John Amos Comenius. Orbis Sensualium Pictus: A Facsimile (1659 / 1968): 48.
I was thinking about the bird-girl when it happened. Her name is Rima. She lives in the tree-tops. She’s slim and beautiful. I tried to read that book about her,
Green Mansions
[1], when I was a kid, maybe eleven or twelve, but it was too difficult for me. I remember all the pictures, though. She’s come back recently. I dreamed about her the other night.
I’d just put it in my bag, the little purse, when I looked up and saw him staring at me. His eyes were blazing, and I knew he knew what I’d been doing. I should have run out straight away, but instead I just stood there as he came over and said he wanted to look through my bag.
I let him, and he found the purse, and one or two things I’d taken from other shops. Then he told me to come into the back room, so I followed him in there. There were two shop assistants in there already, a boy and a girl. I guess they were on a break. The girl was leafing through a magazine. The man, the shop-owner, said he was going to ring the police, and that I should stay there.
The girl ignored me, and kept on reading her magazine. I was just sitting there feeling miserable, but also kind of strange, like I was excited. The way you get when you’re about to take something and you’re not sure if anyone’s watching, a creepy feeling down your skin. I felt like I was seeing everything really clearly – like it was the end of the world, but I was alive for the first time.
Anyway, the guy (who didn’t have a magazine to read and needed something to do), suddenly asked me, “What’d you take?”
“A purse,” I said, really humbly, like I had to do whatever he said. I was now a criminal, and he was still straight, so I was his slave. I asked him what was going to happen to me.
He looked at me like he was curious what sort of an animal I could be. “The police’ll come. We always prosecute now. Shoplifting is, like, sneaky theft, so we’ve got to be careful about it.”
There was nothing more to say, so I just sat there and tried to think about something else. I kept coming back to how Dad was going to react. He keeps on telling me to get out more and make friends – as if that’s easy when people think you’re a freak or a swot! Now I was a thief as well.
“We’ve caught quite a lot of people lately,” volunteered the guy (who was thin and had dorky-looking big ears), “but mostly they run off before we can stop them. Sometimes we get the stuff back, though.”
I could see he was going to have a lot to talk about this evening when he got home from work. (“We caught a thief today. This really weird girl. I sat and talked with her in the back room before the police came. She was
such a loser. I bet she could have afforded to buy the stuff she stole, it was just she was so mean she thought she might as well take it.”) He didn’t even hate me. Just felt a kind of disinterested curiosity like you might about an animal in a cage (“Oh, do monkeys really live on leaves? I thought they ate nuts.”) He sounded so smug with that we – like all of society was on their side of the bars, and there was just me outside.
It was actually a relief when the police walked in. They led me out to their car, and I thought about making a break for it, but I knew they’d catch me, and then everyone would stare. I didn’t have the guts. Instead I climbed in, and they drove me to the police station.
It was kind of like this whole process had been started by just that one thing, that pair of eyes meeting mine, like that stare was the source of everything, the fingerprinting, the conversation, and then the questioning and the long statement they drew up and wanted me to sign. I signed it, even though there were some words spelt wrong and they’d rephrased what I said. I admitted everything they asked me, but I didn’t tell them how many other things I’d taken.
Then I came out, and Dad was standing there. His face was quite normal. I expected him to be red with anger, or all pale and sad, or even wiping away a tear, but he just looked like he always does, vaguely disapproving and disappointed. I have to admit he had good reason to look disappointed this time.
We hardly even talked about it in the car. It was just too horrible. I would have to go to court on Monday (this was Saturday afternoon), and I might even have to go to prison.
In a sense, it was a relief. At least they know I’m worthless now, I thought. There’s no point in pretending to be the same as everyone else. She’s just a loser-thief, they’ll think, and she’s totally disgusting. It’d be better if she was dead.
It turned out that the main thing he was worried about was how much other stuff I’d taken. “I can’t be a receiver of stolen goods,” he said. I said I
had taken some other things, but I couldn’t really remember what. He said that I’d have to return them all or else pay for them.
I burst into tears at that point. I said I couldn’t face going back to those shops and handing things back to them. What if they decided to prosecute?
He said he understood, and that he’d send them back anonymously, but that I had to come clean on how much stuff there was.
I started drawing up a list, but there seemed to be so much when I went through my chest-of-drawers. Finally I faked it. I listed some of the things I’d taken, and fudged the rest. Even so it came to a couple of hundred dollars.
Dinner was bad. Dad didn’t say anything about it at all. Peter started lecturing me a bit on what a stupid thing it was to do, but even he gave up after a while. The funny thing was how normal everything felt. It was like the whole world had collapsed, but here we were living on just as if everything was normal.
After dinner I went to my room, because I didn’t feel I could watch TV with the others, and tried to read a kid’s book. I couldn’t concentrate, though.
I kept on expecting Dad to come in and really tear strips off me, lecture me on how disgusting and awful I was. I was almost looking forward to it, so I’d have something to react to, to resent, but he didn’t.
Finally I got into bed, but it was hard to sleep. I thought about going to court, and what they’d do to me there, and what I would say. Dad had announced at dinner that he’d arranged to have his lawyer there, and that we should drop in to see him before the court appearance, which was scheduled for ten o’clock.
The whole thing went round and round in my mind until the only thing I wanted in the world was to go to sleep. Actually, it would have felt better if I could have gone to sleep and never woken up at all. Then I started thinking about the bird-girl again. She was free, she was good. When bad things happened to her they weren’t her fault. Everything she did was beautiful because she was beautiful. She was the opposite of me in every way. I wanted more than anything in the world to wake up as her.
The bird-girl lives in the tree-tops. She never descends to the forest-floor if she can help it. She has one enemy, the monkey-man. He mostly comes by night. If you sleep out on your terrace in hot weather you may wake up to see him leaning over you. He likes to pilfer small bits of jewellery or food. Sometimes he kills animals, and sometimes babies.
People are scared of him, but he’s difficult to catch. The bird-girl knows about him, and knows where he nests by day. She’s always careful to hide when it gets dark. She has her own nest up there among the upper branches, a world of spiderwebs and humming-birds, eighty feet above the ground.
What does she eat? She eats honey from bees-nests, certain roots and flowers, which grow up there. She wears feathers from birds’ nests, which she weaves together with plant thread (she’s good at sewing).
Nuts, too, she eats nuts. Those are perhaps her favourites. She never touches meat. The monkey-man eats meat.
She never really knew her parents. They were ordinary people, people of the earth. They fled into the forest because they fell in love and couldn’t marry. He was poor, a wandering musician; she was a farmer’s daughter. But they both loved wild things, so they went there to avoid pursuit.
They built themselves a little shelter in a tree, and planned to live out their days together, in happiness. When she got pregnant it was hard for her to climb up and down their ladder, so he had to do everything – all the food-gathering and the preparation, too.
The baby came at night. There was a lot of bleeding, and he was unable to stop it – it went beyond the herbal remedies he knew. He set out to find a doctor, but by the time they got back it was too late. His young wife was dead. The baby, however, lived.
For a while, they moved back into the village. Nobody bothered them, but they weren’t made very welcome either. The village children said she was the daughter of a witch, and threw stones and hard words when she tried to play with them. Her father took her on long walks through the forest. That was the main thing she remembered about him, his slight figure pushing through the undergrowth, stopping to point out useful plants and berries, things to eat and to avoid. He didn’t want what had happened to her mother to happen to her.
When he died, too, after a brief illness, she was about five years old. The headman’s wife decided to take her in. But it soon became apparent that, young as she was, she was more of a servant than a daughter. She had to clean up after the other children, wield a broom taller than she was, never eat at the same table as the rest of the family.
When she was seven she ran away. She lay in the bushes for a long time hearing the voices calling for her, trembling when they came too near, but the search was a perfunctory one. She had never been a good enough servant for them to bother to hunt her down.
From that time on she was on her own. Trial and error taught her things about the forest even her father hadn’t known, but it was more like remembering. It was as if she’d known it all in a previous life. It grew cold at night, and her worn-out rags were little protection. It was then she thought of feathers, and used the skill at sewing that had been so laboriously beaten into her.
She carved herself a little flute from a hollow twig, as she’d seen her father do, and learned to play a few of his old songs. After a while, though, she stopped playing his music and began to imitate the birds. Their songs held far more mystery, and sudden swoops of tone and register which were almost like a language. She learned to speak to them, and call them, and they accepted her among them.
The monkey-man was different. She’d heard rumours of him long before she saw him. Birds would fly by in unusual numbers, leaving their nests behind (he liked to plunder eggs, and broke those he didn’t eat. Fledglings, too, he took). So she knew enough to be on her guard, the first night she saw him, snuffling along the ground, half bent-over, half-erect, yet with a terrifying agility. The slightest noise and he would bound for cover – standing leaps of fifteen or twenty feet.
Was he human, or an animal? The question scarcely required an answer. He was there, and that meant danger. She learned to keep her traces hidden better than before, and yet he must have known about her. She couldn’t fight him or face him, but sometimes she would take it on herself to save birds from him, warning them of his approach, carrying their nests and fledglings to a safer bough, so high he couldn’t reach it.
Once he had discovered the village, though, his attention turned that way. By day, while she was flitting through the treetops, he would hide in some dark burrow, then come out and prowl around the huts by night. The villagers grew nervous. They started locking things up, but he was cunning. If a way was left open, he would creep in and steal and spoil all he found. His teeth were very busy there at night.
Of course it couldn’t last. One morning after the gnawed corpse of a baby had been found at the edge of the forest, the preparations began for a hunt. They didn’t know enough to come in the dark, when he was active, so the first thing the bird girl knew of it was when she heard beaters thrashing down below.
Descending to observe them, she was spotted, and after that the hunt followed her. (The monkey-man slept on in his hole, unaware of the damage he was causing.)
She could run faster in the upper eaves of the forest than they could follow through the undergrowth, but there were many of them and they had dogs. Their strategy seemed to be to trap her in a tree away from the others. Even there, though, she felt safe enough; she could repel any attempts to climb up to her with ease.
She had lived so long without fire she didn’t even recognise it when the first red leaves began to creep their way towards her, up the trunk, eating and smothering all the plants and insects in their path.
“Rima,” the people shouted from below. “Rima, murderer!” They chanted it, like mad things, believing her their enemy. She didn’t try to speak to them, although she recognised one or two faces from when she had lived among them. Instead, she climbed up as far as she could go into the topmost branches of the forest canopy.
The smoke was curling up around her, already she was coughing, soon she would fall down among them, burn before their eyes, a little witch, shrouded in feathers, victim of their wrath. She tensed herself, and sprang.
Some say she missed her footing, crashed down through the branches, landed in the flames and was burnt up. I say, though, that her skin costume caught the wind, bellied out like a sail, and carried her lithe thin frame just a few feet further to the nearest tree. From there, she ran, scurrying like a squirrel, faster faster, far away from the village, to the heart of the forest, a place where no men come, beyond the great waterfall, and there she lives to this day, doing no harm, living among the hummingbirds and grubs, tending her nests, and fluting the songs of the bright birds.
Notes:
[1] W. H. Hudson.
Green Mansions: A Romance of the Tropical Forest. 1904. Foreword by John Galsworthy. 1916. Illustrated by E. McKnight Kauffer. New York: Random House, Inc., 1944.
evasion 2 (7) (2003-4)
[30/7-2/8/2003]
[2639 words]
[Published in
evasion 2 (7) (2003-4);
Monkey Miss Her Now (Auckland: Danger Publishing, 2004): 101-07.]
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Cover image & Design: Raewyn Alexander (2004)
Nature and her Ape, Art, according to the Adepts
John Amos Comenius, Orbis Sensualium Pictus: A Facsimile of the First English Edition of 1659. 1st ed. 1658. Introduction by John Sadler. The Juvenile Library (London: Oxford University Press, 1968)
