Owls Do Cry Page 2

  —You will drop blood when you walk, Francie said.

  And not knowing how to answer her, Daphne said

  —Rapunsel, Rapunsel, let down your hair;

  quoting from the prince who climbed the gold silk rope to the top of the tower, it was all in the fairy tales they found at the rubbish dump. The book smelt, and it too had been eaten by worms which still lived in its yellow pages, and it was dusted over with ashes, and it had been thrown away because it did not any more speak the right language, and the people could not read it because they could not find the way to its world. It had curly writing on the cover, saying, The Brothers Grimm. It spoke of Cinderella and her ugly sisters with their cut-off heel and toe and the blood flowing black, the snow colour of every bean flower.

  —But I don’t wanner go to school, Toby said. I wanner go to the rubbish dump an’ find another book.

  The lady doctor was coming to school that day. She wore a grey costume and because she was the school nurse and fierce, they had her mixed in their mind with the grey nurse shark that is deadly, creeping behind you when you swim, to swallow you in one gulp; though not found in these waters, only, I believe, near Sydney.

  Every time she came the nurse took the dirty children to look at them and whisper at them through a roll of cardboard. Thirty-two, fifty-five, sixty-one, she would whisper; and the children, if they were the dirty ones and being examined, would have to echo, Thirty-two, fifty-five, sixty-one; and if they echoed correctly it meant they could hear and would not have their ears poked at and operated on. And the lady doctor would then take a stick like an ice cream spoon and very very gently part the strands of the pupil’s hair, to look through it and find if it were inhabited. She would look at their clothes, too, and see how often they had been washed, and if they were hand-me-downs or new. And she would hold a square of cardboard in front of the dirty children and point to the letters printed on it, and expect to be told the alphabet, muddled up, and them to see small print, even smaller than the middle column of a page of the Bible where it says See Tim. Rom. Deut., and other mysterious words.

  Toby did not like this. He feared it all. He had seen on a page of the doctor’s book that his mother kept on top of the wardrobe, a picture of the animals with many legs that walk through people’s hair; and the red spots that come on people’s faces, and the way legs turn crooked. Toby was a sick boy, himself, who took medicine, a teaspoon in water after each meal until his mother found out what the writing on the prescription meant. And then,

  —Bromide, she said. Drugs.

  So whenever the bottle of medicine came, in twos or repeats, Toby’s mother said

  —No child of mine, no child of mine will drink this filth; and she broke the seal and popped off the cork and poured away the thick mulatto fluid.

  Toby did not get better. He went to school and sat in the back row and put his head on one side, trying to know what was written on the blackboard and what the master, Andy Reid, was saying in the history lesson.

  There had been Maori Wars and the white people had taken a block of land —how big is a block of land, Toby wondered. They built houses with blocks and walked in the morning around the block, touching every second fence and plucking every third marigold. But this block of land in history, they say it held a forest of kauri that only a storm could walk round in a minute and pull out by the hair, every second and third tree.

  —The government was good then, Andy would say.

  And sometimes he said —The government was bad.

  And he talked of peace and war that never seemed to happen at the same time in history. There were, say, six years of peace when Maoris and white people spent every day and night of the years smiling at each other and rubbing noses and exchanging greenstone and kumaras and kauri and marrying and going for picnics and boiling the billy and drinking tea and eating fish and laughing and no one was ever angry.

  Until the six years finished. On New Year’s Eve, perhaps, with the white and brown people standing outside the New Year, the same way people stand outside theatres and cricket grounds waiting for the films or the shield match to begin; and the mothers warning their children, Remember you must not laugh or play or swap anything. We are killing for six years. It is War.

  Toby could not imagine years of war, but Andy Reid told everyone and Andy Reid knew. He said also that there had been a Hundred Years’ War when some people’s faces must have been born angry and died angry without any smiling in between.

  But history was hard to understand with its kings good and bad and their wigs and their white fitting pants for dancing a minuet; and then the two princes sitting in the dreadful tower and listening to the water dripping from an underground cavern on to their faces and down their necks and on their heads poked like flowers from their pretty petal ruffs. Toby felt sorry for them but he could not understand history and wanting to get more land and gold; nor, sometimes, could he understand what the master said, or read the words on the blackboard. And that is why he wanted not to go to school when the lady doctor came.

  He was often sick and had to stay away from school. When he was sick his hand shook as if it felt cold and then a dark cloak would be thrown over his head by Jesus or God, and he would struggle inside the cloak, pushing at the velvet folds, waving his arms and legs in the air till the sun took pity, descending in a dazzling crane of light to haul, but, alas, preserve, where in all the sky, Toby wondered, this cloak of stifling recurring dream. And he would open his eyes and see his mother beside him, her big tummy and the map of wet and flour on her sack apron.

  He would cry then.

  The velvet cloak came over and over again so that whenever Toby moved his hand or arm too quickly, his mother would rush to his side and ask,

  —Are you all right, Toby?

  Or at school Andy Reid would say,

  —You can go and lie down, Toby Withers, and you may be able to stop it.

  —It?

  Did Andy Reid understand what happened, and how the cloak came with its forest of a million folds? Did he know why some people are given a private and lonely night, with a room of its own but no window that the stars, called by the tattered woman at the show Zodiac, may look through?

  So Toby did not go to school that day when the lady doctor came. He said goodbye to his mother and father and said,

  —Yes, I’ve got a hanky and I’ll tell them if it comes on; and he ran on ahead of Daphne. Daphne was glad, for it made her afraid to be close to him in case it happened and she was alone watching him, and he would die or choke out of the terrible mulberry colour of his face and his hands twitching and his eyes rolled back, and white, like the eye, closed, of a dead fowl that Daphne had seen by the fowl house. And yet, standing there on the wet side of the street, with Toby gone ahead, and the African Thorn hedge, hung with berries like penny oranges, leaning over to jag her legs if she walked too close, she felt alone, and wanted to catch up; so she caught up and went with Toby to the rubbish dump to find things. They found a bicycle wheel and a motor tyre. Inside the motor tyre was a stack of ledgers full of neat writing and figures written carefully in a beautiful blue ink; and each page seemed, to the children, like something out of a museum, to be kept under a glass case, like the handwriting of a pioneer or governor.

  Daphne gathered the books and put them in her lap, stroking them because they were valuable.

  —These are treasures, she said. Better than silver paper, this lovely writing.

  —They’re not, said Toby. They’re just sums, grown-up sums.

  —But they’re made like treasures. Why do they throw them away? And when you’re grown up you work at treasure, so it must be.

  —No. It’s out of banks, said Toby. Where they wear striped suits and get red in the face when it’s hot.

  And he tore some pages out of the books, though Daphne tried to hold on to them, and he made paper aeroplanes and wet on one to see if it changed to invisible.

  And then they talked about the fairy tal
es that nobody had wanted and had put in the ashes to be burned. There was a little man, truly, the size of a thumb. He used to drive a horse by sitting in the horse’s ear and whispering Whoa or Gee-up. And there was a king who lived in a mountain of glass and could see his face in seventy different mirrors in one look. And a table that rose up through the earth the way the organ, they say, in the big theatres, rises through the floor and music plays before the people are settled and God Save the Queen begins.

  And to make the table vanish the little girl in the story had to say only,

  —Bleat goat bleat

  Depart table neat.

  —But, talking of tables, I’m hungry, Daphne said to Toby. What’ve we got?

  They had nothing. Dinner time must be close, they thought, so they took one page of the blue writing of sums, in case it was really treasure for a glass case, and they walked home, passing the fruit shop on the way.

  Daphne went into the shop that seemed always wet and being washed and the cabbages turning yellow and the fruit specked; and before the shopkeeper came (she was a Chinese woman with different funerals and weddings and churches from Toby and Daphne) Daphne sneaked an apple under her arm and crept out, so that she and Toby had half an apple each, dividing it fairly because it really belonged to Daphne, Toby having the green sour part with thick skin, and Daphne the rosy-cheeked side; though to emphasize the fairness of their venture and the importance of not telling, she agreed to let him walk on the sunny side of the street and be warm while she continued in the shade.

  And in the afternoon they both went to school. The lady doctor had been. She had collected people and ticked off their names on white cards, with red ink, and given Norris Stevens a note to take home to his mother, about his tonsils. He was to have his tonsils out, he said, and everyone felt envious.

  —Why were you not at school this morning, Miss Drout said to Daphne.

  —I was sick, Daphne said.

  And

  —It came, was Toby’s answer to Andy Reid. And Toby was told to lie on the sick bed and they gave him a drink of milk at playtime, through a straw.

  4

  Their town, called Waimaru, was small as the world and halfway between the South Pole and the equator, that is, forty-five degrees exactly. There was a stone monument just north of the town, to mark the spot, in gold lettering.

  —Traveller, the writing said, Stop here. You are now standing halfway between the South Pole and the equator.

  What did it feel like to be standing at forty-five degrees?

  It felt no different.

  Waimaru was a respectable town with the population increasing so quickly that the Mayor kept being forced to call special meetings of the borough council, which were reported in the local newspaper, the rag, it was called. To decide if the reserves where grew native trees and shrubs should be offered for sale as housing sections, and the shrubs, and also the children who played near them after school, be rooted out and planted somewhere else; but the Mayor’s suggestion was defeated and letters to the paper followed, threats of resignation, a special meeting of the afraid beautifying society who had given many shrubs; a defiant meeting of the Build Your Own Home Club; after which, calm fell like a sweet mantle, and the shrubs and children (including the Withers family) remained happily planted on the hills surrounding the town.

  And the young Councillors shook their heads, saying,

  —This is not progress. The northern towns go ahead, becoming bigger and bigger, while we stagnate here, in the south.

  They were afraid.

  —We shall be left behind, they said.

  Left behind from going where?

  Among the letters to the paper were some by Mrs Withers who called herself Tui, the native bird, to show she wanted the native bush left on the hills. And sometimes she called herself, if she were writing about bush, Miro, the little red berry. She showed her children the letters, and though they could not understand them, they knew their mother must be Someone, so they could say it in school, with the others who said,

  —My father owns a car.

  —My uncle can chop down trees faster than anyone.

  —My mother writes letters to the paper.

  —Yes, Mrs Withers would say, as she licked the envelope for closing,

  —I’ll blow them up.

  And Bob, her husband, would make a rude remark to her.

  —Yes, I’ll blow them up. I’ll put my foot down. We women can’t be trodden on.

  Sometimes, instead of signing herself Tui, she became Mother of Four; and instead of Miro, the little red berry, she changed to Disgusted, or, merely and universally, A Mother.

  —I see Mother of Three has answered me, she would say. I’ll settle her.

  Oh, as if gentle Amy Withers could settle anyone!

  And then her husband, going to a lodge meeting, would call from the bedroom,

  —Where’s my best tartan tie? I haven’t all the time in the world.

  And Amy Withers would pick over shirts and socks till she was hit by a cascade of tartan tie.

  —Here’s your tie, Bob.

  She was afraid of her husband. She said Sh-sh to the children when Bob came home from work or parliament was on the air.

  —Honourable gentlemen, Bob would say.

  Honourable gentlemen.

  He was Labour.

  But, about the town. You should read a booklet that you may buy for five shillings and sixpence, reduced at sale time to five shillings, increased at Christmas to six shillings. This booklet will tell you the important things about the town and show you photographs – the town clock saying ten to three (the correct position of the hands for driving, says the local traffic inspector); the begonia house at the Gardens, and a perplexed-looking little man who must be the curator, holding a begonia plant in flower; the roses in the rose arch and the ferns in the fernery; also a photograph of the Freezing Works, the outside with its own garden and fancy flower-beds, and the inside with rows of pegged pigs with their tiny trotters thrust out stiff; of the Woollen Mills, the chocolate factory, the butter factory, the flour mill – all meaning prosperity and wealth and a fat filled land; and lastly a photograph of the foreshore with its long sweep of furious and hungry water, the roll-down sea the children call it, where you cannot bathe without fear of the undertow, and you bathe carefully, as you live, between the flags; and beware of the tentacles of sea-weed and the rush of pebbles being sucked back and back into the sea’s mouth each time it draws breath. Certainly, inside the breakwater is a little shovel-scoop of bay, Friendly Bay, where you paddle and sail shells and eat ice cream bought from Peg Winter, the mountainous woman who moves like faith from town to town, leaving behind her a trail of sweet and ice cream shops, almost as if they dropped from her pocket, like crumbs or seeds springing into red and white painted shape, with cream-coloured tables and chairs inside, and other high swivel-chairs as the dizzying accompaniment to a caramel or strawberry milk shake.

  And glass cases packed with chocolate, dark or milk, fruity or plain.

  Everything in a glass case is valuable.

  5

  Sings Daphne from the dead room.

  Sometimes in this world I have thought the night will never finish and the real city come no nearer and I think I will stand for a breath under the huge blue-gum trees that I have in my mind. My eyes are used to the dark and as I see the tall trees with their bark half-stripped and the whitish flesh of trunk revealed underneath, I think of my father saying to me or Toby or Francie or Chicks,

  —I’ll flay the skin off your hide, I will.

  And I know that a wild night wind has spoken those same words to the gum trees. I’ll flay the skin off your hide.

  And there is the skin hanging in strips. I smell the blue-grey gum-nuts, five ounces of them, flavoured and nobbly under my feet, and I take off my shoes and the gum-nuts dig in my feet and I walk to the foreshore of Waimaru where the sea will creep into the sleep of people and flow round and round in their he
ad, eating out caverns where it echoes and surges till the people become eroded with the green moth and all cry inside themselves, Help, Help.

  And then even the sun travels from dark to dark and I am not the sun.

  Yes, even the sun.

  And why will it rain so much after the night?

  Rain.

  Up north in the winter-time or midsummer the rain drips in sheets of silver paper, my mother said, who lived there a long time ago, where there are wasps in swarms and a blossom week and palm trees, imported; where the daffodils are earlier than here, with wider and frillier trumpets, and the flowers more bright, painted, growing in the superlatives of memory; and the sea, why the sea more blue and warm and churned in the summer time with sharks whose presence is reported in the newspapers,

  Seen on the green lawn.

  And the footpath in the northern city?

  It melts under your feet.

  And the rain falls in silver paper.

  And a kingfisher, colour-fast, will sit on a telegraph wire and be stroked and sing with the silver dazzle.

  Oh Francie, Francie was Joan of Arc in the play, wearing a helmet and breastplate of silver cardboard. She was burned, was burned at the stake.

  6

  It was an afternoon in a hall filled with people, girls in their white spun silk, each holding shilling bags of coconut ice, pink and white, from the home-made sweet stall; mothers who smelled like a closed room of talcum powder and stored fur; with their parcels from the handwork sale, tablerunners and tea-showers in lazy-daisy and chain and shadow stitch.

  It was the last day of the term and Francie’s last day at school though she was only twelve, thirteen after Christmas. She could count up to thirty in French. She could make puff pastry, dabbing the butter carefully before each fold. She could cook sago, lemon or pink with cochineal, that swelled in cooking from dirty little grains, same, same, dusty and bagged in paper, to lemon or pink pearls. She knew that a drop of iodine on a slice of banana will blacken the fruit, and prove starch; that water is H2O; that a man called Shakespeare, in a wood near Athens, contrived a moonlit dream.