The Hunchbeak - (II)

Some days I feel very old, but not today. I’ve just seen something I’ve never seen before. A wild bird, Gymnorhina tibicens, the Australian Magpie, the only true Magpies in the world, not a pied crow, is asleep on the steps. The tibicens comes from the Latin word for piper or flute-player. If you’ve ever heard an Australian Magpie you’ll get the reference.

It’s the Beak, and he’s sleeping on the second-top step to the house, beak tucked under his wing, blind-eye to the world. In daylight, at three in the afternoon. He’s been there for hours. He was there when I opened the door this morning at eleven, hopped to the top step, asking for food, for meat in particular. I filled the cheese bowl, but he ignored it. I found the minced beef in the fridge and fed him, four or five good-sized pieces until he was full, until he couldn’t fit any more in.

And then he did something I’ve never seen before. He wiped his bill on the steps, and stayed. Picked a step, one from the top and got comfortable. Then settled in. He’s in pain, I know. Today it’s hard on him, and he’s tired, very tired. I made coffee and started my day, came out to watch the noon news bulletin, and he was there. I fed him again an hour or so later, and then again later still. What he doesn’t eat the ants clean up. But I’ve never seen a bird sleeping like that, and particularly not on the ground.

He feels safe here. Knows I’m thinking about him, that there’s no danger from this quarter, that I have his back. The occasional noise from the builders down the road wakes him, but I talk to him softly, tell him it’s safe, that he’s safe here. I drop my mind into my chest and open my heart, open the heart chakra, and reach out to contain him, to give him warmth and protection. And he relaxes, tucks his head under his wing again, and sleeps. It seems I’m finally getting the hang of it, the Green Ray that is. Attracting what you want and need by staying open to being called on, being part of the world. My beloved would be pleased. It’s taken years.

We live with the front door open, always have. When Cath and I met we both had the habit, a working class thing, English. We’ve always had birds, possums, the odd stray cat and on one occasion a huge black cockerel that had escaped from a neighbours yard, coming into the house. In part it’s about living with an open heart, although that sounds incredibly pompous. But it’s hard to explain any better than that.

A bird in the house can mean an impending death, but not here, they’re just part of the extended family, and since Cath died they’re more important than ever. I don’t have pets, and I stopped acquiring familiars years ago. Too many of them died as a result of my untidy process. Which is what familiars are for, it’s true, as insurance against magic rebounding on you. But it’s hardly fair to them. You befriend them, invite them in, make them part of your personal world, give them a name. When they respond, get close to you, become familiar, they become a familiar. Then, when your magic goes wrong and you overreach yourself they take the hit when it rebounds on you. And they die, if they’re lucky. So I don’t do that any more. I have friends with wings instead, which is much better all round. And the door stays open.

We don’t live in fear of wandering malice, of random robbery and criminal malcontents. We don’t attract them, and I always maintain an awareness of the immediate neighbourhood, keep a weather eye on the mood, the season, the prevailing wind. And I still follow her old maxim: Nothing to be scared of if you’re the scariest thing out there.

We did it together.
I’m doing it for both of us now.

He’s down in the garden now, after four hours just standing, hanging out, sleeping in fits and starts. The three o’clock crocodile of Catholic schoolgirls is streaming down from Lourdes Hill School, which brings a lot of high-pitched chatter and clumping of school shoes that he can’t ignore. But he hasn’t gone far. Just down the stairs. Which means I can collect the mail without disturbing him.

I know he’s struggling. I’ve thought of ringing a vet, getting advice, but I know I can’t end it for him. I’m not the type, and I’ll always favour hope over death as a solution, or even just a stop-gap. So I’ll stay awake, keep an eye on him, do some laundry and drink some coffee. It’s what there is to do.

The Hunchbeak of Beatrice Street.

~
It’s killing him, the poor little bugger. He’s only five months old, but I can’t see him making it through the winter. One month, maybe two at best. But he doesn’t complain. Birds don’t. They put up with what they can’t change and suffer in silence.

He’s the oldest of the two chicks from this years brood. The fourteenth of fifteen that Crookfoot has produced since we moved in here eight years ago. And he’s male. That you can tell from the attitude, the volume, the cheerfully loutish behaviour around the cheese dish on the front steps. Crookfoot lost her last two in a rush late last year. The younger one, a slender female with a delightful disposition and endlessly chatty was chased out of the territory, as is the usual practice.

That left Mother and J.R, her one-eyed, seven year-old son, in residence. There have been more than a dozen others over the years, raised from squawking fluffy bundles until they’re able to look after themselves, then evicted, sent out to try their luck, and risk their lives in the big wild world.

J.R wasn’t thrown out. Not for him the savage pecking and ruthless methods of magpie eviction. His monocular disposition made him too vulnerable, and he stayed, an overgrown baby at first but growing over the years into a loyal support and handsome son, always ready to help feed each year’s new brood, long after Crookfoot had given up on the endless round of stuffing squawking beaks with beef, cheese and whatever else turns up. He was a big lad at the end, strong, broad-shouldered, a solid and respectable citizen, with a powerful neck due to his endless need to scan for danger with his one good eye.

He was hit by a car in the last week of April ‘07. Blind-sided one last time in Goulbourn Street by one of the endless supply of utes and vans that swarm around the endless supply of ghastly townhouses being built there. He didn’t get much of a send-off. I saved him from the ants, but wrapped him in newspaper and put his body, a good weight too, in a council rubbish bin. I didn’t have anything better in me. I’d used up all my ability to do funerals and grieving when Catherine died in November 2006, and by the end of April, two weeks after her birthday, I was just too heart-sore, too cried-out to cope with another parting. Even for a magpie I’d known all his life, had fed since he was a skinny squawker at the bottom of the pecking order.

I marked his passing by breaking the bowl he’d fed from all these years. Slid it off the top step with my foot and watched it crack into three pieces. I shed a few tears. A week or two later I went down to Goulbourn Street at three in the morning and spray-painted a memorial to him in the middle of the road; his name, the date, twelve feet high. It’s almost gone now, a year later. I’ll go down some night soon and redo it for him. I don’t sleep at all any more during the dark hours so I’ll have plenty of opportunity.

He was replaced a week or two later by a blow-in. A yearling male magpie chased out from a clan somewhere else. This is too rich a territory to go to waste, and too big to be defended by Crookfoot alone. It took a month or so for her to establish that she was top bird. The males are aggressive, and slow enough learners that it takes a while, and several quick, vicious pecks in the side-ribs to get the message. He’s called Boofhead, Boofy-Boy, or just Boof for short. They get the names that seem to fit, and he was a very boofy boy to start with, all wild eyes, and noise, and beak, and attitude.

Since then he’s put on some weight, learned his place, acquired adult plumage and, since this years brood was born, taken up where J.R left off as primary child-care, beak-stuffer and all-around aero-dynamic role-model. A year is a long time for a young magpie, and he’s much smarter, more capable, more able to keep up his end of a conversation now.

Crookfoot loses interest in the endless feeding they require fairly quickly. Once they can fly she spends as much time alone as possible, delegating the on-going care and feeding to whoever’s number-one bird after her. Given that she builds the nest, mates, lays the eggs, sits on them in all weathers and feeds them once they hatch in November she’s usually had a gut-full by February. She has a look that’s incredibly eloquent at this time of year when they all turn up for food around five o’clock.

She’ll watch Boofhead running back and forth, endlessly feeding one noisy beak after another, and look at me with the eye of a mother who’s done this too many years to count, and would just as soon have a quiet chat, a cup of tea, and close the door to the nursery. There’s a genuine, parent-to-parent connection. I feel it especially when I rush off to pick up Nell from work when she’s had a lousy day, and can I drop everything and pick her up right now? After all, what could I possibly be doing that’s of any consequence?

Nothing, nothing at all.
What indeed?

This years pair were fairly typical. A loud, solidly-built, bombastic, aggressively shouting male, and a slender, quieter, more intelligent and thoughtful female. The female is doing fine. There’s plenty of food, plenty of minced beef and grated cheese available from me, and the recent rain has pushed plenty of edible species up out of the wet ground. She’s injured a foot, and is limping, but it doesn’t look permanent so she’ll be fine, I think. But the boy is in trouble.

I noticed it first about six weeks ago, mid January. He had a misshapen upper beak. It was fine on one side but had a bulbous swelling on the other. It didn’t bother him so I didn’t pay much attention to it. Nell and I even joked about him being the Hunchbeak of Beatrice Street. But now it’s getting worse by the day. The swollen beak started to get larger about three weeks ago. Then I noticed a similar dark clumping of growth on his left foot. It didn’t slow him down any, and it doesn’t appear to cause him pain, just made it look lumpy and inelegant.

Now the growth on the beak has spread with some similar growths around one eye. In the last two days it’s obscured his eye and he’s now blind on one side. I’ve spotted more growths on his left leg around the ankle joint, up near the body, not big, but growing. And he’s getting a little thick in the neck, so something may be happening under the feathers. He’s still got thick fluffy down around his head and shoulders. I don’t think that he’ll live long enough to grow new plumage.

I have no idea what it is. If it spreads to his other eye he’ll be finished. A blind bird doesn’t last very long. Either way I don’t think he’s got much time left. It’s growing faster than he is, poor little sod. Poor noisy, aggressive, hungry, determined, full-of-life, little sod.

I hope it’s clean, at the end. Quick, merciful.

We had a baby butcher-bird a few years back who had an obstruction in his throat that killed him. He couldn’t swallow. We gave him food ground extra fine, but in the end he couldn’t swallow anything, though he kept trying.

One night he came in and perched on an arm-chair an hour before dark. He couldn’t eat, but we sat and talked to him, Nell and I, and he stayed quite late, well after dusk. He drew comfort from our company, felt loved, cared for. He knew we were with him, knew that our lives overlapped, that he meant a full life’s-worth of being, and dying, and memory. His name was Ralph.

A little human warmth goes a long way, on very small wings sometimes. The next morning the neighbour found him, under a bush next to the fence. She handed him to me and we gave a him a burial in the backyard under the fig-tree.

.

Lawyers, Sex and Money

 
Je suis consumé par chagrin.

A few days ago I got the most recent letter from a solicitor in Gympie, who’s doing his best to blackmail me into giving money to Catherine’s former husband. A nasty little man, pickled in beer and marijuana; dull, unappetising and obsessed with fish. The husband that is, I don’t know about the lawyer. It plunged me into depression again. Real depression, not just a black mood or moment; sleeping all day and awake all night, clothes and bedding scattered around the room, clean laundry under the heap, subsisting on a diet of chocolate bars and double strength coffees. Most unhealthy. It’s hard to tell what’s causing the gloom, the husband or the lawyers.

On the one hand Catherine’s ex is still trying to gouge money from her, long after she’s left him and long after she’s dead. He’s like a louse that doesn’t know when to stop, doesn’t realise that the warmth has fled the flesh, that the host is no longer a banquet for this unquiet parasite’s pleasure. Have we have a plan for him? Let's say no more now, but wait until all knots are tied and all deals sealed. Then we’ll see what may be done to bring him undone.

“First thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.”
– Shakespeare, King Henry VI Part 2: Act 4. Scene II

On the other hand we have lawyers, enough to make you slap that hand hard against a wall. I loathe lawyers. Not hate, not despise, just a cordial loathing for a necessary evil. I’ve never had anything to do with them that hasn’t cost me in spades: emotional capital as well as simple lucre. They wear upon the soul, grate upon the nerves, abrade the self-respect and strength I carry with me.

The last one I hired was clean enough. Top end of town and glass-faced high-rise, sharp-faced blonde and efficient with the work, which was done by a middle-aged brunette, but billed for the blonde. They were a front for me, representing my good self to the Supreme Court, arranging the grant of Letters Of Administration over Catherine's estate. Clean, simple, efficient enough, money for new old-rope.

The one before that cost me $8,000, failed to represent me in court, reduced me to tears for failing to deal with the magistrate on my own, bullied me over the phone and gouged me for work that didn’t address the issue. In the end I solved the problem myself. Inveigled a written confession from the slimy bastard in question, held it over his head, that of my disgusting first wife, and made them shift to my tune. Justice was acquired, I suppose, sufficient unto the day. Then, after it was all over, I went to the police station and got my guns back in person.

The lawyer in question was an ugly old boot, with a Latin inscription over her door which translated as ‘Old dogs for hard roads’. I should perhaps have spotted that I didn’t need an old dog chasing me along a hard road when I had problems enough in the first place. They say if you’re innocent you have nothing to fear. They lie. Being innocent doesn’t prevent you from being involved in the shit of others, and it almost guarantees that you’ll wind up paying in some form or other. Pounds sterling, pounds of flesh, a shit-load of grief, a wagon-load of someone else’s shit.

This evening I went to see a free lawyer, the Caxton Street Legal Service, which, naturally, is in Heal Street, New Farm. You turn up, fill out the form and then wait until a ‘pro-bono’ brief calls your name. I had the reply to the Gympie swine ready with me. I’ve spent the last four days writing and re-writing it. I just needed a legal eagle-eye to weed out any weaknesses and let me see it clear. It was quick, and done with good-natured good humour by a brace of well-educated ladies. Once I saw it through their eyes we were done in minutes. It helps that I’ve enough practice now to craft a fissile missive. But that wasn’t the interesting part.

L’exigence de guerre, l’exigence d’amour.

I’d dragged the carcass out of bed at the crack of three pm, drained bleary-eyed cups of coffee while watching an excellent French film about torture during the war in Algeria. Showered and scraped with razor, steam-ironed a black shirt and got myself in the car and there with sufficient alacrity to be at the head of the queue. Then filled in the form and sat to wait with a H.H. Kirst novel which quickly palled.

And then it happened. I began to write. And not just any writing. I’ve been working on a chapter about Colleen, my Eurydice that was. And I’d hit the wall. Stopped cold when it came to a hot point about lust and the mechanics of seduction. And there in the lawyers office, sitting among the dim and destitute, the divorced and despairing, I began to write about sex. Just a sentence or two at first as an idea struck me that needed recording, but then it began to flow.

Soon I was writing as fast as my blue biro would scrawl. Hot, wet, steam-powered legatos of lubricious lust. Clauses dripping desire onto taut fabric. Long, hard sentences about long, hard thoughts. Moments of sublime sensuality and sheer stockings topped by black-lace bands. Scotch and ice, and sex for the sophisticate. Wicked, wilful sins held in check by the bondage of anticipation. Every so often I’d pause, searching for the mot mauvais, but it didn’t take long. Soon it was on again, on for young and old, novice and necrophile, wench and wanton..

I waited for almost two hours to be seen by a lawyer. But it didn’t matter a damn, because I filled six A4 pages with a wealth of fabulous, luminous sex-magic. The man sitting in the plastic chair to my right was reading it over my shoulder when they called his name. I was still writing it when they called mine. Tomorrow I’ll transcribe it, edit and add to it. And edit the legal letter. Right now it’s 3.52 am and after dining rather late I think I’ll hit the sack for a few hours of well-earned.

I think Pan is starting to talk to me again.
It’s been quite a while but I’m glad to hear his pipes.
 

The Trip-Thud Theory

 
We had our own theory that explained the creation of the universe, Catherine and I. The Big Bang theory always seemed so, well, boringly masculine in it's thinking. It's the sort of theory that pale physicists (and even paler magicians), who’ve spent far too much of their adolescence indoors picking at acne and dreaming of the hugeness of the cosmos and the rarity of sex, would come up with. So, in the course of an evening of quiet contemplation we came up with this:

The Trip-Thud Theory of Creation

It's pretty straightforward, and goes like this: Creating a universe is a pretty demanding sort of job, and a Creator who's going to have to pack a whole lot of everything into a very small singularity to kick things off is likely to find the planning stage a bit of a trial. So it’s fair to expect He’ll need the odd evening off for a drink and a fairly speculative session of “Woss-it-all-gonna be about, I mean really, when you get right down to it, eh? Woss-the-point gonna be?”.

And having slaved away at the plans all week He’ll no doubt find himself at closing time staggering out of the snug bar of the Bacchus Arms Hotel with a right skinful and will head for the nearest all-hours (figuratively-speaking) Indian take-away, (putting some serious grunt into archetypal patterns of future human behaviour incidentally) and half an hour later will be groping in the primordial trouser-pocket for his keys at the front gate of Chez Tout.

In the meantime - not that time exists yet, a-priori, or even post-priori, now that I think of it - the paper-bag containing the Cosmic Vindaloo, the Korma of Heavenly Bounty and a Prawn & Seafood Biriani with all the trimmings, will be reaching the point at which the sogginess at the bottom is rapidly approaching the minimum degree of tensile strength required to hold things together under the weight of the aromatic product of God's late night alcoholic yearning for sustenance.

Fumbling at the door with the keys will take critical seconds (of unreal time) that cause the cosmic combination of tiredness, inebriation, sogginess, clumsiness and buggerment (some of the most fundamental principles underlying the whole of creation) to coalesce at the un-moment when God leans after the retreating door as it swings open.

At that moment occurs the Trip. When God catches his boot on the front step, and in accordance with the newly-minted Laws of Physics and the Guidelines of Self-Preservation, his enormous body falls forward into the hallway and his arms swing wildly out in front of him.

Then comes the Thud. And as the shock of carpeted floor resonates through His holy frame, the star-strained and soggy paper gives way and the contents of the universe, spicy, hot, majestic and infinite in it's variety burst forth from the torn and flapping bag and fly in an ever expanding interstellar spray of loose firmament and little bits of coconut.

The time the mighty spray of creation takes to expand and unfurl is all the time in our universe. Mighty, meaty nebula, shot through with an incandescent assortment of rare spices (and not a little dust swept up from the spice factory floor) give rise to all the infinite variety of life, the universe and everything. Look up at the night sky and you will see the ever-expanding spiral of the Milky Way (Coconut milk and a Goats milk Lassi actually) as it hurtles ever outward on it's trip through the dark hallway of space/time in God's bijou, des-res, ‘two-up and an-infinite-number-down’ heaven.

The Crab Nebula is simply the succulent, doomed Friday night special danced into being by the many whirling arms at the Shiva Nataraj late night celestial kitchen. The mighty gas-clouds that illumine the heavens for those with the best telescopes were originally intended to gurgle through the digestive system of the Creator, causing him no end of remorse late on a Saturday morning.

The stars are just the heat-signatures of cooling pieces of the celestial take-away as it expands ever-outwards. Black holes are simply tiny pieces of the soggy paper bag, observable to us now only as mysterious inverse gaps in the fabric that once held all of creation in check. We are merely insignificant passengers on the lost left-overs of God’s Sunday fry-up. In the world’s before us monkeys Primal Chaos rained down along the hallway.

It’s a theory, anyway, and a pretty good one for explaining the observable facts too, I think. The complex interplay of the various Gods necessary for our tiny existence can be glimpsed behind the veil of myth. Many, many Gods were involved in the universal creative process. Probably not many Goddesses though. They would have cooked something wholesome and satisfying at home, possibly using parts of some of the Gods. Although it’s probably safest to assume that they’re involved somewhere in the back-story and to give them credit for the bits in life that make some kind of sense.

The theory also gives some shape to the issue of what happens at the end of everything. When the still sweet but rapidly cooling universe hit's the carpet it's a pretty fair bet that most of us will be in for a whole lot of trouble. The First Bounce may send huge lumps of the universe crashing back through itself, spinning whole galaxies off course, causing calamitous chain-reactions more powerful than all the atom bombs ever made. Let’s see Bruce Willis stop the clock on that little lot. Lumps of the less spicy lamb bits may be snaffled by the dog (God’s always struck me as a dog-person) and condemned to wander the infinite until, well, what dogs do.

What can be salvaged will be little more than the odd broken pappadum and any of the sauce left in the plastic containers, and perhaps a very small tub of cucumber raita or sweet chilli dipping sauce. And a hairy garlic naan, there’s always one, and always hairier than it should be. In fact most of creation is destined to be sworn at and then scrubbed out of the carpet over a very long period of space/time, and eventually trodden in to the background radiation of the hall runner. Our own tiny solar system may be doomed to fall between the fibres of the carpet, only to be vacuumed up next week by the Dust-Buster of the Divine Being.

Which won't leave much for making the next universe, will it?