I got the book of nocturnes and looked closely at them. I tried to see how the brush did that, did so little but made you feel so lonely. I knew what I was going to do. I was going to copy one, just to see how it was. Maybe I’d paint that view from the tunnel, send it to Harry, and if he liked it he’d come back to Blackjack Road. He’d have to, sooner or later.
In fact, that funny-looking bird that Harry had whittled out of wood was still sitting there on the windowsill, where I’d left it. I picked it up and examined it, as if it knew something, as if it held a clue, as if in holding it I was holding some part of Harry. I hadn’t properly appreciated that bird when he gave it to me. I didn’t see it; all I saw was a useless thing that Harry had stood still to make. Deep down, I guess I always knew that Harry’s way was special and Eddie must have known it too, but that special way annoyed me so much that I couldn’t bear it. I couldn’t bear to see how Harry was where he was, wings or no wings; he wasn’t thinking thoughts about where to go next or how to be better. He was sitting under a tree, carving a bird out of a stump of wood, not for anything, just because the wood was there, lying at his foot, or the bird was there, tucked up in a branch; and together, the wood and the bird gave him the idea. It didn’t matter to Harry that he wasn’t exactly Michelangelo. The thing was, Harry had nothing to prove. He was at home in himself.
Was I ever like that? Probably before I was born, when I belonged to everything. When I was part of the air: a tree’s exhalation. And then I was born. I was there, given a shape, a little squirming body clad in nappies, and howling, simply because I recognized myself within the everything. It’s how a piece in a jigsaw must feel once it’s cut out and made separate, when it isn’t part of the picture anymore; it’s just a bit, a howling bit crawling along the old lino, alone, thinking: This is me, the rest is those others. Maybe you never think it, you just know it; and that knowing sends you stumbling into the huge haphazard arms of life, running from your aloneness. You don’t stop, no, you keep running and running, until along the way you lose someone and voilà, your aloneness finds you.
So, even if you don’t know it, maybe you’re always trying to get home again. You’re hungry for it. You’re sent out seeking a way to get there. You sing songs and fall in love; you pierce your nose, sweat, jump up and down, and go pash on an old mattress at the sawmill. You hold close the one you love; you build a house and make a family to go in it. You surround it with a fence and say, this is mine. You make a lot of money and you buy a lot of things; you buy a great pair of shoes, you run. Maybe you paint a picture of the ocean, or maybe you just fall off the boat. Maybe you make a bird.
Home isn’t where you live; it’s where you aren’t hungry anymore.
Right then that little wooden bird was better than any other bird I’d ever seen. I put it on my bedside table, on top of my book of nocturnes, as if they were in the same family. Then I lay on my bed and closed my eyes. Before I knew it I was imagining Harry and me in a big room.
There are long crimson curtains over the windows and they billow out like ball gowns. I am waltzing, with Harry. We’re moving like kings. No, we’re moving like angels. It’s easy. We go ’round and ’round the room. There’s no furniture to bump into, no one watching. My feet are in the air. Sky pours in. I’m closing my eyes. I feel his voice touch my neck. Slow, his voice says. Go slow.
I open my eyes and I smile and I dance slower and slower.
Special thanks to Rosalind Price and Sue Flockhart; thanks also to Antoni Jach and Tim Freedman; and to the Tasmanian Writers’ Center for my residency there.
Copyright
Text and illustrations copyright © 2003 by Martine Murray
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E-ISBN 978-0-545-28312-0
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Murray, Martine.
How to make a bird / Martine Murray.—1st American ed.
p. cm.
Summary: When seventeen-year-old, small-town Australian girl Manon Clarkeson leaves home in the middle of the night, wearing her mother’s long, inappropriate red silk dress and riding her bike, she is heading for Melbourne, not exactly sure what she is looking for but not wanting to stay at home alone with her father anymore.
ISBN 978-0-439-66951-1 (hardcover : alk. paper) [1. Runaways—Fiction. 2. Emotional problems—Fiction. 3. Family problems—Fiction. 4. Mothers—Fiction. 5. Brothers and sisters—Fiction. 6. Grief—Fiction. 7. Australia—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.M9637Ho 2010
[Fic]—dc22
2009027453
First American edition, June 2010
Cover photo-illustration © 2010 by Ali Smith
Cover design by Elizabeth B. Parisi
How to Make a Bird Page 17