The Elusive Language of Ducks (6 page)

So you
do
feel uneasy about it. You've obviously been doing some research yourself.

Only a couple of years ago, when we were choosing the new duvet. I was looking for the best down. And did you know, he added, that some dinosaurs grew down as well? In France they found down feathers from the dinosaur era, preserved in amber. And a decade or so ago, 124-million-year-old fossilised feathers from theropod dinosaurs were found in a place called Liaoning in China. We never think of dinosaurs as fluffy things, do we? Think of how many duvets
they'd
make.

I'm serious. It doesn't feel right.

I am, too. In actual fact, he added, it's commonly accepted in certain scientific circles that all birds have evolved from the aforementioned
theropod dinosaurs, and are in fact dinosaurs themselves.

Don't twist everything I say into scientific twaddle. You're such a pedant. You're trying to avoid reality.

Speaking of which, he said, I've been thinking, too. It's four months since your mother died. For the first time in years, we are free. You're tired, truly — you need a break. Let's go somewhere. Somewhere nice, a cottage by a beach, or in the bush. Over to Waiheke. Or anywhere you choose. Hop on a ferry or a plane, and off we go.

She pulled her hand out from his, the old duck panicking, taking flight.

We can't. How can we? We can't.

Why not?

Well. Who would look after . . .?

Who would look after . . .?

He made her say it.

Who would look after the duck?

He hauled himself up from the sheets and stretched back against the wooden bed-head. He was doing those annoying neck exercises that prepared him for something difficult to say. She turned and peered up at him. His ruffled mix of grey-black hair. His conniving eyes squinting at her. His beard sleekly wrapped over his chin, every hair a silver strand feeding into the loom of his mouth. What thoughts were weaving through the words of this fabricated conversation?

And here it came:

That's another thing. I've got another meeting down in Hamilton next week. He pulled his bottom lip out and over his moustache. I'll take the duck down to Te Awamutu. Back to its pond, with other ducks, where it should be. You've done a very fine job of looking after it, but it needs to be rehabilitated with its own kind. And, he added, so do you.

She noticed his rumpled skin, and the soft flesh of his arms. In a few years he'd be sixty. One day, she thought, we will both die, and who will go first?

I can't have a break, she told him. With Christmas coming up. Everyone coming to stay. There's so much to do. And I've got another editing job coming up. It's not the time to go away.

Well, after Christmas then. There's a possibility of a contract in Christchurch for a while. We could both go.

Christchurch! What about the earthquake?

They've
had
the earthquake. It's over. OK, apart from a few aftershocks. We could stay with Maggie and Toby. But, anyway, the duck. I'll take the duck down to Te Awamutu next week.

The duck's not ready.

She climbed out of bed.

Where are you going?

Toilet, she said.

But down in the bathroom she sat on a stool in the dark by the duck, sleeping in his box. When she finally returned, the light was off and the man was asleep. If I die first, she thought as she lay floating aimlessly through the night, on and on with her hollow bones and her chest aching with grief, who will look after the duck?

But if the man died first, she at least would have the duck to look after her.

A darkened room, a long time ago. Thick curtains pulled over the window by the bed.

She was staying at her grandmother's and had just awakened from an afternoon nap. Mad cries of seagulls outside. She was sitting up, surrounded by a whole country of double bed, with the rolling hills and valleys and fissures of a silk-covered eiderdown. Her chubby fingers picked at a tiny stalk protruding from one corner, tugging at it until it slid out of the hole to reveal . . . a feather! Unfurling itself to dance in her breath, like smoke on a stick.

Later, her grandmother came into the room and held her over the chamber pot from under the bed. She didn't manage to pee, but when she was removed, they both peered into the dry pot. A soft feather lay curled there.

‘Look, Nana, I done a feather,' she said.

‘Oh, you little poppet!' her grandmother had cried, hugging her tightly. And then the story moved from that room into other rooms, and other places. It was related over and over, and always the reaction was laughter. From this, Hannah as a child experienced and understood the pleasure of being funny.

And now, Hannah was thinking that it had taken a feather from a duck to give her this realisation, and how, many years later, a whole living shimmy of feathers on legs was still able to amuse her.

Chapter 4

The duck was just a duck, just a bloomin' duck, a generic duck that began as a yellow pom-pom like every other duck of its type. Its fluff was gradually being replaced by down and feathers in a schedule that was preordained. Even though she had never taught it anything of significance, it had learnt to snap at mosquitoes, preen itself, and to shiver its beak into the mud and earth looking for worms. She had been imprinted on it, just as any person or any animal would for any other duck that had become stranded without its own kind.

So the bond between them was nothing special at all: it was a common old garden one. The anxious cheeping whenever she went away, or came back into view, had provoked or triggered a response from her that made her feel protective towards it. Nature had set it up very nicely. As every grandmother or mother felt towards her grandchild or child, there was the ingrained sense of love, or whatever it was, to save the next generation from harm.

How
cute,
how
gorgeous,
each and every baby creature was for most normal mothers on the planet. So common, that those words had become clichés in that sense. Love was just a biochemical or electromagnetic response. It was probably measurable in all its differing intensities in the endocrine system. Or the blood. Or the air between them.

And so with her duckling. She had been duped by Nature, been pulled in, drawn deeply down into the sloppy sloshy scheme of things.

As measles ran its course (or the common cold, or a stomach bug, or Parkinson's disease), the signs and symptoms — the process of the onset, the duration, the aftermath, etc — were normally predictable, with varying degrees of severity and side effects according to the individual. The variation depended on the state of the victim at the time. All were ailments that progressed in more or less the same way. They all consisted of a list of stages, to one degree of intensity or another, dependent on the host.

She was the host to the duck, that was for sure. She'd been afflicted by a duck. It was an ailment that wasn't in her medical books, and she was uncertain as to what stage she was at with it now, or whether it was terminal. And the side-effects were unknown.

Her mother was afflicted with Parkinson's disease. Over the years her body had lost its lively suppleness, her fingers stiffened, her handwriting became minuscule, and she couldn't do up her buttons. And she'd had more and more of a struggle to paint freely. At first, although they commiserated with her, neither Hannah nor her mother's friends had really understood the difficulty.

Their coaxing was well-meaning: Don't give yourself negative messages. Just do it.

But it won't happen, her mother would reply. I can put the paintbrush onto the canvas, but there's something happening between my brain and the paper. I simply
can't
paint the way I used to.

In the end it was the constant falling over that brought her reluctantly from living independently in her own home in Hawke's Bay to living in Auckland with Hannah and Simon. A night of lying on the floor of the bathroom, like a wounded gull with the tide rising, as the handbasin overflowed unceasingly through the night, spewing water around her and out into the living room carpet. Her head was resting on a sodden towel which she'd either fortuitously landed on or had managed to pull under her head. In the morning she was discovered by the caregiver arriving to give her a shower, and was taken to hospital in an ambulance, bruised and shivering, and later developing pneumonia. She never returned to live at her home, and resented this.

Take me to the sea, she'd say to Hannah. Just take me to the sea and let me walk and walk and walk out into it. I mean it. It will be better for everyone.

Or: Just take me to a nice place in the bush and leave me there. Truly, dear, I'll be happy to go, surrounded by Nature.

But instead she had to leave her friends from her hometown and live another three years, in a body battened down as it flailed to be free, like a stunned and trussed insect, packaged up for devouring later.

I just can't think properly, she would say. I think I'm going mad. You'd tell me, wouldn't you, Hannah? You would, wouldn't you?

Of course I would, Hannah would assure her with a hug, but you're not mad, not at all.

And she wasn't.

Sometimes, Hannah would arrive at Primrose Hill to see her mother's face hanging cocked, her mouth open and her eyes as dead as the flowers that wilted in the Agee jars on the locked piano. Or, at other times, her face was puffy with anxiety, her eyes searching for familiarity. Around her in the lounge, other old people sat in chairs and bucket seats, either resigned to isolation or, in an act of solidarity, their dry old voices quacking like hungry mallards across a pond. Help, help, heeeelp.

But when Hannah marched in, greeting them jovially one by one, all of those faces perked up as she called each one of them by name. That was the label around the handle of the suitcase of their own lives, and that was who they were, and they were happy to be reminded. That was the call they had responded to from the time they were babies, from their teachers, whispering lovers, enemies, roll calls, and this name would be the identifying tag around their toes. Only their own children didn't use their name. To their children, they were universally Mummy, Mama, Daddy, or Papa, but that, too, defined who they were beyond any given name, defined a status and connection that, above all, was unique and permanent.

And Hannah's own mother's face came alive when she saw her, because she was the link to all the known things. Her caregivers had no idea what she was talking about when she mentioned a person she had once known; or a spontaneous recounting of an incident from her past, as if assuming the caregiver had been privy to her train of thought leading up to it. When Hannah arrived, all the obscure off-beat comments that wafted like leaves from an old tree upon the people who'd never known her, now had value. These leaves became meaningful, because Hannah knew the twigs and branches from which they fell; she had embraced the now-bending trunk of her mother's life.

And each leaf held the code to enter conversation, the means to enter a room. All the doors squeaking open and there they were, together, discussing the people who had featured in her life. Until in the end the hallucinations caused by the drugs toyed with her mind, and eventually the disease spun a mesh through her thoughts, and they too were fastened down.

Who's Ted? one of the caregivers asked one day, as Hannah was feeding
her mother. The caregiver was sitting at the dining room table on the other side, feeding another resident.

Ted's my father. Mum's husband. He's been dead for decades. Why?

Ah, I see. Her husband.

Why? Did she mention him?

Her mother was sitting between them, opening her mouth like a bird as Hannah spooned soup into her.

She was calling for him this morning. In bed, said the caregiver. It was just on dawn and she was calling from her bed, not in a panicky way, but softly, questioningly, as if she couldn't understand why he wasn't there. Just calling quietly, wondering where he was.