The Swan Book (34 page)

The Harbour Master was nursing a sick swan on his lap, and so was the monkey, and wondering why he was looking after these creatures in a squalid apartment. He asked Oblivia,
Where did you get clothes like that?
This was what the Harbour Master wanted to know, after seeing the pale sepia-coloured satin dress most of all, as she and Warren Finch walked off in the distance, and noticing the matching high-heel shoes. He said she looked unbelievable.
At first,
he exclaimed,
I told myself no way – I really couldn't recognise it was you.

After this happened, all the Harbour Master wanted to do all
day long was sit around waiting for a chance to see Warren Finch on the television, just to criticise him. Any news about the Australian Government was just grand. The Harbour Master believed that because of bloody Warren Finch, he had become a specialist in Australian politics – not that this was difficult to do, he claimed. They were all gutless wonders. He grumbled continuously about not being able to stand the sight of the man, so whenever he saw the new President of the country on television – because this was what Warren Finch had finally and seamlessly become (through an inspired shove of the exceedingly long-serving and unpopular Horse Ryder from Government during the course of one stormy night when so many trumped up and legit charges of conspiracy against the machinery of the party flew like a flippen maelstrom through the corridors of power in the country) – the Harbour Master and the monkey yelled at him for the complete sell-out that he was; a complete reprobate of the first order who had dumped his wife and turned against his own people.
Ya moron
, they screamed at the television.

The acclaimed monkey genius Rigoletto had become so obsessed with watching the news, he started to make specialised comparisons with how politics worked in the monkey world. He claimed that Warren Finch had stepped out of line with his own society. That he had left his people for dead. They were now joined to the throngs of banished people wandering aimlessly around the world, always searching and always lost, and who created more banished people wherever they went.

You give people no choice
, the Harbour Master, sick of sitting in swan shit, shouted at the television.
You want them to be like you – a lost man. Like you did to this girl here. What is she now? Hey? Tell me that? Come here now. I want to fight you.

Now Oblivia was left to rescue the fallen swans herself, because the Harbour Master and the monkey could not be bothered. They
were too obsessed about having no real voice in the politics of Australia. Neither would leave the television for a minute. They were consumed in a running commentary about Warren Finch.

This massive consumption of electricity just for a television, and glut of injured or recuperating swans also consumed with television viewing, did not stop her from wanting to see herself on the television as well. Then finally – bingo! What a shock on the 7 O'Clock News. She quickly noticed the really small things that were totally opposed to how she thought about herself. Where were the downcast eyes for instance? Why the lack of self-consciousness? Where was the shame? How could she have agreed to allow people to stare at her like that? She had to adapt to the television picture of herself with fingernails painted red or pale pink, speaking through lipstick, looking from eyeliner and orderly designed hair, and how she moved with an air of confidence dressed in Marlene Dietrich clothes.

The Harbour Master said she looked beautiful but Warren Finch was an ugly man. These sightings of the President with his wife became more and more frequent the more that they watched the television together, so they had to surmise that Warren Finch was forcing the girl to go mad from seeing herself being paraded around as the wife he wanted her to learn to be. And equally alluring, they reasoned that these daily sightings of the Indigenous President of the newly created Australian Republic with his promise wife were intended to be very newsworthy to the viewing public that adored the country's first couple.

Yet there was more to think about. It had taken numerous glimpses of seeing herself masquerading around the place as Marlene Dietrich, for the girl to realise that Warren Finch was stealing parts of her life for his own purposes.
Yes, that was how he was covering up his mésalliance of a marriage with her.
She did not know how it happened, but somehow, a part of her life was being lived
elsewhere with her husband. She came and went into a different life which Warren Finch returned through the television screen.

The Harbour Master and the monkey were deeply committed to their investigative arguments about this theft of her identity by an impostor – or not – and argued with Oblivia who believed it was her all right, and this gave them the excuse to be more or less glued to the television because why kill the dream, when otherwise they would have to be rescuing swans. They complained:
Wasn't the place crowded enough?
It was all they could think or speak about, including abusing that ugly man Warren Finch, saying
we are sick of you
, because they were stuck in an apartment with poultry swans. There were now so many of them nestled in the apartment it was hard to walk around the place without thinking you were in a stinking swannery. So the Harbour Master and Rigoletto, now covered in swan lice, sat tight in front of the television, unwilling to move unless it was absolutely necessary to feed themselves.

Oblivia had swans living on the rooftop where the cold wind whistled continuously, and now many needed to be released. She believed it was her job. It was the only reason why she was staying, and had not become a permanent television wife. Soon it would be the swan's breeding season and each swan would have to be reunited with the rest of the flock before their instincts to breed became too great, forcing them to panic on the rooftop and in the apartment, while attempting to escape.

Oblivia knew that she must take them to clear land, or to a large stretch of water so that they could have the space to run and take to the skies. She needed help to find this space in the city that sprawled like a maze in her mind, with neither the Harbour Master nor the monkey interested in helping her. They were more interested in Warren Finch than swans, or becoming lost in the city, and said if she wanted help:
Ask Warren Finch's Mr Machine to take you to the genie shop
.

Machine was sitting in an armchair on the ground floor with his favourite white cat wrapped around his neck like a scarf; it chewed the man's hair as though it was feathers. When Machine saw Oblivia standing in front of him with a piece of paper signed by Warren Finch, saying he should help her relocate the swans, he shouted in shock.
Well! Well! Well!
He was surrounded by misted water spurting several metres high from a colossal fish mouth and falling, but that he was damp did not worry him. He just kept swinging along to the amplified sound coming through the loud speakers of Dean Martin singing
Houston,
while a pile of damp cats purring and snarling at the white cat tumbled all over him
. What's the matter? You want a tour of dilapidation? Want to see the ruined city or something?

Machine said he would need some time to study the street guide – an old disused book he pointed to on the table beside him that was half a metre thick. He thought it would be very difficult to work out the easiest directions to reach the magic shop she was talking about.
Okay.
This was a skewed dream of a city, he explained, with tidal surges at any time, and in saying he never liked people much, asked whether she realised that there were millions of them rushing around right outside their door – people doing anything to save themselves in the day to day? Mostly he grumbled about how the city was stuffed and nobody cared what it looked like anymore.
Everything is falling down around you. Nothing is getting fixed up. Pigeons are flying everywhere. The sky is full of them. I have seen thousands of the things circling around this building alone. Their shit – falling everywhere. They call this globalised depression. I call it shit. Subsistence life. The trouble of being micro-managed by the government with intervention this, and intervention that, until passivity breeds the life out of you and you may as well be dead. You want to become like that? It was an absolute disgrace. You are better off staying where you are – inside.
But still, because Warren Finch's signature was on
the note, he agreed to take her there, but only at night for these reasons: hatred of sunlight, and because he did not like walking around in the city during the day when it was crowded, although even the Harbour Master had told her that in reality, he had only seen dribs and drabs. It was a ghost city. Hardly anyone lived there any more after the thousands of unemployed people had moved away and disappeared into thin air apparently. Machine patted his knee cat and said:
Be ready when you hear a knock on the door
.

After several hours of waiting that night and being scared out of her wits, there was a scratching sound on the other side of the door.
Quando! Quando?
The Harbour Master interrupted what he called,
another bloody quandary to deal with
, and told her straight to
F–N straighten up
, and that she had better get used to answering the door. The lice-scratching monkey agreed, and claimed the Harbour Master was a natural mastermind at getting things done in a timely fashion.

So! Olé!
She answered the door and found an owl sitting there. The little bird busy scratching with its beak was disturbed by the door opening and flew off in fright. It descended slowly down the atrium. Instinctively, the girl knew the owl wanted to be followed, and even more than this, she thought that Machine had become the owl – the one that had been promised to her by the genies. She quickly looked at all of the swans jumbled into the apartment honking over the top of the sound of the television:
Take/me! Take/me!
She quickly grabbed the swan with the strongest wings flapping in readiness for flight, and left dressed in her darkest clothes with the hood of her jacket pulled down over her head as she entered the lane outside.

Out into the rainy night, and walking quickly through street after street and lanes and darkened alleyways with the swan in Warren Finch's napsack strapped over her back, with her mind swinging around in her head about why she had not been smart
enough to see what was not visible to anyone else, such as the owl-like features in Machine's face, she followed the owl that could have been him.

The owl kept a hasty pace in its flight. There was no time for faint-hearted indifference about whether she should follow it or not, though she was being taken far away from The People's Palace
.
Any idea of how to return had not dawned on her yet, although she was keen to return as quickly as possible in case she had to be transformed into Warren Finch's television wife again – because she was forced to go everywhere with him.
In your dreams,
the monkey claimed,
Let's escape. Why not kill Warren if we ever see him again? Then we can all go back to the swamp
. How? How played over in her mind a thousand times a day. What a word
how
was. It could drive anyone mad. The owl flew on oblivious to any quandary she was having about needing to be somewhere else. Even if she had changed her mind and wished she had never left, it was too late. The owl kept her alert to its sudden shifts in direction, and often flew high to cross buildings while she had to run down and around them while lugging the heavy swan, to find a way to keep following. She was convinced that the creature wanted to lose her in the labyrinth.

The air was like ice. Massive clouds soared across the skies of the city. A hard wind blew the owl along until finally it landed on a lamp post in front of a long-abandoned, boarded and nailed-up shop where, on the business sign, painted monkeys and owls danced across faded yellowish words that she was barely able to read,
The World of Magicians and Genies.
The owl shook itself to end its flight, and then suddenly flew straight through a crack in the deserted building.

This was how the world stood in the darkness, but whenever a rouge neon light flickered brightly, it lit up the street, and she could see behind the boards and inside the shop. But genies were oblivious of time. A rose fragrance that had been sprayed in the
shop for decades by those who had worked there, was still in the air of this otherworldly, something not of this time, unbridled to time perhaps, magic shop that brought it back into existence.

The first thing she noticed as light flashed into the building was movement on the floor. It was alive with the city's lizards and skinks that had gathered in the warmth of the room. Perhaps, she thought, they were participating in a historical conference about old homelands when lizards lived in trees. The desks where the genies had sat looked as though they had been gathering work for hundreds of years, while the books that they had written in had grown into tall mountains. She could see the notes and drawings they had left behind, notes about the measurements they had been taking of grass owls, seashells, seeds, feathers and odd things like that.

There were elderly owls in the room. Not local. These came from other wild places in the world. The old owls sat very still and civilised on perches, so as not to waste their breath on life's flippancies. Only the younger owls did that – flying soundlessly to and fro across the room – leaving and returning from the city streets. The room's other large bird life consisted of several old rare and valuable parrots that preserved the entire history of their species inside their heads. Who knows why the genies wanted them saved? What could anyone do with information about what no longer existed?

The girl heard the parrots chatting about the ordeal of travelling across the world aboard bankrupt ships with the genies. These vessels were now rotting down in the harbour. Permanently anchored. Saved up for a rainy day. She thought the parrots looked lucky to be living in perpetuity in this ageless room. They would always remain perched on their ornate bird stands studded with pearls, but deep inside their little ticking hearts, she
knew they looked around their diminished world, and pondered where they had ended up.