The Chantic Bird (16 page)

He didn’t smash me one, though. I let my head go limp and rolled it to one side towards him. If I’d flopped the other side he might have thought I was being smart, dodging the punch I expected. I might have copped it, that way. Instead, with my head flopped near him, he thought I’d collapsed again and got the driver to go faster. I wanted to get them to turn on the siren and I was nearly going to ask them, but they did anyway. They usually do if they get irritated and what got them irritated was going along nice and steady and then being asked to step on it. Just for the sake of some rotten little b, which was what they called me when I was coming round. I heard them say it. And when there was no one round that wasn’t in their little club.

Did you ever try my little trick on a doctor? When he’s taking your pulse, you relax, breathe in deep, then breathe out very hard. Your pulse slows down, not gradually, but it sort of pauses then gives a big thump and then none for a little time. It gets back a bit faster after that, then it’s time for another breath out. It will thump again after a nice pause. The doctor will look at you—they’re very careful about getting tricked, and also, if there’s something the matter with you and they’re the only ones that know, they like to get a look at your face; I think it gives them a lift to know you’re clapped out and you don’t know it, especially if they’ve got another thirty years to go. When he looks at you, you’re on your own. I was all right, I know how to look innocent. If you’re not used to it, look out the window or pretend you’re having trouble with your eyes. Something. They never believe anyone else can keep track of a couple of things at a time; if you’re squinting, they’ll never believe you could be putting one over at the same time.

There’s another thing, if you can manage it. You think of something that always frightens you, and your ticker will go faster. If you do that after you’ve been slowing it down, you’ll have him shake his head and peer at you. That’s the time to be looking out the window. I used to think of a football team of legs with blue and white socks, running out onto the field. Remember the nervous feeling you have before a game? Well, those legs reminded my heart of that feeling and it beat faster.

Apart from anything being wrong, I’m fine. The bed is good and hard; I’m only comfortable on a hard bed, or the floor or a rock or a grating or something like that. I can’t say actually comfortable, but I feel better inside when I’m living hard. It’s as if I’m not asking any favours.

Bee and the kids came to visit me. Littlies are not supposed to come in; their germs are too strong for grown-ups. But I got them to go round to the other entrance—it was at Hornsby—not the entrance the visitors use, and anyone who saw them then thought they’d been allowed in at the other end, and no one stopped them. Chris was coming on about that time; she started climbing up some oxygen bottles onto a shelf; she wanted to sit there, she was too short to see me properly from the wooden floor.

Bee commanded, ‘You can’t get up there, Chris!’

‘Yes I can,’ said Chris. ‘You know me.’ That cheered me up. The doctors had started going over me and letting the young learning doctors have a go at me. You’re in for that in the public ward. The young ones were very taken with some flat brown marks on my legs and arms; from the way they looked you’d have thought they were the blunt tentacles of cancer coming up to the surface for oxygen. For all I know they might have been.

Bee got Chris down, anyway, and that made her yell. It was good to hear a little kid yell with something besides the agonies.

Stevo said, ‘Be quiet for a minute Chris! Mum, why do ladies scream?’ Chris sneaked away to look at the television set in the ward and came back delighted. Someone gave her some lollies to go away. We asked her what she saw and she said a nice girl on the television with her arms wrapped round a man.

‘I think she loves her daddy,’ she explained. We made her give some of the free lollies to Stevo. ‘Lollies make me strong, don’t they?’ he reminded us. To Bee he said, ‘Why did you say before I can’t have chips? Because they give me bad breath?’ Bee was cornered there, but she didn’t have to answer. He knew when he’d won, he didn’t have to hear her admit it.

I started to feel stronger with Bee and the kids about and it wasn’t long before I started to think to myself, Why should I stay still for these people in white coats to prod me and look in everywhere in me and ask me questions and expect me to do what they said and stay here until they let me go? Why should they have any power over me at all? Just because of words written on pieces of paper? That was all that made them official. Take away the bits of paper and what were they?

‘Now hear this,’ was Stevo’s command. He saw me drifting off on my own wavelength and he wanted me back.

‘Now hear what?’ I said. He got confidential.

‘I like little girls.’

‘Which little girls?’

‘Ones at school and new ones I meet.’ Bee looked pretty depressed, but she smiled at that.

‘Why don’t you have mummies at school?’ he asked.

‘I don’t think they’d get much work done. Mummies have a pretty easy time,’ I reckoned. Bee didn’t come in.

‘It’s a possibility,’ he commented.

‘Why don’t you start telling Daddy more of your story?’ Bee questioned. Daddy. Stevo didn’t look too happy.

‘Daddy’s sick.’

He started then, but all the time he spoke he was looking out the window and I could see he wasn’t going to get very far. I’ll tell you what, he only got as far as last time. He stopped almost the same place as before. One minute he was talking about the song like glass bells and the tears in the King’s eyes and the silk ropes on the Bird’s feet, and the next he was outside running over to a culvert in the hospital yard down near the paddock with the horse. He was digging with a stick and later he brought back some very white clay to take to school and make little figures.

Bee didn’t seem to mind him running off and forgetting the story, but I reckon she knew her own mind. It was more important for me to give the kid an ear than for him to be made to stick there and talk when he didn’t want to.

Chris was showing a lot more life. She got up to Stevo’s little lolly box of treasures that Bee carried in her brown bag and took out his cards that he saved out of the cornflakes packets.

Bee said, ‘They’re Stevo’s cards.’

‘Will he hit me?’

‘He might.’

‘I don’t care. I’ll cry later.’ What a kid. I was so happy, I knew she was going to be as big a character as Stevo. The only one left now was Allie; I didn’t know what she would turn out to be, but she was only young.

Bee gave me a folded-up paper from Stevo. Since it was folded he called it a book. There were coloured-in drawings on it, but I’ll only tell you what he wrote.

Mrs Hen layed an egg down by the road

side. Mr Dog said Why did you. I didn’t have

a home. I’ll build you a home. No, no.

But it was a golden egg.

Bee explained that the story was meant to cheer me up while I was sick.

Bee went shortly after and the kids waved at the door and that left me with only me to talk to. Almost everyone around was dying. There were other kids there, mostly out of car crashes, with broken this and that, but they weren’t the sort of kids you’d be breaking your neck to talk to. They were proud of their head-on crashes, not ashamed of their stupid reflexes, and they mostly had about fifteen thousand other smashes to talk about. You’d think if they had one prang that would be the last, they’d at least go to a car club and learn to read the road conditions by the seat of their pants, or something. Or else not talk about it.

If I was a big sort of thing watching the world, I’d have a big rubber ready and I’d rub out all the nasty ones in the world and the stupid ones.

The trouble is, I can see that even nice people have nasty kids, and there’d soon be just as many nasty ones to rub out.

When I got up, I’d only been in bed a few days, but just the same I was wobbly on my feet. It was so hard to get any pace up that when I walked out onto the verandah of the kids’ ward—there were no nurses around, I could be doing all sorts of things for all they cared—when I swayed out in the middle of a crowd of kids I nearly got included in their game. It was only a very simple game, I could probably have done it first go. But there was something about the feeling of nearly being a kid again that I didn’t take any reprisals against them when I got shoved round a bit.

There was excitement that same day. One of the older kids was in a very filthy mood and a lot of the younger ones were playing near the toilets and one must have had his finger round the corner of the door jamb, because when this kid slammed the door in his bad mood, the edge of the door took off the top joint of the kid’s finger. Some people just can’t look after themselves. I wouldn’t leave a finger in a place like that even if there was no one around. The kid was yelling very loud, much louder than when he was playing and the others were gathered round him in a circle looking at the stump; I saw the finger-bit on the floor and picked it up and gave it to one of the kid’s friends and she tormented him with the sight of it and when the nurses came and the sister, she hid the piece and showed her parents that night. They didn’t show proper appreciation so she put it in a match-box and sold it to one of the others for half a dollar and a bar of coconut rough.

I had a rest on my bed after about twenty minutes, whatever was the matter with me left me pretty tired. It was no use asking the doctors; they liked to be one up, they wouldn’t tell me what was the matter or what they were looking for. If I’d had a few quid it would have been different, but when you’re in a public ward you take what they dish out.

Another brother of mine had spent a lot of time in hospital, I remember while he was in once and nearly dead I sort of stole his mate and that left him with no one to visit him. Why was I always doing bad things like that? The brother that died, he was taken in with bad pains to the very same ward I was in, only a year ago, but the doctor must have been a nut, he opened him up with a vertical cut and all that was wrong was appendix. You’d think they would have found the leukaemia in his blood then, but it’s hard to spot if they don’t even take blood tests.

Next time I got up I felt a bit better; there was a lot of fun to be had with the stray dogs that used to come in the park at the back of the hospital. They’d get some scraps here and there and I used to get some goolies ready, then scare them, and as they ran away, usually in a wide circle ready to come in the grounds again, I’d toss a rock high up in the air away on before the dog. With good aim, you’d see the rock high in the air, and the dog running along underneath in a straight line. The curve of the rock would come down to intersect the straight line. It was hard to actually hit a dog like that, but if you landed one just before or just behind, you’d get a result. And if you had a bad shot and went to one side of the dog, you’d have a fair chance of seeing him side-slip on his neck. They’re easily startled.

The other patients used to get a bit disturbed, most of them were animal-lovers. They hated other humans. They’d nuzzle any old dog, but would they nuzzle any old stranger? No, sir. Once there was a beautiful shot going begging and I ran out to grab a rock. But I’d been sitting down for hours and I ran out very fast, without taking any breaths beforehand. After forty yards I had to stop, hunched over. My ticker wouldn’t go. Then with a big effort, it gave a great thump as if it was blowing up a balloon with not enough air. For a while, although I was breathing, my chest felt as if I wasn’t. I felt as you feel when you hold your breath, starved of air. Even though I was breathing. It’s a wonder I’m still alive. It was easier when I hunched over, if I tried to straighten up I felt bad still.

What with all that, I had to think up something to show the world I was still there. They have ramps at both ends of that hospital; one down to the entrance, from the wards, and the other right through the other end to the theatre. Both ramps might have people on them at visiting, so I waited until after.

From the servery the stainless steel trolleys are wheeled out into the big corridor to wait for someone to take them round the wards. I detached one and took it to the top of the western ramp. You should have seen it sail down that covered porch. The rubber wheels were a big help and the weight of the plates on top and the food underneath. Lucky the front door was propped open—they have no air conditioning—for although the thing lost a few dinners going down the front steps, it kept most of the plates and knives and forks until it went off the gutter out front. If I was an engineer I would have written a letter to the people who made those trolleys and said what a good precision job they made of the bearings and the axles.

But they wouldn’t appreciate my letter; I didn’t have any bit of paper saying I was an engineer, so I couldn’t have an opinion. The trolley stopped when it fell over in the gutter, the plates went furthest. Lucky there was no one crossing the corridors in its way; it didn’t even hit a car or anything, but a blue metal truck roared up and tried to get by the plates. You should have seen it, the driver tried to pick his way through it very slow out of respect for the hospital, but he didn’t actually want to get down and pick them up. I don’t blame him. The plates crunched slow and very loud.

One of them snapped with a sound very like the tuning fork the teacher had when I was in fifth class. I don’t mean the sort of sound, I mean the same note. You’d never believe it, but I was a soprano once. Old Mr Hocking or Pryce with a y would disown me now, but they thought a lot of me then and my voice like a bell, as Hocking said.

When I got back inside I got my collar sort of neat and parted my hair and the nurses ate out of my hand. If I’d come back in the room untidy they would have hated me and they’d probably have accused me of the trolley bit. It’s amazing how easy you can lead people on by your appearance.

I passed the exact door I tore my leather coat on one night when I’d visited my brother. It was a Yale lock with the latch out and I was in a hurry to get home. I suppose I was always in a hurry to get visits over. I wonder if he ever knew before he died how I hated visiting him? I never even contradicted the house doctor that Monday morning when he told me and my other brother that it was no use giving him another transfusion. Without actually saying it he made us think the poor kid would never leave the bed anyway, never be able to get on his feet again. So we didn’t stick up for a few more weeks of life for him. We just let him die like a dog, like the doctor wanted. I suppose they wanted the bed. They’d been pretty good to him, letting him go home weekends and the bed still there for him on Monday mornings. When he waved goodbye and I was at the door his face was so white it reminded me of when he was a kid. When he was a baby he lay on his back for thirty months and he was white as the sheets around him. But no one ever wondered if there was something wrong. He bled for a week when he got a tooth out, so some wisdom in Ma got her to teach him to look after his teeth so he wouldn’t have any more out.