The Chantic Bird Page 16

  Some girls are like that, it does them no good in the long run, but you can’t talk them out of it. They get all sympathetic when they see dogs with one leg or helpless babies getting bashed or pathetic things like that. That’s what made me annoyed with her. She must have jumped to the conclusion that I was helpless, just because I was a little out of breath and needed a rest. To tell you the truth, I was too out of breath to object much, and she ran on and on with this quiet look, and a lot of batting her eyes with sympathy. It was pretty miserable if you could have looked at the scene from a football field away, but you would be making a mistake if you thought I was miserable.

  That’s a funny thing; the old man used to talk about how crook things were when there was no money, but I’ve had no money and I got along all right. You get hungry, that’s natural, but it’s not the end of the world. Old people grumble too much, it’s like they thought they should be getting breakfast in bed all their lives and they found that wasn’t so; they get very nasty about how the world treats them. I think people should be tougher.

  If I could have squeezed a tear out of my face, or got down in the mouth, this nice girl would have stayed with me like a dog for years. You got the feeling about her that as long as you came up to the specification she had in her head, you could walk all over her and it’d be apples with her. She was sort of pre-set, a machine set for a certain mixture of sadness and sympathy, ready to go full ahead if all the coins dropped.

  Why is it no one in this world is straight enough to see they don’t amount to anything? Pretty soon she left me. I felt good that I’d beaten her soppy kindness.

  I felt pretty cheerful. I looked up at the sky, it was wonderful to be alive. For a moment. But in a minute it was gone. Presently I noticed a man with a fruit stall on bicycle wheels. He could move it round without much noise. When I saw him come round the block the second time I started to feel the old alarm buzzing away in my head. He was one of the jokers that were after me, I could tell.

  I got back home and all the way home I was thinking of Bee, how the skin on her little finger was a light pink, a sort of sweetness-pink that went right through you.

  Stevo was out, so I waited. I wanted to hear more of that old bird story. There was something in me that said if I didn’t go after him and get the story I would never know it. Bee said if I waited he would come. I waited.

  He came by a couple of thousand years later with a girl called Diana, they were on a horse each. The horses belonged to Diana. I was going to call out to him, Hey! I didn’t know you could ride a horse! But it never seemed the right moment to call out. They looked good; Stevo looked as if he was born on a horse’s back. They came closer until I could see the veins on the horses’ legs and round their eyes.

  They leaned inwards to each other, they must have been talking kid talk. The horses’ heads leaned inwards, till they touched. But Stevo and his girl looked otherwhere, not at me.

  15

  SWIMMING POOL

  After old Stevo was gone, I sat in the ceiling for three days. I thought of all the stealing and bashing I’d done for him and I wished I’d done more; I wished there were a hundred hours in the day so I could be out clobbering for Stevo and the others. I’d like to be able to say that in those three days I went through a transformation; perhaps I did, but if so, I can’t tell the difference. I’ve become what I’ve become.

  All I can remember of sitting up there, apart from feeling that the whole world had left me, is what Chris said to Bee about the birds. I taught them to leave a hose through a low branch of the jacaranda so a dribble of water came out on a flat rock; the birds drank there and the kids tore up slices of bread and scattered the pieces over the grass for the sparrows, starlings, peewits and robins, silvereyes, currawongs, magpies, kookas and stray jays.

  ‘Mummy, have they got souls?’

  ‘No, dear. All they’ve got is breadcrumbs.’ And that about summed up my life.

  When you sit down for a long time, not lying down or weakening at all, you start to feel as I did. It’s very clever of humans and all the other boned animals to have solid bones to hold their flesh apart, otherwise we’d all be squashy lumps. That’s looking at it in a grateful light; actually my bones wanted to come out through the thin tough skin of my backside after about a day, but I managed to beat my skin and my silly bones, mainly by hating them. And making them do what I wanted.

  You’d expect three days of meditation would produce more than that in the way of what I thought I ought to do about things, and what I meant to do about the kids. Something…Instead, nothing. Three days of it.

  I didn’t feel I ought to stay up there like that. Bee might worry and start to get hard on the kids.

  Do you ever have something happen in your head? With me it’s usually my eyes. Suddenly I have this shift of vision, as if my eyes were switched off, then they turn on again, but a bit to the left, or lower down. It’s the break between that gets me, as if I fell, myself. It’s like when your eyes slip down off someone you’re about to hammer. I think it’s when you feel so hating at your victim while your hand is about to bash forward, but just before it lands. You know, the little disconnection in your head as if your eyes rolled back in to look in your own brain; you have to focus sharply unless you want your hit to go astray and not hurt. Thinking about it, I reckon it’s most when you’re going to hit someone you’re a lot superior to. I remember the same feeling when you kill an animal; only then, of course, you’ve got the extra spit and the round, easy feeling in your stomach. When I’m talking about is just when it’s in your eyes, and there’s no one in front of you that you’re going to knock over. It just comes when you’re walking along or when you stop to remember something.

  They could easily stamp out kids like me. But no one’s fair dinkum. If they got all the other kids good and nice and sober and industrious, the bottom would fall out of a lot of their rotten trade and shops and promotion. Even if they did it, they’d never know what makes us tick, it’s too simple for them to take notice of. They don’t get the idea we’re simply against them. Whatever they do.

  Not everyone can be like me. Most of the kids get round in packs; they like the warm feeling of the others sharing some of the blame if they get caught. They don’t develop the metal in the guts that makes you able to do what you like on your own. No one with you, no mates to rat on you, no one with different ideas to foul up good plans.

  I was walking along near some land the speculators were going to chop up and plant houses on. I looked at it to fix it in my head in case I ever came that way later when streets and houses were there and I could say to myself I remember what it was like without the changes. It was a flat place, an old watercourse when only the blacks were there, the last place around to be cut up. There was an acre or two of dry, flax-shaped grass, brittle grass and green and brown ferns. You always see green and brown ferns together; the ones that are dying are standing right beside the young growing ones. The dryness and the sound they made of sneaky whispering, hit straight at me. I felt right away all empty and rustling and dry inside.

  I knew the cure. A year ago when I was picking up a few clues on photography at a camera club I got to know a woman called Christine. No relation to our Chris. So I got her on the phone and we went to Adams’ in town for a few drinks and a bit of a feed. She ordered up very big on the drinks and I ended up taking home to her place all sorts of bottles; beer and wine and even a bottle of whisky. I spent the weekend there and I could hardly get her away from a bottle all the time, but I can’t complain, because I was wrecked. She really gave me a good time. It was worth the money the drinks cost me. This was at Mosman, at her house. Around nightfall on the Sunday I heard the phone ring, though she had adjusted the bell so it rang very quietly, and when I sneaked round to listen I heard her making arrangements with another bloke. Sure enough, after she had asked me what time I was going she made a call herself and mentioned a time a quarter hour after the time I told her. Which was eight o’c
lock. Ten past eight I was still there, to see what she’d do, and sure enough she was edging me to the door.

  ‘You’re trying to unload me,’ I said.

  ‘You said eight,’ said she. ‘I’m so tired.’

  I was so tired, I went. On the steps outside, I passed a big bloke, a lot older than me, and he was struggling with a cardboard carton full of bottles. She had a capacity, that one. Must have had a gullet like a horse collar.

  With a weekend of breath and staleness and the smell of bedsheets, I got a powerful wish for some trees around me, instead of potted plants. The seats in the stand down at the oval weren’t too bad for a bed. Next day I walked down to the swimming hole at the back of Cheltenham; running was out, I was so tired, and it was a good day for a swim. I stayed there all day, someone bright had put a rope from a tree so you could swing out over the water and drop in. That was nice, until at the top of one of my swings I looked out over the hanging rock and saw a man and a woman in the ferns. They didn’t care about snakes, and it was getting on to snake weather.

  I didn’t want to have to see people doing that wherever I went, so I left. They saw me, though, they were watching me. I gave them a few good swings, to show off a bit, but they weren’t a bit embarrassed. I could have made things hot for them if I’d wanted to, but this time I let them off; I didn’t even want them to know for sure I’d seen them. The main thing is to look innocent; that’s all they know—what they see.

  I wished I’d gone to the Jungo, that’s west of the old slaughter yards, even if the place was lousy with Estonians potting away at kookaburras with twenty-twos, getting something for lunch. At least there’d be no one near when you went in, or trying to talk to you. If there’s one thing gives me the tom-tits it’s people talking to you. I don’t mean if you ask them something, but when they just come up and talk to you for no reason at all. I never answer.

  In a way, though, I liked the idea of those two being down by the hole on a Monday, at least they weren’t pretending to be necessary to the country’s trade-health. I’ve read a magazine or two, there’s enough machines now to do all the work, but people just aren’t used to the idea of the streets being full of people. They like to be safely clocked in.

  I reckon I’ll never get used to the ideas you’re supposed to have when you’re old. I stayed down in the bush, it was very pleasant with a bit of breeze coming up the track to meet you, but I did no running that day either, I was just too hot. The new bark skins on the young gums reminded me of the pole vault sticks we used to cut when I was young. I had a friend years ago, Bongo. Bongo had a cousin that admired pole-vaulters, she said; we got her in his lounge room on Sundays when she was down on a visit and his parents were at church, but I didn’t like kissing her after he’d had a go, so I always got in first.

  In those days we used to swim at the slaughter yards, we were there the day it was a hundred and eighteen, naked in the water. The Fishies was a better pool, deeper and cooler. I was lying flat on a grey rock then, and the sound of my fingers on the stone startled me, it took me back immediately to the sound my fingers made when I tried to ease my brother’s toy shark away from him. Why did they give all the presents to him? Did they like him? But he was always grumbling, there were tears in his eyes half the time and a miserable look. Frowns, yells. And I was all sunshine. Our stupid grandmother gave him that overcoat, none for me. Why should I forget that? Life’s too short to forget those things.

  And when I got home that Sunday to Bay Road to ask the old man what that word meant that the man wrote on his friend’s back, I was the one that had to run. The Papworths used to stone you going to school and coming home, there was a quarry opposite their house; I always meant to go back when I got older and land a few on them, but I never did. Their biggest brother could swim for miles under water, I used to think, there was no limit to what big kids could do. I suppose I knew all along it would be my brother who would get picked on by my cousins and tossed in the water; he was always miserable. We were little then.

  Billycart races, swimming in Hen and Chicken Bay, I remember it all. That’s the sort of life I intended to have; it’s what I like.

  Stevo was sick about this time and I bunked most of the time in the roof of the dressing sheds at the swimming pool. The new one near home. It was easy to get back home in the daytime to look in on them and give Bee a hand. I tried to let Stevo get away with more little things than he was usually allowed, I knew that would help to build his confidence.

  He broke the only paint brush we had and went round asking, ‘Where’s the wig of it?’ He was getting better.

  Chris was starting to take an interest in ‘Mummy’s toots’, and went round with tennis balls in her dress. She pricked up her ears when she heard about Auntie Jane having a baby.

  ‘Has Jane had the baby yet or is it still muckin’ round in her tummy?’

  I dug up an old mouth organ and let Chris play it, since Stevo had got one from the woman next door for his birthday. But with Chris you had to explain. We’d just been talking about my brother that died and what we said must have stuck in her head. We’d got some of his things from the flat where he lived, each one in the family took what he wanted. Chris knew her own mouth organ once belonged to yet another brother and couldn’t understand how we could have got it and given it to her if the other brother wasn’t dead too.

  ‘If Paul isn’t dead, how’d you get the mouth organ?’

  Stevo had a dream when he was getting better. ‘I saw some men last night getting old. And their heads falling off. Right off.’ And soon he started eating again. I used to bring him paper bags of chipped potatoes, since Bee didn’t like you giving them lollies.

  ‘I like chipped potatoes. I think they’re so nourishing.’ I even started taking them all for walks round the street and down to the running park and the swings. When I went down one street instead of another, he said, ‘You said you were going that way, but your eyes were very mysterious, so I knew you were going to go this way.’ I had seen a man leaning against a dark car, and I thought I knew him from somewhere. It wouldn’t have been good, if I’d really known him, for him to see me with the kids, for if he wanted to cut me down or anything he would have known right away where my weak spot was, and how to hurt me. Actually I recalled later that it was a man called Moey, that I saw last at a circus riding a goat for a kewpie doll prize.

  The baker up there still had one cart going with a horse. It was cheaper and he wanted to use the horse rather than sell it to the knacker’s. I’d told Stevo about horses and knackers and when he saw old Barnsie’s animal, he said, ‘That’s a gluey sort of horse.’ I didn’t really know if they still use them for glue, but that’s what I told him.

  Later, I borrowed a car from the car park outside the station, a Holden—you can get into them very easily—and we were both very satisfied, Bee and me, to see how he was almost his old self again. He took with him the underwater goggles I got for him and stared and made noises out the car window at the drivers and walking workers we passed.

  ‘With this noise I’ll stop their minds.’ He was getting eager to grow up, and this I wasn’t very keen on.

  ‘Grown-ups have such fun. Or do they?’ he remarked. I hoped he’d stay a boy as long as he could. I tried to. It was good to be out driving with Bee and the kids, like a real family. Chris sang for us her special song, she’d started to go to school. ‘Way down yonder in the paw-paw patch,’ but what she sang was, ‘Lay down yonder in the paw-paw patch.’ You couldn’t get her to change it, either. Bee tried to.

  Sitting up there driving someone else’s car, I thought of the old man sitting up in his bed at the Randwick TB hospital and how I visited him once in three years and how on the night he died and I slept there, all I could think of was the noise of his dying had stopped and I was relieved.

  We got to Coal and Candle Creek on the road that the old man had helped build and I think some people there might have thought they recognised the car we were in, becau
se an old man with grey in his hair came up to us, with a question on the tip of his tongue. I could see that, so I took a sudden quick step towards him. He made the same back move that young Stevo had made when the water hit his leg. No one else seemed to see what nearly happened, he went away, and since he probably didn’t say anything to the people he was with before he came over, he didn’t have to explain anything about his sudden retreat.

  I played with the kids and got them iceblocks and things, and made plenty of time having lunch, hoping Stevo might get round to telling me his story of the Chantic Bird. He didn’t. I didn’t want to be at him all the time, pestering for a story. Besides, who was the kid? Him or me?

  At night when I got back to the swimming pool sheds, I fell asleep on my back and had another coloured dream. This time it was black. Three tall black men standing in front of me with creases in their faces, like tribal markings, only these were fresh cut in their faces with a knife. The sides of the cuts had sharp edges, like a razor cut makes and the funny thing was that although the wounds were red inside, there was no blood leaking over the sharp sides of the cuts.

  It was a weird dream, for the black men didn’t do anything. They just stood there, looking straight forward, not even at me, as if into their future. Only I knew you can’t look into the future. Just standing still and watching, and the cuts red and fresh. All you can see is the past.

  The sound of a kid rasping on the metal of the wire fence woke me and I could hear whoever it was walking in rubber shoes on the old concrete path. Then I got on to a man with a spike picking up papers in the park part, ready for another day of kids and lollies. There was something about him I couldn’t stand, he was too like the other ones that kept bobbing up ready to chase me off from wherever I wanted to get settled. I couldn’t take the chance on him not being dangerous to me, so I climbed down and got out.