by J. Ashley-Smith

Perhaps I should have been surprised when the magpie first spoke. Strange as it may seem, I had become quite used to the mimicries of those curious backyard birds, with their pristine black-and-white feathers, their inquisitive orange-red eyes. Their infamy as deadly swoopers, as springtime terrors of the skies, is legend here in Australia. But I’d never myself been swooped, always associated them rather with their mellifluous warblings, their impersonations. Maybe you remember, too, back when we first moved here as Ten Pound Poms, over half a century ago now, that time a magpie perfectly imitated the mew of our first cat: the irascible ginger, Mr Bentley. Now that was a surprise. Hearing his unmistakable complaints and turning to see not a raggedy ball of orange fur padding toward us across the garden, but an impostor, now hopping, now strutting, peering at us from first one eye, then the other. That muggy afternoon, so many summers ago, the magpie held its beak high and let forth another meow, both throatier and more pure than Mr Bentley’s, but in all other details precisely correct. Since then, I’ve heard magpies imitate all kinds of odd sounds: a neighborhood dog; the onomatopoeic calls of currawongs; and once, the rising and falling groans of a leaf-blower. I was so used to their strange calls, I would hardly have paid this one any mind, if it hadn’t spoken with your voice. And addressed me by name—the name no one had ever called me but you.

You were inside then. Of course. It had been weeks since I’d tried to wheel you out to catch a ray of sun. I’d given up hope the world of color and light might ever again penetrate the blank windows of your eyes. That day I hadn’t even gotten you out of bed, though our nurse—the kindly, patient Miss Little—was always reminding me not to leave you too long in one position; forever doing her bit to keep your bedsores from flaring up again.

I was having one of those days. A day where, no matter how sweetly the sun shone or the birds sang, all I felt was despair. Our small suburban home felt like a prison, the walls too close, too cluttered with reminders of how wonderful our life had been. And everywhere, in every room, the smell of you. Not the old familiar smells: the musky odor of your shirt from an afternoon digging the garden, or the tang of your cologne on those rare nights you got all dressed up. The new, alien smells of disinfectant, of human waste, of a body that could perform little more than the most elementary functions. It was one of those days where some bitter and selfish part of me said again and again how this wasn’t what I signed up for, that a marriage wasn’t supposed to be a death sentence. One of those days where an aged care facility beckoned. Putting you in a home would mean the death of our superannuation, would mean I could eat nothing but potatoes till the end of my days. And you’d made me swear I’d never—not ever—banish you to one of those hideous institutions … “Put a pillow over my face, Nance. Let me die. I don’t want you to remember me as no vegetable.” That’s what you always said. And yet here we are.

It was hardly past ten, the day looming ahead of me like the shadow of our old elm. I’d taken my cup of tea and a biscuit out into the front garden, out beneath that ancient, elephantine tree, to have an early elevenses and watch the empty quiet of the neighborhood. Cockatoos bickering over seed outside our neighbors’ front gate. A bearded gentleman running, with a dog strapped to his waist. A harried mother, with one in the pram and another trailing along behind. I was just beginning to wonder—not for the first time—if I would feel any different caring for you now if we’d ever had children of our own; if there were some maternal instinct that would have switched on, made me more competent, less resentful. But then I heard your voice, clear as day and right beside me.

“Nance,” you said. Only it wasn’t you, but the magpie, strutting among the leaf litter, grubbing around under the mulch with its beak. “Nance,” it said again, and cocked its head, peered up at me with one wary eye.

“Sidney?” I said, and felt immediately absurd.

The magpie said nothing more, though I coaxed it, even broke off a little of my biscuit. The moment it snagged the crumbs in its beak, it beat its wings, took off for a high bough of the eucalypt beyond the power lines. Though it sang from its perch there, throaty and melodious, I felt strangely abandoned. A seventy-year-old woman with a cold cup of tea, alone.

• • •

It was days before I saw the magpie again, though I took my tea and biscuit out to the elm each morning; and each morning, impatient, a little earlier than the last. And though I scattered oats on the kitchen window sill and on the steps outside our front door, it did not return.

The drudgery of care felt oppressive. Those few days stretched endless, a porridge of stagnant time that even the relentless cycle of chores could not budge. I had no patience—with anything, but with you in particular. As I scrubbed you down in bed the way Miss Little had shown me, or dragged you up to heave your dead weight across to the commode, or shoveled into your drooping mouth that morning’s colored goop, I was seething, hating you, wanting—forgive me—to hurt you. In my impatience I lost all interest in those quiet pastimes that had kept me sane since your decline: Wordle, the daily crossword, Scrabble on the iPad. All I wanted was to see the magpie, to hear it speak my name, the way you used to when you could say anything at all.

Outside the prison of the house, though, all was beautiful—transcendently so. A late spring after a wet winter, the interminable rains of another La Niña, and the usual dustbowl of our front lawn was thick and verdant. The camellias along the front of the house were all in bloom, pink and white and red. And the elm, still spindly from the winter months, was just beginning to sprout its first pale bursts of leaf. All about the neighbourhood, acacias frothed with blossom, brilliant yellow fireworks frozen in time. I took my little breaks out in the garden, on the bench seat beneath the elm, where, in earlier, happier times, we two had sat on summer evenings, sipping a G&T, the charcoal smell of the barbecue wafting from the back garden. Now I sat there alone, while inside you rasped your awkward breaths, lips slack, your empty eyes staring at … what exactly? Did you see anything beyond the blank walls of our old spare bedroom? Did you hear the sounds of spring outside? Did your mind—such as it is now—take you … anywhere? Did you remember anything of us? Of me? It would be so much easier to endure all this if I only knew you were still in there. If I could catch even a glimpse in that living corpse of the man I loved—the man I still love, wherever he is.

Taking my breaks out on that bench beneath the elm, my eyes scanning the trees and bushes round about for a glimpse of the magpie, I became slowly aware of another world existing within our own. A world of signals and warning calls, of wingbeats and ritual displays. The daytime quiet of our suburb, I found, was not so quiet at all, the air alive with the booing of doves, the bickering of cockatoos, the wing snaps of Indian mynahs defending their territory. I’d never noticed before just how many birds there were, all around us, every day. The butcherbirds, the wattlebirds, the families of choughs. The cuckoo shrikes and fantails, and king and superb parrots. I didn’t know any of their names at first, but soon dug around in the bookshelf for your old Slaters Field Guide, took it out to the bench with my cup of tea. I was so engrossed trying to work out if I’d seen a lorikeet or an eastern rosella, I didn’t notice the magpie return, had no sense of its presence until, again, it spoke.

“Nance,” it said. “Hullo, Nance. Why the long face?”

• • •

So many days had passed since that first encounter that I had begun to doubt myself, was beginning to question whether I’d really heard what I thought I heard. It was like an old cassette tape I played over and over, and with each replay the memory faded, became fuzzier, more indistinct. If you hadn’t spoken again—if it hadn’t spoken—I don’t know if I would have continued to believe.

And yet here again was the magpie, hopping around at my feet, pecking at the crumbs of digestive I tossed down, tilting its head to peer at me with one orangey-red eye.

“Hullo, Nance,” it said again. “Why so sad, Nance?”

And wasn’t it just like you to ask that; such a stupid question. As though there were only ever two ways to feel, and to be anything other than happy was some kind of moral failing. It used to make me so cross whenever you interrogated my moods, said, “Cheer up, Nance.” I’d shut myself off from you, simmering away. And with nowhere to go, that feeling would build up inside me like pressure, would turn to anger directed at you, at all the ways you didn’t understand me. But that was back when I thought we would go on like we were forever, that we had all the time in the world.

“I’m not sad,” I said to the magpie. “I’m …” My shoulders tensed. “It’s complicated.”

The magpie moved its beak this way and that, then back again. Strange, jerky movements punctuated by a glance from first one eye, then the other. I realised it was shaking its head.

“Nope,” it said. “It i’nt complicated. It’s you, Nance, what’s complicated. You always was.”

My throat began to ache like I’d swallowed a Scrabble piece. But I didn’t cry. I was too stunned. Not because I was being psychoanalysed by a magpie—that I had already become oddly accustomed to. But because, maybe, it wasn’t a magpie at all, but you, speaking through a magpie. To hear again your voice, however scratchy and distorted, to feel again your concern, your warmth, your boundless tolerant love for me, it hurt worse than anything I’ve ever had to endure; worse because bound up in it was a kind of joy, an ecstatic happiness I’d not felt in years and had forgotten possible. I’d had no time to grieve your loss. You departed by slow degrees, leaving your body behind. And though that reminder was always with me, I’d forgotten you, confusing my memory of you with that rasping, dribbling, shitting thing in the house. It would have been easier if you’d died.

My eyes were blurry with tears, but you didn’t seem to notice, hopping about in the mulch, investigating an empty snail shell, poking at a peg I’d dropped weeks ago. I wiped my eyes and watched you pecking at some unseen treat among the leaves, my heart a leaden thing.

And it’s funny, but as the magpie hopped about, doing its magpie business, I began to think how much it reminded me of you. Its restless energy. Its curiosity. I found myself remembering that distant you, the man I first fell for, little more than a boy, and me so stuck up and proper. I remembered Brighton beach in 1972, you in those ludicrous shorts, your legs so skinny, capering about in the sand trying to get a laugh out of me. And you, running down into the water and diving right in, even though it was freezing and filthy. I got all prim over how you shortened my name, acting shocked at how common you were. But it excited me too. You excited me. Enough to say yes when you asked me to marry you, to walk with you up the aisle, then up the gangplank of a ship bound for Australia; our permanent honeymoon. I don’t know if I ever told you, Sidney. How happy you made me then. How happy you always made me.

“Sidney …” I began. But the magpie had gone.

When at last I went back inside, I found you squirming on the bed, groaning with discomfort. You’d soiled yourself and rolled about in it. All up your back and down your legs was smeared with filth.

• • •

The magpie came pretty much every day after that. I’d leave the kitchen window open, crumble walnuts or bits of digestive biscuit on the windowsill, which it snapped up with a cockeyed swipe of its beak.

It wasn’t so much a fan of the oatmeal. The little piles I left out in the mornings would be abandoned once it had its fill of sweeter, fattier fare. Each morning, I’d open the window and leave out a little food and in only a few minutes the magpie would be there, standing on the sill while I made my cup of tea and helped myself to a small bowl of muesli—oats being good enough for me. But wasn’t that just like you, too? I never could get you to enjoy eating healthy.

After breakfast, I’d start on the chores. But something in me had changed and I wasn’t committed to them in the same way I used to be. Some impatience had crept in, and a sense of futility. It all seemed so pointless—all of it. Anything other than sitting out on the bench and talking to my magpie was an impediment. I felt like a teenager in love. All I could think about was the moment I’d be out there again—out there with you. The real you.

Do you remember, Sidney, what it was like back then? What it felt like to be young and so completely in love? I gave you such a hard time, made you work like a dog for every scrap of my affection. But it was all just a mask, that armor I wore—still wear, I suppose. Underneath I was as soft and susceptive as a fledgling, and burning with excitement, with disbelief. I wanted you with all my heart. Wanted you so desperately to want me. Did I ever take it off for you, I wonder, that mask? Did I ever let down my guard enough for you to see how I truly felt, how much you always meant to me?

My elevenses with the magpie were just like those old days, sort of. You, trying everything to make me laugh, cheering me up with silly presents or prancing around in the hope it would make me smile. As I sat on the bench in the morning sunlight, the magpie did his funny little dance, bringing me gifts, a shiny sweet wrapper or a puff of acacia blossom. He’d preen and strut and tell me funny stories. I was happy like I hadn’t been in months; years, even. It was as though we’d been given a second chance, you and me, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to do it all over again. I vowed to myself that this time I’d hold nothing back, would hide nothing from you.

But I was curious, too. How was it possible? How were you in there, looking up at me from those inquiring orange-red eyes, speaking to me from that pointy gray beak? Where were you really? Were you the magpie? Or was the magpie just a … mouthpiece, like a telephone you could call me from whenever you wanted a chinwag? Though I’d grown used to this new and unusual way of being together, some sensible, critical part of me kept nagging, wanted to peer under the curtain, to learn how it was done.

“Don’t ask that, Nance,” the magpie said, whenever my curiosity got the better of me. “Don’t ask.” And then it would launch into some fantastic story, an anecdote of you and me with all the trimmings, those embellishments you’d always add, as though the day-to-day events of our married life were as packed with drama and romance as any opera. “D’you remember, Nance? D’you remember that time we was …”

And off you’d go.

It was in the middle of just such a story that a car I didn’t recognise pulled onto the drive. The magpie squawked and beat its wings; a flash of black and white and it was up in the tree. It was a large, new navy-blue car, big and serious-looking. The driver stepped out, a woman I’d never seen before—as big and serious as the car—with a gray crew cut and a square chin.

“Mrs. Norris?” she said, her voice officious and booming. “I’m Miss Rankin, from the agency. I’m here to replace Miss Little. We called, but you haven’t been answering your phone.”

It was the nurse—another one. Back already. A week had passed in a moment and I’d hardly noticed. I followed her up the steps to the front door, meekly, though it was my own home and she the stranger. My face was hot and flushed, felt red as the camellias blooming either side of the steps. It was as though I’d been caught in some indiscretion, found by my mother with a boy in my bedroom. I turned on the threshold, glanced back toward the trees hoping to catch a glimpse of my magpie. But you were nowhere to be seen.

A look of outraged disdain puckered Miss Rankin’s face. She pressed ahead of me, uninvited, into the house.

“In here?” she said, pushing open the door to the spare room. “Oh, Mrs Norris!”

Lord knows what you’d done, but that body of yours was on the floor, crumpled against the skirting board. One foot was still up on the bed. Your pajamas were soaked with wee and half off, exposing on your legs and back the raw, raging bed sores.

• • •

It was terrible, the dressing down that odious woman gave me. She made all kinds of threats, said she’d report me for this and that: maltreatment, malnourishment, neglect. She said I’d been starving you to death. Worse.

I wanted to tell her it wasn’t like that, to explain. But how could I tell her the truth? And what even was the truth? That it wasn’t you in that room any more than a house is the family who makes their home in it—that the important part of you, the Sidney I held so dear, was with me in the form of a magpie. That we were happier than we’d ever been. Standing shamefaced in the spare room while that wicked nurse raked me over the coals, it all seemed so ludicrous. And you, your shell, so helpless and damaged. I’ve never felt so guilty, or so foolish.

For more than a week after she’d gone, until days after her next visit, I clung to my chores like a woman drowning. I kept you fed and clean, turned you and tended to your sores, even wheeled you out into the lounge to feel the sun while I did the crossword. I talked to you like I used to, calling out the clues, how many letters they were, which letters we had. But you never said anything—of course you didn’t. I didn’t go outside to the bench, though the weather was glorious, the chorus of the many birds an open invitation. I told myself I didn’t want to, that my place was inside, my duty was to you—to that body of yours. The judgment of the terrible Miss Rankin was like a sack cloth covering my shame, her words a flail with which I whipped myself into obedience. Though I still left food for the magpie, it was only oatmeal, and I left the kitchen window closed.

I saw the magpie only twice in all that time, through the glass of the front door, pacing on the steps. It called out to me, throating its mournful, flute-like warble. The second time, it tapped on the glass with its beak. And though it pained me worse even than the guilt I felt, I didn’t go to it. I didn’t open the door. The magpie’s eyes, as it peered at me through the glass, first with one and then the other, seemed filled with sadness. I turned my back, went into the lounge and closed the door behind me, tried to ignore the tap-tap-tapping from the corridor, tried not to see you slumped in the wheelchair, tongue poking dumbly from your mouth, your chin slick with drool.

• • •

The last time the magpie came knocking at my door, I was in the kitchen fixing your food. I heard the tap tap tap of its beak on the glass. It sang a few bars of its morning song—woodle-ardle-oodle-wardle—summoning me as surely as if it had pushed the doorbell.

“Go away,” I yelled down the corridor. “Can’t you see I’m busy?”

“Nance,” it said and tapped again. “Come on, Nance, open the door. Let me in, Nance. Let me in.”

It was your voice, your words. How could I refuse?

I opened the door and in hopped the magpie. Its claws tapped scratchily on the floorboards as it followed me back into the kitchen. With a beat of its wings it rose to the bench top, peered into the bowl, squawked—the perfect imitation of a cockatoo.

“Yuck,” it said. “What’s that muck, Nance? Got any biscuits?”

“It’s good for you,” I said. “Pumpkin, broccoli, chicken. It’s all you can eat now. Well, not you. You know what I mean.”

“Yuck,” it said again. “I’d rather be dead than eat that slop. Get the biscuits, Nance.”

I crumbled a digestive onto the benchtop and the magpie pecked at it thoughtfully. It cocked its head, peering past me at something. Then it hopped down from the bench and into the lounge.

When I caught up with it, the magpie was pacing the Turkish rug, cocking upward glances at the figure drooped in the wheelchair.

“Bloody hell,” it said. “Is that … Is that what I look like?”

It circled the wheelchair with a series of hops, fluttered up to land on your knee, onto the tartan blanket I’d stretched out there. It peered up at your sagging face, turning its head to peer with first one eye, then the other. It shook its head, hopped up your arm to your shoulder, examined your profile with great care and curiosity. Then, as though in disgust, the magpie shat down the front of your pajama top.

“Gormless sod, in’t I?” It said and turned to me. “Put it away, Nance. I can’t bear to look at it no more. Put it back in its box.”

The magpie flew from your shoulder to mine, perched by my ear like the parrot from Treasure Island. I suppose that was the moment I stopped thinking of you, the body, as you anymore. I wheeled it back to the spare bedroom, with you gripping my shoulder, chatting away, cheerful as ever.

“That’s right, Nance. Just stick it on the bed. Now close the door. That’s right. I don’t want to see it no more and you shouldn’t have to neither. What d’you want with that manky old thing when you’ve got me for company. Come on, Nance, that’s right. Let’s go back to the kitchen. You fix yourself a nice cuppa and I’ll polish off that digestive. Then you sit down and tell me all about it. It’s been too long, Nance. I’ve missed you.”

• • •

We slept together that night, for the first time since you went downhill. I lay curled on the bed, and you slept standing on the bedside table. It didn’t look at all comfy, but you told me it was fine, that you always slept that way these days and were all the better for it.

I woke in the night to the sound of banging from the next room. Thumping, and a kind of muffled groan. I made to get up and see to it, the needs of the body in the other room, but your voice in the darkness made me pause.

“Leave it, Nance,” you croaked. “Leave it. There’s nothing in there we need worry about.”

I lay back down and pulled up the sheet, closed my eyes.

“That’s right. You just go back to sleep. Sweet dreams, Nance.”

But I couldn’t sleep. I lay there in the dark, as wide awake as if I’d drunk an espresso, listening to the sounds from beyond the wall. The bumps and rattles. The dreadful glottal moans.

When at last I did drift off, I dreamt of flight—soaring, liberating flight.

• • •

Those last days were perhaps the happiest of our marriage. Certainly, they were the least complicated.

You knew, I think, how it would end. That, as separate as you were from the body you’d left behind, you were tied to it nonetheless. Bound. Maybe we both knew. And that knowledge lent an electric sparkle to each moment of our last hours together. For the first time in my life, I held nothing back. Not a thing. I felt so free in your company, no longer constrained by my past inhibitions, my innate reserve. I saw you, at last, for who you truly are. For the kind and beautiful soul you’d always been—and always will be, wherever you are now.

We were out on the bench when it happened, in the shadow of our resplendent elm, its leaves now lush and green and whispering gently in the faint spring breeze. You were pecking about in the mulch; listless, you seemed, almost bored. I was drowsy, lulled by the serenity of that blissful morning, the stillness inviolate. The empty street, aglow with sunshine. And the smell of springtime everywhere, the air thick with that heavy fragrance of life, of its endless evanescent flowering. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw you stop, cock your head to the left as though listening.

“Nance,” you said. “Listen, Nance. I’ve got to tell you something.”

You cocked your head again, to the right this time. Then froze. You shook out your feathers, like you might to clear them of rain.

“What?” I said. “Tell me what, Sidney?”

But you never replied. The magpie lifted its head, opened its throat and let out a long exultant peal, a warbling, ululant song filled with joy and sadness. And I knew you’d left me.

The magpie took flight. Not over to the eucalypt by the power lines, as usual. But away beyond the rooftops, toward the reserve at the edge of the suburb. I stood, straightened my skirt and went back up to the house.

Your eyes were wide open, your mouth, too. I shut them gently, went into the bathroom for a flannel and the soap. I stripped the bed, peeled off your pajamas, had to loosen them with warm water where you’d soiled yourself and it had dried to a crust. I cleaned you. Not the way the nurse had shown me, but gently, lovingly. Remembering every corner of your old body for what it was: a piece of you, my dear, dear husband.

From the very back of the cupboard I pulled out your wedding suit, unzipped it from the cover. I’d not seen it in decades. There was a dead flower in the lapel, a camellia. The petals crumbled when I touched them. The suit smelled of you, though you’d not worn it in forty years or more. It was too small, of course, so I got out your summer suit instead, the cream one I always liked that made you look so dapper and handsome; the one you always used to wear with that straw hat. I couldn’t find the hat, and wouldn’t have been able to put it on you anyway, with you all laid out like that. But I dressed you in the suit and a nice white shirt, smoothed the lapels. I lay down beside you with my arm across your chest.

There’s a car pulling into the drive. The nurse, I expect. At least I won’t be seeing any more of her.

Oh Sidney, what am I going to do without you? I don’t know if I’m ready to say goodbye.

Perhaps a cup of tea and a biscuit. And then I’ll be ready.