NOELLE

Noelle had a brown bird made out of fabric, with plastic beads for its eyes and wire inside its fabric talons. The bird looked like a cross between a humble, awkward sparrow and a big hawk. Noelle had never been able to tell if the real bird it was replicating was big and airborne or belonged on a a city street, hopping over drains. She had named it Eden, after the Garden of Eden. She had never given it a gender. It would look back at her and smile meditatively.

Perhaps it was the ambience of her bedroom that made this brown bird so exquisite. Noelle’s bedroom was lit up with a floor lamp that shone a warm reddish light through its Middle Eastern red lining, and hundreds of blue, yellow and green fairy lights strung all over her room and all over her house.

Apart from a bathroom, a kitchen and an adjoining open plan lounge room, Noelle was lucky enough to have two rooms at her disposal in this place. The bird Eden lay in her bedroom next to her pillow, the other room was her music room. It had bird pictures on every wall.

Noelle played two musical instruments. Classical flute, and a steel string guitar. She loved playing and singing pop songs on the guitar in her room. She loved taking her flute to Brighton Beach and playing it to strange birds that settled on rocks around the sea. But there was one thing she loved most of all, which was to take the guitar to the sea.

Most of the songs were about her role model and best friend, Candy.

When Noelle sat by the sea with her guitar, birds rose and lots of music would arise, usually in A flat minor, with a capo on the fourth fret. It was the right key for Candy, but the instrument was limited to only portray a particular side of life, singing about the small day parties they threw with friends in parks or median strips, shopping for new jeans like teenagers, and that enchanted night when they had sat in a late night café drinking chai tea at 11pm.

They had once lain in the fairy-lit dark listening to a violin and piano duo on the speakers in Noelle’s room. Noelle looked at Candy’s soft pale skin in the vague light, her flat stomach under a crop top, her narrow arms, the vintage blinds on the windows shadowed her body like a piano in black and white.