The Elusive Language of Ducks (4 page)

Shortly afterwards he told her exactly what it was, as if he'd known all along.

It's a uropygial gland, he read from the screen of his computer. It produces oil to spread over the feathers to make them water-repellent. It's strongly developed in waterfowl such as ducks, and not all birds have them. Emus, ostriches and bustards don't. Hmmm, no, wait a minute . . . What you're looking at is the uropygial
wick,
under which is a single narrow nipple-like papilla, producing vitamin D precursors, extruded cells, ester waxes, fatty acids, fat and sudanophilic secretory granules.

What's a bustard, wondered Hannah, and what's a sudanophilic secretory granule? But she didn't dare ask.

Ducks are more buoyant than they would be if their feathers absorbed water, continued Simon.
And
they have hollow bones. If ducks die at sea, say after an oil spill, ninety per cent of them float for at least two weeks.

Hannah looked at the duckling with its hollow bones and uropygial wick.

Well, she said. Well, we have learnt something.

Simon had always relied on knowledge or information as a means of communication.

The first time he'd asked her out, rather casually, one cold Easter, to a university tramping club get-together, there'd been a bonfire. Baked potatoes encrusted with thick charcoal, sausages, white bread, tomato sauce, mulled wine, laughing camaraderie. After eating, everybody sat on logs around the fire and hollered out rude songs into the chilly night.
She'll be coming round the mountains when she comes. The hair on her dikydido hung down to her knees.

Then, without any preamble, he'd grabbed her hand.

Come, I want to show you something, he said.

She'd clambered up from the log and followed, or rather was pulled behind him, along the grassy dunes, down to the beach and around a headland of rocks, their boots squelching through the wet sand left by the low tide. Around the next bay they stood against the rocks, sheltering from a keen wind cutting its way under their coats. The icy blue light of the full moon was shattered across the choppy sea. It's stunning, Hannah said, pushing herself against him, more for warmth than anything.

Diving into his coat pocket, he pulled out a large pair of binoculars. He moved behind her, resting his arms on her shoulders, breathing close to her ear as he held the binoculars to her eyes, directed towards the moon. His hand, she noted, was trembling. She took the binoculars from him, adjusting the focus as he pointed out the main craters and seas and mountains. He had names for them all. Unaccountably, she started to giggle, and the more she tried to stop the worse it became.

What's funny? he asked.

Nothing, she replied, but the more unsettled he became, the more the bubbles burst out from under the lid of the boiling kettle.

As he pulled away from her, she could feel his sense of rejection and this made her worse.

What's wrong? What did I do?

She stopped until the hysterics exploded from her again.

I'm sorry, she kept saying, I'm sorry.

He wound the strap around the binoculars and stuffed them roughly back into his pocket.

She pulled herself together.

I just don't get the joke, he said and, when she started giggling again, he grabbed her and placed his mouth over hers. He tasted of charcoal, sausages, tomato sauce, mulled wine. He tasted of teeth and tongue. He tasted of everything she had ever wanted, forever, in her whole life. Suddenly they were urgently making love, still bundled up against the cold in their layers of clothes, she with her back pressed against the rock face, and, above her, the unblinking eye of the moon, with all its craters, seas and mountains, shattering itself into every particle of her being.

Afterwards, as they ambled hand-in-hand back to the bonfire, he said, with an element of hurt lingering in his voice: I still don't get what it was that you were laughing at.

I'm sorry, she said again. I tend to giggle when I'm nervous.

But really, she'd been laughing at his premeditation, his obvious preparation, she was laughing because he had set up everything so that he could have the excuse to put his arms over her shoulders, and his cheek against her cheek to murmur craters and lakes in her ear. He could have muttered anything — the periodic table, his favourite ice-cream flavours, characters from
Animal Farm;
he could have been silent. And all these months at university he had given her no clue that he even liked her. They were both a few years older than the other students who were straight from school, and they'd enjoyed lengthy discussions in tutorials, in groups over coffee, sometimes sitting next to each other in lectures, in a contrived arbitrary sort of way. It had suddenly seemed ridiculously hilariously gloriously funny.

And then he'd said, There's something I need to tell you.

Oh?

I don't want to tell you now, but just remember that I told you this: that I need to tell you something.

You're married with three children?

No, he said.

Ten children?

Don't be silly.

I know you're Australian, she joked. And I don't mind.

I'm wishing I hadn't mentioned it. It's not funny.

You can tell me, she said.

I don't want to tell you now as there might be no point. I mean it's early days, I mean . . . I don't know what
this
means to you.

OK, she said. Sure, that's fine.

I mean, we've only been ‘us' for five minutes. Well, maybe seven, he said.

OK, she said again, and nestled into his armoury of jerseys and coat. And she took from this that he was looking at a meaningful relationship, and, although this would normally scare her off so soon, for some reason she knew it was to be, and didn't mind at all.

Hannah was stressed, bogged down with a sudden overload of the editing work she did. Sometimes the duck felt like the breaking point and she had to call on Simon to help her. And it so turned out that Simon, who had played an instrumental part in the duck coming to stay, didn't like to touch it unless it was wrapped up in a towel and placed carefully in his lap. And even so, when this was forced upon him, he sat upright in a meditative pose with his eyes closed. The epitome of contrived tolerance.

The first time she handed him the duck, after the duck had been freshly bathed in warm water in the wash basin, both the man and the duck protested. The duck wriggled to be free.

He doesn't like me, Simon said to his wife.

He doesn't like me, the duck said to the woman.

Well, you'll have to get used to each other, said the woman to both of them. If you want me to cook your dinner, she said to the man. If you want me to clean out your box and give you fresh water and stir up your mash, she said to the duck. And smash up a snail or two, she added. And pudding for you, as well, and if you'd like me to be relaxed enough to have a wine with you later, she added to the man.

She eased the duck from Simon's big smooth hands. Held the duck against her stomach, rubbed his damp downy breast with the towel. He pressed against her and nuzzled into her shirt. He thought he had won. Simon, too, thought he had won. He yawned and stretched and scratched his ear. She chatted to each of them a little, and once they had both calmed down, she wrapped the duckling in the towel again and passed him over to the man. This time, both duck and man were resigned to each other.

The duck was outgrowing the carry-bag, so Hannah had bought a large plastic storage box which he slept in at night in the bathroom. But he needed to have more of a free run in the daytime. And it was Simon who, under some pressure from her, had built the makeshift hutch for the bottom of the garden. A third of it was a wooden covered shelter, and the rest was a run enclosed above and around with chicken-wire. It was makeshift because one day the duck would have to go.

At first the new hutch, about two metres long, seemed enormous, but already with his water dish and mash bowl and the towelling cloth in the shielded corner for nestling into when the wind was cold, it felt cramped. Hannah was thinking they should extend it. She'd imagined he would love his new abode, but once the duck realised that this was the place of confinement when she went away during the day, he would squeak unhappily every time she brought him near it. Now he threw himself insanely against the netting, over and over, trying to force his beak through the wire holes along the rows. This one and this one and this one. He was a persistent gambler, clinging to the vain hope that one of the wire holes was the magic one that would let him through.

While Hannah was there, he ate, or sat looking at her. But as soon as she turned her back, the cheeping started. He was like her fridge door, reminding her that she had left it open. He was the smoke alarm needing a new battery. He was the drier saying that the clothes were ready. The microwave saying the food was done. The phone calling for an answer. He was an electronic beeper, reminding her to be anxious, that she was leaving him alone and motherless, and that she was mean mean mean.

She thought of her mother in the Primrose Hill Rest Home. How, in the beginning, she would shuffle along the corridors — her handbag, now almost empty, over her arm — until the staff found her again. Sometimes she would set out with a wobbly friend, the two of them supporting each other, out for an adventure along the pastel-hued corridors that all looked the same. In the end, to stop her escaping, they'd crammed her bones into a bucket chair from which she couldn't get up. In the end she couldn't get up from anywhere. In the end she couldn't stand. In the end the only exercise she had was to bat with her right hand at a balloon thrown directly to her from the centre of the room.

The duck was about a month old when the woman placed him in his cage and went out to a long meeting about a book on adoption and its association with mental illness. All day she had to consider people who were isolated or depressed or manic around issues of adoption.

She couldn't help thinking of the duck in relation to all this. At the meeting she mentioned him to people she hadn't met before. She was told that ducklings didn't have a defined gender until later, according to how they fitted in with the dynamics of the rest of the flock. Hannah found this difficult to believe, but even so, wondered whether she was actually influencing the final gender of her duckling. Somewhere, quite early along the way, she had started assuming that he was a male, and for no other reason except that she
felt
that he was. Almost without doubt. But when she was also told that drakes in general were rapacious and aggressive, she just
knew
this wouldn't be the case with her gentle little duck, whatever gender he turned out to be.

As soon as she arrived home from the meeting, the duckling jumped up and ran at the wire netting.

The woman picked him up from the cage, her hands slipping under his belly to calm his clockwork legs. He was like a puppy, such was the intensity of joy as he snuggled into her. She was a dandelion leaf salad, the sun on his fluff after a bath, she was a paddock wriggling with worms, she was a wing, she was a mother duck.

I thought you would never come back, he whimpered. He told her how cats had slunk towards the cage, their whiskery noses investigating. How it had rained — the first time he had experienced water that hadn't been presented to him in a dish or a basin. Today it had fallen from the sky, and she hadn't been there. He dug his beak under her hair, delving into the skin of her neck. She sat down on the steps of the deck, and he laid his neck upon her stomach, burying his head into the crook of her arm, and finally the chirruping settled, and in the silence, in his silence, she thought she could feel his heart vibrating against her arm.

And she thought of his anxiety and isolation all the day long, and wondered whether there would be issues in the future over his adoption.

As the days passed, the duckling's shape pushed out further into the form of a duck. It looked as though a thumb had pressed its beak outwards. Its body was stronger and also longer, its neck snaking out from its body. It was a balloon being blown up in the night by a masterful street artist. One day, she thought, its tail might be tied into a knot and the duck released to float away into the sky, to join all the other fluffy white balloons that skidded high across the wide summer blue.

The woman wondered what would happen to the duck when he grew up. She visualised him filling up all the spaces she had to offer. She imagined going down to the bathroom one morning, to where he slept on straw in the large plastic box, only to find that the duck was a square thing occupying every corner of the box.

Chapter 3