The Chantic Bird Read online

  My mind. At the back of my mind I have a feeling that there is something I’m going to do. Why do I say the back of my mind? All I know is I can’t quite get at this thought, it doesn’t seem to want me to grab it. Is it that I am going to kill someone? Is it something I have to do? Or want to do?

  I woke up from thinking to hear the sound of a man’s hand on a shirt. Rub your shirt with your hand and you’ll see what I mean. There were people coming in for a meeting, and shortly I found myself again looking up holy legs from under the platform. The women had no lipstick on and I thought straight away of Plymouth Rocks and the old man giving up the insurance and going broke and trying the rest of his life to give up smoking because it was sinful, but drinking wasn’t and he didn’t like the taste of beer anyway and couldn’t afford anything dearer. When I was a kid I used to practise holding my breath in their meetings, they had a beaut electric clock on the wall at Beecroft, and I got up to two minutes. I was about twelve then, only a kid. The idea was you had to hold it as long as you could, but you couldn’t let it out noisily, everything had to be quiet. No matter what you let go there, you had to be quiet. They didn’t even like you turning the pages of your hymn book and making a noise.

  We often had Sunday dinner with the biscuit kings or the meat kings, and boy, did we eat, my brother and me.

  They certainly gave us a lesson in comfort. I often thought, as we tucked into the roast pork or the mountains of delicious fresh cream, how funny it was that most other religions sort of praised poverty and plain living while this mob had never heard of it. When we got home from their two-storey houses on Sunday night we always found that our own little fibro wreck of a house had shrunk to the size of a kid’s play-shack, the sort you see balanced crazily in the fork of a tree.

  I got out into the fresh air again and straightened up and walked and walked, and the first thing that hit me was a terrific big white wave. Of cheerfulness. I was swamped in a heap of bright feelings, tossing over and over, I felt I was being dumped in the surf, and the joy of the world was getting up my nose and suffocating me. I must have rolled a bit as I walked, because some people tch-tched as I staggered by, drowning. I not only must have rolled, I must have looked very harmless at that time, because people don’t usually make any remarks when I pass. When I got my breath after a struggle, my chest took great swells of air and I felt my eyes bright and hardening and almost pushing out of my head, I felt so well.

  It faded quickly, and all I was left with was sore eyes. My eyes always get gritty and sore and need lubrication, when I have an emotional attack like that. Or even when I drink too much and talk and shout at the same time. It was bad luck for me, though, that I’d been so high a few minutes before, because after that I sank down very bad. I remember thinking to myself, perhaps this isn’t life at all, yet. Maybe it’s a sort of pre-life, a foyer, a vestibule, an ante-chamber of life and I’m due to get to live sometime later. But life isn’t around you, on this planet. Practically everything around you is dead; you have to move things yourself and be the only life there is. Life is buried in us and you sometimes have to dig it out.

  I felt so crook about this, that a few tears came into my eyes at the misery of it. It was just as well, too. The salt water made my eyes feel fine and pretty soon I cheered up, knowing that I could still rise above these silly feelings, I could still tread on them when I wanted to.

  I switched my head over from thinking of myself to thinking of Stevo; that always made me forget everything.

  When I had them out for another day not long ago, he suddenly cried out in the car, bouncing up and down in his seat, ‘The bindies are hot with joy!’ That’s exactly what he said. I put it down in pencil on the paint of the dashboard of the car I’d borrowed. I didn’t even know what it meant.

  ‘Did you get a load of that?’ I yelled to Bee, in the back seat.

  ‘What do you mean, boy?’ she asked him.

  ‘They make you go Yow!’ he bubbled. That was all he would say. You couldn’t help being proud of a kid who could say things like that. And later, when I overtook a trailer with a light load trying to keep me behind him, he said, ‘Some drivers look away or look ahead. And some put their eyes at ya!’

  The way he stared round at them it was no wonder. But it was a pity if they couldn’t take a little kid staring. I’d never thought of it before, but I guess there wasn’t much for a kid to do in a car between stops. The next thing I remember, he was fiddling with his hat. You had to ask a kid like that what he was doing, if only on the offchance of hearing some brand new idea, from wherever it is they come from just before they’re born.

  ‘I have to have the brim of my hat up, so the other drivers can see my eyes talking to them.’ I reckon if I’d ever said things like that when I was a kid, my parents would have stayed alive instead of dipping out, just to hear more. All the rest I remember of that trip is the way Stevo called the television cartoons Dopeys and Chris called them Popeyes. Even if you took them a hundred miles away, their minds were never far away from home.

  Without thinking about it I found that I’d walked home. The house watched me, I could feel its eyes following me. The trees listened. Each empty paddock had the look of a minefield.

  I was rubbering round the verandah, the way I do, when I heard Stevo. They never actually expected me, but they were always ready for me when I got there, no matter when.

  ‘We won’t tell Daddy there’s no cake for him, ’cause that will unhappy him. We’ll just let him see for himself.’ I had missed dinner. I never said anything, but there was an arrangement that if I got there in time I ate; if not, I went without. It wasn’t dark, anyway, I could eat later.

  Instead of eating, Stevo started again on the story of the Chantic Bird. But he only got up to the part where the Chantic Bird’s song was like the tinkling of glass bells, and he broke off to run outside and kick a ball, only it wasn’t a ball. I watched him kick an old fruit tin around and when I looked at Bee, I could see she was anxious. It only took me about half an hour to see why. Stevo was hurting his shoes and he probably only had the pair he had on. I was disappointed he hadn’t carried on with the story, I had come to expect it, and what with that and the thought of his shoes, I felt very sorry for the poor little kid and raced out to roll a drunk. I had to wait a bit more for it to get dark, then I got on to old man Keble coming down the hill from the Hampden. I bowled him and rolled him and went right back home and made out I’d forgotten to give her the money before, and gave her the old drunk’s donation. Actually, that wasn’t all. The money smelt so much of beer, I had to rub some of her fancy soap on it so she wouldn’t smell it.

  I hung round a bit, then I decided to go back to the theatre. On the way I thought of my brother, the one that died, and how when he was in that beautiful old Catholic hospital he was put next to a criminal. This man was going to bottle him with a lemonade bottle, he reckoned. I saw the sisters and made sure a cop was there by his bed twenty-four hours a day, but my brother wasn’t happy until he got into another ward. They put him out on a verandah because they knew you thought things were going good if you were outside. He was dying, of course, but no one was supposed to tell him. I’d want them to tell me, it was too much like a dog dying, the way he went. But the thing that hits you between the eyes is that no matter what time of day or night it is, something’s killing something. The hawks overhead and the sparrows looking nervously over their shoulders, the mice darting, the owls calling, the birds after the butterflies, the killing doesn’t stop. With my brother it was a tiny germ in his blood.

  All of a sudden I heard something, a stiff curtain on rings slid back. For a moment I thought I was back in the theatre and I got a cold feeling in the back of my head. Then I realised the sound was only in my head after all; it was the sound the curtain made round my brother’s bed when he had an attack and the blood supply to his brain was interrupted.

  I waited around outside the theatre and just when I was about to go in, a man and a w
oman appeared and went in. Everywhere I went there were people following me, or if not following me, then blocking me. I hopped on the next train out of there and the first thing I did when I got off at Penno was to run up the steep cutting as fast as I could.

  12

  HOSPITAL

  You’ve got to watch the citizens. They’ll call copper if you look sideways at them. What it was, I must have collapsed somewhere. You couldn’t tell the coppers from the meat-wagon men from where I was on the ground; their legs were all the same and they were too close to my head.

  If there was anything funny that night, it was the sound, in the ambulance, of Stevo’s voice talking to Bee.

  He spoke, ‘Come on, wake yourself up. Make a fuss! I’ll help you wash up—poor old thing!’ Don’t get me wrong, he wasn’t really there with me, that was what he said to Bee after they had heard that I was in hospital. I was seeing it in my head, and I hoped that when it happened it would be the way I imagined it, because it was a good feeling to think Bee was worried. When thoughts like that hit you, you have to laugh. There I was, the sort of human that goes round making a bump and smash wherever I could, and getting away with it, and underneath the fine, proud actions of bashing and stealing and assaulting I was hoping a sixteen-year-old girl was crying and upset over me. They left a man in a blue uniform with me in the back of the ambulance, and when he heard me laughing he leaned forward to see if I was laughing at him, and he was ready to land me one, don’t you worry, and I was glad again when I saw that, because I was right—I had always been right—they were exactly the same sort as me; they’d smash a young kid lying down in an ambulance without a thought. If no one was there to see. You can’t imagine how pleased I was with that. They’re the same sort as me, don’t you worry about that, so don’t get mixed up with them, and if one day one of them is in a crappy mood and you’re waiting on a corner for someone after dark at night and he tells you to move on; you just move on and don’t argue. Or else. He had a voice like a soft-nose bullet; you thought how round and cheerful they felt in your hand, but they thumped home hard.

  He didn’t smash me one, though. I let my head go limp and rolled it to one side towards him. If I’d flopped the other side he might have thought I was being smart, dodging the punch I expected. I might have copped it, that way. Instead, with my head flopped near him, he thought I’d collapsed again and got the driver to go faster. I wanted to get them to turn on the siren and I was nearly going to ask them, but they did anyway. They usually do if they get irritated and what got them irritated was going along nice and steady and then being asked to step on it. Just for the sake of some rotten little b, which was what they called me when I was coming round. I heard them say it. And when there was no one round that wasn’t in their little club.

  Did you ever try my little trick on a doctor? When he’s taking your pulse, you relax, breathe in deep, then breathe out very hard. Your pulse slows down, not gradually, but it sort of pauses then gives a big thump and then none for a little time. It gets back a bit faster after that, then it’s time for another breath out. It will thump again after a nice pause. The doctor will look at you—they’re very careful about getting tricked, and also, if there’s something the matter with you and they’re the only ones that know, they like to get a look at your face; I think it gives them a lift to know you’re clapped out and you don’t know it, especially if they’ve got another thirty years to go. When he looks at you, you’re on your own. I was all right, I know how to look innocent. If you’re not used to it, look out the window or pretend you’re having trouble with your eyes. Something. They never believe anyone else can keep track of a couple of things at a time; if you’re squinting, they’ll never believe you could be putting one over at the same time.

  There’s another thing, if you can manage it. You think of something that always frightens you, and your ticker will go faster. If you do that after you’ve been slowing it down, you’ll have him shake his head and peer at you. That’s the time to be looking out the window. I used to think of a football team of legs with blue and white socks, running out onto the field. Remember the nervous feeling you have before a game? Well, those legs reminded my heart of that feeling and it beat faster.

  Apart from anything being wrong, I’m fine. The bed is good and hard; I’m only comfortable on a hard bed, or the floor or a rock or a grating or something like that. I can’t say actually comfortable, but I feel better inside when I’m living hard. It’s as if I’m not asking any favours.

  Bee and the kids came to visit me. Littlies are not supposed to come in; their germs are too strong for grown-ups. But I got them to go round to the other entrance—it was at Hornsby—not the entrance the visitors use, and anyone who saw them then thought they’d been allowed in at the other end, and no one stopped them. Chris was coming on about that time; she started climbing up some oxygen bottles onto a shelf; she wanted to sit there, she was too short to see me properly from the wooden floor.

  Bee commanded, ‘You can’t get up there, Chris!’

  ‘Yes I can,’ said Chris. ‘You know me.’ That cheered me up. The doctors had started going over me and letting the young learning doctors have a go at me. You’re in for that in the public ward. The young ones were very taken with some flat brown marks on my legs and arms; from the way they looked you’d have thought they were the blunt tentacles of cancer coming up to the surface for oxygen. For all I know they might have been.

  Bee got Chris down, anyway, and that made her yell. It was good to hear a little kid yell with something besides the agonies.

  Stevo said, ‘Be quiet for a minute Chris! Mum, why do ladies scream?’ Chris sneaked away to look at the television set in the ward and came back delighted. Someone gave her some lollies to go away. We asked her what she saw and she said a nice girl on the television with her arms wrapped round a man.

  ‘I think she loves her daddy,’ she explained. We made her give some of the free lollies to Stevo. ‘Lollies make me strong, don’t they?’ he reminded us. To Bee he said, ‘Why did you say before I can’t have chips? Because they give me bad breath?’ Bee was cornered there, but she didn’t have to answer. He knew when he’d won, he didn’t have to hear her admit it.

  I started to feel stronger with Bee and the kids about and it wasn’t long before I started to think to myself, Why should I stay still for these people in white coats to prod me and look in everywhere in me and ask me questions and expect me to do what they said and stay here until they let me go? Why should they have any power over me at all? Just because of words written on pieces of paper? That was all that made them official. Take away the bits of paper and what were they?

  ‘Now hear this,’ was Stevo’s command. He saw me drifting off on my own wavelength and he wanted me back.

  ‘Now hear what?’ I said. He got confidential.

  ‘I like little girls.’

  ‘Which little girls?’

  ‘Ones at school and new ones I meet.’ Bee looked pretty depressed, but she smiled at that.

  ‘Why don’t you have mummies at school?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t think they’d get much work done. Mummies have a pretty easy time,’ I reckoned. Bee didn’t come in.

  ‘It’s a possibility,’ he commented.

  ‘Why don’t you start telling Daddy more of your story?’ Bee questioned. Daddy. Stevo didn’t look too happy.

  ‘Daddy’s sick.’

  He started then, but all the time he spoke he was looking out the window and I could see he wasn’t going to get very far. I’ll tell you what, he only got as far as last time. He stopped almost the same place as before. One minute he was talking about the song like glass bells and the tears in the King’s eyes and the silk ropes on the Bird’s feet, and the next he was outside running over to a culvert in the hospital yard down near the paddock with the horse. He was digging with a stick and later he brought back some very white clay to take to school and make little figures.

  Bee didn’t seem to
mind him running off and forgetting the story, but I reckon she knew her own mind. It was more important for me to give the kid an ear than for him to be made to stick there and talk when he didn’t want to.

  Chris was showing a lot more life. She got up to Stevo’s little lolly box of treasures that Bee carried in her brown bag and took out his cards that he saved out of the cornflakes packets.

  Bee said, ‘They’re Stevo’s cards.’

  ‘Will he hit me?’

  ‘He might.’

  ‘I don’t care. I’ll cry later.’ What a kid. I was so happy, I knew she was going to be as big a character as Stevo. The only one left now was Allie; I didn’t know what she would turn out to be, but she was only young.

  Bee gave me a folded-up paper from Stevo. Since it was folded he called it a book. There were coloured-in drawings on it, but I’ll only tell you what he wrote.

  Mrs Hen layed an egg down by the road

  side. Mr Dog said Why did you. I didn’t have

  a home. I’ll build you a home. No, no.

  But it was a golden egg.

  Bee explained that the story was meant to cheer me up while I was sick.

  Bee went shortly after and the kids waved at the door and that left me with only me to talk to. Almost everyone around was dying. There were other kids there, mostly out of car crashes, with broken this and that, but they weren’t the sort of kids you’d be breaking your neck to talk to. They were proud of their head-on crashes, not ashamed of their stupid reflexes, and they mostly had about fifteen thousand other smashes to talk about. You’d think if they had one prang that would be the last, they’d at least go to a car club and learn to read the road conditions by the seat of their pants, or something. Or else not talk about it.