Collected Stories

Exotic Pleasures

1.

Lilly Danko had a funny face, but the actual point where one said “this is a funny face” rather than “this is a pretty face” was difficult to establish. Certainly there were little creases around the eyes and small smile lines beside the mouth, yet they had not always been there and she had always had a funny face. It was a long face with a long chin and perhaps it was the slight protuberance of her lower lip that was the key to it, yet it was not pronounced and could be easily overlooked and to make a fuss about it would be to ignore the sparkle in her pale-blue eyes. Yet all of this is missing the point about faces which are not static things, a blue this, a long that, a collection of little items like clues in a crossword puzzle. For Lillian Danko had a rubber face which squinted its eyes, pursed its lips, wrinkled its nose and expressed, with rare freedom, the humours of its owner.

At the age of eight she had written in a school composition that she wished, when fully grown, to take the profession of clown. And although she had long since forgotten this incident and the cold winter’s afternoon on which she had written it, she would not now, at the age of thirty, sitting in a boiling old Chevrolet at the Kennecott Interstellar Space Terminal, have found anything to disown.

Here she was, knitting baby clothes in a beaten-up car, while Mort, dressed up in a suit like a travelling salesman, walked the unseen corridors inside the terminal in search of a job as a miner on one of the company’s planets, asteroids or moons. She was not likely to share any jokes on the subject with Mort, who was stretched as tight as a guitar string about to break. And she wished, as she had found herself wishing more and more lately, that her father had been alive to share the idiocies of the world with.

She would have astonished him with the news, made him laugh and made him furious all at once. Here, she would have said, we have the romance of space and pointed to the burnt ugly hulk of an interstellar cargo ship lowering itself onto the earth like a dirty old hen going down on its nest. Space had yielded no monsters, no Martians, no exotic threats or blessings. The ship roaring bad-temperedly on the platform would contain nothing more beautiful than iron ingots, ball-bearings, and a few embittered workers who were lucky enough to have finished their stint in the untidy backyards of space.

It wasn’t funny unless you made it funny and Lilly, four months pregnant, with twenty dollars in her purse, a car that needed two hundred dollars and a husband who was fighting against three million unemployed to get a job, had no real choice but to make it funny.

“C’est la bloody guerre,” she said, holding up her knitting and reflecting that two hundred miles of dusty roads had not done a lot for the whiteness of the garment.

Fuck it, she thought, it’ll have to do.

When the face appeared in the open window by her shoulder she got such a fright she couldn’t remember whether she’d said “fuck” out loud or just thought it.

“I beg your pardon,” she said to the bombed-out face that grinned crookedly through the window.

“Pardon for what?” He was young and there was something crazy about him. His black eyes looked as sleepy as his voice sounded. He was neglected and overgrown with wild curling black hair falling over his eyes and a bristling beard that was just catching up to an earlier moustache.

“I thought I may have said something.”

“If you said something,” he said, “I didn’t hear it. I am definitely at least half deaf in one ear.”

“I probably didn’t say it then,” she said carefully, wondering if he was going to rob her or if he was just crazy. “Are you looking for a lift?”

“Not me.” He stood back from the windows so she could see his white overalls with their big Kennecott insignia. He was tall and thin like a renegade basketball player. “This,” he gestured laconically to include the whole area of car park, administration building, docking platforms and dry parched earth, “this is my home. So,” he paused for a moment as if what he had said had made him inexplicably sad, “so I don’t need a lift, thank you.”

“Any jobs in there?”

“Let’s say there are an awful lot of people in there waiting to be told no.”

Lilly nodded. “Yeah, well …”

“You want to see something?”

“Well, that depends what it is.”

He walked smoothly back to a little white cleaner’s trolley he had left marooned a few yards from the car and trundled it back, whistling like one who carries rare gifts.

“If anyone comes,” he whispered, “you’re asking me directions, OK?”

“OK.”

“This,” he reached a large hand into the white cart, “is really something special.”

He was not exaggerating. For what he now pushed through the window and onto her lap was the most beautiful bird that Lilly Danko had ever dreamed might be possible, more exquisite and delightful than a bird of paradise, a flamingo, or any of the rare and beautiful species she had ever gazed at in picture books. It was not a large bird, about the size of a very big pigeon, but with a long supple neck and a sleek handsome head from which emerged a strong beak that looked just like mother of pearl. Yet such was the splendour of the bird that she hardly noticed the opaline beauty of the beak, or the remarkable eyes which seemed to have all the colours of the rainbow tucked into a matrix of soft brown. It was the bird’s colouring that elicited from her an involuntary cry. For the feathers that ran from its smooth head to its graceful tail were of every blue possibly imaginable. Proud Prussian blue at the head then, beneath a necklace of emerald green, ultramarine and sapphire which gave way to dramatic tail feathers of peacock blue. Its powerful chest revealed viridian hidden like precious jewels in an aquamarine sea.

When she felt the first pulse of pure pleasure she imagined that it came from the colours themselves and later when she tried to explain this first feeling to Mort she would use the word “swoon”, savouring the round smooth strangeness of the word.

“Don’t it feel nice when you touch it?”

“Oh yes.”

And even as she answered she realized that it was not the colours that gave such pleasure, but that the feeling was associated with stroking the bird itself. “It’s like having your back rubbed.”

“Better.”

“Yes,” she said, “better. It gets you right at the base of the neck.”

“It gets you just about everywhere.” And something about the way he said it made her realize that he wasn’t showing her this bird out of idle interest, but that he was going to offer it for sale. It was an exotic, of course, and had probably been smuggled in by some poor miner looking for an extra buck. If the crew-cut Protestants who had begun the push into space with such obsessive caution had seen the laxness of the space companies with quarantine matters they would have shrieked with horror. But NASA had wilted away and no terrible catastrophe had hit the earth. There were exotic shrubs which needed to be fed extraterrestrial trace elements to keep them alive, a few dozen strange new weeds of no particular distinction, and a poor small lizardish creature raised for its hallucinogenic skin.

But there had been nothing as strange and beautiful as this and she calculated its value in thousands of dollars. When she was invited to make an offer she reluctantly handed it back, or tried to, because as she held it up to the man he simply backed away.

“You’ve got to make an offer. You can’t not make an offer.”

She put the bird, so placid she thought it must be drugged, back on her lap and stroked sadly. “OK, I’ll be the bunny. How much do you want?”

He held up two hands.

“Ten dollars?”

“Is that cheap or is it cheap?”

“It’s cheap, but I can’t.”

“You should have made an offer.”

“I can’t,” she said hopelessly, thinking of Mort and what he would say. God knows the world pressed in on him heavily enough. Yet the thrilling thought that she could own such a marvel, that she need never hand it back, crept into her mind and lodged there, snug and comfortable as a child sleeping beneath a soft blanket.

“I can only offer five,” she said, thinking that she couldn’t offer five at all.

“Done.”

“Oh, shit.”

“You don’t want it?”

“Oh yes, I want it,” she said drily, “you know I want it.” She put the bird down on the seat, where it sat waiting for nothing more than to be picked up again, and took five of their precious dollars from her handbag. “Well,” she said, handing over the money, “I guess we can always eat it.” Then, seeing the shocked look on the wild young face: “Just joking.”

“If you don’t want it …”

“I want it, I want it. What does it eat? Breakfast cereal and warm milk?”

“I’ve got feed for it, so don’t sweat.”

“And the feed is extra, right?”

“My dear Dolores,” he said, “where this bird comes from, the stuff it eats grows on trees. If you’d be nice enough to open the boot I’ll give you a bag of it and our transaction, as they say, will be finito.”

She opened the boot and he wheeled round his cleaner’s trolley and hoisted a polythene sack into the car.

“What do I do when it’s eaten all this?”

But he was already gliding across the car park towards the administration building. “Well, then,” he giggled over his shoulder, “you’re going to have to eat it.”

The giggling carried across the hot tarmac and got lost in the heat haze.

Lilly went back to the car and was still stroking the bird when Mort came back.

Through pale veils of pleasure she saw him walking back across the blistering car park and she knew, before he arrived at the car, exactly what his eyes would look like. She had seen those eyes more and more recently, like doors to comfortable and familiar rooms that suddenly open to reveal lift wells full of broken cables. She should have taken him in her arms then and held him, stroked his neck until the lights came back on in those poor defeated eyes, eyes which had once looked at the world with innocent certainty, which had sought nothing more than the contentment of being a good gardener, calm eyes without fear and ambition. She should have taken him in her arms, but she had the bird and she sat there, stroking it stupidly, like someone who won’t leave a hot shower until the water goes cold.

He came and sat behind the wheel, not looking at her.

“Take off your coat, honey,” she said gently, putting a hand on his. “Come on, take it off.”

It was then that he saw the bird.

“What’s that?”

Her left hand was still stroking it. She ran a finger down its opaline bill, across its exquisitely smooth head and down its glowing blue back. “It’s a bird. Stroke it.” She tugged his hand, a hand which each day had become smoother and softer, towards the bird, and the bird, as if understanding, craned its supple neck towards him. “It’ll make you feel better.”

But Mort put both hands on the steering wheel and she saw his knuckles whiten. She was frightened then. He was a dark well she had only thought of as calm and still, but that was in the easy confidence of employment, in times without threat. Now, when she said what she had to say, something would happen.

“Mort, I’m sorry. I paid five dollars for it. I’m sorry, Mort.”

He opened the door and walked slowly around the car. She watched him. He didn’t look at her. He walked around the car a second time and she saw his face colouring. Then he started kicking it. He moved slowly, methodically, kicking it every couple of feet as if he wished to leave no part of its dull chalky body unpunished. When he had finished he came and sat down again, resting his head against the wheel.

Lilly got out of the car and walked to the driver’s side.

“Come on, bugalugs,” she said, “move over. I’m driving.”

She slid behind the wheel, thinking that in another month she wouldn’t be able to fit behind it, and when he moved over she passed him the bird. By the time they had left the terminal he was stroking it. His face had relaxed and resumed its normal quiet innocence and she remembered the days they had worked together as gardeners on the Firestone Estate as if this were some lost paradise from which they had been inexplicably expelled by a stern fascist god.

“Let’s stay in a motel,” she said. “Let’s have a hot shower and a good meal and get drunk and have a nice fuck in a big bed.”

“And be broke in the morning,” he said, but smiled.

“One morning we’ll be broke. We might as well have fun doing it.”

Mort stroked the bird slowly, dreamily.

“Do you like our bird?” she asked.

He smiled. “You’re a crazy person, Lilly.”

“Do you still love me?”

“Yes,” he said, “and I like the bird. Let’s have champagne and piss off without paying.”

“Champagne it is.”

As it turned out, the motel they chose didn’t have champagne, but it had an architecture well suited to their plans. Its yellow painted doors faced the highway and when they backed the car into the space in front of the room there was nothing in their way to prevent a fast getaway.

2.

Lilly lay on the bed stroking the bird which sat comfortably between her breasts and her swollen belly. The bottle of wine which stood amongst the debris of a meal on the table beside her was very nearly empty.

Mort, his hair wet, sat naked in a chair staring at the television. She envied him his looseness, his easy sexual satisfaction.

“Why don’t you put it down?” he said.

“In a minute.”

“Come and rub my back.”

“You’re a greedy bugger, Morto.”

“You want to be careful with that bird. It probably should have injections or something. You shouldn’t fuck around with exotics when you’re pregnant.”

“You’re the only exotic I fuck around with.” She looked at him and thought for the millionth time how pretty he was with his smooth skin and his hard muscles and that beautiful guileless face. “Let’s get another bottle.” The drunk Mort was more like the old Mort.

Without waiting for an answer she reached over and picked up the phone. She ordered the wine, put the bird in the bathroom with a saucer of seed, threw Mort a pair of trousers and picked up her own dress from where she had dropped it.

It was the manager himself who brought the wine. He wasn’t content to hand it through the door. “I’ll just pick up the trays,” he said, and Lilly noted that he already had his foot in the door, like an obnoxious encyclopedia salesman.

He was a short, slim man, handsome in an overripe way, with a mole near his eye and waving dark hair. Lilly didn’t like him. She didn’t like his highly shined shoes or his neatly pressed flannel trousers. She didn’t like the way he looked at the wet towel lying on the floor and the rumpled disordered bed freshly stained from lovemaking.

She sat on the bed while he busied himself with the trays. When she saw he was actually counting the knives and forks she started mimicking him behind his back.

When he announced that a saucer was missing she nearly burst out laughing, as if anyone would pinch one of his stupid tasteless saucers.

“It’s in the bathroom,” she said, and was wondering if she should add “where it belongs” when the man took the opportunity to inspect the bathroom.

When he came back he was holding the bird in one hand and the saucer in the other. Lilly took the bird from him and watched him drop the seeds into the rubbish bin.

“There is a house rule against pets. It’s quite clearly displayed.”

“It’s not a pet,” she said.

“I can’t have people bringing pets here.”

She saw Mort put his head in his hands as he anticipated one more setback, one more razor-nick defeat.

She took the saucer from the manager’s manicured hand. “Just stroke it,” she said, “it has special properties,” and smiled inwardly to hear herself use a word like “properties”, a leftover from her wasted education.

The manager looked at her with supercilious eyes and was about to give her back the bird when she firmly took hold of his free hand (which she was astonished to find damp with anxiety) and rubbed it down the bird’s back. When she took her hand away he continued to stroke it mechanically, the threatened light of authority still shining in his eyes.

“Go on,” she encouraged, “it feels nice.”

In spite of a private conviction that he was being made a fool of, the manager stroked the bird, at first tentatively and then more surely. The bird, as if understanding the importance of the occasion, brushed its cheek against the manager’s and then for a minute or two very little moved in the room but the manager’s hand.

Lights from the highway flowed across the wall.

On the television a mute reporter held a microphone towards a weeping man.

Twice Lilly saw the manager trying to give the bird back and twice she saw him fail.

“Feels nice, doesn’t it?”

The manager nodded his head and looked embarrassed. She could see that pleasure had made his eyes gooey as marshmallow.

“Now,” she said briskly, holding out her hands for the bird, “I’ll put it in the car so we won’t be breaking the rules.”

“No.” He was like a two-year-old with a teddy bear.

“You’ll exhaust it,” Lilly said, “and we need it for tomorrow. It’s our business. That’s what I mean about it not being a pet.”

“Your business?” the manager asked, and in truth every person in the room was trying to think how this beautiful bird might be anyone’s “business”.

“It’s a Pleasure Bird,” Lilly said, lighting a cigarette although she had given them up three months ago. It gave her time to think. “We charge a dollar a minute for people to stroke it.”

“You people in show business?”

“Sure am.” Lilly exhaled luxuriously and sat down on the bed.

“Dollar a minute, eh. Good work if you can get it.” He was being nice now and she allowed herself the luxury of not despising him for it.

“You think that’s too expensive?” She held out her arms for the bird. “We’ve charged more and no one’s ever complained.”

The manager stepped back from the extended arms, cooing over the bird like a mother keeping its baby from harm.

Lilly started talking. Ideas came to her so fast that she hardly knew how the sentence would end when she started it. “You can have it for half an hour.” She watched the manager glow. “In return for the price for this room and the food.”

“Done.”

“And wine, of course.”

“Done.”

“For an extra five dollars in cash you can take it to the office so we won’t disturb you. We’ll get it when time’s up.”

“Done.”

“What’s the time, Mort?”

Mort picked up his wristwatch from the top of the mute television.

“Nine twenty-three.”

“OK, it is now nine twenty-three.” She opened the door and ushered the manager out into the night. “I’ll pick it up from you at exactly nine fifty-three.”

When she shut the door she was grinning so broadly her face hurt. She hugged Mort and said, “I’m a genius. Tell me I’m a genius.”

“You’re a genius,” he said, “but you were crazy to let him take it away.”

“Why, for Chrissakes?”

“He mightn’t give it back.”

“Oh fuck, Mort. Stop it.”

“I’m sorry, it was just a thought.”

“Be positive.”

“I am positive.”

“Well, pour me a glass of wine and tell me I’m beautiful.”

The manager had taken the corkscrew and they had to shove the cork in with a pencil.

As it turned out they made an extra twenty dollars’ cash that night. It was ten-thirteen before they persuaded the manager to relinquish the bird. They stood in his office holding the wristwatch while the man bought minute after minute of extra time from his petty cash. The phone rang and wasn’t answered.

As they left his office, the bird ruffled its feathers and shat on the concrete.

3.

Mort didn’t want to look at the empty wine bottle or the plan he had agreed to so easily the night before. When Lillian got up he curled himself into a ball and pretended he was still asleep. Lilly knew he wasn’t asleep and knew why he was pretending.

“Come on, Mort, don’t be chicken shit.”

Mort moaned.

“Come on, Mort honey, or we won’t get a stall.” She rattled a coffee cup near his ear. “Do you want to get rich or do you want to stay poor? Here’s your coffee, baby. It’s getting cold.”

When Mort finally emerged, tousle-headed and soft as a child’s toy, he was in no way prepared for what he saw. Lilly was wearing white overalls and clown’s make-up. There were stars round her eyes and padding in her bum.

“Oh Christ, Lilly, please.”

“Please what? Drink your coffee.”

“Oh shit, please don’t. We don’t have to do that.”

“You heard what I told the man. We’re in show business.”

“Take it off, please. I don’t mind the business with the bird, but we don’t have to do all this.”

“Drink your coffee and I’ll take Charley-boy out for a shit.”

When he drove to the markets it was in strained silence. The clown held the bird. The straight man was at the wheel. When the car finally lost its muffler neither of them said anything.

4.

The markets had sprung up to meet the needs of the new poor and were supplied and operated by an increasingly sophisticated collection of small-time crooks. The police, by mutual agreement, rarely entered their enclosures and business was thus conducted with some decorum, whether it was the purchase of stolen clothing or illicit drugs (the notorious Lizard Dust was sold here and it was only the poor who tolerated the violent illnesses that preceded its more pleasant effects). Here you could buy spare parts for rubber thongs, fruit, vegetables, motor cars of questionable origin, poisonous hot dogs and bilious-coloured drinks.

The market they drove to was a vast concrete-paved car park which, at nine o’clock in the morning, was already unpleasantly hot. A blustery wind carried clouds of dust through the stalls, rattled the canvas roofs, and lodged a fine speck of dust in Mort’s eye. So it was Lilly who joined the queue for temporary stalls while Mort adjourned, more in embarrassment than pain, to minister to his eye in the men’s toilets.

The stall number was 128. It was nothing more than a wooden trestle table with a number painted on the top. Canvas awnings were a luxury they could not yet afford.

Mort stood behind the stall in his suit and tie, red-eyed and sulky. The bird stood stoically on the table. Lilly, resplendent in overalls and clown’s face, waddled to and fro in front, a balloon of swollen belly and padded bum.

“It won’t work.”

“Of course it’ll work,” she said. But her stomach was a mass of nerves and the baby, probably nervous of the life she had in store for it, kicked irritably inside her. “Don’t look like that,” she hissed. “I can’t do it when you’re looking at me like that.”

“Do what?”

And she started to do it. She felt a fool. She did badly what she had dreamed would be easy. Her voice sounded high and when she tried to lower it, it came out worse. What she said was hardly impressive and rarely funny. But she began to lumber amongst the crowds clapping her hands and making a fuss.

“See the Pleasure Bird at stall 128,” she yelled. “First three customers get a minute of pleasure for free. Oh yes, oh yes, oh yes. One dollar, one minute. They say it’s better than sex. One dollar, one minute and the first three customers get it free.”

A crowd of ragged children followed her. She did a cake walk. She danced a waltz with a black man in a pink suit. She fell over a guy-rope and made it look intentional. She attracted a small crowd by the simple device of placing a matchbox on the ground and making a big show of jumping over it, bowing and smiling when the jump was done. The matchbox jump was the most successful stunt of all and she gave the laughing crowd the news about stall 128 and the Pleasure Bird.

By the time she’d got lost in an alley of used car parts and been threatened by a woman who was trying to sell bruised apples she was exhausted. She had blisters on her feet from Mort’s sandshoes which were four sizes too big and a cut on her hand from the fall over the guy-rope. She limped back to the stall to find an enormous crowd huddled around an old woman who was dreamily stroking the bird. Mort stood beside her with his watch in his hand. The crowd was strangely silent and the woman crooning to the bird seemed vulnerable and rather sad.

“Ten minutes,” said Mort.

The woman reluctantly handed the bird back and, from a pocket of her voluminous black dress, produced a half-unravelled blue sock from which she counted out, in notes and coins, ten dollars.

As Mort handed the bird to the next person in the queue, the quiet solemnity of the recipient’s face reminded Lilly of a face in her childhood taking communion in a small country church. He was an Italian, a labourer with a blue singlet and dusty boots and he had only had the bird for thirty seconds when he cradled it in one arm and dragged a bundle of notes from his pockets which he placed on the table in a crumpled heap.

“Tell me when time’s up,” he said, and sat on the trestle table, hunched over the bird, lost in his own private world, impervious to the mutterings of the impatient crowd.

After that they limited the time to three minutes.

They could have worked the market all day but Mort, rather than sharing Lilly’s ever increasing sense of triumph, became more and more upset with her costume.

“Take it off. You don’t need it now.”

“No.”

“Please.”

“Don’t be silly, Mort. It’s part of the act.”

“You look a fool. I can’t stand people laughing at you.”

They hissed at each other until one o’clock when Mort, his face red and sullen, suddenly dumped the bird in Lilly’s lap and walked away.

At two o’clock she closed the stall and limped painfully back to the car. The bird shat once or twice on the way back, but apart from that seemed none the worse for its handling. Mort didn’t seem to have fared so well. He was sitting woodenly inside the boiling car and when she asked him how much he’d taken he simply handed her the money.

She counted two hundred and thirty dollars in notes and didn’t bother with the silver.

5.

The balcony of their room looked across the wide graceful river which was now silvery and cool in the late light. A rowing eight moved with svelte precision through a canopy of willows and two black swans descended from the sky above the distant city and Lilly, watching them, imagined the pleasant coolness of the water on their hot bodies.

Her make-up was gone now and she wore a loose white cheesecloth dress. The ice clinked in her gin and tonic and even the small chink of the glass as it touched the metal filigree table sounded cool and luxurious to her ears. She put her blistered feet up on the railing and stroked the bird gently, letting the pleasure saturate her body.

“Mort.”

“Yes.”

“You feel OK now?”

He leant across and put his arm on her shoulder. His face was sunburnt and there was a strange red V mark on his chest. He nodded. “Put the bird inside.”

“In a minute.”

He took his hand back and filled his glass.

Lillian was feeling triumphant. She had a fair idea of the worms that were eating at Mort and she was surprised and a little guilty to discover that she didn’t care excessively. She felt cool and rich and amazingly free. After a few minutes she picked up the bird and put it in front of the bathroom mirror where, she discovered, for all its unearthly qualities, it behaved just like a budgerigar.

She went back to the balcony and stood behind Mort, rubbing his broad back and loosening the tense muscles in his neck.

“Tell me I was terrific,” she said. “Please say I was great.”

Mort hesitated and she felt the muscles under her fingers knot again. “Let’s not talk about it now.”

She smiled just the same, remembering checking into this hotel, Mort dressed in his salesman’s suit, she in her clown’s make-up, the bird quietly hidden in a plastic shopping bag.

“Lillian,” she said, “you were terrific.”

The river was almost black now and, when two birds cut across it towards a certain tree, it was too dark to see the stunning colours by which she might have identified them.

6.

Their days were lined with freeways and paved with concrete. They limped south with a boiling radiator and an unmuffled engine. They worked markets, factory gates and even, on one occasion, a forgotten country school where the children let down their tyres to stop them leaving.

Mort no longer complained about the clown, yet his resentment and embarrassment grew like a cancer inside him and he seldom thought of anything else. He had long since stopped touching the Pleasure Bird and the full force of his animosity was beamed towards its small colourful eyes which seemed to contain a universe of malignant intentions.

“God, Jesus, it likes freeways.” Lilly held the bird in the air, displaying its ruffled feathers, a signal that it was going to shit.

Mort didn’t appear to hear.

“Well, stop the car. You’re the one who’s always worried about where it shits.”

Slowly, irritatingly slowly, Mort pulled the car into the white emergency lane and the bird hopped out, shat quickly and effectively, and hopped back in.

“This bird seems intent on spreading shit from one end of Highway 31 to the other.”

Mort pulled back onto the road.

“It’s really crazy for doing it on nice clean roads. Do you notice that, Morty?”

“Why don’t you put it down for a while. You’re getting like a bloody junkie.”

Lilly said nothing. Her clown’s face showed no emotions but those she had painted on it, and in truth she did not allow herself to think anything of Mort’s jealousies. She stroked her index finger slowly down the bird’s sensuous back and the slow waves of pleasure blotted out anything else that might have worried her. Even the police siren, when it sounded outside the window, did not startle her. It reached her distantly, having no more importance than a telephone ringing in someone else’s dream.

She watched the police car park in front of them and watched the policeman walk back towards their car, pink book in his hand. She heard him talk to Mort about the muffler and saw them both walk around the car looking at the tyres. Even when the policeman stood beside her window and spoke to her she did not think that the words were really addressed to her.

“What sort of bird is that?”

It was only when the question was repeated that she managed to drag her mind to the surface and stare blinking into the strangely young face.

“It’s a Pleasure Bird,” she smiled, “here.” And she passed the passive bird into the big white hands.

“Sure does give a lot of pleasure.”

“Sure does.”

The bird was passed back and the pink notebook opened.

“Now,” he said, “how about we start by you telling me where you got this.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s an exotic.”

“No. It’s from New Guinea.”

“Look, madam, you’ve chosen the wrong fellow to lay that on. This bird comes from Kennecott 21. I was there two years.”

“Fancy that,” said Lilly, “we were told it was from New Guinea.”

The notebook closed. “I’ll have to take it.”

Lilly was struck by the early rumbles of panic. “You can’t take it. It’s how we earn our living.”

But the policeman was already leaning over into the car, his hands ready to engulf the plump jewel-like body.

Then he was suddenly lurching back from the car window with his hands to one eye. Blood streamed down across his knuckles. The bird was pecking at the fingers which covered the other eye. The noise was terrible. She saw Mort running around the car and he was beside her starting the engine, and the bird, as if nothing had happened, was back sitting on her lap.

“Don’t go,” she said. “Mort. Don’t.”

But Mort was white with panic and as he accelerated onto the highway Lilly turned helplessly to watch as the policeman staggered blindly onto the road, where a giant container truck ran over the top of him.

Even as she watched she stroked the bird in her lap so she had the strange experience of seeing a man killed, of feeling guilt, horror and immeasurable pleasure all at once. The floodgates lifted. Seven colours poured into her brain and mixed into a warm sickly brown mud of emotion.

They turned east down a dusty road which led through the rusting gates of neglected farms. Grass grew through the centre of the road and swished silkily beneath the floor. Lilly began to remove her make-up. Mort, pale and shaken, hissed inaudible curses at the dusty windscreen.

7.

Yet their life did not stop, but limped tiredly on through a series of markets and motel rooms and if their dreams were now marred by guilt and echoes, neither mentioned it to the other.

They bought a small radio and listened to the news, but nothing was ever said about the policeman and Lilly was shocked to find herself hoping that his head had been crushed, obliterating the evidence of the attack.

Mort drew away from her more and more, as if the crime had been hers and hers alone. When he spoke, his sentences were as cold and utilitarian as three-inch nails.

He took to calling the bird “the little murderer”. There was something chilling in the way that dreamy childlike face moved its soft lips and said such things as: “Have you fed the little murderer?”

He was filled with anger and resentment and fear which had so many sources he himself didn’t know where the rivers of his pain began, from which wells they drew, from which fissures they seeped.

He watched Lillian perform at the markets, saw the bird shit on every hard surface that came its way, and he watched it narrowly, warily, and on more than one occasion thought he saw the bird watching him. Once, removing the bird from bedroom to bathroom for the night against Lilly’s will, he thought that the bird had burned him.

At the markets he did less and less and now it was Lilly who not only attracted the crowds but also took the money and kept time. He felt useless and hopeless, angry at himself that he was too stiff and unbending to do the things that he should to earn a living, resentful that his wife could do it all without appearing to try, angry that she should accept his withdrawal so readily, angry that she showed no guilt or remorse about a man’s death, angry when she met his silences with her own, angry that he who hated the bird should continue to want the money it brought him.

They spent three hundred dollars on the car. Its radiator no longer boiled. A shiny new muffler was bolted securely into place. Yet the sight of that clean metal exhaust pipe sticking out from beneath the rear bumper made him close his eyes and suck in his breath.

He drank champagne without pleasure and made love with silent rage while Lilly’s eyes followed invisible road maps on the ceiling.

With sticky tissues still between her legs she brought the bird to bed and stroked it till she drifted into sleep. Even the ease of her sleep enraged him, giving him further proof of her cold self-sufficiency.

And it was on one such night, with his wife asleep on the twin bed beside him, with a cheap air-conditioner rattling above his head, that he saw the current affairs bulletin on the latest quarantine breakdown. He watched it without alarm or even any particular interest. There had been many such breakdowns before and there would be many again in the future. As usual there were experts who were already crying catastrophe, and these were, of course, balanced by optimists who saw no serious threat to the terrestrial environment.

The breakdown in this case involved a tree, named by journalists as the Kennecott Rock-drill. The seeds of this tree took to their new home with a particular enthusiasm. Adapted for a harsh, rocky environment the seeds had a very specialized survival mechanism. Whereas a terrestrial seed secreted mucus, the Kennecott Rock-drill secreted a strong acid much as a lichen did. When dropped on the rocky surfaces of its home planet the secreted acid produced a small hole. In this self-made bed the root tips expanded, using osmosis, and little by little cracked the rock, pushing a strong and complicated root system down a quarter of a mile if need be. In a terrestrial environment the whole process was speeded up, moisture and a less formidable ground surface accelerating the growth rate to such an extent that a single seed could emerge as a small tree on a busy freeway in less than seven days.

Mort watched the programme with the same detachment with which earlier generations had greeted oil spills or explosions in chemical plants.

Service stations in the north were overcome by green vegetation. Men in masks sprayed poisons which proved ineffective. People lay in hospital beds seriously ill from drinking water contaminated by this same herbicide. Fire, it seemed, rather than slowing the spread of the Rock-drill merely accelerated the germination of the seeds. Mort watched an overgrown house sacrificed to fire and then the result, a week later, when giant Rock-drills grew in the burnt-out ruins. He would have turned complacently to the late movie on another channel had they not shown film of the Rock-drill’s home environment.

There he watched the strange rocky outcrops of a Kennecott planet, saw the miners working beneath a merciless sun and silently thanked God he had not succeeded in getting a job there. He admired the beauty of the giant trees silhouetted against a purple sunset and then, sitting up with a cry of recognition, saw the flocks of birds that crowded the gnarled branches.

The birds were identical to the one which sat silently on the end of Lilly’s bed.

He sat shaking his head, as puzzled and secretly pleased as any lost citizen who finds his hated neighbour on public television.

8.

The argument started the next morning at breakfast and flickered and flared for the next two days as they pursued an ever more erratic course, dictated more by Mort’s perversity than the location of markets. His eyes blazed, bright, righteous and triumphant. A strange pallor lay like a sheet across his tucked-in face.

To Lilly he became a mosquito buzzing on the edges of an otherwise contented sleep. She slapped at the mosquito and wished it would go away. The bird, now officially outlawed for its role in spreading the Rock-drill seed, sat contentedly in her lap as she stroked it. The stroking rarely stopped now. It was as if she wanted nothing more from life than to stroke its blue jewelled back for ever and it seemed, for the bird, the arrangement was perfect.

“Are you listening to me?”

“Yes.” She hadn’t been.

“We’ll have to hand it in.”

“No we won’t.” There was no anger in her voice.

Mort sucked in breath through clenched teeth.

She heard the intake of air but it caused her no concern. No matter how he shouted or hissed, no matter what he said about the bird, there was only one danger to Mort and it had nothing to do with quarantine breakdowns. From the depths of the blue well she now lived in, Lilly acknowledged the threat posed by the Kennecott Rock-drill and in her mind she had fulfilled her obligation to the world by collecting the bird’s shit in a cardboard box. It was as simple as that. As for the potential violence of the bird, she saw no problem in that either. It was only violent when it was threatened. It was wiser not to threaten it.

These simple answers to the problem did not satisfy Mort and she concluded, correctly, that there must be other things which threatened him more directly.

“Do you know why you want me to get rid of this bird?” she said.

“Of course I bloody know.”

“I don’t think you do.”

“All right,” he said slowly, “you tell me.”

“First, you don’t like the bird because you hate to see me being able to earn a living. Then you hate yourself because you can’t. You’re so fucked up you can’t see I’m doing it for both of us.”

“Bullshit.”

“No, Morty. Not bullshit, fact. But most of all,” she paused, wondering if it was wise to say all this while he was driving.

“Yes, most of all …”

“Most of all it is because you’re frightened of pleasure. You can’t have pleasure yourself. You don’t know how. You can’t stand the sight of me having pleasure. You can’t give me pleasure, so you’re damned if anything else is going to.”

The car swung off the road and onto the verge. It skidded in gravel. For a moment, as the wheels locked and the car slid sideways, she thought that it would roll. It turned 180 degrees and faced back the way it had come, its engine silent, red lights burning brightly on the dash.

“You’re saying I’m a lousy fuck.”

“I’m saying you give me no pleasure.”

“You used to make enough noise.”

“I loved you. I wanted to make you happy.”

Mort didn’t say anything for a moment. The silence was a tight pink membrane stretched through pale air.

She looked at the warning lights, thinking the ignition should be turned off.

She was expecting something, but when the blow came she did not know what happened. It felt like an ugly granite lump of hate, not a fist. Her head was hit sideways against the window.

Everything that happened then was slow and fast all at once. She felt wetness on her face and found tears rather than the blood she had expected. At the same time she saw the bird rise from her lap and fly at Mort. She saw Mort cower beneath the steering wheel and saw the bird peck at his head. She saw, like a slow-motion replay, the policeman walk onto the road howling with pain. She quietly picked up the bird in both hands as she had done it a hundred times every day, and quietly wrung its neck.

She held the body on her lap, stroking it.

She watched Mort, whom she did not love, weep across the steering wheel.

9.

They drove in grey silence for there was nothing else to do. It was as if they travelled along the bottom of the ocean floor. If there was sun they didn’t see it. If there were clouds they took no note of their shapes or colours.

If they had come to a motel first it is possible that the ending might have been different but, turning down a road marked A34, they came to their first forest of Kennecott Rock-drill. It grew across the road like a wall. It spread through a shopping complex and across a service station. Water gushed from broken pipes.

When they left the car the smell of gasoline enveloped them and in the service station they saw a huge underground tank pushed up through a tangle of roots and broken concrete, its ruptured skin veiled by an inflammable haze.

Lilly heard a sharp noise, a drumming, and looked to see Mort hammering on the car’s bonnet with clenched fists, drumming like a child in a tantrum. He began screaming. There were no words at first. And then she saw what he had seen. Above their heads the branches of the trees were crowded with the birds, each one as blue and jewel-like as the dead body that lay in the front seat of the car. Through mists of gasoline Lilly saw, or imagined she saw, a curious arrogance in their movements, for all the world like troops who have just accomplished a complicated and elegant victory.