The Chantic Bird Read online

  10

  CEILING

  Stevo used to say ‘Tampoo’ for thank you. Chris said ‘Tattoo’ for thank you. That went over and over in my head all the way back home. I was still hanging on, in my head, to the sound of the kids’ voices as they said Thank you, when I got up in the ceiling, took my coat off and got down on my sheet of hardboard. I don’t know how long it was, but I woke hearing Bee say to Chris, ‘Ah-ah! Chris. What you doing?’

  ‘I not Chris,’ said Chris. I nearly laughed out loud. She would be able to get away with what she liked when she was a big girl. For some reason I felt glad. It seemed to me then that it was important for girls to be able to do what they liked with the world.

  When she went to sleep around eleven, there was an eye watching her in the cot. Later, when she woke up and when I must have next woken up, there was an eye watching her, with glasses. She said this with a new sort of concern. The glasses were an added menace. When she helped Bee with the washing up and Bee told her to mind how slippery the dishes were—Bee used a detergent I got straight from an oil company, it wasn’t broken down—and she dropped a couple, she got in first to Bee with,

  ‘Little children like me don’t have any sense what their mothers tell them to do.’

  I was watching down through a crack in the ceiling then, and I saw Bee watching her with tears in her eyes. I went back and lay down again, I didn’t want to see any emotional women putting on a turn.

  Stevo wasn’t in my line of sight and I started to wonder what had happened to him. I thought I’d better go down and offer to listen to his story of the Chantic Bird again to make him happy, but from what Bee said I found Stevo was sick. So that was that. No story.

  There’s strength in the air, just above your head, if you can reach it. You only need the right knack of doing it. Strength to get through and above your own troublesome self, strength to make your chest puff up and make you equal to the opposition in whatever fight you’re in. I had my ear to the main roof beam at that moment and I swear I heard a tuneful humming from the body of the house, a sort of noise that made all the sour things inside you curl up and die, and all the good healthy things revive that don’t normally have much of a chance.

  Bee went in to see how Stevo was getting on, I heard them, but you can’t see them from where I was in the ceiling. She told him the news about Elaine moving, and how she couldn’t find a house they wanted round about.

  ‘Well, if they can’t find a house in this neighbourhood, why don’t they try another neighbourhood,’ suggested Stevo, and the joke was, that Bee said about them not being able to find a house handy because she wanted to introduce tactfully the idea of his friends moving away, but she found he was quite prepared for whatever happened.

  ‘Perhaps we could help them, by looking up some houses for sale,’ helped Bee.

  ‘I was just thinking. There are lots of fine houses. I read it in the Herald.’ Stevo surprised her. She got so emotional about Stevo being awake up to what was going on, plus his being sick, that she covered him over with hearty kisses. I wish I’d been sick enough for them.

  But Stevo was used to that sort of treatment.

  ‘Just give me a dry one,’ he pleaded. ‘Try not to get upcited when you’re kissing me.’

  She was so worked up that she started to get wet around the eyes again, then with a lot of drops in her eyes she laughed.

  ‘What’s so funny?’ he demanded aggressively.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said, to head him off. She fished around in her things and got them all lollies, to take their attention away from the wetness around her eyes.

  ‘Ah,’ put in Stevo, ‘I like lollies, because I can relax with them.’

  I suppose it was reaction, but Bee started to get a little sharp with them after she had cried over them. She ordered them about a bit.

  ‘Some day I’m going to break your heart,’ promised Stevo. He wasn’t sure what was going on inside her; it was his way of saying she should ease up.

  I lay back on the hardboard, trying to put my thoughts in some sort of order. But all I could do was bring back to mind Stevo’s excited cry last Christmas, ‘Look at all the presents I’ve got! Everyone must be mad about me!’

  They were only ordinary presents, but there were a couple of dozen of them from all the people he knew and he thought he was made.

  Why should I suddenly remember the way everyone looked at me when Stevo had to go back to the hospital every day for his dressing on the leg I burned? Why should it come back to smash me down every time I wasn’t expecting it?

  Was it something I had got from my parents? Was it a sign there was something corrupt in my parents? No. My parents weren’t corrupt, they weren’t anything. It was the same with me. I knew I was more than equal to most of the kids I ever knew, but there was no place for me. There was no actual function, no legal function, that would fit me.

  The wind in the wires outside moaned and it was the sound I should have made. I couldn’t stand the thoughts that crowded into my head and spilled over on my tongue so that I found myself talking aloud. I got out and went back to the city and set fire to a city fire station while all the men were in bed—the night shift is provided with bunks—then another fire in an Arcade off Elizabeth Street. I knew that if there were two fires in the city at the same time there were not enough engines to put them out. They were still on water instead of dry powder, so I had the jump on them. Besides, their water pressure couldn’t get up above a hundred and twenty. I knew private firms that had up to two hundred and fifty pounds pressure and I’d seen some of the fires they couldn’t put out, so I was sure the poor old under-equipped brigades wouldn’t be able to handle what I’d set them.

  I watched from fifty yards. I noticed a man watching me and I wasn’t sure what expressions I’d had on my face while he was watching, so I didn’t know what he thought about me.

  Presently he came over and asked me to help him park his caravan. He was an interesting case; he might have been a perve or a copper’s nark, or an ordinary citizen, but I wasn’t in a position to judge. I cleared out. The sort of face he had and the way he stood reminded me of uniforms.

  11

  STAGE

  ‘Look at the mountain, singing like a bird.’ I was keeping away from home, to give them a rest from me. ‘A sea breeze has come down.’ I’ll never forget that. I had borrowed one of the cars at the station quite early one morning, just after the worker who drove it got on his train to Sydney, and I took the kids out for a drive to the beach. And Bee. I don’t know what Stevo had been reading—he was like me, he started reading when he was young—but whatever it was, it had made him a poet. Those were his own, exact words. I didn’t make them up just so someone would say how clever he was. If anyone wants to say how clever he is, they can go right ahead and say it. He is. I looked up where he pointed, and sure enough, all I could see was hills above us. It was a fine day all right, but the only birds I saw were birds, not mountains. I didn’t hear any singing. He remarked that a sea breeze had come down when we were on the beach and he was standing there wet, looking back at the dry sand and the hills beyond the traffic and the shops.

  I remembered all this while I was camped under the stage of the local picture show. Television had white-anted their audiences, and they had to use the place for other things besides films, since they couldn’t keep going all week on the leftovers from the big distributors. I knew all that because I asked the man once why we didn’t get the new films for months. That was why some of the time, when churches, for instance, had a party or a play or a meeting on, I’d be looking up holy legs from my crack in the cypress. On movie nights, I had a view of the whole stage, but it was from one side and the screen, instead of being a rectangle, was a very squashed parallelogram and the people were wafer thin. You expected them to peel off the white back cloth any minute. And when they walked, it was a nightmare. Only their voices came loudly to me below.

  The whole point of this is that I
was still held prisoner by my habit of getting away from the family, then remembering them and going over their good points at a safe distance. I knew that well enough, there was no need to kid my own self.

  The second day I was there I had this new sort of dream. You know how I often have coloured dreams, even if they’re only green and brown dreams like the one where I was shot in the head. Well, this was a one-colour dream, the colour stone. But there were stone colours of all sorts, within what you could call recognisable stone colours, even to the grey weathered look you get in the bush rocks, and the purple patches of sandstone when you split it.

  I was a mountain. A stone hill. Not like Ayer’s Rock; I was steeper, fiercer. Naturally. I was a mountain and people were chipping away at me. That’s right, chipping. You know how it is when the doctor puts some snow on your back and cuts out a cyst, or lances a boil—I mean the times when the anaesthetic actually takes and you feel nothing—well, that’s how it was. You could hear the operation, but feel only pressure, not pain. There were people all over me, chipping and napping away with hammers and picks and chisels. I don’t know why; I couldn’t see what they were doing with my pieces, but from the look of the people, they were carting bits of me away to make into statues and sculptures. You know, ‘The Unknown Factory Prisoner’ with round fat bits of stone instead of the cyclone netting and barbed wire like on real factories. There were even a few chisellers making faces out of me, faces of other men. I guess you could call them famous faces, but I wouldn’t. I don’t recognise famous, or well-known, or rich, or anything that isn’t ordinary.

  Hacking me to make other men’s faces! I wouldn’t be a block for people to carve and shape up into other shapes. They weren’t going to make me into something else! So what I did, I split. If there was any shaping to do, I’d do it. I left off dreaming then, probably because I didn’t like the idea of having got smaller, that is, broken into smaller pieces. They left, then, the ones who weren’t destroyed in the crash. In a week, though, they’d forgotten, as if the passing of a lump of time meant that I was any safer for them to climb on. When they came back, I landslid some surface rock on them, and since they couldn’t get on me any more, they put up a sign at my bottom, TRESPASSING PROHIBITED.

  I was lucky they didn’t do the usual thing and blast me, doing the very thing I threatened them with. It amazed me that they didn’t get the message; all they had to do was associate my splitting with their being on me, and my not splitting with their not being on me. After that, all they had to do was keep off my back. One warning ought to be sufficient to the reasonable ones. But I don’t think there were any.

  Going back that day in the car Stevo was so happy—he still had his trunks on; you couldn’t get them off him—that in the middle of singing, he suddenly burst out, ‘I’m a silver-winged robin!’ I sneaked a look at Bee in the driving mirror to see the nice expression on her face. I ought to explain that she liked to sit in the back seat; she said it was luxury, like having a chauffeur. What it was, though, she wanted to keep me away. By keeping herself away from me, she thought she could take my mind off things.

  Under the footlights, I was in a different world. It was as if there was no world there, and I had to import one from outside or conjure one up by looking through a crack up into someone else’s world.

  I’ll tell you the most surprising thing. I wondered what I’d struck on picture nights. There were two paths down opposite sides of the theatre building, going to the back and the toilets. I knew what kids said to one another, so I got across the other side and listened to the women. I wish I’d had some witnesses. You wouldn’t believe the filth they go on with when they’re together. Still, I’m used to what men say. You have to laugh, though, when you think of it. There’s a stream of men on one side of the building going on with the usual, and a stream of women on the other side, going on with their usual, then they turn, both streams, and come back. As soon as the streams get together, the filth stops and they talk about the picture, the car, the kids or the weekend, anything but what they most enjoy talking about.

  It was pretty dark under the stage and some days I had to rely on the factory whistles to remind me to get out and grab some food. The best thing I thought of to scare the people that had meetings there was hiding the skin of a little green tree snake under the seat of a chair and dropping it when they were halfway through and fed up, and pulling it with brown cotton about two feet towards my little knothole. You can only do that sort of thing for a short distance if you have to use cotton, if you make it any longer they get on to the cotton.

  When Stevo used to try to explain something to me and I’d pretend not to understand what he was describing—I only did it so he would get the idea of searching his head for words instead of using the first ones that occurred to him, that might be right and might not be—and when he couldn’t make me see he’d say, ‘You only see what you’re looking at, Daddy.’ Well, that was the same with those people. All they could see was the skin of the snake, they didn’t look any further for the cotton. For that trick you have to dry the snake out and draw him, then work the skin with oil. Don’t use motor oil, it makes the skin brittle. Then you don’t quite fill it with dry sand. If you fill it, it won’t wriggle.

  The church turnouts were the funniest, next to the Parents and Citizens who had committees to get money for the state schools. The mothers and fathers of the local schoolkids weren’t really interested in what happened inside the classrooms. If I was a mother or father, I would be, because it’s there the kids soak up a lot of prejudice from some unhappy teacher, and besides that, they’re taught things that don’t quite go down in the rest of the community. Like patriotism, for instance. What Australian is patriotic? What is there to be patriotic about? Yet you ought to hear the flag stuff and the British Empah jazz. It’s watered down a bit now, but it’s still mostly the same stuff. And what do they teach you about the Factories and Shops Regulations? Or the Crimes Act? Kids are let loose now and they don’t know what not to do. In the olden days it was different, you had principles. But there’s no principles now, no one’s honest, no one’s generous, no one cares a damn what happens to the next person. Look at me.

  I shouldn’t pretend they’re worse than I am, though. I remember how I used to get into the cricket team when I was at school; I might have got five for none and all that when I did get in, but I never missed picking the longest straw, and if it was a case of picking out the bit of paper with your name on it, all you had to have was a memory for the size of the paper.

  Remembering that, I felt pretty young, I can tell you. Most of the time I forget those sort of things, they’re not really very bad. As a matter of fact, they’re not bad enough, and that is why they embarrass me. Old time seems to fly away very fast at times, and every time he flaps his wings he smacks you in the mouth.

  Stevo said once, ‘Did you dress Daddy when he was a little boy?’ to Bee. That made me feel about as young. But when Bee answered, I was in another world. She only said a few ordinary words. ‘No, darling boy,’ she said. ‘He had his own Mummy to do that for him.’ The words, though, sort of dropped very light from her lips, but didn’t fall just anywhere like other people’s words. Hers floated. They floated right into you, you could almost hear the tiny vibrations in your bones and veins.

  I thought mostly about Bee for the next few days and I reckon I forgot to go out to raid the supermarket at Penno. I used to take advantage of the cheating the food people used to do. You know the packets of breakfast foods or any other packets, they are never filled up. If you slit a cornflakes packet in a special way and press down the flakes to about an inch off the bottom of the packet, you can stuff it with all sorts of other things, as long as you insulate the tins with something that will deaden the noise. And for the price of cornflakes you can have dollars’ worth of food. But if you try it, don’t let the girl on the desk pick it up. They’re supposed to, I know, but if you only get a few things they can add up easy without picking th
em up, and they like you to wrap them yourselves if they can get you to. I was always obliging like that.

  Anyway, I got no food. I was thinking. Next thing it was Saturday and the films were on, and the usual mucking up. I’ll tell you what, I was so quiet inside from thinking of Bee that I got a hankering to get into the movies to join in with the other kids rolling bottles down the aisles or even, if the kids in front were cheeky, even getting rid of empties by hurling them. That was a pretty cruel game, I know, someone was always getting hurt. You had to keep your eyes open to make sure it wasn’t you.

  Like Stevo said, ‘Every time you want to do something, you do it.’ He knew. I paid and went in and next thing I felt a hand on my shoulder. I was in a seat, so it wasn’t a queer. What it was, a kid wanted to rest his catapult on my shoulder while he took aim at someone up front. I was glad I came. It was nice to be able to get back into the ways I liked. I used to do that myself when I was a kid.

  Where we had it over the old people, we never used to worry about dignity. I’ve thought a lot about it, because on the face of it, they ought to be able to beat us. But to get at us, they have to drop this business of walking tall and upstanding, walking and speaking nicely and slowly, and everything that adds up to the word dignity. They have to come down to our level to do any good. They have to be able to nick over a fence or down a pipe, up a tree or through a house and out the back. You can’t wear good suits or smoke pipes and do those things, so we had them beat. But the funny thing was, instead of them copying us and being able to do the things we did, they kept as they were and wondered why we didn’t copy them! Hell, who wants to look like an old man, all square and thick and closed up like a public building?

  And the ones that tried to be like us and made a mess of it were the worst. As soon as we got out a new way of talking, to get away from their ways, they started to pound our words to death. Until we stopped using them. Then they were left dribbling the old-words and wondering what to say next, while we imported a new style.