The Anatomy of Wings (17 page)

“No it wouldn't. It would survive.”

We were fighting so much we nearly missed Deidre Schelbach walking along the footpath in her dirty white checkout lady dress and red parka. When we saw her we put our heads down and pretended to be in a very interesting conversation.

“Rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb,” said Angela. “Is that her?”

“Rhubarb, yes, rhubarb,” I said.

She went through the automatic doors without looking at us.

Inside we took up our positions one bench down from the cigarette counter, where Deidre was putting her bag away and opening up the register. An old man with a false leg sat beside us. I knew it was a false leg because the man said he was going to win the Saturday Morning Great Grocery Giveaway, touch wood, and he lifted up his trouser and knocked on his wooden leg with his knuckles. When we looked surprised he laughed very loudly and his belly moved up and down.

Angela smiled at him politely.

“Do you think Deidre looks any different?” she asked.

“A little bit,” I said.

Deidre was serving someone. She smiled at her first customer.

“How?”

“A little bit … lighter,” I said, but I wasn't sure. “Not so … angry,” said Angela, and she opened up her bag and took out
The Book of Clues.

She chewed on the end of her pencil. She wrote

at the top of a blank page and underlined it.

“Don't do that here,” I said.

“Why not?”

“She'll see us.”

“No she won't.”

I grabbed one end of the book and tried to take it off Angela. Angela pulled the other end. We pulled backward and forward. The man with the false leg thought it was funny.

“You're crazy,” I said. “We'll get caught.”

“Doing what?” asked Deidre, who had left the cigarette counter and come to stand in front of us.

Angela let go of the exercise book so that I held it in my lap. It was still opened on the page titled with Deidre's name. I closed it up. I saw Deidre looking at the writing on the cover. The picture of the girl with flowing blond hair and the toothpick eyelashes.

“What are you two up to?”

Even though she was lighter and less angry she still had a tough face. Her words were still accompanied by a bad smell.

“Hey?” she asked.

“Nothing,” I said.

I turned the book over on my lap to hide the writing.

“Why's my name in there?”

“We're looking for clues,” said Angela, suddenly fearless.

“Clues about what?” said Deidre. She put her hands on her hips.

“About everything,” I said.

Deidre chewed on her bottom lip. She looked at me for a while. The man with the wooden leg shifted in his seat and pretended not to be listening.

“You look a bit like her, hey?” she said.

“We have the same mole.”

I pointed to the mole on my cheek.

“But different as well,” she said.

“Is there anything you can tell us?” said Angela.

“No,” said Deidre.

“Nothing at all?” asked Angela.

Deidre laughed but then looked at the ground.

“You kids have got to stop it,” she said. “Some shit you just shouldn't muck around with, you get it?”

“Like what shit?” I said.

“Like nothing,” said Deidre. “Go on. Get out of here.”

She waved us away with her hand.

“Go on,” she said. “You've got to leave it alone.”

Beth divided her time between saving Marco and the hill in Memorial Park. When she didn't come home after school like she promised, Mum sent us to find her. We walked up and down streets. We walked past the house on Amiens Road but Beth's bike wasn't there. We walked to the water tower. We walked to the caravan park.

The caravan park was like a little town. A wide main street ran down its center and the straight caravan rows ran off from either side. There were white street signs showing the row numbers. Miranda lived in row 9, the very last row, and the caravan was up against the tall chain-wire fence and the row of mango trees, which dropped their fruit in summer to rot on the ground.

We walked down the quiet main street. A group of men with long beards gazed into the open hood of a car. A stooped woman hosed out the moss-covered shower block with bleach. A crow sat on a bin overflowing with beer cans. An old black dog on a long chain watched us pass.

I secretly hoped Miranda's stepmum wouldn't be at home because sometimes she got angry. When she got angry Mrs. Bell bared her yellow teeth and her eyes turned crazy. I'd seen it before in town right outside the Blue Tongue Lounge Bar when she was fighting with another lady on the footpath. They had been fighting each other in the middle of the day but both
looked like they were very tired. They had slapped at each other with weak arms, missing each other occasionally. Finally Mrs. Bell had hit the ground and lay there with her yellow teeth showing like a snarling dog that had been kicked. I was watching from the car window until my mother told me to cover my eyes and, as we drove away, to not look back.

Mrs. Bell's boyfriend, Kevin, came to the screen door. He wore a pair of jeans but no shirt. His chest was covered in thick black hair. On his shoulder he had a tattoo of a roaring tiger but his own smile was full of large white teeth like the Cheshire cat's. He was combing back his wet hair.

“They might be here or they might not,” he said, grinning, like it was a very hilarious joke. “But wherever they are they'll be up to no good.”

He winked at us.

I tried to see past him into the caravan but I couldn't.

“Come in and have a look if you like,” he said.

“Why can't you just tell us?” said Danielle, who was (a) angry at being made to walk for kilometers looking for Beth, who she considered a troublemaker, and (b) already very annoyed at having to wear a Milwaukee back brace.

“Where would be the fun in that?” asked Kevin, and he scratched his balls.

“Pervert,” said Danielle, and pulled me with her by the arm.

Mum rang Aunty Cheryl and enlisted Kylie in the search. She said Kylie was supposed to be looking out for Beth. She tried to turn it all around as if it was Kylie's fault. She yelled and shouted and threw things in the kitchen.

“I give up,” she said.

Nanna came and told her it was because there was no religion in our house. She said Mum only had herself to blame. When she came she brought a bag of rags. Mum and Nanna used the rags for cleaning. Mum opened up the bag and took out a rag and I saw it was a section of an old pair of yellow shorts that had belonged to me. She started cleaning the wall telephone with it.

“I just don't know what to do,” she said as she cleaned. “She won't listen to a thing I say. She is like another girl. I don't even know who she is anymore.”

“She has never been the same girl since the lake,” said Nanna cautiously.

“Are you still going on about that?” said Mum. “It's that Bell girl that's caused all the trouble.”

“You must separate them then,” said Nanna, “and you must lock her up.”

“Don't be silly,” said Mum. “What do you mean?”

“I mean put her in the room and turn the key.

That will learn her the lesson. Keep her here for one day. Remember I did it once with Louise.”

While they planned to lock her up, Beth was in Marco's new car, an old sun-faded Holden with a dark interior and the upholstery spewing stuffing and springs. He was giving her shadow-filled kisses and pressing apart her thighs with his hips. They were at a place in the desert where men took their women. A water hole that people said was bottomless. A place where the sunlight leaped and danced on the rock walls.

“Do you sometimes feel sad?” she said, touching the pure white skin of his cheek.

“No,” he said. He climbed off her, back against the door. He spat out the window. “What's that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing,” she said. “Just sometimes you look sad. Inside.”

He lit a cigarette and after a drag passed it to her.

“What're you going on about? Are you stoned or something?”

“I don't know. Don't worry.”

He grabbed her by the legs and pulled her toward him.

“Why'd I be sad?” he said, tickling her until he made her laugh. “Hey?”

“Sorry,” she said. “I don't even know why I said it.”

Marco dropped her off on Memorial Drive so Mum wouldn't see him. I'd been riding up and down streets looking for her but she ignored me. She opened her bag and took out chewing gum while she watched Marco go. Marshall Murray shook his head from the patio.

“Tell me what you know,” he called out to Beth.

“Nothing,” she replied.

It was late. Mum had already exhausted herself. When Beth opened the door she just shook her head. From our bedroom door I saw her follow Beth down the hallway and I could tell she was thinking about locking her up. When Beth went into her bedroom Mum's hand hovered near the handle but she didn't do it.

“I'm grown up, Mum,” said Beth.

“You're not,” said Mum.

“Please. Why can't you understand?”

After she started drinking on the hill she was sadder. The sadness expanded inside her. She couldn't sit still for it. She lay on the sofa and got up again. She went to a window. She lay on her bed. She started a biscuit, she threw it away. She rested her head against the bathroom mirror. I saw it. The way she held her hand over her heart when she thought no one was watching. The very faint glimmer of tears in her eyes. I saw it when she chewed her nails until they bled.

“What are you staring at?” she said to me.

She sounded angry, like Miranda or a Shelley girl.

She saved a moth with the map of the world on its back. Its wings contained an inland green sea fringed in arid continents. She held it on her fingertip for a long time.

“It'll just fly into some other web,” I said.

“Maybe it won't,” she said.

“Moths only live a very short time,” I said.

“You're such an annoying little shit,” she said.

I hated her and loved her that final winter.

She saw sadness in Nanna's open-palmed Madonnas suffocating inside the glass cabinets. I saw her try to turn her face away from painful things: struggling insects; a three-legged dog; Kylie, clumsy, dropping her bag, calling out to her across the oval; a simple boy pushing supermarket trolleys; two women staggering across the highway with a carton of beer, tiny specks. On those days she felt everything suffering.

That winter the nothingness of still days slipped into her, drop by drop. Days when everything was so bright and each and every thing had a shining clear edge: the telephone lines draped across wide empty streets, the frayed edge of a white cloud, the hawks above her with trembling wings, tumbling and free-falling through the sky.

Sometimes on those days the whole world
hummed. She laid her head against it. She heard it whispering like the sea inside a shell. She heard the mine quivering and shuddering and groaning.

“What's wrong, chook?” said Dad.

He had come home from the pub and found Beth curled up on his side of the bed. He slipped his flip-flops off and lay down on Mum's side. He turned on the transistor radio.

“Hey?” he said. He patted her on the back.

“I'm going mad,” she said.

“No,” said Dad.

“Yes,” she whispered, facing the wall.

“How mad?” said Dad. “Stark raving?”

“Yes.”

“That's my girl,” he said. “Come here.”

She rolled over and put her head on his chest.

“As long as you're not barking mad,” he said, and she closed her eyes and half smiled against his heartbeat.

She only had six months to live.

I
N
THE BOOK OF CLUES
Angela wrote under the title “Deardry”:

She crossed out the clue of the tough girl's black rubber-band bracelet. She sang “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” incessantly, in her weak quavering voice. “Don't,” I said. “It hurts my eardrums.” “But I'm training you to sing again.” There was a terrible rumor that Anthea Long was going to borrow Tammy Hoffman's Austrian national costume for the Talent Quest and sing something from
The Sound of Music.
It would be just the kind of thing she would do.

Mr. Barnes asked me if I was going to sing because he said he'd heard I was very good. I thought, at first, that he was making fun of me. I thought it
was a mean thing to make fun about but then I realized he didn't know that I couldn't sing anymore.

“Probably not,” I said.

I kind of felt sorry for him because nobody was frightened of him, not the way we were frightened of Mrs. Bridges-Lamb. He wore very tight pinstriped bell-bottoms even though it was 1983. When he bent over to write on the bottom of the board the beginning of his hairy bum crack showed and everyone giggled. I called him Bum Cracker Barnsey at little lunch and that made everyone laugh.

After school in the afternoons Aunty Cheryl came to our house with Kylie and tried to train Mum how to be a mother again. She made Mum get out of her Japanese happy coat. She made her brush her hair. She made her get out the recipe book and pick something to make for dinner.