How to Make a Bird

by Martine Murray

  Once I saw a mynah bird land on my windowsill. It stared at the glass. It was an ugly teenage mynah bird with a fluffy head and bulbous hooded eyes. And even though I was only the distance of a small bush away from it, the young mutt couldn’t even see me. I’d never been so close to a bird like that before; I could see the ridges on its yellow feet. After a while its mother flew in and dropped a worm in its gob and then flew away again. The mynah bird waited. The mother must have said, “Wait there, I’ve got some dessert coming.” Anyway, I really loved watching it just standing there. It wasn’t even beautiful or rare or balancing on one leg, it was just being itself. I thought of Harry Jacob and how when Harry played guitar, he just played it; he didn’t try to get your attention with it. I wished the Thin Captain would act a bit more like a mynah bird. But I reasoned to myself that stars have the right to try to glitter as much as they can. You wouldn’t catch a peacock dressed like a mynah bird.

  In front of me there was a couple jostling. They were dancing, actually, only they weren’t being very smooth about it. The boy was big, in a hulkish way, and he had a roaring warrior grin. She had spiky black hair and a tight lacy top, and she was round and squishy, and parts of her bulged out, like one of Ivy’s pincushions. You could tell she liked being pushed around by that Viking boy. She didn’t care about anything else, like whether she might be bumping into other people or looking foolish. Next to me there was a boy in a red T-shirt. He was holding a beer and he had nice brown arms. He wasn’t talking to anyone either, but I didn’t want to talk to him. I wanted to watch the Thin Captain. The jostling couple kept bumping into me and the boy in the red T-shirt. They were distracting me from my true mission, since I found myself watching them more than the stage, not because they looked good but because they were about the worst, bumpy, out-of-time dancers I’d ever seen and they weren’t one bit embarrassed about it. I was fascinated by their lack of shame. My mother would have rolled her eyes if she could see them. Was I rolling my eyes? Not on the outside. I could tell that they were having a good time. Was I having a good time? They were all floppy with the fun they were having. I was standing stiff like a rusty anchor lodged in a forgotten place. So, I took a few liberties. I loosened my head from my neck. I let it float and lift. I softened down, sank into my body, away from other people’s opinions. My eyes closed and opened. I was swaying and my arms were moving too. I was surrounded by music, I was buoyant and flowed like a weed in the ocean. I rippled, expanded, gave in to my beating heart and bones. I danced. The red T-shirt boy must have noticed I was behaving like a fun person, because he said something to me.

  “What?” I said, because the music was loud.

  “Like your dress,” he repeated, leaning his mouth toward my ear. I turned and looked at him. He was dancing. I was dancing. We were dancing next to each other. If I added this up with the compliment he’d just leaned close to give me, I thought it might mean we were dancing together. I hoped this wasn’t the case.

  “Do you?” I said, rather stupidly.

  “Yeah.”

  “Thanks.” I turned my face to the floor because I was feeling awkward. I noticed my feet were bare. My shoes had once been in my hand but now they weren’t. I frowned at my naked feet as if they’d misbehaved, but of course it wasn’t their fault. It was the red wine that had set my mind adrift in a rather nice way. I’d been drunk a couple of times before. The first time was when Lucy and I went to Adam Allcot’s New Year’s Eve party. Lucy said I couldn’t go in jeans, so she gave me a white dress that was short and had tiny red dots on it. Lucy didn’t ever wear it because her legs weren’t good, she said. It made my legs look brown, so I didn’t mind. When we got there they gave us a glass of champagne. Adam Allcot’s dad had a lot of money. There was a swimming pool with banana lounges around it. I remember those banana lounges especially because I was sitting on one when the champagne first hit me. I remember looking over at Lucy to see if she was feeling like I was. The only other thing I remember was that there was this older boy from school who pulled me into the garden and kissed me, and I didn’t like it at all because his tongue went ’round and ’round in my mouth in a repulsive, urgent way, like he was having a race and not a kiss. And when I tried to get away he pushed me over on the grass and I got a grass mark on Lucy’s white dress and I felt anxious in case it stained. After that the night was spoiled, because I wanted to go home and wash the dress before it was too late.

  The red T-shirt boy wasn’t that bad. He had talked to me, just like that, as if I was a regular nice girl who wouldn’t think mean things. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to dance with him. Maybe my dancing fun would be enhanced. The problem was that I didn’t want to get stuck with him. Just say we started dancing and it wasn’t fun. Then how would I stop? I didn’t look at him, I looked straight ahead and tried to decide whether I should or shouldn’t look.

  “Can I get you a drink?” he said.

  It was nice of him to ask, and I did even look again at his brown arms and think that they were the kind of arms I would like to have around me, but still, I didn’t want him to get me a drink just in case it meant I owed him something. So I said, “No thanks,” and he walked off. I knew he wouldn’t come back. I started to feel almost lonely and regretful. I felt we’d been watching the band together, in an unspoken way, of course, and now I was left watching it alone. I wondered why I was so unfriendly; you’d think I preferred my own company, but I truly didn’t. Maybe I was a cactus in my past life. Maybe I was a walrus.

  Anyway, it felt as if that touch of regret and those six or eight glasses of red wine weren’t mixing so well in my head, and then when I let the music in too, it all felt worse and much too much. I was slowly getting anxious and jammed in. I tried looking at the Thin Captain, but he wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at the crowd. You could tell he loved the crowd, the thousand nameless faces merged into one. What he loved was the size of it. The dark swaying animal. I was in it. I was its eyes. He loved the eyes upon him. He was sucking in the love. My mind was falling around, spinning.

  I threaded my way out.

  Had the love been sucked out of me?

  Did walruses ever feel lonely? Did they have brothers?

  I sank onto the steps outside. To the passersby I would have looked like a wet old flag thrown over the step. The white concrete was cold and firm on my back. I liked the feel of it.

  “You all right, lass?” said the bouncer, who looked like he should be doing a war dance but instead was just folding his large dark arms across his chest. I considered my beautiful dress, which was now unmistakably shabby because of the beer smear down the side. I considered my head, which felt not unlike my dress, sticky and wet with alcohol. I breathed in the ocean, and without trying to get up I said, “All things considered, yes, I’m all right.”

  “Well, you can’t lie there, someone’s likely to step on you.” He had a tattoo of an anchor on his forearm. Maybe, I wondered in a seesaw way, it was a sign, or maybe it wasn’t. But I didn’t want to move. Not one bit. So I groaned and hoped it might make him a bit more sympathetic to my situation.

  “You had too much to drink, lass?”

  “Yes,” I said, a bit curtly I suspect, because his sympathy seemed to wane suddenly.

  “Look, if you’re gonna have a chuck, there’s toilets out the back. I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to get up now.” He stood right over me, like a shadow. I groped around and stood up, leaning on the banister, glaring at him feebly. I hated anyone telling me what to do.

  The thought of going back in there made me feel weary. But I couldn’t give up. I didn’t want to be in that room, but I had to go back for him, the Thin Captain. I swelled up with air. I was ready. I was swaying and breathing and charged with love. I plunged back in.

  chapter twenty-five

  Luckily, the music had finished and people were dispersing or assembling around the bar. There was no one onstage. The Thin Captain had disappeared. I would find him, though. He had asked me t
o come. He would want me to find him. He would be expecting me. He would say, “Ah, here is the girl in the red dress. I’m so glad you came.” He would—

  “You got a pass, lady?” I’d found the backstage door.

  “What pass?”

  “A backstage pass. Can’t let you in without a pass, sorry.”

  “But I was invited.”

  “Sorry, lady. You need a pass.” He crossed his arms and acted like a brick wall. I was standing there, brimming with despair, when another man put his arm around my shoulders.

  “It’s okay, Ron, she’s with me,” he said to the brick-wall man. It was like magic: The man automatically stepped aside, and in we walked. Just like that. I felt the way Moses must have felt when the Red Sea parted. The man with the magic was almost bald, but he wasn’t old, just bald. He was sweaty too, and his skin was white, but there was a blue tinge about him. He had eyes like a cat and, though he kept his arm around my shoulders and took me into the room, I wasn’t sure he was real.

  It all seemed to happen in an instant. I didn’t have time to thank him, or inquire, before—there I was, in the band room, the out-of-bounds room for only the most special people.

  It was a small, ugly room. There was a couch against one wall, a table in the middle with cut-up fruit and cheese on it, a line of mirrors, and a fridge. There were people, groups of them, smoking and talking and laughing. They seemed older than me. I saw the Thin Captain straightaway. He didn’t see me. He was talking to a girl on the couch. His arm was around her.

  “So, who invited you?” said the bald man. I saw the groups of people looking at me. I stood out. The red dress. It was wrong. It was dramatic and loud. I wanted to turn it down. I wanted to blend in. I stared wildly at the bald man. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t say who invited me. Some spurt of laughter snaked up out of a corner in the room and I could feel my thoughts stand up like hackles. It was as if, up till now, those poor sun-sodden thoughts had been plodding around like fat lazy queens in long cloaks and, upon entering the band room, had suddenly started to run fast and get very thin and alarmed. I tried not to pay any attention to them. I tried for an instant to fix my mind on a simple thing, like the wet shine on the bald head in front of me, but before I could stop it, those runaway thoughts were having me thinking I was surrounded entirely by crocodiles. Large, laughing, upstanding crocodilish people wearing snappish expressions. It wasn’t that the people had uncommonly large jaws or threatening teeth, it was just that the air around me seemed ferocious.

  I heard a conversation going on about haircuts. Someone was pointing out someone else’s bald patch. Then there was a white-haired girl in tight pants who was talking about skydiving and getting engaged to the bald patch, all on the same day. How thrilling, I thought to myself, mainly to test out my ability to make a normal observation. The engaged girl was bending over to butt her cigarette, and I saw she was wearing those underpants that only have a strap up the back. You could see them poking up from her tight pants. It started me thinking about my silver shoes, which led naturally to the realization that I wasn’t wearing them right when I most needed to be making an impression. Worst of all, I was standing barefoot in the middle of a band room, with a backpack containing a book of ocean paintings and a head containing crocodiles.

  “Oh, you’re a fan!” smirked the bald man in response to my speechlessness. “You wanna speak to Frank?” He jerked his chin in the Thin Captain’s direction.

  “No.” I breathed the word out, desperate to make him stay next to me. I realized that a fan was the lowliest of the low and though technically I really wasn’t a fan, I certainly didn’t want to be thrust over there. At least not until the thought aerobics had settled. I tried to tell myself that there was no reason for me to feel crocodiled; after all, they were just people like me, only a bit older and with sexier underpants and musical instruments. The bald man frowned. He wasn’t a philosopher. In fact, none of them were talking about human suffering or foreign policy. They weren’t discovering antibodies or saving forests or even painting pictures that make your heart leap, so why should I feel so squashed down and eaten up by them?

  “I’m the drummer. Did you see the gig or what?”

  “Mmm. I saw. But not much. Too crowded.” He nodded and walked over to the fridge.

  “Wanna beer?”

  “Yeah, thanks.” I didn’t want one. I hated beer. But I wanted to keep him with me. I wanted him to shelter me. I didn’t care who he was or what he said, as long as he would stand next to me. He was a shape I could hide behind, blend into. At least, with him, I was part of a people clump. I was feeling so jellyfish, so soft and internal and small.

  It’s no use hiding behind him. They all think you’re an idiot, said Mean Person. They know you’re a faker. I argued feebly that maybe they were like Pedigree Disco Girl: nice on the inside. Maybe they didn’t even notice me. But I couldn’t convince myself.

  The bald guy gave me a beer and I leaned up on the bench, just to give a casual waiting air, but I knew it was affected and I couldn’t get it right. So I sighed and stopped trying. I said to myself bravely, “Oh, who cares what they think?” And though Mean Person snorted dubiously, I took a swig of beer and, as proof of my defiance, stole another look at the Thin Captain.

  He was fiddling with a champagne glass which had a broken stem, balancing it on his thigh. He wasn’t talking to the girl. The guy who had the recently lamented bald patch was sitting on the edge of the couch, and the Thin Captain was laughing with him. But the girl sat on the other side of them, and I died a little inside to see his arm flung around her. It definitely was. I’d hoped I’d seen it wrong the first time, but the arm was there. She didn’t appear nervous either. She had her legs crossed and she was smiling. She had a pretty face, hair rusty like autumn leaves, pale skin, green shirt, jeans, and sandals. She was gazing around the room as if looking for something a little more interesting than the haircut conversation. She saw me looking at her, but if she thought anything you couldn’t tell. She leaned on the Thin Captain and said she was tired. He patted her leg and kept talking to the bald patch. She closed her eyes momentarily and sank back into the couch with a big sigh. He turned to her and said she could always get a cab if she wanted to leave. She nodded vaguely and reached for a glass of wine, as if she didn’t care, as if she wasn’t going to make trouble. You could tell he didn’t like to be bothered.

  I turned my back to them. I was vaguely aware that the drummer was speaking to me but I’d not heard a word. Why was I so dressed up? That’s what the drummer wanted to know. I don’t know, I was saying, wanting to get out. My mind was racing. I felt as if I was caving in, as if any minute I might just shrivel up and everyone would point in horror. “Look! Silly girl has shriveled up.”

  “Frankie, you going?” the drummer was speaking now to him, the Thin Captain. I felt weak. They were coming toward us. Thin Captain and the girl. Both of them. I didn’t look. I looked down. “Not coming out?” persisted the drummer.

  “Nuh, we’re going home,” said the Thin Captain. He was next to me. I could see her, the bottom half of her anyway. She wasn’t holding his hand.

  “See ya then,” said the drummer, lightly, as if it didn’t matter.

  “Yeah, have a good one,” said the Thin Captain, and as he said it he tossed a glance at me. He looked down at me as if I was a speck of dirt on his shoe. Not even his shoe, the drummer’s shoe. I was something for the drummer to kick off. He didn’t even recognize me. Everyone in there must have seen that I was just a fan who didn’t even get a mere hello.

  “Bye, Lana,” said the drummer.

  “Bye,” said the girl. She gave me an uncertain smile. I knew she felt sorry for me. And somehow I felt sorry for her too. I don’t know why, but suddenly she seemed so very sad to me. It even occurred to me that if she’d been at my school, she and I could have been friends.

  chapter twenty-six

  By the time I got out of there it was late and the streets were em
ptying, which was lucky because I was feeling private. If I could have, I would have yanked the self out of my body and put it in the bin or covered it with dirt. I sat for a while on a low brick wall, pulled my knees up, and put my head on them. I saw myself spilling all over the street, pouring into the pavement like melted ice cream, people having to step over me on their way to the beach in the morning. What a mess I would make on the street. People like Mrs. Mrs. Porrit would say, “Did you see Manon Clarkeson? Late in the night she poured herself all over the street. Just like her to make a mess. She always was a hopeless child.”

  And my mother would be ashamed. She wouldn’t talk about it, though, not to anybody. My dad would hurry over and clean up the mess.

  Once, I tried to make a birthday cake for Dad, as a surprise. I admit I got a bit creative with it: I didn’t follow the recipe exactly, and it came out looking like a badly shaped hat. But I put candles on it anyway, and when I took it to the table Mum poked it with a fork and laughed. She said, “Oh, why are you so hopeless, Manon?” I didn’t answer her, since I didn’t know why I was so hopeless, but Eddie took a piece. It looked pretty messy on his plate. He said it tasted fine, but Mum snorted. Dad didn’t say a word. After that I never made another cake. I’m just not the baking type. But I could still hear people snorting at me. Mean Person was a champion snorter. Mean Person, of course, had a few snort-infected words to say. Oh, boy, first you make a complete dickhead of yourself, and now you’re getting maudlin. What did I tell you? You’re hopeless.

  I was sick of that word hopeless. It had been dumped on me a long time ago, as if it was a dunce hat, as if I would always be somewhat incapable, unable to steer myself properly through life, unable to put out a fire, to roast a chicken, or wear a nice dress. It was like having a curse put on you. You can’t help but believe it, because you always believe what they tell you. And before you even know it, you’ve become a hopeless mean old word-dumper yourself.