The Swan Book Read online

  The acclaimed monkey genius Rigoletto had become so obsessed with watching the news, he started to make specialised comparisons with how politics worked in the monkey world. He claimed that Warren Finch had stepped out of line with his own society. That he had left his people for dead. They were now joined to the throngs of banished people wandering aimlessly around the world, always searching and always lost, and who created more banished people wherever they went.

  You give people no choice, the Harbour Master, sick of sitting in swan shit, shouted at the television. You want them to be like you – a lost man. Like you did to this girl here. What is she now? Hey? Tell me that? Come here now. I want to fight you.

  Now Oblivia was left to rescue the fallen swans herself, because the Harbour Master and the monkey could not be bothered. They were too obsessed about having no real voice in the politics of Australia. Neither would leave the television for a minute. They were consumed in a running commentary about Warren Finch.

  This massive consumption of electricity just for a television, and glut of injured or recuperating swans also consumed with television viewing, did not stop her from wanting to see herself on the television as well. Then finally – bingo! What a shock on the 7 O’Clock News. She quickly noticed the really small things that were totally opposed to how she thought about herself. Where were the downcast eyes for instance? Why the lack of self-consciousness? Where was the shame? How could she have agreed to allow people to stare at her like that? She had to adapt to the television picture of herself with fingernails painted red or pale pink, speaking through lipstick, looking from eyeliner and orderly designed hair, and how she moved with an air of confidence dressed in Marlene Dietrich clothes.

  The Harbour Master said she looked beautiful but Warren Finch was an ugly man. These sightings of the President with his wife became more and more frequent the more that they watched the television together, so they had to surmise that Warren Finch was forcing the girl to go mad from seeing herself being paraded around as the wife he wanted her to learn to be. And equally alluring, they reasoned that these daily sightings of the Indigenous President of the newly created Australian Republic with his promise wife were intended to be very newsworthy to the viewing public that adored the country’s first couple.

  Yet there was more to think about. It had taken numerous glimpses of seeing herself masquerading around the place as Marlene Dietrich, for the girl to realise that Warren Finch was stealing parts of her life for his own purposes. Yes, that was how he was covering up his mésalliance of a marriage with her. She did not know how it happened, but somehow, a part of her life was being lived elsewhere with her husband. She came and went into a different life which Warren Finch returned through the television screen.

  The Harbour Master and the monkey were deeply committed to their investigative arguments about this theft of her identity by an impostor – or not – and argued with Oblivia who believed it was her all right, and this gave them the excuse to be more or less glued to the television because why kill the dream, when otherwise they would have to be rescuing swans. They complained: Wasn’t the place crowded enough? It was all they could think or speak about, including abusing that ugly man Warren Finch, saying we are sick of you, because they were stuck in an apartment with poultry swans. There were now so many of them nestled in the apartment it was hard to walk around the place without thinking you were in a stinking swannery. So the Harbour Master and Rigoletto, now covered in swan lice, sat tight in front of the television, unwilling to move unless it was absolutely necessary to feed themselves.

  Oblivia had swans living on the rooftop where the cold wind whistled continuously, and now many needed to be released. She believed it was her job. It was the only reason why she was staying, and had not become a permanent television wife. Soon it would be the swan’s breeding season and each swan would have to be reunited with the rest of the flock before their instincts to breed became too great, forcing them to panic on the rooftop and in the apartment, while attempting to escape.

  Oblivia knew that she must take them to clear land, or to a large stretch of water so that they could have the space to run and take to the skies. She needed help to find this space in the city that sprawled like a maze in her mind, with neither the Harbour Master nor the monkey interested in helping her. They were more interested in Warren Finch than swans, or becoming lost in the city, and said if she wanted help: Ask Warren Finch’s Mr Machine to take you to the genie shop.

  Machine was sitting in an armchair on the ground floor with his favourite white cat wrapped around his neck like a scarf; it chewed the man’s hair as though it was feathers. When Machine saw Oblivia standing in front of him with a piece of paper signed by Warren Finch, saying he should help her relocate the swans, he shouted in shock. Well! Well! Well! He was surrounded by misted water spurting several metres high from a colossal fish mouth and falling, but that he was damp did not worry him. He just kept swinging along to the amplified sound coming through the loud speakers of Dean Martin singing Houston, while a pile of damp cats purring and snarling at the white cat tumbled all over him. What’s the matter? You want a tour of dilapidation? Want to see the ruined city or something?

  Machine said he would need some time to study the street guide – an old disused book he pointed to on the table beside him that was half a metre thick. He thought it would be very difficult to work out the easiest directions to reach the magic shop she was talking about. Okay. This was a skewed dream of a city, he explained, with tidal surges at any time, and in saying he never liked people much, asked whether she realised that there were millions of them rushing around right outside their door – people doing anything to save themselves in the day to day? Mostly he grumbled about how the city was stuffed and nobody cared what it looked like anymore. Everything is falling down around you. Nothing is getting fixed up. Pigeons are flying everywhere. The sky is full of them. I have seen thousands of the things circling around this building alone. Their shit – falling everywhere. They call this globalised depression. I call it shit. Subsistence life. The trouble of being micro-managed by the government with intervention this, and intervention that, until passivity breeds the life out of you and you may as well be dead. You want to become like that? It was an absolute disgrace. You are better off staying where you are – inside. But still, because Warren Finch’s signature was on the note, he agreed to take her there, but only at night for these reasons: hatred of sunlight, and because he did not like walking around in the city during the day when it was crowded, although even the Harbour Master had told her that in reality, he had only seen dribs and drabs. It was a ghost city. Hardly anyone lived there any more after the thousands of unemployed people had moved away and disappeared into thin air apparently. Machine patted his knee cat and said: Be ready when you hear a knock on the door.

  After several hours of waiting that night and being scared out of her wits, there was a scratching sound on the other side of the door. Quando! Quando? The Harbour Master interrupted what he called, another bloody quandary to deal with, and told her straight to F–N straighten up, and that she had better get used to answering the door. The lice-scratching monkey agreed, and claimed the Harbour Master was a natural mastermind at getting things done in a timely fashion.

  So! Olé! She answered the door and found an owl sitting there. The little bird busy scratching with its beak was disturbed by the door opening and flew off in fright. It descended slowly down the atrium. Instinctively, the girl knew the owl wanted to be followed, and even more than this, she thought that Machine had become the owl – the one that had been promised to her by the genies. She quickly looked at all of the swans jumbled into the apartment honking over the top of the sound of the television: Take/me! Take/me! She quickly grabbed the swan with the strongest wings flapping in readiness for flight, and left dressed in her darkest clothes with the hood of her jacket pulled down over her head as she entered the lane outside.

  Out into the rainy night, and walk
ing quickly through street after street and lanes and darkened alleyways with the swan in Warren Finch’s napsack strapped over her back, with her mind swinging around in her head about why she had not been smart enough to see what was not visible to anyone else, such as the owl-like features in Machine’s face, she followed the owl that could have been him.

  The owl kept a hasty pace in its flight. There was no time for faint-hearted indifference about whether she should follow it or not, though she was being taken far away from The People’s Palace. Any idea of how to return had not dawned on her yet, although she was keen to return as quickly as possible in case she had to be transformed into Warren Finch’s television wife again – because she was forced to go everywhere with him. In your dreams, the monkey claimed, Let’s escape. Why not kill Warren if we ever see him again? Then we can all go back to the swamp. How? How played over in her mind a thousand times a day. What a word how was. It could drive anyone mad. The owl flew on oblivious to any quandary she was having about needing to be somewhere else. Even if she had changed her mind and wished she had never left, it was too late. The owl kept her alert to its sudden shifts in direction, and often flew high to cross buildings while she had to run down and around them while lugging the heavy swan, to find a way to keep following. She was convinced that the creature wanted to lose her in the labyrinth.

  The air was like ice. Massive clouds soared across the skies of the city. A hard wind blew the owl along until finally it landed on a lamp post in front of a long-abandoned, boarded and nailed-up shop where, on the business sign, painted monkeys and owls danced across faded yellowish words that she was barely able to read, The World of Magicians and Genies. The owl shook itself to end its flight, and then suddenly flew straight through a crack in the deserted building.

  This was how the world stood in the darkness, but whenever a rouge neon light flickered brightly, it lit up the street, and she could see behind the boards and inside the shop. But genies were oblivious of time. A rose fragrance that had been sprayed in the shop for decades by those who had worked there, was still in the air of this otherworldly, something not of this time, unbridled to time perhaps, magic shop that brought it back into existence.

  The first thing she noticed as light flashed into the building was movement on the floor. It was alive with the city’s lizards and skinks that had gathered in the warmth of the room. Perhaps, she thought, they were participating in a historical conference about old homelands when lizards lived in trees. The desks where the genies had sat looked as though they had been gathering work for hundreds of years, while the books that they had written in had grown into tall mountains. She could see the notes and drawings they had left behind, notes about the measurements they had been taking of grass owls, seashells, seeds, feathers and odd things like that.

  There were elderly owls in the room. Not local. These came from other wild places in the world. The old owls sat very still and civilised on perches, so as not to waste their breath on life’s flippancies. Only the younger owls did that – flying soundlessly to and fro across the room – leaving and returning from the city streets. The room’s other large bird life consisted of several old rare and valuable parrots that preserved the entire history of their species inside their heads. Who knows why the genies wanted them saved? What could anyone do with information about what no longer existed?

  The girl heard the parrots chatting about the ordeal of travelling across the world aboard bankrupt ships with the genies. These vessels were now rotting down in the harbour. Permanently anchored. Saved up for a rainy day. She thought the parrots looked lucky to be living in perpetuity in this ageless room. They would always remain perched on their ornate bird stands studded with pearls, but deep inside their little ticking hearts, she knew they looked around their diminished world, and pondered where they had ended up.

  Sometimes the homesick parrots’ thoughts caught them in a nostalgic moment, and they would suddenly utter words from ancient languages. The girl watched the parrots waste their knowledge; their rare and valuable words disappearing into thin air. Never to be spoken again when the lost languages faded away.

  Well! Holy! Holy! The swan flew in the dead of the night. Its faith was in itself. The great black bird had struggled to be free from the girl’s arms and like a racehorse, ran in the direction of the neon sun where three strange men had appeared. They may have only been drunks, or spies sent by Warren Finch to keep an eye on her, but slunk away when noticed, and disappeared in the fog.

  The great swan was soon in the air, wings spread in slow flight, just above Oblivia who was running after it down the street. The swan was completely savvy about directions in the city and took shortcuts, for within minutes she was back inside the lane. Where you been? Odd Machine was waiting at the door, angry but relieved that she had come back. He complained about how lonely he was, but she sped past him and ran back up to her apartment. The healed swan joined others outside in flight paths leading to the eel pond in the botanical gardens in the centre of the city where flocks of great numbers were assembled for the night.

  Now swans were set free every night. Oblivia had faith in the owl with the Dean Martin Houston song stuck in its head, as it flew continually waving and gliding and twisting its body as it looked around, to suddenly change course over buildings. She followed its flight through the darkness on whatever route it took, keeping the bird in sight, and knew that the owl would always end up in front of the abandoned magic shop.

  It did not matter that the owl’s destination was just around the corner from The People’s Palace and that she was pursuing the owl over vast distances for nothing. She told the Harbour Master and the monkey that an ordinary, logical route was not the point. If she had walked there herself in the most direct route possible, she would never have found the old genie’s shop on the long abandoned street where the city’s ghosts came at night, and which was best to release swans returning to flight. It was the desire she followed, of completing an arduous journey that allowed her to see the right perspective of the neon sun shining through cracks in the boarded-up frontage of the shop, and she grew stronger by imagining the genies still working in their workshop on the other side of the boards, and by believing that the spirits in this place – all of the ghosts that had never been taken home – also ran with the swan along the street, and helped it to fly. It was a ghost street. Very exciting: there were thousands of ghosts there. She had seen them herself, she claimed, although the Harbour Master and Rigoletto were not really convinced about her story. They knew a thing or two about ghosts.

  Rigoletto sang his anthem, questa o quella. Badly sung opera was enough for the street kids to stop using the lane. They left, while shouting that whoever was singing like a monkey should stop. The gangs found something new to do, and gathered on the street corners waiting, to follow the owl leading the darkly clothed and hooded girl with a swan under her arm, or sometimes slung over her back.

  The street kids kept their distance from Oblivia staring at the boarded-up building. They punched each other in the head to stand back to pay a bit of respect for the traditional owner of the land. They wondered whether she was just mad, you know, having gone crazy in the city, and crept in closer to see over her shoulder.

  None had the girl’s ability to visualise how the genie’s shop had once been, of seeing the tiny birds buzzing inside an antique Chinese aviary constructed of wire that had once been forged into decorative swirls. She ignored their voices whispering in her ear, What are you looken at, sis?

  Inside the aviary flew the smallest hummingbirds in the world – but only if you thought of them flying, flying from cone-like nests in which they slept. The more she stared at the stillness of the nests, the more the hummingbirds would become animated, and would begin darting around the fresh flowers inside the cage. The street children were oblivious to the ghosts of the street crowding around them to watch the hummingbirds, but they felt that there must be something special about the building, and were organ
ising a break-in.

  Oblivia knows that her nights on the streets will not last long and she ignores the owl flitting around the light poles to catch insects, and the street children breaking into the building. She has too many other things to think about. For instance, she never knows when she will have to dress up again to appear on television – and what if Warren was already at the apartment waiting to pick her up? Already she feels that she will not be living in the apartment much longer. Feels it in her bones. Even the Harbour Master was packing his things.

  Ships’ bells can be heard faraway in the harbour, and the black swan released from her arms stands alone and confused on the empty wet street. Each swan was the same; uncertain about its ability to fly again until the wind off the changing tide pushed it along, and its webbed feet would start running down the road with their heavy load. The wind gusting along this corridor grew in intensity, and soon picked up the running swan and pushed it into flight.

  The neglected city had thousands of pigeons flying around the rooftops of buildings, and trees sprouting out of the sides of cathedrals, chestnuts growing from the alcoves; fig tree roots clung to the walls, and almond and apple trees grew from seeds that flourished in the damp cracks. In these trees while pigeons and pet budgerigars slept, down below the troupe of owl, girl and swans travelled with a multitude of ghosts. Their parade implied a pilgrimage, a dedication to their never forgone longing for what was and had been, a prolonged hurting, like the Portuguese word saudades, describing the deep yearning of those left in limbo, and the melancholy dream passing through every quiet street in the city. Then Oblivia would again feel an excitable urge exploding in her stomach, to rush back to the apartment in double-quick time before dawn, for she was always hoping to become the television wife, to see herself as greatly loved, with the jubilant political husband – Head of State world leader – to actually experience what it felt like to be beside someone like this, and which would prove once and for all it really was her in the picture, that she felt this love seen on television, and by establishing her authentically beyond any measure of doubt to the Harbour Master and the stupid monkey.