First chapter: The Axeman’s Carnival by Catherine Chidgey
Winner of the 2023 Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction Ockham New Zealand Book Awards
Catherine Chidgey made history when she won her second Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for The Axeman’s Carnival (her first win was for The Wish Child). Convenor of judges Stephanie Johnson described The Axeman’s Carnival as “unique: poetic, profound and a powerfully compelling read from start to finish.” It is one of our biggest-selling local fiction books, and has been reprinted a number of times, but if you haven’t read it, here’s the first chapter to provide a taste. Since The Axeman’s Carnival, Chidgey has released Pet and is now working on The Book of Guilt.
Chapter one:
A long long time ago, when I was a little chick, not even a chick but a pink and naked thing, a scar a scrap a scrape fallen on roots and wriggling, when I was catching my death and all I knew of sky was the feel of feathers above me, the belly of black as warm as a cloud above me, when I was blind, my eyes unsprouted seeds, my eyes dots of gravel stuck under skin, when I was a beak opening for nothing nothing nothing, she lifted me into her pillowed palm. My siblings cried out as she carried me away, calling from our nest high in the spiny branches: Father! Father! Where are you? Come back! My mother called for him too, her voice frantic and afraid – but he, hunting for food, had left us all unguarded.
That first day she sang me a strange human song as she packed me into a slippery box punched with holes for air. I love you, a bushel and a peck, you bet your pretty neck I do . . .
Then came another voice, deeper than hers, and it was a voice I knew already, a voice I remembered chopping its way up our tree and into our nest of sticks and wire and wool. Shaking us in our shells. Come away, and Get in behind, and Dutchie, Dutchie, ya mongrel. She stopped singing to me about pretty necks then and said, ‘You’re not to touch him.’
‘Haven’t you learned your lesson, babe?’
‘I said you’re not to touch him.’
The box tilted and bumped and I was all claws in search of something to hold.
‘I’m just looking.’
Their breaths on my bareness, raising featherless bumps. A snort that I felt as a shock, a shove.
‘It’s got no chance.’
‘Give me the lid. He needs to rest.’
‘Well, for Christ’s sake, don’t name it. And don’t come crying to me.’
I wanted the membranous press of the egg; I wanted back in my shell. In my shell I understood my own dimensions, how I curled leg to breast and beak to wing, how I filled the wide world. There I heard my mother talking about the sun and the wind, which could parch us and pummel us, and I felt her tidying the nest, cushioning every corner, pushing away sharpnesses that might hurt a hatchling. I heard the songs of my flock, too, and when they all sang at once I felt the notes blood-deep. At the tip of my beak, a bony spike: an egg tooth, aimed at the blunt end of the shell. My sister and my brothers spoke to me from within their speckled planets, telling me to let in the air, to take my first breath in the soft close dark so that I would be ready. I listened to their hammering, all three of them breaking stars in the sky. ‘Now?’ I asked. ‘Now,’ they answered, and I began to shift my body, to move as they too were moving.
In the slippery box I lay like a stone, and she touched me to check if I had died. Then she cupped me under her hand, and when I was warm again I began to beg. Whatever she brought in her little syringes, minced and mashed and measured, I swallowed. I was a hole of hunger and I shouldn’t have survived, but she stroked my spine with a single fingertip and said, ‘What shall we call you?’ Back then I did not know light and could not know light and I thought, when I opened my eyes, that her hand was my mother. A day or two later, I saw her hair as feathers, black against the white of her temples and shoulders and neck, and I knew that she loved me.
‘Oreo?’ she said. ‘Sushi? Domino? Or are you a Panda? Or a Puffin? No, that’s confusing.’ She picked up the lid of the box. ‘Vanilla Choc Chip?’
He peered in at me too, his riverstone eyes red-rimmed, scratched with broken veins. Hair a dirty yellow. His face tanned but the squint lines white. ‘You know if it keeps me awake I’ll have to wring its neck.’
‘It’s just until he’s old enough,’ she said. ‘Then I’ll let him go.’
‘And what about the mess?’
‘I’ll housetrain him.’
‘Marnie, it’s wild. You can’t housetrain it.’
‘Yes you can, kind of, when he’s a bit older. I’ve been reading online.’
‘It won’t be staying that long, though.’
‘Mmm.’
‘If you keep it that long its parents won’t take it back.’
‘If I return him during nesting season they’ll swoop me.’
Tufts of downy feathers grew as soft as dandelion fluff, and spiky pinfeathers, spiky blood feathers. Oh, I was a scruff of a thing, patchy and mismatched, a little branchling only a mother could love. I perched on her finger as if it were my home, and she held me to her chest and hummed, and I felt myself taking shape, shuddering into life. I started to flap my wings. To realise what they were for.
The slippery box was in the hot-water cupboard and the hot-water cupboard was in the laundry with its shelves of sprays and poisons and its white deep-freeze. Beyond the window, the paddocks of sheep, hundreds of them, thousands, chewing and shitting and turning themselves into meat, and the single eucalyptus trees and the stands of poplar, and the vast dark pines on the hillside that stretched their branches full of needles and blocked the sun and the wind and cut black shapes from the air. Higher still, the mountains where no trees grew. And inside the cupboard the old towels ragged at the edges, and the flannelette sheets worn smooth from the rub of bodies, and the hot-water cylinder that whooshed and ticked, a hot heart. She left the cupboard door open a crack when she put me to bed, so I wouldn’t feel too cooped up, but I wasn’t to make a break for it, did I understand? I was still small. It was still dangerous.
One night I saw him through the crack. I saw him. He opened the deep-freeze and shouted, ‘I’ll get it, babe. Do you want Boysenberry Ripple?’ He chipped away ice. Shifted frozen sheep legs. The hot-water cylinder heaved and hissed. In the distance another voice: Any lingering showers will clear by late morning, with a high of sixteen. Then he had a box, a slippery blue box just like the one she’d kept me in, and he was pulling off the lid and scooping out something bloody, a mess of veins. I saw him. Dropping it into two white bowls. Thud. Thud. Licking his monstrous fingers. I must have called to my siblings to save me, I don’t remember, I saw him with his box of dead birds, slippery and dark red, and the pine trees huge in the evening. Then the crack opened and she said, ‘What’s all this racket?’ and I must have kept calling to my siblings, Help me, find me, save me, and I fluttered to the bare-board floor and hid behind the cylinder in the downy dust.
She said, ‘It’s all right, it’s me. It’s Marnie. Marnie’s here.’
And I understood that the sounds she was making were not just sounds: they held a meaning, the way my own tongue held meaning.
And when she lifted me and held me I saw that the box of dead birds was not a box of dead birds, but still I did not trust him, and again she said, ‘Marnie’s here. Marnie’s here.’
And I knew what she meant.
From the windowsill I could see my flock in the distance, and hear them, and I tried to tell which birds were my magpie mother and father: little bits of black and white, dark and light, too far away. One day I thought I heard them singing for their lost chick, but every family lost half their chicks, and all parents sang for them, and the voices might have been the voices of someone else’s parents.
I saw the new lambs through the window as well, shaky on their new legs, tails fluttering as they drank from their mothers. And I saw him collecting the dead lambs and throwing them into the cage on the back of his quad bike, and the dead mothers too.
‘Isn’t it old enough yet, Mar?’ he said.
‘Not yet,’ she said.
I walked before I flew, lurching left right left across the waxy floor.
‘Just like a drunk,’ he said.
‘Just like a toddler,’ she said. ‘Baby steps, baby steps, little boy.’
I flapped my way to the seat of a steel stool, and then to the top of the slick deep-freeze. Put together all wrong for this smooth world, I skidded and slid. When I came to a stop at the windowsill I thought I could step through the glass, that mysterious slice of nothing, that trick of the light. He let me crash into it not once but three times, though she held her hand to her mouth, because I had to learn, didn’t I, and the best way to learn was by making a painful mistake.
‘Told you,’ he said as I staggered back from the thing I couldn’t see. ‘Just like a drunk.’
He put shapes on the windowpane for me, though: bird silhouettes that looked as distant as the sky. I watched her peg the washing to the clothesline, watched it turn in the hot nor’west wind, scree, scree, scree.
I knew he would make her take me back to the pines on the hillside when I was old enough, and I wanted to leave and I wanted to stay. She picked me up and zipped me into the front of her jacket where it was warm and dark as love, and I began to warble against her, trying out my voice.
She said, ‘A bit longer.’
He said, ‘It’s not natural.’
She said, ‘You owe me.’
He said, ‘Don’t start that again.’
And perhaps I played at helplessness. Perhaps I trembled my wings and begged open-beaked when she came with her syringes and her soft voice. When she scratched me behind my head. When she folded a jersey into a feather-soft nest that smelled like wool and like grass and like bark and like her. She was so beautiful. I love you, a bushel and a peck . . .
They kept the laundry door closed but I knew the house had other doors. That was how houses worked. I heard their footfalls in those shut-off places, their questions and their pleas: Are we out of kindling? and Have you seen my lighter? and Make us a cuppa, there’s a good girl. At night their whimpers and sighs, and every morning and evening, in the room on the other side of the wall, downpours that started from nothing and pelted and gushed in time with the hot-water cylinder until they stopped just like that. And now and then, moving from room to room, the suck and howl of a storm that I thought must surely snatch me and cast me away and away like a seed. I screamed for her when the storm came, and kept screaming until it stopped – again, just like that – and then I lay on my back in her arms and she rocked me and sang to me, you bet your pretty neck, and I closed my eyes and recalled the dark of the nest when I was still blind and bare, and the rocking of the branches, and my mother’s song.
He said, ‘It’s not a baby. I’m worried that you think it’s a baby.’
She said, ‘I know it’s not a baby. Babies don’t have feathers. Babies don’t have claws. Babies don’t eat raw meat.’ She cooed to me, held out her pinky finger for me to nibble.
He said, ‘If I could undo it I would. You know I’d never hurt you, not on purpose. I’m no monster.’
She said, ‘Who’s a good boy? Who’s the best boy?’
And I was not the only animal they brought into the house: I heard the orphan lambs that bleated for their mothers, and I saw Marnie mixing up milk for them at the laundry tub, then scrubbing the bottles and the rubbery pink teats.
Little by little she began to let me into other rooms – the kitchen, the hall, the living room – following me round with the slippery blue box that I had long since outgrown.
‘Do you know how crazy you look?’ he said, but she held it under my tail and kept repeating, ‘Use your box,’ and whenever I shat in it she fed me a treat because she loved me.
He was always watching her: I remember that. He’d watch her pull off her muddy clothes or brush her long black hair. He’d watch her pick up the feathers I shed, watch her tuck them into her pockets. Now and then he’d sit on the steel stool and watch as she bent into the deep-freeze. ‘How lucky am I?’ he’d say, slapping her flank and smacking his lips. And sometimes she shooed him away, and sometimes she laughed and perched on his knee, then put her mouth to his mouth and fed. And then, laughing, they disappeared down the hall and I heard him: Marnie, Marnie, Mar Mar Mar.
That was my first human word, and though I collected countless more it remained my favourite. When the house was quiet and I was alone I practised: Mar Mar Mar Mar. I felt the air moving in and out of me, the thrum of the syrinx deep in my breast as I tried to copy the sound. How strange the shape of their language, how blocky and thick. How stunted it still feels compared to my own. I tightened different muscles, vibrated different membranes, flexed my chest and my throat and even my tongue until I got that first word right. Then I collected another, and another.
I was perched in the fake pine tree he’d put together in their living room; it glittered with fake icicles and fake pine cones as I sang my morning song. I could see the real trees through the window, a crack in the glass bending the hillside in two.
He said, ‘I don’t care where you let it go, babe, just do it today. Today, Marnie. It’s been over three months and I’ve been reasonable, anyone would agree I’ve been reasonable, but I’m at the end of my rope. It’s not normal to keep a wild bird inside. It’s not kind. I bet it can’t wait to escape – and I for one would appreciate a bit of peace and bloody quiet. I’ve got the carnival coming up, and I need my sleep, and that thing is noisier by the day. I’ve had a gutsful. Did you know they can get as loud as a jackhammer? I looked it up online. A jackhammer, Marnie. I don’t think we want that. I don’t think it’s reasonable to have to put up with that. I’ve let it go on this long because I love you and, yes, I owe you, but there’s crap on the face cloths, Mar. There’s crap on the tea towels. It’s not healthy.’
I stopped singing and hopped from the fake pine tree onto her finger, and I did not trust him and I was right not to trust him.
‘He still has the occasional accident,’ she said. ‘But hardly ever now.’
‘All the same,’ he said.
She zipped me into the front of her jacket where I could feel the rush and beat of her.
He said, ‘See, that’s exactly what I mean.’
‘All right,’ she said. ‘God. All right.’
Then we were outside, just the two of us, because he had work to do, but he’d shoot into town that night and get Chinese for tea, would she like that?
Beyond the yolk-yellow house the wind thrilled through my feathers, fluttered Marnie’s hair. Every sound carried. The squeal of the turning clothesline, the buzz of breeze in the pines on the hillside. The clatter of eucalyptus bark that hung dry and dead. A black-and-tan dog whining on its chain. The cough of the quad bike or the old two-wheeler, fading and fading. The sheep, swivel-mouthed and dissonant. And everywhere the birds: chittering sparrows and skylarks and thrushes, the click and gurgle of starlings, the chiming bellbirds. Fantails on the wing, snapping at insects mid-air. Pipits flicking their tails, stuck on a single phrase. And above all these and louder, the magpies. The songs I’d heard from the house everywhere around me now, tumbling down on me, each bird leaping octaves, whirring, bubbling, fluting, sounding two notes at once. I made out distress calls, alarm calls, food calls, open-necked carolling. We are here and this is our tree and we’re staying and it is ours and you need to leave and now. I listened for my parents and my siblings, turning my head to every new voice.
‘This is the place,’ said Marnie, and she set me down in the shade of the pines, among the rippled roots. ‘Stay away from the dogs,’ she told me. ‘And the broken fence wires. And especially the cherry orchard. They have traps down there.’
From a little bag in her pocket she took some fresh mincemeat, and I remembered how my parents brought me and my siblings our food, how we begged fit to shatter stone when we felt them alight on the nest with something caught and quivering. How they fed each of us in turn, no favourites. I opened my mouth and waited for Marnie to feed me, but with her hand, the hand I had thought was my mother, she scattered the mincemeat on the ground. Pointed at it. Nudged me in its direction. Further down the hill, the lambs were filing from one paddock to another. The dogs forcing them through the gate. Rob whistling to the dogs. And where was Marnie going? Why was she backing away? Why the choke choke choke in her throat?
Then, high above, a cawing and a screeching, and wide black wings that flashed with white, and rust eyes that fixed on Marnie, and Get out of here, get out get out get out, I’ll pierce your eyes and drink your blood and clean your bones. Down he swooped like a gale, like a god: my father. At the end of his rope.
