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Copyright © Carmel Bird
2002.
All rights reserved. |
This story was commissioned for an
anthology to be edited by Debra Adelaide for Random House in 2003.
I have given here only the first few hundred words of the text,
and will add the remainder when the book is published.
Maps of the world with Dog
The walls of the bomb shelter were papered with
large Bible-quality maps of many countries, and maps of the whole
world, the world a soft and beautiful place, a place for dreams
and voyages and adventures. The oceans were a dreaming egg-shell
blue, the countries watery pastel shades of biscuit and eau de nil
and faint peach blush. The veins of the rivers traced wandering
spider webs, shaded sides of mountains, and mountain ranges were
fine smudges from a fairy’s feathered paintbrush. This was the
world. Before Pearl Harbour, before Hiroshima, once upon a time,
before Darwin was bombed, before the U-boat got into Sydney
Harbour, once upon a time, just there, just below forty degrees
south.
We called it ‘the trench’ and it was located
at the end of the garden, behind a row of apple trees, across the
path from the fowl house, near the cage where we kept the
love-birds, backing onto a wild stretch of wild mint laneway that
led over the hills and faraway between the clumps of yellow gorse
to the dairy where we used to go to singalong to the cows at
milking time, and to collect white enamel buckets of cherry plums
in summer from a wild witch woman called Dolly. Salty butter she
sold us too, and warm frothy milk fresh from the cowshed in a
scrubbed tin billy with a lid, the money with a note in a pocket
or a hot and curled up hand. Skete came with us at our heels,
romping and bomping along the lane, across the hill, down the
muddy pathway to Dolly’s back door under the huge plum tree.
Skete died in 1943. She was pretty old and when
she died she had nowhere to go because she was a dog. So she moved
into my dreams and I would wake up certain that she was there
beside me licking my face, rolling on her back to be tickled,
surfing in the long grass which lay in glaucous waves all over the
white counterpane. This was the duck egg ocean at the far edge of
the known world where dogs and people went on being born and
living and playing and dying in an almost ordinary way, almost
ordinary but shadowed over by a war in which the guns were
elsewhere but the enemy was within, within the fragile gates of
the dreams and imaginations of children in the trench. The army,
the navy, the air force, the troops, the countrymen, the
countrywomen, the nation, the Commonwealth, the allies were
fighting the enemy, Hitler, the Japs, the Germans. Everything
about the war was on the wireless and in the paper, and postcards
sometimes came from fighting men, men at war. The words I learned
were limited, but one was Churchill, one was London, one was
blitz, one was bomb, one was kill, and another one was die.
Another one was shelter. Somewhere to hide,
somewhere to go, somewhere safe. The bomb shelter. Skete died and
my grandmother died and nothing stopped and the war went on.
It
was 1943 and my grandmother died and my dog died, and my grandmother
had a grave at the Carr Villa cemetery with white china flowers and
crossed hands under a strange glass bell, and Skete had a place
beneath the nectarine tree and my father, a man who was fond of
digging down and building up, had excavated and constructed a bomb
shelter behind the apple tree, next to the fowl house. White china
flowers like icing sugar and white bone crossed hands, wishing you
goodbye. Ivory hands wave farewell, toss a bunch of blue bleu blau
foregt-me-nots and they blow a kiss and the head turns and the hand
waves and the lover, loved one, lovely fades and disappears and is
gone on her journey to the stars of the night sky. My grandmother
had died and gone to heaven to be manufactured, transformed into a
shining, twinkling star high, high in
the night sky where you could go out in your dressing gown
and slippers and look for her, look up at her. Speak, wave, smile. A
twinkle, a sparkle, a glitter, a blaze, a pinpoint of pure and
amazing light. Maybe an angel, such things have happened. Guarding,
maybe she is guarding us, looking out for us, interceding, singing,
loving us forever and ever, over and over again. Flying and floating
and fluttering. She was fabulous, the way she was drifting along in
the evening sky. And her house was just a place we never went to any
more. No more bread buttered at the end of the loaf and sliced off
against the bosom of her apron. No more squatting by the fish pond
looking for the goldfish lurking beneath the lily leaves in the
shadows of the mysteries of the deep dark water, so dangerous you
could fall in and drown in the weeds. Topple over and splash and
fall in and disappear in the depths, green and murky where the
goldfish lurk beneath the lily leaves. No more sitting in the sun,
barefeet, on the step at the back door. No more chasing milky dusty
white moths among the clumping blue frill-crumpled leaves of the
cabbages.
But when Skete went, not so long after, when
Skete died, disappeared, she had nowhere to go because she was a
dog. But she solved this problem by swimming through the pale green
watery waves on the sleeping counterpane, licking and longing for
love, and she also moved into the time just before sleep when I
could hear her running up and down up and down the gravel drive,
paws racing on the golden gravel, her lead a ribbon of flittering
sound on the windswept worries of my drifting mind. I would kneel up
at the window and watch for her, wait for her to fling herself
faithfully along the driveway between the twilight moonlight lady
standard rose bushes, Lorraine Lee, Josephine Bruce, Cecile Brunner,
Madame Hardy. She was not in the bedroom, people said, not in the
driveway, no, people said. I knew where she was. Dashing along just
out of reach, bouncing just beyond the corner of the eye, out of the
line of vision, line of fire, I watched for her, if I could catch a
glimpse. If I could catch a glimpse I could capture her, bring her
back to me. Here Skete, come on Skete, here Skete. Good dog.
Skete was an Australian silky terrier with
long straight hair, slate blue and tan and black, with piercing
black black knowing loving dog-eyes, wise sad mouth, alert,
inquisitive, excitable, adoring. She was the dog and I was her
human, half human. My father would put me in the black metal basket
on the front of his bike, Skete across the back of his neck, and we
would ride off to play cricket. Bliss for me and bliss for Skete,
ecstasy, exultation, the joy of being chosen and small enough to
ride in the basket, on his neck, the wind in our hair, gushing
pleasure, wind flittering in the ribbons of my dress. A feeling of
safety and a sense of danger, and we are going somewhere important
and different and serious and glorious. Going to watch them play
cricket. The Hillside Crescent Cricket Club including B.V.C Cooper
and S.W.J. Wallbridge and A.Playsted (Capt.) – I don’t pretend I
remembered their names – I got them from the photograph I have of
the team, eleven handsome men in cricket flannels with crossed arms
in a photographer’s studio with a backdrop of embossed velvet
curtain and a many-paned window from Cinderella’s ballroom. Some
of them could still be alive I suppose, but most of them would
hitting sixes and taking catches way out there on the heavenly green
of the starry velvet oval. Out for a duck – I always thought that
was a lovely way of talking. I don’t quite know what to do with my
father’s old cricket bat, really. It’s a Four Star, made from
Superior English Willow and is split and bound with string and
strips of very fine leather, almost translucent, like chicken skin.
Maybe it’s rabbit? Probably pigskin. Anyhow, this is the bat that
hit the ball that I saw and heard at the Hillside Crescent Club
circa 1943.
So there we were, me and Skete, Skete flying
through the air, me rolling over and over down the steep slope of
the slippery grass at the edge of the field. I had ginger beer and
anzacs in the clubhouse, men in white running, the sound of the
gleaming red ball on the Superior English Willow. It sails up, up,
will he catch it, yes, no, got it! I wonder now about some men
playing cricket while other men have gone to war. I wonder about
that. There must have been some player missing, don’t you think,
some substitute while we waited for the spin bowler to build the
Burma railway. Maybe he never came back, that bowler. He was far
from my mind as I rolled over and over down the slope with Skete.
Skete flying along above the waving grasses, slippery, smelling of
green juice in the sunlight.
At home we ran round and round the garden
together, in and out of the fruit trees, across the lawn, up the
rose path, round the palm tree, down the drive, through the fernery,
past the playhouse, down to the chook house, into the bomb shelter,
out into the long grass under the apple tree rolling around again in
the sweet blurred blue-green of the grass that reaches up to heaven.
I have my gun.
This is a hefty wooden toy my father made,
called an ak-ak gun, modelled on some weapon used in military combat
out there on some other parallel to the north. My gun will be
protection against the attacks of monstrous enemies, Japs with
enormous grinning mouths filled with the teeth of sharks, as
revealed in drawings and diagrams by my sisters. Germans in smooth
helmets and big boots. These are the enemies from whom we will hide
in the trench, safe and sound and wise and locked and barred and
armed. To the teeth. I carry the gun as I move with my dog around
the terrain.
We also had our gas masks. Importantly ugly,
to be worn for vague reasons of safety and wonderful excitement in
the reality of imaginary warfare. Khaki, grotesque, frightening,
goggle eyes and an elephant’s trunk, is that really me inside
there when I look into the looking glass? I had dresses of romantic
floral silk, smocked in elaborate colours and patterns by my mother,
grub roses, pink and green and blue, exquisite, and knitted
cardigans, and my gas mask. I long for a long lost photograph of my
hand-tinted self, portrait of child in silk dress and white socks
and red shoes and regulation gas mask – long for it to turn up in
somebody’s cellar, attic, kitchen drawer. And they scan it and
send it to me as an attachment, saying hey look at you! Such things
do happen. Someone once sent a picture of me as a little bridesmaid.
And like sometimes in the busy street of some old Spanish city I
have turned my head, just that split second too late to see Skete
jiggling along beside a warm stone wall. Because she had nowhere to
go, long long ago, she is still here there and everywhere, I only
have to pay attention.
Pay attention to the moments between waking and sleep when the
plumes of red sorrel under the pear trees conceal all but the
quivering shadow of the dog, when perfect light-green plates of the
nasturtium leaves, pebbled with drops of shivering water part and
Skete is perfect again in the sunlight, and the petals of calendulas
orange as the sun stick to the soles of my feet. I was in charge of
Skete and she was in charge of me. She had a little rainbow rubber
ball and she would jump up and catch it in her mouth and I could see
that her teeth were very sharp indeed, very very sharp and strong
and accurate, and her little jaw is not so little after all. And she
sits at my feet in the firelight on winter nights, pretending to be
asleep, and the permanent and perpetual wireless is on – London,
blitz, Churchill, blackout – and I roll bandages for soldiers
while my mother and my sisters knit strips with their white knitting
cotton, or they knit balaclavas with their khaki wool, or mittens,
or socks. It is most important that the soldiers’ feet should be
kept warm and dry. Should it become necessary at any time we will
proceed to the bomb shelter where there are blankets and candles and
sand and water and matches and pillows and tins of condensed milk
and corned beef and biscuits, as well as Fowler’s jars of fruit
taken from the garden and preserved. Dark luscious raspberries
bleeding in their own juice behind shiny glass. Charts about bombs
and blackouts and gas masks, how to fit. Shouldn’t Skete have her
own gas mask? Nobody
answers. Blitz, blackout.
The last time I ever visited the old house
where Skete is buried, I stood in my bedroom in the time just after
dusk and I heard her in the drive, running on the gravel, trailing
her skinny lead, happy and purposeful and forever bright. She knew I
was there. I suppose she also knew it was the last time, that there
would be new people who might hear the little running footsteps and
imagine they were the wind rustling in the creeper, the bowling and
blowing of dry leaves on the pathway, the sound of nothing in the
twilight.
Nothing in the twilight is a terrier who can
catch a rainbow rubber ball in mid air in her teeth, or can kill a
rat or a possum or a bandicoot. There was a story that long ago one
of her ancestors had killed a thylacine. On a shelf in a cupboard in
my great aunt’s house there was the bottom jaw of the thylacine to
prove it. Nobody ever commented that the jaw in fact proved nothing,
except that a thylacine had died. The story was that the dog had
killed it, and although without the story the jaw was still amazing,
with the story it was even better. Killed by a terrier just like
Skete. Surely not. Amazing. It was a young small tiger, but still.
People would look at the jaw and hold it heavy on the flat of their
hand and stare at it and look at Skete and shake their head and say
yes it was fantastic wasn’t it, that little dog. The thylacine,
they say, was that a dog, or a wolf, or a tiger, or what? A sort of
wolf, maruspial wolf. Pin-cushion. History meets fantasy meets
science in due course.
The lower jaw of the thylacine is dark, the
colour of mahogany – why this is I don’t know – and it forms a
curving hollow, rimmed with teeth, and into the hollow is set a high
tight cushion, puffed up, covered in white bridal satin, stuck with
pearl-handled pins and one long amber hatpin. There are dark spots
on white at the end where the bottom jaw was once hinged to the
skull. Where the satin meets the bone they have added a trimming of
thick decorative lace, and have tied a bow, neat and finished. The
tiger’s jawbone is a long long way from home, far from the
wilderness, tucked away in its bridal finery in an old lady’s
cabinet of curiosities where it shares a little world with a cowrie
shell shiny and big, milk white spotted like a dream quoll or
pardalote, milky blue around the rim, snugly housed in a hump-back
tin, lined with burgundy velvet. Hold the cowrie to your ear and you
will hear the sounds of the sighing sea, the woosh of the whaling
ocean, the thunder of the waves, thoughts of the wandering moon.
There is scrimshaw carved by sailors, images of tall ships, of
mermaids, of fish and of strange birds, rippling waters and puffing
winds. The nautilus is paper fragile, a whisper, and lies on a
saucer, left in its natural state, wonderful enough to say, this is
a nautilus shell, and people say, ah yes, a nautilus shell.
But the curious marvel of the thylacine is not
only that this one was killed by an ancestor of rainbow-ball Skete,
but that the species has gone extinct, and extinct is a word with
such a fatal ring that when you hold a piece of a thylacine in your
hand, even if it has been turned into a pin-cushion, you feel the
charge, the power of loss, of creation here today and gone tomorrow
and never to return. Not for the thylacine the firmament of heaven,
blinding flash of starry winking angels. Not for him the undulating
waves of downy counterpane where dogs can play forever. The
thylacine has gone in sorrow and in violence and in guilt and
fantasy, and has lodged in its own special place of science and
imagination and hope and an amazing bright tomorrow that I will look
at shortly. Extinct animals join a special company, like a tragic
ghostly zoo where they are all extinct together. The old thylacine
that went in 1936, and the Florida dusky seaside sparrow, a recent
one that went extinct in 1987. That’s another story about habitat,
and the Kennedy Space Center, and the highway to Disney World. Then
there is the very sad romantic history of Spix’s macaw, a blue
parrot which is almost extinct. I have read statistics that give the
numbers of species that go out of existence every day, but I can’t
be sure how accurate they would be. For someone who grew up on the
fortieth south parallel the word ‘extinct’ has a particularly
resonant ring, for the history of Indigenous Tasmanians is one of
the attempt, considered by some to be successful, of white colonials
to eradicate a race of native people. If you are interested in
tragedy, there is one for you to follow.
But to return to the thylacine and its bright
future. I am heading here for the edges of the cloning debate. Since
the qualified failure of the cat-cloning experiment in the US I
haven’t heard much about people wanting to clone their pets. But I
wonder how it would be if I had, to put it crudely been able to get
a more or less identical clone of Skete over and over again. If I
could take you by the hand and open the back door and call, here
Skete, and she came and you could see what I see when the lights go
down and she rises up in the grasslands of the old white
counterpane. How would that be? That would be put different spin on
things, wouldn’t it then? If the real cloned Skete could run and
yodel up and down the gravel drive, what would become of the ghostly
Skete, what would she do with herself? Questions, questions.
News of the thylacine, a striped wolf-like
animal with a marsupial pouch, was first recorded by Europeans when
the crew of Abel Tasman’s ship saw footprints resembling those of
a tiger when they landed on Van Diemen’s Land in 1642. Early on
the animal was called a hyena, and before long there was a bounty on
its head. Naturalists became interested in the exotic animals of the
world, the thylacine being one of these. The first one went off to
Regent’s Park zoo in London in 1850, and I think it is nice to
note that the traffic in human beings from England to Van Diemen’s
Land stopped soon after that, in 1853. It’s a sad sad story, the
story of the thylacine. I never saw the last one ever, the one in
the Hobart zoo, but my father did, and he said it was very sad. He
thought it should have been a rather noble animal, but it was lonely
and abject and beaten and caged, and its fighting spirit was long
since gone. He said.
I wonder what kind of a fight was put up by
the one whose pin-cushion jaw lies in the cupboard with the
scrimshaw and the nautilus. The image of the thylacine haunts
Tasmania today, for it is found on many logos, marking the bright
red garbage bins of Launceston, marking in green the Department of
Tourism, on buses, postage stamps, Coats of Arms, and alcohol. It
appears, as is only proper, on television, a strangely wooden
replica moving through a strangely tropical forest, advertising
beer. There are people who are convinced this animal lives on in
secret somewhere in the Tasmanian wilderness, and they devote their
lives to finding it, to proving that extinction has not, after all,
taken place. Clearly it haunts the heart, dogs the imagination,
inspires scientists to undertake amazing and wonderful experiments.
Putting up no fight when it died out in the Hobart zoo, it now has
become a tissue issue, probably putting up no fight against its own
resurrection. For some scientist in Sydney have begun to work on the
DNA from young thylacines long ago dead and pickled in alcohol.
Amazing? Yes. People are so incredibly clever, the thylacine is
putty in their shaping hands. Hoping to establish a breeding
population and to bring back the tiger, bring back the creature
whose claws the sailors saw in 1642. Turn back the hands of time,
roll back the sands of time.
The place where we buried Skete was in the
heart-shaped piece of earth underneath a nectarine tree, where the
sun slants in beneath the branches, and a few years later, when I
had become obsessed with tulips, my father gave me that plot for a
garden. Skete is here, deep deep down, you won’t disturb her. She
nourishes the soil. And I did not disturb her. No sign of her was
ever found, not that I was really looking, for her spirit and her
body and her soul and her lead flittered nearly every night up and
down the golden gravel of the drive, and her dear pink tongue played
often in my ear as the stars came out in pinpoints across the sky.
And the tulip bulbs were fat little onions in the palm of my hand,
and they were covered with wonderful transparent brown paper skin.
The green tips broke the soil, pushed up and out and gradually the
furled green bud, soft as angel skin, shyly appeared sheathed in
mysterious dusty misty green wrappings of leafy spears. Until the
day when the stems were tall enough, and the buds began to split,
and the cups began to open and there were the petals, the finest
scarlet silk, kisses damp in the dappled light. Deep in the centres
were the splashes of clear yellow, and there was a pale green-white
cross on a stalk, and black black dusty stamens, like velvet,
quivering. It was a miracle, or like a miracle. It was nature,
really, but I held my breath and felt like part of something
marvellous. I could put the bulbs into the ground, near Skete, and
they would turn into Chinese silk, butterflies, real Dutch tulips
right there under the nectarine tree.
The world, after all, is a soft and beautiful
place, full of rivers and mountains and dreams. Voyages, adventures.
We never had to use the bomb shelter, but when I went home recently
for the last time, before handing everything including Skete over to
new owners, I went in there and I found one of the books of charts
giving information about bombs and gas masks and so on. I can tell
you that a General Purpose Bomb gives an explosion which bursts the
case of the bomb into fragments or splinters which are shot out in
all directions at a high velocity. Unimpeded splinters may travel at
a distance of 600 to 1,200 yards. Debris may also be projected
violently from the surface struck.
The
maps of the world had disappeared long ago. Just as well. They would
have made no sense.
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