The Chantic Bird (26 page)

Now there’s no interfering from Petersen, and he’s out of the book, I can tell you what I was really hiding: one of the kids is our kid, Bee’s and mine. Why should I tell old Petersen? I’d sooner have the rotten public know it than him, washing his hands in our private things. When Allie came, that was the only time I visited hospitals regularly. She was closer than parents and brothers. I’d see her in the viewing window, each day she’d be moved a place or two left, as more got born.

The worst thought I have now is that some day even my little Allie’s eyes will let the darkness in.

If there is no other life, why is this one so lousy?

I did what I should have done a long time ago, and went after whoever it was that had been following me. At times I had thought it was imagination, but now I was sure there really was someone following me, watching, ready to pounce. Bee was reading a book about old British history and Boadicea and that gave me an idea about chariot wheels, so I got hold of another car from Russo’s and welded a two inch pipe cross-ways near the back bumper, underneath the car to the chassis. I rigged up a steel bar that I could slide in the pipe by throwing a lever sideways in the car, a steel bar with an edge that could rip open a car, tyres and all. It didn’t take me long to find the man that was following me. He was in a uniform, too, with a white shirt, tie and dark trousers. After I followed him a way I got ahead of him and came back the opposite direction. Russo’s car was a Dodge this time and it stood its ground well when the steel ripped open my pursuer’s car. Where it ripped along the side, the wind caught it and took it sideways right off the road.

That gave them something to think about when they found it. They could add that to their statistics. But people just don’t understand that when bad things happen, it’s someone like me paying them back.

No one looked like coming so I went to have a look at what I’d done. The side of the car had ripped and the wind had opened it up like a condensed milk tin and pushed it back sideways over the driver’s head. Unfortunately for him the edge of it had half scalped him, the skin and hair was all lifted up loose and he was taking no notice when I got there. Have you ever noticed when you prang a car there’s always rust under the paint? Rust under everything.

Somewhere it had gone wrong. This man didn’t really look like he was following me, in fact allowing for the claret everywhere he looked a lot like a man I used to see on the train when I first went to work. I never spoke to him, but he just went to work and came back like all the rest. When you lived where we did and worked in the city, you always got home too late to do any work outside, if you were the kind that did that. And he did. I saw him with a fork or secateurs trying to make his garden the same as the other people in the street. And he did. There was no kind of point in a man like that following me. Actually he looked as if he might be just trying out his car, maybe he’d found a new thing to do instead of digging dirt. Tinkering with a car.

I got out of there feeling a bit bad. Ditched the car and wiped everything with a gasoline rag. No marks, no smells. Gasoline kills all smells.

Perhaps there had never been anyone following me. I must have made it up or something inside me had made it up because it knew I wanted to think someone was after me.

But there should have been someone following me, all the same. I had done enough for an army to be following me. In a way, I felt pretty cheated; it took from the excitement of the last few months.

One of my last actions in the house was to put the eye in new spirit and seal the lid so that it would keep forever in the ceiling. Or as long as forever is.

I decided about then to give the family bit away. Give them a rest. Like a sort of Adam that they taught us about in scripture at school, I had got kicked out of where I was put, I had to waste a bit of time mucking about with one thing and another, I had to get mixed up with a woman… Now, with the kids starting to grow away from me, I could move on.

I was sick of being at a loose end, I needed something to be attached to. Being free to go and do as you like isn’t enough. I suppose going west isn’t what you’d normally choose to do. Maybe I was called from over the hills. No. I’ve been pushed. Thinking there’s been someone following me, not knowing who it is. I reckon it’s me. Something inside me has to get away from the crowds into a place with more room to move, where you can’t see so many people at any one time. I can manage a few at a time.

I decided to call it quits and look for something bigger. A town of my own, perhaps. I knew I could survive anywhere, all I needed now was to get some practice working through other people. I had to forget my habit of going alone all the time. I’d need a stooge or two. I didn’t admit it to myself at the time, but Stevo snapping at me had rocked me. There was no point in staying on. Once when I thought it was like going away to die, I couldn’t stop laughing.

A town of my own. Stolen cars, tow trucks, farm protection agent, local council, a town of my own. While the rest were looking upwards for bombs, I’d collapse them from inside.

I left the house after burning anything down the backyard that might give a clue to who I was inside. All I left was a list of all the people I hate and I hid that. They would all get theirs some day.

The freesias were nearly finished, so up the street I wrenched out some freesia bulbs from the fence edges where they grew wild, sneaked back home and planted them. Next year Bee would be reminded of me.

On my way out past the pub, I followed a man with a good suit and rolled him when he got to his car. I got eighty-five dollars out of his pocket and left him on the back seat of his own car. A man with an open-neck shirt and a bit of grime on it came out before I left and went over to an old truck. I got him and only took half what he had. When I turned to go, something made me stop and go back and put some of the other man’s money in the poor one’s pocket. I walked out to the edge of the car park, but I couldn’t make it. Something stronger took my legs back to the truck. I took the lot.

You won’t believe how much the same it seems to me and all the kids I know; getting a man’s job by competition—or knocking him over the head.

This was my beginning. I felt so good I didn’t mess their faces up, either of them, but round the corner I changed and wished I had, or at least put the boot in. I felt so rotten.

That night I slept in the mountains out past Kurrajong, where the switchback hills are, before Lithgow. Another coloured dream bored into my skull, this time I was in an old boat that was heavy in the water, I was so weak I couldn’t move, and the boat was on fire. Just like the Viking funeral I once acted out for the fenced workers. Only this time I was blinded by the western sun and couldn’t see if anyone was watching. Dying, I was, but weak, and no audience. There was no good feeling about it at all. I woke up almost in a sweat, except that I was cold. I always get cold in the mountains. The little dews on the grass had all the flashes of the ring I got for Bee, when you held it sideways to let the sun shine through.

I had a sort of vision that kept on in my skull. I got this picture in my mind of lots of little patches of Australia with no marks of human building on them, no tearing down, no ploughing—vacant patches, unused. Capable of being changed, worked, moulded. And tiny country towns. There must be hundreds of places just waiting for someone with a strong hand to take over. I would get a town for myself. Then when I had something behind me, another town. It can be done these days, people are weaker and more isolated from each other. They never get together now, their stupid competition for money and goodies takes up all their time, and separates them further from each other.

I spent all day there, getting some sun into me. The wind on my face there had crossed thousands of miles from the western ocean without being breathed by any other dirty human. There was no smoke from chimneys in it either. I was ready to go down out of the hills and onto the western plains to find a town to put in my pocket. I made a list of all the things I wanted and studied it for a few hours. I set off in the afternoon.

Looking at the hills in the late sunset, there was nothing as good as our world. Even if someone owns the hills—and that’s always a bad taste in your mouth—they’re still beautiful. Much the same way as Bee, the same quietness.

The Chantic Bird story isn’t quite the same as Stevo left it. I went to a library and found that after the Bird had cured the King with her song and bargained for a sort of freedom, she volunteered, off her own bat, to become a spy for him if he kept her return a secret. She was going to tell him everything that went on in the country. I guess that cured me of Chantic Birds. By the way, it should be Enchanted Bird; Chantic was Stevo’s own word.

I remembered a certain memorial on the road to Lithgow, that’s why I took this picture with me from home and enough glue to stick it on with. It was a memorial to war and it always stuck in my throat that it was war, or actually gas, that laid the foundation for my old man’s TB. Halfway down a hill into poor old Lithgow I stopped and glued my coloured picture of war. It was a man landing on Iwo Jima and one half of him was all right, but the other half had no uniform, no skin, no flesh, only shredded stuff. It was just before he fell on the sand. They don’t allow that sort of stuff to be printed now—they’re recruiting like mad—but just after the big war they let their heads go and showed all sorts of horrors.

I felt good, and sort of easy in my stomach after I glued it over their rising sun badge.

As I came down out of the mountains on to the plains, it was funny how many times I got this rushing feeling in my chest. I try sitting up very straight, but it does no good. I have to have the vent windows turned right in, now, I just can’t get enough air in my lungs.

As I finish this, I’ve stopped the car and got out, adding the last few lines to the story. Right now, nothing matters but living. I’ll just leave the story—my story—on the back seat, I can’t afford to let anyone read it yet. Slipping back over a few pages, what is it? A tale told by nobody. A mouth in the empty air. I wish this swirling pain in my chest would go away. When I take over my town I can’t afford to have anyone see me doubled up like this, sweating like a pig in the cold country air. Trying to get breath into me.

Don’t forget I’m writing to show you what a silly thing it is to live.

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