The Chantic Bird (12 page)

Allie and Chris havocked the saucepans just then, and the cake dishes, flour sifters, biscuit pans and baking dishes, and the kitchen was a mass of aluminium from end to end. By the time Bee got there, I was away.

The boat was still there, so I didn’t have to go looking for another one. I had just got it off the Parramatta River mud and a bit of keelroom under me, when this big covered motor boat hailed me and wanted me to help him moor it. He was alone on the boat and I’m just about to give him a hand when I said to myself, I went easy on those kids before, why should I be always helping people? So I stood up in the boat and thought a bit and while I was thinking I picked up some flat stones from the bottom of the boat and skimmed them over the water. The best I did was seven hits, that is, when I skimmed it, it hit the water and bounced up again seven times. I decided this man in the boat might be the fellow I thought was following me; I noticed someone before, if you remember, sort of driving me out of whatever place I was in, stopping me from settling down in any place. Sure as I thought I was right, there he’d be right on me.

No one can be a nice free island with no one bothering you; everyone has to be nothing more than a bit of dirt along with everyone else. I turned away from that stupid man—let him tie up his own boat and get his feet wet—and since it was getting on to the afternoon, I decided to do something spectacular, as soon as I could get an audience.

What I did, I heaped the boat with brush and gum leaves and went back downstream until I came to a place where there were factories and I could get near the shore. I waited till it was about five to four and the workers were in the yards waiting for the knock-off whistle. Then I headed her upstream into the afternoon sun and had a Viking’s funeral.

What you do is heap the brush so you can be standing behind a half-circle of it and when you light it and the brush burns and the gumleaves smoke like blazes, you appear to be standing right in the middle of it. From the other shore, of course, they can see you’re behind it, but the ones near me didn’t know.

Just before I set fire to it I heard the last lathe or power saw or milling machine, or whatever it was, turned off, and there was a new quiet on the water. My bonfire crackled and smoked and the sun lit me up like Technicolor. People in the waterside streets stopped and pointed and some ran inside to telephone to get the dollar from the papers, the dollar you never get. They always say someone else rang first. All I did was stand still—that always rattles people, they think you’re looney if you stand still—and head west into the sun.

It wasn’t as much fun as it could have been if a lot of people had been after me. I just went past them, pretty glorious of course, but out of reach.

The workers looked at me through their wire fences. They couldn’t chase me, though. They weren’t allowed out.

Don’t ever pal up too close with girls. You get too dependent on them. It’s like a tall kid and a short kid, with the tall kid bending down all the time so as to be the same height as the short kid and not to make him miserable, then the tall kid finding it hard to straighten up to his natural height again when he needs to. Girls shorten you down to their size.

They’re cunning, too. Ever notice how healthy a girl is before you get thick with her, then when you’re saddled with her, she feels free to get sick all the time, and slops back to what she must have been before she put on the act? I get tired of girls very smartly.

I hope I can keep this story sort of kind, with no hard feelings for anyone in it. Or am I kidding myself? Is it ever going to be possible for me to be kind to others, when I have to suffer these hittings in the chest that come from nowhere and rock my whole body? When they come I can sit down and look at my chest and stomach and see them shake with each heart beat, and my head shakes too, so that my eyes seem to flicker if I’m trying to look steady at any one thing.

Other times everything is different and I’m on top of the world; the only thing left to beat is myself. But whether it’s good times or rotten times I’m caught up in this sort of hurricane that doesn’t rest, hurrying me on, knocking me here and there. Pursued by people I can’t quite sight properly, that dodge out of the way just as I’m trying to focus on them, and the thought bashing me in the head, on and off, that there is something waiting for me in the future, something not good.

I forget where I was then, but I remember the sound of a peewit’s wings, fast-flapping wings, scaring off crows. Then later, I remember closing my eyes, just as if I was on the back of a train, and seeing the receding column of the present as it may have been, except I didn’t see it. I was looking at the receding past. That was a depressing thought; I started to think there was no such thing as the present time, only the nearest piece of the past instead. Where was I?

I remember, too, the sound of a turning car, and the croak of a rubber suspension bush. Then I was on a train. I remember that. There was the green painted leather of the seats, and there was me sitting back thinking about I was only ever caught once doing bad things and making a resolution to go back and get that rotten interferer, but it came back to me that I already did. He was the one I waited for when he was on the way home from the pub at Penno.

In the train, that’s where. Two men arguing behind me about the coalition of the Liberal and Country political parties, and were they getting stuck into each other. I was turning around to shut them up and I found it was one man. Talking and arguing to himself and taking two parts. I looked at him hard to see if he was kidding me, but no, he didn’t even stop. He had no blank look in his eyes like some people find in loonies’ eyes; they were bright and he looked very interested in what he told himself. A couple of kids with big cases got on, I remember that; they looked as if they were running away from home. One had a violin. They sang madly a lot of the way. I still can’t remember where I was, perhaps I’d had some sort of blackout, I’d know if I’d been on the grog; it’s no use, it won’t come back to me. Yes, the train passed a station where a man and a woman were doing something under the railway steps. It was afternoon and her coat was wrapped round him; that much has come back.

Oh, and the noise of shunting.

I’ll tell you what is handy, and that’s a bit of leather from train seats. It’s good stuff and even though they mark it now, there’s a lot of things it’s handy for. I slashed a few and got some good squares, just the sort of thing to pin down on the old wood chairs at home and make life easier for Bee and the kids. A bit of sponge rubber or a cushion underneath and they’d have padded seats. I felt a sort of good thing in my insides then when I thought how they’d like it.

The train wheels ground and clattered and settled into a steady beat and under cover of the noise I got my leather. There weren’t many workers in the carriage by then, just that half dozen that gets a bit lonely or frightened that there’s someone behind them. There was someone behind them—me, but when they peeped round I’d be looking out the window or something innocent and they’d turn front again. I’ve often thought, sitting behind people late at night in a train, how easy it would be to bash in the head in front of you. To test what it feels like, I’ve sometimes got to my feet and raised my arm, pretending it’s holding a hammer or iron bar, and felt the exciting warm feeling inside that I’d actually have if I brought it down crash. Once I even got up behind a man, with something in my hand—it was a big steel bolt I found on the platform—and you should have seen the face on the man when he saw me in the window and turned round to check if his eyes were telling the truth. He leaped away and I got out at the next station before he could see the guard. No one would have believed him, anyway, he had glasses and looked like a loud-mouthed complainer, and I had a collar and tie and hair done nicely, and a pretty even sort of look on my face. I look very harmless at times like that, specially if I take care to walk in a nice neat manner.

I didn’t bash any heads that night. I had nothing massive enough, anyway. What I did, though, was wreck a train.

It wasn’t very wrecked, just eased off the rails. You have to pick a place that’s not too far out in the open, where you can get under cover in case you have to run for it. I got off at the next station and out the back end and into the shadow of an overhead bridge. The way to do it, you can use all sorts of things you find by the lines—blue metal, fishplates, bolts—you build up two ramps to take the leading bogie on a gentle tangent away from the rails, just a skinny angle is all you need. It has to be packed down very tight.

The other way is to loosen the fishplates and lever the rail out of line; all the train does then is just drop a bit and plough up a few sleepers. I did the ramp bit. The end of the station was dark and no one saw me. A few of the passengers got a jolt when the front carriage lifted nicely and drifted into the space between two sets of lines, but as a crash it wasn’t much. I blocked the up line for about three hours, that was all. You get a better kick out of things like that if there’s blood. Or even hysterical screams. But the workers returning home from their work cages didn’t have a yell in them. Some even got out and stumbled across country, you had to laugh to see them trying to keep vertical, you’d think they were blind.

As I say, it wasn’t a great success, but it was something. How many people live and die and crawl down into the clay and never wreck a train? You’d think they’d all be going like mad to accumulate a past which is something to be proud of instead of just sneaking through every day with no skin off. That’s it. That’s all the house-owning job-captive wants; to get through to bedtime each day with no bruises and no bleeding. They’re mad; the past is their only possession. Even I can see that.

A lot of people are going to be upset when they read this. I can hear them asking why I do these things, even though I’ve just told them. They can tell me books full of things I shouldn’t do, but who’s going to tell me what I ought to do? Who? Besides the ratbags?

You hear people talk about maturity. That’s the end. Who wants it? A mature loaf of bread is ready for the slicer. A mature worker is already on the skids. Did I say everyone ought to be equal? Hell, I don’t know what to think.

I gave away the thinking and got up for the night under a railway bridge down the line a bit. It was dry, and some warm air left over from daytime was trapped there. In the morning I thought I’d leave another little message for future archaeologists, so I lay on my back and drew on the underside of the concrete, which was only a foot above my face and had the prints of the timber forms on its skin, a cosy little picture of a train being derailed and a kid watching from up a tree. Someone in the future would think there had been a sort of guerilla war going on. I even put the date. No one in my time would ever see it, and there was something good about that. A storm blew up. You could hear it racing towards you making drums out of all the trees, until the first big drops stung you cold. I pulled my head in.

I couldn’t help thinking of Bee, though, and all the nights she had to look after the kids herself, sitting up trying not to look at the television programmes, with a book in her soft lap because she wanted to keep up with what was going on in the world. And while I had her in my mind I could swear I heard the way her cups chimed when you tapped their thin lip edge, with the clear light of morning flooding the east window.

I had a good sleep there in the daytime, no one disturbed me. Milk shakes and fruit were my food that day. At night I had a high old time remembering.

I remember. That’s enough to make anyone bored, reading it. But it doesn’t bore me, and this is my story. If anyone doesn’t want to read it, all they have to do is stop.

There is my first doorway, the first I slept in. I can see it now in the shadow in the main street of Tamworth where I ran away to when I was fourteen and sick of home. A dirty great copper woke me with his torch and sent me down under the bridge to sleep; there were branches there and you could make a mattress to kip on.

I didn’t realise what a long job this book was going to be. Can’t you write faster or something? Still, if it’s going to be any good it’ll take all we’ve got, I suppose. One thing at a time, from now on; I’ve spent sixteen and three-quarter years hopping from one thing to another; now’s the time to settle down to one thing at a time, and this book is it.

Petersen, who met me on a railway station one morning, was tall as a pole with a pin-head. He was some sort of psychologist as well as a writer, and analysed me with tests down at the Red Cross, inkblot stuff, Rorschach, you know what it’s like; I think that’s a picture of two people dancing—that’s very interesting, very few people see any violent movement, can you describe them more clearly—well, they’re in evening clothes—that’s amazing. That kind of stuff. One night he asked me what would I do if he suggested we lay down together in bed and that took me by surprise; maybe it was no wonder someone knifed him in China. He taught me a few things, though; I don’t want to give the impression I’m not grateful.

When I got back I was so broke I had to sell my rifle to one of my brothers. It was new and cost twenty dollars then, so he gave me five and a lesson in business.

In the middle of my remembering I couldn’t help wondering again—it happened every day, practically—wondering if my people had any idea what they were doing. When they got together, did they have a clue about what their offspring could turn into? Poor Ma, she had a terrible life. Yet maybe she was happy some of the nine months.

Getting back to going to bed with other blokes, like Petersen wanted, reminds me of three other times at Saratoga, Tascott and Marrickville. What was there about me that made these kids want to treat me like a girl? Is it because of that that I have got right away from going round with other kids and prefer to be a lone wolf? Maybe it’s not only because the police have started their savage old policy of breaking up any gatherings, even two kids together. If I’d been the police I’d never have done that. Look at me. They’ll never catch up with me; I have no other gutless kids to rat on me; to catch me they’d need a net like a mosquito net. Another thing, they’ll never work out why I’m against them, so they’ll never know how to go about catching me. They can never get at me, not the me inside. There’s no such person. I’m convinced of it. A hundred kids like me, all working alone, and this sweet old society would be on its ear in a week.