We heard the wire door slam and looked up to see Mum carrying a tray of cups.
Sprawled on the grass, we had our afternoon tea. Dad lay on his back, closing his eyes to the sun. Gracie, her cheeks still stained from tears, crept towards him. She looked at me and then to Mum, asking permission, daring us to dare her to tickle him. I could see Dad’s eyes roaming beneath their lids, straining to see between the lashes. Mum smiled and Gracie scurried her fingers across Dad’s chest, ferreting them into his armpits. Pretending to be ticklish, he squirmed and bucked like a fish landed on a jetty.
‘Make me an angel, Daddy. Make me.’
Dad grabbed her around the rib cage and held her up to the sky, like an offering.
‘Look, Josh, I’m an angel, I can fly.’
Mum stayed and helped Dad with the wire, while Gracie, having fetched her dolls and teddy, began her own tea party. Dad gave me the job of measuring and cutting lengths of dowel for the perches — a job I enjoyed as it meant using the extendable tape measure, pressing the button, watching the metal strip retract like a lizard’s tongue.
While I worked inside the aviary’s frame, Mum and Dad worked their way around the outside, gradually surrounding me with wood and wire. Dad enjoyed working with Mum. When a piece of wire pierced her finger, he made a point of kissing it better. He didn’t leave it at that either; kissing her on the neck, then whispering something in her ear. Mum laughed and brushed him away.
‘Too much Song of Solomon, that’s your problem.’
Dad took some nails from the box and dangled three from his mouth like miniature cigarettes. Trying to speak with them like that, without moving his lips, he mumbled, ‘What do you reckon, Josh? She’s going to be all right, isn’t she.’
He meant the aviary, not Mum.
‘Finished!’ he said, hammering in the last nail with a flourish, giving it an extra blow for good measure.
Mum put her arm around his waist. ‘Looks great.’
Dad squeezed her. Gracie was running round in tight circles inside the aviary, flapping her arms and chirping like a bird. Mum ran into the house for the camera. Aiming it, she said, ‘Stand still, Gracie. Okay, look this way. Now you, Josh.’
I grabbed Gracie and pulled her in front of me, my folded hands hanging like a pendant around her neck. We smiled at the camera.
‘Lindsay, you too. Perfect.’ CLICK! ‘You look like a bunch of gaol birds.’
I was working alone in the Natural Birthing Centre’s Pan Room when someone knocked on the door. It was open and I told them to come in.
Wearing elbow-length woollen mittens, taking a steaming hot bedpan from the steriliser, I turned round and saw a woman in her early twenties, with short, crimson-coloured hair and a ring through her nostril. ‘Hi,’ she said, smiling, half lifting her hand as if to wave.
I slotted the metal pan into the rack on the wall. ‘What can I do for you?’
‘Jenny, our midwife, sent me here. She said you’d be able to give me the placenta.’
Judging by the hair, the green, crushed-velvet top, I expected her to be louder, more brash, but she was softly spoken, almost old-fashioned in her politeness. Slipping off the mittens, I walked to the bench beneath the dispensary window and picked up a small white plastic bag. ‘What’s the name?’ I asked, trying to find an identification label on the bag. ‘Williams?’
‘Yeah, that’s Carly — it’s her placenta; I’m just her helper.’
Handing it to her, feeling the slimy thing through the plastic, I said, ‘Hold it underneath; they’re not real strong these bags. You wouldn’t want it splitting open.’
As she was about to leave I asked what they were going to do with it, teasing her by saying I had heard they were good for the garden.
‘We’re going to eat it,’ she said, grinning, enjoying seeing me shocked. ‘They’re full of iron, you know.’
Mrs Potter tried to make me feel good about taking her canaries, as if it were me doing the favour. ‘Just think, I’ll never have to sweep up bird seed again!’ She took the tubular water dispensers from the cages and emptied them under the rhododendron by the gate. ‘Make sure you fill them when you get home — they don’t work so well without water.’
She kept a straight face while I smiled. Carrying the cages out to the car, I copied her: one hand holding the wire handle on top, the other supporting the base, waiter-style, as if the cages were enormous cakes.
Mum propped them against each other on the back seat and Mrs Potter handed her a blanket, saying, ‘Pop this over them; they travel better blind.’ She stepped back onto the footpath and shoved a hand into the pocket of her apron. ‘Well, Happy Birthday, Josh.’
I turned and gave her a hug and she kissed me on the cheek, which was something she hadn’t done since I was a small boy.
‘I hope you enjoy them,’ she said.
I kissed her in return. Her skin was soft and dry like flour. ‘I’ll take care of them, I promise.’
Having wound down my window, Mrs Potter poked her head in and said, ‘If they won’t whistle, play them Frank Sinatra; they love old Frankie.’ Talking to Mum now, being cheeky, she added, ‘Whoops, I forgot! You don’t play that kind of music, do you? I’m not sure how they’ll go with hymns.’
Mrs Potter looked so alone as we pulled away from the kerb; sad, now that she could no longer make jokes to hide her feelings. Driving home, Mum began to cry. I don’t know why, but I pretended not to notice and didn’t try to comfort her in any way. Instead, I looked at the houses and the little groups of shops sliding by, every now and then turning to check the birds were all right, that the cages were riding upright, the blanket still in place.
A week later, the birds looked content in their new home. I had finished feeding them and was playing football in the backyard; pretending to be the whole team, commentating as well. As a backman, I had just kicked a raking torpedo out of defence. I was about to mark it as a high flying centre half-forward when Old Mr Capello clambered onto the side fence.
‘Heh, come, come.’ One arm clutched the fence top, the other waved me over.
I took my eye off the ball and got a fright when it hit the ground beside me. Picking it up, I took it to the fence for security, bouncing it once as I walked.
‘Soccer, you play?’ Mr Capello pointed at the ball.
I shook my head, smoothing a hand along its oval curve.
The Capellos had moved next door when I was seven. Mum and Dad treated them like they did everyone else in our street — smiled when they saw them, said hello, wished them a Merry Christmas each year. Old Mr Capello was Mr Capello’s father, grandfather to the Capello kids. He was short and brick brown. Though old, somewhere in his seventies, he still looked strong. ‘Built like a barrel,’ Dad had once said. He made his own wine in their garage, drank it sitting on a kitchen chair on the patio, in the dappled shade of the vine. In summer he wore baggy shorts and a white singlet and, on hot nights, carried a mattress outside and slept on their front porch. He had white hair and whiskers and brown eyes set so far back in his head that on sunny days you couldn’t see them for the shadow of his brow.
‘Uccello,’ he said, and started whistling and pointing to the aviary.
‘Canaries,’