Bird and Sugar Boy

by Sofie Laguna

  Animal got his name from riding his motorbike like an animal in the old bikie days. I can’t think of any animal that would want to ride a motorbike, but it means that he rode it very fast, turned a lot of tricky corners and crossed the double yellow lines. Animal can bend his thumb right back to his wrist. He has a different limp for both legs. One knee has a hinge inside, and he has a metal bit in his back to hold him up. He’s got a tattoo of live to ride on his arm as well. Uncle Garry reckons he should’ve got ride to die.

  Dad did a barbecue for dinner with pork sausages and plum sauce, and fish. Him, Garry, Animal and Carby talked about the difference between Japanese cars and cars from America. Garry, Animal and Carby were on the side that said cars from Japan weren’t any good and Dad was on his own side saying, well, at least they’re bloody reliable. Lena did the salads and played cards with me. After dinner the guys played pool. Uncle Garry got Dad a second-hand pool table for his birthday. It’s in the living room now instead of the dining-room table, which got moved into the back shed. They all knew Carby’d win, but they played anyway, and at the end of the game they always shook his hand, then gave him a pretend punch in the stomach. Carby laughed and pretended it hurt. Mostly if there’s ever people over, which isn’t that much, we have barbies and eat on the back verandah.

  I like it when Lena and Uncle Garry and the boys come round for dinner because suddenly there are other voices in the house, different laughs, different bodies sitting and walking and moving in different ways – not just Dad and me. After Garry, Lena and some of the boys have been over, the house feels like a wind has gone through it and moved everything round, even though everything’s in exactly the same place as it was before, except maybe there are more empty beer cans and pizza boxes than usual.

  It was Monday morning at Denham Public. ‘Sugar Boy! Pass it!’ Sugar threw me the tennis ball as Mrs Naylor turned to face the whiteboard to write down the names of the countries in Scandinavia. The ball landed on Jacky Jane’s desk, knocking her pencils onto the floor. Sugar plays soccer, not football, so he’s not so good at passing.

  ‘Craig!’ Jacky whispered, loud enough for Mrs Naylor to hear. Jacky Jane’s father is the mayor of Denham Shire and she’s smart because she reads a lot of different books all the time. I never talk to her. The only books I like to read are Birds: A Field Guide by A P Davies, and Illustrated Birds of the World and Birds at Risk from the reference section in the library. When Mrs Naylor heard the tennis ball hit Jacky’s desk she swung round.

  ‘Craig Hill, did you throw that?’ Mrs Naylor is someone with a name that fits – she’s sharp and thin, up and down, without shapes or curves. Her eyes are like the heads of two dark nails, and they can nail you right to the back wall of the classroom. That’s where she nailed Sugar when the tennis ball rolled into the tip of her brown shoe.

  ‘Yes, Mrs Naylor. Sorry, Mrs Naylor.’

  ‘The classroom is not a football field. You should know better, Craig,’ she said, picking up the ball and putting it on her desk. ‘Jacky, are you alright?’

  ‘Yes, Mrs Naylor.’ Jacky kept her eyes on the book in front of her.

  Didn’t Mrs Naylor mean tennis court? Should I correct her the way she corrects me in front of everyone? Should I say, ‘Mrs Naylor, don’t you mean the classroom is not a tennis court since that’s what he threw to me, a tennis ball, not a football?’

  I was walking through the kitchen at Sugar Boy’s house, after school, when I heard Sue Hill, Sugar’s mother, on the telephone to her neighbour, Carole. ‘Oh, I know, Carole … I know … James and Craig are together way too much … neither of them seem interested in other friends … he’s a handful … I think he’s a bad influence on Craig … I’d need eyes in the back of my head … well, what do you expect when his role models are so rough round the edges … bikies! Oh, Carole, I know … the last thing I need …’

  I kept walking into the living room where I couldn’t hear Sue Hill on the telephone anymore. I stood in the middle of the room and stared up at a painting of Sugar’s grandmother that was hanging over the fireplace. If your edges are rough, what does that make the rest of you? Is it the edges or the middle you have to worry about? Sugar’s grandmother stared back down at me in her pink cardigan with her mouth shut tight. I walked out to the back room where Sugar was waiting. We were in the middle of Play Station.

  ‘Hurry up! The Champions of Norron have just got twelve of your men.’

  I captured fifteen of Sugar’s warlords before Sue Hill put her head round the door. ‘Your father will be wanting you home, James. Off you go.’ She stood there waiting to make sure I left right then.

  Sue Hill is usually too busy with Sugar’s little brother, Chris, to notice me and Sugar too much. Chris has got a breathing condition – like asthma, but worse. Sue Hill has to stay home all day making sure he gets the air in, or maybe he gets it in, but she has to stay home helping him to let it out. And she has to make sure that Chris doesn’t get an allergy because allergies mean he has to go to hospital. Sue Hill has to make sure that no germs get up his nose. It’s a big job and she’s always tired and stressed from it.

  Sugar’s baby sister, Madeline, keeps Sue Hill busy too. Madeline will only wear pink or white, and if you try and put another colour on her she lies on the floor, kicks her legs up and down, spits at you and screams, ‘I’m a fairy! I’m a fairy!’ She won’t move until Sue Hill says she’ll watch her do a ballet show. Sometimes Sue Hill makes Sugar and me watch the ballet show too.

  I found Birds: A Field Guide by AP Davies when I was eight. I was in the op shop with Dad because we needed something to make me look like a pineapple for the school concert, which was about the five food groups. Dad was looking for green clothes that could be the top of the pineapple. The other kids were getting their costumes sewn by their mothers, but Dad said if he couldn’t find it at the op shop it couldn’t be found anywhere, and he’d fix a fuel lead but he wasn’t going to start bloody sewing.

  My dad’s a single parent. Single parents have to do everything on their own, including having a job, doing the housework, getting dinner on the table and turning you into a pineapple. This means they have high stress levels. High stress levels keep you from smiling or singing along to the radio or just deciding to go fishing without too much planning.

  I went over to the toy section of the op shop and picked up a broken model of a World War II fighter plane from off the shelf. Underneath it I saw a book that must have been left there by mistake. It was called Birds: A Field Guide. On the cover was a bird with a round, bright yellow body, green wings and a shining blue patch on her chest like a bib. She was perched on a branch with two dollars written in pencil underneath. That blue-bibbed bird looked at me and in her dark eye was the shine of a smile that said, James Burdell this is the book for you. My heart missed one beat. I didn’t know what to do because I didn’t want Dad to see me getting that book.

  My dad likes big things – he likes engines and mechanics and things that work with the aid of the human hand. He doesn’t need to draw feathers or think about beaks and how they hold onto the food. It’s not what a person who knows about the way things actually are needs to do. ‘You’re a big dreamer, James. Don’t fall into that trap. Stick with reality – it’s the way things are.’ My dad says this to me a lot. Big dreams are the way I want things to be – reality is the way things actually are. It’s important to understand, the difference.

  But maybe it was the sort of thing that if my mother hadn’t shot through I might show her. I might say, ‘Since you’re not shooting through, Mum, I want to tell you about birds. Here, look at my drawings. Dad doesn’t understand, does he, Mum?’

  I don’t know what my mother’s big dreams were, but I’m pretty sure they didn’t involve Dad or me or Denham Shire (where we live) because she shot through when I was a toddler. That’s what I heard Dad say to Uncle Garry one night when the rest of the street was sleeping and all the beer was drunk and the possums had come down into
the low branches for leftovers. I was awake and looking out my open window through pretend binoculars for the sooty owl who is shy and rare, when I heard my dad say that one thing, loud and clear when everything else was muffled. ‘She shot through, Garry. She didn’t give me any choice. What was I supposed to do?’

  Shooting through … it sounds like it leaves a bullet-sized hole that goes right through to the other side of something. In my mother’s case it was right through to the other side of the world. She moved back to England to patch things up with Husband Number One, and Dad and me don’t hear from her. I looked on the globe at school for England. There’s a lot of different countries and seas between Denham Shire and England.

  This all happened a long time ago and now I only remember one thing and that’s the smell of wool when it’s wet. I don’t know why. I only know that when I smell the smell of wool when it’s wet I get a feeling of this lady – my mother. I’m sure it’s her.

  Back in that op shop, I wanted to stroke the green wings of the bird on the cover of Birds: A Field Guide by AP Davies. I wanted to look inside at what other birds there might be, but I didn’t – not then. I wanted to be by myself when I did that.

  I looked around the shop. Mrs Neville, the lady who runs the op shop, was helping Dad in the clothing section. They weren’t looking at me. I stuffed the book under my jumper and walked down the back to the curtains-and-towels section and I hid that book right at the bottom of a pile of faded brown curtains that I hoped nobody would buy.

  Dad found four pairs of green ladies’ stockings that he said we could tie to my head and fill the legs with old newspaper for the green bits of the pineapple, and we left the shop. All night at home, while I half-watched the TV and half-helped Dad stuff the green stockings, I thought about the bird with the round yellow body and shining blue bib, sitting at the bottom of the pile of faded brown curtains that I hoped nobody would buy.

  In the morning I got two dollars from the glove box of the ute where Dad throws all his change. Then after school, when Sugar Boy said, ‘Bird, do you want to go to the ditch?’ I said, ‘No can do, Sugar. Dad’s given me jobs.’ Maybe when I got home I’d do a job for Dad so it wouldn’t be a lie.

  I rode my bike as fast as I could to the op shop and walked straight down to the curtains-and-towels section. My book was still there! Mrs Neville put Birds: A Field Guide by AP Davies into a crumpled plastic bag, smiled at me and said, ‘God my maker giveth songs in the night. That’s birds.’ I smiled back at her and said, ‘Thanks.’

  I went home to my room and closed the door.

  Birds: A Field Guide was filled with every kind of bird, starting with the black-browed albatross and finishing with the yellowlegs. The bird on the cover was called a sunbird and its favourite place to live was a rainforest. A P Davies said it on page 280.

  In the back of the book it said, AP Davies has been observing, drawing and painting birds since he was eight years old. The same age as me. AP Davies was my first bird friend.

  By the time we were in Grade Four some of us rode our bikes round the ditch. The ditch is this big valley – only not so big as a valley, more like a ditch. If you ride really hard into the ditch you could get lift-off riding up the other side and you’d be in midair for a minute. Mostly only the guys in Grade Seven got a lift-off, while we used to ride where the ditch wasn’t so deep and do smaller wheelies. The Grade Sevens didn’t like us riding near them. One day I said to Dean Orbs and Tony Torucci, ‘Let’s go to where the Sevens hang out.’ Dean started saying how he had to get home actually, and Tony pretended he hadn’t heard. Sugar Boy stepped forward and he said, ‘Come on, Bird! Let’s go!’

  Nobody had called me that before. My name’s Burdell. James Burdell. It gave me a surprise when he called me that – Bird … James Burdell, Bird … Birdy … When Sugar Boy called me that I liked him more than before because it was as if he knew me, even though he didn’t because I hadn’t told him. ‘Let’s show the Sevens how it’s done!’ he shouted, then he took off ahead of me, riding straight for the deepest part of the ditch and calling out ‘Biiiirrrrdddd!’ I had to race to keep up with him. He went charging into the ditch shouting, ‘Out of our way!’ His front wheel slammed straight into the bank and he went flying off his bike through the air and landed on his face in the mud. Simon Shelley and Dave Briggs in Grade Seven were laughing at him, but he stood straight up with mud all through his hair and on his cheek and chin and a drip of blood coming from his nose, and he shouted at them, ‘Now you try that!’ We were always together from then on, and Sugar Boy always called me Bird, as if he knew.

  Dad was cleaning the kitchen when I came down this morning. He was stressed and in a bad mood. A bad mood shrinks my dad’s eyes. I poured some cornflakes into a bowl and started to eat. ‘Do you have to make so much noise, Jamie?’ Dad said, while he shuffled through a pile of papers at the kitchen table.

  ‘Well, I can’t suck it up through a straw!’

  ‘Put the kettle on and don’t be a smart arse.’ I put the kettle on. Then there were just the sounds of sipping and slurping and the radio saying there was an earthquake in Japan. Dad doesn’t talk much in the mornings. He’s thinking how to get someone’s car fixed and about making ends meet. Sometimes I think the ends are just hanging, looking for each other but never finding each other, just swinging dangerously in the wind. Like electrical chords that belong in the wall.

  Dad finished his cup of tea and turned off the radio. ‘You doing all your work at school?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Not what I’ve heard.’

  I slurped back the last bit of milk from my bowl of cereal. ‘I have to go, Dad. I don’t want to be late for class.’

  ‘Be good, Jamie.’

  ‘Yep.’ I grabbed my school bag.

  ‘Listen to your teachers. Concentrate. Stop either dreaming or mucking around or doing whatever the hell is pissing them off so much, okay?’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘And I want you home when I get back.’

  ‘Sure, Dad.’ I ran down the hall and left the house.

  I wonder sometimes if the reason Dad wants me home is because he doesn’t like coming back to an empty house. I don’t like coming back to an empty house, either. It’s all right if Sugar is with me, but if he’s not, I sit in Dad’s TV chair and try and remember my mother’s face.

  ‘Dad,’ I shouted from the kitchen, ‘have you seen my science project?’ Dad couldn’t hear me. He was sanding on the back verandah. ‘Dad!’ No answer, only the scrape scrape scrape of sandpaper.

  I was looking through piles of letters and newspapers and Auto Weeklies on the kitchen table when I saw a letter from Denham Public School to Dad. I knew it was from school because at the top of the page it said, Denham Public School: A Community of Learning Since 1981. I picked up the letter.

  Dear Mr Burdell

  We feel it would be timely to have a talk with you about James’s progress in class. James is a bright boy, but he is showing increasingly disruptive tendencies, making it difficult for other students, and teachers are growing concerned. As you know, we have discussed solutions to James’s behavioural problems in the past, but we feel another meeting is due. I look forward to hearing from you, to arrange a time.

  Regards,

  Geoffney Brooks

  School Principal

  After I read that letter I didn’t feel like doing my science project anymore, even though it was about the seasons and how winter becomes spring, and what happens to the fauna. I went outside and kicked stones at the Hills hoist.

  ‘Turn to page twenty-three of your maths books, please,’ said Mrs Naylor to Seven D. What would happen if every single person in the class said no? Mrs Naylor would probably go and get Mr Brooks. He’d come and he’d say, I believe Mrs Naylor told you to open your maths books at page twenty-three. Please do so. But what would happen if every single person still said no? Would Mr Brooks end up having to call the police to try and get us to open our books? Would
the Prime Minister end up coming and telling us? Or the army?

  ‘James, what is the answer to question three, please.’

  I looked at question three. What is ¾ of 36? Easy. ‘Twenty-seven, Mrs Naylor.’ Sugar Boy’s head was down and he was looking at his maths book. I drew a picture of Mrs Naylor with her arms and legs like nails with pointy ends on a corner of my page. Then I drew a picture of a hammer above her. I tore off the piece of paper and wrapped it round my rubber, then I threw the rubber across to Sugar Boy. It landed on his desk. He undid it and looked at the picture I’d drawn of Mrs Naylor, and then he started his squeaking laugh. Mandy Allen giggled.

  ‘What’s going on over there? Mandy?’ Mrs Naylor folded her arms and looked around the room. ‘Who is the source?’ Mrs Naylor asks that every time she sees Mandy getting the giggles. Sugar Boy stuffed the picture in his pocket and stopped squeaking. ‘Concentrate, please, Seven D!’ Everyone went back to their maths.

  Outside the window I saw sparrows sitting along the fence. In Birds: A Field Guide, AP Davies said that sparrows were introduced into Australia so that the English people would feel more at home when they first got here, because they were used to them in England. Now they’re known as pests, but A P Davies said it’s not the sparrow’s fault, it’s the fault of the humans for bringing them here in the first place. He says that on page 30 and I like the way he’s on the side of the birds, not the humans.

  Soon the row of sparrows flew away. ‘And so by breaking down the figures into smaller parts, we can –’ said Mrs Naylor.

  ‘And so by breaking down the figures into smaller farts, we can –’ I said. The back row started to laugh.

  ‘What’s going on down the back there? Who is the source?’ Mandy turned round to look at me, and Dean Orbs was still laughing. Mrs Naylor put two and two together. ‘James, you again?’