Magpie Hall (2 page)

Magpie Hall was to be renovated. Carpet ripped up and floors polished; walls knocked down for open-plan living and indoor-outdoor flow; wallpaper torn off and walls relined and painted fresh modern colours. I had seen the plans.

I don’t think Grandpa would have liked it. He had left the house and farm to his three children — my father and his brother and sister — and, oddly, to my brother. I think Grandpa had notions that Charlie, as the eldest son of the eldest son, would take over the family business that my father had shunned, that he would take a wife and pass the farm to the next generation of Summers. But my brother was firmly attached to the city life, with a promising career as a doctor ahead of him. Better for Grandpa if he had left it to me.
At least I wouldn’t be gutting the house. I would have kept it just the way it was.

But I had no say. I was invited to the family dinner following the reading of the will, and they barely discussed the matter. They knew what they wanted — my parents and aunt and uncle — and only Charlie sat still in the corner, pale, clutching a beer. He felt guilty, I know, that he had inherited so much when his sister and cousins hadn’t. After a few more drinks, Charlie had stood, swaying slightly, and said, ‘What if I want to be a farmer?’ and the rest of the family had laughed him down. But I knew he hadn’t meant it as a joke, not in that moment. For one tiny second, I think my brother had imagined a different life for himself.

Around my parents’ huge dining table it was decided that they would subdivide the farm — after it had been in the family for generations — and sell it, and that they would keep the house. It would be turned into a bed and breakfast hotel, to earn its keep. My family has never been poor. At the time I didn’t understand why any of them needed any more money than they already had, but I kept the thought to myself. Perhaps, too, they had other reasons. Although my father and his siblings had grown up happily on the farm, things had happened there since that they would prefer to forget. We all would. I just didn’t think that punishing the house was the way to go about it.

As I walked through those dusty rooms, down the corridor lined with old watercolour landscapes and still lifes, I knew that this would be my last chance to know the house as it was; that soon my family heritage would be watered down, perhaps washed away, forever.

Although some of the antique furniture would remain, for ‘character’, everything else would be cleared out or stored in the attic. The first to go would be the stuffed animals — the ‘menagerie room’ we called the study where most of the animals were kept, and
where Grandpa practised his taxidermy. But it wasn’t just Grandpa’s collection — the birds and the stoats and the stag trophies he had spent his spare hours bent over — it was also Great-great-grandfather Henry’s collection, which meant there were some rare and very old specimens, of both exotic and native birds and animals, including the huia. My family would have liked to donate it all to a museum, or, even better, to sell it to private collectors, but here at least I had some say. For Grandpa had left the entire collection to the only family member who had taken any interest in the art of taxidermy: me.

I was ten years old. Charlie, two years younger, stood over the magpie, pinging the rubber band of his slingshot. He hid the weapon behind his back when he heard me approach.

‘What did you do?’ I asked. Blood grazed the bird’s eye, but other than that it had no visible marks. I knelt down beside it.

‘Nothing. It was an accident. Stupid bird.’ He ran off, laughing, his skinny legs windscreen wipers in the long grass. He turned once to yell, ‘Stick it up your arse!’

I lay down on my stomach and pushed my face towards the magpie, looking for any sign of life. I touched it, picked up the body in the cup of my hands. It was warm, soft; its head flopped lazily.

‘There birdie, poor birdie.’

I pulled it into my chest and kissed it, wanting to comfort it somehow. The close proximity to real death thrilled me. It was the most elegant creature I had ever seen. I wanted to hold it forever.

I knew just what to do with it.

Grandpa was in his taxidermy room, tidying up.

‘Now, what’s this you’ve brought me?’ Taking the bird from me,
seeing the look of concern on my face and handling it with more gravity than he needed. ‘Yes, yes,’ he said. ‘A fine specimen of
Gymnorhina tibicen hypoleuca
. Not a native, mind. Introduced in the 1860s to control the insects that were destroying the crops. Did you know that?’

I shook my head.

‘And now they’re here to stay. Like old friends. Let’s see what we can do for this one, eh?’

We kids had once been attacked by magpies. They had swooped and dived at us as we walked through the eastern paddock to the river for a swim, and a beak grazed my hair before I put my hands over my head and ran, screaming, back to the house.

Grandpa taught us how to deal with the birds. He broke two thin branches off a tree and showed us how to walk tall, sticks erect above us. He found four ice-cream containers and some pens. We drew psychedelic eyes on the bottoms and set off for the river, all of us, marching like tin-pot generals with the containers on our heads, their eyes hypnotising the magpies above and keeping them at bay. We named the pool at the other side of the paddock the Magpie Pool. Charlie proclaimed himself King of the Magpies after that, but I was not at all surprised that one of his missiles had found its mark.

Henry Summers must have loved those magpies to name the house after them; or maybe they were such an integral part of the landscape they were unavoidable.

I felt bereft when Grandpa took the bird from me and laid it out on the table. I sighed, and he looked up and saw my face. He moved aside then, reached for my hand and pulled me to him. ‘Do you want to do it? Do you want to bring the bird back to life?’ I nodded, of course, but I was scared of the scalpels that lay on his workbench, of what they might do to the bird, so perfect in its death.

Grandpa made an incision from the magpie’s throat to its tail
(‘Airway to arsehole,’ he said) and after he had gently peeled back the skin, he let me squeeze the secateurs that cut through the leg and wing bones at the shoulder and hip, and finally the neckbone. The bird had merely shrugged off its coat and now lay naked beside it.

Together we mounted it. The magpie became our project for the rest of my holiday there as we scooped out the contents of the skull with a brainspoon, dried the skin with salt, checking up on it daily until it was ready, fashioned the body from clay and sawdust, chose glass bead eyes and sewed and glued and slowly watched it take shape. We positioned it with wings outstretched, full of life, defiant. We sat on the high stools at the workbench, shoulder to shoulder, bent over the bird. Grandpa’s great knobbly hands, with their brown-acorn knuckles, enclosed mine so often as we worked that I came to know their smell and texture as well as I knew my own small pale hands, which were like rabbit paws next to his.

The magpie came home with me at the end of the holidays. My mother tried to make me keep it in the shed, but I would not let it go. It perched in my room and kept a guard over my dreams as I slept. I took it to school for show and tell and all the children wanted to touch it at lunchtime. They sidled up, measuring me, not sure whether to revile or worship me. It was a dilemma they would face all through my school days.

Now, the menagerie room looked as though Grandpa had just stepped out for a cup of tea. The big work table, hip height, dominated the centre of the room, and the tall stools I used to balance on were dotted around it. His instruments were lined up ready to use: scalpels, brushes, brainspoons. Containers of eyes, descending in order from biggest,
like marbles, to the tiniest of rodents’ beads. Glass cases cluttered with jars and small animals stood with their backs to the walls.

I took a moment for it sink in: this collection was now mine. I owned it. Every parrot and hummingbird, every tui and snarling stoat.

Outside, the day was dulling. A small whirlwind picked up a pile of leaves and scattered them across the vast lawn.

I didn’t know how long it had been since Grandpa was well enough to work in this room. My parents tried to get him to move in with them, especially in those last few months, when he was really ill, but he refused to move. He said he was damned if he was going to live out his last few months in a house in the city where he couldn’t see the stars at night. But we all had busy lives and nobody could afford to take the time off to care for him indefinitely at Magpie Hall.

He had grown up in this house, as had his father; his wife had died there; he had raised his children, seen grandchildren come and go. The house was far too big for one old man and his housekeeper, with no other dwellings for half a mile — and those the workers’ cottages up the hill, where Joshua the station manager lived with his wife and young children. Magpie Hall wasn’t built for this solitary life. Standing there, I felt its spaces echo around me, and realised it was the first time I had ever been there alone. And in that moment I understood why Grandpa had left the house to Charlie, in the sweet hope that it would be restored to a new generation, that the cycle that had passed with Grandpa would begin again, that Charlie might start a family there. And although Grandpa wanted to stay there until he died, I know that the silence got to him, that the house had lost some of its life since I had stopped coming as a child all those years ago. Its spaces were thick with regret. Its edges had faded and frayed.

Finally the family employed a nurse to look after Grandpa but we visited him often and in the end he said he preferred to have a near-
stranger looking after him. When he couldn’t wash himself properly or go to the toilet unassisted, he would rather his family didn’t have to do it for him. It was about dignity, he said.

I moved back to my home town after my grandmother died, to take up my university studies and to be closer to Grandpa. I grew up in the right part of town, went to all the right schools. By day it was a pretty, safe place, covered with bright flowers or a sprinkling of frost, depending on the season. Old money lived there, apparent in the huge colonial houses that sat behind brick walls and hedgerows, shutting out the world. By night it became a city where prostitutes were found floating in the river; where teenage girls were raped or murdered; where a young man could be beaten to a meaty pulp for wearing pink sneakers; where tourists were knifed in the town square for talking funny; where the citizens were held captive by boy racers, who circled the perimeter like sharks, engines growling and tyres smoking. The good folk cowered in their houses and waited for the sun to rise. I had left as soon as I was old enough, swearing never to return, so when I did, I chose to live as far away from the town centre as possible, over the hills in the industrial port.

With the bare bulb now illuminated, the animals threw sharp shadows on the walls. Exotic butterflies and beetles were trapped behind glass, and the light reflected off their wings and bodies. Grandpa had told me about them — they were from Henry’s vast collection, captured in Africa and Australia and Brazil. The most marvellous part of the story was that he hadn’t just acquired them; he had caught them himself. Who knew how much had gone into each specimen, how much it had cost him, in money, danger and sweat? And here they were, colours as alive as ever.

I let my gaze slip to the glass cases. These had been my guilty pleasure as a child. The kids at school didn’t believe me when I
told them what they contained: not only stuffed animals but jars of creatures preserved in what I supposed was formaldehyde or alcohol, with faded labels written in old-fashioned ink: a coiled thin white snake, with a label that read
Zamenis hippocrepis, Egypt, 1882; Squid, Aegean, 1875
stuffed into the jar, its tentacles wrapped around themselves and pressed against the glass. More jars were stashed behind them, three deep. One snake,
Dipsas dendrophila
, from Sumatra, had large scales on its black and white body, giving it the appearance of a fish floating in water. I don’t think Grandpa even realised how much time I spent in this room when he was out on the farm. I knew where he kept the key to the case and I hid in the menagerie room with Henry’s collection while the family forgot my existence. I opened the doors, moved aside the jars at the front and reached in to pull one from the back: one of the good ones that only I knew about. I would never have shown my little brother what I now held in my hands, suspended in the heavy liquid, turning in the light: a human foetus. Next to the foetus on the shelf, a pair of tiny feet. A baby’s feet, soles pressed against the glass, with rosy rings lacing its toes. The label read:
Smallpox, 1885
.