The Chantic Bird (15 page)

I shouldn’t pretend they’re worse than I am, though. I remember how I used to get into the cricket team when I was at school; I might have got five for none and all that when I did get in, but I never missed picking the longest straw, and if it was a case of picking out the bit of paper with your name on it, all you had to have was a memory for the size of the paper.

Remembering that, I felt pretty young, I can tell you. Most of the time I forget those sort of things, they’re not really very bad. As a matter of fact, they’re not bad enough, and that is why they embarrass me. Old time seems to fly away very fast at times, and every time he flaps his wings he smacks you in the mouth.

Stevo said once, ‘Did you dress Daddy when he was a little boy?’ to Bee. That made me feel about as young. But when Bee answered, I was in another world. She only said a few ordinary words. ‘No, darling boy,’ she said. ‘He had his own Mummy to do that for him.’ The words, though, sort of dropped very light from her lips, but didn’t fall just anywhere like other people’s words. Hers floated. They floated right into you, you could almost hear the tiny vibrations in your bones and veins.

I thought mostly about Bee for the next few days and I reckon I forgot to go out to raid the supermarket at Penno. I used to take advantage of the cheating the food people used to do. You know the packets of breakfast foods or any other packets, they are never filled up. If you slit a cornflakes packet in a special way and press down the flakes to about an inch off the bottom of the packet, you can stuff it with all sorts of other things, as long as you insulate the tins with something that will deaden the noise. And for the price of cornflakes you can have dollars’ worth of food. But if you try it, don’t let the girl on the desk pick it up. They’re supposed to, I know, but if you only get a few things they can add up easy without picking them up, and they like you to wrap them yourselves if they can get you to. I was always obliging like that.

Anyway, I got no food. I was thinking. Next thing it was Saturday and the films were on, and the usual mucking up. I’ll tell you what, I was so quiet inside from thinking of Bee that I got a hankering to get into the movies to join in with the other kids rolling bottles down the aisles or even, if the kids in front were cheeky, even getting rid of empties by hurling them. That was a pretty cruel game, I know, someone was always getting hurt. You had to keep your eyes open to make sure it wasn’t you.

Like Stevo said, ‘Every time you want to do something, you do it.’ He knew. I paid and went in and next thing I felt a hand on my shoulder. I was in a seat, so it wasn’t a queer. What it was, a kid wanted to rest his catapult on my shoulder while he took aim at someone up front. I was glad I came. It was nice to be able to get back into the ways I liked. I used to do that myself when I was a kid.

Where we had it over the old people, we never used to worry about dignity. I’ve thought a lot about it, because on the face of it, they ought to be able to beat us. But to get at us, they have to drop this business of walking tall and upstanding, walking and speaking nicely and slowly, and everything that adds up to the word dignity. They have to come down to our level to do any good. They have to be able to nick over a fence or down a pipe, up a tree or through a house and out the back. You can’t wear good suits or smoke pipes and do those things, so we had them beat. But the funny thing was, instead of them copying us and being able to do the things we did, they kept as they were and wondered why we didn’t copy them! Hell, who wants to look like an old man, all square and thick and closed up like a public building?

And the ones that tried to be like us and made a mess of it were the worst. As soon as we got out a new way of talking, to get away from their ways, they started to pound our words to death. Until we stopped using them. Then they were left dribbling the old-words and wondering what to say next, while we imported a new style.

My mind. At the back of my mind I have a feeling that there is something I’m going to do. Why do I say the back of my mind? All I know is I can’t quite get at this thought, it doesn’t seem to want me to grab it. Is it that I am going to kill someone? Is it something I have to do? Or want to do?

I woke up from thinking to hear the sound of a man’s hand on a shirt. Rub your shirt with your hand and you’ll see what I mean. There were people coming in for a meeting, and shortly I found myself again looking up holy legs from under the platform. The women had no lipstick on and I thought straight away of Plymouth Rocks and the old man giving up the insurance and going broke and trying the rest of his life to give up smoking because it was sinful, but drinking wasn’t and he didn’t like the taste of beer anyway and couldn’t afford anything dearer. When I was a kid I used to practise holding my breath in their meetings, they had a beaut electric clock on the wall at Beecroft, and I got up to two minutes. I was about twelve then, only a kid. The idea was you had to hold it as long as you could, but you couldn’t let it out noisily, everything had to be quiet. No matter what you let go there, you had to be quiet. They didn’t even like you turning the pages of your hymn book and making a noise.

We often had Sunday dinner with the biscuit kings or the meat kings, and boy, did we eat, my brother and me.

They certainly gave us a lesson in comfort. I often thought, as we tucked into the roast pork or the mountains of delicious fresh cream, how funny it was that most other religions sort of praised poverty and plain living while this mob had never heard of it. When we got home from their two-storey houses on Sunday night we always found that our own little fibro wreck of a house had shrunk to the size of a kid’s play-shack, the sort you see balanced crazily in the fork of a tree.

I got out into the fresh air again and straightened up and walked and walked, and the first thing that hit me was a terrific big white wave. Of cheerfulness. I was swamped in a heap of bright feelings, tossing over and over, I felt I was being dumped in the surf, and the joy of the world was getting up my nose and suffocating me. I must have rolled a bit as I walked, because some people tch-tched as I staggered by, drowning. I not only must have rolled, I must have looked very harmless at that time, because people don’t usually make any remarks when I pass. When I got my breath after a struggle, my chest took great swells of air and I felt my eyes bright and hardening and almost pushing out of my head, I felt so well.

It faded quickly, and all I was left with was sore eyes. My eyes always get gritty and sore and need lubrication, when I have an emotional attack like that. Or even when I drink too much and talk and shout at the same time. It was bad luck for me, though, that I’d been so high a few minutes before, because after that I sank down very bad. I remember thinking to myself, perhaps this isn’t life at all, yet. Maybe it’s a sort of pre-life, a foyer, a vestibule, an ante-chamber of life and I’m due to get to live sometime later. But life isn’t around you, on this planet. Practically everything around you is dead; you have to move things yourself and be the only life there is. Life is buried in us and you sometimes have to dig it out.

I felt so crook about this, that a few tears came into my eyes at the misery of it. It was just as well, too. The salt water made my eyes feel fine and pretty soon I cheered up, knowing that I could still rise above these silly feelings, I could still tread on them when I wanted to.

I switched my head over from thinking of myself to thinking of Stevo; that always made me forget everything.

When I had them out for another day not long ago, he suddenly cried out in the car, bouncing up and down in his seat, ‘The bindies are hot with joy!’ That’s exactly what he said. I put it down in pencil on the paint of the dashboard of the car I’d borrowed. I didn’t even know what it meant.

‘Did you get a load of that?’ I yelled to Bee, in the back seat.

‘What do you mean, boy?’ she asked him.

‘They make you go Yow!’ he bubbled. That was all he would say. You couldn’t help being proud of a kid who could say things like that. And later, when I overtook a trailer with a light load trying to keep me behind him, he said, ‘Some drivers look away or look ahead. And some put their eyes at ya!’

The way he stared round at them it was no wonder. But it was a pity if they couldn’t take a little kid staring. I’d never thought of it before, but I guess there wasn’t much for a kid to do in a car between stops. The next thing I remember, he was fiddling with his hat. You had to ask a kid like that what he was doing, if only on the offchance of hearing some brand new idea, from wherever it is they come from just before they’re born.

‘I have to have the brim of my hat up, so the other drivers can see my eyes talking to them.’ I reckon if I’d ever said things like that when I was a kid, my parents would have stayed alive instead of dipping out, just to hear more. All the rest I remember of that trip is the way Stevo called the television cartoons Dopeys and Chris called them Popeyes. Even if you took them a hundred miles away, their minds were never far away from home.

Without thinking about it I found that I’d walked home. The house watched me, I could feel its eyes following me. The trees listened. Each empty paddock had the look of a minefield.

I was rubbering round the verandah, the way I do, when I heard Stevo. They never actually expected me, but they were always ready for me when I got there, no matter when.

‘We won’t tell Daddy there’s no cake for him, ’cause that will unhappy him. We’ll just let him see for himself.’ I had missed dinner. I never said anything, but there was an arrangement that if I got there in time I ate; if not, I went without. It wasn’t dark, anyway, I could eat later.

Instead of eating, Stevo started again on the story of the Chantic Bird. But he only got up to the part where the Chantic Bird’s song was like the tinkling of glass bells, and he broke off to run outside and kick a ball, only it wasn’t a ball. I watched him kick an old fruit tin around and when I looked at Bee, I could see she was anxious. It only took me about half an hour to see why. Stevo was hurting his shoes and he probably only had the pair he had on. I was disappointed he hadn’t carried on with the story, I had come to expect it, and what with that and the thought of his shoes, I felt very sorry for the poor little kid and raced out to roll a drunk. I had to wait a bit more for it to get dark, then I got on to old man Keble coming down the hill from the Hampden. I bowled him and rolled him and went right back home and made out I’d forgotten to give her the money before, and gave her the old drunk’s donation. Actually, that wasn’t all. The money smelt so much of beer, I had to rub some of her fancy soap on it so she wouldn’t smell it.

I hung round a bit, then I decided to go back to the theatre. On the way I thought of my brother, the one that died, and how when he was in that beautiful old Catholic hospital he was put next to a criminal. This man was going to bottle him with a lemonade bottle, he reckoned. I saw the sisters and made sure a cop was there by his bed twenty-four hours a day, but my brother wasn’t happy until he got into another ward. They put him out on a verandah because they knew you thought things were going good if you were outside. He was dying, of course, but no one was supposed to tell him. I’d want them to tell me, it was too much like a dog dying, the way he went. But the thing that hits you between the eyes is that no matter what time of day or night it is, something’s killing something. The hawks overhead and the sparrows looking nervously over their shoulders, the mice darting, the owls calling, the birds after the butterflies, the killing doesn’t stop. With my brother it was a tiny germ in his blood.

All of a sudden I heard something, a stiff curtain on rings slid back. For a moment I thought I was back in the theatre and I got a cold feeling in the back of my head. Then I realised the sound was only in my head after all; it was the sound the curtain made round my brother’s bed when he had an attack and the blood supply to his brain was interrupted.

I waited around outside the theatre and just when I was about to go in, a man and a woman appeared and went in. Everywhere I went there were people following me, or if not following me, then blocking me. I hopped on the next train out of there and the first thing I did when I got off at Penno was to run up the steep cutting as fast as I could.

You’ve got to watch the citizens. They’ll call copper if you look sideways at them. What it was, I must have collapsed somewhere. You couldn’t tell the coppers from the meat-wagon men from where I was on the ground; their legs were all the same and they were too close to my head.

If there was anything funny that night, it was the sound, in the ambulance, of Stevo’s voice talking to Bee.

He spoke, ‘Come on, wake yourself up. Make a fuss! I’ll help you wash up—poor old thing!’ Don’t get me wrong, he wasn’t really there with me, that was what he said to Bee after they had heard that I was in hospital. I was seeing it in my head, and I hoped that when it happened it would be the way I imagined it, because it was a good feeling to think Bee was worried. When thoughts like that hit you, you have to laugh. There I was, the sort of human that goes round making a bump and smash wherever I could, and getting away with it, and underneath the fine, proud actions of bashing and stealing and assaulting I was hoping a sixteen-year-old girl was crying and upset over me. They left a man in a blue uniform with me in the back of the ambulance, and when he heard me laughing he leaned forward to see if I was laughing at him, and he was ready to land me one, don’t you worry, and I was glad again when I saw that, because I was right—I had always been right—they were exactly the same sort as me; they’d smash a young kid lying down in an ambulance without a thought. If no one was there to see. You can’t imagine how pleased I was with that. They’re the same sort as me, don’t you worry about that, so don’t get mixed up with them, and if one day one of them is in a crappy mood and you’re waiting on a corner for someone after dark at night and he tells you to move on; you just move on and don’t argue. Or else. He had a voice like a soft-nose bullet; you thought how round and cheerful they felt in your hand, but they thumped home hard.