The Swan Book (32 page)

Everything works,
Warren said, while striding around the apartment that looked as though it was never used. She was given a quick demonstration of electric appliances: stove, fridge, jug, toaster, microwave, washing machine, television, radio. Rubbish: Left nightly outside the door. Water: Hot and cold shower, bath, basin, kitchen sink. Toilet: How to flush. Cleaning: Broom, mop, bucket, wipes. Cleaning liquids: Kitchen, Bathroom, Toilet, Laundry, Floors. Clothes: There were some spare clothes left in the wardrobe. He slid a glass door open and she could see a line of clothes hanging for her. Shoes on the floor. Underwear in the drawers. He continued on, and quickly explained what she could and could not do in the apartment, which he said was,
yours now.
Frequently, he called out lists of instructions with:
You must promise me that you will remember.
Then he emerged from the bedroom, bags packed, one in each hand. The mobile was calling but he did not answer.

Her eyes had been glued to the images changing on the television until it occurred to her that the mobile was still ringing.

I will call them back in a minute,
he said, and looking at her for a moment as he tried to remember something he had to say, he continued:
I will try to get back on the weekend.

Her eyes were now fixed on the bag in his hand. Warren could see her face locking into meltdown, another panic attack, and thought he better say something to her, before she destroyed
the place, or stopped him from leaving. Yes, that would do it. He would explain his work to her – where he had to go.

Sometimes Canberra. That's the nation's capital. I am in government you know. Sometimes the world. Anywhere. My parish is the world. Wherever I am needed in the neighbourhoods of power. That is where I work: where I do business. Your business is to stay here and be my wife. Machine will look after you.

It was his words that described hugeness that helped her to realise how powerful he was, and her lack of power, in a place that she did not know.

Just ring the lift if you need anything. You can trust him so don't worry about asking. You will be good company for Machine. He is a good man and he does a good job.
He broke the slight awkwardness in his voice by looking at his watch to confirm his departure.

Look!
He said impatiently,
I have got to go right now to catch the flight. This is something you will have to get used to I am afraid. I have to go tonight because I have been away too long and I have a lot of very, very urgent work to do, starting first thing in the morning. Look! I will call you.

Then he left. She heard him talking to the man he called Machine on the other side of the closed door, and shortly afterwards, the slamming concertina gates, then the rumbling noise of the lift wobbling back down its own neck, and the whining sound of creaking ropes fading further away.

She now belonged in the menagerie of exhibits artificially created by the weirdo named Machine. That was how the Harbour Master described the situation.

From that moment of silence, Oblivia would be waiting for Warren to come back.

Countless times, the girl stood in front of the large glass windows of the apartment, as she would do numerous times in the future. What did she watch? Cold rain mostly, that fell on the sun-deprived
walls of the buildings across the laneway while she daydreamed about how she would escape through the mazes stacked in her mind – thousands of unknown city streets and distances across the country too great to be imagined, to return to the swamp – imaginary flights that always fizzled into a haze-land between the here and then that stopped her every time. She followed the routes of rainwater pouring through the moss and black lichen that grew in profusion down the shady walls, or dripping melodically like piano notes onto the drooping foliage of fig trees, banana trees, tropical trees and ferns growing from cracks in these buildings. She watched dark-hooded people drifting into the lane to sleep. Those who formed a huddle for security at night, then left in the morning. Sometimes, she would be awakened in the middle of the night when she heard people screaming
King Billy
, and she rushed to the window to watch dark shadows scattering though the waters flooding in the laneway, the old drought-buster spirit when tidal surges flooded through the sewers into the lower, poorer, and central parts of the city, usually at times when violent hail storms from cyclonic weather struck the coastline. She watched the people from the lane moving away, or sheltering from the rain and hailstones under pieces of cardboard and plastic, or standing around for hours in floodwater, holding their belongings to their chests, until the waters subsided.

Old Bella Donna's books about swans wrapped in fishing net were left on the table like a souvenir. Oblivia had found the package one night while roaming around the apartment after she had woken startled from a nightmare taking her to the brink of madness. Her common nightmare of being caught in the improbability of returning or leaving, of being locked in this moment forever, and there it was on the table. Had Warren come back? She froze, looked into the shadows, then started searching the place with the kitchen
knife while the Harbour Master was winding her up so fast, urging her on to kill the useless prick if she found him, that she was racing around in a frenzy like a mad woman cut loose. The books could have been a wish come true. Washed up from the tracks of dry salt lakes. Hauled through the clouds outside the window. She had missed the genies tapping on the glass, to grant her wishes if she had any more to make.

The Harbour Master kept calling Warren Finch a fuckwit for leaving them all in this dump of a place. He was itching to leave. He said he had seen her bloody books in the vehicle where she had left them.
On the edge of the salt lakes.
The books smelt of the hull. If she touched one, or picked it up, images of being in the hull flashed through her mind.

Somehow, the books became good company. Pages were flicked over, and lines recited, and reflected upon:
The wild swan's death-hymn took the soul of that waste place with joy.
Was this wasteland the swamp? She left the books on the table, and touched them frequently as though they were her friends. She sang over and over, a chant, her lonely incantation to the swans flying over Country,
All the black swans sail together.
She moves on, finds another thought –
He who becomes a swan, instructs the world!
This swan could spread his wings and fly where his spirit takes him, and Oblivia imagines the past disappearing in this flight to a frightening anticipated unknown future. Shakespeare's
Sweet Swan of Avon! What a sight it were
…where a Mute Swan, or Whooper Swan, flying ten-thousand leagues, had taken the old swan woman's people across the sea. But her mind turns away from that vision, and returns to anticipate how her own black swans from the swamp were moving over the country she had travelled, and listens to them singing their ceremonies in flight, and she holds this thought in her mind because it soothes her, instructs her in endurance and perseverance.

Days passed and weeks turned into months of not knowing how she could continue reminding herself of the home she had been taken from, a place that no longer existed in the way she remembered –
Now, when you awaken, remember the swan's last dance.
As quickly as she tried to reconstruct the swamp in her mind, the quicker the images of watery slicks consumed the hull, capturing
the earthed lightning of a flock of swans…
and the rotting abandoned hulls flew away in the wind from a world fallen apart. It was not safe to have thoughts that were now wavering into forgetfulness until all that remained were vague memories too hard to hold. She no longer felt safe thinking about the hull. Slowly but surely, her life had become anything Warren Finch wanted it to be,
the Swan I tempted with a sense of shame…
and he was already doing that by not coming back.

In the middle of the day Oblivia watched the liftman from her window, when he was down in the narrow lane, right where the water was gushing out of the pipes carrying the water flooding from the top of the building. His shoes are wet from the windswept rain, but he continues emptying the rainwater from their bowls and feeding his cats. They follow his every move despite not liking the rain falling on their fur, because they are hungry. They are mainly orange marmalade cats; black and grey brindle cats; black and white cats. Soon, they are just wet cats. He judiciously supervises the feeding ritual to ensure that each cat manages to grab a bit of food.

Machine reminds her of Warren. The dominant, stronger cats are often discouraged from being too greedy with a swift kick from the tip of his boot. Other times, when in a hurry, he does not bother emptying water from the bowls. On these occasions, he just throws scraps of meat all over the laneway and wherever a bit lands, the cats rush towards it, and it all ends up in catfights. He watches for
a moment or two as though he finds pleasure out of the spectacle of fur and claws, then he turns his back and saunters off towards the street entrance to the building. Other times he seems to be sick, and just empties tins of congealed cat food onto the ground in the running water. Then afterwards, he picks up all of the tins and carts them away in his rubbish bag.

Over rooftops where the crows wait, she would often see right out to the grey bay where the clouds were chopped by wind. She listened to the sound of ferry-boat engines whining in the rough, and the jets that flew continuously over the roof tops, and she wondered whether Warren might be on board, antlike, up in the sky. In the street below, in the constant sound of traffic, she saw delivery trucks travelling back and forth to feed the city, as if the entire population of the country existed only in this place.

Sometimes, when the weather eased, and if she looked closely, out into the shadows of the greyness, she would often find the dark form of a fisherman huddled in his secret fishing place among the rocks along the edge of the bay. She watched the small motorboats slowly churning over the choppy water, where hunchback fishermen went back and forth, then as night fell, the boats moving between lanes of flickering red, green and golden globes, and a seemingly never-ending trail of bats travelling from one abandoned park to another across the city. Then she moved away from the window. Her daily routine was completed.

Warren Finch still did not return, and she did not wish he would come back. She started to believe that one day the view from the window would change. A plane might fall from the skies, straight into the deepest part of the bay in front of her, with his body still strapped to its seat. She waited expectantly, anticipating the time when she would become one of the hunchbacked people on one of the little fishing boats, with eyes blinded by a stinging sea spray as they searched the crash site.

The rain never stopped falling. Sometimes it fell so hard it was impossible to see the bay. The telephone never rang. She had placed the receiver on the table and left it there.

Oblivia avoided Machine like the plague. Never wanted to see him. She did not even watch him feed the cats anymore. She feared that one day he would knock on the door and she would have to answer it. Yet, the liftman did his job of looking after her. He regularly left groceries and money outside the door in a box along with the household and personal things she hardly used. She stacked the things left by Machine into a mountain as high as the ceiling until the construction tumbled. She restacked bath soap, tins of food, laundry detergent into a higher pile. Most of the perishable food she did not eat, she left in the rubbish bin outside the door, where more food was left for her.

One night she woke up thinking that Machine was searching through her rubbish somewhere in the building, some place where she imagined he lived in a den like an animal, and where occasionally she thought she heard a phone ring. She felt disgusted and threw her rubbish from the window into the lane, but always quickly afterwards, she would see him picking up every single thing she had dropped with a pointed stick, and dropping it piece by piece, after he inspected it, into a large, green rubbish bag. It was these little incidents that fed her loathing of the ugly man. Her mind grew fat on it. But she could not leave. She depended on him. And still she did not wish that Warren would come back.

Sometimes, in the middle of the night, she would suddenly wake up to the sound of the concertina door of the lift slamming repeatedly in her head. She would run to her door and listen. Always watching the brass, hook-shaped door handle, waiting for it to turn. She thought Warren had come back. He had changed
his mind. Then she heard slow, laboured breathing, and she wondered if each achievable breath would be the last. Instinctively, she knew it was the liftman on the other side with his ear to the door, listening to her – checking to see if she was still alive. She could hear Warren calling Machine on his mobile phone when the thought crossed his mind:
Keep checking just in case she tries to kill herself.
He could hear her heart pounding. The knife she slides across her hand is so sharp, that she often cuts herself. She tries not to breathe while waiting for the door handle to move. The blood falls from her hand. But he always leaves with his shoes dragging across the floor. The concertina doors open and slam shut. The lift begins whining back down to the lower floors.

It was only when the lift faded away that she would breathe normally again, but one night after he left she heard breathing coming back to her through the walls, in rhythm with her own breath. She now understood it was this sound that had brought Machine up to the top floor of the building. The sound flooded the apartment. She was too afraid to turn on a light, and went from room to room trying to find the sound, but it was coming from everywhere. It came from the air of her breath. The air was wrapping breath with breath.

Then she knew. She could feel the presence of their bodies, of beating wings from lean-chested birds, lightened from the long journey, with necks stretched in flight. The swans had arrived. Above the building they flew in a gyre that was lit intermittently by strobes of searchlights. All around, soft breast feathers fell lightly. The swans flew through the narrow lane outside the window, and upwards into the darkness, after their eyes had found hers. Their search had ended.