The Chantic Bird (17 page)

I settled in my bed. I was pretty tired, my eyes drooped. A kooka was on the verandah sill, his cocked head very still. I sat up in bed watching him, then when he pushed up into the air and flew away his windy wing flap startled me.

What with all that exertion I started on my old trick of getting sore eyes; I’m sure they were full of gravel and sand, they were so dry and irritated. I fell back on the pillow and shut my eyes and imagined I was in the bush looking down on a cold jutting rock, there was a great singer standing on it, don’t ask me how he got out here to this dead hole of a country, so I made him sing a very sentimental song that I’d heard come from an opera called the ‘Girlfishes’. I still seem to hear it now, and anytime I want my eyes irrigated I imagine that song, and it works. I’m very sentimental really. I can listen to a sad thing or something sentimental about someone’s kid, and the tears bubble up in my eyes. I can even imagine I’m listening to someone, in fact it’s better that way; with someone around, I have to think continually if they’re about to clobber me, or something. After all, I’d do the same if someone was silly enough to shut his eyes with me around.

The bed got more and more comfortable, my eyes didn’t sting any more and my head travelled back to Bee. Last time I was at the house she was on about the weather. Usually nothing ever worried her, but she carried on about what the scientists were not doing about the weather.

‘If they want different weather for Sydney, or any other place, why don’t they make it by putting up mountains and making more lakes. They can do it with their silly big bombs. They could make weather traps.’

I couldn’t talk for a little while. Bee didn’t usually say more than a few words, she was wound up that time. I asked her why she got so het up about weather, but she must have thought she’d said enough. She wouldn’t say any more, only that she’d been reading some books. It made me wonder, that sudden belt of talking, if the weather was what she was really worried about. Maybe she was worried about the kids. Or me.

What did Ma and my old man think they were doing? Did they get together some cold night when they were too tired and miserable to do anything else? Was it a last resort, before they cut their throats? Were they desperate? I’m glad I don’t know. I don’t really want to find out I’m the product of something so casual that I nearly didn’t happen.

Poor Ma. When she couldn’t get us to do what she wanted by asking, she thought she could hurt us by hurting herself. She never woke up that it was impossible. No one who looked at us and heard us talk would ever think we’d suffer to see anyone in pain. Even a mother.

The verandah creaked with the sun leaving it, just like it creaked mornings with the sun getting under its skin. The plastic sheeting under me, in case I wet the bed, creaked too.

Pretty soon nothing creaked. I was far gone in a dream. I was surrounded by this tree, full of prickles, this prickly tree had its arms round me so I couldn’t get out. I couldn’t call out for help because there was a great thorn under my chin and others on all sides of my head, in fact the more I looked round to explore the dream, the more thorns I found lined up on me. Some people came round the tree and I tried to signal them to get me out, but no matter how I moved I came up against these needle thorns. I couldn’t speak, couldn’t move, all I could do was move my eyes from side to side. That saved me. There was one man looking right into the tree, right at me, but it was dark and all he could see was a darkness. I was moving my eyes from side to side, trying to let the light flash on them, when I saw what they had in their hands. They were out to get me. Some had shotguns, some had mattock handles, some had axes, some knives, some just rocks. And now I looked closely they were all in uniforms. What had I done? I must have done something pretty terrible this time, but I couldn’t think what it was. I was stiff with fright, and woke up soaked. Sweat ran down the back of my head. The top of my back near the neck was all water, I was water everywhere.

I guess you could say I went to water. Nurses were round the bed when I woke, and there was a screen. I couldn’t even see any of the nasty patients, or the dying ones. I quieted down right away so they wouldn’t give me any needles to put me off. After dark they went away and took the screen. I was shaking and had pains all over me, but I went out. I knew I was the same person, with the same strength, no matter what condition I was in; all I had to do was prove it to myself.

What if that thing was happening to me now? The thing I always felt was just round the corner for me. Perhaps it was a sickness. I tried my strength on a fence, one of those wooden fences white with enamel paint. I had to dig my heels in at the edge of the concrete footpath and push with everything I had against that fence. It worked. I broke the fence and woke the people’s dog, but I walked on pretty happy, because it showed I hadn’t lost one bit of strength; I was only sweating because I was sick besides. I hate the sound of dogs barking, so I trotted on down the street to Edgeworth David Avenue and I was so happy I still had my muscles that I lifted the front end of a small car parked outside the corner shop so that the back was up to a street tree and the front nestled in behind a lamp-post. Whoever owned that would have to get help, unless he was strong as me. I had to breathe extra hard, though, but that’s not hard to understand when you remember I was sick.

I walked back to the hospital, I didn’t want to go home and give Bee or the kids whatever germs I had. The shivers got me before I got to my ward, it was hard walking, so I forced myself to trot again. That always made me feel better. Unfortunately I trotted into a wall just where I thought there was a long empty room. They carried me back inside.

That was nice of them. I asked them to carry me very carefully, so they wouldn’t break the bubbles. I was carrying a trayful of bubbles. The tray was about a foot wide and the bubbles were about two inches round, but the bubbles kept expanding, I had to keep my hands on them to try to stop them getting too big and beyond me. I tried to contain them. It was hopeless. They got bigger and bigger, they slipped through my fingers, they forced my hands wide apart, they were going to expand to the size of separate worlds. The tray was yards wide and I was way above them and much bigger, myself, to try to master them, but it was no use. No matter what way my dream twisted and turned and grew and tried to cope with the expanding bubbles, which were now like great balloons big enough to carry a man into the air, no matter what I did, the bubbles forced me back.

I came awake fighting for breath, although at the back of my mind I knew I wasn’t really suffocating.

‘Open the doors!’ I howled.

‘Open the doors and I can breathe!’ I kept on like that very loud for a long time until they had to call the house doctor and he tried to talk me out of it—he didn’t want anything like this getting to the ears of the local Board—but in the end all the doors in the hospital were opened. They tricked me, partly, because I know for sure that one door was closed without them telling me, but I must have been too tired to insist; I let them kid me. I went to sleep peacefully. It was great being able to breathe.

Maybe I’m only alive when I’m dreaming. I don’t know. But I could see our old goat plain as day in my dream, butting the little old fibro toilet down the yard, and I could hear Ma inside yelling help! I ambled down to pull the goat away and tie him up a bit further on where he could nibble the blackies in peace and on the way down the steps a terrific wind blew up and knocked next door’s toilet flat with only the pan standing. Black and shiny and squat. I know those things happened weeks apart but, dreaming, they both got in together.

Sure enough when I rescued Ma, it wasn’t Ma. It was Bee. So we went out all dressed up—no car so I had to take the train—and they held us up at the ticket office. Some old woman trying to get a ticket for his cat. He was tweedy and old and so was the cat. He should have shoved it in a shoe box with a few holes for air. I started to tell him this, but the words changed into asking Bee why she didn’t hang around more at home with her legs up like the girls in the magazines, but she took no notice and helped me onto the train, telling me to mind my step for I was now a small kid in white socks and short pants. We got to the ceremony in Sydney, they’d cleared the traffic off the Bridge and all the important people were there sweating in their dark clothes and all the workers were there and all the kids were there but they had light summer things and were quite comfortable.

It turned out there was a war starting and they had the ministers and priests blessing the flag, then blessing the soldiers’ bayonets and rifles—it took an awful long time—saying prayers and more blessings for the jet fighters and the navy ships and all their vehicles and all the servicemen and everything. At last they wheeled up a huge big bomb and blessed that, only they called it a device. Nuclear device. However the bomb was too much and the Bridge broke and everything sank except the children, who swam to shore. Luckily Bee was a small kid now, like me, and when we got to shore all we could see of the ceremony was a small piece of paper floating around in the harbour breeze. I knew without catching it, that it had the bomb formula written on, you know, the E equals MC squared bit we learned at school. Unfortunately one of the kids, his daddy must have been a general, rescued it and tried to drum up a bit of a procession with it, holding it up as if he’d found the holy grail. It was only paper, after all.

Then somehow we were in the sportsground with millions of other kids. One of the kids whose daddy was a minister before he sank, had taken over from his old man and organised a religious service. Talk out your troubles, he boomed over the PA system. So the kids all obeyed and talked out their troubles to each other, except no one listened, so they were talking to themselves—the row was tremendous. Sit and think, boomed over the mike, so everyone sat and thought. The leader’d had enough. But while it was quiet with only the noise of millions of kids breathing, the general’s son grabbed the mike off the other kid and yelled: Make the army your Korea! There were too many leaders for me. The big people sinking hadn’t changed a thing. Soon some bosses’ sons would get kids to follow them, other kids would take refuge in the army, everyone would be looking for someone to lean on, no one wanted to be his own boss.

I turned to go. I was about to ask Bee if she wanted to go, but she was only another sort of thing for me to lean on, so I was glad when I looked down and found she’d turned into a magazine and I was carrying her under my arm. But magazines were only another sort of thing to hide in, so I gave her to some little kids who looked lost.

The sound of a mower woke me, the sort a man sits on, and I woke up thinking of my old man and how his constant companions in his last years were the Bible and Yates Garden Guide. Don’t ask me why that got into my head after my crazy dream.

So there I was. Clapped out at sixteen and three-quarters. They set a wardsman in a brown uniform to watch me, and I was so weak in their rotten bed that I didn’t even object. For the first few days. Then it got to me that here was a uniform that had caught up with me and I started to worry. What if this joker had something to do with the others that had been following me?

I had to get out of there. When he went out for something I started to leave, but I was so weak on my pins I decided I’d better go back and put up with it until I was better.

The worst break I had in years, when I got back to the ward they strapped me down, rolled me onto a trolley, raced me down a corridor and down a ramp and whipped out my tonsils, just to teach me a lesson, and when I was back in bed the next day a kid I hadn’t seen for years or at least months visited me and gave me a swig out of his bottle of gin.

Sometimes everything in my chest swirls. I think I must have got away from that hospital too soon. They all had smiles on their faces, thinking of the lesson their surgeon taught me about not getting into the hands of anyone with some authority that you get from a piece of paper. I wonder if they had anything more to smile about? They didn’t tell me what they found out about me.

The best thing seems to be to take pretty deep breaths, not too quick, then relax and breathe out; if I force the breath out I get the thump in the chest. This way it’s only a tumbling in the chest, like the waves that hit the rocks then tumble and swirl about in the crevices and gaps as the sea sucks them out again for another attack. I was hiding up in a sort of loft inside the School of Arts, amongst the kids’ medicine balls and caretaker’s ladders and old advertising boards. You get to it by going in the room just inside the front door, the room with the sink and cupboards and the manhole in the ceiling. When you get up there you take the step-ladder with you, and also, if you don’t like dust, you take up a wet rag and wipe over everything. The loft thing projects into the main hall and has a wood decoration in front of it, so you can’t be seen from the stage, neither can the mess of wood and cardboard things.

If you’re hearing a steady stream of noise and something gets between you and the noise, you’ll notice the interruption. The gutter water in the street after the rain was dribbling its little quick song and I heard it suddenly cut in two. It hit me with a hard blow, I was liking the sound of that gutter water. A leg with a lot of bone in it hit the metal of a car, the venetians on the front windows of the School of Arts clattered as the door opened. An old man’s neck clicked. It was a society meeting, I had to lie low for a couple of hours, trying not to laugh at the things they said. They wouldn’t have liked the thought of a stranger listening to their minutes and their points of order and their votes and notices of motion.

They wouldn’t like me at all, and what that sort of people don’t like is bad. Very bad. Delinquent. They’re the ones that are always saying how bad the juvenile menace is growing. But nowadays there’s more juveniles, so naturally our output is up, but you can see from what I’ve told you that there are a lot of kids that don’t do much harm at all. I do enough for a couple of dozen.