Collected Stories (34 page)

Lilly lay on the bed stroking the bird which sat comfortably between her breasts and her swollen belly. The bottle of wine which stood amongst the debris of a meal on the table beside her was very nearly empty.

Mort, his hair wet, sat naked in a chair staring at the television. She envied him his looseness, his easy sexual satisfaction.

“Why don’t you put it down?” he said.

“In a minute.”

“Come and rub my back.”

“You’re a greedy bugger, Morto.”

“You want to be careful with that bird. It probably should have injections or something. You shouldn’t fuck around with exotics when you’re pregnant.”

“You’re the only exotic I fuck around with.” She looked at him and thought for the millionth time how pretty he was with his smooth skin and his hard muscles and that beautiful guileless face. “Let’s get another bottle.” The drunk Mort was more like the old Mort.

Without waiting for an answer she reached over and picked up the phone. She ordered the wine, put the bird in the bathroom with a saucer of seed, threw Mort a pair of trousers and picked up her own dress from where she had dropped it.

It was the manager himself who brought the wine. He wasn’t content to hand it through the door. “I’ll just pick up the trays,” he said, and Lilly noted that he already had his foot in the door, like an obnoxious encyclopedia salesman.

He was a short, slim man, handsome in an overripe way, with a mole near his eye and waving dark hair. Lilly didn’t like him. She didn’t like his highly shined shoes or his neatly pressed flannel trousers. She didn’t like the way he looked at the wet towel lying on
the floor and the rumpled disordered bed freshly stained from lovemaking.

She sat on the bed while he busied himself with the trays. When she saw he was actually counting the knives and forks she started mimicking him behind his back.

When he announced that a saucer was missing she nearly burst out laughing, as if anyone would pinch one of his stupid tasteless saucers.

“It’s in the bathroom,” she said, and was wondering if she should add “where it belongs” when the man took the opportunity to inspect the bathroom.

When he came back he was holding the bird in one hand and the saucer in the other. Lilly took the bird from him and watched him drop the seeds into the rubbish bin.

“There is a house rule against pets. It’s quite clearly displayed.”

“It’s not a pet,” she said.

“I can’t have people bringing pets here.”

She saw Mort put his head in his hands as he anticipated one more setback, one more razor-nick defeat.

She took the saucer from the manager’s manicured hand. “Just stroke it,” she said, “it has special properties,” and smiled inwardly to hear herself use a word like “properties”, a leftover from her wasted education.

The manager looked at her with supercilious eyes and was about to give her back the bird when she firmly took hold of his free hand (which she was astonished to find damp with anxiety) and rubbed it down the bird’s back. When she took her hand away he continued to stroke it mechanically, the threatened light of authority still shining in his eyes.

“Go on,” she encouraged, “it feels nice.”

In spite of a private conviction that he was being made a fool of, the manager stroked the bird, at first tentatively and then more surely. The bird, as if understanding the importance of the occasion, brushed its cheek against the manager’s and then for a minute or two very little moved in the room but the manager’s hand.

Lights from the highway flowed across the wall.

On the television a mute reporter held a microphone towards a weeping man.

Twice Lilly saw the manager trying to give the bird back and twice she saw him fail.

“Feels nice, doesn’t it?”

The manager nodded his head and looked embarrassed. She could see that pleasure had made his eyes gooey as marshmallow.

“Now,” she said briskly, holding out her hands for the bird, “I’ll put it in the car so we won’t be breaking the rules.”

“No.” He was like a two-year-old with a teddy bear.

“You’ll exhaust it,” Lilly said, “and we need it for tomorrow. It’s our business. That’s what I mean about it not being a pet.”

“Your business?” the manager asked, and in truth every person in the room was trying to think how this beautiful bird might be anyone’s “business”.

“It’s a Pleasure Bird,” Lilly said, lighting a cigarette although she had given them up three months ago. It gave her time to think. “We charge a dollar a minute for people to stroke it.”

“You people in show business?”

“Sure am.” Lilly exhaled luxuriously and sat down on the bed.

“Dollar a minute, eh. Good work if you can get it.” He was being nice now and she allowed herself the luxury of not despising him for it.

“You think that’s too expensive?” She held out her arms for the bird. “We’ve charged more and no one’s ever complained.”

The manager stepped back from the extended arms, cooing over the bird like a mother keeping its baby from harm.

Lilly started talking. Ideas came to her so fast that she hardly knew how the sentence would end when she started it. “You can have it for half an hour.” She watched the manager glow. “In return for the price for this room and the food.”

“Done.”

“And wine, of course.”

“Done.”

“For an extra five dollars in cash you can take it to the office so we won’t disturb you. We’ll get it when time’s up.”

“Done.”

“What’s the time, Mort?”

Mort picked up his wristwatch from the top of the mute television.

“Nine twenty-three.”

“OK, it is now nine twenty-three.” She opened the door and
ushered the manager out into the night. “I’ll pick it up from you at exactly nine fifty-three.”

When she shut the door she was grinning so broadly her face hurt. She hugged Mort and said, “I’m a genius. Tell me I’m a genius.”

“You’re a genius,” he said, “but you were crazy to let him take it away.”

“Why, for Chrissakes?”

“He mightn’t give it back.”

“Oh fuck, Mort. Stop it.”

“I’m sorry, it was just a thought.”

“Be positive.”

“I am positive.”

“Well, pour me a glass of wine and tell me I’m beautiful.”

The manager had taken the corkscrew and they had to shove the cork in with a pencil.

As it turned out they made an extra twenty dollars’ cash that night. It was ten-thirteen before they persuaded the manager to relinquish the bird. They stood in his office holding the wristwatch while the man bought minute after minute of extra time from his petty cash. The phone rang and wasn’t answered.

As they left his office, the bird ruffled its feathers and shat on the concrete.

Mort didn’t want to look at the empty wine bottle or the plan he had agreed to so easily the night before. When Lillian got up he curled himself into a ball and pretended he was still asleep. Lilly knew he wasn’t asleep and knew why he was pretending.

“Come on, Mort, don’t be chicken shit.”

Mort moaned.

“Come on, Mort honey, or we won’t get a stall.” She rattled a coffee cup near his ear. “Do you want to get rich or do you want to stay poor? Here’s your coffee, baby. It’s getting cold.”

When Mort finally emerged, tousle-headed and soft as a child’s toy, he was in no way prepared for what he saw. Lilly was wearing white overalls and clown’s make-up. There were stars round her eyes and padding in her bum.

“Oh Christ, Lilly, please.”

“Please what? Drink your coffee.”

“Oh shit, please don’t. We don’t have to do that.”

“You heard what I told the man. We’re in show business.”

“Take it off, please. I don’t mind the business with the bird, but we don’t have to do all this.”

“Drink your coffee and I’ll take Charley-boy out for a shit.”

When he drove to the markets it was in strained silence. The clown held the bird. The straight man was at the wheel. When the car finally lost its muffler neither of them said anything.

The markets had sprung up to meet the needs of the new poor and were supplied and operated by an increasingly sophisticated collection of small-time crooks. The police, by mutual agreement, rarely entered their enclosures and business was thus conducted with some decorum, whether it was the purchase of stolen clothing or illicit drugs (the notorious Lizard Dust was sold here and it was only the poor who tolerated the violent illnesses that preceded its more pleasant effects). Here you could buy spare parts for rubber thongs, fruit, vegetables, motor cars of questionable origin, poisonous hot dogs and bilious-coloured drinks.

The market they drove to was a vast concrete-paved car park which, at nine o’clock in the morning, was already unpleasantly hot. A blustery wind carried clouds of dust through the stalls, rattled the canvas roofs, and lodged a fine speck of dust in Mort’s eye. So it was Lilly who joined the queue for temporary stalls while Mort adjourned, more in embarrassment than pain, to minister to his eye in the men’s toilets.

The stall number was 128. It was nothing more than a wooden trestle table with a number painted on the top. Canvas awnings were a luxury they could not yet afford.

Mort stood behind the stall in his suit and tie, red-eyed and sulky. The bird stood stoically on the table. Lilly, resplendent in overalls and clown’s face, waddled to and fro in front, a balloon of swollen belly and padded bum.

“It won’t work.”

“Of course it’ll work,” she said. But her stomach was a mass of nerves and the baby, probably nervous of the life she had in store for it, kicked irritably inside her. “Don’t look like that,” she hissed. “I can’t do it when you’re looking at me like that.”

“Do what?”

And she started to do it. She felt a fool. She did badly what she had dreamed would be easy. Her voice sounded high and when she tried to lower it, it came out worse. What she said was hardly impressive and rarely funny. But she began to lumber amongst the crowds clapping her hands and making a fuss.

“See the Pleasure Bird at stall 128,” she yelled. “First three customers get a minute of pleasure for free. Oh yes, oh yes, oh yes. One dollar, one minute. They say it’s better than sex. One dollar, one minute and the first three customers get it free.”

A crowd of ragged children followed her. She did a cake walk. She danced a waltz with a black man in a pink suit. She fell over a guy-rope and made it look intentional. She attracted a small crowd by the simple device of placing a matchbox on the ground and making a big show of jumping over it, bowing and smiling when the jump was done. The matchbox jump was the most successful stunt of all and she gave the laughing crowd the news about stall 128 and the Pleasure Bird.

By the time she’d got lost in an alley of used car parts and been threatened by a woman who was trying to sell bruised apples she was exhausted. She had blisters on her feet from Mort’s sandshoes which were four sizes too big and a cut on her hand from the fall over the guy-rope. She limped back to the stall to find an enormous crowd huddled around an old woman who was dreamily stroking the bird. Mort stood beside her with his watch in his hand. The crowd was strangely silent and the woman crooning to the bird seemed vulnerable and rather sad.

“Ten minutes,” said Mort.

The woman reluctantly handed the bird back and, from a pocket of her voluminous black dress, produced a half-unravelled blue sock from which she counted out, in notes and coins, ten dollars.

As Mort handed the bird to the next person in the queue, the quiet solemnity of the recipient’s face reminded Lilly of a face in her childhood taking communion in a small country church. He was an Italian, a labourer with a blue singlet and dusty boots and he had only had the bird for thirty seconds when he cradled it in one arm and dragged a bundle of notes from his pockets which he placed on the table in a crumpled heap.

“Tell me when time’s up,” he said, and sat on the trestle table,
hunched over the bird, lost in his own private world, impervious to the mutterings of the impatient crowd.

After that they limited the time to three minutes.

They could have worked the market all day but Mort, rather than sharing Lilly’s ever increasing sense of triumph, became more and more upset with her costume.

“Take it off. You don’t need it now.”

“No.”

“Please.”

“Don’t be silly, Mort. It’s part of the act.”

“You look a fool. I can’t stand people laughing at you.”

They hissed at each other until one o’clock when Mort, his face red and sullen, suddenly dumped the bird in Lilly’s lap and walked away.

At two o’clock she closed the stall and limped painfully back to the car. The bird shat once or twice on the way back, but apart from that seemed none the worse for its handling. Mort didn’t seem to have fared so well. He was sitting woodenly inside the boiling car and when she asked him how much he’d taken he simply handed her the money.

She counted two hundred and thirty dollars in notes and didn’t bother with the silver.

The balcony of their room looked across the wide graceful river which was now silvery and cool in the late light. A rowing eight moved with svelte precision through a canopy of willows and two black swans descended from the sky above the distant city and Lilly, watching them, imagined the pleasant coolness of the water on their hot bodies.

Her make-up was gone now and she wore a loose white cheesecloth dress. The ice clinked in her gin and tonic and even the small chink of the glass as it touched the metal filigree table sounded cool and luxurious to her ears. She put her blistered feet up on the railing and stroked the bird gently, letting the pleasure saturate her body.

“Mort.”

“Yes.”

“You feel OK now?”

He leant across and put his arm on her shoulder. His face was
sunburnt and there was a strange red V mark on his chest. He nodded. “Put the bird inside.”

“In a minute.”

He took his hand back and filled his glass.

Lillian was feeling triumphant. She had a fair idea of the worms that were eating at Mort and she was surprised and a little guilty to discover that she didn’t care excessively. She felt cool and rich and amazingly free. After a few minutes she picked up the bird and put it in front of the bathroom mirror where, she discovered, for all its unearthly qualities, it behaved just like a budgerigar.