The Chantic Bird Page 19

  I sort of wandered into Bee’s room and somehow it turned out that I got into her old papers and souvenirs. Not that I mucked them up or anything; I put them back in place exactly where I found them, but there were bundles of letters, piles of old programmes, crumpled handkerchiefs with old smears on, train tickets with the sleeper butts still on, all sorts of things. I pulled the shades and rigged up a barricade so I could put a light on without being seen from outside. It was more comfortable then. There were a couple of things that made me a bit uneasy, things like other kids’ writings on her old theatre tickets; she’d been to the ballet with some joker from the Glebe a few times. I didn’t know she ever went to places like that, she never ever said a word about ballet to me. It’s amazing how close-mouthed women can be. But the worst thing about it was thinking I hardly knew her. She’d done things and been places I’d never know about.

  When I got to one particular letter I read it twice, put it and the rest of the things back in the drawer, all in order, put out the light and took away the barricade and went out to a place a few streets away. It was dark and quiet; my sort of night. They had a dog, but it was too sound asleep to hear me. They also had a back porch and since it was a hot night the back door was open; this kid slept on the back verandah, it was one of those old places with the old verandah closed in. Not too different from our house. I clubbed this kid good and proper. He would be doing other things besides writing love letters when he woke up in the morning.

  I realise he would probably never know who did it or why, but I’m not the kind of person that has to worry about those points. As long as I do what I want to, that’s all that is on my mind. I never liked that kid, he was the sort that slapped you on the back and said merry things while watching you closely. Maximum impact, but meaning nothing except watch him closely.

  ‘What would you do if I asked you to sleep with me,’ Petersen used to ask. He expected me to say Punch you in the nose, and I did. He had got to the stage where he thought he knew all about me, but he was still testing and probing. I didn’t mind going out with him in the city, no one ever knew you there, no one cared and best of all no one remembered. He always paid.

  So when I told him the lie about the kids, he was right in and it was no trouble to get him to the house. I made it a nightfall jab, with the neighbours still glued to the TV and the blue lights flickering in every house round. He took right away to the typewriter Bee had in the bedroom, I let him stay there because the noise of it couldn’t be heard next door and I could make sure he didn’t go out. There was no kind of sense letting him be seen. As I watched him next morning settle down to bashing out a few more pages, all I could see was he was different from me. And above me, somehow. Or he thought he was. You could see it in the way he hunched over the machine, sort of hunched in prayer but also on the receiving end of a private line from someone up there that liked him.

  He sat bare again, testing me. I can’t say I didn’t notice before how white he was, because I did, but one thing about him, he didn’t smell at all. You can overlook a lot when someone doesn’t smell or let his underwear go bad. It was just that I could feel him thinking that he had the upper hand on me. I couldn’t care less about dominating someone—I don’t need a side kick—but he cared. He wanted this book about me to be his book, he could see himself getting the glory, he was going to step high on my shoulders. If I let him. He was going to be the hero of it, not me. His name, in big print. I was something he picked up, soon he would drop me and pick up someone else. He was dominant. If I let him.

  I didn’t let him. I got the screwdriver that I’d ground down to an ice-pick point, put a felt guard on it up to the hilt to stop the squirting and put it in him while he sat there hunched. You could see his ribs easy, it was a snack to push it in between them. The guard worked fine and soaked up the red, but there wasn’t much. His heart left home immediately. I held it in him until it looked as if the hole had stopped leaking, then put him in the bath to wash him. Don’t any of you go grieving for him; you can’t waste sorrow on people you don’t know.

  I burned the felt and washed the weapon, then concentrated on the body. I washed him again to get everything clean and hygienic and rinsed him so there was no soap left. The head, hands and feet were going to be the main worry, I didn’t like messing with those parts of a person. I got a cardboard box, the one that came with the altar wine or the butter—I forget—and put the head in—his neck was pointed up the plug end, so he drained pretty easily. The bath water ran out under the house along a sort of rough drain that had board sides, and meandered into the rockery; the poinsettia might have redder colours next flowering.

  I didn’t mention the actual cutting because it’s something that might worry people; I had to use Bee’s breadknife and you have no idea how tough human meat is. It wants to stay joined together. And the sound is not something you should dwell on.

  Touching the hands was better than hanging on to the feet while I sawed through. Somehow feet are more personal, they make you embarrassed easier. At that stage I had the head and two hands and two feet in the box. Just for the look of it, I changed their position and moved the head up to the top, hands in the middle and feet on the bottom. It didn’t look good to have the feet sitting on the head. They had to be adjusted so that the cut part faced up, otherwise if they leaked down on bottom of the box and wet the cardboard, I might be in the position later of lifting the sides of the box and having the bottom stay on the ground along with the contents.

  If I’d remembered my old man’s cut-throat razor before, the job would have been easier. We still kept a little drawer half full of his things—all that was left of his forty-nine years. Books, shaving things, medals. With the razor I did a pretty good butcher’s job on old Petersen and separated him into joints, chops, meaty ribs, and pieces of steak. At least I called them steak—they were the cheeks of his bottom, and his leg and thigh muscles. He didn’t have enough arm muscles to call steak.

  For the bones I had the old man’s hacksaw, the one with the pistol grip. The meat I piled at the other end of the bath and let it finish draining. There was going to be some embarrassment with the bones later, but the meat would have to be finished first, no good getting rid of the bones bit by bit.

  When everything was ready, I left the cardboard box in the bathroom and took the meat into the kitchen. I finished chopping it all up, wrapped it up with the lights and the skin in a cornsack, took the clothes and wrapped in them the contents of the cardboard box and left them in the barbecue grate. It was actually for burning rubbish, but we called it the barbecue.

  That day I burned that part and stuck an old rubber tyre on the fire so no one would get the Auschwitz smell. And at night I borrowed a car and got down to the Zoo again and gave the cornsack to the lions. I had to go over the fence on the western side and be quick about it, because the animals kicked up a row. When I got back home and ditched the car and rubbed everything I touched with a gasoline rag, I checked that Petersen’s extremities were burned up.

  I had to pound up the bones with a hammer on the laundry floor and put them round the orange trees. Then I sat at the typewriter and slowly took over my story where Petersen had left it, just after he got to the house. I’ve chopped out a few of his comments where he went off the track a bit. You have to consider the readers, and you have to consider your own feelings, too. At least he didn’t make my words come out differently; I checked through and they’re as I told him.

  He left a few scraps of paper along with the main story. One of them has on it; ‘What feelings about violence he has used and sufferings caused to those robbed? Especially unfortunate drunks.’

  I’d tell him, and I’ll tell you now. None. No feelings at all. If they want to put themselves at a disadvantage, like rolling drunk, then walk out into the jungly old world, then they can take what comes. If it’s a smack behind the ear and their wages gone, then so what? They can’t do any better with their money than I can do with it. My kids ar
e just as good as theirs.

  Now Petersen can’t know about it, I’ll mention the money I saved up in the ceiling, out of all I got from drunks and others, over and above what I gave Bee. Bee and the kids would have enough to live on for a long while if I went away.

  I hope no one’s too disillusioned with me, or upset about Petersen, but I can tell you there’s more people disappear than you know. Or the police admit. With luck no one would miss him, and there’s very little noseyness round my way. It doesn’t pay to shop anyone these days; someone like me can serve his time and still be out to even things up before the tattlers are much older.

  Bee was back home the next week. She wondered a bit when she saw me there, but she didn’t say anything. I didn’t like to trick her with one of my sincere looks, so I tried to look pretty shifty. She was the same, though. Even while I was standing around pretending not to watch her, the house creaked from the heat and I felt a bit guilty. The kids were tired, Allie was asleep, and I was more or less useless, sitting there, looking out the windows, scaring myself a bit when I looked through the horizontal slats of the blind and found that the vertical binders were dancing all over the place, not just with every pulse beat, but in between as well. Bee trod very lightly, she hardly seemed to dent the floor mats, and all she did was for the kids. You could watch her and yet not watch, and it seemed as if she was put on earth one minute and straight away she began walking round getting things for people, fixing up the baby’s mess, making little plans for taking the kids places and getting them things, making a cake for the woman next door that had her husband off work, shelling peas and slicing beans for the old lady that had arthritis in the fingers, but never doing what I did; I went there one day with the beans and saw what the old lady was doing. She had her hands in cold water half the day so I told her she ought to wake up to herself and use the rubber gloves Bee bought her, but she couldn’t feel with gloves on; some stupid excuse like that. I told Bee she ought to stop doing things for her, but Bee didn’t do what I said, or hardly ever, even though she mostly listened.

  No matter what time of day she passed you, she was always fresh and she smelled light and sweet. I’d say all her underclothes were fresh on. I hate people that smell.

  I tried to do a few things for her, mainly outside, but I soon got tired and had to sit down. After all, our house was the place where I’d been a little kid, from ten on, and there was a lot to think of. My cousin Jim visited us once years ago and I took him down the pitch to play cricket; he took the cover off my new six-stitcher in half an hour on the concrete wicket. That was just before he left to fight the communists. What I mean, he didn’t exactly go to fight them, he was taken. He was only in the Army because he couldn’t get a job.

  Anyway, I was bowling to him, before the ball split, and when I tried to send down one he couldn’t hit he yelled out that it swung a foot. Swung a foot? What did that mean? I didn’t have a clue, but I thought he meant it was a seamer. I forgot all about it until one day I saw some cricket on the TV at home with Stevo and Bee. There was a bowler that swung the ball a foot and everyone said what a bowler he was. I didn’t feel so bad about that cousin splitting my good ball then, in fact I think he meant to compliment me. He was captured later.

  I went up the street to get a few refreshments for the family. A dog tried to chase me near a big house I used to deliver groceries to for old Cowan when he had the Post Office and general store, but this dog had never met me before. It tried to rush in and bite, then off. I grabbed for its neck but my hands slipped on its fur and all I got was the tail. You should have seen that dog sail through the air. Cats do that sort of thing much better, they keep their feet down, but this dog tumbled over and over like a sputnik. Luckily for the owner, it just missed a straight young ornamental tree. At that velocity, it would have broken the tree off at the roots, and it probably cost quite a few dollars. Dogs you can pick up in the street, but no one will let you pick up valuable trees.

  Old whiskers used to trundle his barrow of vegetables up that street when I was a kid; it was funny to think that I could remember the exact spots I’d seen him and here he was, dead for years.

  I took home a dozen bottles of beer, I had to get a taxi to carry them, I was getting puffed much sooner lately.

  The kids liked their beer, it was good for their stomachs. Even Allie wasn’t too young. All they had to remember if they got headaches was to have a big drink of water; that would dissolve their aches. I can tell you more about the family now there’s no Petersen to get in the way.

  Bee was fond of her beer and it was nice to have the whole family happily swallowing. I guess I was pretty clumsy, mainly because I was glad to see them all enjoying themselves together. Chris asked me later, ‘Why can big people tread on your foot and not say sorry?’ That was the first I knew that I had trodden on her. Even Stevo was able to look at problems of life and human existence after his second glass. He was looking at the wrinkles on his heel.

  ‘Look, Mum. Afraid I’m getting old.’ Bee laughed out loud. She always looked more cheerful after a glass of beer, until about the third one. Then she got to the stage where she doubted that she should be drinking beer at all. On the fourth, though, the world was right again.

  ‘A boy is a boy,’ she said, and it seemed a very deep thing to say. He was going for some sort of test the following Wednesday, I think it was an IQ test. We decided over the beer that he would do well.

  The kids had wanted to have coloured sheets on their bed after they saw them in the shops and it wasn’t long after that that I was able to give Bee enough money to get them. I won’t tell you where the money came from, this time. When we got the sheets and Bee put them on the kids’ beds, Stevo came out with; ‘I’m glad I made those comments.’ He made the original remarks about the sheets, it was only fair he should take the credit.

  Bee asked Chris about the scripture class at Sunday school. ‘What did you do at Sunday school, Chris?’

  ‘I put some glue on Jesus.’ I think Bee only asked her that to get one of Chris’ funny sayings out of her, but we all appreciated it, even Stevo and little Allie, who laughed when she saw the others laugh.

  It was nearly the same as when we looked in Stevo’s book that he used at home for his sums. In the holidays they bring their old books home. You could find bits of notes any old time with the words ‘I love Miss Thomson’ in his shaky writing. He nearly went through the paper with each stroke.

  It made me feel very good to be sitting there watching the beer take its effect on Bee. Actually the curve part of her eye where the eyelashes stick in was probably worth more than my whole sixteen and three-quarter years together, it was so beautiful.

  She must have seen me watching her this time, because she was just at that stage of the beer where she could get mad over some little thing. She couldn’t very well do anything to me, so she tore up some sheets of paper the kids had used for scribbling and acted mad that they’d been left around.

  ‘Do you always tear up things when you’re angry?’ Chris asked. Bee saw reason then and smiled and the bad feeling passed. Those things always passed quickly in our house.

  ‘I’m not really angry at them,’ she said. ‘I’m just on edge a bit, but how can you convince a kid of that?’ She didn’t want to have to tell me she’d caught me looking. I still can’t understand why she was so sensitive about it.

  She covered up a bit by getting back to the scripture classes; this time she asked Stevo how he liked them.

  ‘They used to tell good stories but now they only tell you you’re naughty.’ Poor Stevo, the other kids were telling on him for playing under the bridge on the way to Sunday school and the big ones called him Herman Munster, he had big eyes and a crew cut. Bee tells me he’s in trouble for chopping other kids with his hand.

  Chris started then on a story about the kids at school and how one naughty little boy lifted up her dress and spat on her.

  I wish they’d never had me. Out of millions of l
ittle wrigglers, why couldn’t it have been someone else?

  The kids seemed to be growing up and I was still only sixteen and three-quarters.

  ‘There’s a girl at school,’ Chris went on, ‘That I’m going to murder. She says, Stop pushing, little girl.’

  Stevo had been thinking. He had slowed down, he had half a glass untouched.

  ‘Mum, is it true there are some people you can never trust?’ I suppose I had told him that, and it was only coming to the surface now, winkled out by the alcohol. We got him off the subject and started to sing a bit with Chris, Lay down yonder in the paw-paw patch, except that Bee made us sing Way down, instead of Lay down.

  But even in the middle of singing I was thinking to myself, I wish I knew who took those photos of Ma’s. Something in me wanted to be miserable. You could see Sydney out the kitchen window. From the distance the city’s a big garden of hardy perennials, made of concrete, watered with money.

  Something came up then that took me away from our little family meeting. I had to kill the black dog. Old Shieldsy had a black dog that was always making a pest of itself and for it to come round barking when we were happy was too much. Too much. I got the rifle and tied up next door’s cat to the clothes line and waited under the house. Sure enough, the black dog came and tried to torment the tied-up cat. I loosed two twenty-two slugs into it, but that didn’t kill it outright. It was making a bad noise and dragging itself away into old Danny’s place, so I picked up a rock about eighty pounds I reckon and let it fall on the black dog to slow it down, but it still kept making that bad noise, not so sharp and barky as before, but more moaning. I had to run back and get the axe to stop that noise, it was getting to me. The neighbours all kept inside.