The Chantic Bird Read online

  There was another girl I saw later, she reminded me of a girl called Rene that I used to give rides on my pushbike when I was much younger, about eleven, and I was just about to slide out from behind someone’s big flat slab and race up behind her, lift and gag her in one move and keep going for the grass on the other side of the road, when I heard the clatter of a car on the loose board of one of the bridges over the culverts. I took that as a sign of danger and let her go. Some days I get very superstitious.

  When you grab a girl like the beige girl, you’re not really attacking her. Not even molesting. If you were, you’d soon see headlines in all the papers. The trouble with the kids that end up in court is, they ditch the girl as soon as they get satisfaction and generally treat her like a bit of dirt. If they took the trouble to take her out somewhere and let her down easy, they’d be free. Unless you get a real hard case girl that’s been brought up wrong with a chip on her shoulder against men. Then you’re in strife, and you may have to finish her off.

  I played a joke on the cemetery keeper, or whatever they call him. The one that goes round just to see everything is falling to pieces at the right rate. There’d been a cave-in in one of the crypts, the kind where rich people get buried. Someone had been in there, young kids probably, and opened the newest coffin. All I did was move the coffin near the entrance, and took out the old girl inside it and propped her up where you’d see her if you were checking up on cave-ins. She looked like the old landlady we had, I used to have to go up and give her the rent; Ma wouldn’t go, she said the landlady gave her the creeps, what with being so old and looking dead till you said, ‘Hem’, in your throat.

  ‘Live and let live,’ she’d say. The landlady. Anyway, this cadaver was sitting up; I spread her arms and took the cloth off her. I was surprised there wasn’t more of a smell, but her appearance was frightful. I had to get a fair way away from the crypt to watch, I even had to leave a trail of bottles and papers to draw the man’s attention to my little trick, but it was worth it. You should have seen that man go to water when he clapped eyes on the poor old lady corpse propped up there starkers.

  Of all people, why did I turn out to be me? Now and again I get the miserables, I can’t help it. I was leaning up against a tall flat slab with a round point at the top, and a spot on the right side of my head, above the ear, rubbed on the slab edge. At the same time I got a funny tickle on the right side of my neck, at the back. I did it some more, and got the same tickle. I thought about it for a bit, then I felt so sleepy I went straight to sleep in the sun, between two old granite blocks.

  They were all done up in a lot of clothes and smarmed with greases and powders as if their fine ageing bodies held a great mystery and must be preserved. I stood on the edge of the crowd round the hole in the ground that the men in the yellow digging machine had made the day before. They were singing songs I didn’t know, but I joined in with bits of songs I had picked up from juke boxes and top of the pops parades. I couldn’t actually say I know one song right through. Not one. Only the very old ones my auntie Olive used to sing when I was a very young kid. And you never hear them now. So there I was, leaning backwards against a thin whitish stone and mumbling the words that came into my head, like ‘Shake it, baby, pretty-eyed baby, you’re the neatest one, paper-doll baby, let’s move, you hear me, let’s move it, c’mawn baby, get me outa here…’ And so on. I didn’t mean anything by it, except I’d never sung at a funeral before, not even my brother’s, or Ma’s, or the old man’s. It didn’t seem the right thing to do. Just shutting up would have been better. Silence. While they put on their clay blanket. And the funeral car men fidgeting around their cars, dying to get away, and trying to have a smoke without anyone seeing.

  Anyway, this slab I was leaning against broke. That put me down on top of a vegemite jar of plastic flowers. I was still riding the slab so I didn’t cut myself when the jar broke, although I did have time to hear the nice sound of the breaking glass. And they chased me. Right in the middle of the singing, with the box still topside. The whole lot of them, except a couple of thick old ladies. I think the average person has a lot of savagery in him, far more than you’d think to see him standing with no hat on looking at the ground, making no comment and listening to the sound of some tired old minister mooning on and on, lie after lie. You couldn’t help agreeing if you’d seen those mourners chase me. The car drivers didn’t move. They took their cigarettes out from behind their backs and smoked openly.

  Mourners have more speed than you’d think. By the way, if you don’t think it’s fair what I said about the lies, you listen at your next funeral. It’s the ministers’ fault. No one is as good as they say; no one is an inspiration for good; no one is a kind, good, generous, loving person. At odd times a few are, but the way they put it you’d assume they were like that all the time. People are just people; dirty and clean, good and mean, generous and dishonest. Actually the average person is pretty rotten, if you ask me.

  I got away, but some of the young ones nearly caught me. They’d had no exercise all day, what with standing around waiting, so they were fresh. I ran into the shade in a culvert and got my breath back in the cool. I laughed a bit about the slab, I can still hear the thick crack of it, and the sort of shrieky laugh of the glass.

  It’s not much fun singing in the street, but if you keep saying to yourself that the listeners are rubbish, you can do it easily enough. I tidied my clothes, specially around the neck—people like you to be neat around the collar and wet my hair with some beer and sang a few songs outside a pub not far from the cemetery. This got me enough for a good meal and a couple of schooners of beer. I can get served in a pub because I’m sort of big for my age. Funny thing, to get served in a pub I have to ruffle my collar and mess up the old hair.

  I didn’t feel cold that night. I walked about a bit on the cemetery roads thinking of things like you do when you’ve had a few beers and nowhere special to go, about Ma being dead and the optician still sending cards asking her to come and get her eyes tested, and the kids I used to play with and fight with, some of them are respectable now with jobs and higher purchase, but they look old. And how when the old man was lowered away, his brother, my uncle, that broke his nose with a brass candlestick, had tears in his eyes, which I thought was a fine thing, and how the other uncle gave me an old watch he had no use for, but he was a Brother and wouldn’t eat with us, not even a cup of tea…It wouldn’t surprise me if they found parents and grown-up people to be the cause of kids like me and my naughty ways: they do the stupidest things, and try to make life complicated all the time.

  I saw a funny thing over where the slabs end and the houses start. A man was waving a light to stop people going down a hole in the road, quite a few people come through the grounds after dark—the cemetery’s a short cut to some places—but a man on a rusty bike thought it was someone like me up to tricks and swerved away. Naturally he went down the hole. It made me laugh, but I didn’t stop thinking. I remembered my old man calling me in to his room, he had TB and had to have a room of his own, he asked me what I was going to do. He meant when I was older. I told him the first thing that came into my head, but when he said that it was getting dark up the street I knew something was wrong. A few mornings later Ma told me they were coming for him, so I tried to shave him with his own razor. I got a lot of stubble off but the parts near his chin were thick and strong and I left him with half a beard. They did a better job at Randwick. When he was dying and making a great racket in his throat I slept on the billiard table—I’d gone to visit him, it was only about the third time in three years—but in the morning he was dead, and they wouldn’t let Ma see him.

  Thinking about that reminded me of the girl I had when I turned sixteen. I must have made life hard for her, she had a small breakdown. It was plain enough to me that after a couple of days in hospital she’d be as good as a bought one, but why did she break down? What is it inside you that breaks? She was always nervy, very anxious to please everyone.
Don’t be like that. Don’t be anxious to please everyone. Maybe she was pretending to have a breakdown.

  Talking about breaking down, that was always a good trick in the cemetery. You get out of your car and wave to people when they come past, as if you’re broken down. When they get out, you jump them. Easy. Another good trick was to put heaps of gunpowder out of bangers in the middle of the road, then light them in front of cars. Kids I know bet on whether the driver will swerve or throw out the anchor. You should see the cars stand on their noses. If people went around prepared—ready for anything—as if they were in a jungle and the next minute might be their last they wouldn’t get so het up about a simple little emergency.

  Well, we fumigated the old man’s room soon as he went. Then a couple of us had a room to sleep in instead of out on the verandah. I saw a picture of his grave once, there’s another brother of mine takes more interest in these things than I do, but I didn’t realise how miserable it was to be dead until I saw the grave when we buried Ma. You see, we put her on top of him in the one grave. Everyone said it was a nice thing and they’d want it that way, but actually it saved money. After all, we were paying for it.

  That beer must have a loosening effect, because before I went to sleep I had to make a toilet out of a dirt grave. There was no stone or grave marker, so there was no harm done, only this slightly raised mound of dirt with strong—sharp and prickly—weeds growing on it.

  That was a funny thought. The sharp grass, I mean. We were playing football on Woollahra oval one day and there were mounds and some digging outside the dressing rooms, which were in the stand. Mounds with sharp grass. It was a funny thought, because there in the cemetery it reminded me of two things. That day I saw a kid I hadn’t seen since kindergarten in Russell Lea, a big tall kid who turned into a big tall man. Not all the big kids at school turned out big; some were much smaller than me, later. The other thing was, I saw that day a kid I hadn’t seen since one day in old Jack Dunleavy’s gym, a kid that came in and threw two hard rights into the heavy bag, then walked out. Later he was big-time, only he never turned pro. You actually get more glory when you stay amateur. I suppose it’s just that the papers give more space to you. When I say you, or me, I mean him, of course; he got more glory. I won’t, unless I do something spectacular. Or nasty. Which is easier.

  When I stood up off the dirt grave, what should come into my head but the old neighbours we had and how quite a few of their sons never came back from the war. Some did, of course, but I reckon the best ones didn’t, to hear their mothers talk.

  When I awoke next morning I had the urge to draw something. I scouted round and found a cigarette packet, opened it out flat and drew on the inside a little drawing of that part of the cemetery. Just a sketch, with tombstones reaching into the distance and all sorts of funny monuments with wings and angels. What I did, I pushed it down a crack in a crypt to give the residents an idea of where they were.

  I had a nasty experience there. It didn’t start out nasty, but it got that way. It was a good day for a sunbake, so I stripped down to my underpants in a part of the cemetery that was very old and where no one came to visit. I put two bits of bark over my eyes because I don’t like being blinded by the glare, and stretched out on my back. Bark is better than pennies, pennies get hot; and a handkerchief stops all of your face getting brown. Anyway, there I was, sunbaking on my back and when I got tired of that, on my stomach, which was really the most restful position. Now I’ll tell you something you won’t like; I was on a nice flat concrete grave, very old, but good and warm in the sun. And here’s something else you won’t like; I was letting the flies tickle me. Flies were pretty bad then and if you kept them off your eyes and mouth there was no harm in them. In fact, I like them. There were so many, it was like four girls, one blonde, one red, one black and one honey colour, drawing their fingernails softly over my skin. Their little fly feet had a kind of magic in them. Believe me, they’re not as black as they’re painted.

  The reason the slab was warm, though, was that the earth had gone from under it. The blasted thing cracked under me, and I dropped down a bit over a foot. To cap it all, the headstone, one of those four-foot things, but thin in the old-fashioned style, fell inwards over me. Luckily it cracked at the base and I took some of the weight of it as soon as it started to fall. It was heavy as lead and tried to press me down into the grave and it took all I had to push it off me and get out of the hole. It frightened the flies away for a few seconds.

  Then I noticed a man riding round and round on a bike. He had a sort of working uniform on, so I knew he was probably after me. It was time I wasn’t there. I escaped, whistling, and do you know what I whistled?,

  When I was young and had no sense,

  I took a young girl behind the fence…

  There was a fence round that oval where I took that young girl with the long brown hair. She didn’t have apple-cheeks, she was pale and had a sort of long face, but boy, she had a big chest.

  I often think to myself: Why did they do it and have me?

  5

  WHEAT SACKS

  I get the feeling there’s something waiting for me in the future. I don’t know whether to say it will be good or bad and I daresay it doesn’t matter, but it’s more likely to be bad because good things don’t often happen. I get no kick out of life, anyway.

  As I vaulted the school fence—this was a long way from my cemetery—I remember I was humming to myself, Things were crook at Tallarook and there was no work at Bourke…I’m no expert, but I think that’s a big part of our sprawly old country’s history; things were crook. A truck boomed down a couple of gears round the corner and started to scream up the hill with its head down. The headlights were on high beam and they nearly blinded me. I can’t stand brilliant lights when I’m in the dark. And I hate being illuminated.

  There were plenty of times I wanted to wreck a school, but not because I had anything against them; I used to like school except for obedience. They used to give you points for doing what someone else said; I liked that about as much as a dog’s bottom likes turps, and it affected me about the same. There was a wind in the wires that night; if anyone lit a school on a night like that all the fire brigades in Sydney couldn’t stop it. Not that that says much.

  Anyway, this wind whipping through the street wires covered me while I got inside. You know, all they ever tried to do was to teach us how to work for a boss, doing what you’re told. And how to count his money and not do anything that would make him lose money. I suppose that sounds pretty all right to you; you’re brought up to think that’s the way things have to be. But they don’t. All I have to do is get on my shoulderblades and look up at the sky and the clouds and I can think of lots of ways the world could be. But you wouldn’t be interested, you couldn’t go against what they taught you. And it wouldn’t make you any happier.

  I was in the part of the school where they teach the very young kids. There was a machine in the corner used for printing some of the guff they fed the kids. I looked at some of it and it wasn’t as good as what they can get on TV, in the cartoons. Looking round the rooms, I felt a bit like I did when I lived next to Rosehill school, looking over the fence at a lot of kids racing round the sloping playground and wondering how it was there were so many other kids in the world. I gave the machine a belt; the silly things they were telling the kids took on a twisted shape like the metal I hit. Now they might have to take the kids outside and show them the world, instead of kidding them you could put the world on paper with a pencil and sort of tame it, cut it up and move the bits around where you wanted, all on paper.

  Some of the kids’ drawings were on the walls. The boys drew clumsy trucks—I thought of when we went out into the country, we used to stand up in the back of the truck, shooting at anything that moved; you could find your way back home by the shine of brass cartridge cases—and both boys and girls drew animals. A blue picture of kittens switched my head back to when I used to have to drown bags of cat
s. The old man didn’t like doing it and he didn’t like giving them to me because he used to reckon I liked doing it; if you liked it, that was bad; the best thing was to hate it and do it without any fuss. Some crazy world. At my first job in a big factory, we had a telephone mechanic that used to hammer them. When we were one cat over, or if the cat we had did something he didn’t like, he got out this great big hammer. The funniest thing was watching them run, after you clocked them. He used to be proud of his method and talk about it to the office girls, although he remembered to look sad and apologise for the poor pussy. If I had a hammer, I could have killed just as many as him, but he always made me beg him for the hammer.

  My first kill was a long, thin tabby cat, with a high domed head. A natural target. I hit it fair and square between the ears, it dropped, spun round like a Catherine wheel, then got up. It charged across the room, hit the wall and charged back. It kept on doing this about six times and gave me time to swallow the extra spit that comes into my mouth when I hit something that hasn’t got a chance. Morgan hit it again, just to show I couldn’t do it right, but it was dead on its feet. Anyway, there wasn’t anyone else there to see if I’d done it wrong, but Morgan corrected me just the same. A lot of people are like that. I can’t stand it. The stormwater drain was just outside; that’s where we threw the cats. I almost made myself a promise to do the same for Morgan as I did for the cat, and see if he ran about after he was dead. But I wasn’t sacked then, so I didn’t feel so much against everyone.

  I wrote a few things on the blackboard, because I knew they had girl teachers for the littlies, but then I looked round the room and saw in the light of the street globes the bits of drawings on the desks, and the nature table where the kids had their bottled snakes, the fish tank, and the rocks and birds’ eggs, and up at the paintings the kids did and the remains of some careful writing where the teacher was showing them how to write, and it all looked so pathetic, as if they really wanted the kids to like going there, and so poor, as if the teachers knew there was no money for real decorations and bright things and got the kids to make their own—there was nothing on the floor, only the bare boards—honest, it was so harmless and well-meant that I couldn’t do it. I thought of Stevo seeing what I was going to write and I got rid of the chalk. I nearly picked it up again when I saw a picture on the wall of a woman who didn’t smile, but looked very confident. She looked clean, I won’t say that, but it was the clean look of not ever having to do any work. She was the sort of sheila that took no trouble to make you like her. I took it down, smashed the glass carefully, and put her back on the wall. At least she could take the same chances as the kids’ drawings and collect her share of flydirt and get dog-eared at the same rate as everything else.