The Bird Factory Paperback - 2005

From the jacket flap

Luke Gray is happy with the way things are. He's finally settled into married life with pragmatic, level-headed Julia, free from his family's absurdities and the chaos of his childhood. Even his mobile-bird factory seems less like a curse he can't shake. But things change when Julia decides they should have a baby... and nothing happens. A trip to the fertility clinic leads to loosened boxers, hormone injections, and some time alone with a plastic vial and a stack of dirty magazines. How could things sink so far, so fast?
His male pride in shreds, Luke finds himself fending off intrusive questions about his sperm from his mother, and avoiding further involvement in his philandering father's affairs. And with Julia more and more a stranger determined to succeed, it's no wonder Luke begins to fantasize about a single, young employee's bee-stung lips. But when complications put Julia in the hospital, Luke is forced to confront his tangled feelings about family, children, and commitment, and decide what he will, or won't, do for love. "The Bird Factory is a high-energy, darkly humorous novel about surviving your family and starting a new one, about the stupid things good men do, and why women put up with them. It introduces David Layton as a sharp observer of human fallibility and a striking new fictional voice.

Excerpt

I BLAME THE RACCOONS.

They’d moved into our new home with us, using the pink, fibrous insulation of our unrenovated third-floor attic as bedding and the wooden beams as roadways. In late spring the mother produced a litter, and as we lay in bed we could hear the scampering of small feet above our heads.

Julia gave up on my promises to get rid of them and called the exterminators. Three men came to our house and after crawling around the attic for ten minutes said they wanted two thousands dollars to make it “raccoon-proof.” Julia threw the men out and let the raccoons stay.

“If we’re going to spend two thousand dollars, we may as well put the money toward renovating the space into a real third floor,” she said.

The attic was reachable through a trap door. We climbed the narrow ladder that dropped from the ceiling in the bed­room closet and hoisted ourselves up into the empty space, careful not to disturb the raccoons, especially the mother, who we feared might attack us if she felt threatened. I swept the room with my flashlight, stopping just to one side of where Julia thought the mother and her litter might be hiding.

I suggested a guest bedroom, a den, an office.

Julia had another idea. “There might come a time when we’ll want to use the upstairs space for something else.” She smiled, an extra big smile because it was dark and she knew her words would make me uneasy.

“Something else?” I asked.

“We’ve been together four years, Luke. And we’ve been married for two.”

“That’s a pretty long time,” I admitted, though it didn’t feel long at all, just an eye-blink of time.

“You’d make a great father.”

For a second, I thought this was why she wanted a child — so I could be a good father — but I came to my senses and recognized that this wasn’t for me, but for us, for Julia.

Backing down the ladder, Julia questioned what sort of stairs we might put in. I said that unless we punched a hole in our slanted roof and put in a large dormer, the stairs would have to rise steeply, to prevent our heads from bumping into the ceiling. Another option was to put in a spiral staircase.

“So, what do you think?” asked Julia.

“I think a spiral.”

“I meant about having a baby.”

We were standing at the bottom of the ladder. Julia picked off loose bits of insulation that clung to my clothes and I had the weirdest impression she’d carry on until she hit bone.

“Why don’t we do the third floor first, maybe get that out of the way.”

“Wouldn’t it be better if we co-ordinated our activities, if we did the attic and got pregnant all at the same time?”

“It’s a suggestion,” I confessed, and because one was associated with the other, I began to think of children as creatures who demanded extra space or were themselves extra space; little attics, where instead of desks and beds we’d install our longings and needs. A kind of endless renovation project.

This wasn’t the best way to think about children, but at least it was a start. I hadn’t thought about marriage either until Julia proposed: “It’s time we got married,” she’d said.

And we did. She’d slipped on my wedding ring like someone who’d had to send flowers to herself.

It wasn’t that I hadn’t wanted to marry Julia or that I didn’t want to have children with her. It was just that I was a firm believer in not rocking the boat. Things were good. Everything was fine. I was happy, so was Julia. Why take a chance with change? Change was bad, or might be bad; it was certainly unpredictable. I’d been raised inside a rocking boat and had grown up permanently seasick. Having children might not only start the swaying again, it might tip the whole boat over. Julia, however, was an excellent swimmer, amorously embracing the water with every stroke of her arms. She said it was an illusion for anyone to think their boat could bob in exactly the same place, day after day, month after month; eventually, the current would press against you. Julia insisted that life’s perpetual adversity forced you to strive toward a better future. And Julia saw a future with children.

***

Sex for the next few months was urgent and passionate and spontaneous. We had sex when we felt like it, and we felt like it quite a lot. Despite my concerns about children, my body seemed to possess nothing but willing confidence. Every flicker of desire was like a potential sign of success. But after six months with no results, a rising measure of fatigue and anxiety began to set in; after eight, panic. Julia began to bring home pregnancy manuals, change her foods, make sure my boxers were loose, and call out with mock lust, “It’s time for servicing!” when her temperature was right.

At first we laughed because our behaviour was so much like what we imagined a desperate couple’s would be. But as the months wore on, we stopped laughing — exactly when, I can’t say — and our sexual trysts became increasingly mechanical. We began to sense that we were failing at the most basic human function. Our bodies were supposed to do certain things, mysterious but common enough — so why wasn’t anything happening?

Media reviews

"A bright and thoroughly charming book. David Layton writes my favourite kind of prose– clean as a whistle, straight ahead and, most important, irresistibly readable. No froth or curlicues for this guy." 
–David Gilmour

“A novel pregnant with sardonic desire and tender pessimism. David Layton births memorable characters conjoined by their need to confront a future as dispassionate as a fertility clinic and as possible as a newborn child.”
–Hal Niedzviecki

Citations

• Quill & Quire, 04/01/2005, Page 36