Monterra's Deliciosa & Other Tales & (3 page)

Stamp STAMP Stamp STAMP from the little mechanical being.

Whuh Whuh ... Whu ... Wh ... from Werner's heart.

STAMP STAMP, STAMP STAMP! Harder, harder the little creature pounded. But Werner lay still, glistening in the wet.

STAMP STAMP. There was a frantic tone now, and even the impassive air picked it up and spread the urgency.

The stone eagle on the dome craned its neck to look ... then peered. It flexed its toes, opened giant wings, and soared off its globe, out over the rooftops of the great city, down to the small curled body on the pavement. Deftly hooking into Werner's coat with talons large as carcass hooks, the stone bird lifted the unconscious man into the sky. They flew over the quiet streets, a rattling whirr all the while coming from Werner's pocket in addition to the steady STAMP STAMP, STAMP STAMP that never ceased. The shrrr of rain obscured the halting reply of Werner's heart.

It was hardly more than three great wing flaps before down, down, the giant bird circled into the thicket of buildings. And there, waiting at the entrance, were the stone man and woman. She, having stepped out onto the pavement, was holding out her open, uplifted arms. Both people were the gleaming grey of the eagle: he, naked and magnificent, and she, half-robed and just as handsome, her smiling upturned face washed by the rain. The eagle loosed the feather-of-a-man into the arms of the woman, and with one sure wing-flap, the giant bird was high above the city once again, where it looped the sky till it was lost in the murk of night.

The stone woman shifted the man in her care to be cradled entirely by her left arm. Tender as with a baby, she used her robe edge to wipe his face and soak up the moisture from his uniform. Her face was calm, but there was a wrinkle between her brows as she worked. Then she nodded to the man beside her.

The stone man and woman had to duck to enter the doors to the building. He went first, his steps ringing on the stairs. She followed with Werner in her arms.

Knock, knock
, he tapped on the door to 3C.

Gretina, inside, was on the bed, talking to the bird trapped in its stone, laid on the duvet.

The steps she'd just heard: terrifyingly loud. Officious. How many men? The knock! With a truncheon? Certainly not knuckles.

Oh mein Gott!
She looked at her watch.
He's late! They've got him! Quick!

She jumped off the bed, picked up the fossil slab with one hand and the mattress with the other, and shoved the stone underneath to hide between the mattress and the metal mesh of the bedframe, all in one fluid motion like wrenching the polishing machine away from her toes.

A smoothing hand to the duvet and her dress, and she was ready to face the door, imperturbable as she'd been with those teasing guards. My Werner? A bit late, but nothing out of the ordinary. A theft? Oh, how terrible. Would you like a strudel?

Knock knock knock! The door shook from the insistence. Gretina's hand shook, but her mouth betrayed nothing as she unlocked and—

The stone woman in the Greek robes rushed in carrying Werner, followed by the stone man. They both stood, uncertain, in the living room, turning this way and that.

"In here!" Gretina yelled, seeing only Werner, limp in the giant's arms. Gretina rushed into the bedroom and pounded the bed.

The stone woman laid him on the duvet and stood beside the bed, looking down at the fragile, still man. The stone man watched from the foot of the bed.

"What have I done? What?!" Gretina hit her head with her fists, then ran to the kitchen. Opened a drawer. Pills? Which ones? No. I wouldn't know. What?

She ran back to the bedroom, threw herself on the bed and kissed Werner all over his face. "Wake. Wake, my darling."

A crumbling sound underneath, like that of gravel scrunched, was muffled by her sobs.

The woman and man watched, sombre.

Gretina stroked Werner's head, rolled up his eyelids to look into his eyes, but he didn't look back.

She felt his wrist, so faint the beat; and then his heart. Heart! The little mechanical creature. She felt its feet pounding against Werner's heart. Heard how strong it stamped. And then, suddenly she heard another sound. A muffled cacophony that grew louder as she listened. She heaved herself off the bed and threw herself into the main room, where the cabinet, that solid, heavy oak, shuddered as if in an earthquake.

She flung open the doors, pulled open the drawers, grabbed up her skirts, and piled all the inhabitants into the makeshift carryall.

They whirred, clicked, chirred and rattled till she dumped the whole teeming mass of them on the bed. Each crawled in its own way to Werner and took up its own position, and did whatever it chose to do. Within a minute, he was covered with an industrious army of little moving objects. Within five minutes, he opened his eyes ... and smiled. First at his beautiful Gretina, and then, with a weakly bent head, around the room. He lifted his hands to touch each little machine lightly, but they were busy, and he didn't interrupt.

The stone woman leant over and kissed his warming forehead. The stone man grasped his hand in a gentle grip, weakly returned. And then, ducking through the doorways, they let themselves out of the apartment and made their way as quietly as they could back to their positions at the entrance.

"Werner," Gretina began. "My starlight. You are all I need. I am so sor—"

The little creatures worked on, ignoring inconsequentials.

Werner was so tired. Still, he needed to remember to someday talk to Gretina about this ... this miracle. She only ever had thoughts for one thing at a time, and now that one thing was her Werner. She accepted the miracle, while his mind kept telling him of its logical unreality. Werner's thoughts whirled round and round until they were lost in sleep.

Dawn threw its grey light into the room where Werner slept, still in his guard's clothes, Gretina still in her dress beside him. As the mechanical creatures quietened, a faint cheep could be heard, then a sort of indignant squawk. Then a kind of rattling flap. Then a scruffly crunch, and a scratch-plop-scratch. But Gretina and Werner slept so soundly they heard nothing.

~

Sometime around Christmas, a visiting professor asked to examine a particular piece, a fossil of a bird from China. But it was on display. Wasn't it? It must have been loaned, but to which institution? There must have been an oversight in documentation somewhere. No one could remember what had happened to it. Very embarrassing.

The curator insisted that the documentation was perfect, and the object must have been stolen.

The guards swore that nothing irregular had ever occurred under their noses. The police had their own theories about absent-minded professorial staff in the museum, but launched an investigation since they could not do otherwise. In their job of uncovering nothing, they made a routine visit to the retired guard nicknamed "Klokwerk," because the director said this boring but persnickety man could maybe be of some help.

But the human automaton was clearly broken. "So long ago it feels," he said. "I just guarded the exhibits. Never looked in the cases. Excuse me. Gretina, did I take my pills?"

The two inspectors drained their coffee cups, made polite thank-yous and left, relieved to escape the sad apartment where that lonely couple were "living" out their years. He, torn from the excitement of a working life, now stuck at home fiddling with mechanical junk strewn all over the dining table, while his ugly wife knitted, some weird bird perched on her shoulder, trilling and cackling, and clothed—the inspectors laughed at this diversion, as they yearned for a real case—in a cloak, like a monk with only its beak sticking out. A cloak of fine wool, patterned with stars.

The Eel

The eel appeared on the third year of the drought, when the creek was so low that the swimming hole grew a green velvet lining of algae.

It was winter, and even though the water was cold, there were no flies to swat, so it was a pleasant time to pick over the mica-flecked stones in the exposed creek bed.

I was bent over glinting a flat rock in the sun when I saw the flash in the water. Just a foot away swam the eel. Its head was still and its body swayed like a ribbon of cold honey stirred in a glass of tea as it examined me through the root-tannined water. The eel was about a metre long, and green with black speckles, not unlike a trout. Its eyes gazed roundly, unblinking, and not at all fishily. They were the eyes of a chicken, with golden irises.

~

After a flood, we'd find the paddocks strewn with dead yabbies, claws big as vice grips, and so brilliantly chalk blue that we wondered why we'd never seen one in the creek. Like many of our neighbours in the wild, we find clues to their existence, or a dead body, but their lives are mostly a mystery.

Maybe this eel lived on yabbies and frogs. Especially after rain, and then especially at night, the frogs bong, conk, and reverberate, metallically to woodenly, loud enough that we hear them through the windows in our house 100 metres up from the creek.

But the frog chorus had dried up with the weather. Maybe the eel was hungry.

Without undue haste, I backed away from the eel, climbed up the creek bank, and ran home; returning with Griffith and a couple of eggs.

Griff squatted on the rocks by the now featureless pool.

"You can try," he said, but without any expectation.

I walked into the pool and broke open one egg with a stone, pouring the contents into the water in front of my feet. The egg, laid that morning, had a solidity of albumen to golden yolk that made it hang like a galaxy with one fantastic sun. There was almost no current.

The water opaqued as a cloud passed overhead. The pool was flat and green-black, almost totally still. We waited in our respective crouches, growing stiff. Then with silent abruptness, the cloud tore away from the sun, and light pierced the depths of the water. And there was the eel, its head looking out from under an ancient fallen tree half caught in the bank, a hazard to us swimmers, but a shelter to this eel and how many other creatures, I'd never put my hand underneath to know.

Out from under the log it swam, straight towards me. It opened its mouth and the yolk and most of the albumen seemed to swim straight in. Then, with a flick and a snap, the eel snatched the last shreds of milky egg white from the water.

While the eel hovered in place, I moved back and Griff took my place. He broke his egg just above the water with the eel poised and grabbing the whole slippery galaxy just as it hit the surface.

~

That winter we read all we could about eels, which wasn't much. It was a short-finned eel, and one day would want to migrate to the sea to spawn, and then die. We couldn't tell the sex, but decided on female. And we called her Angie, short for
anguilla
, the rather nice name for what is a common freshwater fish with an uncommon lifestyle.

Eels are voracious eaters at the best of times, and this drought was a lean time for all. As blue skies followed upon themselves unabated, the brown grasses were clipped ever shorter by the kangaroos and wallabies that now lived in the valley, driven here by the sparseness in the hills where they usually browsed, and still slept during the day.

After a couple of hungry wedge-tailed eagles picked up a surprisingly easy meal of two chickens one day, our chickens had to be confined to their night pen. For a while, the eagles visited the site of their chicken pick-ups every day. They'd hang over the valley like two massive kites, then swoop down to sit on the roof of the pen, finally giving up to crouch round-shouldered in the branches of the trees by the creek, just watching the chicken pen 50 metres away. I didn't worry about the chickens any more though. They were safe, if bored.

The eagles' usual easy meals of rabbits and small native game were scarce now, and the marsupials would not breed until the drought broke.

~

Up at the house, the grass was pulled threadbare by the teeth of roos, and the spinifex roots dug up by a wombat whose clodhoppery stumbles banged against the walls at night.

The parrots were still happy, crunching blackbutt and stringybark gumnuts in the forest at our back.

Angie seemed happy, too. She was now a very tame lithe eel, decidedly fatter than when we had first discovered each other. We fed her once a day, and after the first week, she was always waiting for us at noon.

At first, dinner was an egg that we broke into the water. Then, one day I dropped the egg before breaking it, and the whole thing slid to the bottom of the creek with only the smallest bump. Angie opened her jaws around the egg and encompassed it, shell and all.

We read about the way eels often travel overland on their migrations, and how they need wet conditions for this, so as not to damage their thick slime covering.

And we heard farmers only half laugh over their "escape artists", the eels raised in dams only to gallop off in their snake-slither way to running water at the first wet-spell opportunity.

That winter, with the daily visits, I felt ever closer to Angie, with that special love one feels from the thrill of earning the trust of a wild animal. By now, she ate out of my hand. She played around my ankles, sluicing around them so that it was hard to feel which was her, which water. She tickled my ankle in a gentle nibble game, and tunnelled her body through the "O" of my hands. The only thing she hadn't done was travel on land, and I wanted to see her do this. To capture this special ability in action became my pet project.

First, I'd put the egg closer and closer to the edge of the water. She seemed shy to go too shallow, and sometimes she was inextricably anxious altogether. I soon discovered she was frightened by flitting shadows. And also, that she didn't like travelling on dry stones. I built a ramp of sod and grass, and sluiced it with a bucket, and when she felt comfortable, that worked. But try as I would, she still wouldn't come up onto the bank.

"It's too dry," Griff said. "Wait till it rains."

~

On September first, it finally did—most of the night, in a steady drizzle. We woke late to a darkened room. The sky, an unbroken blue for so many days that cerulean had become ugly and the otherwise beautiful early and late shadows only accentuated the sharpness of hunger—that sky was gone—replaced by a soft and lovely cover of woolly grey.

The whole morning it drizzled. Birds sat dripping in the trees. Currawongs and finches sang.

"Today's your day," Griff said.

"Let's record it," I twittered.

We set up the tripod and telephoto on the balcony, and zoomed it in to the perfect spot, the top of a rise just 20 metres from the creek.

I ran down with two eggs and a strip of meat for good measure. She loved meat. The smell of her meal would be irresistible, especially since we'd figured for a while now that all her meals these days were on us. It was 11:45 but she was waiting.

She was unusually lively with this rain, and there were no shadows to frighten her.

I showed her the eggs and waived the strip of meat in the water. Up the hill I backed.

She watched, keeping her head still but making all kinds of fancy turns of the rest of her body.

The first egg I put on the top of the ramp.

She came into the shallows, and then started up the ramp.

Moving backwards, I placed the second egg and the meat on the designated high spot, then turned and ran back to the house, bursting onto the balcony in time to see her lift her head, smell and sight the second part of her meal.

Griff moved away from the camera so I could look through the lens myself.

And I could see everything in detail. She made it all the way to the second egg and was perfectly in the centre of the shot when the eagle swooped.

The photo shows Angie in the claws of the eagle—a long, limp, streaming ribbon.

That day, the drought broke, to be replaced the next day and the week after, by the flood.