The Anatomy of Wings (28 page)

Nanna began by pulling a cutout piece of newspaper from beneath a hand-painted bone china poodle on the coffee table.

“Many things have been going very wrong for a while now,” said Nanna.

“We want to help you, darling,” Mum interrupted. “We only want to help you.”

“And we want,” said Nanna after the interruption, “no matter what has happened, to make everything right.”

“Oh yes,” said Mum. “We need to start all over again. A fresh start.”

“Where are the checks, Jean?” asked Nanna.

Mum took her purse off the coffee table. Nanna handed over the piece of newspaper. It was an advertisement for the School of Secretarial Studies in Townsville. Summer school commencing in November.
GET A HEAD START ON TYPING
,
DICTATION
,
SHORTHAND
,
STENOGRAPHY.
One hundred percent graduate employment guaranteed. Enrollment fee: one hundred
and seventy-five dollars plus textbook expenses. Accommodation available for out-of-town students.

Mum passed over two checks. One was for one hundred and seventy-five dollars written in her own delicate hand. The other was made out by Nanna for the amount of two hundred dollars.

“For your expenses,” said Mum. “What do you think?”

“Secretarial school?” said Beth.

“You will go out of this town for a while,” said Nanna. “It will be good for you. You will stay with Aunty Margaret by the sea. You will come back a new girl.”

“Secretarial school?” Beth said again, but quietly.

She started to laugh and then stopped.

“I don't know what to say,” she said.

“Just say you'll go,” said Mum.

Beth said she'd come home. Everyone was to begin again. Everything was to be forgotten.

“You must not say anything about anything,” Mum said to me, but I didn't know what she meant.

“Exactly that,” she said. “Don't ask so many questions. You've always got a hundred questions. We want to keep the peace, that's all.”

“You shouldn't say this to her,” said Nanna. “Her questions are what make her. Where would our Jennifer be without her questions?”

“Curiosity killed some cats,” said Mum, and then I had to feel very sad about all the cats that had been killed by falling into their own reflections in wells or by getting trapped in small holes or inside cupboards or by merely crossing the highway to explore among the anthills.

Beth was going to pick up some stuff from Michelle's flat. Then she'd come home in the morning. Mum agreed to anything. She agreed that Danielle could get her hair permed. Danielle couldn't believe her luck. She phoned to make her appointment and then jumped up and down on the spot. Her Milwaukee back brace rattled. That night she washed her hair and stood in front of the mirror for an hour brushing it goodbye.

Mum asked her if she was sure that was what she wanted. Danielle turned to her holding a long strand between her fingers.

“Of course it's what I want,” she said. “It's the only thing I've ever wanted.”

“You know your father loves your hair,” said Mum, “and your Nanna. And I love your hair just the way it is. You don't know how lucky you are to have all that beautiful hair.”

“I don't care,” said Danielle.

Danielle counted out the money that she had saved by being paid to wear her Milwaukee back brace. She flicked through the pages of her perm
scrapbook and found her exact perm and cut out the page carefully with a pair of scissors.

The girl in the photograph was leaning against a fence in a country field on an overcast day. She was dressed in a white handkerchief-hemmed skirt and cheesecloth peasant shirt. She had her head tilted slightly backward and her eyes closed as though she had just taken a deep breath of country air. Her luxuriant brown curls cascaded down her back. Danielle folded the picture and put it in her schoolbag for the morning.

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

“What if it doesn't turn out the same way?”

“It will,” she said.

“What if it looks stupid and it is stuck that way?”

“It won't.”

“Please don't do it,” I said.

“Why?” she said, interested. She was always looking for new ways to torture me.

“It will change everything.”

“Everything is already changed,” she said.

That night it was very hot. I turned this way and that in my bed. Mum took down the curtains in Beth's room and washed them. The washing machine groaned in the dark. Danielle told me to stop moving. We heard Mum put clean sheets on Beth's bed and smooth out the ballerina bedspread. She couldn't sit still.

I knew she was never going to stay. I didn't know it in words. With all my might I summoned up images of Beth at a typewriter and there she sat in a gray office in a bleak building. I watched her glide through ill-lit corridors carrying manila folders. I saw her take dictation dutifully. She was very still, all of her, except for her hand, which raced across the page, spewing a trail of mysterious symbols. I willed these images into existence with all my might. But I had a feeling. It was a very bad feeling. It felt like the closing of a book. The ending of things.

After I made Angela skip school and then go to the caravan park she said she was never going to lie again. That's it, she said once the Talent Quest was finished. It was too late for things.

“Come with me,” I said about the address.

It was the last thing in
The Book of Clues.

“No,” she said. “You know I can't. I'm not doing that stuff anymore.”

She handed me the book in her bedroom. I knew I had to go there by myself.

The address was written in Beth's hand. It was in Memorial North, a very long dismal road filled with smudged houses and flats with no grass and Hills hoists sagging with miners’ clothes. The sulfur fumes hung above the street, a flat brown cloud; I breathed shallowly and covered my mouth.

I put down my bike on the dirt of number 17 Normandy Street and walked up the driveway to flat number 3. I knocked on the door. I didn't know what I would find. The tall man who answered the door had long bangs that hung over one eye. I'd woken him up from sleep. He looked at me for a while and then his mouth opened.

Beth was a swan and I am only a sparrow but we have the same mole on our cheek and some of her face is in mine.

“Did you know Beth Day?” I asked.

“No,” he said.

“Did you see her on the night she fell?” I asked.

I was surprised at how brave I sounded.

“No,” he said.

He looked full of regret.

He shut the door. I heard him moving around inside. The television went on. A car chase. The thud of guns.

At the end of the street there was a girl sitting on the footpath with her feet in the gutter. At first I thought it was Angela but then I saw that she was bigger, older. She had short hair. Getting closer I recognized the stripe of black roots down the middle.

“Hey,” Deidre said.

I stopped my bike on the pavement with my foot.

“I seen you going in there and wanted to make sure you were all right and everything.”

“I'm all right,” I said.

“You're only little,” she said. “You should go home.”

Later, much later, she would tell me many things.

“I'm going,” I said.

Deidre stood up and dusted her bum. She smiled a half smile, looking down at the road.

“You ever got any trouble you should come and see me, hey?” she said.

“All right,” I said.

On the way home I rode through the hot close November air. I rode through the dog-eared streets, past the sun-faded houses, past all the families I didn't know, shut up inside with their air conditioners droning.

The highway was empty. I rode with my eyes shut. I let myself drift into the middle of the road. I could feel the desert angels everywhere. They were turning and somersaulting and soaring on open wings. The air was alive with their feathers and their breath.

A
STORM CAME ON THE LAST DAY AND MY ICARUS WINGS FLEW.
It came out of the west, tentatively, like a lady gathering up her skirts before stepping inside a doorway. A storm lady with her bunched-up cloud skirts revealing a deep blue petticoat of rain. The storm lady did not move but stood behind the mine, as though wondering whether to approach.

We slipped with sweat on our little laminate chairs and watched her through the louvers. Down below, shiny fat bullfrogs in the water troughs called out with joy and in the cassias beside the bike racks choirs of cicadas sang madly. In the scrub beyond the oval a lone storm bird cried its warnings.

Sweat stains expanded beneath Mrs. Bridges-Lamb's arms on her white frill-collared blouse. Her red and white zigzag-patterned skirt stuck to her bottom when she stood up. Massimo Gentili, who was
slowly clicking down all the colors on his highly prized multicolored pen, sniggered when he saw it.

Mrs. Bridges-Lamb looked at us carefully, then she removed her glasses and listened to us. No one moved. Massimo's finger was poised above red on his multicolored pen like a kangaroo frozen in headlights. The ceiling fan, wobbling on its base, sliced through the warm, sticky silence.

The storm lady took the opportunity to step out from behind the mine and breathed the first cool breeze in through the louvers. Her breath smelled like rain clouds. Into the room she sighed the scent of raindrops hitting dry earth. The cicadas stopped singing and shivered in their shells. Every flower, every branch, every leaf, every twig opened up its heart and waited. The classroom filled with this scent of the dry earth waiting. A lost hornet hummed in through the window and hovered and then, as though realizing it was in the wrong place, left again.

Mrs. Bridges-Lamb returned her glasses to her nose. Sweat ran in rivulets from her hairline, converging into streams where her jaw met her ears, cascading down into the crinkles of her neck. The sweat washed away the topsoil of face powder, kept in a tortoiseshell compact on her desk and applied throughout the day. She looked at everyone except Massimo, who was the person she spoke to.

“Massimo,” said Mrs. Bridges-Lamb, eyes settling on Tanya Moorhouse. “Do we use pen in year five?”

Massimo jumped in his seat and clicked on red involuntarily. He dropped the pen to his desk and a pained smile stretched on his face and then dissolved. He did not answer.

“Jane-Anne,” she said while looking at Trevor Burton. “Do we use pen in year five?”

“No, Mrs. Bridges-Lamb,” said Jane-Anne Fryar.

“Now,” she said. “Whilst Massimo brings me the pen you will all open up your tidy boxes and retrieve your atlases and then wait with your arms crossed.”

The opening of the tidy boxes was accompanied by the first rumble of thunder. Everyone turned their heads to the windows. Into the room came the breath of the storm again. It shimmied around the room, playing games. It touched us. Placed cool fingers on our wet necks, lifted ponytails, sent a piece of paper on Mrs. Bridges-Lamb's desk pirouetting up into the air. It raced up to Mrs. Bridges-Lamb and kissed her on the forehead just as Massimo handed over the pen. For the briefest moment she closed her eyes. She took the multicolored pen and placed it on her desk where we could all see it. That was all. She did nothing more. Clouds moved over the sun.

We had turned to our maps of Italy when the first rain fell. The sky let go of its rain suddenly in a great
burst of water. We could hear nothing but the sound of it on the roof. Mrs. Bridges-Lamb's mouth moved but her voice was drowned. And then, just as suddenly, it stopped. An orchestra conductor had waved his baton at the timpanists. The roof made shocked clink-clanks and tsk-tsk sounds as it contracted. The storm bird, momentarily silenced by the downpour, started up its warning call again.

Before Mrs. Bridges-Lamb could prize back our attention from the sudden rain, a second wave came. This time it was carried on the back of a wild and unruly wind. This wind bent the cassias over and knocked down bikes in the bike racks. It rattled the louver glass. It whipped the flag around the flagpole. All along the back wall our Icarus wings whispered and rustled and struggled against the one tack that held each pair down. The wings wanted to fly.

“Front row, stand and come and sit on the floor at the front of the room,” Mrs. Bridges-Lamb shouted over the wind and blasts of rain. “Quick, quick.”

The second row and then the third and fourth were marshaled down to the wooden floor in front of Mrs. Bridges-Lamb. She sat on her high-back wooden chair and we huddled, legs crossed, in front of her. The rain and wind were deafening. We were cocooned by the noise. The wind pushed against the louvers. It swallowed up Mrs. Bridges-Lamb's words.

She motioned for us to squeeze closer together. Downstairs, unseen things were banging and crashing and rolling on the concrete. Above us the wind was playing the roof like a wobble board.

An explosion of thunder erupted so close it lifted our bottoms off the floor. The blackboard duster fell into the bin beside the board. A row of books toppled over dead on Mrs. Bridges-Lamb's desk. The doorknob rattled. Angela put her hand on my arm but when I looked at her I found she wasn't that scared at all. She only had the look of someone riding the Cha-Cha at sideshow alley.