Owls Do Cry (7 page)

—I told you, nothing today, thank you, Mrs Withers repeated, jamming the door harder in case the insurance man needed any more proof.

No, she disapproved of them. Rooks, hounds, she called them. Bloodsuckers. Though really what they sucked was money which seems, however, to be another form of blood necessary for life.

So the day the children went off to the rubbish dump and a man, like an insurance agent though it was Saturday, knocked at the back door, Amy Withers put her sack apron on the bench in the scullery and opened the door, just a little, then jammed it fast, for she knew the man was a salesman.

—Nothing today, thank you, she said. I cannot afford it.

The man was obstinate and put his foot in the door.

—I’ve come, he said.

Amy would not let him finish.

—Nothing today thank you. I cannot possibly buy whatever you have to sell.

The man smiled sadly, then pushed suddenly at the door, and walked in. He said he was a doctor and didn’t want to sell anything. He thought, as he entered the depressing and untidy kitchen, it’s a commercial world, certainly, where even death is bought and sold, and the world is bankrupt in death.

—No, he said aloud, he didn’t want to sell anything.

But he sold death, the terrible way, on the never-never, though Amy tried to keep him out.

He told about Francie, and said

—Pull yourself together, Mrs Withers. I take it your husband is up north with the Limited. He’ll be home any time now. He knows, but he doesn’t know the details yet.

And when Bob Withers came home, with his workbag of coal in one hand, and his dirty blueys in the other, and his face puckered he stood in the doorway and saw Amy sitting in the corner on the bin, with her arm around Chicks,
and the other children standing around and pale, and the kitchen fire out.

He kissed his wife and started to cry and his overalls dropped on the floor and unrolled into the empty stained pattern of his other work-self, flat and robbed.

—Oh Bob, Amy said. You’re home early. You’ve never been home early before.

The children had never seen their father cry before. They had thought that fathers get angry and shout about the bills and wearing slacks, and laugh with the woman from the bookstall, and sometimes with mothers; but never cry.

He looked like a bird, with his mouth down at the corners, the way a fowl looks when the rest of the fowls have been put in for the night, and the realization of their going has overtaken the last fowl; and she panics; and her beak drops; and that is how Bob Withers’ face seemed when he really knew about Francie. He knew later than the others. They had been warned, and driven, like fowls at night, inside, though not to warmth. Driven inside to outerness, as if the moment they passed through the door of knowing, they came, not to warm nests, but dropped down to dark, yet in some kind of comfort because they were together and close; and there was Bob waiting to be driven inside to share the darkness of their complete knowing, and not wanting to go, and being scared, like the lost fowl.

Francie did not come home that night to sleep in the bed in the front room. Although Daphne knew she was dead, she expected her to come and do her hair in front of the mirror and pull her dress tight around her waist, to see her measurement, if she were slim enough; and stand kicking her legs up, acting
like a chorus girl; and practising her grand opera, though the free book had cheated and was not free and you had to pay twenty guineas for learning opera. And then squeezing out her blackheads, the ones in the seam of her nose and cheek. And plucking her eyebrows. Daphne expected all this, but it did not happen. Instead, the tweezers that Francie used for plucking stayed in exactly the same place on the duchesse. They stayed there for hours and days and weeks. Once, Daphne moved them a few inches to see what they were like moved, if they looked any different. And she went to the wardrobe and jiggled the clothes up and down, danced the evening dress backward and forward, though it had nobody inside it, danced it, the destiny and maxina, just to see. If only she could have seen! Just once more, only once, and then it wouldn’t matter.

And through it all Amy Withers said,

—Have faith.

Through the funeral and the flowers and the cards that she put in a cane shopping basket, shaped like a cradle; to be gone through afterwards and the nicest ones picked out to keep, the ones with the white gloss on them and the raised cross entwined with flowers, and words to tell that Francie was not really dead, only sleeping. Through it all, Amy Withers said,

—Have faith.

You could not see faith, but it was somewhere to help, like the air that was to uncrease the school tunics; so, now, when the pattern of life had become unpleated and dis-arranged, it was, for Amy Withers.

Faith will smooth everything.

And also seeing Francie on resurrection day.

The long corridor outside shines like the leather of a new shoe that walks that walks upon itself in a ghost footstep upon its own shining until it reaches the room where the women wait, in night clothes, for the nine o’clock terror called electric shock treatment
. They wear dressing gowns of red flannel, as if God or the devil had purchased a continent of cloth and walked, with scissors for stick, from coast to coast, to cut the dead mass pattern of mad men and women whose eyes will spring blind with sight of their world and the flag of cloth hung in the shape of sun across their only sky.

Oh, but at nine o’clock, it is said, all will be well. Their seeing will be blinded, the shade replaced across their eyes to restrict their looking to their plate, their tea, their cigarette; in practice for the world; stopped like a house to look forever on its backyard.

Hairclips have been taken from them and arranged in rows along the mantelpiece. Their teeth are sunk in handleless cups of luke-warm water, arranged in circles, for companionship, upon the bony-legged table.

—Take your teeth out, the women in pink have commanded. Take your teeth out.

And soon the same god or devil who walked the continent of cloth will turn the switch that commands

—See. Forget. Go blind.

Be convulsed and never know why.

Take your teeth out as a precaution against choking, your eyes out, like Gloucester, to save you sight of the cliff and the greater gods who keep their ‘dreadful pother’ above your head. Your life out as a precaution against living.

And the women, submitting their teeth, their eyes, their lives, smile, embarrassed or mad in their world of mass red flannel.

The nurse is pink, like a flower from the garden, except the wind that bends her body is blown from the same continent of swamp and trapped water with the voice of God or the devil in her ear, like the same small voice that drove the horse, said Gee-up, Whoa.

on the sunniest of days, coloured like a single toi-toi with a sunflower in its heart of seedcake though the seeds were burned black in ash that the same wind that bends and crushes the pink body of flower had driven on and on through a million years to a world of blindness

this room

and a black blanket laid like an elasticised and bordered beetle upon the bed, and the women lying upon its furred
shell with their temples washed clean in a purple gasp of liquid
ethereal soap

concealed in cotton wool. And the gabbling jibbering forest-quiet women wait in crocodile for the switch that abandons them from seeing

and fear

and no struggle to leave for in seeing they inhabit a room of blind where doors are moulded lockless, and those who enter from the corridor may cleave the wall with their bodies, and the same wall closes behind them in a velvet mass like a wave in the wake of a journeying saint or ship.

But God or the devil has come, walking the long corridor, squeezing his mind and voice in molecular drops through the forbidding encircling wall. He greets the women. He wrings the blood from their gowns of flannel. It drips upon the floor into a creek flowing to the wall and not passing through and now it is a wave pressing upon the wall and unable to escape.

The women scream. They fear drowning. Or burning.

The nurse picks off one of her pink petals, flutters it upon the wave to soak the crimson, suck it in one breath. Then she readjusts her body, tucking the petal in the gap between her mouth and eyes, and smiles upon God or the devil who stands ready to signal her with a lift of the hand, a widening of his eyes, a signal as secretive as a scream

and the head of the writhing crocodile is broken off, dragged through the door at the end of the room,

and the door flings itself open like two palms which gesture,

Cela m’est egal, Cela m’est egal
.

And the writhing head is borne inside, and the women waiting hear a shuffle of footsteps, a voice, two voices, the scream of a soul being surprised in a funnel of dark. Then silence. Till the door flings itself open again in a gesture of indifference, revealing its wooden hands and the grains of heart and life and fate.

Cela m’est egal, cela m’est egal
, it speaks like a carefree breath or commonplace, and the wheeled-out bed holds what is left of the head of the crocodile, whose face is blue, like Toby, with a black pipe like a whistle stuck in its mouth.

Its eyes are open in their triumph of instilled blindness.

Unconscious, the head groans and writhes and quickly, as it would die, it is screened by roses from the rest of the writhing crocodile, and its eyes closed and smoothed with the forefinger of the pink flower, gently, as the dead are treated, who cannot be hurt now; and the pipe taken from its mouth as if, had it lain longer there, it may have played too enticingly its melody of blindness.

And once more the crocodile is severed, the same procession to the door, the same quietness,

Cela m’est egal
.

And now Daphne passes the rows of women who lie dead, each with her pipe or whistle thrust in her mouth, or quickly withdrawn in case the music make immobile, as in the fairy tale, the world outside and here.

The doors receive. The same indifference.

And God or the devil on the left, at the head of the raised bed that floats, chequered, like a shadow projected from the tethered real by some invisible globe of light. The doctor moves, carefully, as if he tiptoed between swords.
He is guarding something. At first it seems his life. Then it is the machine, cream, with curved body and luminous eyes, one red, the dangerous eye, the other black for cancellation of impulse. He stands with his hand resting lightly, it seems lightly, upon his treasure; then Daphne knows he dare not move his hand away from the voluptuous body of the red and black-eyed machine which, in case of escape, is fastened, as a lover secures the object of his love with cords of habit, circumstance, convenience, time, with black charged cords, varicose, converging to a unity that is controlled by a switch, and pressure of the doctor’s own hand.

—Turn on, my love, he will say, and reach for the switch, and caress the red luminous eye with his gentle hand.

He looks at Daphne, as if she may have interrupted his pleasure, or as if he will communicate to her, then blot from her knowing, the delight he feels in his lovely machine.

—Climb up on the bed, Daphne.

She climbs a suspended shadow of mountain and finds on its summit a golden hollow, her own size, for lying in. How well it fits, carved for her comfort, by each year of her life, changed to rain and wind from the north, or the south, bringing snow.

—Lie down, Daphne.

Daphne lies down. Suddenly over the top of the mountain, their heads level with the lowest cloud, there appear the faces, set and shaped in cloud, of five women dressed in white, envying the gold hollow. They look down and smile, to win friendship. Their hands itch to dig the gold, to store
it in their ample linen pockets and crawl from the room; for they
must
crawl, they are white insects with feelers waving in their heads, each feeler tipped with a trace of white like a separated snowdrop. They wave their feelers.

—Lie down, Daphne.

—Lie down, Daphne.

The doctor comes as close as he dare without drawing his hand from the switch of his love.

—Hello.

He smiles, a wicked deceitful smile, like the world after the morning, that reveals the truth of the golden mountain, of every gold mountain; that all are nests of clay, and the sun an inarticulate rock whose deceptive attribute of light, chipped off by pick-pick of time, closes upon the silence of its unshadow and oblivion.

—Hello, Daphne.

The women wave their feelers. They suddenly go stiff, their knees set like concrete, their breasts of stone; and press icicles upon Daphne’s ears, and her body down, down in the hollow; though one of them says kindly,

—Put this in your mouth.

It is not an aniseed ball or acid drop or blackball, but a little black pipe or whistle.

—Bite it.

Should it not be played? Drop thy pipe, thy happy pipe. The doctor, waiting, exults. He presses the switch. One moment then, and nothing.

Oh the wind is lodged forever in the telegraph wire for crying there on a grey day on the loneliest of roads of dust and gravel and forest of cocksfoot at the side and gorse or broom hedge with the dead pods refusing to drop and the cross the crucifix of the leaning poles linked by the everlasting wire of crying of the wind lodged forever in the telegraph wire for crying there
.

The green baize and oil sickening smell of the gramophone horn, a smell swallowed and vomited from memory upon a folded sheet of summer, burned and boiled in a pumice copper with a pine cone gum log, old apple wood
.

Francie, come in you naughty bird

the rain is pouring down
,

What would your mother say

if you stay there and drown?

You are a very naughty bird
,

you do not think of me
,

I’m sure I do not care
,