The Swan Book Page 25

  One night she woke up thinking that Machine was searching through her rubbish somewhere in the building, some place where she imagined he lived in a den like an animal, and where occasionally she thought she heard a phone ring. She felt disgusted and threw her rubbish from the window into the lane, but always quickly afterwards, she would see him picking up every single thing she had dropped with a pointed stick, and dropping it piece by piece, after he inspected it, into a large, green rubbish bag. It was these little incidents that fed her loathing of the ugly man. Her mind grew fat on it. But she could not leave. She depended on him. And still she did not wish that Warren would come back.

  Sometimes, in the middle of the night, she would suddenly wake up to the sound of the concertina door of the lift slamming repeatedly in her head. She would run to her door and listen. Always watching the brass, hook-shaped door handle, waiting for it to turn. She thought Warren had come back. He had changed his mind. Then she heard slow, laboured breathing, and she wondered if each achievable breath would be the last. Instinctively, she knew it was the liftman on the other side with his ear to the door, listening to her – checking to see if she was still alive. She could hear Warren calling Machine on his mobile phone when the thought crossed his mind: Keep checking just in case she tries to kill herself. He could hear her heart pounding. The knife she slides across her hand is so sharp, that she often cuts herself. She tries not to breathe while waiting for the door handle to move. The blood falls from her hand. But he always leaves with his shoes dragging across the floor. The concertina doors open and slam shut. The lift begins whining back down to the lower floors.

  It was only when the lift faded away that she would breathe normally again, but one night after he left she heard breathing coming back to her through the walls, in rhythm with her own breath. She now understood it was this sound that had brought Machine up to the top floor of the building. The sound flooded the apartment. She was too afraid to turn on a light, and went from room to room trying to find the sound, but it was coming from everywhere. It came from the air of her breath. The air was wrapping breath with breath.

  Then she knew. She could feel the presence of their bodies, of beating wings from lean-chested birds, lightened from the long journey, with necks stretched in flight. The swans had arrived. Above the building they flew in a gyre that was lit intermittently by strobes of searchlights. All around, soft breast feathers fell lightly. The swans flew through the narrow lane outside the window, and upwards into the darkness, after their eyes had found hers. Their search had ended.

  The swans flew around the building looking for a place to land. They tried to land on the roof then flew off towards the bay. Their numbers had grown. Along the way, the land had given up its swans from all the drying inland watercourses, swamps, man-made lakes and sewerage ponds, drains and cattle dams. The migration had assembled a black cloud that flew in the night on its long journey to find the girl.

  But the swans were gone in the morning.

  City of Refugees

  Late at night gangs of street children heard the swans singing and followed them into the lane. Their world was the deep night while the city was in blackout to conserve energy. The swans were driven by nervousness, but their bond with the girl was greater than fear and held them to the lane. Hundreds of swans circled the building every night, flying in lines, sometimes coming so close their wings clipped the buildings and triggered a chain reaction of downward spiralling. Again and again they returned, and flew through the narrow corridor with even greater compositions of desperation than the previous night.

  These aerobatics were how the swans communicated. With all of the nervousness generated at night, the swans kept away from the busy city during the day. Instead, they waited in the polluted waters of the bay, and in ponds in the ruined botanical gardens of the city, and any other abandoned flatlands with a sprinkling of water.

  They returned in the quietness of the night and flew continuously through the lane, the closest they could get to the girl staring at them from her window. It was the flight of the obsessed. The continuous trumpeting of great numbers of swans joined harmoniously with their soft whistling to twist a melody that was sombre and grief-stricken, but this music was charming to the street kids. They barged into the lane and were ready to challenge any fear they had of being threatened by the roaming cardboardbox street dwellers that had claimed the lane as their own.

  The life of the deepest part of the night in this pitch-black, power-starved city was always left to prowlers like the street kids looking for something to do. They roamed the shadows to feel alive. They were the sleepless of the world with no peace in their souls. They were the children of the homeless poor people of the city. Well! They were boys and girls of all ages and from all racial backgrounds mingling together like friends when they followed the swans through the city to the lane.

  You know what they believed? That the lane was blessed. A filthy lane was the place to find Heaven. So! The kids arrived in hordes, groups of seven or eight that soon became hundreds. All the leaders had a bony Staffy, the dog of choice, Staffordshire Bull Terriers, with thick necks adorned with studded collars and led on rusty chains. It was miracles these children were after. And they felt closer to a miracle just from looking up to the sky and seeing the swans as they swarmed through the lane. They started calling the very ordinary lane a sacred site – The holy place.

  They developed war games, firing non-stop rap songs in quick succession. Soon, they could not stop themselves from challenging one another to jump from the edges of buildings they had broken into, hanging out of windows on the higher levels to be at the height of swans in flight. They played a sound game by toying with the rhythms from the swans’ beating wings. Their chants dared one another to fight for territory, or to fly off, take off, fall to death, never come back. In this cacophony echoing through the lane, they spent hours learning to replicate the glory of the city’s cathedrals, as they swung between buildings on ropes worsted from rags of old clothes, trying to touch the swans.

  The melee of sounds bounced back and forth along the walls, and exploded in the lane below so loudly, it could have woken the dead. The only ones disturbed though were the sleeping bodies inside the platforms of flattened cardboard boxes; the nests constructed by slow hands. This invisible world of the city, a place where decades of dampness, flooding and rain had ridden the lane with slimy algae, was now the street kids’ cathedral.

  Those who slept there in rubbish-bag coffins stuffed with newspaper to keep warm, while water leaked continuously from the rooftops, were unable to get a decent night’s sleep. Nor could they die in a sweet dream. So, they just lay there, and cursed the fact that they were still alive.

  The river of swans continued on, they flew trancelike through the gaps between the buildings. They circled and spiralled towards the moon, and gathered something in the air that had been locked out by the walls of the city. They were capturing from the skies the small packages of memory of the girl who was thousands of miles from her home. Perhaps this was what they sprinkled in the lane with feathers dropping, sprinkling dust down like magic so that her mind ran straight back to the swamp’s ancient eucalypt, tangled in vines from countless seasons of bush banana.

  You know it doesn’t work like that, the Harbour Master often claimed while standing beside the girl in her apartment to watch the spectacle in the lane. Even the Harbour Master’s small monkey, who thought it was Giuseppe Verdi’s Rigoletto, and was always dressed magnificently in brocaded silk jackets, confirmed this was not like the real world whenever it was asked to throw in a bit of good advice. What a disappointment. It had no intentions of becoming the fortune-telling monkey of the lane.

  The Harbour Master had brought his monkey friend back from overseas, after he had gone on a cruise ship around the world in search of Bella Donna’s homeland. Had no luck, he said, in finding the descendants of her swan leader. He spat in disgust about his adventure. It was only a love boat he said
. The ship had no idea where it was heading. It was full of gypsies searching for something to happen in their lives, their world had been like that from the day their ancestors had been expelled from the Garden of Eden. So he got off the stupid boat with the pie in the sky people and hitch-hiked the rest of the way like a real man, hopping along the floating islands of boat people until he found success.

  What he found was that there were swans in most continents of the world and finally, he believed he had found the old woman’s swans. There were not many left. The poor things had flown back to paradise, which was an oasis in the desert, just like the Middle East. He had watched these swans for a very long time while they stood around in dried-up marshland where decent people were reciting poetry, and for the hell of it, singing for rain, as though rain would open the gates of the most fantastic gardens of all times. All he learnt was that those swans were completely mad so he left them there. They were too blind to see that gardens were everywhere. The whole Earth was paradise in the eyes of its custodians.

  Whereas, look at the monkey, he said. This creature had no illusions about paradise. He carried his paradise inside himself like a little holy man. Flocks of pigeons followed him wherever he walked though the seas of humanity. The Harbour Master said the monkey was his guru. He was better fun than trying to bring a swan across the world that was overweight with its own dooming prophecies.

  The monkey and I flew back to Australia on a Qantas flagship – full of choir singers singing old Mamas and Papas songs over and over until you hated the sound, ‘each night you go to bed my baby, whisper a little prayer for me etc, etc, and tell all the stars above this is dedicated to the one I love.’

  Once the Harbour Master returned to The People’s Palace and saw the large crowds forming in the lane for the coming night, he said that he would be staying around for a while. This looks interesting, he claimed. The little monkey thought so too even though he was really a serious creature that looked as if he belonged in an office where a lot of money was being made.

  It was not long before the world of the lane did not intrigue the monkey. It silently chewed reused PK gum with its big brown teeth, and looked as though it was reflecting on its life so far thinking that all up, it could have been better. Still, nobody could say the monkey had a victim mentality because he was now a drifter, or because the world of the lane had overnight turned its fur grey, and before too long, the grey had turned white like a snow creature from the arctic circle, far snowier even than a Japanese Macaque.

  The fact of the matter was that the snow monkey simply did not like Australia. It had turned ancient-looking with all of its yearning to go home, to go back to a city of millions, possibly a billion people, to some quiet little monkey house with a big rock in the front yard from where he could sit all day long and beg pistachio nuts from passing tourists. Gee! the creature said while shredding a lettuce into thousands of little pieces to resemble its own shattered mind, the lane was not like the jungle – not a proper jungle.

  But that was not everything. There was much more to be said about what happened in the lane. Oblivia changed her mind about her nerves, and frequently, she left the building at night to rescue the fallen swans. Many fell in the street-kid game. The rescuing manoeuvres became a regular occurrence. Oblivia, the Harbour Master and the monkey would rush to the door as soon as they saw a swan falling.

  In an instant they abandoned their fearfulness of the city, as well as the ongoing debates about whether they liked Australia or not, and stampeded into the crowded lane in the middle of the night. They would be off without a second thought, while hassling each other along the way to be the first one to open the door that kept out boogie men like Machine, so that they could be bop a hula down the gauntlet of at least a dozen flights of stairs – instead of taking the slower-than-death lift that still had an electricity supply attached to it, probably because only someone like Warren Finch could afford to pay the excessively expensive electricity charges in the city – then chase one another in circles to find the actual front door through the maze of fountains, cats and statues, while cold shivers rushed down their spines.

  She knew Machine never slept and was always watching, but she did not hesitate in her hasty exit through the front door to the lane. Once outside, with the Harbour Master egging her to fight the people sleeping in the lane with her knife, and the monkey’s little fingers raiding everyone’s pockets for food, a Mars Bar or PK gum, she realised how easy it was to grab a swan under her arm and make a hasty retreat back to the building.

  Whenever she found herself in the lane, Oblivia realised that she could move inconspicuously like any of the other darkened shapes covering the ground and no one would care less. This was so, even when the conglomerate of bodies huddled together under blankets, paper and cardboard frequently erupted and flew apart in waves of swearing and fights. They would settle again momentarily like a butterfly pausing to rest, when some old peace-keepers switched on the ghetto blasters roaring Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini. She pushed and shoved people aside, all psyched to fight anybody that got in her way, but swans falling in the lane right on top of people did not exactly cause a world war. The multitudes sleeping in cardboard and newspaper bedding kept on snoring, having already anticipated a bit of night clubbing.

  Before long, Warren Finch’s apartment became a menagerie; a swannery for stunned, injured and recovering birds. Oblivia was a recluse but no Greta Garbo locking herself away and letting bygones be bygones forever. She could not get out of The People’s Palace fast enough to save another swan.

  Glass was a big problem. Swans in the swamps have no idea about glass. In each desperate attempt to reach the girl, some would crash head first into her window. Some would fall into the lane after being swiped by the street kids playing their game of hanging out the windows on the upper floors of the catastrophic city’s abandoned apartments that smelt of decades of rose fragrance, impregnated aromas of herbs and spices – cumin, turmeric, cardamom, or of cat urine – and where old people lived in dank smelling rooms.

  When absolute silence entered the lane during the early hours of the morning, and the swans began to disappear over the rooftops, the rain-soaked street kids with vacant eyes left too. They would come down from the buildings to wander off to crash on the busiest streets in the city where they slept. These bundles of rags were barely noticeable pushed up against shop windows, and were almost absorbed into the scenery of the most prestigious department stores. There they stayed, and you would never know if they were dead or alive. Their lullaby was the continuous sound of shoes clipping the pavement. The general public watched over them like guardian angels rushing by, while ignoring the dreams pervading the air, that sounded like trumpets from heaven calling for a shepherd to take the children home.

  So far, Oblivia had avoided the police. While the sirens of police cars raced towards the lane, the door to The People’s Palace would open immediately, and be slammed shut behind her after she returned with another rescued swan. The girl suspected Machine called the police. His turf war! Just as it was his door to open and close. His building. His dilemma of noticing that swans not only filled her apartment, but makeshift pens on the rooftop too, waiting to be returned to unknown places he had never set eyes on.

  Oblivia could not understand how she kept seeing glimpses of herself on the television. The monkey had noticed her first because out of boredom it was flicking around with the control switch to find a nature documentary, preferably about monkey homelands or performing monkeys, and ended up watching an old sepia-coloured Marlene Dietrich movie. Everything was going along fine until the monkey yelled out in a startled squeal, Who is that?

  This was when the Harbour Master began watching the movie to see what the monkey had seen, and he saw the same thing too. The girl was changed almost beyond recognition, as though Marlene Dietrich’s spirit had jumped out of the television and into the girl and then appeared in a news flash where she was standing right beside –
of all the people on Earth for goodness sake – Warren Finch. This person whoever she was only flashed across the television screen in a split second. But it was enough. Enough to see that the girl was dressed up like Marlene Dietrich in sepia and parading like the actress, and was actually beside Warren Finch. This same news flash was repeated many times through the Marlene Dietrich movie.

  The Harbour Master was nursing a sick swan on his lap, and so was the monkey, and wondering why he was looking after these creatures in a squalid apartment. He asked Oblivia, Where did you get clothes like that? This was what the Harbour Master wanted to know, after seeing the pale sepia-coloured satin dress most of all, as she and Warren Finch walked off in the distance, and noticing the matching high-heel shoes. He said she looked unbelievable. At first, he exclaimed, I told myself no way – I really couldn’t recognise it was you.

  After this happened, all the Harbour Master wanted to do all day long was sit around waiting for a chance to see Warren Finch on the television, just to criticise him. Any news about the Australian Government was just grand. The Harbour Master believed that because of bloody Warren Finch, he had become a specialist in Australian politics – not that this was difficult to do, he claimed. They were all gutless wonders. He grumbled continuously about not being able to stand the sight of the man, so whenever he saw the new President of the country on television – because this was what Warren Finch had finally and seamlessly become (through an inspired shove of the exceedingly long-serving and unpopular Horse Ryder from Government during the course of one stormy night when so many trumped up and legit charges of conspiracy against the machinery of the party flew like a flippen maelstrom through the corridors of power in the country) – the Harbour Master and the monkey yelled at him for the complete sell-out that he was; a complete reprobate of the first order who had dumped his wife and turned against his own people. Ya moron, they screamed at the television.