Sea birds, land birds. Short, flat-beaked birds; long, red-footed sharp-beaked birds. He would bring them home for Rosemary to cure or kill, to drown in warm water, to stuff to death. Birds that soared on still warm air; island birds casting shadows on the water. He had no sportsmanship; would climb trees at night, slinking sleeping birds from the nest, scattering feathers across Rosemary’s carpet. Feathers, and a tiny remnant claw. A reminder that he could have left the entire corpse, had he wanted to.
Rosemary did not want him to. It was all right with small birds, common birds. Who would miss a sparrow? But the protected penguin, clumsy and clambering onto the beach at dusk, would get them both into trouble. A fine for Rosemary, and a site two foot under for naughty puss. The Department of Conservation didn’t joke about bird catching. It was unaccountable—they cared more for the live creature than the memory of it, the warm salt smell half smothered with feathers, the graven coin. No vision whatsoever. Bound in the wheels of bureaucracy.
Rosemary took the penguin, with pangs of guilt, half-suspecting the cat was laughing at her, knowing she would protect him and mocking her for it. He had dragged it home whole, telltale marks left in the sand. Rosemary went out and scuffed them, disguising the evidence; wrapped the bird in a pillowcase in panic, and shoved it into the freezer.
“Just what the hell am I supposed to
do
with it now?” she snapped at the cat, his eyes winking up at her, reflecting in the kitchen lights. The trouble with neighbors . . . word would get around that Rosemary had a wild cat about the place and starved, it would go after native birds. Of course it wasn’t starved, just good at looking feral. Good at behaving monstrously to poor defenseless creatures—although the penguin had left a sharp slice across the nose as a parting gift. Rosemary felt no sympathy as she held the cat down and doused it with iodine.
He scratched her, sharp and indignant. The iodine stung her as well as him. “Bugger off then, you little bastard,” Rosemary said, and there was real feeling behind it.
The penguin stayed in the freezer for a long time, and every time Rosemary caught sight of its blue feathers through the freezer bag, the staring, milky eyes, she had been irritated. She began to wish she had buried it as soon as she had found it splayed across her floor. Surely it was only paranoia that made her want to hide it as quickly as possible, but that same paranoia kept it safely buried under tuna steaks and lamb chops. The little penguin ghost hung over her, wheedling and threatening in turn, gazing mournfully at the ocean. Eventually she tired of its mute accusations and fed it to the cat. He didn’t like it, but Rosemary refused to give him anything else until the penguin was gone. It took an entire fortnight, and the birds in her garden suffered for his disgust. They were smaller than he was, weaker, and the cat had so little sense of shame that Rosemary would see him mooning at her through the glass of the living room door, a delicate wax-eye green in his mouth. He dropped them unmarked on her carpet, although some mornings brought only feathers.
How Rosemary wished he would pick on something that would fight back! And not as ineffectually as the penguin, but something that would put him off his downy dinners for good, freeing his mistress from the obligation of cleaning up after him. Yet the only bird she could think of that he wouldn’t challenge were the albatrosses that sometimes flew over the coast and circled the fishing boats. On sunny days, when she needed to feel her own freedom from the cloistered walls of the library, Rosemary would barter to spend the day on one of those boats. As a child it had been her favorite treat, and she saw no reason to deny herself as an adult.
When quicksilver fish were netted and brought to deck, shiny-scaled and scattered over the salt-wet wood, Rosemary would watch from her perch at the bow, resplendent in a yellow parka. She loved to see albatrosses drop to the boat; their still wings a dark scythe against the sky. Protected, they swooped for the fish, were permitted their tithe. Giant beaks sliced through flesh, tore and gulped in ruthless greed. Dark eyes watched Rosemary, fearless, and fascinated she kept well away from those razor beaks, the heavy wings each as long as her arm.
It was their freedom that appealed to her, that and the disdain with which they floated in currents that slapped Rosemary’s face, chafed it raw, and rocked the boat from side to side. Air cracked in the sails, waves smacked at the hull.
She would have liked to take them home with her, to circle her house in stormy weather and remind her of the wideness of the world, the world that wings could take her to, the freedom those wings would give her. Coined albatrosses were nearly unheard of—bad luck to kill an albatross, it was worse to capture them—although there were several known copies on the black market, and Rosemary had purchased one of them. She found—but she would never have admitted it—that the false freedom of albatross flight in her library couldn’t match the reactions of her own escape to the fishing boats, her own identification with the bird. This gave her disquiet, and so she dreamed of an albatross that flew home to her, a garden of better birds, of further flight, and buried her purchase in the stacks. Buried her flight in cages, and small birds that could be tamed and contained.
Rosemary had birds as a child, peach-faced lovebirds that cooed and died in elegant, lime feathers, too delicate for her chubby hands. They fed on fright, and more often than not expired of it. Rosemary buried them in the garden where she had once lost another bird, one that had escaped from its cage when she was cleaning it, one that had flown around the room, bumping into clear glass until it found a window that was open and flown away, into the cool green garden and the brightness of sky. She went to the neighbors, asked if they had seen it pale green against the deep, clear silhouettes of ferns. She left food on the veranda dutifully, having no real expectation of the lovebird returning with its silly face blushed with adventure. She heard her parents talking. “It’s obviously not from around here. The other birds will gang up on it—it’s probably dead already.” Well, they were clannish, Rosemary supposed. She could understand it, and felt surprisingly little sympathy for the wanderer. What a nuisance bird to cause all that trouble, to go where Rosemary could not follow! Hadn’t she fed and watered it, done her best to ignore what a disappointment it was as a pet? Freakish, flighty . . . unfriendly in the extreme. The bird didn’t return, and Rosemary did not grieve for it, jealous for the freedom she could not contain and could not mimic. She searched briefly for a well-pecked corpse, fallen stiffly into the long grass of the hedged garden, but she never found anything. She looked at the remaining bird with dislike, and her parents misunderstood. “We’ll get you another birdie, darling.”
She had better luck with budgies, lazy mincing birds prone to fits of screeching temper, but they spent the rest of the day nibbling on cuttlefish and ignoring Rosemary’s attempts to be friends. She liked them, even when, unprovoked, they showed all the character of feather bolsters. Even the cat (an earlier model, but with the same greedy stare) didn’t bother them greatly. A lovebird would have keeled over in terror.
Perhaps budgies had less imagination,
Rosemary thought. They spent their days squatting and bobbing, producing infertile eggs. Only one hatched. Blue-gray, reminiscent of grave clothes and sacraments. It was weak and had no strength to fly: sat shivering on its perch, small squeaks rocking its body like earthquakes. With its downy baby feathers fluffed up, it was almost the size of its parents, and they fussed over it, preening, feeding, clucking. It made no difference, the lovebirds were back, a cuckoo in the nest. The blue budgie sat ghostly in the cage of its predecessors, a well-scrubbed cage that still had echoes of lovebird, for the budgie trembled, possessed with terror. Rosemary hung over it, hoping to claim one success, but for all her hovering the baby died. She wondered if it was from fright, if her presence had stifled the bird, suffocated it. Perhaps she was a plague on the feathered population of the world, and yet albatross flew about her.
From that time on, Rosemary kept cats. They could be trusted not to keel over when her back was turned. Their independence was a comfort.
(When Rosemary took her bird-memories and handed them over, she lost her liking for cats.)
It was a hard walk in the scaly, ridge-backed mountains, but Rosemary had paid porters with bright handfuls of summer holidays and the flat presses where oil and wine spilled like blood through her fingers, dripped onto her tongue, staining brilliant teeth. It was worth it to walk freely and unburdened, to the remote hut of her next vendor.
The wind across the tussock tops spread her hair like streamers, lifted her arms as if they were wings. She let it toss her along the mountains, careered down slopes with arms winged open, and felt she was flying. The wind was so strong that her feet barely touched the ground, and Rosemary pictured herself alone in the hills, weightless and soaring. The sun shone on the tussocks and on the tiny waxy leaves of the trees below the bush line—they glinted in her eyes and made her dizzy, the warm, slippery smell of growth and earth coating her face and fingers as they spread in the wind. It was the smell of freedom and luck, with porters far behind and the land opening out beneath her, green-scaled and golden at the tips where the tussocks came in.
The moment Rosemary realized what luck was—and that she had it—was stamped on her memory with dragon wings and old crayon.
A primary class, with sun shining in despite the shallow veranda with its glowing red windows like spilled paint, where at the end of year children sat in a circle, dissecting the classroom and taking it home with them. Pieces of chalk, and broken crayons, and pictures that held the walls up. There were some things everyone wanted, class projects that had hung all year and waited overhead for lots to be drawn. The dragon was one. It ran the length of the classroom, an enormous shadow of bright green, with children riding between the bright scales. Rosemary had drawn herself, reluctant, and pasted it on in turn, although she was sorry for it and whispered apologies in the dragon’s ear when no one was looking. Her portrait didn’t belong there. It didn’t look like her, and she disliked how inferior it was—how inferior they all were—compared to the sleek perfection of the dragon itself, the mountain outline of its scales. Too high to reach, she imagined them cool between her fingers.
Leaving the house, it was the open-mouthed, back-toothed chewing of the cat—and the suspicious glare it sent in her direction, a sneaky prelude to sidling—that caught Rosemary’s attention. Usually the cat only looked like that when it was eating something it shouldn’t, just long enough to catch her attention before running off with the sticky remnants of its dinner.
Rosemary didn’t want to look but felt she had to. It never did to look away from unpleasant things—they didn’t go away, and the only person you cheated was yourself.
Sitting between her splayed out heels, and wanting the drawing,
really
wanting it, and having her name drawn out of the hat, Rosemary was surprised by luck for the first and only time. Afterwards, she wasn’t surprised at all—she had wanted the dragon more than anyone else, so of course it had flown to her. Rosemary believed she was lucky, luckier than the classmates who saw their tiny selves folded and rolled and taken away on the dragon they had also wanted—but not enough. “You are lucky,” they said to her, in sulky-envious tones, and Rosemary had smiled because it was true. The dragon was proof. She was lucky, now and forever, and the sweet dry smell of the rolled-up wax—it smudged off on her fingers if she wasn’t careful, streaking them green like old bronze—was the smell of the rightness of the world, where everyone got what they wanted best.
It hung over her in the dark, wax slick under her fingers, and Rosemary’s back itched with the feel of little legs, of round faces with orange smiles with twigs for hair. They looked down at her from their place atop the dragon, and she resented their presence; resented their polluting the clean ridgeline of the dragon’s back. She would have liked to cut them off, but their legs were part of the dragon and even if she had snipped off their owners—her classmates—from the picture on her wall the legs would remain.
The cat stayed put, which suggested what it caught wasn’t tasty enough to bother preserving. Pressed against the foot of the house was a skink, made short and squat by the loss of its tail. Rosemary liked skinks, liked most reptiles but snakes. Reptiles reminded her of dragons and freedom and luck, but the snakes on their ribbed, socked feet were too earthbound to be endearing. She could not picture wings on them, like she could with the skink, frozen on tiny, needled feet.
She picked it up—a smell of wax, the warm, slick crumbling scent of sunshine on its skin—and saw it bite her. Rosemary didn’t really feel the bite, but with the shock of it she dropped the skink back to the ground, where it lay still. Again she picked it up and again it bit; despite herself Rosemary dropped it again, flat onto its back with a quick flat thud like a falling crayon. Her fingers were waxy, a residual sheen.
Blood bloomed on her finger, and the cat slunk away, disinterested. It didn’t seem eager to eat any more of the skink, but Rosemary had lost sympathy and would have let it anyway.
Looking back, Rosemary realized she could have colored over the lines, but at the time she didn’t think of it. Her child self would not have wanted to try, frustrated by her inability to stay within the lines, clumsy hands that were short and fat like badger’s mitts as yet incapable of fine motor control. Control . . . Rosemary could not control her hands and did not want to control the dragon. It was the color it was, a scratched and mottled green, and it was not Rosemary’s place to darken its skin, to skin the scales from its eyes and make it red ravaged and hungry, to snatch the riders from its back and gorge them down in lumps, to be free of its harness and still pinned to her wall. At night Rosemary lay with the dragon above her and knew it to be real. This did not frighten her. She supposed it would have to eat but it wouldn’t eat her. Why would it? They were the same.