The Chantic Bird (20 page)

Bee didn’t say anything to that.

‘It’ll be your turn first, Mum, won’t it?’

‘Yes, son. You won’t have to worry for a long time.’

‘What will Chris and me and Allie do then?’

‘You’ll be fine big people then. Everything will be different.’

‘Won’t we care?’

‘I suppose you will, but you won’t cry. I think we’ve talked enough about that, Stevo.’ Stevo wasn’t going to admit anything, but fortunately at that moment Chris ran and fell over the little step into the lounge room where the floorboards had a bump in them. She cried, and ran to Bee’s lap.

‘I know how to make you better—ice-cream.’ She patted Chris’s hair.

‘I know how to make you better, Christine,’ corrected Stevo. ‘Jesus and God will make you better. They’re good and kind.’ I bet the scripture teacher would have been surprised to know that anyone ever remembered what she taught the kids on Wednesdays.

These things didn’t fix Chris, though, so Bee got the breakfast ready. When Chris felt she hadn’t been kidded to enough and balked at eating Bee’s hash because it had spinach in it, Stevo came to the rescue again.

‘Popeye gets spinach in his tummy. He gets it from the big girl that’s always in trouble.’ That fixed Chris. Out the kitchen window the kids could see who was passing in the street. I could hear the steps of a heavy man on the bitumen.

‘What was that on the man?’

‘Don’t know,’ said Bee. ‘Wasn’t looking.’

‘You’ll have to watch it, Mum,’ said Chris severely.

‘It was a sugar bag on his shoulder for carrying wood from the bush,’ said Stevo. He was usually positive.

‘Any weddings today, Mum?’ asked Chris. It was Saturday and Bee had taken them to a wedding of one of her brothers a couple of Saturdays ago.

‘I don’t like weddings,’ said Stevo. ‘I don’t want to put heavy wedding things on.’ He had had to put on a white frilly shirt and blue satin trousers. I was lousy enough to call him Esmeralda and it stuck in his head. ‘I just want to go to see people.’

They were starting to split up, as a group I mean; Bee couldn’t keep them still for very long just talking to them. Chris pinched Stevo’s mouth organ, Stevo whacked Chris, Bee whacked Stevo, Stevo cried, Chris blew the mouth organ.

‘I can’t love you any more,’ cried Stevo. ‘I’m in jail and the doors are locked.’ Poor little kid. Even Allie was sorry for him, she big-eyed him and went on slobbering, dripping with tucker.

‘Mum,’ asked Chris, holding up the wet mouth organ, ‘Why is the music always there? Why doesn’t it wear out?’

That gave Stevo his chance, tears and all.

‘The music isn’t there all the time. It’s not there till you blow it.’ That was a triumph, knowing something.

Chris said, ‘You’re healthy. You’re brave, aren’t you? Why should you cry about everything?’ I think she was a bit tougher than Stevo. I remember the other day he pulled her leg and she fell off the lowboy, but she didn’t put him in. Not many little kids are as independent as that, specially girls. Girls are great dobbers.

‘Can I play over in Janet’s before she comes home from school?’ said Chris. She loved clambering over the big rocks.

‘Not while she’s out,’ Bee commanded.

‘Is it against the law of other people’s property?’

Somehow I didn’t like getting down from the ceiling while they were there, I waited until Bee started on the washing and the kids went out playing. Stevo wouldn’t want to be telling me his bird story, not when he could be playing. I went round to the old cricket pitch where we used to play when we were kids, it was shady there. I thought how different the world was now from then, when all we had to do was trot round and play when we wanted to. I still did, but there was no one else wanted to. I bowled a few rocks along the wicket, it was concrete and the rocks skidded nicely under the bats of the invisible batsmen. I got out about as many batsmen as the rocks I bowled.

People want you to be a tidy number doing a tidy job and no questions asked and no complaints. And people want to do that themselves, as if being born was a mistake and they want to turn their eyes away from the place they’ve landed in and be penned up neatly under someone else’s orders.

The next thing I remember is the sound of knees and ankles. I wandered away from the house with the idea of getting into another office block, this time a new one with a dirty big field of parking meters blooming over a couple of acres. I had to have a bit of a rest and I haunched down on the kerb when this young girl came along that was like Bee in every way except she was opposite colours.

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.

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’clock. 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.