The Swan Book Read online

  The large garden was a forest of full-grown pine trees decorated with coloured lights. It stretched all the way to the edge of a rocky cliff where waves crashed, but the red-haired lady said it was a good thing they had planted the trees to muffle the sound of the ocean, because you get sick of it roaring day and night. It was enough to give you a headache. Underneath the dripping canopies of the trees a single seagull was lost somewhere in the needles, singing its airs to the seagulls gliding far away, over the sea.

  The family ran breathless along curving paths, brushed against the wet foliage of the trees, and deep in the forest were greeted with Christmas carols sung by a glowing metre-high smiling robot snowman with a red carrot nose, and black top hat. It’s an extravaganza – a miracle, Warren exclaimed, saying that he had never seen anything like it in his life. It was first prize mind you, in the whole of the city, the children and their mother said proudly.

  Warren looked on warmly, his face flushed and glowing as the soft lights touched his skin. He said it reminded him of how great Christmas was in this house. And there, in a corner of the yard, sat many more second-hand Christmas trees of all shapes, sizes and condition in pots. The girl learnt that these were orphan trees. They had been dumped by people in the city, and were waiting to be planted one day – once space could be imagined for them. Yea! We drove around and collected them all – couldn’t bear to see them die senselessly, the wife claimed. It does not pay to take your eyes off them though, the husband added with a wink, otherwise their numbers would increase. Then they ran from the mist in a jostling stampede back to the house just in time to experience a crinkling smell of smoke, as the electricity short-circuited the wet lights. It was different in the old country, where you had to run around with a torch in the middle of the day to see where you were going. The woman’s voice filled the house.

  Christmas! Christmas in the city was different now. The girl had to listen very hard, to keep up with the quick-speaking red-haired people racing through everything stockpiled in their heads for this moment, as if every precious second counted while Warren Finch was in their home. She watched words tumbling out of four mouths that never stopped moving – open and closed, up and down. Their voices shouted to be heard above each other to complain about power surges in the city, and the malfunctioning Christmas lights that were never like this before. They remembered a time when you could leave the lights burning all night without anyone batting an eyelid. Bring back the good old days when we could even cover the whole yard, trees and all, with the snowflake machine. The only good thing apparently, was that it had been another bumper season for the growth of the Christmas trees. The red-haired man was jubilant about this. Conifers loved the rain, and the perpetual mist, and did not seem to mind if the sun never shone.

  Which is a good job with the way it has been raining all the time, the red-haired man said with a sigh.

  That’s right love, the wife replied with another happy peal of laughter.

  All the trees must have grown approximately three metres, just since spring.

  Whatever happened to the good, old, hot Australian Christmas, hey, Warren? It will be snowing next thing.

  Warren said it was all to do with global warming and climate change, but his moving-mouth friends were more concerned with the failure of the electricity in the yard. Still there was great relief that they had been able to show him the lights, since the woman said, she could not remember when Warren had missed seeing the lights of Christmas in their house: Not since he had been sent by his elders to the city as a young man to complete some of his education.

  The refrigerator was worshipped. Glorified like the supreme spirit of the city. The huge blue fridge dominating the kitchen was like a house within the house – bigger than a humpy. Coloured lights lit up the interior when you opened the door. Warren was told that it was a new fridge. That it had come from overseas. It had been the biggest in the shop, the biggest you could buy, and with Warren there for Christmas, they were pleased that they had gone ahead and bought it. Whenever they spoke now, it was about some item extracted from the fridge for consumption. Food had to be talked about while it was eaten like people do in Paris the lady said.

  Warren Finch was in his element. He relished the conversation about food and talk of regional differences in dairy products, recipes and dishes he had tasted at various restaurants in countless countries he had visited since the last Christmas. Oblivia had only seen him eating with the genies, where he did not seem concerned about what he ate. He put anything in his mouth. She watched as they talked endlessly of things of no importance to anyone but themselves, and now about the brands of butter you could buy in places called the ‘new’ supermarkets, which was not like the old days, they claimed, when they had no butter at all during the long drought. They said it was almost as bad as the place where the girl had come from – God! Blessed girl.

  Isn’t that right E–thyl? The girl’s failure to answer their questions stiffened the room. She did not know what these conversations were about. Warren, who had never stopped smiling, just shook his head in a familial gesture that the family understood, without wasting words, don’t bother, don’t fuss, not worth the trouble.

  Well! Eee-thyl will have to know which butter to buy if she is going to be living in the big city now.

  Why? The red-haired husband asked in mock astonishment. E–thyl might not even like butter.

  Of course she likes butter. You like butter, don’t you Eee-thyl? The girl nodded, but she had never tasted butter.

  A woman can be good for other things – not just being knowledgeable of which butter to buy.

  Warren laughed. Mentally, the girl noted the joke, thinking it might be useful to know how to make him laugh one day.

  In this introduction of what gave peace and pleasure to Warren Finch, the girl had found hell. She wanted to scream. She hated everything about these people. Her mind left the room to look for the genies’ camp among the owls and rats, and somehow, in a slim crevice of non-stop talk bouncing off the wood panelling, she heard an owl outside calling from a Christmas tree. She wanted to leave. Go outside. Disappear. Crawl away from this dead wood house that Warren had claimed would be her home. Her mind walked through its wooden cocoon where geography was lost, and where momentarily, she saw the ghosts of trees with branches swinging in the wind, that swung out and would hit her.

  Noticing her silence, the woman said, Ethyl, you just make yourself at home, love. This is your home now too, you know. The girl’s fingers ran along the wood panels which she visualised as tree trunks in some dense forest in her head. Why could he not have been like other men? asked Aunty Bella Donna of the Champions. She was standing in the back of the room trying to pull the girl from the tree roots and telling her to start acting polite and grateful, and stop that chatting to herself like an idiot. Harbour Master stood in the doorway. He just yelled at the girl that they were a pack of racists. Couldn’t he just have been like the men who killed their wives in the bush? Not go around bringing them to places like this. You would be better off dead. Skeletons left propped up against a tree somewhere. Sun bleaching bones with pieces of skin hardened to leather, and pieces of rag from their dresses fluttering in the wind. A bird picking about on her bones! Things like that!

  The girl escaped. She left the table where the continuous sound of voices grated like gravel thrown across the floor of her brain. In the corridor of that vast house she felt lost, although relieved in being alone, and tried to remember the route of the journey with Warren. No plan of escape came easily to mind, so she explored the Christmas house.

  The voices faded as she followed a corridor lovingly decorated with festoons of pine branches that were tied with red ribbons in big bows, and large silver bells tinkling automatically from an inbuilt sonar detection device. Otherwise, it was a quiet house with empty rooms where only the sound of clocks could be heard ticking from walls, mantelpieces and cupboards. She was guided by an orange, grey, black and white marbled ca
t that ran ahead and led her into its favourite room. On entering the room, she discovered it had been permanently divided into more rooms, and these smaller rooms had been partitioned within, into strange, little alcoves on the Christmas theme that replicated in miniature scale nostalgic wintertime memories of foreign countries.

  She felt as though the meowing cat was sweeping her along, urging her not to linger too long – don’t get sucked into other people’s worlds. And don’t knock anything over and spoil the dream. They passed each elaborate world of dreams, where miniature winter people went about their business walking, stopping to talk to others, living lives among reindeers, tending baby deer, riding colourful sleighs, and looking at a cheerful Santa with elves, and grinning snowmen. There were carol singers that looked into rooms full of brightly wrapped presents, decorated Christmas trees, dinner tables laden with feasts, bowls of delicious apples and pears, and behind them, a countryside full of red robins singing in barebranch trees, and miniaturised forests of pine trees laden with fake snow.

  The girl examined each of the created worlds closely with a dark, morbid fascination, consciously searching for failure, proof of fault, in the perfect images of nostalgia. She heard herself saying: Did not exist. Did not exist, and drowned the old woman’s delight in recognising all the places she had known once upon a time, and the Harbour Master mumbling in her other ear about all the racists running around and ruining the country. The cat protested. Meow! Meow! Insisting it knew the consequences of falling in love with constructed fairylands, so mind you don’t break anything because the red-haired people really love their memories. But the girl had already become lost in the theatre of the remembered foreign lands. She did not want to be reminded of footsteps on gravel when Aunty Bella Donna of the Champions was already walking among Christmas valleys, and pulling the girl back to a day long ago when up in the mountains they searched the vista for a house in a village that no longer existed.

  They travelled to fields in the miniaturised scenery where saintly-looking people talked to birds, and small children lived in the care of swans while their fathers and mothers were away at war. These were lands where swans had been fed by a spring under a great ash tree where its three roots of fate kept spreading throughout the world to create the past, present and the future.

  There, in another theatre, the old woman pointed to swan gods singing to swallows, where the neck of the longlived swan is curving and winding; and to the swan that swims on the river separating the living from the dead. She wanted to find a swan lifting off from a quiet lake and leading a people to their doom in the sea. Where had such a cruel swan come from? Was it living out Aristotle’s death song of swans, and sung because it believed it was going to heaven, as Socrates assented, as it flew to sea to die? Heaven! The girl could hear an angel in the heavens above humming the swan waltz. Her swans might already be on their way back from heaven.

  A globe contained disgruntled fishermen sitting around on the snow ice fishing in another winter, with lakes and seas frozen over, and birds in plight as snow fell. On icy waters, old Aunty showed the girl her cursed people who had been turned into swans. They dipped into freezing shallows to feed on the aquatic plants below. Some, the old woman said looking into the globe, were spirits condemned to live in the sea for centuries, while others would fly in a lonely sky forever. They were cursed like the children of Lir she said. They died because they were too old and decrepit when they had changed back to their human form, after living nine hundred years through an evil spell that had cast them as swans. Their fate twisted between Erin and Alba on the sea of Moyle.

  The girl had spent hours searching for deception in these countless miniature scenes of Christmas, perhaps because she hoped that some tiny voice would reach up to her ear, but the more she leant into the little scenes, only their happy faces returned her gaze. And the more she searched, the more she found old Aunty’s stories of swans really existed in other people’s memories too. She even found the sailors aboard the East India ship in the year of 1698, and watched as they watched a black swan off Hollandia Nova. Sailors ran on the beach as they chased swans over great sheets of shallow water. Then, on a wooden ship on a Christmas sea, she discovered two black swans in a cage heading to Djakarta in 1746. And black swans in the Europe of 1791, at Knowsley, in England, where they were bred in the Earl of Derby’s menagerie, and also in France – in the Empress Josephine’s ponds at Malmaison – and the waters of Paris at Villeneuve L’Étang. She saw small graves of black swans with people standing around the little brown plots of earth, including Sir Winston Churchill, mourning his war gift from Australia before World War II.

  After exploring all of these little scenes that had been created by months of labour, she had found no eucalyptus tree trunk with strange writing in the dust, no swamp lined with people guarded by the Army. She could not understand why this history did not exist in this world of creation. It was incomplete. Wrong. This was the flaw that she had searched for and found. There was no miniature black girl such as herself in any of these depictions of humanity, no swamp world of people quarrelling over food, not even Warren Finch among the black shepherds, or a black Wise King.

  What became of the time when a young Bella Donna of the western world ran through the snow with her family and countless others as exiles? Where were they in the scenery of Christmas? Where were the escaping boat people who had placed their fate in a swan that led all the rickety boats that failed the decades adrift on the mercy of seas in that world of unwanted people? Where were the deserted boat people cities that had existed on the oceans of the world? She moved on with the knowledge that there was no link between her and Warren Finch’s world.

  City Swan

  The fiery woman worked her fingers to the bone to get into the girl’s brain, as though this was where one removed grime, salt, vegetation, blood of dead animals, lice, and whatever thoughts about having different origins she had brought into the house. Big Red, that was her name the woman said, after she had found the girl asleep in the corridor. With her sleeves rolled up, the woman joyfully prepared a more proper wife for Warren than what he had arrived with.

  The girl had slept against a wall with the cat, and dreamt of a river walled up with knotted debris composed of words describing tree trunks, branches and leaves that had been washed away by previous floods. She knew it was not a safe place to stand against the wall breaking up in the flooded backwaters where volumes of words kept spilling over her head. Submerged and struggling, she bobbed up to surface every now and again, while swimming through schools of coppery red fish that were larger than whales jammed right to the steep banks of the river.

  It was mid-morning when Big Red had transformed the girl with enough hot baths to convince herself that she had found the true colour of the girl’s skin. She styled the girl’s hair, contouring her wild golden-tipped brown curls to remain close to her head, and coiled the rest into a bun at the base of her neck. She painted her fingernails cream. The wedding gown was next. The girl was thinner than expected and not as tall. She knew to expect her to be dark, not that dark, but the colour was fine for the cream silk that had been ordered. Now the dress itself did not fit.

  She hissed between teeth filled with pins, cursing Warren for having created a monumental problem by wanting so many things to be done like this. A wedding gown from Italy! What next? It was the bride’s job to give her measurements. How would he know? And he should have given more warning if he wanted to leave it to somebody else to organise everything for him. Hold still! Don’t move an inch. The girl dared not breathe. Yet! Yet! My dear, she sung finally, saying she would build Rome with her bare hands in a day if she had to. Why? Because, she explained, Warren deserved to be happy for all he has to put up with. And with a pin she would stab the girl if she did not make Warren a happy man.

  You are a very lucky girl. This is going to be the happiest day in your life. I hope you know that. So, don’t mind me. Who am I to complain over a simple little thing
like not having the dress as perfect as it should be?

  Finally, the dress clung to the girl’s body and the cream silk with embroidered lilies fell down to her ankles, and Big Red who found it hard to believe in miracles, admitted Warren had chosen the right dress. Unbelievable! Who would have thought you could put the bush where you come from into a frock. The girl looked into an oval mirror and saw herself like golden syrup in a cream dress with the same colour arum lilies of the land of the owls, and gloved hands. She looked grand, said the children applauding their mother who was gushing with pride. Red said Ethyl looked exactly like a fashion queen from a magazine. A miracle, she said to Warren. And don’t you do this to me again. Warren looked at the girl. He looked relieved. He embraced the woman strongly. It was plain to see that she meant the world to him.

  Oblivia felt like she had been turned into a dolled-up camp dog and vaguely nodded to the question of whether she took Warren Finch as her husband to love and obey etcetera – since what did it matter whether she said, I do to Warren Finch, or fuck you arsehole if that was what she was supposed to think, and who was no less of a stranger in the room to her than anyone else there staring at her. Did it matter? Not the idea of marriage. This was the whole point with Oblivia, long after the house had filled with guests who greeted the red-headed dragon woman profusely as they entered. The man who officiated the marriage wore a tight black snake suit that could have been a boa constrictor strangling him. His face was sickly grey. He looked as though he had seen a ghost. Perhaps he was a ghost, Oblivia thought – she even thought it was funny, wondering whether she was really in some other reality, and if this was what the ghosts of white people did all the time, getting married, saying I do, promising the world and whatnot. She wasn’t going to be anybody’s slave. Whilst the marriage celebration proceeded with colour and glitz, the only strange person in the room was Oblivia with her girlish thoughts. But, you have to understand, said a woman-expert on Indigenous affairs in a small gathering of like-minded among the guests, this marriage will cement bonds with these people. It is their law. He will need to keep his principles on his road to ultimate power.