How to Make a Bird

by Martine Murray

  I dreamed that Eddie and I were in a queue. We were going somewhere. The men at a desk let Eddie through because he had the right ticket, but I didn’t. I was looking in my bag, for another type of ticket or a passport or something, and Eddie was walking beyond the double doors. He was going on a boat. I was annoyed. I wanted to go too, but the men wouldn’t let me go.

  I don’t know how long I slept. Maybe it was only an hour or so. And it wasn’t that I woke up; something woke me. Just like that night when I’d sensed my dad sitting on my bed. Only this time it wasn’t my dad.

  It was still dark, but I could make out the bulk of Travis hovering over me. I couldn’t see his face, only the blackened looming shape of him. The floor groaned under the weight of his body.

  “What?” I said. He hadn’t spoken, but I didn’t like the quiet coming out of him. I wanted him to speak so that he would stop being that dark breathing bulk, that readiness. Surely, once there were words, normal little words and explanations, out in the air, pop, like that, then the tight deadly quiet would be broken and the lights would go on and all the dark shapes in the room would again become couches and lamps and ceramic breasts and normal things.

  He put his hand on my leg but he didn’t speak.

  “Travis?” I said sharply. I started to sit up, to wake us both up properly and sort it out. Maybe he was sleepwalking. He bent down toward me. I don’t know what happened next—if his hands came toward me, or if my body jumped up. The hands went like claws to my shoulder. His knee jammed over my thighs. I felt a rush of horror, real horror. I knew what was happening. It was night and Travis was on top of me. He was trying to get sexy. His breath smelled bad. I turned away.

  “What the hell are you doing, Travis?” I knew exactly what he was doing, but I wanted to give him a chance to get out of it nicely, pretend he had made a mistake. His mouth was on my neck, a wet wormy tongue. I squirmed away. He didn’t say, “Beg your pardon, Manon, I just fell.” He said, “It’s all right, Manon. I won’t hurt you. It’ll be nice. You’re gonna like it. Come on, relax.”

  His voice was whispery, sugary, like I’d never heard it. It wasn’t the usual Travis. I thought of Pervert Man. I thought of Ruth Warlock. I knew he wasn’t going to be nice about this.

  “Get off me, Travis.” This time I didn’t even try to say it nicely. His body pressed down on top of mine; it didn’t just lie there, it pushed downward, as if he was trying to grind my bones. I was jammed underneath. His hands were moving fast and he was pulling at my red dress. I didn’t want my red dress pulled down like that. I was pulling it back on and he was pulling it off. It was stupid. I was feeling mad since it was my dress and my body but he was acting like it was his. I yelled at him to get off but he just kept saying, “Shhh shhhh, you’ll like it, you’ll like it.” I wasn’t liking it one bit. I was hating it. His hands felt bad. I couldn’t stop them; they searched under my dress as if I’d stolen a million dollars and was hiding it under there.

  So I can’t be blamed for what happened next. It wasn’t so much me who did it, it was my hand. My hand getting back at Travis’s hands. My left hand, to be precise. It reached out toward the table, fumbled with the empty bottles, grabbed a large one, and then I watched the hand bring the bottle down on Travis’s head, as hard as it could. Harder than I could’ve done it, were it me and not my hand. I heard it connect: a dull wet thud and a shattering. For a tiny second everything stopped. I was shocked at what my hand had done. Had I killed him?

  I didn’t have time for this concern to take hold of me before his head jerked up and he screamed. He rolled to his side, moaning. I wasn’t stopping to listen. Once I knew he wasn’t dead, I was pulling my dress up, scrambling off the couch, quick as I could. My heart was thumping in my chest as if it were trying to get out itself.

  “Bitch,” he yelled. “You little bitch.” I fumbled in the dark for my backpack and yelled out, “Sorry.” I wasn’t one bit sorry. It was just my habit to apologize, especially as I’d just injured a man twice my size. Fear can make you tell lies. Besides, there was no way I was leaving my book of nocturnes with Travis. I was finding them and I was getting out. I saw that I’d broken the bong on his head. There was a very bad smell. He was trying to stand up, staggering, with his hand across the back of his head. He was yelling really foul words at me, which I don’t care to repeat. I grabbed my pack and I ran down the stairwell and I ran down the dark street, past the lovely, safe houses. I didn’t stop running till I was almost at the beach again.

  chapter thirty

  I headed for the beach the way a heart heads for home, running all the way there and then stopping still and staring out, breath thudding away over the black spreading sea. Not a single other person was there. Just the thin torn waves scratching at the shore, and a couple of seagulls wheeling around the dark sky, their bodies eerie, silent and pink in the glow from the city. Fuzzy dots of light shone out from the factories around the bay, like the long-distance eyes of a stranger, blinking back at you, uncomprehending.

  If you keep running and running in one direction, sooner or later you come to the end of land and face the sea, and then you have to stop. You have to consider. The sea asks that of you.

  But the thought of considering made me panic and I looked for my bike instead, since it was something I belonged to. It was still leaning against the No Standing pole, looking strangled and abandoned, so I didn’t look at it for long. Still puffing, I flopped down on the cold gray sand. I grabbed handfuls and poured it on my ankles, as if I was digging myself in, as if I was another beach fixture, like the rubbish bin with its hat of hot chip packets and empty cans.

  Mean Person was edging to get a word in. I knew I had to stop this happening; if I let Mean Person start on about me being the only person in the whole world who was awake and alone and with nowhere to go and a bad-man experience burning inside and not even a pair of shoes let alone a hand to hold, then that would be the end of me. I had to make a friend pretty quickly or I might just die of aloneness right then and there. Can you die of that? I had a mouse that did. It was called Dora and it died after Flora ran away. It stopped running around in its wheel. I found its little stiff body lying dead still in the wheel.

  What a tiny frail heart a mouse must have.

  I could hear the soft, fat ebbing of the ocean’s body against the beach, like it had a heartbeat itself. An on-and-on, never-ending heartbeat. Small sounds of birdsong threaded through the air, and the stars were fading like an old smattering of dust. I felt like a spy, witnessing the quiet private time when night slipped into dawn. As if it was undressing.

  I made out to myself that the tall lights, with their showers of yellow air falling on the sand, were great upstanding wise figures like Abraham Lincoln and Nelson Mandela and Mr. Jesus Christ himself. Also Mr. Higgie from the Castlemaine chemist, who is always kind and wears a safe white coat. And I couldn’t leave out Mr. Whistler, who painted those paintings in my bag, because I knew for sure that, whoever he was, he would understand.

  Or would he?

  If he came along right now and saw me, he’d think I was like a broken-down car that had driven too fast over too many bumps. He’d think I’d lost my wings. He’d think I was a fudged-up kids’ kite.

  I’d always figured that those despairing wings had lost their body, but maybe it was the body that had lost its wings? Or maybe it didn’t matter what gets lost, maybe it’s just once you’ve lost something you always expect that someone will come along and fix you up again. You’re waiting for it. So there’s another type of waiting. You’re waiting for someone to know you’re not really a fudged-up kids’ kite, you’re just a person whose heart’s got a hole or two, or you’re just a pair of wings whose body fell away. I knew then why I’d felt bad about leaving those wings hanging there. I was the one who knew them, knew how they really were. It was my job to know that they were really a glorious bird, waiting to be fixed, to be whole again. Who would know it now that I’d gone?

  I was l
ooking at the ocean and it was looking back at me, combing the shore with its little white-edged waves, like fingers stroking you, like how Ivy stroked my back, soft and on and on, like pulling out knots…enough to make you give in. I sighed, not for me but for the ocean. What a job, being the ocean, being the weeping of the world, offering with its body, a lament: an endless underlying call of again and again. Wave after wave. Again and again. There’s a pattern to all this, I thought.

  It was me who had to know I was all right. I couldn’t keep waiting for someone else to know it, because no one else could. Only that small blade of self, leaning in the wind.

  I did a very important thing right then. I stood up. It may seem like a simple motion, but believe me it was a great glorious victory. It was as if I was reversing the wind, shaking the stillness out of a rock, draining the despair out of a drooping wing. I didn’t feel like standing, I felt like lying down and curling up on my side like a leaf that knows it’s heading for a drain. But I thought of Dora the mouse, I thought of those wings, and I lifted my arms up and made myself as big as I could. I kept thinking to myself, “Boy, I’m good at being big. Look at me, I’m huge, I’m swooping, I’m carousing, I’m Hollywood. Look at me, I’m moving.”

  I started to swoop along the beach, running at the water’s edge.

  Unfortunately, Travis’s hands came rudely back into my mind and to stop them I had to think of Harry’s hands. Harry’s lovely hands, never expecting anything from anyone. I only intended to remember the look of them. I always did admire the look of his hands. They were wide. They were men’s hands but they held life so softly. They were new and gentle and I couldn’t help remembering how they touched, even though I was not intending to remember that. The night, by the Springs, I felt Harry’s hands going under my clothes, and I could tell those hands knew about love. I felt my body under his hands, like I’d never felt it before. I felt it getting warm and hungry. And when we opened our eyes, his hand was on my leg and he said, “I like your leg.” I smiled because it seemed to me that perhaps he knew my leg. I said, “Harry, let me confess, my leg likes you.” And I watched his hands gently pulling at the buttons on my shirt.

  The next day he took me to school on his brother’s motorbike. When he leaned forward, I leaned into him and rested my head sideways on his back. I closed my eyes to feel the wind like a cave around me. We were going fast, carving out the face of day: sun spilled in the tunnel of trees, a splattered sky, shining, burnt colors of leaves, chunks of light gleaming in and out of shadow. I felt as if I’d been untied. When he pressed my leg, something in me leaned closer toward him. He was dark and anonymous in his helmet. He could’ve been a prince. He could’ve been a dangerous man.

  I told Sharon Baker. (You have to tell someone. It’s almost like doing it again, in the telling of it, even in the remembering.)

  “I kissed Harry Jacob,” I whispered.

  “Wow,” she breathed out. She was really much nicer than Lucy. She wasn’t a know-all, and I’d long since worked out that eczema wasn’t contagious. “Was he a good kisser? I bet he was.”

  “The best,” I said, as if I’d kissed a million others.

  “How far did you go? Did you do it?” she asked.

  I didn’t answer her right then. I just grinned. I was a new person. But that was my secret self.

  I was walking, feet in the shallows. You couldn’t tell, if you watched, whether the darkness was fading out of the sky or whether the light was seeping in. I knew that soon the sun would rise and people would come in their white jogging shoes, puffing up and down the beach. The trams would start rattling and clanking and cars would zoom past. The day would creak into action, just like any other day. And the night would be wiped away, snuffed out by the light and action and white sneakers jogging, as if there wasn’t really madness and shame and regret; there was just this onwardness, the world heading forward.

  It must have been about five o’clock in the morning. I took off my red dress, I lifted it over my head and let it drop on the sand where it lay like a dying puddle. I walked into the water, stepping over the small, charging waves. The cold swept through me, clear and ringing. I felt the morning air enclose me. I was happy to be cleaning everything off: Travis, the bong water, the band room, the extinguished hope, the red dress, especially that.…Boy, it felt good to be out of that dress. That dress was my mother’s dress and not mine and even though she was in me, I was in me too. And I was the one wearing this self. It didn’t have to be red. Blue, I thought, blue is the largest color.

  I stood in the sea up to my waist, my fingers pulling through the water. The horizon stretched out like the world’s first and last line. An untouchable line. An eternal, knowing kind of line. I knew there was an importance lying along the horizon and I half expected it to confess itself to me. I even listened for the sound of a collision. What an effort it must be to separate the sky from the sea.

  It made you think. If the horizon is what distinguishes one thing from another, says this is this and this is that, then it is the horizon that gives you the feeling that there is an ending, a final place where one thing will meet another, a place to go toward.

  But it wasn’t really like that, because if you listened to it, you couldn’t hear that final place, you could only hear the waves coming again and again, as if they were the horizon’s own breath, nudging the sand into different slopes and ripples, leaving their ribbons of foam and winding heaps of bone and shell, all worn smooth by some insistent caress, some long journey, some distant tiny collision, over and over. You see the waves continue, sometimes small or sighing, or sweeping in fans, or pounding the shore like an angry fist, still just continuing. It makes you wonder if there isn’t really somewhere to arrive at, if it isn’t all just continuing, and continuing. It makes you suspect that there might not be any final discoveries that will turn the world back up the right way.

  To wander without trying to find something. Imagine that. Imagine what might fall out of the air.

  Once I found a paper nautilus shell, just like that, just as if it had fallen out of the air. I was walking, pushing myself forward through the ocean, at Lorne, waist-deep, one arm hovering above me, wrapped in a plaster cast. My broken arm was a new limb, jutting out white and dirty. The same one I had in Ivy’s photo. The one I was proud of. I did forward rolls with it. And I went swimming. There was no reason to be looking for something, I was just seeing how I could move through the water without wetting the plaster. My foot felt it, just its edge, just a fine and tender frilled lip.

  Not everyone gets to stumble onto something perfect. I put it on the mantelpiece at home, up with Eddie’s footy trophies. It wasn’t that it was beautiful and rare; it was the rare and beautiful fact of finding it. A vulnerable truth that had chosen me, edged itself impossibly out of the sand, whole and white. Proof that life will find you best when you aren’t looking for it. When you aren’t trying to work it out.

  I stretched out my arms and stroked the top of the sea with my palms. And since I was feeling emotional, I let my arms spin ’round and ’round, driving them through the water. Then I sank down into it. I went right under and swam along the line of the shore, reaching with my arms. It was a long time since I’d swum in the sea. A summer holiday, years and years ago.

  Those memories belonged to a land that was always behind me. A land of shadows, untouchable, unchanging, and completely mine. A scent could take me there. The smell of the sea and there I was swimming at Lorne, Eddie, always swimming out deeper, diving under, calling out “Hey, Clapot! Watch this!”

  I lay on my back in the sea and looked up. The sky pressed against me. I let it lay like a weight over me, let it spread through me, inky and soft, so I was swamped by it. Not for a reason, not to get something from it, not to go forward from it, just to taste it.

  And then I cried. I cried like a storm that had been brewing for a long time. It was like I was the God Almighty rain itself, pouring down from my own inside. Noises came out, sounds
I’d never heard come from myself. But I let them come. It was as if I was there and the crying was there and I was holding my own crying in my arms. And the sea was holding me. So I didn’t have to stop it. And neither did the sea.

  I had no choice but to look up, to become small again, to become big again.

  There was the note of a single star: an arrow of longing saying good-bye.

  chapter thirty-one

  Once I saw a dead dog.

  Eddie and I were at Lorne, walking along the wall by the beach early in the morning, playing follow-the-leader. It was my turn to lead. The tide was so high there was no beach in some places, and the waves were crashing up against the old stone wall. I saw it first. A dog’s body was being rolled around by the waves and bumped up against the wall. I cried out when I saw it. My hands flew up to cover my eyes. Eddie said, “Oh, Clapot, it’s a golden retriever. The poor thing.” The way the waves pushed and pulled at it made me feel bad. There was nothing the dog could do, because it was dead. I was mad at the sea and the waves. There’s no dignity in being dead.

  Eddie stayed with the dead dog, to protect it. I ran all the way back to the campsite to tell Dad. I was feeling important and sad. I saw all the squat wood houses with their beaming windows and bristling lawns and people leaving and arriving with their hunger and appointments tucked and clicking in their minds, and not one of them thinking that there was a golden drowned dog being rolled around by the waves. It should have made a difference. I felt annoyed at them too, even the houses, just for going on, without minding that there was death, for not every now and then moaning or folding in half.

  Eddie’s dead body was all dressed up in a suit and his hair was greased down. It wasn’t even a nice suit. It was a cheap gray suit with a pastel pink tie. No one wears suits like that when they’re alive, when they can choose. I’d only seen Eddie in a suit once, for Benjamin’s funeral. Before we went to the Castlemaine Funeral Parlor, Mum had chosen some clothes for Eddie to wear, but when we got there his body had already been dressed by the funeral people and we were too embarrassed to ask them to change his clothes. There was lolly-pink shiny material swishing around him. He lay in the pink gummy mouth of a coffin, about to be swallowed up forever, made into air and memory. It looked like a kind of occasion, in that coffin, one that Eddie wouldn’t have gone to. Not even I would have.