The Chantic Bird (7 page)

Well, we fumigated the old man’s room soon as he went. Then a couple of us had a room to sleep in instead of out on the verandah. I saw a picture of his grave once, there’s another brother of mine takes more interest in these things than I do, but I didn’t realise how miserable it was to be dead until I saw the grave when we buried Ma. You see, we put her on top of him in the one grave. Everyone said it was a nice thing and they’d want it that way, but actually it saved money. After all, we were paying for it.

That beer must have a loosening effect, because before I went to sleep I had to make a toilet out of a dirt grave. There was no stone or grave marker, so there was no harm done, only this slightly raised mound of dirt with strong—sharp and prickly—weeds growing on it.

That was a funny thought. The sharp grass, I mean. We were playing football on Woollahra oval one day and there were mounds and some digging outside the dressing rooms, which were in the stand. Mounds with sharp grass. It was a funny thought, because there in the cemetery it reminded me of two things. That day I saw a kid I hadn’t seen since kindergarten in Russell Lea, a big tall kid who turned into a big tall man. Not all the big kids at school turned out big; some were much smaller than me, later. The other thing was, I saw that day a kid I hadn’t seen since one day in old Jack Dunleavy’s gym, a kid that came in and threw two hard rights into the heavy bag, then walked out. Later he was big-time, only he never turned pro. You actually get more glory when you stay amateur. I suppose it’s just that the papers give more space to you. When I say you, or me, I mean him, of course; he got more glory. I won’t, unless I do something spectacular. Or nasty. Which is easier.

When I stood up off the dirt grave, what should come into my head but the old neighbours we had and how quite a few of their sons never came back from the war. Some did, of course, but I reckon the best ones didn’t, to hear their mothers talk.

When I awoke next morning I had the urge to draw something. I scouted round and found a cigarette packet, opened it out flat and drew on the inside a little drawing of that part of the cemetery. Just a sketch, with tombstones reaching into the distance and all sorts of funny monuments with wings and angels. What I did, I pushed it down a crack in a crypt to give the residents an idea of where they were.

I had a nasty experience there. It didn’t start out nasty, but it got that way. It was a good day for a sunbake, so I stripped down to my underpants in a part of the cemetery that was very old and where no one came to visit. I put two bits of bark over my eyes because I don’t like being blinded by the glare, and stretched out on my back. Bark is better than pennies, pennies get hot; and a handkerchief stops all of your face getting brown. Anyway, there I was, sunbaking on my back and when I got tired of that, on my stomach, which was really the most restful position. Now I’ll tell you something you won’t like; I was on a nice flat concrete grave, very old, but good and warm in the sun. And here’s something else you won’t like; I was letting the flies tickle me. Flies were pretty bad then and if you kept them off your eyes and mouth there was no harm in them. In fact, I like them. There were so many, it was like four girls, one blonde, one red, one black and one honey colour, drawing their fingernails softly over my skin. Their little fly feet had a kind of magic in them. Believe me, they’re not as black as they’re painted.

The reason the slab was warm, though, was that the earth had gone from under it. The blasted thing cracked under me, and I dropped down a bit over a foot. To cap it all, the headstone, one of those four-foot things, but thin in the old-fashioned style, fell inwards over me. Luckily it cracked at the base and I took some of the weight of it as soon as it started to fall. It was heavy as lead and tried to press me down into the grave and it took all I had to push it off me and get out of the hole. It frightened the flies away for a few seconds.

Then I noticed a man riding round and round on a bike. He had a sort of working uniform on, so I knew he was probably after me. It was time I wasn’t there. I escaped, whistling, and do you know what I whistled?,

When I was young and had no sense,

I took a young girl behind the fence…

There was a fence round that oval where I took that young girl with the long brown hair. She didn’t have apple-cheeks, she was pale and had a sort of long face, but boy, she had a big chest.

I often think to myself: Why did they do it and have me?

I get the feeling there’s something waiting for me in the future. I don’t know whether to say it will be good or bad and I daresay it doesn’t matter, but it’s more likely to be bad because good things don’t often happen. I get no kick out of life, anyway.

As I vaulted the school fence—this was a long way from my cemetery—I remember I was humming to myself, Things were crook at Tallarook and there was no work at Bourke…I’m no expert, but I think that’s a big part of our sprawly old country’s history; things were crook. A truck boomed down a couple of gears round the corner and started to scream up the hill with its head down. The headlights were on high beam and they nearly blinded me. I can’t stand brilliant lights when I’m in the dark. And I hate being illuminated.

There were plenty of times I wanted to wreck a school, but not because I had anything against them; I used to like school except for obedience. They used to give you points for doing what someone else said; I liked that about as much as a dog’s bottom likes turps, and it affected me about the same. There was a wind in the wires that night; if anyone lit a school on a night like that all the fire brigades in Sydney couldn’t stop it. Not that that says much.

Anyway, this wind whipping through the street wires covered me while I got inside. You know, all they ever tried to do was to teach us how to work for a boss, doing what you’re told. And how to count his money and not do anything that would make him lose money. I suppose that sounds pretty all right to you; you’re brought up to think that’s the way things have to be. But they don’t. All I have to do is get on my shoulderblades and look up at the sky and the clouds and I can think of lots of ways the world could be. But you wouldn’t be interested, you couldn’t go against what they taught you. And it wouldn’t make you any happier.

I was in the part of the school where they teach the very young kids. There was a machine in the corner used for printing some of the guff they fed the kids. I looked at some of it and it wasn’t as good as what they can get on TV, in the cartoons. Looking round the rooms, I felt a bit like I did when I lived next to Rosehill school, looking over the fence at a lot of kids racing round the sloping playground and wondering how it was there were so many other kids in the world. I gave the machine a belt; the silly things they were telling the kids took on a twisted shape like the metal I hit. Now they might have to take the kids outside and show them the world, instead of kidding them you could put the world on paper with a pencil and sort of tame it, cut it up and move the bits around where you wanted, all on paper.

Some of the kids’ drawings were on the walls. The boys drew clumsy trucks—I thought of when we went out into the country, we used to stand up in the back of the truck, shooting at anything that moved; you could find your way back home by the shine of brass cartridge cases—and both boys and girls drew animals. A blue picture of kittens switched my head back to when I used to have to drown bags of cats. The old man didn’t like doing it and he didn’t like giving them to me because he used to reckon I liked doing it; if you liked it, that was bad; the best thing was to hate it and do it without any fuss. Some crazy world. At my first job in a big factory, we had a telephone mechanic that used to hammer them. When we were one cat over, or if the cat we had did something he didn’t like, he got out this great big hammer. The funniest thing was watching them run, after you clocked them. He used to be proud of his method and talk about it to the office girls, although he remembered to look sad and apologise for the poor pussy. If I had a hammer, I could have killed just as many as him, but he always made me beg him for the hammer.

My first kill was a long, thin tabby cat, with a high domed head. A natural target. I hit it fair and square between the ears, it dropped, spun round like a Catherine wheel, then got up. It charged across the room, hit the wall and charged back. It kept on doing this about six times and gave me time to swallow the extra spit that comes into my mouth when I hit something that hasn’t got a chance. Morgan hit it again, just to show I couldn’t do it right, but it was dead on its feet. Anyway, there wasn’t anyone else there to see if I’d done it wrong, but Morgan corrected me just the same. A lot of people are like that. I can’t stand it. The stormwater drain was just outside; that’s where we threw the cats. I almost made myself a promise to do the same for Morgan as I did for the cat, and see if he ran about after he was dead. But I wasn’t sacked then, so I didn’t feel so much against everyone.

I wrote a few things on the blackboard, because I knew they had girl teachers for the littlies, but then I looked round the room and saw in the light of the street globes the bits of drawings on the desks, and the nature table where the kids had their bottled snakes, the fish tank, and the rocks and birds’ eggs, and up at the paintings the kids did and the remains of some careful writing where the teacher was showing them how to write, and it all looked so pathetic, as if they really wanted the kids to like going there, and so poor, as if the teachers knew there was no money for real decorations and bright things and got the kids to make their own—there was nothing on the floor, only the bare boards—honest, it was so harmless and well-meant that I couldn’t do it. I thought of Stevo seeing what I was going to write and I got rid of the chalk. I nearly picked it up again when I saw a picture on the wall of a woman who didn’t smile, but looked very confident. She looked clean, I won’t say that, but it was the clean look of not ever having to do any work. She was the sort of sheila that took no trouble to make you like her. I took it down, smashed the glass carefully, and put her back on the wall. At least she could take the same chances as the kids’ drawings and collect her share of flydirt and get dog-eared at the same rate as everything else.

I picked up a small pile of catty-looking rags the teacher must have used for wiping things and rubbed out my chalk words, then hung the rags like a tattered garland round the shoulders of the picture that I’d equalised. That’s what I call it, equalising. Like death, lopping the lot to one size.

Out of the corner of my eye I caught a movement in a house about two hundred yards away. There was a bluish light in one window where the TV was, but the movement came near one of the dark windows. I gave up wrecking the school and climbed out of the window, keeping my eyes on the movement.

It was a kid. He’d got out of the window and closed it very slowly, with no noise. I got there, along the grass part of the footpath, just as he finished closing the window. I had to nip over a low fence to hide when he came towards me. He walked on the grass, too, pretty satisfied with himself and in no hurry. He had no coat on, so when I got to the house I took mine off. I knew there was a girl in bed in that room, maybe without a coat she’d mistake me for him. I did what he did, in reverse, but when I got in, she was fast asleep, so I got in the bed beside her and in her sleep she got used to the warmth of me. Probably she forgot he’d gone, or thought he’d come back, because for the next forty-five minutes my name was Greg. She was too lazy with sleep to do anything spectacular, but I got what I came for.

You had to laugh. The parents were inside watching a television programme while their daughter was being raped in her bed. I had one bad moment. Her wrist clicked and made a sound when there should have been no sound. Bear in mind, too, that I was taking a risk; they could have had any old disease for all I knew. You have to give me credit for that. Why, I could have been alive with crabs that same night. She hadn’t bothered to have a shower before she let Greg in, but the chances are she’d be clean. The house looked neat enough, although you can’t always tell from that.

Whoever set up this circus must be laughing. Whoever made a joker like me must have had funny moods. Here I am, wanting no one to be above anybody else, and yet I want to have nothing to do with the mob. Any mob.

I picked out a big pile of wheat sacks to camp in that night, in the yards of a flour mill. I thought I had a battle on my hands for one moment there. What might have been a watchman came through the yard at me, I thought he had a uniform, but he was only cutting through the yard to go to the car park, and it was only a pen pusher’s uniform. Something flaps inside me when I’m about to clobber somebody. A wide, loose, flapping feeling in the bottom of my stomach, but only when I get angry.

The top of the pile was where I slept. I took out some of the middle sacks, built some walls round me down where it was warm, and pulled one over the top for a roof.

You know, I wouldn’t like to get caught. They might cure me of doing what I like. If I could just live long enough to give myself a chance to get tired of living. I wedged myself in amongst the bags and took a sight through my roof at the stars.

I was standing on something that didn’t push back up with any pressure on my feet; I guess I was floating, standing up. The place was wide and dark, like a big lawn at night. There were fountains arching up and curving down, neon lights all colours shining in the water and in the mist floating away from the edge of the fountain jets and floating away up and over from the part of the stream where it loses height and breaks up, floating very cool down over the black skin of water shining with the colour you can’t make out, smearing and running down the sides of tall glass buildings that caught with their edges and curves the full play of the lights of green and gold and blue and white and purple and amber. Nothing happened, not while I watched. There was no one there; I don’t even think I was there. And it was cold. I came to a big monument with a statue of a man looking up at the sky and a plaque underneath. The plaque said, ‘I hope only that with the short time available to us before this planet perishes, we shall be able to penetrate the surrounding darkness and make it possible for a precious few of our descendants to escape to another home for the human race, there to perpetuate a faint memory of those of us who rose from the slime and stood erect, in time to see the decay of our planetary system and our own imminent danger.’