THE BLUEBIRD CAFE
Chapter One
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Copyright © Carmel Bird 1990. All rights reserved
The upstairs window of the Bluebird Cafe in the Tasmanian ghost
town of Copperfield reflects only the sky, and above this window
the gable rises to a point on top of which is a spindle of turned
wood, painted blue. If you look up at the spindle and half close
your eyes, especially at dusk, the spindle looks like a woman.
Bedrock Mean, the only human being for miles around, still lives
in the cafe where she mourns for her young daughter Lovelygod
who vanished from her bedroom in the middle of the night on the
seventeenth of August 1970, ten years to the day before the baby
Azaria Chamberlain vanished from her bed in a tent in Ularu.
'It seemed to me to be a night like any other night,' Bedrock
says. 'It was cold, but the nights are often cold in Copperfield.
The interior of the forest around here is dim and moist, for sunlight
can not penetrate the thick foliage, and the forest floor lies
still and soft and mossy like the bed of a silent giant. Beneath
the canopy of the great myrtles are soft fetoons of fungi; in
the dark grey-green of this place where the fronds and swords
and slow coils of ferns criss and cross and curl like some memory
more than half forgotten in the mind, scarlet, spongy caps gleam
in rotting crevices, and the silence of the secret glades is the
silence of a nightmare. In some places the forest floor is false,
a laughing trick of the land, a trap.
I hear the silence of the forest reaching out to Lovelygodand
calling her in the middle of the night from her bed. In her white
nightgown she runs through the back garden past rows of vegetables
and fruit trees until she comes to the wire gate that opens onto
the gravel path leading away, away into the forest. On bare feet
she runs into the thickest darkness of the smoky labyrinth; she
goes where none but darting furry animals may go. In and in and
in she skips until she reaches the false floor of the phantom
forest, treads on the magic carpet of sweet, poisonous matting,
and slips through the surface and is gone. No ruffle, no ripple,
no sound can be detected outside the forest.
'When Lovelygod was born I fancied she had wings. Strange. Yet
even if she had wings they would not save her; she could flutter
forever and ever in the cage the earth has made for her. Yet as
long as I live, and as long as Lovelygod is missing, I will never
give up hope.
'When I was a child myself I used to go past a haberdashery shop
and in the window there was a pair of red shoes, a child's pink
smocked dress, and a white satin ribbon tied in a bow. Next to
these things was a tinted photograph of a five-year-old girl and
a handwritten notice that told you Shirley Thompson set off one
day all be herself to visit her grandmother who lived two streets
away. Between Shirley's house and her grandmother's, Shirley vanished,
leaving no trace. As far as I know she has never been found. Her
mother put the photo and the clothes which were the same as the
clothes Shirley had been wearing, in the window of the shop in
the hope that somebody who knew something would see them. I was
told that Mrs Thompson kept Shirley's room exactly as it would
have been if Shirley had been there, and in the front window of
the house she always left a light for Shirley. I didn' t understand
it then, but now I know that the hope is unending because the
guilt is unending -- if Mrs Thompson had not let Shirley go out
by herself, Shirley would not have disappeared.
'If Lovelygod had not been sleeping alone in the room at the end
of the veranda with the windows wide open, free to roam, free
to be stolen, free to disappear, she would be here today. The
mistake was mine; the guilt is mine; I will never give up hope.'