The Ghost's Child (6 page)

But it was just the iron man enjoying the game. “A man doesn't need material goods. They're bad for the willpower. A chap should provide himself with what he needs to be comfortable, and invest the remainder in bonds.”

“Bonds!” Mama made a curt huffy noise. “Who cares what a man needs? A woman needs jewels. Does his mother wear diamonds, Matilda? Because diamonds are wonderful to inherit.”

Maddy, embattled, finally twitched; she stamped her foot, and sand jumped from her shoe onto the fancy carpet. “He doesn't have bonds, and he doesn't have a mother! Feather's not rich! He's poor!”

Mama kept her serenity; only her mouth puckered with enjoyment. “Darling,” she purred, “why love a pauper, when it's so easy to love a rich man? Forget this dustbin ragamuffin, Matilda. He's obviously after your money.”

Maddy stared at her mother furiously, this woman like a redback spider, stylishly clad and venomous. “Why are you like this, Mama?” she asked. “Why is love worth so little to you?”

Her mother reared up, instantly freezing cold. “I'll teach you the cost of love,” she snapped. “If you run off with some pauper then your father will cut you out of his will. Let's see what birdy boy thinks about
that.
”

Maddy's black eyes went to her father, but it was the iron man who glanced over the newspaper at her. “I will not let a layabout get his hands on your inheritance, Matilda,” he confirmed. “I've worked too hard to see it wasted by some fly-by-night.”

Desperation thinned Maddy's blood and raised goose bumps on her arms. She crossed the room to kneel by her father's chair, and took his hand in her own. The iron man's palm was cool, but Maddy trusted that inside his skin there dwelt another man who was warm with kindness and affection for her. “Papa,” she said, “Feather is my answer. Feather is my most beautiful thing. Have you forgotten the elephants and snow geese we saw? The coral and fireflies? The most beautiful things in the world don't want money. I love Feather, Papa, and he loves me. I'd rather have nothing, than be without him. All I ask from you and Mama is that you be happy for us.”

“Happy!” Mama gagged. “Happy to see I've raised a harebrain? This is all
your
fault.” She turned hissing to Papa, waving her thin arms. “Filling the girl's head with poppycock about beauty — idiotic! It's time you grew up, Matilda, and understood a thing or two. The world is not a beautiful place. Everyone is out to snatch what they can, and they'll shove you into the dirt if you're in the way. You can't put faith in anything. Everything dies. The prettiest things are the first to decay. You're a fool if you think otherwise, Matilda, and your father is a fool for letting you. Tomorrow morning you're taking the first train out of this backwater, and you'll not come home until this absurdity is gone from your head!”

Maddy looked with alarm to her father, who merely eyed his willful child, the inheritor of all that was leonine and good in him. She clutched his hand, Mama flamed her eyes, the ancestors craned forward on their hooks and wire, eager to hear what he'd say. When Papa eventually spoke, it was to say, “A man more beautiful than a sea eagle? This is something I must see. Invite your Feather over for dinner next Sunday night.”

“Absolutely not!
Absolutely not!
”

Maddy and Papa ignored Mama. Maddy hugged her father's hand. Another day, when there was time, she would tell him how much she loved him, how his presence in her heart eased her loneliness and made her strong. For now, there were more pressing things on her mind. Inviting Feather to the house would be like trying to coax a deer indoors, he would surely refuse; yet this opportunity could not be allowed to slip. “Come to the cove instead,” she suggested. “You can meet him right now, today.”

“Very well!” said her mother, startling even the ancestors. “Let us meet this feather-duster, this pigeon! Let us hear him sing! Matilda, bring my parasol!”

And while her mother was rigged in her hat, gloves and boots, and her father's hair was combed and his summer coat plucked of lint, Maddy sat on the couch in a deepening stew of regret, her heart descending to her knees. Until now Feather had been hers alone, indescribably perfect and precious. Sharing him would surely besmirch that pristine past, and fracture the peace of the future. As she followed her parents across the lawn and into the bushland Maddy was mute and reluctant, aware that every footstep was carrying her closer to disaster. Dabbling in Feather's clean life, exhibiting him like a curiosity: she was ruining everything. She stumbled along, prodded by twigs and leaves, swiping at the sticky flies, feeling hateful and sick. She dreaded to think what Feather would say when the three of them crowded onto his beach. Mama would crow to see him; Feather, seeing her, would recoil. He would never forgive Maddy for bringing them; they would never recover from being brought. With each moment that drew them nearer the cove, Maddy's worlds came closer to colliding. The nargun snarled and barked at her to change course. Birds dashed through the trees crying. Yet Maddy's mouth stayed stubbornly closed, her gaze fixed hard on the ground. What a flighty, fatuous little girl she would seem, if she were to change her mind now.

A cowardly piece of her began to wish that Feather was a dream even now dissolving.

Instead he was doing handstands by the water's edge. At the sight of Maddy and her parents he turned upright, and stared as if they were more peculiar than camels. His trousers appeared more than usually scrappy. His nose was peeling from sunburn. “Goodness, it's a savage,” gasped Mama. “I think I'm going to faint.”

But Maddy felt a surge of love for the queer smoky creature reflected in the shallows. He would never be angry or disappointed — he would forgive her anything, he would laugh and understand. She skittered across the sand to him, catching his brown fingers in her own. “Mama, Papa, this is Feather!” And instead of being sorry, she was outrageously proud.

Mama stood rigid on a sand dune. “If this is a joke, Matilda,” she said, “it is in very poor taste.”

But her father only stood and studied Feather, his thumbs hooked in his waistcoat, saying not a word. Maddy knew he was thinking about their quest for beautiful things. Papa would see that Feather was like a fine brumby colt, something worth catching and owning. He removed his hat, inclined his head and said graciously, “How do you do, Mr. Feather. I am Matilda's father. As her father, I do what I can to protect her, and to make her happy. Sometimes these ambitions clash: sometimes, to protect her, I have to make her unhappy. But this afternoon it is me who is glum, because my daughter has informed me she is in love. As you can imagine, those are worrying words for a father to hear. Love has its drawbacks, as I'm sure you know. But I do want to see her happy, and there's happiness in her voice when she speaks of you. Maddy says she loves you, Mr. Feather. What I would like to know is, do you love
her
in return?”

“This is not funny!” Mama screeched, scattering a distant herd of cows.

Papa and Maddy and Feather paid her no attention. Maddy looked at Feather, wringing his hand, her blood sounding louder than the waves thumping the shore. She knew he could crush her badly now, with just a shake of his head. He had never said the word
love,
as if it were something too heavy to pick up. If he disavowed her now, before Mama and Papa, there would be nothing left to do but return home and lock herself in her room, and lie down and seep away.

Feather's gray gaze left Papa's shrewd face, and traveled across the sand and up into the hills. From a nearby pillar of stone, a black-browed tern launched itself into the sky. It flew off quickly, calling stridently, its mission urgent. Maddy saw its wings shutter inside Feather's eyes. He bowed his fair head and she knew he saw everything: the harm he could do her, the cracks pulling through his world. In her mind she saw a wild thing, crouching and snared. Feather sighed softly, and looked up at Papa. “Yes, I love her. I do.”

“No!” Mama bawled. “No, no!”

Maddy caught her breath, feeling she might cry. She bit her tongue against shouting the jubilance she felt. Papa was nodding, already making iron plans. “You live on a beach,” he pointed out to Feather. “Clearly my daughter can't do the same. She is my most beautiful thing, and I want her to be properly cared for. You may think nothing of wind and hail, but Matilda is accustomed to crockery and doors. You are not the man I'd have chosen for my daughter, Mr. Feather, though I am not surprised she has chosen you. For the sake of her happiness, I am prepared to compromise — provided you do the same. Prove your love for her, sir, by quitting your undomesticated ways, and live life as a civilized fellow, as the rest of us do.”

“But Papa,” Maddy started, “the beach —”

“It is not negotiable, Matilda,” said her father.

Maddy, wide-eyed, looked to Feather, whose consideration had returned to the straggly hills. She knew someone better than herself would say
don't do it, Feather, don't agree.
But Maddy was herself, and she loved and wanted him, so she stood in anxious silence and said nothing and saved nothing, hungering for him to agree. And when, without turning his sights from the hills, Feather nodded and said, “I will,” Maddy did not feel like the architect of a gaol, but exultant and victorious, and no longer alone.

B
ecause neither of them wanted to stroll in the park or hear the street sounds or drink iced tea with the neighbors, Maddy and Feather went to live in a quaint cottage in a forgotten field far from town, a place in which nobody had lived for many years. The house had four rooms and a falling-down fence, and its kitchen chimney was plugged by a possum's nest. A deep black forest of tall pine trees surrounded the cottage and its field, but on a sunny day the ocean could be seen in glittering glimpses between the spindly conifer branches. The overrun garden was jostling with flowers and weeds, and the field was flouncy with blue butterflies. Behind the house was a wide and depthless pond of enigmatic splashings. Maddy's mother turned ashen when she saw the cottage, and swore she would never come again. “I hope you're pleased, Matilda,” she said, turning away with a twisting smile. Maddy's father laughed and laughed at the cottage, like a nasty boy giggling at a doll's house: but he could not deny that it had several doors and that its cupboards were full of crockery. “I am here if you need me,” he told his daughter, yet Maddy needed nothing more. She was burrowed away from the world that perplexed her; she had Feather, and a forest to keep him secret; for company they had her little cat, Perseus; in such seclusion they would be safe. She slipped her arm through Feather's and said, “We will be happy here.”

“If we must be anywhere,” he answered, “I am glad we're here.”

And it seemed to Maddy that no two people had, in fact, been happier. She filled the cottage with interesting things she had brought home from her travels, as well as stones and mouse skeletons and empty cocoons that she found on her rambles through the forest with Perseus. Feather pottered in the garden each day, gathering fallen rose leaves and brushing pine needles from the paths. Because the forest threw chill shadows on him, Maddy sewed him a wardrobe of clothes. She chose material that matched his storm-colored eyes, adding buckles and buttons and many wide pockets in case he found something to carry. The rustling field was threaded with nettles, so she measured his feet and bought boots. He looked handsome as he drifted around the house, his throat and wrists bound by collars, his boots creaking like cellar doors. He looked different from the young man she had found on a beach with a pelican in his arms, the bronze fading out of his skin now, his hair darkened by the forest's shade. She loved to see him blinky-eyed at breakfast, or frowning at the thoughts in a book. She found herself wishing she had just one friend, to whom she might show him off.

She sat on the doorstep with Perseus in her lap and watched him work in the field, tilling the soil for vegetables, the grass flattening into paths under his boots. In the garden he rescued beetles from the birdbath, and scattered seeds and biscuits for the animals that visited the garden. He stopped and listened to subtle sounds of the forest, smiling in sympathy, cocking an ear. He tasted raindrops and pine sap and pools of mud, he watched the wind bend the flimsy tips of the conifers. He knelt in the ancient flower beds, pulling dandelions and buttercups from between shrubs. “What are you doing, Feather?” Maddy asked, when she saw his scratched, smudged hands.

He said, “I don't think a garden is supposed to have weeds.”

She stopped beside him, somehow unsure. She had always rather admired weeds, being something of a weed herself, eking out an existence, not expecting much. After a moment of hesitation she said, “I don't know why weeds are punished for being what they are. Look at that one, squeezed into a crack — it's given no tending, but it never complains. Look at this one, clinging to stones — what flower could live fiercely as that? Weeds have roots and leaves and petals, the same as other plants. Why, then, should they be banished?”

Feather shrugged slackly. “I don't know. Isn't it how things are meant to be? Isn't a garden for jonquils, and lily of the valley?”

And it was true that all the gardens Maddy had known were completely free of weeds. On their search for the world's most beautiful thing, she and her father had never stopped to admire dock or shepherd's purse. Feather could leave the weeds to thrive, she supposed, but then the garden might be ugly, not beautiful. Their house might seem laughable, their life together unconvincing. She wanted herself and Feather to be unassailable, for nothing to be wrong. “I'll help you,” she said, turning back her sleeves.

After this, it seemed to Maddy that the cottage was not as nice or as proper as it could be. The windows and walls were grubby, the rooms smelled dimly of earth. She and Feather could not live like birds on the beach — but nor should they live like bears in a cave. They needed somewhere fitting to be. So she filled buckets and soaped surfaces until the glass and walls were spotless; she went to town and bought material to make curtains for the windows. She waited for the possum to venture out one night, then blocked up the chimney and burned the furry, flea-bitten bed. She oiled all the hinges that squawked, and gave the furniture refreshing coats of paint. She worked from morning until midnight, finding one thing after another in need of attention. Every well-finished chore made her feel more certain that theirs was a world that could last. One evening Feather came through the noiseless front door and, seeing his reflection in the newly polished floor, stood still, peering down. “Do you like it?” Maddy asked. She herself was very pleased. Smoothing and polishing the timber had been the work of many days. “Take off your boots,” she told him. “I don't want you to ruin it.”