Robbie formed the opinion long ago that funerals were bullshit. His brother, spoiling a wilderness of silent years, had called to explain in stoned fragments that he would be unable to eulogise their father because he had pissed off too many people in town to be speaking from a pulpit, besides which it would be more meaningful coming from Robbie because he had always been closer with Dad and presumably had more stories. Robbie said he’d do it, though the logic creaked under the fact of his brother being the one who never left town, and of Robbie having to catch all sorts of trains to commemorate the life of a man whose final resting age was an unconfident guess. He cried writing it, and discovered a more honest idea of love than he had previously known, and had it printed on nice paper and ring-bound with a plastic cover. He delivered the eulogy to a Uniting Church minister and three old boys from the RSL, and afterwards told his brother’s voicemail to not call anymore or he’d jump right back on all those trains again and kill him.
He was therefore not drawn to the rigmarole of arranging a funeral for himself. The wake was a different matter. Those old boys were a laugh, for example, and the Uniting minister put it away like he was hosing down a fire. He talked elliptically about God’s kingdom and how it was important for the living to forgive the dead while Robbie retched bile into one of the RSL toilets. Funerals marinated you in death and made you bend backwards for some cunt who would probably never lift a finger. Wakes gave you something to look forward to. Robbie could not walk past a newsagents without scanning the death notices for a lively wake.
His own death notice was more carefully prepared than his other offerings to the paper. He liked to write drunk, and to remain drunk as he closed spit-sealed envelopes around his half-pages of incendiary working class wit, and to become drunker on the drive into town where the post box was. This time he slept on it, managing to redact the more pointed of last night’s jokes, such as how everyone was invited including certain married poofters who had lately bought the old Fitzwilliam place. What the paper received was a tasteful two-line invitation for all and sundry to celebrate the life of Robbie Speer, soon to be shuffled off his mortal coil by a malignant testicle, BYO grog.
Now it ticked over to midnight on the appointed day and he regretted his restraint. In his last public act as a flesh-and-blood man he had spoken softly and let people walk all over him. His ute was in town, left there to make space in the driveway, with the keys in the ignition and an unaddressed letter of bequeathal on the front seat. In its place were tarps, camping chairs, and a Weber full of charcoal, but no cars with headlamps to light the scene as it was lit in Robbie’s imagination. The empty driveway was a cavernous, laughing mouth.
Magda called out like the scission of a high-tension wire, the protest cry of a diurnal thing kept awake by cheap halogen globes. It was a call not described in the Bushwalker’s Guide to Australian Birdsong, which prompted Robbie to scribble the discovery on the inner cover of his op-shop copy and mail it to the publisher’s address. His plan for tonight had been to cover her willow craypot with a blanket and, in the morning, leave everything ajar so she could bugger off on her own if she wanted. It was tough luck for Magda that he now needed some company.
There had been something fateful in her arrival. It was the first week of swooping season, and Robbie and Eric were last in the pub. Eric was the least regular of the pubgoers, but the best listener, and was convincingly amused to hear that the Australian magpie was not a true magpie, not a trinket-hoarding corvid that could square roots and multiply, but one of the dumbest creatures on dry land. Robbie expected him to arc up about this, sore from the day he helped Eric and Vee with their bailing and Vee just about kicked him off the property over some piece of satire regarding the referendum. Eric was strong and silent, though, and Robbie felt bad for the pair of them in light of nobody else exactly lining up to rescue their hay from the coming rain. Eric drove him home with his ute on the towbar, and the next morning Robbie found his window cracked and Magda twitching on the grass below.
Can’t live with ‘em, he cooed to the angry bird, guessing it was Vee who vetoed the couple’s attendance. In that case there was nothing to be bitter about. It would be easy enough to go to his grave cursing Eric as a broken-backed, two-faced coward, but there were higher considerations. On the day of the testicle, for instance, when it was the size of a navel orange, a receptionist told him that the local family doctor was retired, and that his replacement was a highly qualified practitioner called Dr. Bianca Lee. He stalled for a self-subdividing eternity before returning to his car, where he fatefully surrendered to the beast in his scrotum. Some things were just the right thing to do.
Later, while he was digging out the dam at the Fitzwilliam place, he told Ashley this story. He preferred the husband, whose quiet self-possession reminded him of the best people he’d known in any of these country communities, but apparently he was no longer in the picture. Their untrained ridgeback was sniffing at Robbie’s crotch and Ashley, swigging Grey Goose, said he could probably smell pussy. Not on me he can’t, said Robbie, and then can’t go to the doctor anymore without a sheila trying to feel me up. This let Ashley unburden himself of how he would not see a woman doctor because women were impulsive and confused medicine with skincare, which he should know, being a feminine and impulsive person with beautiful skin. This annoyed Robbie, who said that probably what the dog could smell was his testicular cancer, the way animals sometimes did.
He wondered if Magda could. That electric shriek, the only noise she ever made in her craypot on the kitchen table away from the window, might be the Geiger ratchet of a bush medicine cancer detector. She did not look like a medical genius. She looked mean, with miserly little red eyes and a beak like a blunt instrument. You had to get in close to see the slight curve in its profile and its finely hooked tip.
He was surprised that she still looked so mean. When he found her crumpled on the spiny grass he knew, in the vault of himself that knew the truest things, that she was suffering because she belonged to a life that would not let her go. She had been injured defending a territory, one that did not intersect with the territorial map carving up Robbie’s universe of rent and upkeep obligations, save for one sheet of glass that reflected her to herself as an intruding creature and brought their worlds together. What code of conduct would make someone tilt at their own image? What a gift to be plucked from that savagery and laid before the hearth. Robbie wanted to teach her a lesson in the Pharaoh’s fashion, leaving her locked in the craypot as guest after guest failed to arrive and they both rendered down to treasure island bones. It was necessary to offer her the choice, though, or else who was the barbarian?
At eleven o’clock in the morning, Eric and Vee crawled up the driveway in their Hilux. Magpies in their path flapped out of immediate danger and watched from low branches. There were dozens of them. Robbie’s ute was in the driveway, with Ashley hanging out of the driver’s door chatting to a stranger. Eric took the stranger for a new boyfriend, thinking Ashley must have hit a desperate patch, before he introduced himself as Robbie’s dickhead brother. More were coming, too: cousins, family friends, and a church minister who was driving everyone in the community bus. The brother came on his own, because his invitation had given yesterday’s date and the journey took longer than expected, while the minister and everyone else had been invited for this evening. The local people received no formal invitations except the strange death notice in the Examiner, which was undated and not published until this morning, but with the news of a big extended-family do, plus the rumour mill surrounding Robbie’s abandoned ute, everyone would definitely be coming.
Eric trod cautiously, wary of the thronging magpies, and knocked as if Ashley and the brother had not been knocking all morning. Vee told him to just open the bloody thing. The door depressurised with Robbie’s spare key, and out burst a large bird with something like a mango clutched in its beak. It soared over the tree canopy and took the army of magpies with it, a roar of wings that settled to graveyard quiet. The four invitees followed a thin trail of blood into the kitchen and found Robbie on the floor, slick with it from a tear in his jeans. Vee took his hummingbird pulse, noted that his breathing was quick and shallow, and hurried the men to find a patch of mobile service. Robbie tried to tell them to stop. Everyone would be coming soon.