The Chantic Bird (2 page)

It’s hard to think of another Australian author who has been so condemned. As the country has changed—woken from its long Menzies slumber to social upheaval, integrated into a global economic order, its borders opened to diverse populations—opinion about Ireland’s work has hardened. Australians have become literalists of the imagination, policing language and the reality it describes, turning away from discreditable aspects or depictions of our past in the hope of unravelling systemic inequality and oppression in the present.

Such thinking has not served a writer who has spent a long career notating his transgressive fancies. Ireland’s unceasing disregard for the bounds of the acceptable and the utterable have come to be seen, at least by some, as complicity. The violence and misogyny threaded through his work must taint the texts. So it is that Ireland has remained unpublished since
The Chosen
in 1997 and was even omitted from the
Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature
.

The Chantic Bird
challenges our sense of ourselves as active agents in the world. Its teenage anarchist narrator calls us on our neutrality in the face of aggression, whether social, political or economic; he decries our craving for a mediated reality, for suburban security over authentic existence. His animal delight in nature and his willingness to live for the day make him almost a hunter-gatherer whose disdain for the hierarchies and accommodations of settled society make us see them in a new light.

In an era when the west finds itself threatened by the actions of individual terrorists,
The Chantic Bird
offers us the original ‘lone wolf’. The narrator’s methods expose those flaws in liberal tolerance that make the punishment easier on the criminal than the crime is on the state. And he embodies the powerful resentment of those who have nothing. David Ireland’s debut is a political novel which is empty of politics. But it is also a tragedy, because it is concerned with a figure whose ceaseless battles to escape society only reveal how he, too, is trapped inside it.

The Chantic Bird

I’m only telling you this to let you know what a silly thing it is to live like I do. What it was, I got sacked from my seventeenth job for fighting or gambling—I don’t know which—and because I was hardly ever there. I was gambling all right, but someone called me a cheat and swung at me, I moved my head and swung back and this kid went in to one of the bosses with blood coming out of his mouth saying I was a standover man. At least the man that lectured me before they gave me my pay said I was a standover man, but he’d been a policeman before he got this good job as personnel officer, so he might have been a bit homesick for the force and a good old backhander in the friendly atmosphere of the charge room. I don’t know.

I don’t know. If I did, do you think I’d hold back? And if you read this, Stevo, or you Chris, I want you to remember that it’s sometimes better to be the one with the bloody mouth, because the sympathy you get you can often trade with.

And you, too, Allie. You might read it some day. But remember I was three months off seventeen. There must have been a lot out of work besides me, there were recruiting posters everywhere.

The way this story got written, I walked onto Pennant Hills station one morning. It was one of those times when I didn’t have a car, and a long, tall streak in droopy sports clothes came up and introduced himself saying I had avid eyes, which was a pretty funny thing to say.

I would have got rid of him quick smart except that somehow he seemed to come from such a different world from me, that he didn’t bother me. You won’t get what I mean, I know that. But he wasn’t different in a criticising sort of way and he was easy to talk to. I didn’t tell him who I was; the way I see it if you’re going to walk up to someone and tell him your name right off, you’ve got to be prepared for the other person to not tell you his name. I mean the first one that speaks is at the mercy of the one who shuts up. Can you understand that?

Anyway, he latched onto me and told me he was a writer and would I tell him about how I lived, what I did and things. I could see from the way he talked that he could see himself a famous novelist one day, taking it easy with a million dollars in his kick and calm, impressive publicity stills plastered all over the country. In every magazine.

I only tell him the things I think would be good for the readers. You can’t blurt out everything. In a way I’m in charge of the book and what goes into it. He can only write what I give out.

‘Just put it in my words. That’s the most important thing. My words. Just as I tell you.’ That’s what I said to him and I looked at every page to see he did it. He even put this in, how I told him what to do. So what? I wasn’t getting anything out of it. Not even a penny for Stevo’s coin collection.

‘I’ll want to see each page,’ I told him. He had to show it to me page by page.

In the summer he used to sit at his little table, bare. Just about everything he did was a sort of test of me.

His name was actually David Petersen. But when I got back there with him out, I found bits of screwed-up paper with Carl Petersen, Randolph Petersen, Patric Petersen on them where he was trying out new names for himself. So he would sound successful, I guess, as well as being it. That’s all I was, something to get success out of.

About getting the sack, it wasn’t only being called a cheat. After all, three of us were playing odds and evens and I was working with another kid to beat the one that said I was cheating. So I suppose I was. But he had no right to be too stupid to wake up to us. The trouble is with calling people names, you can’t take the words back, and if you’re called you have to do something about it.

But putting us in to the boss! That was bad. He should have settled it outside, or got the other kid in with him to work against me, and paid me out that way. People at the bottom of the heap, like us, should stick together. Not call in outsiders. Bosses.

Even when there was no fight or argument, I still felt the same about the not sticking together. Whenever I saw a bloke trying to get above his mates I had to hack him down. Since I was a kid I’ve been up to here with equality and all that crap, hearing about it, I mean, not seeing it. Then in the next breath they teach you hygiene, which means that even your best friend is rotten with germs, they give you exams that show no one is equal, they give you sport so that the equal ones play for the School and the drongoes fit in nowhere, so that they’re games no longer; they’re a measure of something else. By the way, when I say they I mean all your teachers and parents and keepers; those sort of people. I reckon you can see from that that I’m awake up to all their bull. Not that I’m bitter about it. I just like to see people acting equal. Sometimes you have to make them do it.

I did in a lot of jobs that way. I could see the bosses didn’t know what to do with me, but just the same the rest of the workers liked having me around. The day had more kick when I was there. Until each blow-up and heave-ho. At least they always laughed, even if they weren’t lucky enough to get sacked with me. I don’t actually have friends any more. I seem to have a habit of taking other people’s friends and that’s not a good thing. I’m trying to give it up. I suppose that’s really why I was there at the Zoo.

After I gave up working, I lived around in any place I could get shelter, as long as no one knew where I was or who I was. I came to the conclusion that I wasn’t suited to live with people, not too close to them, anyway. The truth is, I don’t actually like people. Only Bee and the kids. I didn’t pick on the Zoo for any reason—I just happened to think of it.

I found this good place to hide, you can find it if you look in the part south of the dingoes, north of the snakes and tigers, east of the deer. I won’t tell you what it’s west of, or you’ll have me pinpointed.

It’s lucky I can sleep anywhere. That place wasn’t made for comfort.

I’ve started having these coloured dreams. Last night a whole dream flashed in front of my eyes and stayed there. There was no one in it, no action; that was the funny part. I was looking from out on the water onto a golden shore that bent round in half a circle. Everything else, water below and sky above, was deep brown, warm brown. The shore was one long flash of bright gold from end to end. That was all. I think I had a buzzing in the ears, but I’m not sure. It stayed a while; it didn’t fade, it just turned off like a light and that was it. Only the two colours. I’d never had them in colour before.

Actually there’s someone after me. I don’t know who it is, or where he comes from, only that wherever I go I see him. He might be dressed differently each time but I know when I’m being followed. What saves me is I’m always on the move.

I stopped taking orders at six, when I found I could outrun Ma. I fixed the old man, too. I pepped up his tobacco with some sort of ash you get when you burn honeysuckle wood. He hated this wood on the fire, it smelled strong, but when he was yelling at me I was laughing inside: he was smoking it in his lungs. When there was no work—he used to sell insurance but the brethren didn’t like that so he gave it up just when a little depression hit us; beg pardon—recession—when he couldn’t get pick and shovel or process work we both used to caddy at the golf links. I had to call him Bob so no one would know he was my father.

That’s just by the way, but how about that for a religion? The Plymouth Rocks, I mean. I wonder if they use insurance for their lolly factories, or if it’s still sinful. Because if you watch these religions, you find that sins change. But that’s not important.

What I’d like to know is, who got Ma’s photos when they took her away? She was paralysed, so she couldn’t have taken them. They were in a flat, wooden box, covered with flowered paper. Reddy brown. I’ll tell you this, I was so mad about everything, the house and all and being the oldest and getting shunted off to work at fifteen, I went and put a handful of white ants under the house, just to give it a kick along. It was falling to pieces, but not fast enough. You know how old houses take years to die. I’m ashamed of it now, because I have to look after the house. And the kids. The others, the next oldest kids, they left when Ma left and I’ve got Stevo, Chris and little Allie.

I haven’t actually got them. This girl, her name is Bee as far as anyone is concerned, she came to the house one day and started to do the cooking for the littlies. She wouldn’t do any for me, all I had to do was get the food or the money for it and she cooked it. I don’t live there, either, I only visit. Except when I hide in the ceiling. The kids started to pick up as soon as she came.

There’s something the matter with me. I don’t know what it is, I just have the feeling that something inside me isn’t working properly. And if you notice a sort of lumpy feeling about this book, that’s the way I told it. In lumps. I’m not much good at continuous work, I’m a bit stop and go.

Just the same, I’d like it to be skilful, brilliant and colourous. But what will it be at the end? A tale told by nobody.

I often think that. When the thought first struck me I went out and put the axe through the wood-bucket. In one hit. I had to bend the edges straight again later. I didn’t want Bee or the kids to get cut.

Great dung-heaps are the earliest things I can remember. Heaps of horse-dung as big as mountains. That was at Rosehill. Pinching my finger in a gate, getting lost at Manly, falling down a lot of steps, chasing a duck round the house for Christmas, looking over a fence at schoolkids, hitting a ball at Castle Hill, and Ma running about with a breadknife in her jumper screaming for the old man to put an end to her. There’s nothing to do in a Zoo but lay down and remember things, once you’ve seen all the animals. You can go out and get tuckered up any time; there’s kiosks around with stocks of food and there’s the big shed where they cut up the meat for the animals.

I remember the milk tap I turned on in old Bay Road, the milko chased me all the way home and I wet my pants when he caught me. I must have been young then. I was so ashamed of it—getting caught—that I went out next day and lit the vacant block. This time there was no one to chase me, I watched the fire from the mangroves in Abbotsford Bay. The old man moved us around a lot then, one step ahead of the rent and the doctors’ bills.

I can just hear the sound of a woman’s dress brushing the cement. Now it’s brushing the creeper growing on the walls. She’s moving away. I usually stop what I’m doing when I hear someone close. And keep my mouth open. You can hear better with your mouth open. And breathe quieter. That’s the way you get, like an animal, but it keeps your hidey-hole secret. Not like when old Ware dragged me out of his grapevines, the first time I was ever caught. It took me years to get even with him as he was coming home from the old Hampden Hotel, but I didn’t forget. I didn’t take his pay, just slammed his thick old head into a light pole. He slept on the footpath the rest of the night; they had no police patrols there.

I remember the first movie I ever saw when I was a kid, and how the horses jumped over me and how I ducked my head, down between the seats of the old Victory at Five Dock. You could smell the women’s feet, with their shoes off—not exactly rotten, just sharp. The smell of some of these Zoo cages is like the smell the possums make in our roof, and the smell I caught under the big rock where I followed a porcupine with my little tommyhawk. The right name is echidna, but I like to use the name I like.

There are some ants running on the skin of old Sir Edward’s cement, it’s thin and you can hear anything that touches it. The rusty reinforcing wire pokes out through it in places, I like the colour of rust. There’s some skin on skin, someone passing, rubbing his face maybe. It sounds like a man’s face…

Lying back here thinking. These animals are no use. It’s cruelty, that and the dollar sign. The first sheep I ever killed had milk in its chest, so I suppose that was cruelty too. But a man has to eat, or at least he does from a man’s point of view. Dogs don’t ask whether they deserve to eat. My old man had two cattle dogs, they were too big to be given names and they scared everyone for miles. I know how to kill a big dog, so they don’t bother me now, but they did when I was young.