Bird and Sugar Boy

by Sofie Laguna

  Yes, Mrs Naylor, me again me again me again!

  I had to go on rubbish duty at recess. Mrs Naylor said, ‘And perhaps while you’re picking up rubbish and putting it in the bin you can think about rubbishy behaviour.’ Jeremy Shadrow’s brother is in jail for his rubbishy behaviour. He stole a car from the Coles car park. I don’t think I’ll ever steal a car from the Coles car park, but sometimes I want to steal Bounty Bars from Coles. I hadn’t yet, but me and Sugar were thinking about it. Would you end up in jail for stealing Bounty Bars, or would you just get community service and have to clean up the streets of Denham?

  After recess it was library time. I really liked library time because of Illustrated Birds of the World and Birds at Risk in the reference section. The birds in Illustrated Birds of the World are so bright and shining they fly right out at you off the pages. With books, when you touch the pages, some of the power of the birds in the pictures comes into you through your fingertips. There are pictures of the birds from Africa, Europe, South America and Thailand. It’s one of my big dreams to go to those places and discover birds no human being has ever seen before. Unknown rare birds that might in some way change the world. Birds at Risk is full of endangered or extinct species like the Jamaican macaw and the Great Auk.

  Sue Hill stood at the kitchen bench and cut us big slices of egg-and-bacon pie. ‘You boys are a pair of rats,’ she said as she cut. ‘I hate to think what the two of you get up to when I’m not around!’ Then she went off to make sure that Chris was breathing steam.

  A pair of rats … Rats are good at getting away with things – like eating compost from the bin in the back yard, and apples from the tree, and living in the piles of old carpet and tyres in our garage.

  ‘Want to go down to the tracks?’ Bits of egg jumped out of Sugar Boy’s mouth when he talked.

  ‘Yep.’ Sugar and me liked to race trains.

  We rode our bikes, one hand on the handlebars, one hand full of pie, down to Denham Station. We went up onto the bridge and hung over.

  ‘You got to make your slag hit dead centre.’ Sugar pulled all the spit he could into his throat. We leaned over the side and made our spit-balls hit between the tracks. Soon we heard the roar of a train. ‘Quick!’ Sugar raced back down ahead of me to where our bikes were lying at the bottom of the grassy slope that led up to the tracks. We needed to get up speed to try and beat that train. The grass was bumpy, but we rode as fast as we could.

  ‘Here it cooooommmeeessss!’ Sugar shouted. His legs moved like pistons as his bike bumped along the grass with me right behind him.

  ‘We’re going to beat youuuuuuuu!’ I shouted as the train sped past us. Sugar held his fingers in an up yours to a man’s face staring out the window. When the roar was gone, Sugar Boy smiled at me. His eyes had a dot of light in each one. ‘Next time we’ll beat it,’ he said.

  Sugar Boy likes soccer and I like football. It’s our main difference.

  Me: ‘Soccer’s not football! If soccer was real football then that’s what they’d call it.’

  Sugar: ‘That is what they call it in the rest of the world.’

  Me: ‘Well, we live here and it’s not called football here. It’s called soccer.’

  Sugar: ‘Whatever it’s called it’s a better game. It takes skill.’

  Me: ‘Soccer players are always falling over.’

  Sugar: ‘Like this you mean?’

  Then he throws his whole self on me and tackles me to the ground. Sugar’s bigger than me. Eveybody’s bigger than me, but I’m still good at football. We take the bikes to Denham Oval for a kick. Sugar plays soccer and I play football, but we play together. It usually ends with Sugar Boy squeaking like crazy and me in a headlock.

  Nothing can rival the Great James Burdell, Alias ‘Bird’, as he swoops on his prey on the footy field. Whoever thought birds and football could go together? Nobody knows it, but birds and footy go together perfectly. It was another big dream of mine to write a book about it – how looking at birds could teach you field tactics and courage. I could call the book Birds and Football: A Field Guide by J B Bird, only no one would believe that someone who likes birds could actually be called Bird at the same time. Some things seem too perfect.

  I planned to draw an eagle when I got home. I wasn’t going to do any of Mrs Naylor’s homework. Birds: A Field Guide was full of eagles; AP Davies says that nothing can rival the majestic beauty of the white-bellied sea eagle as it flies through the air to surprise its prey.

  ‘Hey, Sug, want to go down to the tunnel after school?’ I asked him after I’d picked up all the chip packets, banana peels and bits of plastic wrap, and Mr Kemp had said I could have the rest of recess off.

  ‘Yep, but I’ve got to go home first. I’ve got to look after Madeline. I’ll come round to your place after that.’

  ‘Okay. We’ll go and check up on the collection.’ I ran through the collection in my head:

  A piece of piping

  Half a tyre

  Rope

  Old newspaper and a green BIC lighter (lighter works)

  A floppy disk

  Half a box of oats

  A Frisbee

  Four empty drink bottles

  A watch with a silver band (not working, but could probably work)

  A mobile phone found under the bridge (also not working, but maybe could)

  Nine dollars eighty in tens and twenties squashed flat by the 4.40 express to the city via Glengray

  When I got home, Dad was sitting in the back yard and looking at the apple tree. There’s an old chair with planks missing from the seat that he sits in sometimes with a beer or a cup of tea that he puts on the armrest when he’s not taking a sip. He turned round when he heard me open the back door. ‘G’day, Jamie. How was school?’

  ‘Alright. Is there anything to eat?’

  ‘I got the ham that you like. And there’s fresh bread there. And apple juice. Make yourself a sandwich.’

  I went into the kitchen.

  ‘You didn’t make any trouble today, did you, Jamie?’ Dad called from outside. Ever since that letter came from Mr Brooks, Dad’s been asking me that with his forehead pushed up and full of lines.

  ‘Nah.’

  Whenever Dad’s been sitting in that chair and looking at the apple tree, I know what he’s been doing. He hasn’t been watching the way the rosellas crush up the apples in their beaks with a twisting crunch. He’s been thinking about making ends meet and his father who lives in a home for the aged.

  My dad’s dad has lost his marbles and when we go to visit him he shouts, ‘Who the hell invited you?! Get the hell out of here! Get out get out get out!’ We don’t see him that much. Dad’s too busy working his own hours to make the money to pay for the home.

  The other thing my dad is thinking about is my mother and Husband Number One. His thoughts are so loud and clear they come out of him like gamma rays and enter my brain so I have to think them too. I leave Dad alone at those times. I don’t want to think about a mother whose face I can’t remember.

  When nobody is home, and I’m sitting in Dad’s TV chair trying to remember, I close my eyes and I smell the smell of wool when it’s wet and I ask to see her face. I don’t know who I’m asking – not her, she’s on the other side of the world, in England. It’s nobody, just the air, but I ask anyway. I look at different faces in my mind; I see blurs of blue eyes that change to brown eyes and then into green eyes. I try to see the hair, but it goes from short to long to brown to black and it won’t give me one clear picture. I look for a nose or an ear or a forehead, but it’s just a soft mess like paint when there’s too much water and all the colours mix together on the plate. I have the smell of wool when it’s wet, but no face.

  When I was five I might still have remembered. I might have been able to remember when I was six – or seven, even. But not when I was ten, not when I was eleven, and not now that I’m twelve. I wouldn’t ask Dad, either. I wouldn’t say, Tell me what she looked like, Dad. There are
some things inside my dad that have a fence around them – talking about the way my mother looks had a very tall, wiry fence around it. I knew without asking.

  After I made a ham sandwich and poured an apple juice I went into my room and opened Birds: A Field Guide. These are some birds where the mother bird and the father bird raise their young together: grebes, geese, swans, herons, egrets, cranes, storks, bustards, bitterns, plovers, gulls, finches, barn owls, frogmouths, robins, bellbirds, flycatchers, fantails, wagtails, larks, swallows, cuckoos, trillers, ravens, pelicans, flowerpeckers and crows. But the coucal pheasant father bird raises his young on his own and when he calls to them he sings boop boop boop! fifteen times. I was about to draw the coucal pheasant teaching his babies to fly when I heard the front gate creak open. Sugar Boy! Sugar Boy! Sugar Boy!

  ‘G’day, Sug. Ya ready?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘I’ll race you!’ We sped on our bikes down my street to the end where it turns to bush. ‘And it’s Bird coming up the outside, and Sugar Boy takes the left turn but can he beat the unbeatable Bird? The crowds are cheering and it’s going to be close, folks, it’s going to be very close and, oh my God, Sugar Boy is attempting to tyre burn the great James Burdell! You gotta hand it to him, folks, the boy’s got guts and he sure can ride but the Great Bird with one mighty effort overtakes Sugar Boy and, put your hands together, folks, the winner is James Birdy Burdell!”

  Our laughing filled up the bush and set birds flying out of the trees and up into the sky. There was a rainbow explosion of parrots over our heads.

  We rode down through the reserve, past the Year Twelves doing football training, past the monkey bars, past the barbecue area, under the fence and down to the tunnel. The tunnel is made of white concrete and it used to carry sewerage before the pipes got changed over. Bushes on both sides hide the mouth of the tunnel and it gets thinner and darker the deeper you go inside. Sugar Boy and me plan to stay there one night. When we were close we heard voices.

  ‘Who’s that?’ I asked Sugar, as we got off our bikes.

  ‘It sounds like girls.’

  ‘What girls come here?’

  ‘I dunno.’

  Jacky Jane and a girl I’d never seen before came crawling out of the tunnel. I don’t know what they were doing in there – it wasn’t light enough to read a book properly, unless you brought a torch maybe. What would girls be doing in a tunnel? I didn’t know what girls did anywhere.

  ‘Hi there.’ The girl we hadn’t seen before had an accent. It was Jacky’s cousin from Canada. I knew that because in Sharing Our Stories at school, Jacky got up and said her cousin, Sandy, was coming to visit all the way from Canada. I wanted to ask Sandy from Canada if she’d ever seen a Canadian red-tailed hawk, which is so good at flying it hardly ever needs to flap its wings, it just stays up there for hours – but we were in the middle of a tunnel war, and I wouldn’t anyway.

  The four of us stood at the mouth of the tunnel. That tunnel was ours. ‘What are you doing here?’ asked Sugar.

  ‘Nothing. We’re just leaving. Come on, Sandy!’ Jacky grabbed her cousin’s hand and pulled her back up the hill.

  After they’d gone, Sugar and me pushed back the bushes and crawled inside. ‘They better not come back,’ Sugar said as he crawled along the tunnel floor.

  ‘We should make a gate for the tunnel that we can lock,’ I said as I crawled along behind him.

  ‘Yeah, out of steel.’

  ‘Yeah, we could get it from the tip. Steel and barbed wire.’

  ‘Barbed wire with rust.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘You got the flies?’

  I put my hand in my pocket and felt Ern Tippy’s fishing flies. ‘Got ’em.’ The tunnel was getting darker now.

  ‘Hey, look at this.’ Sugar was sitting up and pointing at something written on the wall. I peered at the writing through the darkness.

  Jacky and Sandy

  were here

  Best friends forever

  I didn’t think a girl like Jacky would write on a tunnel wall. The tunnel wall was public property. I don’t really know a lot about what girls do because I haven’t got the feminine influence in the home. That’s what Sue Hill said to Carole when they were having coffee on the Hill verandah: ‘I don’t really mind them spending so much time together, it’s just that James – he’s such a little roughian … sometimes I wonder about … well, I guess he hasn’t had the feminine influence in the home … oh, I know, Carole … oh, it’s pretty terrible …with his mother on the other side of the world … it’s not like she’s died or anything.’

  I’d rather be a roughian than a dumb girl any day.

  We crawled past the

  Jacky and Sandy

  were here

  Best friends forever

  graffiti to where we kept the collection. It was hidden under leaves and rocks.

  ‘They better not have touched our stuff!’

  ‘Everything’s where we left it,’ Sugar said, as he swept away the dirt and leaves.

  I took the flies out of my pocket. ‘Thanks, Erny,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, thanks.’ Sugar Boy did his squeak laugh.

  ‘I wish this mobile phone’d work,’ I said to Sugar, giving it a shake.

  ‘Maybe we should take it in to Ron’s Red Hot Mobile Deals in town?’

  ‘It’d probably be too expensive to fix.’ I looked closer at the phone.

  ‘Yeah – and then you’ve got to get a phonecard for it. They cost thirty dollars. Tony’s got one.’

  ‘Tony Torucci’s a dickhead,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah,’ Sugar agreed. We both laughed.

  ‘So is Dean Orbs,’ I said.

  ‘Dean Orbs is a real dickhead.’

  ‘Dickhead Dorby!’

  ‘Sam Henderson wears gel in his hair.’

  ‘Yeah, and it stinks.’ We sat there for a bit, not talking anymore. We could still hear our own laughing and on top of that, some birds and the wind in the trees. ‘Want to make a fire?’ I asked Sugar. We’d talked about lighting a fire, but we’d never done it before.

  ‘Yeah,’ Sugar said. He got the newspaper and the green BIC lighter out of the collection. ‘Maybe at the front?’

  ‘Yeah.’ We cleared away the leaves and stuff from the front of the tunnel and I collected some twigs to get the fire going. ‘Want to light it?’

  ‘Yep.’ Sugar lit the newspaper. We watched our little fire burn. Smoke curled up. We listened to the crackle of the twigs. Sugar reached over and put another stick on the fire. ‘Dad’d kill me,’ he said. You never get to see Sugar Boy’s dad. He’s a mystery man. You know he lives at 5 Neals Road with Sugar and the rest of his family because a man’s shoes are at the back door and there’s photos of him and Sue Hill on their wedding day, and other pictures with Mr Hill and the kids all around the place. And sometimes late at night, if Sue Hill lets me stay over, you can hear his voice – or what sounds like it could be his voice – when he comes home. And you can hear them talking, mostly about Chris and his medical air problems. They always sound worried. I asked Sugar about it once. I said, ‘Where’s your dad all the time?’ He told me his dad was at work, that he had to make enough money for Chris and his doctors. ‘What does he do at work?’ I asked him.

  ‘He checks on water and makes sure it’s okay to drink.’

  ‘For bugs, you mean?’

  ‘Um … yeah, for bugs.’

  ‘So he does tests on the water?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘And experiments?’

  ‘Yeah … he does experiments.’

  I sat there for a bit, thinking about the water and the bugs. ‘So he’s a water scientist?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Sugar nodded his head and smiled like he was pleased. ‘That’s what he is – a water scientist.’

  One thing I like about Sugar Boy is that he’s never asked me about my mother.

  While our fire burned we had a competition to see who could name more legends in soccer and
footy. Sugar could have been making his names up because I’d never heard of most of them. A lot of soccer stars come from overseas. Even Sugar had heard of everyone I said.

  We let the fire go out. Only black coals were left. I pulled one out; it was hot in my hand. I bounced it around until it was cool enough and then I drew wings on the concrete of the tunnel floor. Sugar wouldn’t have known what they were. It’s hard to draw wings as good as I draw them at home in my drawing book when you’ve only got coal and concrete.

  ‘Let’s write our names,’ Sugar said. We took out another lump of coal each and crawled into the tunnel again, past

  Jacky and Sandy

  were here

  Best friends forever

  Bird, I wrote.

  Sugar Boy, wrote Sugar.

  Then he added on Best Friends Forever.

  ‘I better get home.’ Sugar crawled out of the tunnel. I took one more look at what Sugar wrote and crawled out behind him.

  BiRD

  SugarBoy

  BEST FriENDS

  FOREVER

  Today in library class when I went to the reference section to have a look at Illustrated Birds of the World, Jacky Jane was already there. She didn’t see me straight away; her head was bent down over the book she was reading. When she looked up and saw me, she said, ‘Oh.’ I wasn’t sure what that Oh meant. It could have been Oh, I didn’t think anyone else was coming or Oh, it’s you – I wish it wasn’t or Oh, I wish you hadn’t seen me reading this book. It could have been all of those things. I couldn’t tell. I often can’t tell what girls mean when they say things, so a lot of the time I keep away from them unless I really have no choice, like if Mrs Naylor puts me in a project group with girls in it, which she does sometimes.

  Jacky stood up, put the book she’d been reading back on the shelf and walked away. Before I took Illustrated Birds of the World out I had a look at the book she’d been reading. It had a picture of a frog with little yellow feet and big black eyes on the cover and it was called A Study in Frogs by Deborah Dibley Ph.D.