The Cage

by Jo Gardiner

It was never going to be an easy death. He lies alone,

cheeks hollow, eye sockets dark. The acrid scent of his body

stalks him, its sour reek. His life has shrunk now to the size

of a fish’s small heart. He thinks he hears flies crowd

in as footsteps disappear along the corridor to another ward.

He’s railed against it for years until no one cared except

his tall, large-eyed daughter who remembers the wildness

of his heretic days. But she’s been living two years now in Saudi

near the bird market where girls in bikinis under their abayas

slip past the moral police just as she’s the only one he lets slip past

his rage. After a flight across one half of the world to see her father

before he dies, she’s trapped now in her quarantine hotel in Melbourne

and spends her days in isolation fighting red tape and updating

exemption applications for a permit to fly home. To kill time, she sews

new dresses with fabric from the souks. In her dreams she hears the night

heron cry on its spring passage to the wadi beyond the city. When will

he die? the forms ask. A calendar pops up to help her choose. She calls

the white hospital room near Holgate where she grew with a regent

honeyeater in the back yard. Ringing through his voice thick with Endone

and anger, come the bellbirds’ clear notes from the eucalypt canopy

where they feast on nectar and manna. She remembers playing with her brother

in the watergums there, the hot smell of earth after summer rain, the grey-

headed flying foxes coming through dense air on warm nights, the sharp tang

of native ginger in the rainforest gullies of the tightly folded hills, the old

masked owl that haunted the Matcham Range. As they speak, she drifts

through the lengths of cloth, she’s hung from lines strung across the room;

she bought them near the Masmak mosque past the royal jewelers

and silk merchants, beyond the gold market in the Souk al-Zal of old Riyadh

where even the sparrows are golden, and the pungent scent of Arabian oud

drifts from woodchip smouldering on hot coals and mixes with the smell

of coffee beans and spice, the cheese washed with honey. Now, she floats

through blue and violet silk, glossy as any purple sunbird or kingfisher’s

plumage, and sheer gauze brushes soft and feathery against her face.

In her voice he hears the wind flow through summery oriental palaces

and every bitterness falls away. Dad, I want to see you, but they won’t

let me out of here. I’m trapped in this fucking room. I feel as though

I’m not going to get out alive. Me too, darlin’. His first laugh

for a year comes from deep in the place we breathe from. Me too.