How to Make a Bird

by Martine Murray

  “Did you see? He was flogging it!”

  “He’s a pervert.”

  “We should’ve got the license plate.”

  “He could be a rapist.”

  “Yeah, as if we’d get in the car. That guy didn’t have a chance in hell.”

  Eddie always had to tell things first. He was the oldest.

  Mum was in bed when we got home. She wasn’t really in bed this time. She was just lying on top of it, but still she wasn’t dressed like a normal mum would be. She was in one of those adult nighties made of satin or silk, pearly and smooth like the inside of a shell, and edged in lace. It was skimpy, in an elegant way. She didn’t look like a girl in a boarding school. You had to wonder why she bothered wearing such a nice-looking nightie when there was no one to see it anyway. She was fiddling with her hair and reading a magazine.

  Eddie ran in and stood by the bed. I just hung in the doorway.

  “We saw a pervert,” said Eddie.

  “What do you mean?” She let the magazine close and reached up to push Eddie’s hair away from his face. She was gazing up at him as if he were a beautiful sunset.

  “He had his dick out,” I said. I stretched up to the top of the doorway and made myself extra long.

  “Now, Manon…” Mum frowned as if she was about to get mad at me for saying “dick,” but then her attention dissolved and she looked away.

  “He did. It’s true. He asked us to get in the car,” said Eddie and he turned back to me, urgently, since he knew he needed my help to keep Mum interested. But I didn’t care to help anymore. So Eddie dropped his schoolbag, just for the bang it made. Mum looked back at him and patted the bed.

  “Tell me what happened.”

  Mum took us to the police station. We went into a room with the policeman. I remember he was wearing a cap and I was watching him writing down our answers, thinking that he wasn’t writing very well and feeling concerned that a man in such a position, a position of authority, wasn’t a good speller.

  “What kind of car was it?”

  “A white Holden,” said Eddie.

  “No, it wasn’t, it was gray.” I knew more about colors than Eddie. He might have been the natural but at least I was artistic—the art teacher said I was—I knew the color. Besides, I was the one who saw the car, not Eddie. But he always had to tell things first. The policeman smiled and glanced up at Mum, who crossed her legs over and swept her hair behind her ear.

  “I don’t s’pose you saw the license plate then, did you?”

  “No,” I said.

  Eddie was squeezing his face and saying “Umm” as if he was trying to remember. Then he just said a number. I knew he was making it up because he didn’t want to look stupid for not getting it in the first place. The policeman wrote down the number that Eddie made up. Now they’d never find that pervert, I thought.

  “And you said the car was white?” he asked Eddie.

  “Yep.”

  “Edouard would know,” said our mother, and she put her hand on Eddie’s leg and smiled, and you could tell the policeman liked her because he looked at her that way, as if it was a private look.

  Later, Eddie and I told Dad about the pervert. We were laughing in the telly room. Mum got out of bed and stood in the doorway. Dad looked up at her.

  “What’s wrong, Emma?” he said. “You look like you’ve just seen a ghost.” She stood there in such an accusatory way that we had to look at her. Her mouth was all bitten inward. Her feet peeped out the bottom of her dressing gown. Dad got up from the couch and walked toward her. She waved him away and pulled the gown together at her chest.

  “I’m not going to sit on that couch. I just can’t support it. It’s revolting.” She said “support it” when she meant she couldn’t “stand it,” because sometimes she got French words stuck in place of the right words. That annoyed me, because no matter how many times you told her how it should be, she still got it wrong. She did it on purpose to get more attention.

  “What’s wrong with the couch?” said Eddie, and we all stared at the poor old couch. We’d had it for as long as I could remember. It probably belonged to our grandparents, Ivy and Benjamin, in its glory days. You had to admit that it wasn’t so glorious now. It had shiny curly gold patterns on it, and frayed arms, and holes in the cushions with a spring sticking out that was liable to tear your clothes if you didn’t look out. There was an old brown wool blanket draped over to hide the holes, but it always fell down in a lazy wrinkle in the middle. The blanket was covered in dog hair.

  “It makes me depressed. Every time I look at it I feel depressed,” she declared, lifting her chin and looking down at the couch as if it was almost too ugly to even look at, as if she could only just bear to gesture toward it with her wavering fingers.

  Dad sat on the edge of the couch and clasped his hands together.

  “It’s worn out,” she cried. “Can’t you see? It’s worn out. It’s rubbish.” Her voice rose urgently and she aimed it at Dad, as if he’d done a terrible, terrible thing by making her live with a piece of rubbish. It made me wonder if indeed it was a terrible thing to be sitting on a piece of rubbish, though I’d never even seen it like that before. I stuck my finger under the threadbare bit on the arm and pulled the thread hard to see if it would break. Dad was looking up at her with his soft eyes. Eddie switched on the telly.

  “We’ll get it reupholstered then, shall we, Emma?” he said, cooing a bit like a pigeon does. She didn’t reply. Her hands combed at her hair frantically.

  “Don’t worry about it tonight,” he said. “Tomorrow you can telephone Mr. Bondarelli. Why don’t you sit down?” He pushed Mou off the couch beside him and we made room for Mum. But she vanished, her bare feet pattering up the hallway. She went to her bedroom, and Mou climbed back on the couch.

  chapter eight

  This was my plan: There were two places I had to go to for my business, and after that I was leaving town. I was going to Paris, actually. The one benefit of having a French mother was that it entitled me to a French passport. Mum was always so precious about Frenchness, as if it made her special. Because of her, Eddie and I, and even Mou, which is short for mouton and means sheep, had had to put up with la-dee-da French names that didn’t work here and just got shortened so they sounded like anyone else’s name. In my mind, France would be a precious country where people would say my name in a la-dee-da way and it wouldn’t sound out of place. And Paris was the most beautiful city in the world. We had a book about it at home, full-color pictures, Eiffel Tower, avenues of triumph, you know. Mum said it was the city of love. I was sure I was a lover, so where better than the city of love?

  The horse money came from Nora, a nice lady, skinny as a piece of paper, with teeth that looked like corn. She was mad about horses and paid ten dollars a week to keep Buddy and Misty in our paddocks. I loved Buddy and Misty anyway especially their velvet noses, so I would have paid to have them there. But Nora left the ten dollars in an envelope under the door if we weren’t home. Whoever found it put it in the pot on the mantelpiece, above the wood stove. When it was full, Dad and Eddie planned to buy a ride-on mower. But that wasn’t going to happen anymore, so I took it; I took seventy dollars and left the rest. I didn’t expect it to get me to Paris. I had another idea about where that money was coming from.

  The first place I was going to was Cyril Jewell House, Hope Street, Brunswick. It sounded like a house of jokers. I’d never been there before, but I’d always pictured it as a big red house on a windy hill, with turrets and spires and mysterious faces at the windows, and hand-knit jumpers flapping on the line. It was where my grandmother Ivy lived.

  I figured I’d catch the train to Brunswick and ride my bike from there. I headed toward the center of the city and accidentally stopped at a shop called Shoe Biz. Dumb name for a shop, I thought, but the front window was enticing: shoes standing on shelves, getting ready. I was just having a vague old squiz, thinking about the importance or not of shoes (if you counted i
t against the other importances in your life), when a shop lady pounced on me. She was a splendid pouncer and was completely polished, with her hair pulled back so tight that her face was stretched into a permanent smile, and her skin so covered in thick face makeup that I couldn’t have said what she was like underneath. She wore a tag that said Deborah, and her eyes were like small wet fidgeting pebbles that couldn’t be covered up. I imagined she was a retired ballerina who liked cats and never stuck her finger in the jam. Who knows? I bet she had a Mason Pearson hairbrush, just like Lucy Brixton.

  Anyway, Deborah admired my dress, so she got me inside and then led me around, darting like a hungry bird at the shoes she was sure I would like. I felt like a faker, actually, as if I was an obvious B-type person who was trying to buy an A-person disguise, trying to pretend I was a person with taste and money and style. You can’t buy that kind of thing. Everyone knows that shoes don’t make you any different. You can’t move up in the world because your shoes are mighty. Deborah would have known that too, but it was her job to pretend otherwise.

  Still, it was worth a try. I came out with a pair off the sale rack. They were slightly too big but half the price of the others. They were silver, though, with thin crisscrossing straps across the top. I put them straight on and walked down Bourke Street, listening to the way they went clip clap on the footpath. My toes poked out in a pretty good way. Sun was streaming down, and since the morning rush had already pummeled the streets they seemed momentarily emptied and calm, as if the city were taking a deep breath in the early morning lull. The few people left were sitting with bags on their laps and faces tilted to the sun, or standing at shop windows and considering, or waiting at tram stops with unfolded newspapers in their hands. There were other bike riders lounging on the steps, but they were definitely authentic A-type bike riders since they had special bike clothes with helmets and clinging shorts. I wasn’t going to ride past them in case they remarked to each other how stupid it was to ride a bike in a long red dress, so I walked, with my head unnaturally still, banking on them noticing instead what spectacular silver shoes I was wearing. Actually those silver shoes were beginning to make my back hurt, and that worried me as I didn’t want my limp to get worse, not even for the sake of those shoes.

  As I made my way to the station, I was thinking about that Shoe Biz shop lady, Deborah. She was probably only a couple of years older than me, but she made herself look old on purpose. Not old in a wrinkled way, old in a snappy handbag kind of a way. She was what Lucy Brixton wanted to become. Lucy even had a dressing table in her room, with a velvet stool shaped like a mushroom. That was where her pink Mason Pearson hairbrush lay, waiting for morning when Lucy’s mum came in and brushed Lucy’s hair, and plaited it and put elastic bands and bobby pins in it. Once, when I stayed the night, Lucy’s mum offered to do my hair, but I was too embarrassed because I thought I might have knots, and my hair is donkey brown even though I wished it was milky. To tell you the truth, I didn’t even know a Mason Pearson hairbrush was a special thing until Lucy told me. I couldn’t imagine my mum doing my hair. Mostly my mum was asleep in the morning. Lucy’s mum even made us lunch in a lunch box. I was so proud of having a proper lunch. Usually I mooched off big Betty Edmunds, who was always on a diet and would sometimes palm off her peanut butter sandwiches. When I got home I told Eddie about getting a proper lunch. I said I was going to ask for a Mason Pearson hairbrush for my birthday and Eddie scoffed. He said it was a stupid thing to ask for.

  “You never even brush your hair, Mannie. Why don’t you ask for a bike? That’s what you really want.”

  “As if. As if they’d get me a bike.”

  “Yeah, but you can still ask for it. You never know,” said Eddie.

  I didn’t get either. I got a book about a horse, called National Velvet.

  After I saw Lucy Brixton’s room, I fantasized about having one all to myself. I was particularly good at the art of fantasizing, probably due to my overactive imagination, but it was hard to pretend our room was elegant in any way. Eddie and I shared it, and it was hardly even a proper room. It was once just a veranda, but now it had walls and a window that looked over the paddock. You didn’t get a clear view because there was a scruffy old melaleuca tree right in the way. The dark wooden ceiling sloped downward and the skirting board was missing, so there was a big gap where the wall met the floor. You could see the ground underneath the house, which is exciting when you’re about six years old but a bit grim when you’re seventeen. There was lino on the floor and underneath the lino you could find old newspapers, which Eddie sometimes read out when we were going to sleep. We had a bunk bed. I slept on the bottom and tried to bug Eddie by pressing my feet into his mattress, making moving mountains between the wood slats. There was a bulky, bursting, slack-jawed cupboard, a yellow bookshelf, a record player that was once Ivy and Benjamin’s, and the five records that we’d gotten as birthday presents. It was nothing like Lucy’s bedroom, where everything was white, matching, and seamless. She had two beds in it even though there was only one of her, but best of all it was never cold in Lucy’s room. She had heater vents in the floor and you could sit around in your nightie. Eddie rolled up a blanket and stuck it in the gap in our room to stop the draft, but it didn’t work properly. We sometimes slept in our wool hats.

  Dad had to go to work very early, when we were still in bed. He’d come in and wake us, just to say good-bye.

  “Dad, do you have to wake us up?” Eddie whinged.

  “How else do I say good-bye?” he said. He gave us a kiss and then left. He did it every time, and after he left Eddie grumbled, but I didn’t. I liked being woken up by Dad. I liked being woken in exactly that way. Eddie said I was a baby.

  “Anyway, why do you have to say good-bye to him when you’re just gonna see him again when he comes home?” said Eddie.

  “I dunno,” I said. “It’s nice to say good-bye.” What I liked was that it was a sure thing. It was regular; it was something I knew would happen, and it did happen, and I liked that. It was like one plus one equals two.

  “You’re acting tough, Eddie,” I said, but he’d already gone back to sleep. Eddie didn’t need to count on things like I did, because he was more normal than I was. He didn’t even have a limp, for a start.

  Sometimes I blamed Eddie, or the bus stop, or even that old woman for me getting the limp. I hadn’t reached a final decision about which of them was really to blame, since it was easier to keep switching the blame between all three and never having to know who to be most angry at. Usually it was the old lady, who was a sticky beak, know-all, preachy type of old lady. Because I never saw her again, I could have furious imaginary conversations with her.

  Eddie made up the game while we were waiting for that old school bus. The idea was to jump from the brick wall, catch hold of the top of the bus shelter, and swing from it. When Eddie did it, it looked easy. He was longer than me and he had more jumping power. But I was good at jumping too. The jumping part wasn’t what went wrong. I climbed up on the wall and figured the distance was not more than a big puddle, and I’d jumped many of them before. The height was the scary part.

  The old woman was standing hunched over a grocery cart, and when she saw me climbing the wall, she twisted her head backward and forward, and her mouth crinkled up in a sneer and she creaked out a warning.

  “You stupid girl. You’ll hurt yourself doing that. I’m telling you.”

  There was something about the old lady that made me feel mad. I frowned and puffed a breath out, almost a snort but not quite. In my heart I felt twitchy. I had to show that old lady, just show her. I was good enough to do anything Eddie could do. What would that old lady know?

  So I jumped. My hands grabbed the top edge of the shelter but my legs flew out in front of me, with such a swing that they pulled my hands off and there was no chance of swinging my legs back. I landed on the pavement. My bum hit it hard. My head felt like it was thrown off, and a pain shot right up my spine and burn
ed onto the backs of my eyes. But I got up straightaway and sat down neatly on the seat, and I said out loud, so that horrible old lady could hear me, “It didn’t hurt.” I was ashamed of myself—not for falling, but for being wrong.

  Eddie knew. It did hurt. But he didn’t say anything because if someone asks if you’re okay that’s what makes you cry. You can hold it in as long as no one gives you somewhere to pour it into. So Eddie just looked up at the shelter with his hands in his pockets. He said I would have made it, but the edge was too fat for my hands and they couldn’t get a proper grip.

  I didn’t care about technicalities. I only cared that that old lady was right and I was wrong, and we both knew it, but I was the one who was hurting. And then I was worrying about my bones, the ones in the spine, especially at the bottom where there was a horrible pain. But I had to concentrate on not letting on about it, not giving that hateful old lady any more satisfaction. I tried wishing that the old lady would just crumble up like a stale old biscuit, but what really kept coming into my mind was the possibility that there was a big crack in my bones, and when I stood up they might just break.

  But that didn’t happen. I got on the bus and I told Eddie.

  “I think I’ve done something. It hurts.”

  “Where?”

  “Here.” I showed him. “And I’ve got a headache too.”

  “That’s the whiplash,” he said. Then he frowned. He took my hand and pressed his thumb into it. He said that he’d heard it helped with headache. But it didn’t. He said he’d get me one of Mum’s painkillers when we got home.

  “You’re not going to tell her, are you?” he said.

  “No way. She’ll just get mad at me. She’ll say it was my own fault and I’m a stupid girl.”