How to Make a Bird

by Martine Murray

  Eddie nodded, because he knew I was right.

  When I started to limp because of the pain down my leg, Dad took me to see Dr. Roland. Dr. Roland had large sad eyes, and photos of his little girl stuck up on the wall. Dr. Roland said I had a disk injury with damage to the sciatic nerve, and I should lie on my back for six weeks.

  “Six weeks?” I said. “No school for six weeks?”

  “I’m afraid not,” said Dr. Roland.

  That was when it was good. For a moment it was unbelievably good. No school. No Math. No Latin. Mum even let me watch Ivan’s Midday Movie Classic on telly with a glass of lemonade. I lay out flat on the newly reupholstered couch. It was now a cherry color, with extra sleeves on the arm, and Mou wasn’t allowed on it at all. After one day of lying out flat I was sick of it, and I started feeling bad about it, and then mad about it, and then I wanted to get cross at someone.

  By the time one week was up and I still had five to go, I was beset by a big woe-is-me kind of a mood and couldn’t summon any nice feelings for anyone else at all, especially since no one in the world was suffering like I was. And when Lucy came to visit and tell me what so-and-so said, and how so-and-so was smoking behind the penguin rubbish bin, and how they all went swimming down at Vaughan Springs and big Biff Lostren was wearing Speedos and everyone was laughing at him for wearing Speedos (because most guys wore boardies unless they came from Sydney), and so on, all I could do was sniff and squeeze out some stiff fake smiles.

  “What have you been doing, Mannie?” asked Lucy, pulling her fingers through her ponytail.

  “Nothing.” I felt my face looking as sour as a dried-up lemon half.

  During that unbearable six weeks, a man named Travis Houghton moved onto our land. He lived in a caravan, and he was an Odd Jobs Man. He wore undershirts, and his arms were brown and chunky and looked like they were about to burst. He had golden wavy hair. He came inside our house sometimes to pay the rent, and Mum made him a cup of tea. He leaned back on the kitchen chair, put his arms behind his head, and said to me, “How’s the little wounded bird?” I didn’t like the way he spread himself out in that kitchen chair, as if he was very comfortable and had forgotten he was in somebody else’s house. As if he wanted to make sure we could see as much of him as possible. He lifted his arms behind his head and leaned back on the kitchen chair and Mum didn’t tell him off. At least whenever he was around, Mum would be nice. She gave Travis some biscuits for his tea and put the milk in a little green jug. Travis had a very deep voice. He asked Mum if she liked swimming and Mum laughed at him.

  It wasn’t just that those six weeks were such a killer, it was the overall effect of those six weeks. For one thing, my leg was never the same, and since my leg was never the same again, neither was I. After all, your leg is a major part of you, when you think about it. You don’t feel right when even a little part of you, like, say, a baby finger, is a bit broken down. You feel limited. I felt as if I was stuck in a race and one leg wouldn’t run. And running was more important to me than to most people. It really was. I liked movement. It made me feel great when I moved. Sometimes it could come over me all of a sudden, not suddenly wanting to move, but as if something was inviting me to move, something like a spaciousness in front of me, an empty stretch of land without an end. In fact, it was the endlessness which got me. I ran at it to test infinity, to become boundless, like an animal.

  But I couldn’t do that anymore. I was limited. It was as if a fence had grown up around me. It wasn’t that I limped, it was just that I knew if I did wild things, like run or jump, I’d have a bad ache in my leg. Actually, I couldn’t even sit down for a long time without the ache starting. So, I was truly damaged and I wasn’t happy. I lost that feeling you have when you’re a pure little kid, the feeling that you can do anything you want: You can do ten cartwheels in a row, you can become a champion. I knew I’d never be a champion. That’s a lot to know when you’re only fourteen.

  chapter nine

  Other people knew it too. Even with my T-bars, I could tell that people knew I wasn’t going to be a champion. When I got back to school, Lucy Brixton had a new best friend. Lucy never actually said it, but I could tell I’d been replaced since she nearly always sat next to Kate Dolson and not me. In History I even ended up sitting next to Sharon Baker, the girl no one liked to sit next to because she had scaly hands and an irritating voice.

  And when Sharon tried to get chummy with me, I knew it was a bad sign. Sharon was assuming that I’d become like her. She was relating to my skew-whiffness. She meant to make me an ally, a companion loser: her with her scaly hands and me with my bad-leg feelings. The loser club.

  “I’ll tell you something,” said Sharon. She was recruiting, so I didn’t listen. I could see Lucy and Kate, passing notes back and forth. Lucy had her milk hair all plaited up on top of her head like a Dutch milkmaid. Elaborate as always. She had white skin and little fat hands that pushed notes across the table. Lucy looked silly with her hair like that. She wasn’t a Dutch milkmaid so why should she wear a Dutch milkmaid hairdo? It was putting on airs. That’s what I thought, and I admit it was a bitter old thought. It was the creaminess in Lucy’s nature. Maybe it didn’t suit me anymore. Maybe scaly hands were okay. Lucy was giggling, her shoulders crumpling inward and a little dainty wisp of hair floating at her neck. I didn’t like that little wisp. I hated it, in fact.

  “Jeez, Manon. Did ya hear what I said?” said Sharon. “You wanna piece of chewie or don’t ya? It’s Wrigley.” I didn’t want Sharon to pass me anything right then, not even a chewie. Scaly hands weren’t okay. Everyone knew Sharon had eczema and you could catch it if you touched her hands. I slumped my head on my elbows and turned away. And then I just closed my eyes and I listened to myself breathing.

  It wasn’t that Lucy was mean. She was still friendly to me. It was more that I didn’t believe in me as much as I did before. I wasn’t sure who I was, so I was awkward and halting. I knew I was behaving like a loser, but I couldn’t stop it. Lucy came over to my house, but I had a feeling she was coming over for something else, not to see me. Even in the best of times I felt anxious when anyone came over, because of my mum, because you could never tell how she would be. We were playing Eddie’s Clash records in the living room.

  “How come your house is so messy?” said Lucy, who was sitting on the newly reupholstered couch. It was Lucy who wanted to hear Eddie’s records. (I was sick of The Clash myself.)

  “I dunno. ’Cause of my mum; she gets headaches. She can’t clean up ‘cause she has headaches.” It wasn’t quite a lie. Sometimes Mum said she had a headache, and that was why she was in bed. But I didn’t really understand what was wrong with her. I just knew that you couldn’t count on her to be anything. She was always in a mood, she never just was; never just a plain clear sky, always weather changes slipping and rippling across her face. So we were on alert all the time. If Eddie got home after me, he’d come and ask me how she was. It was easier if you were prepared, especially if the weather was storm cloud, because then you could just piss off for a while, over to the Jacobs’ or to the Hills’ to watch Bewitched on telly.

  “Anyway, she’s good looking, your mum,” pronounced Lucy, as if it was a compensation.

  “So they say.” I flicked through the records.

  “My dad says your mother’s a beautiful woman, even if she is schizo.”

  “Schizo?” I squinted at Lucy. Pretty was one thing, but schizo was another.

  “Where’s Eddie?” she said, standing up and looking out the window.

  “How should I know?”

  Lucy was looking at the bungalow. Eddie had moved out of our bedroom because he said he needed his own room. I was right. Lucy hadn’t come over to listen to records with me. Eddie was the real reason for her visit. Girls at school were always asking me questions about him. They even rang him up.

  chapter ten

  I got to Flinders Street Station, but I didn’t exactly feel like going in. It looked lik
e a dirty gaping mouth with too many words coming in and out of it, and I felt weary at the thought of being buffeted by an argument of people. There was a skinny guy sitting on the steps playing guitar and singing in this quiet frail voice, his face looking up like a hungry bird. He seemed aimless, like a shepherd, and had a prominent and eager lifting nose and grubby red sneakers. I dropped some horse money in his guitar case. I was glad he was there. I don’t know why. Because he wasn’t going in or out. Because he was just there.

  Harry Jacob played guitar, but not in a frail-bird way. That was why Eddie made friends with him. Eddie couldn’t concentrate long enough on anything to be able to learn to play the guitar. He was only good at things that came naturally to him, things he didn’t have to work at, like footy and cricket and waltzing and laughing and girls. Everything else, like schoolwork, he didn’t care about. Harry didn’t even play footy. Straightaway that made Harry Jacob odd. If you were a boy who didn’t play footy, people were liable to call you a pansy. But Harry got away with it because he was tall, because he played guitar, and because he was Eddie’s mate and Eddie was captain of the local side. Eddie never told us he was captain; we read it in the local newspaper.

  Harry had a big family and he was the youngest. The Jacobs were once farmers but their dad had gone into real estate, since there was a drought and farming was “bad on the back.” Harry’s family didn’t put any pressure on Harry; he wasn’t expected to be anything.

  Harry and Eddie got along easily, probably because Harry wasn’t in awe of Eddie. And probably because Eddie had a lot of respect for the things that he didn’t have, and they were exactly what Harry had. Harry knew where he was. Eddie didn’t know a thing about what he wanted. In fact, I reckon that instead of wanting to get something, Eddie wanted to lose something. You had the feeling that he wanted to just shake it off, like a dog shakes off water after a swim. Only it couldn’t be shaken off, so instead he didn’t let it settle. Eddie never settled. You couldn’t tie him down to anything. He never made promises. It drove girls crazy. Eddie never promised a girl anything.

  A lot of action started to go on around then. And I mean that kind of action. For example, Susie Newbound came to school and let loose that Barry Hill had kissed her boobs. Susie was tall and she had big ones. She didn’t tell everyone. She just told Ellen Green, and Ellen told Sharon Baker, and Sharon, who never gave up on befriending me, told me.

  “You’re kidding? On the skin?” I said. I was only fourteen and a slow developer in that area. I didn’t understand how a kiss like that could be anything but humiliating.

  “Yep. On the skin. Apparently she didn’t care.” Sharon, who was delivering the scoop to me, wriggled her body in a mock shiver. We shivered together in a repulsed way.

  I wasn’t really repulsed; I was alarmed. Did that happen to Susie because she had big ones, or would that happen to everyone? Even me? And if it happened to me, how the hell would I not die of embarrassment? I didn’t even want to be looked at, let alone kissed, and certainly not on such private parts. I comforted myself with the observation that Susie Newbound’s boobs stuck out and made you notice them, like you’d notice a speed bump in the road if you were riding your bike. The rest of Susie didn’t stick out; it wasn’t unusual or uncoverable. She had freckles and a small head and she straightened her hair.

  I told Lucy. “Guess what? Susie Newbound got her boobs kissed.”

  Lucy rolled her eyes. “I know,” she hissed. “Philomena’s been doing it with Froggo.” She muffled her triumph with a casual shrug. But I saw it. I saw her enjoying knowing more than me, knowing a better, saucier thing.

  “Philomena?” I was incredulous. Philomena, that sour old rectangle who never liked me. “And Froggo?” Froggo worked at the gas station. He was okay. He used to have pimples, but not anymore.

  “Yep. They’ve been doing it for ages. The whole way.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I just heard.”

  If it was true, that would make Philomena the first person I knew who had actually done it. Sometimes it came into my mind, Philomena and Froggo doing it. At that stage, I didn’t know what “it” would look like, but whenever I saw Philomena on her bike, avoiding me, I got a nasty picture of her and fat Froggo making movements. I didn’t want to think about it. But sometimes it’s as if there’s a movie playing inside your head and you’re not even the operator. It just went to show, I thought. And then since I wasn’t sure what it showed, I just notched the fact down in my mind as an important indicator of the mysterious unknowable order of things. It was never as you’d expect. Still, I challenged Lucy. I said it couldn’t be true. Lucy didn’t say anything. She shrugged again, acting unimpressionable. She always did that. Lucy and I weren’t best friends anymore. We were just so-so friends.

  I was sixteen and still hadn’t had a proper boyfriend by the time that deadly hot summer arrived and the bad things were beginning. It was as if life’s brain went balmy and mean after that summer, as if it had bad sunstroke. For starters, there wasn’t enough flowering and nectar in the bush, so the birds were compelled to eat Mr. Nelson’s Pink Ladies. Mr. Nelson called them the pariahs of the sky; he acted as if the poor birds were criminals. He grew red and fat and desperate, and sometimes got up at dawn with Mrs. Nelson and they stood at the edge of their orchards on little yellow steel ladders, clapping at the parrots and finches who scampered across the sky looking for Pink Lady apples.

  That was the summer Susie Newbound got pregnant, and Eddie dropped out of school. It was the same summer that Ruth Warlock went missing. I didn’t know Ruth Warlock very well, since she was only a little kid, but I saw her picture in the papers and everyone talked about her all the time. She was only seven, and everyone said she was too young to be going to school on her own. In the newspaper picture she looked like such a regular gap-toothed happy girl, with straight bangs and a ribbon tied in the top of her hair. But it said “Missing” underneath, and that made the photo kind of eerie and sad. She was an only child. Her parents ran the bakery and they had to leave for work at five o’clock in the morning. So her dad used to phone Ruth twice: once to wake her up, and then again to tell her when to leave for school. She rode her push-bike to the school in Harcourt. She had to cross the railway line and the highway. No one knew what happened to her. They never found out, not to this day. That’s why it was so bad. You had to keep wondering and imagining. And the things you saw in your mind, or at least the things I saw in my mind, since I had an overactive imagination, were worse than anything, and no one could ever say, “No, it wasn’t as bad as that.” Once I saw a movie on telly where a man was kidnapping fat girls and keeping them in a hole and then skinning them to make coats. Ruth Warlock wasn’t big enough to be made into a skin coat. But at school there were very creepy Ruth Warlock stories going ’round. I couldn’t help thinking of that pervert man holding his thing, the one Eddie and I saw. And then I started to have nightmares, because I got these two pictures stuck in my brain: Ruth Warlock, with her gap-toothed smile, and Pervert Man. They made me feel bad in my heart, and I knew then that the world wasn’t safe.

  That summer, we used to hang out in the gas station, where you could play Space Invaders, or in the sawmill, where you could smoke. Someone had put a mattress down in the old mill shed, so people went and pashed in there. I never did. I wasn’t going to pash on some smelly mattress. Susie did. She liked those tough boys: the Nelson brothers and Froggo and Beggsie. But I didn’t. Those tough guys had mean ideas. After the bushfires, Angie Hill saved this baby rabbit and kept it as a pet, and some of them shot it in the head and then gave it back to her. They thought that was funny. Once they got their driver’s licenses, they spent their weekends spotlighting or paddock bashing, and they shot at the signs all the way along the road to Bendigo.

  I wasn’t thrilled about the scene in the sawmill, so I was really just waiting for summer to be over. I was doing my waiting under a tree in our paddock, near where Travis Houghton had his ca
ravan. It was a mighty good tree, a claret ash, its branches crammed with leaves, spreading out and hanging low like a big old henna hairdo. If you lay underneath it and looked up, you felt better just for watching the waving leaves and the slivers of blue sky, and for letting that be the only thing in your mind, so your mind could just sway along with the weight of the branches. But my mind always got on to something. A notion could sweep it up and stir it ’round and drag it one way or another, and then I’d just float off, figuring that life would be better if I was a bird and not a girl with a bung leg and bad thoughts. I got a feeling for that tree. I took it on as a new friend. That tree didn’t do me any harm at all.

  The first time I got an inkling about Harry was one of those stinker summer days when I was under the tree and Eddie came out to smoke a cigarette. He squatted down with his elbows on his knees.

  “You having fun?” he said.

  “What?” I waved my hand in front of my nose to get rid of the smoke. I was in a purist phase.

  “I said, are you having fun?” It wasn’t a proper question. He wasn’t even looking my way.

  “What does it look like?”

  He didn’t answer me, so I closed my eyes and I figured he’d just leave, but he didn’t.

  “Eddie, are you smoking pot?” I said. “You’re stoned, aren’t you?”

  “Look, Mannie, what’re you doing here, anyway? You look like you’ve expired or something.” He sat down properly, and I got the sense that he did have a purpose after all.

  “Just looking up at the tree.” I was lying on my back with my arms under my head. I got up onto my elbows, since I could tell we were in for a conversation. “Why, whaddya think I’m doing here?” Eddie was looking straight ahead and shaking his head as if he was disapproving.