It was the unbending Puritan in Epona who wrenched Colette’s
The Vagabond
from under her daughter’s mattress, opened it, saw the words, “voluptuous body,” and deliberately cracked the book’s spine so that it broke in two halves. Epona then shredded the pages, spotted with age and smelling of damp, which had managed to endure more than ninety years in a world now absolutely hostile to books.
Bird Girl still feels sick and furious whenever she thinks about this desecration. What her mother did that day was barbaric. Bird Girl had paid dearly for that little book with her own blood. That was the price demanded by the black marketeer who set up his street stall one day, and disappeared the next. He was a remarkably tall man, and as thin and straight as the stem of a wine glass. He wore a battered fedora pulled low on his brow. He had a sensual mouth and hands so huge and restless that at first she thought she might have to secure
The Vagabond
with some slickly delivered sexual favours. But he wanted blood.
He had observed how keen she was. It was the only book on his table, cleverly camouflaged by a heap of gauzy scarves. So Bird Girl’s first glimpse of Colette’s powdered face, with those penetrating eyes blazing like lanterns, was through the filmy mesh of swathes of Prussian blue and magenta. She checked first to make sure there were no EYE officials hanging about, then picked the book up, riffled through its tender pages, and saw phrases that made her quiver with desire to possess this story whole. She knew at once that she would adore the heroine, Renée Néré, who chose to perform half-naked on the music hall stages of France rather than marry a wealthy man who adored her.
She had to read more — right away. “Can I look at this behind your stall?” she asked.
He frowned and rubbed his nose, before beckoning Bird Girl behind his display of jumbled oddments and tawdry treasures. She sat on an upturned wooden box, obscured by the open door of his van, reading greedily here and there of how Renée chafed at the idea of a rose-smothered domesticity. What Renée wanted above all was to be amongst “the wanderers, the lords of the earth.”
It was at that moment that the idea of taking to the road first struck Bird Girl. In Renée Néré, she immediately recognized an alter ego. Renée was besotted with looking, and with possessing the marvels of the earth through her eyes: rippling fields of gold and crimson, the sapphire sea, the silvery wings of white owls. Bird Girl knew she would probably never see a white owl, except perhaps stuffed, in a glass case. Yet sitting behind that junk stall, her whole self seemed to quicken in answer to a ghostly call. She did not know why it had never struck her before that writing was what she wanted most to do herself. But the realization came in that instant, prompted by the probing eyes of Colette’s portrait on the book cover, and by her heroine’s urgent need to look so intently at the world. “Blood,” the stall man in the battered hat whispered to her. She could hear he was getting impatient. “Two vials for the book. If you’re clean.” This meant Bird Girl had to show him the encoded card the EYE made everyone carry, registering your blood type, genetic weaknesses, and viral load, if any.
She produced her card and he studied it closely. What if his syringe was recycled? She wanted the book badly, but she didn’t want to risk death for it. She was lucky. He was well-equipped. From the back of his van he brought out a brand-new syringe in its sealed paper packet, straight from the manufacturer. The vials he removed from a leather case looked equally pristine. The blood business was apparently quite a productive sideline for him, but Bird Girl chose not to speculate about where hers might end up.
“Good colour,” he said, as they both watched the dark-red fluid slide inside the tube. Bird Girl clenched her fist and thought of Renée Néré. When they were done, the stall keeper even offered her a clump of sterilized cotton to press against the puncture.
He shook her hand at the conclusion of their transaction, which surprised her. “Enjoy it, kid,” he said. “These little bird books are precious few these days.”
At first Bird Girl thought he had read the book himself and was referring to the passage about the twilit silvery owl. Then she saw he was tapping the little orange ellipse at the base of the book’s spine. Inside the ellipse was the outline of a white-bodied bird, with stumpy rigid black wings and webbed feet. Its tiny black-and-white head pointed upward and to the left, so that one got the impression it was regarding something quizzically, at a distance. A questioning, solid, assertive little bird, with its stiff wings and wide-planted feet.
Bird Girl must have looked quizzical herself. “Penguin,” explained the stall-owner. “Penguin paperbacks. Used to be millions of them. Good literature affordable to the masses. Gone now, most of them. Burned. Ploughed under. Shredded. Doomed. Like the bird, when you think of it.”
“What happened to the bird?” she asked.
“Waddlers. Didn’t fly. Antarctica. Ice melted. Too hot. Expired.”
She wondered then if he spoke in those terse, truncated phrases because English wasn’t his birth language. It struck her that perhaps his speech patterns had come to resemble the bric-a-brac on his table: a miscellany of objects, all of which could slip easily into a pocket.
She never saw him again. But she often thought of his odd, eloquent elegy for book and bird.
“Filthy self-indulgence,” was how Epona described
The Vagabond
, the day she found it hidden under Bird Girl’s mattress. Such a delicate little book to meet with such a destructive force. What a pathetic sight Bird Girl must have looked: on her knees, attempting to patch together countless fragments of old paper. As she saw it, her mother had mutilated a woman of warm and abundant charms, with an amazing gift for luscious imagery and astringent insights. In fact, Bird Girl regarded Renée as almost a sacred being, her personal Prometheus. She had put a fire in Bird Girl’s head that made her want to wander the world, and to write about what she saw. Rest in peace, Renée Néré, whispered Bird Girl, as she gave up the futile task. She sat on her floor, and cried so much a wet patch spread across her lap.
She did not hear her mother come into the room; there was only her startled awareness of Epona’s sleek, high-polished black boots, the right foot tapping. When she was a child, the sight of that tapping foot could turn her stomach. Bird Girl could not recall exactly when she had stopped fearing her mother’s anger. On the other hand, she could never entirely let go of the awe her mother inspired in her. But this time, not even awe could hold her back. Bird Girl sprang to her feet and let her fury speak.
She hated having to remember the details. Sometimes when she pictured them facing each other — Epona with her shingled hair and body encased in black leather, her daughter in the mint julep see-through mini-dress with her zebra leggings — it seemed a pair of blind and questing primordial beings was speaking through them. Two of the ancient Titans perhaps, loose and restless in the universe and seeking a likely host, found it in the sore wound opened between the leader of The New Amazons and her only child.
The words that came out of their mouths were coarse and brutal and cursed, as they were cursed by speaking them.
“Trash,” Epona said, as she ground the tender fragments of
The Vagabond
with her boot heel. “Trash that inspires you to dress like a slut.”
She touched Bird Girl in a way she never had before, with absolute contempt, her fingernail flicking up the hem of her daughter’s dress, and catching briefly on the close-knit fabric of her tights. Her mother might as well have spat in her face.
And so it began: their final battle made of words: mutilating words that left a wreckage so total no forgiveness or atonement was possible.
“Slut,” her mother called her, “Degenerate. Disgrace.”
“Freak,” Bird Girl called her mother. “Heartless. Maimed dyke.”
Such cruelty issued from their mouths, and who or what directed them? What abandoned tutelary spirit, maddened by long neglect? It was not that Bird Girl was trying to evade responsibility for the scurrilous words she consciously formed and spoke. Yet on that grim afternoon she and her mother had hardened into extremes of what they were, and all that lay between them was ripe for death.
When she had finally gone back seeking a rapprochement, the Armoury had mocked her with its emptiness. Perhaps she would never know who had stormed The New Amazons’ stronghold, and whether her mother and her band of warriors were alive or dead. This ignorance of her mother’s fate was also a curse.
In the self-reviling days of her convalescence, Bird Girl was haunted by images of her mother strung up like an animal in an abattoir. Her own unforgivable words would invade her, like sharpened hooks that tore at her breast wound. Her grieving then for Lola would send her nearly deranged. Lola had sacrificed herself, not realizing how despicable, degraded, and worthless Bird Girl actually was.
If it hadn’t been for Chandelier, Bird Girl wonders if she might have tried to do away with herself. How could she ever have thought him a bit dense, albeit gentle-natured? She is still astounded by the treasure trove of knowledge he brought to comfort and distract her during the worst of her clawing grief and self-hatred. It was a marvel really, just how much Chandelier had packed into his small head. He was one of those rare people who could simply scan a page and have its entire content memorized. He knows rather more about reptiles than she’s interested in hearing. But he has stored away as well, the plots of countless myths and dramas and novels — and glory of glories — some poetry.
During her recovery, the two of them evolved a game of tossing one another poetic words or snippets to see what ideas or odd filaments of thought they might attract. “Darkling” was one of those words. Bird Girl had learned it from the Fool in
King Lear
:
So, out went the candle, and we were left darkling.
She had concentrated on every word the Fool spoke in that play. She loved the way he stood back and commented with such barbed wit and compassion on the old king’s disintegration, and on human greed, folly, and betrayal. Bird Girl always imagined the Fool as small and young and fluidly acrobatic. She also thought of him as brave and blithe. He gave people the bitter draught of truth to drink down, but made it palatable with humour. She often wished that Lear’s Fool, or someone like him, could be one of their company. So she was pleased to discover something of his mercurial spirit in Chandelier as she came to know him better.
When she spoke her word “darkling,” Chandelier tossed it back to her in triplicate. He knew a poem called “The Darkling Thrush,” about a frail and aged bird who chose to “fling his soul upon the growing gloom” of a killing winter.
He knew “Darkling, I listen,” from “Ode to a Nightingale.” The young poet who wrote this praise-song to the bird was dying of a wasting lung disease, Chandelier told her. That was why he spoke of being “half in love with easeful Death.” When the poet hears the nightingale pouring forth its soul in ecstasy, he recognizes there could be no more perfect moment for him to die. “Darkling, I listen.” Bird Girl thought the poet used the word to enfold himself: like a protective cloak against the dank night air.
The third “darkling” Chandelier tossed her was grim and chill, like dirty water flung in one’s face. She recognized their own situation right away in the lines he recited. This was
their
time, as they were now, even though Chandelier told her the poem had been written hundreds of years ago:
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night
.
It is all still the same, Bird Girl thinks: the struggle and flight, and the clash of ignorant armies. The only difference is the EYE, which watched everything from its grand remove, and orchestrated more than any of us could ever know. Although she detested the endless, dismal forest, at least it freed them from the EYE’s eternal surveillance and control.
A picture comes to her of the six of them: she and Chandelier and Harry, Lucia, Candace, and the Outpacer in flight from the City, labouring to cross the poet’s darkling plain. They look far, far away, recognizable only by their respective shapes silhouetted against a pale green sky. These little shadow-figures struggling onward look so minuscule from that distant perspective and so obviously weary that the understanding comes to her. They are “the darklings.”
She thinks then, as she often does, of the smooth glazed features of the masks from the theatre box. She is puzzled still by their huge, protruding foreheads that look oddly wrong and sore — and yet right somehow — for their stern and oracular faces. She wonders what obscure function or secret lies behind their wide-open mouths and the bulges above their eyes, and whether it might help the darklings in their journey.
She was studying her own mask, searching its coldly enigmatic gaze, when the Outpacer rushed in with his news about the camp of silk tents. He’d done a quick reconnoitre, he told them breathlessly, and seen women in long skirts, children, and a tethered goat. “A goat,” he repeated excitedly. “Do you see the significance? If they keep a goat, they’re probably peaceable.”
Candace, Harry, and Chandelier all looked at him stunned. It took Bird Girl a moment to realize this was because the Outpacer has let down his cowl. He had at last exposed his face to all of them. She did not immediately notice because since his hood fell away in Lola’s bedroom she has continued to visualize his face even through the shadowy burlap.
“I am sorry,” he told them, “to show myself to you so abruptly. But how else was it to be done?”
Even Candace, whose mouth still hung open, seemed to recognize this as a rhetorical question. Harry nodded and cleared his throat, a sound gruff enough to jar them all out of their stupor and into action. Bird Girl’s skin was buzzing, as was her head. She presumed the others felt what she was feeling: curiosity shot through with apprehension; hopefulness tinged with foreboding. What if the encampment was not what it appeared? What if they were walking into an ambush?