How to Make a Bird

by Martine Murray

  “You think too much.”

  “You know that picture in the hall? Eddie?” He didn’t reply. He was busy taking a deep drag on his cigarette, and he held the smoke in for as long as he could.

  “Mannie, ever since your back got bad you’ve been lying around and thinking, and it doesn’t do you any good. That’s all. You get stuck inside your head. It makes you weird.”

  “Did you hear what I said? About the painting?” I sat up straight.

  “Which, the yellow one?”

  “Yeah. Why are you smoking anyway? It’s bad for your lungs.”

  “’Cause I like it. I just like it. See, Mannie. That’s exactly what I’m saying. If you didn’t sit around thinking all the time, being smart about everything, then you might find you like more stuff. Problem with you is you always figure out what’s wrong with things, instead of just doing them. Why don’t you do something stupid? Even if it doesn’t make sense, you might just enjoy it. You figure it out too much and then there’s no living left to do, ’cause you’ve worked it all out in your head.”

  “Jumping off that wall was stupid.”

  Eddie put his hands to his forehead and then he rubbed his brow with his fingers, as if he was suddenly weary.

  “Look, I know this is really going to make you mad, but I’m going to say it anyway. Sometimes you remind me of Mum. The way you float around, living inside your head, imagining things, and you get all the proportions wrong. You blow things up and you put in colors when there aren’t colors, and then you can’t really see what’s in front of you. Did you notice it was holidays? Did you think about that? You’re too busy worrying up these problems in your head. Tell you what I think, you should bloody well smoke a number. You know what I’m saying? You should make a few mistakes. Real mistakes. You know what I’m saying, Mannie?”

  “Have you finished?” I said, because I never appreciated it when people tried to tell me what to do and what not to do. I pulled a bunch of old leaves up under my nose and smelled them. “I mean, is that what you came out here to say?”

  “Nope, I came out to ask you if you wanted to come for a swim with me and Harry up at Wally’s dam.”

  “You know that yellow picture I was talking about?” I persisted. Eddie puffed on his cigarette and nodded. “Well, I was thinking how it would be good to know what you were meant to do. You know how there’s all those men working in that yellow field, and they’re lying down, resting? I think they look like they’re a part of something, and they know what their particular part is. That’s why they can just go and rest like that, because they know it’s their time for a spell. Do you know what I mean?”

  Eddie squinted. He tapped on his cigarette and watched the ash fall.

  “What would you do, Eddie? I mean, if there was no one telling you what to do?”

  He shook his head. He didn’t even take the time to think about it. He pushed the butt into the ground and then laid it in the palm of his hand, like a gift.

  “God knows,” he said as he got up. He went to walk away, but then he turned around. “You coming for a swim or not?”

  “Yeah, I’m coming,” I said, only because it was so damn hot, not because I needed their company.

  Then again, you wouldn’t ever swim alone at Wally’s dam because of the leeches. Wally was a German pig farmer, and some folks said the dam had pig poo in it, but I don’t think that was true. It was just the leeches. If you got one on you and there was no one to check you from behind, it would give you the creeps. That hot day I got a leech on the back of my leg and Harry burned it off with his Winnie blue. Eddie was the one who spotted it.

  “Hey, you got a leech on your leg, Mannie,” he said, but he wasn’t jumping up to help, even though he knew how I hated leeches.

  I wheeled around in a panic, and Harry just took his cigarette out of his mouth, kneeled down behind me, and took my ankle in his hand. He held the cigarette right over the leech till it dropped.

  “There, it’s gone,” he said and he looked up at me. He didn’t just let my leg drop either, he placed it back down on the ground, carefully, as if my leg was valuable. He sat down and put the cigarette back in his mouth. His hair was wet from swimming, but you could still see the curls in it.

  “Mannie’s got a thing about leeches,” said Eddie, playing with a bucket on the end of his foot. “She’s a wuss.”

  Harry grinned but he didn’t laugh. He didn’t make fun of me at all. He leaned back on his elbows and looked up at the sky or the tall gum trees with their dangling leaves. I didn’t know which. It was hard to tell just what Harry had on his mind. He never said. Not like Eddie, who always told you what his opinion was, even if you didn’t care to hear it.

  But I knew something about Harry Jacob then. I knew that he wasn’t one of those tough guys, and he’d never kill a pet rabbit. He was different.

  chapter eleven

  I was at the train station, waiting for the Brunswick train. I was eating a green pear, actually. I had a pear-eating method. First I ate around the top, and then I lifted it up, dangling it like a light bulb, while I tilted my head to get underneath to the fat bottom. From this position I noticed a young man watching me intently. I wouldn’t have paid any attention, except that he looked so pleased with himself, as if he knew something that no one else knew. He wasn’t really a man; he was a boy dressed up as a man. He was wearing a hat. A white straw hat with a black band and a dip in the middle.

  It looked to me like a hat that was satisfied to have found a head that would not shy away, a head that would swagger beneath it in beaming confidence. I was busy getting lost in a haze of envy for the hat’s happiness, when I noticed that the boy underneath it was looking back at me, so I smiled and explained that I was looking at his hat. I threw the pear core onto the tracks. He tipped his hat and looked up at it as if he and the hat were friends. “What’s with the dress?” he said. “You going to a party? I mean it’s a nice dress.” I wiped my mouth on my arm.

  “Actually, I am going to a party. Later.” I stared out at the tracks because I was lying and I don’t like to look at people when I tell a lie. He hardly seemed to notice. He stuck his hands deep in his pockets and rocked back and forth.

  “Well I’m going to Queenscliff. Have you ever been there? ’Cause if you haven’t you should go. You can come with me if you want to.”

  “No thanks. I’ve got stuff I have to do here.”

  “What stuff?”

  “Just stuff.”’

  “Well, there’s a beach there. Maybe you should come anyway, I wouldn’t care.”

  “Why should I?” I gave him a long look. The idea that I should do anything other than what I planned made me feel uncomfortable. He didn’t say anything. He shrugged. I watched him for a moment and then I smoothed down my dress and leaned back into the wall, letting my new silver shoes peep out. I had no intention of taking up the conversation again; I didn’t like the way he seemed to think he knew more about what I should do than I did.

  He said, “Maybe you never been surfing, huh?”

  “No, I haven’t.”

  “You scared?”

  “I’m not scared. I just don’t want to go.” I wasn’t meant to just give up my plans and go somewhere with a random guy like him. The idea of it made me mad. He was mistaken. “Why are you asking me? Don’t you have some friends you can ask?” It was as if I’d thrown something hard out at him. His head jerked back and he frowned. But he regained himself quickly and laughed.

  “Don’t worry. There’s a whole lot of us going up for the day. I only asked you ’cause I thought you might like to hang out.” He shrugged again and he said, “Have fun at your party.” And then he spun around on his heel and walked up the platform a bit. I could tell he didn’t like me much anymore.

  I have to admit it, I felt bad, and my thoughts went over and over it. What had he seen in me that made him think I might need some friends? And why had I been so mean to him? I didn’t want to be recognized and he seemed
to think he had recognized me. But I was in disguise. I wasn’t that old Mannie Clarkeson, I was Manon, A-type, elegant, and “on business.” Probably, I reassured myself, it was just the red dress and the silver shoes, attracting attention.

  The reason for my red dress was that it reminded me that I was out—not in, out. That wasn’t exactly true, it was more to put me in the proper frame of mind: the outward state of mind. When I was out, I felt required by the sun, and by the trains snorting along, and by the woman with porridge legs squashed in tiger-print shoes, and even by that annoying boy, to be clean and polite. That was the outward state. Politeness didn’t come naturally to me. I was really a rude person. I had rude thoughts about people. Rude and boring thoughts, actually. Not spicy, no, not that. A thought more like this:

  There is a couple sitting opposite me on the train. He has short dark hair and a big chest and he is acting like a horse. She is lanky and large-nosed and wearing long pink socks for a certain effect. She wishes she could act like a horse too, but she can’t. She just doesn’t have it in her to act like a horse. I watched the couple a while and saw that the man didn’t mind that the woman didn’t have it in her to act like a horse; he must have loved her for other reasons. I wouldn’t have loved her if I was that man; I just wouldn’t have forgiven it. A person should be able to act like a horse if they feel like it.

  I looked down at my red floating dress, which covered my legs and almost covered my silver shoes too, depending on how I placed my feet. The dress made me feel like a person in a painting: someone who wasn’t actually real, someone who didn’t have to wipe mud off their boots, or vacuum old carpets, or answer to anybody else. That’s why I liked it. Because it exulted. In fact, the red dress effect was similar to the T-bar effect, only larger.

  chapter twelve

  I got off at Jewell Station. There was a map on the wall there. I pressed my thumb to it and followed the streets in my mind. Cyril Jewell House wasn’t going to be hard to find. First I had to make my way to the main road. Sydney Road.

  The side street from the station was crammed with buildings. It was getting hot and the air was thick and smelly. There were cars everywhere and trucks backing, causing jams. Suddenly there didn’t seem to be much room. I was squeezing and squinting. The glare was bouncing off the white brick walls of a big factory. A group of three men were spread over a small stairwell, smoking cigarettes and eating falafel, so I stopped and asked if I was heading for Sydney Road.

  “Like a hot chip?” One of them pushed a foam bucket of chips with sauce toward me. I shook my head. “Makes you sick, doesn’t it?” he said. His hair was all greased down and he had a lazy kind of voice.

  “What? The chips?” I said.

  “Nuh. The government. It’s fucked.”

  He fixed me with an uncomprehending stare, which I pretended not to notice. I figured he’d been living next to traffic too long.

  Sydney Road eventually led to Sydney, if you kept heading north for another thousand Ks, so it was a big road with a lot of promise. There were shops on either side. Not special spiffy shops, like in the city, but all kinds of plain, ugly places spilling along like a crowd of jabbering orphans tossed out to the far edge of the city. The shops sold things from other parts of the world: carob paste, flat bread, artichokes, semolina cake, spinach triangles, haloumi cheese in jars, pipes with cord, rose water, and puffy white wedding dresses. Except for the wedding shops, there was no fuss about anything. Plain as plain it was, and cheap too. I felt a sudden rush of enthusiasm, to be standing in the middle of the busy footpath, buoyed up and surrounded by the grimy but half-exotic atmosphere. It was hectic and loud and gusty with smells and sounds. No one was wearing expensive shoes, I was sure.

  What I liked about Melbourne was the way you couldn’t ever know it. It was the hugeness of it, the gray flat streets that reached out and crisscrossed and yielded lines of houses, all proud, upright, brimming with roses and sheltered by fences. I only knew our grandparents’ street and the house that stood opposite theirs. Once we’d met the boy, Paul, who lived there with his Yugoslavian mother. Paul had fat lips and hair like a helmet, and he only read Mad comics. I called him Paul Slop-a-lot because he had a Yugoslavian surname that sounded like that.

  The last time I went to my grandparents’, they’d moved to a small flat. Benjamin was dying. Dad took me and Eddie. He stood behind us as we waited at the door, one hand on each of our shoulders, as if he was about to push us forward, like little boats. We were like a package, the three of us waiting at the door. It was good to be a package since it meant that whatever was about to happen would happen to all of us together and not just me. I listened to the hiss of wet leaves scurrying into gutters, and then the murmurs of people inside.

  Cully opened the door, and when she saw us she started to cry. Cully made my dad Christmas cake every year. She helped my grandparents with ironing and cooking. Sometimes she gave us old mints wrapped in tissue.

  There was the smell of wet wool coats and whiskey. My shoes sank in the fat cream carpet. Aunt Marjorie stood peeping out from the kitchen door, nibbling on a cracker. Ivy tottered toward us, hands clamping around Dad’s wrist, like a drowning swimmer clutching at a life raft. She didn’t say much; her mouth was wobbly. Dad made excuses for why Mum wasn’t with us. Ivy was wearing a long turquoise blue dress; she always wore blue, it was her color. But she’d got her makeup wrong, like a kid who can’t color in properly and goes over the lines, and so she looked like a frail, disheveled queen.

  “Your grandfather wants to see you. He’s in the bedroom,” she said, bending down to kiss us so you could smell the powder on her face. She dabbed at her eyes with a tissue. Usually Ivy took us to the kitchen, gave us biscuits or ice cream and lemonade and made a big fuss about us. Benjamin let us play with the ice dispenser on the freezer, which had a button so you could choose crushed ice or ice cubes. Eddie and I walked toward the bedroom. We’d never walked toward it like this before. It seemed to take ages. The bedroom door was half open, like a frowning mouth; it seemed hesitant, and injured, as if waiting to be properly shut or properly opened. Eddie edged in first without touching it, and I followed.

  Benjamin was lying on his bed. Once, that bed had been enormous, but now, in the small room, it looked cramped, like a proud animal in a small cage. Once, it had been the center of a big room in a big house, with windows that jutted out and a line of cushions to sit on. The cushions were bleached pale by the sun, and there were dried-up insects behind the curtains. There was a grand piano in the entrance hall and hot towel rails in the bathrooms. It was a white house, solemn and tall, clean and glorious like a bride.

  That white house had stood for something, something sugary and unbelievable, something that faded on the tip of your tongue like the icing dusted on Ivy’s half-moon biscuits. The biscuits were kept in a tin that was hard to open. You had to take it to Benjamin in the den. He opened the tin and let you have as many as you liked. When you kissed him, you could taste whiskey.

  Now Benjamin and Ivy were on a pension and they lived in a flat in Brunswick.

  Eddie announced us as we entered the bedroom.

  “Benjamin, it’s me and Manon.”

  We always called him Benjamin. He was too tall to be a grampa, never hobbling around or craggy or bent over by close-knit cardigans.

  Benjamin and Ivy. Once, the two of them lay propped up by big square pillows, sitting in the four-poster bed with initialed robes and spectacles, trays of tea and toast, smelling the way grandparents do, syrupy and delicate, always happy to hoist you up there with them.

  Now Benjamin lay there alone, evaporated and pale.

  “Oh, it’s you, my boy,” he said. His head lifted a little, then dropped down. “And Manon.” Skin drooped across his neck like an old curtain. He wore a gray suit, and no shoes, just clean camel-colored socks. It was almost his ninety-fourth birthday. Benjamin always did things properly, elegant as an ironed silk handkerchief, even as he died.

 
His hand reached for us and you could see the bones and lilac veins poking through. The hand flailed like a flapping moth, looking for someone’s. Eddie pressed it between his palms.

  “I’m gone, I’m gone,” said Benjamin. His eyes showed only a faint look of alarm, as if even that, the fear of going, was fading. Breath wheezed in and out slowly, a whistling sound, as if it was catching and dragging over a surface. There were medical contraptions on the bedside table: white plastic things with lips and valves, and also pills. Eddie clamped down on his hand. To stop him slipping away. If only you could, hold someone there in life.

  I’m gone, I’m gone. The words clawed at the stillness in the room.

  “It’ll be all right,” said Benjamin. It was what we were supposed to say.

  “Yeah,” said Eddie. I didn’t say anything. I don’t know why. I was thinking too hard. And I didn’t want to say the wrong thing. So I shut my mouth and remembered Benjamin’s once-proud peppery old hands holding a hardback book up to his face. Biographies, he only read biographies. He only liked true things.

  Benjamin looked at us both, his eyes flitting between us. I thought I might not ever see him again and it made me cry. But it was okay because even Eddie had tears rolling down his nose. You hardly ever saw Eddie cry.

  “Did you read that book yet, Manon?” he asked. I’d forgotten about that book. A hardback biography, of course. It was about a woman, and he thought I would like her. From the photos inside it looked as if she was just a housewife called Janet. I didn’t plan to be a housewife, so I’d stuck it on the bookshelf and forgotten about it.

  “Not yet. But I will,” I said, and I really meant it.

  “Would you get me a Coke?” said Benjamin.

  “Coca-Cola?” said Eddie.