The Chantic Bird Read online

  I couldn’t help thinking of Bee, though, and all the nights she had to look after the kids herself, sitting up trying not to look at the television programmes, with a book in her soft lap because she wanted to keep up with what was going on in the world. And while I had her in my mind I could swear I heard the way her cups chimed when you tapped their thin lip edge, with the clear light of morning flooding the east window.

  I had a good sleep there in the daytime, no one disturbed me. Milk shakes and fruit were my food that day. At night I had a high old time remembering.

  I remember. That’s enough to make anyone bored, reading it. But it doesn’t bore me, and this is my story. If anyone doesn’t want to read it, all they have to do is stop.

  There is my first doorway, the first I slept in. I can see it now in the shadow in the main street of Tamworth where I ran away to when I was fourteen and sick of home. A dirty great copper woke me with his torch and sent me down under the bridge to sleep; there were branches there and you could make a mattress to kip on.

  I didn’t realise what a long job this book was going to be. Can’t you write faster or something? Still, if it’s going to be any good it’ll take all we’ve got, I suppose. One thing at a time, from now on; I’ve spent sixteen and three-quarter years hopping from one thing to another; now’s the time to settle down to one thing at a time, and this book is it.

  Petersen, who met me on a railway station one morning, was tall as a pole with a pin-head. He was some sort of psychologist as well as a writer, and analysed me with tests down at the Red Cross, inkblot stuff, Rorschach, you know what it’s like; I think that’s a picture of two people dancing—that’s very interesting, very few people see any violent movement, can you describe them more clearly—well, they’re in evening clothes—that’s amazing. That kind of stuff. One night he asked me what would I do if he suggested we lay down together in bed and that took me by surprise; maybe it was no wonder someone knifed him in China. He taught me a few things, though; I don’t want to give the impression I’m not grateful.

  When I got back I was so broke I had to sell my rifle to one of my brothers. It was new and cost twenty dollars then, so he gave me five and a lesson in business.

  In the middle of my remembering I couldn’t help wondering again—it happened every day, practically—wondering if my people had any idea what they were doing. When they got together, did they have a clue about what their offspring could turn into? Poor Ma, she had a terrible life. Yet maybe she was happy some of the nine months.

  Getting back to going to bed with other blokes, like Petersen wanted, reminds me of three other times at Saratoga, Tascott and Marrickville. What was there about me that made these kids want to treat me like a girl? Is it because of that that I have got right away from going round with other kids and prefer to be a lone wolf? Maybe it’s not only because the police have started their savage old policy of breaking up any gatherings, even two kids together. If I’d been the police I’d never have done that. Look at me. They’ll never catch up with me; I have no other gutless kids to rat on me; to catch me they’d need a net like a mosquito net. Another thing, they’ll never work out why I’m against them, so they’ll never know how to go about catching me. They can never get at me, not the me inside. There’s no such person. I’m convinced of it. A hundred kids like me, all working alone, and this sweet old society would be on its ear in a week.

  I’ll never forget running back from Lion Island, eight kids in a twelve foot boat, when the wind sprang up in the afternoon around four o’clock. Boy, that was when I decided never to work with other kids. You’d never believe how brave some of them were on dry land, there was Eddie; he’d walk up to any service station and get the till and shoot the Alsatian dog, but see him in that boat and you wouldn’t give two bob for him. For a firm footing on a bit of rock he would have sold his mum and chopped his old man in little pieces with an axe, like he was always threatening to do. His old man was lame in one leg. We were only young, then. About the age when you sneak up to the lovers at Bobbin Head and creep up the rocks to watch them at their tricks. Too young to do it, though.

  I’d never seen what my parents did together, so when I was old enough to start, myself, all I knew to do was the kissing I’d seen on the films and the tricks I’d seen on naughty photographs and on the sly in parks when the men and women didn’t see you looking. When I was twelve, though, and the bigger kids let me come with them, I found out how easy it was. The girls were dying to be popular with us and the way to be popular was to be tough and to be in it. Just those two things. They didn’t even have to look like girls.

  The second movie I ever saw in my life was Kidnapped, and since I wasn’t allowed to go to the pictures because of my old man’s religion, and because it was such a long way away—I went to a school filming—I had to come out early. A little girl called Dot who used to watch us at cricket, came out at the same time and I sat with her all the way to Warrawee. Boy, if that’d been a year later, I’d have known how to make sure she got home a different girl. As it was, all she wanted to talk about was cricket. She wanted a hero. She was too stupid to know that I never thought of cricket, ever, until I was down there on the pitch with a ball in my hand or two hands on a bat.

  A sudden shadow slapped me across the face. Two kids had found me, under the bridge. They were on the run from their parents and they wanted a place to hide. When they saw me they wanted me to help. All they wanted was a boss. A leader. I tried to tell them the thing to do was to go alone, but they didn’t know what I meant.

  They were changing, while I talked to them, from people, that is humans like me, into things; I could just look at them and they turned into thick things like rocks and tree stumps, things not like me. You could bash them and they wouldn’t be hurt. I did, and took the shillings they had in their pockets. They were too scared to dob me in to the police and their uniforms; they ran away very fast and left me to my thinking and my bridge.

  My old man was tickled, it’s the only time I recall him smiling, when I asked him why the breadman had a horse with lumpy veins. I still remember the varicose look of the horse in the shafts; I’d been used to seeing horses that were smooth and shiny, even if they were a bit on the ribby side. That was at Rosehill. Half a dozen house movings later, and with my first bird shot, I started on the bakers’ horses and cows in the paddocks and the chinaman’s pumpkins in the patch across the way. That was in Bay Road. The chinaman is gone; what were once his fields is now a park, with only grass growing.

  That reminded me of another gun. I was coming home late to the house one night and this brother of mine—he’s gone now—charged out with a twelve-gauge shotgun on full cock to blast Sexy Rexy. It’s a wonder he didn’t blast me when I grabbed the choked-down end, but at least Sexy Rexy went away without a large hole in him. They were both drunk, anyway, they probably wouldn’t have noticed if they got shot, either of them.

  When my ship comes in, she said—my auntie it was, on the front verandah of the old house in Bay Road one Sunday night around half-past eight—when my ship comes in, there were a lot of things going to happen then. They never happened. Her poor old ship was never sighted; it probably never sailed. Now she’s on her uppers, back with another of my uncles, the one that handed me down his old watch when the old man died and told me to mend the verandah where the dry rot was eating it down; he’s one of the brethren, too, you can’t eat a biscuit or have a cup of tea with her even when he’s out. Still, why should I mind if she’s found a meal-ticket for the rest of her days? I hope she lives till she’s a hundred, she’s had it pretty tough; not as tough as Ma, but tough enough. Ma, she always wanted me to go back to being anything from two and a half to six, a little black boy that did everything she said. ‘He used to be so nice and obliging.’

  It was pretty quiet on the railway lines then; I went down to see if I could hear any trains coming, the metal was cool on my ear and all quiet. I climbed back up to the road this time and went for a r
un, about half a mile and back under the bridge, just in time to have myself a brightly coloured dream about Bee. I didn’t mean to have this dream, it just came, all I did was lie down and it dreamed itself into my head.

  The first thing I saw was Bee in a wide white dress bordered with a fine blue, tied up to a fat gum tree, the one that grows in the middle of the track on the way to Lorna Pass. She had her two arms spread wide and her legs pulled apart and tied around the bottom of the tree. The next thing was someone tying her to the tree; his back was towards me, but he was young. The next thing was Bee being carried along the track to the tree. The next thing was Bee being knocked on the head, further along the track, and as she fell, she hit her elbow and the blood came. It was clear, shining blood.

  The funny thing about the dream was that it was backwards. First she was tied up and last she was knocked over; at first I didn’t see what was happening to her after she was tied up. Then after a while, when my mind had been going back over the same track a few times, I began to sort things out, and as I did, the dream got round into the right sequence. Until then, although I’d seen her scraped elbow in the last part of the dream, I hadn’t seen any blood on her elbow in the first part. When my head got this right, I saw the dream right through from the beginning, and right past Bee being tied up with blood on her elbow, right through to seeing who it was that was blindfolding her and tearing her white dress off with the blue border, down to her pale blue panties and stiff white brassiere. She didn’t have a really exceptional chest.

  Why blindfold her? She must have seen the kid. But no, perhaps she was really knocked out—yes, it would be better that way—she was knocked out right up to the time he blindfolded her, then she awoke while he stripped her. Yes, that would be better; kinder to Bee and better for me. It was me did it. You couldn’t help guessing that, I reckon. Even in the dream I was a bit ashamed, but that added a sort of extra kick to the whole procedure.

  You’d think I would have woken up hot from a dream like that, but in fact I was very cold indeed. I wished Stevo was there to tell me about the Chantic Bird. I would have listened. Honest. I wouldn’t have bought him off with lollies or a bag of potato chips.

  That dream must have got me. Who put me here? The bugger. I’d like to see him in my shoes. I have to admit I never thought I would be dreaming of doing things like that to Bee. I tried to put that sort of thing out of my head, by thinking more about the kids and the funny things they said.

  Stevo was always talking about me getting little. I suppose I started it in the first place by telling him that when he was grown up I’d have to look up to him to see his face; I thought that was the best thing to tell him when he was always having to bend his neck back to look up at me, it might take the funny feeling out of his mouth at always being the small one. I wanted to stay friends with Stevo, and I reckoned the best sort of friends are sometimes stronger than each other and sometimes weaker than each other.

  ‘When will I get little, boy?’

  ‘You get little when your strength blows out.’

  He even reckoned I’d be a baby again.

  ‘When you’re born I’ll tie you up for fourteen days. When you’re tiny I’ll smack you.’ I remember telling him that people got a bit shorter when they’re old; that’s where he must have got the tiny bit. And one day when we were in Robson the grocer’s and they were giving away free samples of porridge he made us all laugh by suddenly yelling out at Robbo:

  ‘Hey, Mister! I’ve got some porridge at home and I don’t eat it—so I don’t want this!’ All the people in the shop smiled at Stevo—they always do. The only ones that don’t appreciate him are relatives or neighbours with kids the same age, they find something wrong with everything he does right.

  When he came into the room once and thought we were hugging and kissing—actually we were bending over near each other, Bee and I, tying up some parcels for their Christmas tree—he asked Bee what was the name for two people that loved each other. She said, Sweethearts, but he shook his head.

  ‘I’ll call you honey lovers. The other name sounded too sweet.’ Boy, you can imagine the way I felt.

  One day, after I’d done some prowling in Eastwood—a lot of these outer suburbs are good prowling places because in addition to having no regular police they often don’t like to report anyone even if they see you; they have dignity, or something—I had to get home fairly smartly and I was hiding up in the ceiling so that if anyone came even Bee wouldn’t know I was there and she wouldn’t have to lie, I was lying on the sheet of hardboard I’d put down on one of the ceiling joists where the cross members met it and when I got my breath back and the old ticker quieted down I had a listen to old Stevo.

  ‘I think your friend Elaine has a rather attractive house,’ he noted. What a way to talk! The kid was only six, after all.

  ‘Their auntie says it’s a bit on the cold side,’ Bee put in. She often came home with a stiff back after sitting in her friend’s kitchen, she told me once.

  ‘It’s a good house, if you run about a lot,’ he amended.

  ‘Are you going to play with your toys now?’ she asked him. She probably wanted to get on with the dinner.

  ‘I’ll just bring my crane out,’ he tailed off.

  ‘Yes. Or else?’ she prompted.

  ‘Or else I won’t bring my crane out.’ She left him to it, and I agreed with her. Any kid that knew how to talk like that was OK. You wouldn’t have to be watching after Stevo all the time.

  I was just settling down on my stomach to have a bit of a sleep when something he said made me prick up my ears.

  ‘Mummy, why do men like looking at ladies?’

  ‘What men, sonny boy?’

  ‘Men like Daddy.’

  ‘Daddy? What ladies does he look at?’

  ‘He looks at you.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘A lot. He looks at you a lot.’

  ‘No one looks at ladies that do housework.’

  ‘Daddy does. He must love you.’

  I listened very hard to hear what she said to that. There wasn’t a sound. I looked over to where the manhole cover was. No, it was on. There was no light coming up. Maybe she knew I was there. Maybe she was stuck for an answer. She used to stand a certain way when she looked at you. Her back foot was facing away but the front one was straight out, pointing. She was probably standing like that just then.

  I waited there a long time, holding my breath mostly, but at last she went on with getting the food ready, and not saying a word. I settled my ribs down to the hardboard again and my head on one side and got ready for a sleep. But what did I get in my head but the memory of my last visit to my old man at Randwick TB hospital. There were gallant diggers, old soldiers they call them, making death noises to imitate my old man, who had just started to make his first few. The way he died, your breath gets caught somehow on the instroke, and when something inside you is calling out for breath and your chest tries to draw it in, there is some other thing inside you that turns the sound of the in-breath into a very loud groan.

  With my young brother it was different. He groaned on the outstroke and made no sound on the instroke. I listened for two hours and his in-breath was quiet, not a rattle of any sort. But the out-breath was a groan, only a light one as if he was very sorry for something. Now that they’re dead, and Ma too, they’ve become a sort of conscience to me. A pretty weak old conscience, I know, but still a sort of one.

  Anyway, back to the old man. Those groans were very loud, and so were the imitations the other old soldiers made. You see, I knew what they were doing, because only three weeks before I heard them doing the same thing and he told me they were making a joke out of old Clarrie Rees who was taking about a week to die. He heard the first few and stopped making his noise. But when I came back later, the last night it turned out to be, and slept on the billiard table, with the cat on the floor that the nurse said was riddled with TB, the old man was in full blast. He sure made a noise leaving th
is world. I must have fallen asleep at the time he actually snuffed it. Before I left I hoisted a metal pan out of the window far enough to bang against the next ward. It was dark, the walls were fibro. The night nurse jumped up and raced outside and while she was out I clobbered the six gallant old diggers that had done the mocking bird calls, with the thick end of a billiard cue. I brought Ma back in the morning, much use that was; she didn’t even insist on viewing the body. The nurse sort of hinted that the old man was in a mess, and I would have liked to see him—he was my old man after all—but she said no. I had on a collar and tie and my hair nicely done, to keep suspicion off me, so I couldn’t spoil the image by demanding to see Dad or threatening to wreck the joint. Could I? But you don’t really know there’s anyone in those coffins.

  I was still feeling mad about the death-house for old diggers, when I heard a noise that reminded me I was back under a railway bridge and when I opened my eyes, there it was, daytime. An old dirty engine was in the station and a railway fettler was tramping off the end of the station towards me with a thick metal tool to tap the rails and the spikes that held the rails down. He found a few loosened ones and bashed them back down into place. For some reason I felt I had to get out of there. I felt he was after me. It must have been the early morning that made me come over all guilty. He found a few more loose spikes and knocked them back where they belonged, in line with the rest. Next it would be my turn.

  I suppose he was only doing his job, finding the ones out of place. For a good railway you need not only a good engine, but good rails to carry it. For some reason I wondered why he didn’t tap the wheels of the engine to see if they were safe or not.