Jeff stuffs and mounts animals; Australian natives, birds mainly, for sale in his shop in the city. People tend to think mounting is the final stage, but it is the first thing he thinks of. How will one leg down, another up, change that line, that one there between breast and beak? Between tail feather and wing feather.
The old man, when it was still the old man’s business, would harangue customers out of the too-small-for-this shop and onto the street, getting them to stand with arms outstretched looking up.
Now stand on one foot. See! See! You are seeing what I mean now.
The birds don’t come cheap. A fully stuffed and mounted black cockatoo, Calyptorhynchus banksii, fetches Jeff thousands. But out of this comes the rent, the electric, the raw product. He is an industry of one. A day off means no money coming through the door. But he’s comfortable and there is always cash-in-hand work from his regular customers. They call him; from the all-night animal hospital with a dead pet; drunk at dinner parties on speakerphone, with an I-know-just-the-guy tone in their voices; from home, when the older piece pulled down off the mantel is broken by fat fingers, the number fetched from the gold sticker he places under each plinth.
He does these jobs at home, out the back in his shed. Jigging them into a cut-to-fit wooden cradle on the passenger side of his '92 Toyota for the return trip. Larger animals are laid down in a wooden box in the back that his dead, unstuffed wife called the Corolla coffin. Once, delivering a bull mastiff, Canis lupus familiaris, he was pulled over by a booze bus on Ballarat Road, the young blower-wielding constable searching for the right blokey, jokey note to leave him on, but coming up dry as Jeff pulled out into traffic. The dog’s glass eyeballs riding the warm night air past recently planted palms. He could make life easier for himself and remove the passenger seats but they stay, along with Karol’s seat cover, the black beads where her arse sat worn to a shine.
He doesn’t drive into the city to the shop. Instead, in all weather, he puts on his black Akubra and walks in, the sound of the seven-forty-five news carrying him out the front door. The walk to work and the doubles tennis he plays each Sunday with his oldest friend Quan keep him fit. They play at the courts just down the road from his house and it was on the way down there this morning that he saw it, the kookaburra, Dacelo novaeguineae, lying next to the path. It was still warm to the touch. It looked perfect. Even the eyes, the first to be attacked by ants, by bugs, were still clean. Lucid. He often found birds on this walk. Especially this time of year. Long hot windy days meant that birds would drop, sometimes en masse, from the sky. A month ago there had been a pair of red wattlebirds, Anthochaera carunculata, thrown improbably, uselessly, just above the low tide mark of the river and set on by small crabs. A year ago there was a juvenile galah, Eolophus roseicapilla, with one claw missing. It now stood one-legged in his kitchen staring out at the fairy possum, Gymnobelideus leadbeateri, that guarded the bills on top of the fridge. But nothing like this. He looked around. A pair of female joggers smartphone-ear-plugged came Lorna-Janeing by. He stepped over, shielding the bird from them, and feeling a bit stupid for doing so, gazed off, over at the racetrack across the river. When they had passed he dropped down, popping a fresh tube of tennis balls and emptying them into his bag. He held the bird for a moment, looking into its eyes. It reminded him of another bird. On a mantelpiece, from back before he and Karol were married.
He’d grown up in Sunshine West. His first jobs were in pubs; in wreckers’ yards picking scrap; at a place that put law documents onto microfilm where he and an Aboriginal bloke called Sydney stood at a desk building a pile of pulled staples between them. Their boss, short sleeved and sweaty, walking in malt-lunch-red-faced, his eyebrows biting down on his front teeth as he joked.
A bridge too far Sydney, a bridge too far.
Jeff picked up some work at the markets putting little stickers on limes, on lemons; another time he had to pull stickers off mangoes, something to do with fruit fly, making a skull-sized sticker ball in a day, which he drop punted over the car park fence on his way out. At twenty-three he jumped on a container ship and ended up in Singapore, then another one through to the gulf. On the train trip through Eastern Europe he grew, then shaved a goatee. He landed in London and ended up pulling beers at a pub in Camden before a girl dragged him north to Newcastle, another lugging him up to Glasgow where his ripped hem jacket did nothing against the cold as he fed coins into a box in the hall which doled out power—twenty-nine minutes at a time to their shitty studio. They slept on a set of blankets folded over on the floor, a skip-found couch with an armrest missing sitting against the other wall. She would steal books, telling him how stupid he was for not knowing the authors’ names, for getting the pronunciation wrong.
Kaymus. Sartra. MarKweeze.
He stayed long enough to get a letter from his mum written on the cream and pink stationery that sat underneath their phone in the hall.
Would he come, would he please come home. Dad is sick.
They’d had a whip around and if he could make it to the embassy in London there should be enough for a flight home. Reading it he could hear a couple arguing out on the street. When he looked out there was no one, just rubbish stacked against doorways. He kicked the coin box off the wall in the hall, passed his neighbour’s slit-opened door and went downstairs. He jammed the box under a double-parked lorry’s wheels, it took off, crunch-busting it open, sending coins skittering. A man walked past as he pocketed the coins.
Why didn’t I think of that?
A month later, he was sick of the hospital. Sick of the tubes and the slippered feet everywhere. The being ignored by nurses whose eyes lit up each time a particular young doctor stethoscoped in. His hair parted clean. So he headed off towards Footscray Station looking for food and walked into the first place he saw. He grabbed a window seat and finger-point ordered. The young waiter with a Bulldogs tattoo laughing, yelling to the kitchen:
One faux soup!
His dad got better. The stroke was a small one, dragging the left hand side of his lip, leaking spit onto his collar. One wrist sat noticeably lower than the other and when he walked it was with a dragging limp. Shoelaces became a pain in the arse, and when he turned up with a pair of Velcro Dunlops his dad gurgled out:
Retard shoes.
His mum sat by his side with an idiotic worry-smile as the clean-part-doctor explained to him that it was down to the drink and that he could either give it up or die pretty soon. A month later he was out, unable to work and on the disability.
Jeff kept coming back to the restaurant. His dad’s coming home was his moving out. The winter sun through the restaurant window, the soup and the tea warmed his hands better than the ripped-floorboard-fire could at the squat he landed in West Footscray with a couple of young punks and a vegetarian girl who would only eat the pastry from the outside of sausage rolls. Quan would pull up at the table next to him and portion out lemons, chilli, Thai basil. He dossed around, half-heartedly looked for work, half-heartedly thought about maybe, maybe trying for the entrance exam and giving uni a crack, or TAFE at least. He went drinking with old mates. They’d hang shit on him for his hair, for the rough paperbacks he shoved into his back pocket for the train ride home.
Kaymus. Sartra. MarKweeze.
He played bass in a band—Squeezebox, who supported Thug once, only once. He was playing a gig at the squat, a benefit for something, West Papuan Independence maybe, when leaving the bathroom with stolen beer he bumped into her. A week later she walked into Quan’s place. The Age folded to an unfinished crossword square on his table.
You guys were pretty shit.
He could hear a laugh let out from the back.
I mean not the worst, but pretty shit.
He gave her the pull-up-a-seat-wave. She reached over and tugged on his matted hair.
And whatever this is has to go.
Karol had grown up in Williamstown, where she still lived with her parents who’d come out sometime in the mid-fifties. Karol worked at the CES in Footscray. He would meet her outside and walk her the hour home, U-turning at the gate. On his way back during summer, when the hill’s hoists were fat with clothes he would snowdrop in, grabbing barely damp clothes, leaving his old, unwashed ones behind. On Sundays they would jump the fence at Whitten Oval and sit behind the goals—the girl in the sensible shoes between the punk and the young Vietnamese kid eating chips and Olympic Doughnuts.
I don’t know why you yell out “ball” all the time.
What’s not to get? It’s short for holding the ball.
What, not “tackle” then?
Karol, as they said to me when I first got here, when they run that flag up the pole make sure you stand up like everyone else.
It took him a year to see the inside of her house. He turned up late on a Sunday afternoon. She’d been away in Sydney visiting a newly arrived cousin and missed the news—his mum was dead. Her dad answered the door wearing a thick black apron with a set of needle-nose pliers poking out the front pocket.
Why is there a boy, I think it’s a boy, crying all over my front step?
They went for a walk down to the beach. She rubbed his back, looking out across the low tide out into the bay. A gull walked over, anticipating a scrap, and coming up dry turned and faced the setting sun with them. A week later they sat at the back of a church as his camphor-scent suited dad spoke to the sixty or so people present.
Crocodile fucking tears.
Even a crocodile has got to cry sometime mate.
A year later, lonely, his dad decided to sell up. He was going to move into a caravan at the side of his brother’s place out near Altona. When they tried to move the furniture from inside his parents’ house, the side table from the hallway fell apart, scraps of pink and cream paper falling out. The back eaten out by white ants. Quan swung a sledgehammer, breaking up the shittiness of it all, and tossing it into the skip they’d rented for the day. Karol left after his dad yelled at her, something about not cleaning the walls in the bathroom right. It was the first time he’d ever hit him. Rabbit punching his crippled guts hard and crumpling him into the hall. His body folding up like an insect as he pissed himself, falling backwards, the air whistling out of his mouth. He went to hit him again, but stopped. Jeff caught Karol a block away. They walked for a bit longer before he realised that Quan was not following. He doubled back to find them in the kitchen, his dad in new pants, both of them drinking a cup of tea.
I guess if you are going to dress like a girl, you might as well hit like one too.
Good to see being a dickhead runs in the family.
He went around to her house for dinner every Sunday after that. Her parents argued, but not in the chip-plate, broke-plate, broken-window way he was used to. Her father Pavel sitting in the lounge, his work thickened fingers wrapped around a small glass of vodka as he sung out to Karol’s mum.
Mister bloody big shot here. I leave Czechoslovakia with a PhD in biology and the only bloody question he has for me is when this bird will be cooked.
They didn’t own a TV either, instead there was a piano next to the fireplace, surrounded by books. In French. In German. Books on anatomy. On top of the piano stood an owl, a boobook, Ninox boobook, and a kookaburra, Dacelo novaeguineae, eyes clear.
He knelt down and held the bird in his hand. Its feathers, beak and claws all virgin, he gently eased it into the tennis tube; a hitch—its wing, near the shoulder cracked clean and broken, but nothing that could not be fixed.