of or written—I just can’t. To say it, to hear it, would be stepping over a precipice to fall. His leaving was like that, but there’d been a promise in it as well. I wouldn’t call it hope, because my heart ached too much to believe it. That, maybe, he might come back.
The first time he met Mum, she recognised a hurt in him because she had it too.
“So much pain, Roan,” she said. Blu never got my name, wanted to know why I had the name of a horse when I wasn’t earthbound, that I tread light enough to float. That’s why he called me Bird. Mum said I grew into my name: a coltish body, eyes large, the colour of dark tea and a mane of flyaway chestnut hair. “Has he ever spoken about it?” she asked.
I was bemused, unsure how she was getting this impression. Mum couldn’t let go: “Did something happen to him?” I panicked just thinking there was a deep secret that he was hiding, even if we’d just met, even if he smiled at me as if the sun was shining on water through his eyes.
“I don’t know what you mean,” I said, and she never mentioned it again. But Mum was sensitive to it. She lost her twin sister when they were fifteen and it was a tear in her world that none of us could mend.
The one time Mum spoke frankly about her sister’s death, she admitted she lost a part of herself. “If I were a bird,” she said. “My wings would have been ripped off.” It was brutal. How could you survive that? Because a bird couldn’t.
Not long after she met Blu, she made the odd comment, “Like meets like.” Yet what was the likeness between Blu and I if it was about hurts that couldn’t be spoken about?
In the end, he left because what Mum had sensed bubbled up.
And loving me had been the trigger.
4
A Barbed Gift
“I know what you’re thinking,” Blu says, pulling me back. He’s not letting go, and the way he’s talking feels different from before when he left. There’s no evasion. He’s tackling this. Now I’m the one wanting to run away.
“No you don’t.”
“Nothing happened, Bird. Kendra wanted something, I’ll be honest, but I didn’t.” The relief leaves me deflated. But there’s a niggling doubt, a wary uncertainty. Still, I don’t ask; I feel I have no right to ask. He leans on his elbow, our hands unclasping, and he cups my chin, so I can’t escape looking at him.
“There’s been no one. That’s the truth.” Staring into his eyes, I can tell he’s speaking true. He can hide things through words, but not his eyes. He could never look at me straight and lie. My bones unhinge at the joints. I nod and not for the first time today my eyes brim with tears.
“God, was it right coming here? You’re…”
“No,” I croak. “No, I want you here.”
“I haven’t even asked about your mum, Bird. I still don’t know what to say.”
The thing is, I don’t want to talk about her. Not now. Not while he’s here. That’s not the point. He came because she left. She walked away from us to live in Sydney. Blu didn’t come back simply to see me. I’m holding onto seconds, minutes, not wanting to talk of what I can’t do anything about. He’s here and it feels like a barbed gift. To have him here because she wanted to escape from her life.
“She once told me,” I begin, not sure where the words were leading, the thought a feather floating, “that you reminded her of herself.”
He rests his head on his hand. His eyes crease half-shut against his confusion. “What did she mean?”
“The hurt in you.”
Blu’s face is still. He can do that, empty himself out so the surface is as calm as a sheet of water, not a ripple. It scares me. I don’t know what to hold onto when he gets like this. An unnerving calm, no disclosure of what lies beneath.
“She was always wary of me, that’s for sure.”
I knew that well enough, although I didn’t want it to be so. Oddly, Coco was the opposite. “Most of us have to deal with pain,” she said, not knowing the details while understanding Blu wasn’t living on the farm in South Gippsland with his parents for a reason. “But there’s something solid about him. Dignified. He’s like my Jack, grounded in the natural world and his love and respect for it. And being able to work with his hands.” Her eyes welled sad whenever she spoke of her first husband. They also shone.
Unlike Mum, Coco talked openly about her life. “Jack’s father was the manager of our farm. A wonderful man. Jack and I grew up together. We loved each other as children before we knew what that meant. Before love became this idea that’s in your head with all these expectations attached to it.”
About Blu she said in her no-nonsense way, “I like him, Roan.”
Coco had a magnanimous view that people were a gift in one’s life, while my mother was a counterweight, preferring to see the potential for heartbreak, for loss and pain.
5
Blu
When I met Blu, it was right here.
I was sitting under a tree in the gardens, drawing. It was after school and I would often come here before going home. Home when I met Blu was with Coco and the Colonel. He was my grandmother’s second husband, a former Admiral in the Royal Australian Navy. I was never sure why Coco called him the Colonel, a lover’s secret she never shared. They lived in an apartment in a street not far from the gardens that had become my backyard.
Blu came up to me, asked me what I was sketching; said he’d noticed me before. He was in his school uniform, as was I. He was in year 11 on a scholarship at Melbourne High. I was at Melbourne Girls Grammar, same year. One of the first things I learnt, we were both in halfway homes. He was living with his sister, and I was with Coco. Neither of us was living with our parents. Both sixteen and we’d had to make do with places that felt temporary, uncertain, even if the people we lived with wanted us there out of love. Coco wanted me to have a home, Blu’s sister, Melissa, just wanted him to be safe.
Blu’s eyes pierce. “I wasn’t just hurt, Bird. I was angry. You knew that. That’s why I went away, because it was poisoning me. It was only going to get in the way of us being together.”
We’re not together—not now, I want to bark at him. His leaving never felt temporary. When he left, he was lost to me. I was lost.
I strain to ask. “And have you been able to deal with it? What was making you angry?”
“Do you want the list? You know the backstory, Bird. Dad was drinking because he couldn’t make the farm work. Mum was going into her shell because she felt helpless and having to do a shit job at a bakery in town to make ends meet. I was skipping school to help milk the cows and do all the work around the farm ‘cause Dad couldn’t get up some days, and then he fell in the milking shed and hurt his hip. Mel left because she couldn’t see a future there and she was right. And then Will.” He didn’t have to say too much more about Will. His brother boiled with enough anger for everyone, relentless and cruel. He’d taunt their dad because he thought he was running the place into the ground. Three years older than Blu, Will wanted to take over, wanted to turn it into a business, diversify with crops. The irony was Blu said he was right, that it was the way to go. Blu wanted nothing to do with the farm. But his dad was stubborn, couldn’t bring himself to change.
Will was savage. When I imagined him, I’d see his heart pricked with blazing splinters burning the pink-red muscle into a charred brick. He’d try and pick fights with Blu and their younger brother, Josh, thinking they were weak links in a family chaining him, targets to beat up with his rage. He’d do it by goading them through actions that were never direct. Melissa said she couldn’t remember Will not being fuelled by a fiery restlessness, like he’d been born with a smouldering heat in his belly, a slow burn that was eating away at him.
“But don’t tell Blu this. I think Will’s just always been jealous of him,” said Melissa. This only confused me.
“Why not tell Blu?”
Melissa had eyes almost the same shade as Blu’s, and they were distracted and knowing. “Because he doesn’t need the guilt.”
Blu was always blunt about Will, told me straight some of what he did.
“One time I saw Will with his mate Todd on the banks of the lake just out of town. They were grasping the necks of the swans. Will called them stretchy-necks. Swinging them like sogged bags of meat until their necks broke. That was the first and only time I hit him.”
Blu said he’d charged him when they got home, slamming Will up hard against the dresser in the kitchen with their mother’s best china, punching him in the face. The weight of him dragged Will onto the floor and the china crashed and splintered around them. “Get the fuck off me!” Will rasped because Blu had his hand wrapped around his throat. Blu couldn’t hear. The only sound was the tidal spurt of blood in his ears pumping hard from his chest. Melissa ran in screaming, yanking at the neck of his T-shirt. “You idiots! Mum’s going to kill you both, look what you’ve done!” Blu was never sure how he got up, but when he did Will slammed his fist into his balls. It was the only time Blu said he vented his anger on anyone so forcefully. He loathed cruelty, but he’d sunk that day trying to best Will. To overwhelm him with his disgust.
“That’s what he wanted—to bring me down.” Blu’s eyes were empty, a shallow pool when he said this.
The year before Blu left home, Will took a rifle to the family dog, a Kelpie called Kip. He’d shot him point blank in the head because he’d gotten cataracts with age and could no longer see. Blu had said nothing while Will snarled at him, daring him to react, said he’d saved them a vet bill with a bullet. Blu cried when he told me, but he didn’t cry when he carried the bloodied body, still warm, laying Kip out on the roots of the one oak tree growing near his mum’s rose garden. He dug a grave and buried him. He sat next to it until night bled the sky of light and he could smell his mother’s cooking. He waited until they’d all gone to bed and snuck out the house. He lay on the grave, his body jerking with the sobs he tried to smother, his face buried into the muffling dirt. Then he puked behind a nearby blackberry bush.
“That was the thing about Will. He never wanted me to forget he thought I was a gutless turd.” It made me sick just hearing it. The final straw was when Will found where Blu kept all the small animals he’d carved. He took an axe to the lot of them. “It will be you next,” said Melissa and paid for him to get the train to Melbourne. She convinced their mother to help support him going to a local high school while living with Melissa and her boyfriend in a house in Prahran. He was fifteen.
Mum saw his pain, but I saw Blu’s strength. He was a survivor and he could be honest with himself. He didn’t hold back when I asked about his past. So unlike Mum, who veiled the past in mystery. Except when she painted. Then fragments came through: a profound love of nature having grown up on the family farm. Coco’s family had bred horses and sheep. Blu teased me about coming from wealthy western district stock, but I’d never seen the farm where Mum grew up. It had been sold to a corporation. Mum would paint double images, always pairing the animals in twos, mirrors to each other. She painted the outline of things, never the whole, so while they never seemed complete, there was an odd stasis to the image that suggested it was done.
When Blu met me he said he got a glimpse of something so pure, so good, that he was lit up by it, but then he’d sink, bogged down by the weight of never feeling good enough. Like he couldn’t be clean enough, light enough, strong enough, real enough. I fell in love with all of it, all the parts of him I knew or sensed, while he said he didn’t feel he could be loved completely for who he thought he was.
6
The Mansion
“What happened with your mum, Bird?”
My mind is sludge. I’m trawling viscous thoughts, images, a past I can’t repress. I’m sure I told him, but I can’t remember. When Blu left for Sydney, Mum was in a clinic being treated for an addiction to sleeping pills and anti-depressants. Something she’d been able to hide for years, but after she and Dad separated, it was Coco who’d forced the issue. She desperately wanted her to get help. So did Raymond, and for that fact, I was grateful. Blu almost stayed, knowing his leaving compounded hers. And the irony; in the end I said go. I’d blocked that out of some instinct to protect myself. I don’t know how I had the will to do it.
“After she came out of the clinic Coco offered to buy the apartment. She and the Colonel thought if they were nearby, she’d have a foundation to get back on her feet.”
Blu knew this, as well as their ulterior motive: neither wanted her moving back in with her lover, Raymond, who lived in Melbourne at the time, as if they thought he was part of the problem. There was still some doubt how involved she’d been with Raymond while still married to my father. By this time, Dad had moved interstate for work, the family home sold. It was Mum who found the apartment with the turret in a block called the Mansion.
The faded rose coloured Art Deco building grandly resided on a steep hill. Steps from the street level led to double glass-paned doors and a foyer of tessellated marble tiles, the staircase a sweep of corrugated iron bent into a vine. Light bulbs hung in glass cages from the central atrium ceiling. Venetian styled mirrors reflected along the walls, silvered glass tarnished by time. If you looked closely, the tiles were chipped, the grout grimed no matter how often it was cleaned. The clotted-cream plaster dusted to peel in places. Its beauty was subsiding like the banks of the Yarra River over the road. Shored up, but under stress.
“For a while she seemed okay. I don’t think it was easy. She’d never lived alone like that before.” Before meant Mum living with the man she left Dad for. That was another leaving, one that Neela has never forgiven her for, and that Dad left the state to recover from, scattering our family with the fallout. I moved in with Coco, not sure how to re-jig the pieces into a new picture.
“Did you want to live with her?”
“No, not really. I mean, I don’t think we ever thought it would happen. I’d started art school. Living with Coco was okay. Neela was living on campus at uni studying music at the Conservatory. It was settled. I think she wanted me to feel I could stay if I wanted to. But the weird thing is I could never see her there permanently.”
Blu sat up, knees bent to his chest, arms circling his legs. It was nearly dusk and he was only wearing a T-shirt and jeans. His shoulders were broader than I remembered. He’d lost his wiry reediness. And it hit like lust, a low ache in my belly, a primal recognition; he wasn’t a boy anymore. It had been so long since his touch had enlivened my body like a flower unfurling in the sun. Instead, my body felt frozen. I’d forgotten it’s shape, where the nerves met skin, how blood could swell and heat the surface by his sheer proximity. I sat up feeling dizzy beside him, both of us staring out at the lake.
“Why’d she leave like that?” It’s the simplest question that paralyses. The cold seeps in. I’m freezing from the inside out. Blu wraps an arm around my shoulders. I’m anchored and adrift. I’m shivering with the chill that settled in the moment I found out what happened. Another rejection, one I couldn’t ignore. One I didn’t want to try and explain. How to say she’d moved to Sydney without telling any of us that she was going? She left a letter for Coco, and one for me, another for Neela. We knew she loved Raymond; it was how much she loved us that was in question.
I’m shivering with wanting to get closer to Blu.
“Shit, Bird,” he whispers, his head bowing close to mine. “I’m sorry. Don’t talk. We don’t need to go there.” I lean into his warmth, his shape. Into the smell of his T-shirt, a lemony detergent, and the deeper scent of his skin, salt and earth. I want out of this feeling, out of my skin. I want him to hold me close enough that I’m shielded, that he’s all I feel. I keep my head low. If I tilt my face to his I don’t know what I’ll do.
“Neela went kind of crazy when we moved in. Cleaning crazy.” From deep in his chest, Blu laughs. It rumbles close to my ear. Just hearing it warms me, the vibrations moving across skin, going deeper. And a glimmer of sensation, that for a moment, I’m safe. No need to put on a face because Neela, Dad and Coco can’t talk about Mum; no holding myself tight so nothing spills out publicly; no embarrassing feelings or messy questions that no one can answer. Blu could always give me a space where I was able to let the pretence fall away, because hiding from him was pointless.
Once the apartment was empty, Neela wanted to clean it, even after Coco had professionals in to do it. Mum said the manic cleaning gene came from Coco. Before we officially moved in, Neela handed me a bottle of bleach and pointed to the bathtub. The rubber gloves halted the burning corrosion of my skin, but did nothing for the fumes wafting up my nose, scorching my eyes. The bath was coloured a rose pink, an accented theme throughout the building. The floor was a tiled checkerboard. Neela wanted the entire apartment spotless.
At the paint store she pulled out swatches of white. “What do you think? Roan?” Neela prodded. My eyes were wandering along lighter shades of flushing pink to deep carmine, from morning sky blue to velvet night.
“Sorry?” Distracted, my mind flicking through the possibilities. Neela pointed at the whites. Snow White. Vibrant White. Eggshell. White. That’s all she wanted. Every wall in the place would be painted white. The ceiling roses, cornices. The timber skirting and doors. All white. I got it. She wanted to obliterate colour, the odours, the residual dirt, all traces of Mum—to remake the space clean. To erase. So I nodded and the palette was decided without any choice on my part.
And I wanted to ask: “Neela, how can you forget?”
Yet Neela would try, while I would always want to see what lay beneath.
7
Proof
“What’s changed for you, Blu? Are you happy with yourself?” It comes out unfiltered, but I want to know.
He darts me a sidelong look. A hint of a smile, but his eyes are sad. I can’t bring myself to speak of my mum leaving. Even thinking it threatens to push me down a dark endless hole. I can’t say how nothing’s certain anymore, as if it ever was; that she’s in another city but it feels like she’s on the other side of the world. How she tried to talk to me after she’d gone, as if words could make up for her actions. How I couldn’t ask the one question that mattered, the words tripping on the tip of my tongue only to be swallowed. Fear stopped me, as well as doubt that I’d believe what she would say.
Blu’s wise. He can tell I need to talk, while knowing it’s near impossible.
“Small things, Bird. It’s not some big change, it’s all these little things I did to try and shift. I guess to be happier.” He’s watching a Mudlark squawking and strutting across the grass. Another swoops low nearly dive bombing the other. “I walk a lot along the beach.” He smiles, full and bright. “Tried surfing. I wish you could have been there. It was fun, but not for me. I go swimming sometimes after work and weekends. It—it’s soothing. Gets me out of my head. I’m pretty tired during the week. Mick doesn’t let up he’s such a perfectionist. But he praises me; lets me know if I could do better. I love the challenge. I think making things helps me to appreciate myself. That I can produce pieces that are beautiful, that people are happy with.”
I’d only seen pictures of his furniture sent on his phone or via email, but I can imagine the pleasure and wonder people feel holding one of his carvings.
I remember the first time I saw his bedroom at the little terrace house he shared with Melissa and her boyfriend, Ben. It had only two bedrooms and Blu’s was the smallest, barely big enough for the double bed jammed into a corner, a clothes rack, pine chest of drawers, a desk and chair. The window looked onto a small light well with some scraggly ferns growing in pots. It was Spartan, the walls painted a stark white, the polished floorboards scuffed with age, until my eyes made out how each surface of the chest, desk and windowsill was covered with these small sculptures.
Blu had used whatever wood he could get his hands on, so the colours and textures varied. I made out animals and had a mad vision of them paired up like Noah’s Ark, or like one of Mum’s paintings. Some were mythical: a griffin, a dragon, a unicorn. But it was the references to nature that compelled me to hold one. An acorn. I held it like the warmth from my hand could make it sprout and grow. A leaf, conker, pinecone, a twig, feather, pebble, flower. And variations of all of these. He’d taken the world around him and made it small and new and precious, but also as natural as if you’d find them lying on the ground.
Blu had been standing in the doorway watching me, hands stuffed into the pockets of his jeans. His face was quiet and expectant. My eyes were glistening. He came into the room, closing the door. He took the acorn from my hand, placed it on the desk. He held my face and kissed me, slowly.
Later, he gave me the acorn as a gift. The first of many.
* * *
The sun is low, light edging the trees with a fire that paints the sky with its glow. Blu tightens his arm around me and we’re both transfixed.
It’s so simple. A setting sun.
“I thought about you every day.” I stiffen and he hugs harder. “I’m not exaggerating. I’d wonder what you were doing. Odd moments. I’d be polishing or carving or sanding. Walking. Especially by the sea. I’d think about you when I went to sleep, when I got up. At first I just ached, I missed you so much. Then I welcomed it.”
“Why?” And then it gushes out, “Why tell me this?”
“Because I want you to know,” he says simply, as if that’s the only reason. “It made me realise again and again what you meant to me.”
“So, it was a test?” I pull away. He pulls me back, but gently.
“No, nothing like that. You can’t know how messed up I felt, Bird. All that crap from my family. What I felt for you was caught up in all of that. I didn’t know what was right. I mean, what I felt for you was right—felt right—but I could feel the other stuff eating away at me, so I’d doubt what I felt, what I thought. I wanted to love you without all the fear and shit getting in the way. God, if that was possible. It’s not rocket science. But it was hard. Real hard. I just wanted to feel worthy. I wanted to feel good about me.”
We’re looking at each other and I can’t get it out—that he never had anything to prove—not to me. Yet it wasn’t about me. It was all about him proving his worth to himself. Something he had to do away from me. The one person he said that mattered more to him than anyone outside of his family, and by that he meant his mum, Melissa and Gryff.
I nod slowly, because I get where he’s coming from. “I know,” I try to reassure him, and he relaxes against me.
“It was never going to be easy for me to get my shit together,” Blu says, a wry edge to his words. I’d always admired how he rarely had any illusions about himself. “But, yeah—I do feel better about myself.”
All I want to say is how much I missed him, but my heart aches, as if I’m already feeling his absence once more.
8
Piaroan
When Coco asked Neela to come to her apartment after Mum left for Sydney, both Neela and I knew it was bad. Gut bad.
Coco sat quietly beside us on the sofa, the two letters addressed to each of us on the coffee table. After she spoke of Mum leaving, Neela screamed, not out of pain, but out of anger, “It’s not good enough! How could she do this?” Then she ran out of the apartment. Neela wasn’t one for histrionics. That was when the freeze settled in, an icy trickle through my veins from a heart going cold. Yet it began before then.
At first when Mum moved into the Mansion apartment she’d call me at unexpected times, like she’d rediscovered she had a daughter. After months of her being in the clinic, I welcomed her voice. A phone call had been a rarity. If I wanted to speak to her, I scheduled a visit at the clinic. Sometimes with Neela, mostly with Coco. I only went one time by myself. She’d been too tired to speak, her face a paste grey from not getting enough air into her tired lungs. Once she’d detoxed, the depression set in. She was barely rooted to this world and the fear bubbled up like a gushing puke that she wasn’t holding on to her life. My anger dissipated then flooded, a tide of heat. That she kept leaving, walking away as if her family wasn’t worth holding on to. How can you believe in someone’s love when they kept letting go? The fabric binding us tore like wet tissue.
I couldn’t see how shallow her hold was to this earth. She began freeing herself before I was born. Before Neela. Even before Dad.
On one visit, Coco sat holding Mum’s hand, fish-belly white and limp. Her eyes never left her sleeping daughter’s face.
“They came into this world together. Identical. Inseparable. I could never understand the power of that. They didn’t need anyone growing up, just each other. They didn’t want friends. I often felt like an intruder. An intruder into my own children’s lives. It nearly killed Pia when Carla left this world without her. Only fifteen. A riding accident. Just like my beloved Jack. It could have been Pia on that horse that day.”
Coco smoothed her fingers against Mum’s cheek. “How can I be whole? That’s what she kept asking me. How can I be me without her?”
I think Coco forgot I was in the room. The wonder was seeing Coco holding her daughter as if her own strength might keep her tethered to this world. She knew too well how loss could break you. How pain cuts razor sharp through the ties to those living. Coco took to her bed after losing Jack. Her children brought her back, kept her here when all she wanted was to follow him. Later she became the anchor, trying to keep her own daughter in this world after her twin died.
* * *
The day Mum moved in to the Mansion, she called me.
“I can see two skies,” Mum said in wonder.
“What do you mean?”
“The night sky that’s sheltering you and me and another, painted right above me in the dome. But it’s lighter, more a twilight sky, because there are stars in it, but not that deep inky colour.”
“Can you paint it?”
And she laughed. “Paint a painting?”
“No, the other sky, the one over both of us.”
“Okay. I will. For you.”
She never did.
The one night I stayed, Mum brought me up to the turret for a picnic. A tartan rug on the tiled floor, cushions from the sofa to sit on, a ring of tea lights along the ledge.
“A mini-constellation,” she said, lighting one tea light with another. I bit into a strawberry.
“What should we call it?” I asked.
“What?”
“The constellation.”
“Oh. Stars are often named by those who find them. How about a play on names—our names. Roanpia?”
“Uh uh. Piaroan. You come first.”
All the lights were lit and Mum sat on the cushion with the knight, the princess and the unicorn. She winced, leaning back against the cold brick. Even with a wool jumper and throw around her shoulders, her body ached from being too thin.
“It feels like a small cage up here some days.”
“A bird cage?”
She nodded, her eyes closing as if readying to sleep. “But it’s an open cage. You can fly out of it and come back.”
“Best sort of cage,” I said, cutting a wedge of what looked like Brie. A little stinky, but creamy delicious. Mum picked at a piece of bread. She ate bird-like.
“No cage is good, Ro. Even one you can leave freely.”
“Is that even a cage?”
“It is if you feel you can’t truly escape from it. Paradox. You might be able to walk out of it, but part of you stays behind. It’s what keeps you coming back, even when you might not want to.” Her eyes were closed now. Like she’d been talking to herself all along. The Brie was glue in my teeth. It gobbed and stuck in my throat. I wanted to spit it out. My gut was in revolt, rejecting it and what she’d said. Whether she meant it or not, she was talking about us. Maybe not Dad anymore, but Neela and me.
We were her cage.
Was that what my love had been for Blu? A cage he wanted to escape?
9
Time
Blu has no idea of my thoughts when he says, “It was Mel who bawled me out.”
“Sorry?”
“She asked what the hell I was doing so far away from you. From her. She said it was great I’d found something that gave me satisfaction, a sense of purpose. But she said I might as well go back to the farm and let Will beat me over.”
It’s a horrifying thought. “Why would she say that?”
“Because she thought I was a dickhead. A fool.” He twists his head as he says this to make sure I’m able to see his face. It’s raw and jagged, a mix of hurt he’s feeling through memory and the fear staring out at me, in plain sight. “Said I’d found something precious. The fact you loved me, knowing all my shit. She said I was letting Will and Dad and the whole fucked up past win. If I thought I didn’t deserve your love, I might as well give up because I was so goddamn lucky to have found it. The real deal.” He’s quiet for a moment. “I felt like an idiot. But, I wasn’t sorry I left. Mel didn’t understand that I needed to. She just saw what I was losing. She was right about that.”
I can barely breathe. “Was it worth it?”
“Not if I hurt you so much you wouldn’t give me another chance.” There’s all this longing folded into his voice, in his eyes. I’m swimming in it. I’m choking on it. Blu places his palm against my cheek. “God, this is so not the right time to bring this up.”
The ground, the sky, they’re pitching, tilting, my senses swirling. “No,” my voice sounds gravely and soft. “No Blu, it’s right.”
He lifts my chin gently. He speaks quietly, quickly. “Would you come to Sydney, Bird? I know it’s a lot to ask, but we could find a place—to live together—just us. I’m not earning a heap, but it’ll get better. You could study at the art college up there. I looked into it; they’ve got a great drawing department—” I press my fingers against his mouth. Feel the fraying skin on his lower lip. I want to eat the words with his breath, to suck the promise of what he’s saying like honey dripping from a comb.
“Don’t you…” he began and I’m shaking my head, the words lost in wanting to weep to fill a riverbed dried up from lack of rain. Yet I hold back. We were walking a wire, such hope, yet I’d experienced the fall.
“You know Mum used to say like attracts like, and I never got it. Neela hates her for what she did. I just feel numb. But I was feeling numb for such a long time. Especially after you left.” I can see the fear in his eyes, a darkening shadow masking his face, and I want to erase it, all doubt, all pain. “And that’s it. All I kept thinking was we weren’t enough to keep her here. I loved her—I mean I love her—but I never thought it was enough. Like you thought you weren’t enough.”
“It’s her stuff she’s talking about, Bird,” he says fiercely. “It’s not about you, it’s her.”
“Maybe. But that distance planted a seed, the way she kept pulling away from us. Kept wanting to leave. To be free of us.”
“What seed?”
“Doubt. Not being able to trust her. Whether she loved us.”
We’re quiet, my words punctuating like a full stop.
“I don’t think that’s freedom, Bird. Wanting to escape, or whatever is motivating her isn’t the same as being truly free. Believe me, I’ve been there.” He smiles ruefully. “Being free is as much about choice, and facing your responsibilities and the consequences of your actions. If you consciously choose to be with someone or somewhere, that’s freedom.”
I knew what he was saying was true.
“Can you forgive her, Bird?’ And then, almost pleading, “Can you forgive me?”
I hunch my shoulders as if my feelings were a weight that could slough off like shedding skin. “I don’t know. Sometimes I’m just too angry or hurt by her to think about forgiveness, Blu. It’s such an iffy thing—I mean if you say you forgive someone, does everything go away? The pain? I don’t think so. It’s not so easy. Coco says it takes time. That it’s about seeing Mum with compassion. As separate from me. And I try—I really do. I know Dad can’t forgive her because he feels betrayed which is a whole other fuck up. And I think he still loves her, which makes it even worse. I’m just trying to accept it, get my head round it somehow, but mostly I feel blank. Like I don’t know what to think.”
He’s waiting because I’ve only answered part of his question. He’s about to speak, but I don’t want words getting in the way. Finally I get the nerve to do what I wanted the moment I saw him. I lean in and kiss his lips. At first all I feel is the taut skin of the line of his mouth because he’s gone rigid with surprise, and then a sweet rush as I breathe in as his mouth opens to kiss me. It’s sudden and exhilarating, because it’s his breath I’m breathing, his mouth moving as urgently against mine. His arms band around me, his hands pressing the nubbly bones of my shoulder blades, crushing them like folded wings, but I don’t care. I don’t care because I want to lose the sharpness and edges that’s me. My heart is aching with the pressure of holding in the pain that’s now squeezing out, wanting release.
I’m anchored just by his touch where for so long I’ve been hovering, bones hollowed out, wanting flight from my life. Blu kisses a trail across my cheek to my ear and he’s saying one word over and over, “Please, please, please…” A plea, a cry and he’s calling me back with every word. To him, to home, to begin anew. It sounds broken, but it’s coming from a place that’s healing. He wouldn’t ask unless he felt he could. It touches a void inside, a space that wants to be full. The muck could still be scraped up, I knew that all too well, but it sounded with promise.
I want to say yes, as if it’s the easiest thing for me to do. Yet I can’t step off the wire; make that leap, not yet.
“Can you stay for a while? Then we can talk more about me coming to live in Sydney with you?” I whisper, holding his eyes fast with mine. I’m asking for time, but I’m not letting go. That much I know, because if there was one thing I’m sure of, I’ve always wanted Blu. It still feels like a wish, a yearning, him being here, and I want it real, to feel love every day, not something conjured by my mind, held at a distance, or the shell of words spoken. Somehow we need to grow from the place we’re at right now, knowing what we’d lost, could lose.
“That is if you can,” I add.
It’s not exactly what he wants to hear, but it’s more than hope. He presses my hand against his cheek and it’s wet, his eyes spilling blue. He kisses the centre of my palm.
“I’ve got time. Mick’s good like that. Said to take whatever time off was necessary. I just need to let him know when I’m coming back. So, I’ve got time. All that you need. And if you want to stay here, I’ll come home, Bird. I mean it.”
He kisses my cheek, the lids of my eyes that flutter to close at his touch and I’m holding my breath, waiting and wanting like when I first saw him on the doorstep, his very presence pitching me into a new life. When he reaches my lips his touch is lovingly slow, as if we have time stretching endlessly before us, that we could make this last.
10
All I Need
One of the last paintings Mum made that I saw before she left.
Two birds, wings outstretched, their outlines hovering against a thin blue sky.
“What does it mean?” I asked.
“Anything you want, baby. But for me—” and her eyes weren’t looking at the painting, but at a point beyond. “I guess traditionally a bird is a symbol for freedom, the fact they fly. A connection of the earth with what’s above.” She was silent and I felt her escape. From this room. From all that was around her. From me.
Her voice was a thread of sound, almost too fine to hear. “But for me Ro, they are symbols of joy and beauty, of love.”
Yet the way she said it—it was beyond reach. Beyond hope. I saw clearly, her paintings, the outline of things. A fissure in the world. Her world.
It was the incompleteness that was a wound in her life.
* * *
My eyes are filled with Blu. His eyes are kind, understanding; his hand stroking my face shapes the skin and bone as if he’s bringing me to life.
“Right now, you being here—that’s all I need, Blu.”
And for once, it was enough. For both of us.
© Angela Jooste 2016