The Anatomy of Wings (5 page)

When Mrs. Bridges-Lamb took off her glasses and began to wipe them with her handkerchief it meant someone was in trouble but first she had to think about it. Without her glasses her eyes were smaller. She peered into the classroom as though we were all in the distance. She forgot about not moving her head. She moved it from side to side, slightly, like a snake listening.

Aunty Cheryl had heard Mr. Barnes was very laissez-faire and thought we might all go wild after being so strictly schooled the year before. It made me think of the whole class suddenly going crazy and hanging out windows. I wished I could have told Nanna because it was the sort of thing that would have made her laugh but we were banned from visiting her because she was a religious maniac. I hadn't seen her since the day of the funeral.

The
Merit Students Encyclopedia
didn't have an entry on famous maniacs, which I had hoped for, but the dictionary said a maniac was an obsessive enthusiast. That made me think of when Nanna made me
help her take out all her Virgin Mary statuettes and put them in the bathtub full of soapy water and they bobbed there like a boatload of ladies lost at sea. And after we had tea-towel-dried them she kissed each one and they all went back into the glass cabinets beside the ceramic dogs, which would get bathed another day.

After Mrs. Popovitch was gone Angela lay back on her red velvet bedspread and opened up
The Book of Clues.
She took the pencil from behind her ear.

“What happened after the lake?” she asked a little quieter.

“Nothing,” I said.

Angela raised her eyebrows.

And everything.

When Beth met Miranda Bell it was two weeks to Christmas and the whole world still shone. At first she told us it openly.

“Can't you see it?” she said.

“See what?”

“The way that tree is shining, or look, look at Mum's hair, it's on fire. Don't you see it?”

But then, after a while, she stopped asking.

Mum took her to Dr. Cavanaugh, who ran his soft white fingers, which radiated a soft glow like candlelight, slowly over her skull. When he sat down he folded his arms and leaned back in his chair. His
wood-paneled office sat in the shadow of a mountain of black slag. It was near the first gate, where a thousand miners entered each day to go down the hole. The train tracks ran behind the walls. Dr. Cavanaugh shut his eyes while the bell signaling the boom gates closing rang out. All the plaques and certificates rattled on his wall as an ore train passed.

“Simple hysteria,” he said once things had quieted down. “Quite common in relation to the onset of menstruation and quite common for young girls to faint too. Perhaps this light, these halos she sees, are the tail end of a moderate concussion.”

“Keep up the fluids,” he said. “Very important.”

Beth was in her blue leotard embroidered with gold flowers when she met Miranda. We didn't know she was Miranda then. She was just an angry-faced girl with long brown hair going backward and forward slowly on the swing. The swing was in Memorial Park, the slice of knee-high yellow grass laid down like a blanket between the houses of Memorial South.

Beth had her tutu in her bag. She had her shorts over her leotard and her ballet shoes strung around her neck. We were wearing new happy shoes, which had tags that said
MADE IN JAPAN.
We'd been at the dress rehearsal for the end-of-year breakup concert for Miss Elise Slater's Jazz Ballet Dance Academy.

“Hey, why've you got that stuff on?” the girl on the swing asked.

The swing was beneath a small crowd of Moreton Bay figs, which bowed their dark heads over her. The girl came in and out of the shadow as she swung.

“For the end-of-year concert,” Beth said. “These are called happy shoes.”

The girl's skin shone like fine bone china when Beth looked at her. The yellow grass of the park waved like flame. The dome of the sky was incandescent.

“You look stupid,” said the girl.

“You should look in a mirror for a change,” Beth said.

“How long is your hair?” ordered the girl.

Beth took out all of her bobby pins and undid her bun and shook out her hair. She put her hand behind her back and pointed to where her hair stopped beneath her shoulder blades.

“You're tipping your head back,” said the girl.

“She is not,” I said.

“Who asked you?” said the girl.

She turned her back to show us how long her own hair was.

“Mine's much longer,” she said, “and, anyway, all blondes go brown in the end and then they have to get it out of a bottle.”

Beth asked her where she got her information from. The girl said her stepmother knew for a fact
and she didn't lie. Beth asked her what happened to her real mother.

“I don't know and I don't care,” said the girl.

“I'm going to be dancing in the National Ballet by the time I'm seventeen,” said Beth.

“You are not,” said the girl.

“So I suppose you can see into the future, can you?”

“Maybe.”

She got off the swing. She said she was going down to the river to look for wild horses. She was going to ride one bareback. Did Beth want to come? Beth said no, she couldn't go in her leotard because it had taken Nanna three weeks to embroider. The girl shrugged and turned away, easily, as though she didn't care either way. Beth shrugged too as if it didn't matter as well.

But at home that night Beth had a faraway look in her eyes.

“Penny for your thoughts?” asked Mum, not knowing Beth was already taking her first small steps away from her and us and everything.

“No thoughts,” Beth said.

She was seeing the girl in her mind. They were riding wild horses. They thundered across the dry riverbed. Up and down dirt tracks. They rode them bareback. They were flying like the wind.

Mr. O'Malley sang a sea chantey even though we were a thousand miles from any sea. I leaned on the outside of the metal fence and Mrs. O'Malley leaned on the inside.

“In 1919 a great disaster occurred,” I said.

“Oh dear,” said Mrs. O'Malley.

“A tank with millions of liters of molasses burst and flooded Boston.”

“Go on then,” said Mrs. O'Malley. “You're having a go at me.”

“It's true,” I said. “Lots of people died. And in 1966 another great man-made disaster happened in Wales.”

“Oh dear,” she said.

“A slag heap collapsed and fell on top of a school.”

“I remember it, you know, a terrible thing.”

“I'm glad there's no slag heap near my school.”

“They wouldn't put them near schools anymore.”

Mrs. O'Malley pulled a hankie from her bra strap and wiped her face. She looked annoyed as Mr. O'Malley swept around her.

“Don't sing so loud, Mr. O'Malley,” she ordered. That's what she always called him. “Me and young Jennifer can't hear ourselves think.”

“And how is the young Miss Day?” asked Mr. O'Malley.

“Pretty good,” I said.

When he was gone Mrs. O'Malley leaned closer over the fence to me.

“Here,” she said, “tell me who this new girl is with the long dark hair.”

She nodded her head toward the patio of our house, where Miranda Bell was sitting with Beth. Mrs. O'Malley wanted to know who her parents were and where they'd come from and how and why and what part of town they lived in now.

“Just blew into town, hey?” said Mrs. O'Malley when I couldn't answer any of her questions. “I thought as much.”

Miranda had an aristocratic face but she lived in a caravan with a broken door. Sometimes she used the window beside her narrow bed to come and go. She was named after a wine and she lived with her stepmother and her stepmother's boyfriend, who had David Essex eyes. She was porcelain-skinned. Sometimes her cheeks flushed red like an English girl's in a storybook. Like Snow White's.

She said she had red cheeks because she was from down south. She had lived everywhere. She had lived beside beaches, beside rivers, real rivers, rivers that ran, in small towns and in big cities with ten thousand streets. Her whole life had been spent heading up north. She had been to at least fifty schools. She couldn't remember the real number. She didn't count
them anymore. She was going to start grade 9 with Beth.

“Who cares?” she said. “It's only school. My stepmother says one school is the same as any other.”

“But where's your real mother?” Beth asked.

It was the first time we went to the creek together. Miranda thought for a while. She looked through her mental catalog of towns and cities and rivers and bridges and seaside roads while biting on her bottom lip.

“I think she is somewhere near the Big Pineapple,” Miranda said. She'd seen most of the Big Things in Australia. “Or maybe she's gone back to Sydney. Dad left her on the side of the road. I don't know. She could be anywhere. But we were near the Big Pineapple.”

“Has she ever written you a letter?” asked Beth.

“How long ago did it happen?” asked Danielle, appalled.

“Do you know the address of the Big Pineapple?” I asked.

“Don't be stupid,” said Miranda. “As if the Big Pineapple has an address.”

We were sitting on the bank of the dry river in a long strip of shade cast by a white gum. The pale river stones reflected the sun. We had to cover our eyes. The hot blue sky weighed down on us.

“It might,” said Danielle quietly before Miranda cast her a glare from beneath her heavy bangs. Even Danielle, who was the Queen of Mean Stares from Beneath Bangs, couldn't equal her.

“I was seven,” said Miranda. “I got my stepmother a little bit after that.”

“You should try writing to her,” said Beth.

“Why?” asked Miranda. She seemed interested.

“I don't know. Because she's your real mum. She might be looking for you.”

Miranda laughed at that.

“Don't you get it?” she said. “She asked to be dropped off. She didn't want to stay in the caravan anymore.”

“Did you say goodbye?” asked Danielle.

“I was asleep,” said Miranda.

That made it even worse.

“Stop talking about it,” said Beth suddenly.

She looked at Danielle and me as though we were the cause of all the trouble.

“Let's look for the horses,” said Miranda.

We stood up to go, dusting the pale dirt from our bums.

“Not you two,” said Beth.

It was like a slap. I don't remember her being mean before that. It made Miranda smile. The smile unlocked something in Beth like a key.

Miranda slept at our house night after night. Mum asked her if she was sure her stepmother approved and Miranda assured her everything was fine. Miranda's stepmother worked late at the Imperial Hotel in the Blue Tongue Lounge Bar. Lounge bars have comfortable chairs instead of bar stools and Aunty Cheryl said certain types drank in them. Miranda didn't like staying at home with Kevin. She said he was annoying after a little while.

Miranda was good at sounding certain about things. Mum liked Miranda then. She liked her in a Christmas holidays type of way. She thought it would all be over once grade 9 began and Beth would be back to her normal self.

Beth's old grade 8 friends knocked on our front door. She received them sullenly. She stood with her arms folded without inviting them in. She answered in single words: yes, no, dunno, sure, maybe. Miranda waited in the living room with the pleased look on her face.

“I don't think I like the way you're behaving,” Mum said when Beth came back inside. “Why didn't you ask Tiffany in?”

“She didn't ask to come in,” said Beth. “She just wanted to say hello.”

“Well you should have offered.”

“I will next time.”

“That's not good enough.”

Miranda and Beth went to the bedroom and closed the door. When I knocked they told me to go away. If I told Mum and they were forced to let me in they made me sit at the bottom end of the bed.

“If you say a word I'll kill you,” said Beth.

Sometimes they sat on the floor and made friendship bands. The bands were made out of colored cotton and woven like the macramé that Mr. Willow taught in grade 7. They made lots of them. They sat cross-legged, heads bowed, blond hair and brown hair nearly touching, as they weaved. They didn't talk but sometimes looked at each other and laughed. Beth wore six and so did Miranda. They made them for each other to remind themselves that they were best friends. They wrote
FRIENDS FOREVER
in black pen on their arms.

Sometimes they braided each other's hair into hundreds of tiny braids. They used up whole packets of rubber bands. Sometimes they played records on the record player Beth had gotten for her thirteenth birthday. Sometimes they put black kohl on their eyes and rouge on their cheeks and practiced making their lips red by biting them. They pouted in front of the mirror. They compared their breasts. Beth's breasts still only fit into a training bra but Miranda wore real bras. If I giggled Beth put her finger to her lips.

Christmas came and went. The silver tinsel Christmas tree dropped its tinsel on the ground. Christmas
beetles the festive colors of anodized baubles flew into the patio light and banged against the walls. No matter how much Beth put them back on their feet they rolled over onto their backs. It is a well-known fact that Christmas beetles cannot be saved.