The Elusive Language of Ducks (17 page)

A pear? It says
duckling
on the menu. Is it a duck or
duck-ling?
she repeated.

Oui, Madame, he said. Eet eeza duck leg, oui.

She looked at Simon. Why did he care whether she had duck or not?

I'll have the duck, she said. Her heart flipped. She quaffed a gulp of champagne.

Good girl, he said. Happy anniversary.

Indeed the meat was the shape and size of a pear. It was also the shape and size of a little fat duckling. The bone poked perkily from the meat. Decapitated. It was positioned on the plate in a pool of dark juice. Blood.

How is it? asked Simon, chewing his lamb, a trickle of fat wending its way through his beard and down his chin.

Fine, she lied. In fact, it was overcooked, falling into sinews like tiny worms.

Can I try it?

Sure. Have as much as you like. She stabbed half the meat from the bone and transferred it from her fork across the table to Simon's plate.

Hmmm, he said. Hmm, that's delicious. Isn't it, hmmm.

Yes, she said flatly, at that moment hating him. How many years had they been married? No one was married that long these days. Surely, enough was enough.

The next day she went down early and lifted the duck from his cage, cradling him against her chest. He pressed his head against her cheek, into her neck. She sat on a rock in the sun, and shifted him onto her lap. She examined him for change. The blood quills on his wings were bursting into tufts of feather. His wings were now extending into the ruff of stomach feathers.

I truly love you, Duckie.

And I love you, he said.

Why did you peck me like that?

He was silent. She stroked his back, dipped her hand into the burning hollow under a wing. Then, on an impulse, she rummaged deep into the feathers above his leg. She was shocked to make out a round lump of meaty drumstick.

When her mother was alive, Hannah had often found herself talking with other people who had ill and aged parents. It was as if they were all agonisingly digging into sand on a large cold beach, using ineffectual toy spades, searching for the hidden boxes that might hold the answers to the questions they couldn't even articulate. In the end, their conversations would finish in a mess pitted with holes too deep for them to cover again.

And now that her mother was dead, she had no idea what it was they'd ever discussed, what could have occupied her thoughts so thoroughly.

But this night she and Simon were invited out to dinner with old friends — Woody and Fritha. Fritha was a duck fancier and had constructed a pond in her back yard to attract ducks. Her partner, Woody, was a hunter. A hunter of wild boar, deer, rabbits and ducks. Another friend, who used to live on a property with a lake inhabited by many ducks and frogs, was also invited. The conversation, all evening, had been dominated by ducks.

Why didn't you bring your duck? Fritha asked Hannah. Indeed, now, she had to ask herself, why hadn't she?

And so
this
conversational beach, in comparison with the worn territory of aged care, was warm and silky. Hannah and the duck fancier flung themselves into the sand, moulding castles decorated with feathers, eggshells and bones. Hannah was ecstatic. She had never quite appreciated Fritha's interests in ducks before.

Fritha gave her an umbrella and took her outside in pelting rain to proudly show off the pond. It had real duckweed, knots of green with loose threads dangling.

You
must
have some, she insisted, kneeling to scoop the water. Rain was pouring off the back of her coat. She shoved a plastic pot into Hannah's hands, full of weedy slop, the weed knitting the surface like a lid.

Gratefully, Hannah placed the pot in the car, before returning inside to join the others who were drinking wine and eating nibbles.

They were mothers sharing baby loot. Fritha shared stories of rapacious ducks, hungry ducks, lesbian ducks, dominant ducks, bereft ducks and ponds. Hannah told stories of sprouting feathers and
astonishment and friendship and loneliness.

Oh, you love him! said Fritha.

Well, I like having him around, watching him, Hannah replied sheepishly.

You do, you do! You love him!

One day he'll fly away and look for a mate, said the friend who used to live by the lake.

I know, said Hannah.

Do they mate for life?

Some ducks do, but not muscovies, said Hannah. Any old duck, apparently.

She'd been exploring online.

You might be sorry, in the end, said Fritha.

Some people cut their wings, Woody said as he moved around the coffee table, filling their wine glasses. You can cut their wings so they can't fly. If you don't want them to leave you. If you cut the wing feathers they grow back again, but if you cut the wings themselves . . .

Hannah had a vision of the pulsating wing, blood squirting from the quill feathers in a crimson fountain. She flinched, her stomach tightening.

How do you know it's a
he,
anyway? asked Woody.

I don't really, it's just that he's always been a boy. It could be that he's not. I suppose.

Mothers have a sixth sense, said Fritha. Anyway, do ducks have penises?

There was a silence. In the end, the woman who'd lived near a lake said she thought they did but she could be wrong. In all the time she'd lived near ducks, she'd never seen a duck's penis.

Fritha said, Well, what are they doing then, when they're doing all that mating kerfuffle? Something must be going somewhere.

Whatever it is, it's over in a jiffy, said the hunter, because they're at their most vulnerable. It has to be quick because of predators.

This is all very interesting, but enough is enough, said Simon, who had been quiet up until now. Really. If you don't mind my saying so, I was hoping for a little escape from it all. No more ducks. Please.

Seconded, said Woody. Quack quack quack quack quack.

Muscovies don't quack, actually, retorted Hannah.

Well, shut the duck up, whatever sound it makes. The hunter softened his jibe with a charming smile, but Hannah felt like hissing at him.

The rain continued. It was raining enough to soak the parched, dusty earth. Windy enough to fling branches and palm leaves from side to side; the backyard was now a shaggy dog shaking off every flea from its hide, howling around the corners of the house because it had been left outside in the wet.

Across Europe snow was falling. The world over there was icing up. Even the Danube was a mosaic of crunchy ice and snow. And Korea was having to postpone its war because of the weather. Planes in London were unable to venture into the skies; they gathered on the tarmac, like frozen birds congregating on a beach in a gale.

And here, too, the sky was spitting out dead birds.

On her walk that morning, Hannah found evidence.

1. A little green wax-eye lying amongst red and bruised camellia petals on the pavement, ants busying themselves around its head.

2. A seagull laid out on the high-tide mark in the sand, already pecked at, its rib bones like the hull of a boat in the making, resting in a dock of seaweedy driftwood.

3. The body of a penguin floating on its back in the sea, like a lazy swimmer enjoying the bobbing chop of the waves, the frantic movement of the sea giving it a semblance of life, a cruel unrelenting dance.

4. A floppy-headed young thrush snagged by a pile of brown leaves in a gutter, water gushing past towards the nearby drain.

5. An empty nest flung from lofty branches.

When the rain stopped, the earth steamed in the summer heat. In the moist aftermath, things bred. Mosquitoes clung like magnets to exposed flesh. Delicate tiny praying mantises burst from their zippers to sway on shiny leaves.

The rain was good for snails. After dark, Hannah took a plastic bag and trawled the streets glistening with rain under the yellow light of street
lamps. Snails grazed peacefully like sheep on grassy verges, in family clusters, or the occasional large bull loner. She felt like a wolf on the fold as she plucked them from under hedges and bushes, over roadside lawns, in damp rotting vegetation alongside driveways. She was a shady, lurking predator. Her bag became heavy with frothy slimy prey.

Back home, she tipped them all into a disused aquarium. She probably had a hundred of them. The next day she fed them with leaves and clippings and closed the lid.

At times during the following days she threw them to the duck and he waddled after them. He was fat, ungainly, funny. He was a dog playing catch, except he ate the ball.

As Christmas approached, Hannah was distracted with things to do. She noted that the duck didn't seem to know how to act when she wasn't with him. From the top deck she watched him surreptitiously as he waddled about the lawn. He appeared forlorn. She imagined that the overnight educator had been taking the chance to tell him bothersome things. He pecked miserably at a leaf, or a stone or a branch, and then drifted around with a bewildered air, as if he was truly baffled as to what to do next.

On Christmas Eve there was the shopping to finish, and the cooking, and the organising for visitors. And now Hannah had her feet parked by the kitchen bench, slipping the knife under the rind of the ham, tugging the skin away to reveal the terrain of succulent white fat. She sliced a grid of diamonds into the lard, then pierced it with cloves. All around the world people were preparing dead animals in a similar fashion. It might be time for her to become a vegetarian.

Simon came in from mowing the lawn and weed-eating, chucking off his gumboots at the door. His jeans were wet up to his calves, furry with cut grass.

Hmmm, yum, he said, leaning across her to pour a glass of water. The sleeves of his checked brown shirt were rolled up to his elbows, and a bloody scratch smudged across his arm. As he drank, she could smell his familiar body odour, warmly herbaceous and sweaty.

He put the glass down, lifted her hair and gave her neck a quick kiss.

The duck's all plucked and gutted, he said. Where do you want it?

Up your bum, she snapped, flicking him away. She was sick of jokes about eating the duck.

Later she sat by the pond shelling fresh peas, while the duck vacuumed up the dandelion leaves she'd scattered there, darting impotently at the goldfish and randomly pecking at the stones around the water's edge.

Suddenly she noticed that he was selecting particular stones to swallow.

No! No, Ducko, no! She grabbed him, tipped him head down, knocking over the bowl of precious shelled peas, which spilled into cracks or rolled to join the new duckweed in the sludgy pond.

He clawed and writhed and flapped until he managed to escape into the water, fluffing himself up and repeatedly dipping his head under the surface. She wondered whether stone-eating was a neurotic action, in the same way that people obsessively pulled out their hair, or washed their hands, or cut themselves. She imagined him eating and eating stones to fill a void, until he
became
stone, to join the concrete statue of the duck already half-submerged there, like a headstone over a submerged grave.

She dreamt that she was holding the duck upside-down by his legs. His beak was wide open and he was still. Dull grey stones plopped from his mouth one by one, landing in a pile at her feet. Each stone had written upon it a foreign word she couldn't understand. Finally the cascade stopped. She gave a shake and one more dropped out. This one was a green pea. She shook him again and more peas fell. She turned him upright again, but he was empty. He was a floppy feathered handbag, and she couldn't find his head. She was turning him over and over looking for his head. She found a zip in the handbag and inside a leather purse, and inside that . . . nothing. There had to be something. She scrabbled around in the purse and found a comb with a few white hairs curling from it. There was also a powder puff and a lipstick. In a side pocket she found a well-worn piece of paper folded into four. Inside a tiny thin scrawl.
Happy Christmas, dear.

Chapter 14