The Chantic Bird (21 page)

I wished I’d gone to the Jungo, that’s west of the old slaughter yards, even if the place was lousy with Estonians potting away at kookaburras with twenty-twos, getting something for lunch. At least there’d be no one near when you went in, or trying to talk to you. If there’s one thing gives me the tom-tits it’s people talking to you. I don’t mean if you ask them something, but when they just come up and talk to you for no reason at all. I never answer.

In a way, though, I liked the idea of those two being down by the hole on a Monday, at least they weren’t pretending to be necessary to the country’s trade-health. I’ve read a magazine or two, there’s enough machines now to do all the work, but people just aren’t used to the idea of the streets being full of people. They like to be safely clocked in.

I reckon I’ll never get used to the ideas you’re supposed to have when you’re old. I stayed down in the bush, it was very pleasant with a bit of breeze coming up the track to meet you, but I did no running that day either, I was just too hot. The new bark skins on the young gums reminded me of the pole vault sticks we used to cut when I was young. I had a friend years ago, Bongo. Bongo had a cousin that admired pole-vaulters, she said; we got her in his lounge room on Sundays when she was down on a visit and his parents were at church, but I didn’t like kissing her after he’d had a go, so I always got in first.

In those days we used to swim at the slaughter yards, we were there the day it was a hundred and eighteen, naked in the water. The Fishies was a better pool, deeper and cooler. I was lying flat on a grey rock then, and the sound of my fingers on the stone startled me, it took me back immediately to the sound my fingers made when I tried to ease my brother’s toy shark away from him. Why did they give all the presents to him? Did they like him? But he was always grumbling, there were tears in his eyes half the time and a miserable look. Frowns, yells. And I was all sunshine. Our stupid grandmother gave him that overcoat, none for me. Why should I forget that? Life’s too short to forget those things.

And when I got home that Sunday to Bay Road to ask the old man what that word meant that the man wrote on his friend’s back, I was the one that had to run. The Papworths used to stone you going to school and coming home, there was a quarry opposite their house; I always meant to go back when I got older and land a few on them, but I never did. Their biggest brother could swim for miles under water, I used to think, there was no limit to what big kids could do. I suppose I knew all along it would be my brother who would get picked on by my cousins and tossed in the water; he was always miserable. We were little then.

Billycart races, swimming in Hen and Chicken Bay, I remember it all. That’s the sort of life I intended to have; it’s what I like.

Stevo was sick about this time and I bunked most of the time in the roof of the dressing sheds at the swimming pool. The new one near home. It was easy to get back home in the daytime to look in on them and give Bee a hand. I tried to let Stevo get away with more little things than he was usually allowed, I knew that would help to build his confidence.

He broke the only paint brush we had and went round asking, ‘Where’s the wig of it?’ He was getting better.

Chris was starting to take an interest in ‘Mummy’s toots’, and went round with tennis balls in her dress. She pricked up her ears when she heard about Auntie Jane having a baby.

‘Has Jane had the baby yet or is it still muckin’ round in her tummy?’

I dug up an old mouth organ and let Chris play it, since Stevo had got one from the woman next door for his birthday. But with Chris you had to explain. We’d just been talking about my brother that died and what we said must have stuck in her head. We’d got some of his things from the flat where he lived, each one in the family took what he wanted. Chris knew her own mouth organ once belonged to yet another brother and couldn’t understand how we could have got it and given it to her if the other brother wasn’t dead too.

‘If Paul isn’t dead, how’d you get the mouth organ?’

Stevo had a dream when he was getting better. ‘I saw some men last night getting old. And their heads falling off. Right off.’ And soon he started eating again. I used to bring him paper bags of chipped potatoes, since Bee didn’t like you giving them lollies.

‘I like chipped potatoes. I think they’re so nourishing.’ I even started taking them all for walks round the street and down to the running park and the swings. When I went down one street instead of another, he said, ‘You said you were going that way, but your eyes were very mysterious, so I knew you were going to go this way.’ I had seen a man leaning against a dark car, and I thought I knew him from somewhere. It wouldn’t have been good, if I’d really known him, for him to see me with the kids, for if he wanted to cut me down or anything he would have known right away where my weak spot was, and how to hurt me. Actually I recalled later that it was a man called Moey, that I saw last at a circus riding a goat for a kewpie doll prize.

The baker up there still had one cart going with a horse. It was cheaper and he wanted to use the horse rather than sell it to the knacker’s. I’d told Stevo about horses and knackers and when he saw old Barnsie’s animal, he said, ‘That’s a gluey sort of horse.’ I didn’t really know if they still use them for glue, but that’s what I told him.

Later, I borrowed a car from the car park outside the station, a Holden—you can get into them very easily—and we were both very satisfied, Bee and me, to see how he was almost his old self again. He took with him the underwater goggles I got for him and stared and made noises out the car window at the drivers and walking workers we passed.

‘With this noise I’ll stop their minds.’ He was getting eager to grow up, and this I wasn’t very keen on.

‘Grown-ups have such fun. Or do they?’ he remarked. I hoped he’d stay a boy as long as he could. I tried to. It was good to be out driving with Bee and the kids, like a real family. Chris sang for us her special song, she’d started to go to school. ‘Way down yonder in the paw-paw patch,’ but what she sang was, ‘Lay down yonder in the paw-paw patch.’ You couldn’t get her to change it, either. Bee tried to.

Sitting up there driving someone else’s car, I thought of the old man sitting up in his bed at the Randwick TB hospital and how I visited him once in three years and how on the night he died and I slept there, all I could think of was the noise of his dying had stopped and I was relieved.

We got to Coal and Candle Creek on the road that the old man had helped build and I think some people there might have thought they recognised the car we were in, because an old man with grey in his hair came up to us, with a question on the tip of his tongue. I could see that, so I took a sudden quick step towards him. He made the same back move that young Stevo had made when the water hit his leg. No one else seemed to see what nearly happened, he went away, and since he probably didn’t say anything to the people he was with before he came over, he didn’t have to explain anything about his sudden retreat.

I played with the kids and got them iceblocks and things, and made plenty of time having lunch, hoping Stevo might get round to telling me his story of the Chantic Bird. He didn’t. I didn’t want to be at him all the time, pestering for a story. Besides, who was the kid? Him or me?

At night when I got back to the swimming pool sheds, I fell asleep on my back and had another coloured dream. This time it was black. Three tall black men standing in front of me with creases in their faces, like tribal markings, only these were fresh cut in their faces with a knife. The sides of the cuts had sharp edges, like a razor cut makes and the funny thing was that although the wounds were red inside, there was no blood leaking over the sharp sides of the cuts.

It was a weird dream, for the black men didn’t do anything. They just stood there, looking straight forward, not even at me, as if into their future. Only I knew you can’t look into the future. Just standing still and watching, and the cuts red and fresh. All you can see is the past.

The sound of a kid rasping on the metal of the wire fence woke me and I could hear whoever it was walking in rubber shoes on the old concrete path. Then I got on to a man with a spike picking up papers in the park part, ready for another day of kids and lollies. There was something about him I couldn’t stand, he was too like the other ones that kept bobbing up ready to chase me off from wherever I wanted to get settled. I couldn’t take the chance on him not being dangerous to me, so I climbed down and got out.

They might just as well send the whole population after me. After all, I’m against the lot of them.

I kept sitting there in the car and waiting, but Bee was a long time coming out. Didn’t they want a ride? This time I’d got a big white American car for them and I’d only be able to have it until the people got back on the train from Sydney; I wouldn’t like the family to be in the car when I got picked up for borrowing it.

That day I just couldn’t wait. I told myself I’d come back later, but right now I had to keep moving. You know, there’s a madness in the air; all you have to do is reach up and grab a bit of it. And when you do, it works for you.

You know, all I seem to do is steal. I was thinking about that as the big Chev floated over the bitumen, in and out the traffic. Now and again some birds would play with the car, flying low out from the footpaths and swooping almost under the wheels. The fact that they were laughing at me and the car and anyone that couldn’t get off the ground, didn’t even annoy me. But behind their little games you could see that they would have been very serious if they’d been a ton or two bigger. Instead of dive-bombing the windscreen or the front tyres, they would have carried the whole lot away, and digested me and it at their leisure. The wagtails were skites, their speed seemed to vary when they came from the side, it made it look as if they knew they had everything covered, and I must tell you I was waiting for one of them to swoop past me and go under an oncoming wheel. Or better still, for them to miss another car and for me to get them under my wheels, or splat against the windscreen.

I felt sort of sarcastic inside myself, as if I wanted to twist my mouth at the world and keep it twisted. Moments like that it would be easy to ease the wheel a fraction to the right and keep your eyes open right up to the crash. I drew a couple of circles with my hands—with the steering wheel inside them—and headed back to the house. Bee and the kids were waiting, which was a better situation.

Talking to them came hard, the way I felt. There was right through me a sort of anger or madness, I could feel it warming me inwards from the skin, it made my bones feel more lively—they wanted to jump about in their smooth coverings of gristle and muscle—but I knew if I let them, they would only flail round and hit whoever was nearest, and that was the family. I must never hurt the family.

No sooner said to myself than forgotten. What happened I don’t know. Only that somewhere along the Gosford road the ferment inside me boiled over. It has always fascinated me that all you have to do to crash is move that wheel a fraction to the right and it’s head-on with another car, or to the left and it takes longer off the road. Just a tiny movement. And you’re in control of it. No one else. I made the movement.

To the left. Whump and off the road, the ground fell away but not too sharply and the wheels didn’t slip much and it was through the trees, missing them—not yet—it was easy enough to go straight for a soft bark red gum or a peeling old stringybark, over a couple of saplings, tasting the moment, spinning it out. Then Bee pushed some words out. She was gripping the seat, but she made no attempt to hang onto me. Now that I think of it, I’m not real pleased.

The words didn’t come out crazed or anything. She had her panic inside and kept it there.

‘If you want to kill us all, why don’t you get a gun?’ And that was one of the cruellest things she could have said. Somehow the feeling inside me had gone away and for a moment I was surprised at the contents of the last minute and what I’d almost done. I put the lid on that, though; I didn’t want to be feeling guilt. You can’t drive properly when you’re guilty. So I took the car over a pretty big bump so that everyone hit their heads on the car roof and the kids thought it was great fun. It surprised me they weren’t scared.

The owner would be surprised to see tree bark on his bumpers. Some people looked when I put the car back, so Bee told me, but I reckoned it was only because people like us got out of it. We must have looked a pretty young family.

I was putting the car back in the line-up outside the railway station where all the commuters parked to save themselves walking a mile there and back every day. The original parking spot was gone but the one I found was only a few dozen yards away.

When I got out and finished wiping the marks off the wheel and windows and seats, there he was. Petersen, I mean. It was his car I’d been using. That’s how I met him. I walked home with him to see where he lived. It was the big old house with the guava trees: when I delivered for old Cowan the grocer, the old lady used to give me a feast of fruit there. In the yard they had a summer house with six sides. That was where I used to meet him to put my story down on paper when his girl friend wasn’t playing the violin there.

I didn’t go home with Bee and the kids, I went out looking for a car of my own. I wanted one to live in for a while; it seemed to me I had been wasting my time living like a rat in other people’s buildings and all over the place. With a car you could get around. It might be necessary to change the plates every couple of weeks, because that was the time it took for a complaint to be processed and the narks to get out looking for you. The best thing to do was what I did. A kid that I used to go to school with was in the car business; you know, getting in, shorting the ignition, driving up the backboard of his big covered trailer and dropping it in one of his farm sheds out in the cow and citrus country, with spray guns and the works. He used to do a proper job, only a prang and a few fractures would show it up when the police got nosey about the engine number or the chassis. He’d do anything: change wheels, put in new engines, a new paint job or even only a slight paint difference, like a stripe or a different coloured top. I didn’t want him knowing what I was doing, so I went out on the Singleton road to one of his sheds and rolled one away that he’d finished and took with me a heap of rego plates so he wouldn’t know exactly which plates I was using at any time and wouldn’t be able to turn me in with a nasty phone call.