The Chantic Bird (10 page)

‘Come and get on the end of this bat!’ I yelled, and out she came. She was all right, too. Her brothers were all cricketers.

‘When I grow up, I just want a good wife who won’t yell at the kids,’ said Stevo. That flummoxed Bee. She went over and put his head against her stomach—actually it went a little way into her stomach; she had a very soft one—and patted him. That flummoxed Stevo. Funny thing, when you looked close at it, his skin had much the same patterns mine had. Mine had more brown, that’s all. The game stopped. Bee went inside and made some jelly for the kids. I showed the kids how to tie Allie up without hurting her.

‘You can’t tie up Bubba. Her my best friend.’ Stevo was firm. Another game gone west. Bee started stirring the jelly, you could hear it easily. Stevo raced in to help.

‘Ha, red jelly and green jelly. I like jelly.’

‘That’s not green, that’s yellow,’ said Bee,

‘Yellow, is it? All right, that’ll do,’ said Stevo. The colour of the red jelly was just the colour of the thumb I saw a butcher cut off one afternoon at Parramatta while I watched in his window.

So while I had nothing to do I told him about living. You know what I mean, you had to explain to kids, the way my parents didn’t, that there’s a time before each of us lived, a time while we live and a time after we live. A lot of miserable people think a lot too much about the hellishing big time after we live, but it’s just as long a time before we lived, so what’s the difference?

‘Where was I before I was in Mummy’s tummy!’ Stevo buttonholed me.

‘Wouldn’t have a clue, Stevo,’ I admitted. ‘But the point is, once upon a time there was no Stevo, now there is a Stevo, and one time later there won’t be any Stevo.’

‘Will you be gone too?’ he observed.

‘I’ll be gone long before you, matey,’ I emphasised. ‘Like the trees. Dogs up the street. The mossies. This house. There’s a time before everything was, then a time for it to live, then it ups and dies.’

‘Does everything have a turn?’

‘Everything that gets here has a turn. A turn to be born, and when it’s time to die, it dies. A house falls to bits.’

‘And dogs leave their chin-bones down the bush,’ he added. We’d come across part of a dog skull on a rubbish heap near the scouts’ camp.

‘Sure,’ I agreed. ‘Trees fall down. Mossies get slapped. Houses get bulldozed or you put a match to them.’

Bee didn’t mind me talking to him. I could tell she wanted me to take more notice of the kids. I suppose there will come a time when they roll her down with the Rookwood clay, or some other clay, and what was once a person will become a nothing. But Stevo was thinking, too.

‘Daddy, a lot of things trouble me.’

‘Don’t think about it,’ I advised. ‘Come and have a shot with your gun.’

He got out his BB gun and we took it outside and blasted away fiercely at a book my old man left behind. It was a book of Kipling stories with nice thick paper that didn’t make the BB’s go oval. You could use them again. I taught him little things like that in case I wasn’t always there to pinch bullets for him. And guns. I think it’s better if they don’t know where the goodies come from, but you’ve got to make sure they’re not altogether helpless in case some bottle or bullet or drunken bum takes you off stage before you expect to go.

Stevo was really getting the idea of guns. You should have seen him, with one eye shut tight and the other straining to line up the sights. He was too young to get him to relax. It made me feel a better bloke to see him getting fierce and strong and joyful, and aiming straight.

And the things he said! When the phone rang—when I was ringing up Bee—and there was a letter came for me, which wasn’t often, he yelled over the phone, ‘Here’s a letter for you, look!’ And when the day was narrowing down to a last few things to be put away, with bed next, he would say, ‘Put things away! Put things away! Why I have to do all these jobs?’ I liked him saying those things you wouldn’t expect to hear any old time, especially times when he was cranky at having to do something. He was like me. As soon as anyone wanted to tell me what to do or how to do it, that was the finish. I knew what had to be done and I knew what I wanted to do. Other people might not like it, but they weren’t me.

Stevo was a good kid when he knew what he did pleased Bee.

‘Now we’ll get Bubby to bed,’ Bee would say.

‘All right. If that’s the way you want it.’ That was Stevo. I suppose I don’t really want him to get like me. Some of the things I believe in wouldn’t help him. Like idleness. You know, not doing the sort of things the authorities like. Idleness, the way I do it, is a counterpunch to all their rush; they’re going nowhere anyhow, the real important work in this world is done inside people, with no one watching. Besides, I can never stop hearing a sort of inside laughter that tells me beyond the next heart beat there may be nothing.

When we’d fixed him up with some hot water to splash about in, Bee told me something he said that day. She’d been trying to get them dressed first thing that morning and she didn’t feel too bright, but she tried not to yell and screech at them.

Stevo remarked to her, ‘Sometimes when you talk it’s like crying.’ She thought that was pretty funny. I did too.

After their bath, Bee made me listen to the Chantic Bird. Made me. Stevo went over it all from the start, about the china palace and the garden of a thousand miles and the foreigners who came and praised everything, but praised the Chantic Bird, most of all. And how no one in the tinkling palace knew where to find the bird with the chantic song.

How did she make me listen? Stevo was getting into his stride and there was a very bright sort of light over his face because when he smiled he smiled with his whole face, and he didn’t see what Bee was up to. But she’d walk in and out, listen a bit, stop, turn around, and come back. It kept me off balance. Usually she knew where she was going, exactly. She went straight to something and what she did was definite. I suppose I’m a bit like a wild animal, sort of on the look out for aimless movements, signs of bewilderment, the sort of vagueness and weakness that I could move in on, and I’d say she knew it. But what got me even more than seeing her not know what she was about, was the sight of her pretty pink heels. She had on these skimpy little slippers—she didn’t have great sheila’s feet; she was small and neat, with no twists and burred over toes—and the slippers showed her clean feet, all pink, a very delicate pink, and it got me. Mostly she dressed right up to the neck, it seemed to me, compared to the sluts I was used to, but now she’d scraped off her lip colouring and pulled her hair back from her ears and the white part of her neck under her hair. I could have eaten any part of her. And when she passed near me she suddenly let loose her hair and I was suffocated in honey gold.

That’s how she made me sit and listen. When I say sit and listen I actually mean just listen, because I don’t sit for very long, I have to move around, even if it’s only from one foot to another. I guess I think I’ll be fixed in one spot if I stop for too long.

Stevo was up to the part where they asked the kitchen maid and she said, ‘Yes. I know the Chantic Bird very well. She lives by the sea and when she sings, the tears come in my eyes.’

‘Silly girl,’ they said. ‘Take us to the bird, the King must hear it.’ On the way, the officials heard cows mooing and thought that was the bird; they heard frogs and said, ‘That’s the bird.’ But they only thought they knew what they were listening to. Then the Chantic Bird sang, and the girl pointed to her proudly. But all they saw was a little grey bird. The Chantic Bird sang beautifully, but they were not impressed; they were disappointed she didn’t have pretty feathers.

‘Will you sing for the King?’ said the kitchen maid.

‘Yes,’ said the Bird, ‘but I’d sooner stay in the green trees by the sea.’

Pretty soon, when Bee thought Stevo had had a fair crack of the whip, she made herself scarce. She knew I’d go if there was nothing solid to stay for. I told Stevo that was enough for that night and I’d see him tomorrow. He got a sort of questioning look in his eye like when his leg got burned, just before the pain hit him.

I’m always doing that. I suppose my brother that died must have looked at me like that when I’d visit him once in a blue moon, then go after five minutes. I was there when he died, though. If I could have got to him later when his face was setting, I would have changed his expression into something fierce and knowing, and got rid of his bewildered and helpless look.

Thinking about these things shoots me. Personal integrity, the value of work, consideration for others, good manners, all the things Stevo was learning, all the things my brother’s death and my parents’ death made me think of, I know they’re good and all that. But sometimes I can’t stand them. Thinking of them makes me want to spew. The ideas I get to trick people and do what I like, I bet the ordinary bloke only gets those ideas when his woman Noes him or when sickness, accident or death back him up against a wall.

I got back near my tent. I hung around a while before going right up to it, because of natural animal caution. Just as well, too. A man and a woman were standing a hundred yards away and I could see they were edging near it, looking for a place to lie down. I let them go, so what? I didn’t even feel like sneaking up on them. They looked around a lot and at last ducked their heads and went in. The sides flapped, I guess they were taking their clothes off. That made me curious, so I crept up on them, but I wasn’t really feeling like it.

Sure enough, they had their clothes off and what they were doing would make you laugh. There I was, sixteen and three-quarters, and I knew how to do properly what they were trying to get round to. The woman at the riding school that got me into the 69 club was an Einstein compared to these bunglers.

Suddenly I was disgusted. I wouldn’t admit it to myself, but the sight of Bee’s pinkness still had me. If I couldn’t have her, why should these old lovers have any peace? I eased the pegs out of the ground till they were all holding by an inch, then when I was ready I lifted the main stay right out of the ground and let go. Canvas collapsed over them. I walked away, I knew they couldn’t chase me naked. Besides, I didn’t feel like running, for once.

I was still in the bush when this feeling closed round me, just like the tent closed round the man and woman. I had sense enough to get off the main track on to a tiny clearing where I could get off my feet. Suddenly I’ve got no energy and all I want to do is sleep.

All of a sudden, on my way out to the jetty, I got these big thumps in the chest. I had to stop and bend over, breathing in like mad, but I didn’t seem to get any air. Something was certainly twisted in there. I didn’t feel funny in the head, so I must have been getting blood up there all right, just a mix-up in the chest. I leaned, I sat down, I sat back, I lay flat. While the swirling got dizzier in my chest, I straightened up, lifting my head and saw a cloud in the sky and the little patch of cloud I was looking at seemed to rush down into my eyes so that wherever I turned my head all I could see was the thick of a cloud. I don’t know how long it lasted, but you’ve got to take your mind off yourself, so I looked round the sky and the clouds, trying to imagine the whole of the universe. The water sounds, lapping at the crusty old piles of the jetty, were silly compared to the silence you could see right up there as far as eye-power could take you. I realised I was nothing, dumped on a putrid mound of nothing, ready to get under the mound as soon as I am putrid, too.

Is it a sort of happiness that moves the sun and the stars? There must be a lot of things that words can’t stretch enough to fit round. There must be a lot of words waiting to be born to attach themselves to things we feel are near us. I rubbed my chest a bit, but I soon stopped rubbing and thinking. A piece of my fingernail had got split at the edge and it kept catching in my nylon shirt. It got me on edge so much I had to get up and tell myself I felt a lot better. What I did, I took this boat out and rowed it round the point till I got to another bay and when I saw a fishing boat that had just got in, tied up at a wharf and the men gone ashore for a drink before they unloaded, I found a thing to do. I put the fish that moved over the side and let them swim away. I left enough for the men’s dinner, allowing enough for two men.

That didn’t make me feel much better, though, because that hangnail kept getting in my shirt, or catching in the ropes or in the canvas. It nearly drove me mad.

The boat I pinched wouldn’t be used or missed until the weekend, so in the meantime it was an ark for me, somewhere to rest and sleep in the sun. Late afternoons, though, heading it into the sun, I was a Viking in a Viking ship and I stood up front. I know you call the front the bow and a boat is a she, but that’s when you’re tied to the sea. I couldn’t have cared less about the sea or the boat, even though I liked it for a few days, so I didn’t reckon it was right to pretend to a love for it that I didn’t have. I know that’s a funny sort of way to be honest, but I’d rather be honest to myself than to anyone else.

I got the hangnail down, rubbing it flat on the wood at the edge of the boat, where the paint had come off.

I put in where there was about fifty yards of beach, and walked up to a pub to have a few beers. There were some kids around my age and big like me, so I got talking to them. But the noise kept getting louder and louder, heads were beginning to spin and barmaids starting to short-change the drunks, and one of the kids started falling off his bar stool and when they went out for some fresh air and gave a driving lesson to one that couldn’t drive, I could see I ought to clear out, since I liked the boat I’d pinched and didn’t have any use for their utility truck. What they did, they started up and the one at the wheel was so drunk he headed straight for the little cliff they had there just above the water. To get that far, he had to go between two big gums and miss another one, so I jumped off the back. When they stopped and went through a little white fence that was a memorial to some locals who got killed in the war and knocked the statue in half at the legs so there were just these two legs standing up, and one of them who’d been asleep in the back got out and saw what had happened and threw up his fish and chips on the grass out of giddiness, I off.