An hour and half again weeding cleared most of the path around the front and side of the house. One more similar session in the days ahead would see the labour done and a fine little garden surround delivered for the new tenants to enjoy. Each prospect through the windows both from the house and the studio gave a frame of greenery that always surprised like a sudden vista.
Some laundry was also managed before leaving this morning, using the still warm water from the boiler after last night’s shower, the first for perhaps six or seven days in this early winter chill. In Carlisle Street before the café the three or four minutes among the loaves at Baker In the Rye gave a whiff of Ruski lands, just as at Japanese Rolls a welcome tang of Nippon. At a stretch wheat and rye fields, big skies, kerchiefed old crones and their men sunning themselves against the walls of the old houses with their walking sticks leaning by the doorway. As ever the lady at Baker appreciated the word of thanks in her own language and replied in kind. With the recent Muslim goatee that sprung from beneath the chin the woman may have had a passing thought of terrorism and bombing.
There was no Arthur now with whom to share the various loaves—the grains, the different grades of rye and sourdough, the Polish product that was occasionally chosen for Arth as a reminder. Arthur’s mother had been born in Australia, but the family had emigrated before WWI, escaping more than enough horror no doubt even without what followed. If the memory was correct, maternal Uncle John across the street had in fact served in the Australian Cavalry; another uncle had been the bootstudder for Footscray Football Club in their glory era.
It was the absence of Arthur which brought back the visit from the morning of the small, yellow-billed blackbird in the front garden. Over breakfast preparations at the kitchen window the darting movement across the path below had drawn attention. A day or two before the same bird had been sighted hopping over those pavers to take a drink from the saucer that sat beneath one of the pots at the end of the row. There was a fine bower created now in that space of filtered light from the tall, overhanging pittosporum along the fence line, fresh mulch that had been spread a few days ago radiating variegated tones, the glowing old red brick stepping stones, all the different pots holding the cacti and succulents.
The thirsty regular could not have been Arthur’s memorable twilight blackbird of the year before. Not likely. An autumn evening last year delivering the bread to Arthur the dark had come down early, Claude from next door roaming in the front yard and behind in Arthur’s pear tree a dark shape had been mistaken for a possum. No, that was no poss. That was a blackbird, Arthur countered after the briefest of looks behind.
There had been some low calling earlier while we talked, it had been unclear at the time from where it had come. The error over the identification had led Arthur to tell of the warning the blackbirds sounded to their feathered friends at the presence of roaming cats.
Arthur enjoyed the visits of the ginger Claude from over the side fence. You could tell by the way he looked in his direction when he passed and sometimes the way he sounded his name. Another black cat that also visited created some friction with Claude; once or twice it seemed Arthur had intervened to stop their fighting. Possums often passed across the rail behind Arthur while we talked evenings at his gate. An unruly pair had found a place for themselves in the roof of his front veranda, where they too sometimes fought for precedence. Under the roof of the house Arthur would not have been happy about the guests, but out of harm’s way in the veranda he was unconcerned; perhaps a tiny bit chuffed.
Previously Arthur had never mentioned anything about the bird life.
If not quite the size of a possum, the figure in the pear that particular evening at Arthur’s was certainly far larger than the yellow-bill of the morning in the back garden.
How exactly one had turned into a kind of bird man, loosely understood, was quite unclear. Early influencers were perhaps the Primary School DP, a man who like many in that era of teaching had been too busy for the classroom and devised various strategies to occupy the children during his long absences. In the case of this old Norm Smith lookalike—the legendary overcoated MFC coach, quintessential tall, lean Australian—the usual resort was plates of bird illustrations that were stood up at the front desk for us clueless artists to reproduce. The hardship of attempting to capture those forms, those features and proportions, set off a little panic like spelling tests and the other schoolroom trials.
Otherwise there was old Chika Zero the Dalmatian Royalist around in Paxton Street, with the large cage of budgerigars, parrots and galahs taking up the whole of the wall in his back garage. Remote and aloof from wife and son sitting in his kitchen chair, very much the testy lord who needed deft handling, at his wife’s prompting Chika Zero managed some fondness for his friend’s orphaned son. That a dour man like Chika Zero could be a bird enthusiast was more remarkable than the vivid creatures that greeted him from behind the wire in his garage.
The yellow-bill’s slaking of thirst that morning had included a gesture that seemed a theatrical flourish at first. At the first motion of pulling back its head after its drink a call had been half expected, some kind of little jubilation as if for a toast. Bending to take one sip after another this birdie continued in the same way tilting back its head after each draught, its yellow pointer sharply thrusting. The yellow bill pointing up at the tree branches from where it had come two times, three times, four could not have belonged to the bird that had produced those warning calls from Arthur’s pear the year before. That other blackbird never was sighted; no bird of that size fitted in our neighbourhood. Even magpies and crows seemed of smaller proportion than the shadowy figure perched half way up the leafless pear on Arthur’s rear fence. This though certainly did not mean Arthur did not know what he was talking about.
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