The Chantic Bird (24 page)

That’s why I’ve kept a lot back. That’s why I didn’t tell him the truth about the kids. When I told him those lies, I could see he was more curious than ever, his skinny frame jerked with anticipation of more secrets to come.

When I got back home to Bee she had her head on a pillow, sick.

Some things are easy to remember. The cab I had was a real old Mercedes diesel, they have a few of them round Parramatta and I was on my way to the house and no one there. Bee had taken the kids with her to the Entrance for two weeks of the holidays. She told me she would be back in time for Christmas, she liked to be home for Christmas. It was pretty luxurious taking a cab, and you can bet I didn’t stay in it right up to the door. Right where the pedestrian crossing is in Bee’s suburb the cab stopped for old Miss Jones—that was the old lady that made a lifework of taking in stray kids—to stagger across and when he was about to go, with a line of traffic behind him and a line in front so he couldn’t turn right, I whipped the door open and hopped out. It was just that part of the day when the light is going and the dark is almost enough for cars to switch on their lights, which they are very reluctant to do. I was down the railway path and round behind the shopping centre and across the road before the driver could turn the car. If he’d been quicker and speeded up when he saw me go for the door, he’d have got me, but people are too kindhearted; they pull back from hurting you just when they could have you on a plate.

It was dark enough when I got home; it was silly to have neighbours see you when there was no need. The house smelled dark, like a cave, inside.

Sitting in there alone and all the bad things I’d ever done started to rise up in front of my eyes. I grinned in the dark over most of them, but not about scalding Stevo, or taking their friends from the others, and not about leaving the old man alone for three years in hospital or Ma when she was dying for six months, or even my young brother that died. Next to Stevo, that one that died was on my conscience about the most. Although Ma and the old man had a pretty rotten go, too. Ma used to try to get us to think he was the finest man on earth. I hope no one ever talks like that about me.

I sort of wandered into Bee’s room and somehow it turned out that I got into her old papers and souvenirs. Not that I mucked them up or anything; I put them back in place exactly where I found them, but there were bundles of letters, piles of old programmes, crumpled handkerchiefs with old smears on, train tickets with the sleeper butts still on, all sorts of things. I pulled the shades and rigged up a barricade so I could put a light on without being seen from outside. It was more comfortable then. There were a couple of things that made me a bit uneasy, things like other kids’ writings on her old theatre tickets; she’d been to the ballet with some joker from the Glebe a few times. I didn’t know she ever went to places like that, she never ever said a word about ballet to me. It’s amazing how close-mouthed women can be. But the worst thing about it was thinking I hardly knew her. She’d done things and been places I’d never know about.

When I got to one particular letter I read it twice, put it and the rest of the things back in the drawer, all in order, put out the light and took away the barricade and went out to a place a few streets away. It was dark and quiet; my sort of night. They had a dog, but it was too sound asleep to hear me. They also had a back porch and since it was a hot night the back door was open; this kid slept on the back verandah, it was one of those old places with the old verandah closed in. Not too different from our house. I clubbed this kid good and proper. He would be doing other things besides writing love letters when he woke up in the morning.

I realise he would probably never know who did it or why, but I’m not the kind of person that has to worry about those points. As long as I do what I want to, that’s all that is on my mind. I never liked that kid, he was the sort that slapped you on the back and said merry things while watching you closely. Maximum impact, but meaning nothing except watch him closely.

‘What would you do if I asked you to sleep with me,’ Petersen used to ask. He expected me to say Punch you in the nose, and I did. He had got to the stage where he thought he knew all about me, but he was still testing and probing. I didn’t mind going out with him in the city, no one ever knew you there, no one cared and best of all no one remembered. He always paid.

So when I told him the lie about the kids, he was right in and it was no trouble to get him to the house. I made it a nightfall jab, with the neighbours still glued to the TV and the blue lights flickering in every house round. He took right away to the typewriter Bee had in the bedroom, I let him stay there because the noise of it couldn’t be heard next door and I could make sure he didn’t go out. There was no kind of sense letting him be seen. As I watched him next morning settle down to bashing out a few more pages, all I could see was he was different from me. And above me, somehow. Or he thought he was. You could see it in the way he hunched over the machine, sort of hunched in prayer but also on the receiving end of a private line from someone up there that liked him.

He sat bare again, testing me. I can’t say I didn’t notice before how white he was, because I did, but one thing about him, he didn’t smell at all. You can overlook a lot when someone doesn’t smell or let his underwear go bad. It was just that I could feel him thinking that he had the upper hand on me. I couldn’t care less about dominating someone—I don’t need a side kick—but he cared. He wanted this book about me to be his book, he could see himself getting the glory, he was going to step high on my shoulders. If I let him. He was going to be the hero of it, not me. His name, in big print. I was something he picked up, soon he would drop me and pick up someone else. He was dominant. If I let him.

I didn’t let him. I got the screwdriver that I’d ground down to an ice-pick point, put a felt guard on it up to the hilt to stop the squirting and put it in him while he sat there hunched. You could see his ribs easy, it was a snack to push it in between them. The guard worked fine and soaked up the red, but there wasn’t much. His heart left home immediately. I held it in him until it looked as if the hole had stopped leaking, then put him in the bath to wash him. Don’t any of you go grieving for him; you can’t waste sorrow on people you don’t know.

I burned the felt and washed the weapon, then concentrated on the body. I washed him again to get everything clean and hygienic and rinsed him so there was no soap left. The head, hands and feet were going to be the main worry, I didn’t like messing with those parts of a person. I got a cardboard box, the one that came with the altar wine or the butter—I forget—and put the head in—his neck was pointed up the plug end, so he drained pretty easily. The bath water ran out under the house along a sort of rough drain that had board sides, and meandered into the rockery; the poinsettia might have redder colours next flowering.

I didn’t mention the actual cutting because it’s something that might worry people; I had to use Bee’s breadknife and you have no idea how tough human meat is. It wants to stay joined together. And the sound is not something you should dwell on.

Touching the hands was better than hanging on to the feet while I sawed through. Somehow feet are more personal, they make you embarrassed easier. At that stage I had the head and two hands and two feet in the box. Just for the look of it, I changed their position and moved the head up to the top, hands in the middle and feet on the bottom. It didn’t look good to have the feet sitting on the head. They had to be adjusted so that the cut part faced up, otherwise if they leaked down on bottom of the box and wet the cardboard, I might be in the position later of lifting the sides of the box and having the bottom stay on the ground along with the contents.

If I’d remembered my old man’s cut-throat razor before, the job would have been easier. We still kept a little drawer half full of his things—all that was left of his forty-nine years. Books, shaving things, medals. With the razor I did a pretty good butcher’s job on old Petersen and separated him into joints, chops, meaty ribs, and pieces of steak. At least I called them steak—they were the cheeks of his bottom, and his leg and thigh muscles. He didn’t have enough arm muscles to call steak.

For the bones I had the old man’s hacksaw, the one with the pistol grip. The meat I piled at the other end of the bath and let it finish draining. There was going to be some embarrassment with the bones later, but the meat would have to be finished first, no good getting rid of the bones bit by bit.

When everything was ready, I left the cardboard box in the bathroom and took the meat into the kitchen. I finished chopping it all up, wrapped it up with the lights and the skin in a cornsack, took the clothes and wrapped in them the contents of the cardboard box and left them in the barbecue grate. It was actually for burning rubbish, but we called it the barbecue.

That day I burned that part and stuck an old rubber tyre on the fire so no one would get the Auschwitz smell. And at night I borrowed a car and got down to the Zoo again and gave the cornsack to the lions. I had to go over the fence on the western side and be quick about it, because the animals kicked up a row. When I got back home and ditched the car and rubbed everything I touched with a gasoline rag, I checked that Petersen’s extremities were burned up.

I had to pound up the bones with a hammer on the laundry floor and put them round the orange trees. Then I sat at the typewriter and slowly took over my story where Petersen had left it, just after he got to the house. I’ve chopped out a few of his comments where he went off the track a bit. You have to consider the readers, and you have to consider your own feelings, too. At least he didn’t make my words come out differently; I checked through and they’re as I told him.

He left a few scraps of paper along with the main story. One of them has on it; ‘What feelings about violence he has used and sufferings caused to those robbed? Especially unfortunate drunks.’

I’d tell him, and I’ll tell you now. None. No feelings at all. If they want to put themselves at a disadvantage, like rolling drunk, then walk out into the jungly old world, then they can take what comes. If it’s a smack behind the ear and their wages gone, then so what? They can’t do any better with their money than I can do with it. My kids are just as good as theirs.

Now Petersen can’t know about it, I’ll mention the money I saved up in the ceiling, out of all I got from drunks and others, over and above what I gave Bee. Bee and the kids would have enough to live on for a long while if I went away.

I hope no one’s too disillusioned with me, or upset about Petersen, but I can tell you there’s more people disappear than you know. Or the police admit. With luck no one would miss him, and there’s very little noseyness round my way. It doesn’t pay to shop anyone these days; someone like me can serve his time and still be out to even things up before the tattlers are much older.

Bee was back home the next week. She wondered a bit when she saw me there, but she didn’t say anything. I didn’t like to trick her with one of my sincere looks, so I tried to look pretty shifty. She was the same, though. Even while I was standing around pretending not to watch her, the house creaked from the heat and I felt a bit guilty. The kids were tired, Allie was asleep, and I was more or less useless, sitting there, looking out the windows, scaring myself a bit when I looked through the horizontal slats of the blind and found that the vertical binders were dancing all over the place, not just with every pulse beat, but in between as well. Bee trod very lightly, she hardly seemed to dent the floor mats, and all she did was for the kids. You could watch her and yet not watch, and it seemed as if she was put on earth one minute and straight away she began walking round getting things for people, fixing up the baby’s mess, making little plans for taking the kids places and getting them things, making a cake for the woman next door that had her husband off work, shelling peas and slicing beans for the old lady that had arthritis in the fingers, but never doing what I did; I went there one day with the beans and saw what the old lady was doing. She had her hands in cold water half the day so I told her she ought to wake up to herself and use the rubber gloves Bee bought her, but she couldn’t feel with gloves on; some stupid excuse like that. I told Bee she ought to stop doing things for her, but Bee didn’t do what I said, or hardly ever, even though she mostly listened.

No matter what time of day she passed you, she was always fresh and she smelled light and sweet. I’d say all her underclothes were fresh on. I hate people that smell.

I tried to do a few things for her, mainly outside, but I soon got tired and had to sit down. After all, our house was the place where I’d been a little kid, from ten on, and there was a lot to think of. My cousin Jim visited us once years ago and I took him down the pitch to play cricket; he took the cover off my new six-stitcher in half an hour on the concrete wicket. That was just before he left to fight the communists. What I mean, he didn’t exactly go to fight them, he was taken. He was only in the Army because he couldn’t get a job.

Anyway, I was bowling to him, before the ball split, and when I tried to send down one he couldn’t hit he yelled out that it swung a foot. Swung a foot? What did that mean? I didn’t have a clue, but I thought he meant it was a seamer. I forgot all about it until one day I saw some cricket on the TV at home with Stevo and Bee. There was a bowler that swung the ball a foot and everyone said what a bowler he was. I didn’t feel so bad about that cousin splitting my good ball then, in fact I think he meant to compliment me. He was captured later.

I went up the street to get a few refreshments for the family. A dog tried to chase me near a big house I used to deliver groceries to for old Cowan when he had the Post Office and general store, but this dog had never met me before. It tried to rush in and bite, then off. I grabbed for its neck but my hands slipped on its fur and all I got was the tail. You should have seen that dog sail through the air. Cats do that sort of thing much better, they keep their feet down, but this dog tumbled over and over like a sputnik. Luckily for the owner, it just missed a straight young ornamental tree. At that velocity, it would have broken the tree off at the roots, and it probably cost quite a few dollars. Dogs you can pick up in the street, but no one will let you pick up valuable trees.