Child of the Twilight

By Carmel Bird

A luminous novel that both questions and celebrates the miraculous 'fresh and brilliant ... the sort of book that keeps on unfolding in the imagination, long after you've finished reading it.' Gabrielle Lord
'It is strange and fascinating to me to think of people - Avila in particular - praying me into existence.' Nineteen-year-old Sydney Peony Kent was a longed-for IVF baby. Her mother, Avila, not only used science to conceive, but also prayed to the Bambinello, a small bejewelled carving of the infant Jesus, housed in the church of Santa Maria in Aracoeli in Rome. Avila's distant relative Father Roland Bruccoli was conceived conventionally. His mother also prayed to the Bambinello before his birth - and that of his twin sister. One evening when the adult Roland is visits the church, the Bambinello is stolen. Roland hopes that Father Cosimo, archivist, poet and riddler, can help retrieve it. But when matters of belief are involved, nothing is straightforward, as Sydney discovers, too, when she is caught up in the search. Deftly weaving together religion, science, pregnancies wanted and unwanted, love, loss and belief, Carmel Bird has created a luminous novel that both questions and celebrates the miraculous. 'Given her due, Carmel Bird would be recognised as one of Australia's finest storytellers and connoisseurs of story' Peter Pierce, SYDNEY MORNING HERALD 'Bird's prose stylr delights in coincidences and conundrums, in the playful and dangerous blend of fact and fiction' Dorothy Johnston, CANBERRA tIMES

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Australia
• Release date: Apr 1, 2010
• ISBN: 9780730445371

Carmel Bird

Carmel Bird is one of Australia's most dazzling and imaginative writers. She is a leading author of short stories (see the collection THE ESSENTIAL BIRD) and novels, including the Miles Franklin-shortlisted RED SHOES and, most recently, CAPE GRIMM. She is also the author of the non-fiction guide WRITING THE STORY OF YOUR LIFE.

Book preview

Prologue

My grandfather Frank called me his ‘child of the twilight of time’.

‘Sydney,’ he would say to me, ‘you are the promise of a different new and beautiful reality. You belong to the twilight. Twilight is the tricky hour between being and non-being, the veil between this world and the next.’

‘Frank,’ said my grandmother, ‘it is wrong to speak like that to her. She is a child like any other child.’

One late afternoon – twilight was about to fall – I heard the two of them talking in the library in the dear old house up north in Mendocino. They were arguing about me. Raised voices were rare in this household, but when they happened, it seems to me now they always happened in the library. I thought then my grandfather’s library contained the history of the whole world. I still believe it really did. This time I was on the terrace, outside the open French doors, buried deep in the silky old cushions of an armchair. The dogs were sleeping at my feet.

‘Sydney is nothing but another insect to you, isn’t she, Frank? Just a specimen for you to fabulate about. But you can’t reduce every single thing to science or science fiction.’

Grandfather was silent except for a catch in his throat that was the beginning of a sob. He turned away from her and walked towards the French doors. He stopped before stepping onto the terrace, and spoke quietly, in a voice I had seldom heard him use.

‘I love her. I love her with all my heart, and I wish in my unforgivable scientific arrogance to understand her being, understand her spirit. She is new, Hortense, new. Do you not understand that she is new? Oh, what’s the use? I am in awe of her courage and her strange perfection. She is a child of change, a child of the twilight of time.’

Grandmother was also very still and quiet, and she just said, ‘Sydney is a child like any other, and I wish, I wish with all my heart that you could see that and remember it. I have said it before and I will say it again, she is not the subject of scientific enquiry, nor is she the subject of some piece of speculative fiction.’

Then Grandfather walked out onto the terrace and across the lawn. He walked straight past me in my armchair but he didn’t know I was there.

I believe he later wrote a story titled Child of the Twilight of Time, but I have never read it, and don’t know of its existence either in manuscript or in published form. He wrote sci-fi under a lot of different names.

My own name is Sydney Peony Kent. Frank and Hortense have now passed away, but they were the parents of three girls, Fatima, Lourdes, and my mother Avila. Fatima and Lourdes died as children in a measles epidemic. Avila grew up and married my father Barnaby Kent. Barnaby is descended from the family that also produced Constance Kent, a girl who murdered her baby brother in 1860 in Wiltshire, and ended up as the matron of a hospital in Australia. In Sydney, as it happened. There was also a Tasmanian branch of the family that invented the cultured pearl. I am unrelated by blood to any of these people, since I am the product of an unknown egg and unknown sperm, implanted in Avila at her own request. The origins of my genetic history will remain forever mysterious, since all the records have been destroyed.

Avila/Barnaby are infertile. The details of my heritage are unrecorded, hence I will never know my true identity. I was born in Los Angeles in 1988, and have lived in Holmby Hills all my life, although I’ve spent a lot of my time travelling the world with Avila/Barnaby. Barnaby is an eye surgeon of international fame, having saved the sight of princes, popes, presidents, and pop stars. Avila runs Marriages Performed at Sea, which takes her everywhere on the celebrity wedding circuit. They were living in Sydney when Avila found out she was pregnant. I haven’t had a real education, although I spent short periods in various Sacred Heart schools which failed to influence me in an educational or a spiritual way. Avila herself is a devout Catholic of the sentimental nineteenth-century type, and belongs to the global Sacred Heart family.

My ‘grandparents’ sometimes remarked that I am an ‘old soul’, adding that I have been here before, and that I have ‘an old head on young shoulders’. All this is absolute nonsense, but they were dear old things, the grandparents, and I never disagreed with them. I am their one and only grandchild, Avila and Barnaby having each no living siblings, so I feel I must indulge them all. It’s a responsibility. There is extended family in the form of the cousins of Avila/Barnaby, and the descendants of those cousins, and of course there are all those fascinating distant relatives worldwide. I was once briefly in high school with one of the descendants of a cousin, and she was a girl so seriously dedicated to doing drugs and having sex in locker rooms and sport stadiums and truck stops that I started writing a book about her, but the repetitious nature of it all caused me to lose interest and I never finished it.

She knew I was writing it and she knew I gave up and all she said was, ‘You’re a loser, Syd. And I’m totally not related to you, remember that. You’re a freak.’

Quietly she said it, and then she laughed and tossed her head and strolled away, disappearing behind the laurel hedge. These days she has a blog where she does much the same as before except on a larger and more public scale.

My principal interest is and always has been in reading and writing novels of a traditional kind. I write in notebooks, in green ink, with the old silver Parker that belonged to Grandfather Frank. Unlike most of my Facebook generation I’m not a blogger, but I am devoted to Google, to the extent that I named my beloved King Charles spaniel ‘Google’ because of his huge brown googly eyes and his dear snub face. He is always with me except when we travel, then I stay in touch with him via live feed at Linda’s Lodge of Luxury for Dogs in Santa Monica. We see and hear each other, and sometimes I believe I can smell his special mixture of earthy dog, mandrake and rosemary dog shampoo, and fresh bread. I take him for short walks on screen in camera range and he goes wild with excitement. ‘C’mon!’ I go, and Google woofs his funny little woof, and off we trot.

I have goldfish and frogs, and a spectacular collection of snow globes, many of which contain reproduction black statues of the Virgin Mary. The black ones, such as the one at Montserrat near Barcelona, are really old and mysterious. And did you ever have a goldfish? If you did you will have some understanding of sadness, of the meaning of life and the significance of death. I have never really made friends with people my own age, but I am devoted to Isabella, my nanny from Mexico. She was only fifteen when she was found by Avila at the bus station in downtown LA. I was five days old. Isabella goes everywhere with us, as do my imaginary native American friends Aurora Flare and Amber Moon, both named after peonies. Isabella carries with her at all times the black and shrivelled remains of her own placenta, her ‘little coat’, which she says is God’s mark of her identity.

My novels are seen by some as evidence of my own fruitless search for identity, in spite of their fanciful plots and complex characters. I consider myself not as an identity, but as ‘material’ in a clinical sense. When I speak of egg and sperm, oocyte and spermatozoon, I think back to the time before I became a zygote, and try to imagine my self, my spirit, even my soul as an invisible speck.

You don’t hear much talk of the soul in the legal and medical discourse around the issue of what is known as Assisted Reproductive Technology, or ART. They stick to the facts. I live in the ART capital of the world, where egg donation and sperm donation and surrogate parenting are matters of fine art and big business, going out to the world, just like anything else, on the Internet. The Cryobank in Palo Alto apparently distributes twenty-five hundred ampoules of sperm per year worldwide. I thought it would be more, but they are the figures I was given. Of course there are plenty of other banks to choose from. In some cases it’s hard to know how they arrive at the figures – it seems there are a hundred and eighty-six million infertile human couples in the world at any one time.

Grandfather Frank and I saw eye to eye on the curious nature of my origins. I go along with his classification of me as a child of time’s twilight, as something new and futuristic. A being from the moment between seeing and not seeing, a creature outside ordinary reality. Avila has given me to understand that this is the case. I constantly peer into the lives of those to whom I would be related, if I were related to anybody at all. Free-floating, I drift along the branches of the family trees of Avila/Barnaby, out to the very finest twigs. There I have found Roland the Good, Cosimo the Archivist, Diana the Manipulator, Rosita the Spinster, Corazón the Fertile, and Rufus the Virile. I examine the stories of these characters, and I myself am Sydney the Navigator, Child of the Twilight of Time.

Chapter One

Holy Child

Early on a wet February evening in 1994, Roland Bruccoli, a young Franciscan Father from Australia, arrived in Rome. Through the blurred windows of his cab he saw lights misted in greenish haloes around the street lamps as he drove through the dusk. It was Roland’s first visit to Italy, and for sentimental reasons he went swiftly to the Franciscan church of Santa Maria in Aracoeli to pay a visit to the miraculous statue of the Infant Jesus, the Bambinello. His mother in Melbourne had asked him to do this. She believed Roland’s birth in 1964 had been in answer to a request she had made to the statue, and the idea of this son of hers bearing a message to the Bambinello was sweet and deeply satisfying. The trust invested by the faithful in a miraculous statue can never be betrayed. The hopes and prayers may be answered in unexpected ways, but they will always be answered. The unexpected ways can be so very unexpected.

Things were, you see, more complicated than this pleasant little story sounds, for Roland had a twin, Eleena. When they were four years old, Eleena had run joyfully up a green embankment dotted with pink and white daisies. She ran onto the road and into the path of an oncoming car. This was during a neighbourhood cricket match, and Roland had been running behind his sister. Their father’s voice – ‘Eleena, Roland, Eleena, stop, come back, Eleena’ – died out, the sound of the word ‘Eleena’ hanging on the air.

Everything stopped. The ball, the bat, the bowler, the conversation of the spectators, the laughter of children playing on the bank. Time. The daisies. The sun for a fragment of a second was arrested in the heavens, and one small cloud hung motionless above the horizon. The car stopped. The young driver rushed forward and fell on her knees over the warm dead child, shaking, silent, choking in her shock. The air was cold, suddenly chill with disbelief. Cherry-red beads from Eleena’s broken necklace pattered across the road onto the sweet damp silent grass on the verge, bouncing into the gutter, rolling under and over little daisy faces.

When Roland was older he began to pray for the wellbeing of the driver who had accidentally killed his sister, and throughout his life his mind forever, at some level, circled the word ‘Eleena’ as it hung in the air in his father’s wild and helpless voice. In a frame of his memory the nimbus of Eleena’s pale blonde hair would speed and spin and float across the green grass of the cricket ground. Throughout his life there would be moments when the vivid mental image of a clump of grass, bright as wasabi, would reveal the glitter of a lone red bead or berry. He could recall a stranger, a man, coming to the house the day after the accident with flowers, and being told by a stiff and tearful aunt to take the flowers away please.

On the day after Eleena’s funeral Roland’s grandmother smacked Roland for running through the garden with his bubble pipe, blowing bubbles into the borders. There were rainbow bubbles sailing among the foxgloves, among the knowing whispers of the spiderwebs in the comforting green caves and slopes of the garden. Was the grandmother conscious of the significance of the bubbles as suggestions of the brevity of human life, the transience of beauty, the inevitability of death? Or was she just a killjoy, a natural-born smacker? Or perhaps both conditions apply. She was desperate with the anguish of her grief, and her eyes were wild and blind with tears, her voice stopped in her throat, her mind a dizzy tangle of love and regret and bewildered disbelief and shaken faith. Deep in the secret legends of the family was concealed the story of her own mother. The mother, Roland’s great-grandmother, had been born a twin. The sickly twin sister, not expected to live, had been exposed soon after birth on a hilltop in Sicily and left to die.

I remember the story of Eleena’s death as Avila told it to me several times over the years. Avila has a vast catalogue of tales of babies and children lost and gone, one way or another. I think it is a habit of mind she has formed, a kind of accompaniment to her own infertility – children are so hard to come by, so fragile, so easily lost, never forgotten. Little Eleena was on Avila’s prayer list, and I was sometimes instructed to light a candle for her on the anniversary of her death. An old-fashioned Catholic childhood can be a strangely morbid affair at times, the communion of saints, meaning the company of the dead, forever hovering around, needing support, sometimes supporting in their turn.

Roland’s mother’s request regarding the prayer to the Bambinello in 1994 was clearly not a simple one, and was inevitably complicated by Eleena’s death all those years before. Roland, her eldest child, her envoy, her courier, had with him in the Roman church a small pink envelope in which there was a letter from his mother to the Bambinello. It was Roland’s task to place the letter in one of the golden baskets provided, to send the message on its way. Heaven only knows what was in the letter. Roland’s mother knows.

The church of Aracoeli was empty. A few candles were still burning, conveying hopes and prayers to Heaven. It was almost time, the Friar said to Roland, to take the Bambinello into the safety of the monastery for the night. But something most strange had happened.

The Baby Boy was gone.

Roland blinked at the empty space where the golden thing should be, was not, and he felt a creeping and billowing fear. Around him an eerie atmosphere of anguish had opened up like some poisonous silver and black flower. Almost all the candles had died, their messages and prayers gently delivered in warm pinky-yellow light to heaven. The police came, at once, it seemed, in a breathless and vivid silence, but no traces of the statue or the thieves were found. The police conducted short interviews, took notes, photographs, made diagrams, crossed themselves, looked at Roland with mulberry-black eyes and a quizzical air, not quite of suspicion, not quite of respect. What was an Australian doing here?

The wooden statue had been decorated with precious stones. Was it stolen for its monetary value, or for its spiritual powers, or for its beauty as a work of art? Had it been taken as a sick joke? Had it simply been borrowed? A prank? Its elaborate crown had been specially conferred upon it by the Pope. Perhaps the statue was taken for love – or hope. Love and hope, the contents of most of the letters in the Baby’s woven golden baskets, these are sometimes powerful motives for peculiar crimes.

At one of my grade schools we once did a Christmas tableau. I was supposed to be a Wise Man in blackface but I came out in a rash from the makeup and Isabella had to take me home before the show. A girl called Angelina O’Day was the Virgin Mary. She loved the Baby Jesus doll so much she kidnapped him and hid him in the trunk of her mother’s car. He wasn’t found until the day her mother was killed in a head-on on the C-163 where it runs through the wooded canyon in the middle of Balboa Park.

One time during the early nineteenth century when the Bambinello was lying in the crib at Christmas, a Roman woman somehow spirited him away and hid him in her house. She became ill, and told her priest what she had done. What happened next was that the Bambinello set off by night all by himself and arrived like a homing pigeon at his rightful place in the crib. And that’s not all. As soon