It wasn’t pretend purpose. I did have important business. It was the kind of thing that only I could do. I couldn’t explain it to anyone either, not even to Harry. It was a matter of the heart, a heartknowing, anyway, that was telling me to do it.
I had this idea of going to a restaurant, first, to settle in. And not just any restaurant. I had a particular one in mind. My mum had taken Eddie and me there once when we were kids. She’d dressed up too for the occasion. We’d caught the train from Castlemaine. I remember she was wearing a long dark coat and a green silk scarf with white spots. She smelled lovely, and she had dark red lipstick, which she fixed up with a little round mirror that fitted in the palm of her hand. She wrote her name on the foggy train window and then she wrote Eddie, and then she wrote my name too, and she drew a heart shape around all the names, although my name went over the line a bit. She was happy. At the restaurant there was a man in a suit who bought me and Eddie some strawberry ice cream. It wasn’t our dad, but we didn’t care. Eddie and I played on the stools. It was a classy place. We had a good time there.
I thought that maybe I should be an actress too, like Mum. But I wasn’t sure I had it in me. I didn’t like people looking at me, whereas Mum liked it. She didn’t only like it, she needed it. It was as if she was in darkness until people were looking at her, shining the light of their eyes upon her. Then she just lit up like our nice glass lamp shade with the roses on it. She got that glittery look. Her eyes opened wide and she would glide about and throw her head back and laugh, or sweep her hair in some way, making it bounce on her shoulders. Her light would fill a room. She’d make people want to keep looking at her. She’d be like a joker. She’d do anything, even put on funny voices. Then, once there was no one to see her, she switched off again, back into darkness. Her mouth sank down into a thin line, like a seam, and her eyes dulled like dry stones. Most of the time she would lie in bed.
I didn’t really count for Mum, not as someone worth switching on for. Neither did my dad. Eddie did. And other people did; anyone she didn’t really know counted, at first. She got tired of people quickly, though. She could use you up, all your eye power, especially if you weren’t important or rich or educated. She would be nice at first, but once she knew you just a little, she didn’t care anymore. You had no more charge; you were as useful as a dead old leaky battery. She had a thing about Eddie, though. It wasn’t just that he was a male, because Dad was a male and that didn’t work for him. It was because Eddie was like her. He was a natural. It was almost like loving herself, the way she loved Eddie.
Then there was the stinking hot summer that made things strange. That was when I first got an inkling about Harry Jacob, and when Susie Newbound got pregnant by Luke Nelson and had to go and live in Bendigo with him. But as far as Mum was concerned, that was the summer Eddie decided he wasn’t going back to school.
When he said it at dinner, Mum went stiff and her eyes looked crazy. She turned to Dad and said, “Ned, he can’t.”
“Why not?” said Eddie.
Dad put down his fork and made a speech.
“You need a proper education. Believe me. One day you’ll regret this. You may not think you need it now, but later you will. Finish your final year, then take time to think about what you want to do.”
Before Eddie even had a chance to respond, Mum put her head in her hands and began to cry.
“See, Ned, see. It’s because we live here. The types he’s friends with. No one in the country is educated. This is your fault. You fix it. Tell him. Tell him what will become of him if he gets a trivial job here. He will amount to nothing. Oh, Eddie, you could be so good if you wanted.” She turned finally to Eddie, reaching her hand to him. Eddie told her to calm down. But she didn’t. That’s when she hit on Harry Jacob as the cause.
“Is it Harry?” she cried. “Is it because he’s left school?”
“Nuh. It’s nothing to do with Harry. It’s just I’m not interested in school.” Eddie was getting uncomfortable. “Would you calm down, Mum? It’s not such a big deal.” He folded his arms across his chest and looked away from her.
“It’s Harry. I know it is. Eddie, he’s a farmer’s son. He doesn’t have your ability. Ned!” She turned to Dad. “You have to stop this foolishness.” She gripped the side of the table. “Eddie, I forbid you. I absolutely forbid you!”
“Jesus Christ!” Eddie snorted in disgust and got up from the table. Eddie and I were the same like that; we simply couldn’t have people telling us what to do or what not to do. She should have known that. Dad leaned over to her.
“Emma—”
She lifted her hand and halted him. She closed her eyes and held everything still for a moment, like a conductor creating a silence in the piece. Then she left the table too. Dad sighed. It was a shame, because lately Mum had been better. There hadn’t been a fight for quite a few weeks, and she’d been out of bed a lot and buying herself new clothes. She was even cooking meals. The funny thing was that in some ways she turned out to be right. It would have been better if Eddie hadn’t hung around with Harry, but not for the reasons she said.
Dad came home one night clutching a bunch of red roses. He held them upside down by the stalks, with the flowers hanging by his knees. He looked frightened. He raised the roses slowly as if he wasn’t sure he should.
She didn’t smile. She narrowed her eyes and lifted her nose, and then she wiped her hands on a towel and snatched the roses from him. She threw them to the floor.
“You think you can just make everything all right with a bunch of flowers?” she shouted at him.
Eddie and I were sitting at the table eating cheese on toast. She wasn’t eating, she was standing at the sink. Dad didn’t speak.
“Well?” she demanded. He sighed and looked down at the flowers as if he was considering whether to pick them up or not.
“Emma,” he said softly, and whatever he meant to say got caught up in his throat and it faltered and dissolved on his tongue as his mouth hung open and his hands rose toward her. She shook her head and stared at him with such a look of disgust that he turned away and left the room. I heard him walk down the hall, take his keys, and quietly shut the front door as he left the house. She ran to the hall and started to scream.
“You’re useless,” she called after him. “You’re a nothing. You make me miserable. I wish I never—”
“Shut up, Mum,” Eddie yelled. He sprang up from his chair and knocked over a glass of water. His eyes were flashing but he didn’t say anything else; he just stood there. I picked up the glass.
Her hand was creeping up her neck and pressing at it. Her mouth was trembling and she took short breaths. Her face contorted, but she couldn’t find the right expression. She was panicking. She wanted to shout at Eddie but she couldn’t. For a second she gripped him with her mad eyes, but when Eddie looked away she fixed her gaze on the broken-up roses instead. Petals lay across the floor like some kind of injury. She glared at those poor busted roses as if they’d caused her an insufferable injustice, and since the roses didn’t deny it she plunged toward the sink with a dramatic sigh and bent over it, sobbing. I put my hand on her back. She turned the taps on full blast and wouldn’t look at me. Then she ran out of the room and threw herself on the bed. Through the whole house you could hear her sobbing.
“Fuck,” said Eddie. “Fuck, I hate this.” He was staring at the running water.
“Poor Dad.” I turned off the taps.
“Fuck it,” Eddie said, and he turned the television on so that it was louder than the sobbing.
It was Dad’s softness that made Mum scream at him, just like how pillows make you want to punch them.
chapter six
I found that restaurant. I think it was the one. It had the right stools, anyway. It was at the top end of the city, on Bourke Street. There was a long bar on one side and a long bench against a wall on the other. The floor was checked and there were stools on poles stuck into the ground so you couldn’t pull one cl
oser to the other. People sat on either side, most of them hunched over newspapers, with one hand shoveling in food. No one seemed to notice me. No one bothered to look up from their newspapers, even though I was in the long red dress. I couldn’t decide if that was good or bad; obviously I wasn’t looking too shocking, but then I couldn’t have been looking too damn captivating either. I figured if you balanced it up I came out looking middle-range, which was okay with me. So I leaned my elbows on the bar and considered the cakes, which appeared to be showing off and waiting there for me to decide.
The waiter was a thick grayish man, swollen with weariness and moving slowly, like a mollusk. He rubbed the inside of a glass with a tea towel and then, leaning back into the bench, called out in Italian to a short woman in the kitchen who was shaped like a dumpling and wore gold hoop earrings. She was bent over pots, wiping bowls, and sighing.
“Now, signorina?” he said, tucking the tea towel in his pants.
“I’ll have that.” I pointed to a yellow cheesy-looking cake.
“With cream?” He pulled a pencil out from behind his ear and wrote on a small pad.
“Can I have ice cream?”
“You can have whatever you like,” he said, and smiled. It was true, no one was here to tell me not to.
While I waited, I stared up at a faded poster of kangaroos on a beach, above the shelves of oranges and wine bottles. Next to that was a painting of a stormy ocean, but neither of these stirred me, so I surreptitiously examined the patrons instead.
Next to me, at the bar, there was a man and a woman. I couldn’t see the woman’s face, since she was twisting toward the man. Her elbow leaned on the bar quite close to me and it was a very elegant bare, brown arm with a gold watch and a cigarette dangling between the fingers. Every now and then her hand disappeared from view and went to her mouth, but then it swung back to where I was, so that small curling trails of smoke floated into my face.
I didn’t smoke, but right then it would have suited me to smoke. Well, it would have suited my red dress and the different feeling I had in it. Smoking looked like such a deliberate thing: considered and controlled, but finished off with the quiet murder of the little red ash and the pensive curl of smoke, aimless in the air like a dreamy afterthought, a final calm. I was lacking in deliberate qualities and final calms myself, so I watched the woman’s hand as it pressed the butt into the white ashtray. I imagined it was my hand, being deliberate.
The man had his head tilted as if it had been struck by an obscurely angled thought that couldn’t quite pass through into language. He didn’t speak but the woman seemed anxious that he might. They were the kind of people you would expect to see in a classical, classy restaurant, and I felt a bit excited to be sitting next to them. Stylish-looking people, without dirty marks—the woman smelling of perfume and clean hair, and the man, I could tell, was a man who would never have dirt under his nails. If Harry could see me now, I thought. I wriggled on the seat and just when I was beginning to feel a little bit good about myself I got a glimpse of my sandals. Suddenly I knew they were all wrong. You can’t wear sandals with a long red dress. The woman, for instance, was wearing shining black shoes with slender heels. I was giving myself away with those sandals. I was ruining the whole outfit. Anyone could tell. I hastily hid my clumpy worn old sandals under my dress and I felt my heart pound with the need for the right kind of shoes.
It wasn’t an unusual way for my heart to be. Either curled up with the waiting or pounding with the wanting. That’s two feelings that move all out of step with each other. Waiting doesn’t really move, it doesn’t have direction, whereas wanting dashes out of you, like an arrow. So if you wait and want and wait and want, then you live in a jagged way. You go along in zigzag, not in a clear line forward, like most people do. It’s as if your bones stay put while your heart and soul bound so far forward you can’t get them back. So maybe you’re not even in one piece anymore, and you end up feeling desperate and grim like those poplars that lean, in an aching way, over the Nelsons’ driveway.
Anyway, the first thing I ever really wanted was T-bar sandals. At school, girls wore them in summer with short socks. T-bars had holes shaped like clover in the top and a little buckle that did up like a belt. Mum said it was a waste of money to have one pair of shoes for summer and another pair for winter. I said I’d wear my T-bars all year-round, but she said, “Don’t be silly, Manon. You can’t wear sandals in winter.”
So it was Mum’s fault that I looked like a nerd in summer with my clunky lace-ups. First I tried cutting clover-shaped holes into them but they wouldn’t cut, so I tried stabbing them with a barbecue skewer instead. It didn’t work. I thought I could just punch out the right shapes, but I ended up with poky holes in my lace-ups, which made me look even worse than I already did. I could tell that people were looking at my shoes. They were all probably talking about it at school.
That’s how Lucy Brixton became my best friend. Lucy was much taller than me, and her hair was milk white, thick, and dead straight. It was always wound up in big plaited buns on top of her head so she looked old-fashioned and odd. Her mother did it for her. But at least Lucy had T-bars, and at least her mother didn’t talk in a funny accent like mine. Then Lucy’s T-bars broke at the buckle and her mum was going to chuck them out and buy Lucy a new pair, but I said I’d take the busted ones. Lucy gave them to me, just like that, and I fixed them up with a safety pin. I was happy as anything in those T-bars. I sat next to Lucy in class. She lived near Harcourt Station, so we went home together on the bus. For a while I felt just like any other normal kid at school. For about a week, actually. For one glorious week I couldn’t stop gazing down at my T-bars. I so liked the way they made me seem right that I snuck looks all the time, especially when I needed an extra boost of confidence. Once, at lunchtime, I even walked up to a gang of eleventh graders, sat down next to Charlie Buttrose, and stretched my legs out and crossed my ankles over just so they could all see my T-bars. Charlie Buttrose was a golden-skinned god who didn’t say anything to me, so after a while I went and found Lucy and we squashed figs into the concrete.
After that it started to fade, the T-bar effect, and slowly I returned to being just me again. It was worse than you would imagine, the fading of the T-bar effect, because it meant that all along I was wrong. All along I was thinking that if only I had T-bars I’d be like everyone else. But it wasn’t the case. It wasn’t the lack of T-bars that was making me like I was, it was something else. And that meant I had to keep looking.
The only thing I knew was that whatever I wanted, I wanted it badly.
Anyway.
I looked at the man, who was almost facing me, though the woman was between us. He was scratching his chin and frowning. His hair was short and the color of charcoal, and he was wearing cuff links. He pulled his shirtsleeve up to look at his watch. The woman sighed and complained about the heat, about how it made her panic, but the man appeared to have lost interest. He lifted his eyes over the woman’s shoulder and he looked at me as if he knew that I was listening. I quickly turned to the faded kangaroo poster. But after a moment I looked back and there he was, staring straight at me. It wasn’t an indignant stare, it wasn’t even curious. It was a stare I was meant to see. He shot it right at me. I turned away and I didn’t look back again.
chapter seven
Eddie and I once saw a pervert. I was only thirteen when we saw him. We were waiting at the bus stop, which was an annoying place, and things always went funny when you just had to stand and wait by the road. Especially for me since, as I said, it didn’t suit me to wait. The shelter there had a pebble-mix surface and brown concrete edges. It was ugly as hell and you had to resent it a bit. We never sat under the shelter, we sat on the wall nearby, or we just stood and leaned. If Eddie was in the mood, we did things, like throw stones at the Give Way sign.
This time Eddie wasn’t in the mood, so I just had my foot up against the wall. I was kicking myself in and out from the wall—in and out,
in and out—making a rhythm in my head. A car pulled up and a man leaned over and curled his finger toward me, motioning for me to come over. Eddie was just leaning and thinking and he didn’t seem interested, so I kicked myself out from the wall and went over to the car. The man looked a bit like Mr. Tony from the milk bar: dark and bleary-eyed, with a well-pressed, lemon-colored shirt. I remember that as I stuck my face up to the window I was hit by an odor that wasn’t exactly roses. Maybe it was only an ugly mix of old sweat and smoke, but it was still enough to make me take a fast step back. You can depend on your nose like that. My nose knew before I did that he wasn’t a hero. He asked me if I knew where the Midland Highway was. Of course I did. Everyone did. It wasn’t far away. I was half pointing and half talking to the man before I sensed again that something wasn’t quite right. I stopped talking and had a proper look.
The man was holding his dick in his hand. His fly was undone and the thing was sticking straight up. I hadn’t noticed at first, because he had pants on and only the end part was showing. It was pale like a knuckle when you make a fist. I eyeballed Eddie and he came over, pushed his way in front of me and looked in the window. Eddie was staring. So I looked again over his shoulder, just to make sure it really was what I thought it was. I knew I wasn’t meant to look, but the man was looking at it too. We were all looking at it, as if it were a hurt animal. He must have been squeezing it.
Eddie said, “Whaddya want?” The man said he was looking for the Midland Highway and could we get in and show him and then he would take us home. He must have thought we were stupid. Even at that age I knew you shouldn’t get in a car with a man, and especially not one who was disgusting. Eddie shook his head and told the man to get lost. The bus was coming then, so the man drove away. Eddie started to piss himself laughing and I did too, since it was exciting to have such a disgusting thing happen.
How to Make a Bird Page 3