The Chantic Bird (11 page)

It’s no use trying to team up with other blokes. It never works, not even with a few beers aboard. I cast off and headed back to this jetty I know, and since it was a nice night, I had a lay down on the planks. I thought it wasn’t as much fun knocking statues about if you couldn’t do it all yourself.

It’s not that I’m afraid of other kids. I’m not afraid of
anything
I can yell at. What gets me is inside. I’m being sniped at from inside and all the bullets are hits. Whoever is inside me, sniping, has no misses.

The sound hit my ear first. I put my head right down to the old adzed plank and what I heard got me over the side into the boat and cast off in about two shakes of a bird’s tail. The prawners were out. There were so many tins rattling and things, they didn’t hear me, but pretty soon they would see me.

They didn’t, though. I kept away from them on the dark side of the river, there were only two of them, and later when I drifted the boat round back to the jetty, I got a few handfuls of prawns and one of their empty tins and anchored the boat later across from Lane Cove and went to sleep with tomorrow’s lunch beside me.

I cooked them ashore next morning in the tin with some sea water, I had no other salt, cooked them till they just turned pink. Delicious. The blackberries were out, so I ate till I rumbled. They left my mouth mainly sweet, but there was a sharp sourness down my throat. It must have been someone’s land, because this man came up through the bush, you could hear him half a mile away, but I didn’t go like he said. How can a man own dirt and rocks and she-oaks and mangroves? If you had to move every time someone said you were standing on their property, you’d have to suspend yourself a foot above the ground, even then you’d be violating their airspace. You can’t all live together on the skin of the world if you have to keep off every place owned by someone. Who hands out the right to own bits of the planet?

He wasn’t big enough to get too close to me, but I didn’t want to scare him enough for him to get help—I wasn’t finished eating—so I started chatting about early history. I’m not completely ignorant. There was a place called the Butcher’s Block near there in Tambourine Bay; someone gave it to someone in the early days with an axe or a chopper or something. You’ll find it in any history around the times of Mary Reibey. This man didn’t seem to know too much about it. He wasn’t interested in history, only title-deeds.

Finally he sat down and sulked, waiting for me to go. I told him I wouldn’t hurt him, but when I went over to talk to him man to man, he scooted back into the brush. As if he had protection there. So then I pretended I was a bit of a woolly-woof. I invited him out in the boat with me, I even started lowering the old strides. Ready to flash it. That got rid of him. You’ll know better than I do how eager everyone is to deny he shares any of the naughty ideas that homosexuals get lumbered for, but did you ever spend a couple of minutes watching these same blokes, miserable at home with Mumma, but faces shining like new pennies with their mates, punching each other lightly when they look as if they’d rather be holding hands, yelling belligerently at their mate when what they’d like to do is coo and kiss.

It’s everywhere, I tell you. I see it all around me. But as far as thinking about what you might do, anything is possible. Anything at all. You can’t trust yourself not to do a certain thing. You don’t know what you’ll do.

I got away from there and round to Fuller’s Bridge and went for a bit of a run through the bush and that made me feel better. What cheered me up, too, was having to hurdle a blanket. This little dip in the track, a tiny valley, and at the bottom of it a man and a woman in a blanket. When I say in, they were really wrapped. I reckon they were taking a day off work, there was a little tinny English car on the main track two hundred yards away, I thought of taking it, but I was so pleased to see two natural people together that I let them have their car. They’d be tired, later, what with all their hugging and things.

I enjoy jogging through the bush. Did I tell you? One of my favourite things is to walk or jog on a bush track or even across country and let my head go on thinking. Now and then you stop and if it’s summer you chew a sarsaparilla leaf or grab a handful of wild currants—they’re very sour and they bring all the juices up from the lower side of your tongue and make it tickle. Or the nutty parts of those woody things that look like fat mountain devils; you have to split them on a rock and you eat the black kernel with the white inside.

I remembered Stevo saying, ‘Would you buy me a Captain John hat and clothes so I can be happy?’ A lot of the things I think of come from the house and Bee and the kids. We used to live at Lane Cove once, I remember trying to make boomerangs out of the mangroves across the river from Ludowici’s.

Back to the boat in a big circle, no one had touched it, and when I picked up the frayed rope I tied up with, I thought of Stevo asking could he help me paint the roof. You tied a rope to a verandah post, threw it over the iron roof and pulled yourself up the other side. He wanted to help on the roof.

‘I will do it, for I can do a really good, hard, splendid job,’ he testified. I had to tell him the iron was too hot, and just to make him feel he was still a man, I gave him the girl guide’s knife I found at school once and the pair of black hockey pads. Actually, I found them a little before they were lost.

And when I came down for lunch that day—I don’t know how Bee got me painting that roof—she had ready a pastry thing with fluffy white lolly on top called meringue. Stevo asked, ‘Can I have some of that? And if I like it, I’ll beg you for some.’

Bee used to say he was a dear little kid and that always used to make me feel peculiar, but I used to make myself remember he was my brother and only little, and the peculiar feeling went away.

We got the works that day. Stevo not only got some of that lolly stuff, he got jelly. Boy, could he put jelly away.

‘Jelly gives me strength,’ he used to reckon. ‘Come on, let’s fight before I lose my jelly!’ And he’d punch and swing like mad, head down, a roundhouse swinger.

When I was a kid a retired minister took us away for a holiday to Wamberal. We’d never had a holiday before, and there was a kid there about my age now, and I used to get him to fight with me, just like Stevo did with me. I wish I’d had an older brother to fight with and play ping-pong with.

There was a little kid that was going to get what he wanted, that Stevo. Listen to what he said once to get himself another drink of milk. He went up to Bee, not too close, and started to lecture her.

‘Are you thinking of God, or silly things?’ He’d just been to Sunday school. ‘God is the law around here, around the world. Even the Indians and medicine men and natives pray to God. And God said I can have some milk!’ That slayed her. He got the milk. If she hadn’t given it to him, I would have.

I carved a small stone face of a boxer I knew for Stevo, then next we found that he and the kids had made it Jesus. That’s when we sent them to Sunday school; after that they stopped the Jesus bit and called it General Thunderbolt, their leader; reporting, saluting. Even the kids had to have leaders.

Some houses were opposite then and putting my hands up to my eyes with a little hole through each one I pretended to myself I had binoculars up, searching the bedroom and bathroom windows for naked girls and wives like I used to do when I was a kid peering in at Phyllis Jensen in her bath, singing like mad. She was, not me. I had a lay down in the boat, listening to the water flapping the side, pretending to myself it was the small, dry rustle of the half-dead grass under the girls’ dressing sheds where I used to look up through the cracks. I won’t tell you where, or you might go there and get caught. Boy, was I full of lewd imaginings that day.

I got those funny words when I read a paper one day about a court case. I don’t often read papers, I think they take the edge off anyone wanting to do anything. And they never show anyone living a happy life. They never give someone’s name, someone like me, and say how colossal he enjoys life and what a good time he has doing just what he wants. No sir, not one stinking word of all the happy clowns like me.

My boat nearly hit a launch about then. There was no bump, I saw it in time and did what had to be done, but the people in the launch bawled out as if you’d taken their lollies. They had a radio going full blast, which was bad taste, I thought. As if the nice noise of the water wasn’t enough. That took me back to when Bee said she sometimes couldn’t sleep for the noise. The old man next door was deaf and couldn’t afford a hearing thing in his ear, but they were lucky I pointed it out to them before it annoyed me, too. They might have been sore and sorry and a lot worse off.

Bee’s funny. She’s got her own way of thanking you. After I did that, she didn’t say anything, although blind Freddy could see I did it for her, and she stopped telling me if things got on her works. Sometimes I tried to think up things that might be worrying her, but I don’t have much luck at things like that. It is hard to do other people’s worrying for them. When Bee didn’t look too severe, Stevo would test her and grab something she would use next and start to take it away.

‘Don’t do that,’ she’d say. ‘I want it.’

‘You cry about it. Go on,’ he’d command.

I put in to a nice sandy cove, mostly because I wanted to relieve myself. The noise of the boat beaching, however, sent a party of lovers in all directions. That was a fine time to come across four pairs of kids taking a day off work, but just to put them at their ease I went then and there on the sand instead of searching round in the trees and rocks. I could feel them watching me from the bushes and behind rocks. They still didn’t show themselves; they must have been very shy kids, so all I could do was go. There was no sense in destroying their day, they probably worked in Sydney and needed a day off now and then apart from their weekends, which were likely strenuous enough.

There was not even a titter from them and no attempt to attack me, so I didn’t muck up their clothes or take their transistors, but they could at least have given me a look at them. All I saw moving behind a thin red gum was a bottom, and it turned out to be a boy’s. The age of that bottom was around sixteen, so they were all probably past the beginner stage. I didn’t bother to think about what their parents would say if they knew where they were instead of being off at the pictures in town, like they probably said, but now that I remember it there is a funny side to it.

I put out again, a bit disgusted. If they were that shy, why make a party of it? I stopped thinking of them a few yards off shore and when I looked back without actually thinking of it, there they were at it again. Don’t expect me to tell you where, but if you like to take a boat up the Parramatta, exploring the whole line of shore, you’ll be very surprised at the nooks you find.

My head went back to the house where Bee was making a fuss at Stevo. You can bet he deserved it, though; she didn’t pick on them for next to nothing, like most women.

‘Do you love me, Mummy?’ he enquired, when she stopped for breath. ‘Or are you still upcited?’ By that time I was thinking I was missing them, so I ditched the boat near a road not far from Halvorsen’s sheds and got a train back home. You don’t need a ticket on these trains, all you do is jump off the back carriage, cross the lines out of sight, and up the embankment. They don’t bother to chase you when they see you’re young and can probably run. When I bowled in, there was Stevo just as I’d last seen him in my head.

‘Want a look at my composition, Dad?’ he questioned.

‘Sure, kid.’ I’d forgotten what compositions looked like almost. He dragged out a ten by twelve sheet of paper and shoved it at me. The letters were about an inch high, he wasn’t a very good writer. But then again, I wasn’t, and it never worried me.

This is my pet.

My pet is a orange bird.

It can fly, and fly high.

I feed my pet and I like

To play with him.

There was a picture of the orange bird at the bottom. Orange was his favourite colour. Mine is yellow.

‘More story, Dad?’ he requested, and I said yes without bothering to think, so he gave it to me from the start. I was looking for a sight of Bee and something to keep me there, but she must have decided I’d have to be interested just for the story’s sake, because she didn’t appear.

Stevo started out with the tinkling china palace, the miles of garden, the wise men and their books about the Chantic Bird and how the King wanted the Bird and the kitchen maid took them to the little grey bird by the sea. When they brought her back to the King, everyone sat round to listen to the song. She sang so sweetly that the King cried real tears, and everyone was touched by the song but watched the King to see what he would do. ‘It is like glass bells ringing,’ said the King, and the Bird sang more.

When he got up to reward the Bird, they did too. But the King really appreciated the beauty of the song; however, he knew nothing of the beauty of freedom, especially the freedom of a bird to sing in its natural home of green trees by the water. He gave the Bird a special cage and allowed it out twice a day, but a dozen hangers-on were there to see she did not fly away home. There was even a rope—a silken rope, but still a rope—tied to each leg when she flew out twice a day for exercise.

I’d heard enough story, so I gave Stevo a bag of lollies I’d bought, and off. Why couldn’t Bee have come around with just a bit of skin showing—a hand, her neck, anything? Just to keep me interested. I couldn’t help thinking of all the bodies on the ground at Berowra and Hornsby and Parramatta park, all over the place, anywhere there was a patch of dark ground, so thick on the ground you couldn’t step between them, and here was me had to knock a sheila down before I did any good, and had to wait around like a spider to catch a sight of Bee, the girl I’d known since I was a kid. The upshot was, I got miserable.

When did I start? Did they do it hating each other? Did that kid that used to pee off the back verandah or through a hole in the verandah floor, did that kid have to grow up to be me? The one that photographed his mates peeing into a peaches tin at National Park and told the chemist he’d better develop the film or else he’d have no windows.