The Anatomy of Wings

by Karen Foxlee

  I rode my bike to Amiens Road and found Beth's bike outside his house. Those afternoons when Beth came out her blue eyes shone. She wore a calm face even though when she got home Mum was going to yell at her and follow her from room to room and tell her that she wasn't going to stand for it, she was going to put an end to it if it was the last thing she ever did.

  When Beth saw me waiting outside the house on Amiens Road she sometimes smiled, other times she picked up her bike and started riding like I wasn't even there. She never asked me if I was going to tell. She unwrapped some chewing gum to disguise the cigarette smoke on her breath. She gave me a piece as we rode. When she looked at me she had that same face as when she'd rescued a moth from a spiderweb.

  That's how I knew she was saving him.

  In March Angela received four new underarm hairs overnight and three pubic hairs. She showed them to me in her bedroom. To be even I told her I had a secret.

  “What is it?” she asked, pulling up her knickers.

  I told her that I had secretly been to the flat to visit my nanna and I had gone inside and drank water backward from a cup to try and find my voice.

  “What if your mum finds out?” she asked.

  Angela was a little scared of my nanna. She didn't like the way she always hoarded lots of fruit in her little flat and kept it until it turned. Or the way she had a lot of dead flowers wrapped in bundles from the feasts of saints. And how she always asked Angela what religion she was and then clicked her tongue when Angela said she didn't know. Angela made a face.

  At home when I passed Mum in the hallway I wondered if she could see in my face that I had been to Nanna's flat. If she could she didn't show it. I wondered if Angela could see in my face that I had torn up the Australian cricket team cards that had taken Angela and I weeks to collect. Tearing them made me feel better for a little while but afterward I had to worry about what I would tell her when she asked to see them, especially Rodney Marsh, who was her favorite. I decided that I was going to tell her my mother threw them out because she was Crazy with Grief, which is exactly what Aunty Cheryl said was the reason we had to go to her place each night for dinner.

  Angela changed the subject from my nanna back to her.

  “Don't worry about not having any hair yet,” she said. “Everyone's puberty is unique.”

  She had read that in The Life Cycle Library, which Mum bought from the one-armed encyclopedia salesman when she was trying to make sense of Beth. The Life Cycle Library contains six thin volumes and was for Young People like Beth and Very Frightened Parents. Mum had unwrapped them and placed them in a neat pile beside her bed. When Angela and I wanted to read them we crept in softly, even though she wasn't in the room, and took one volume at a time.

  Angela always wanted volume 1 because it had a large section on a boy's anatomy. She always said oh my god look at this and her cheeks went red even though it was the same diagram of a penis that we'd looked at one hundred times before. In volume 1 of The Life Cycle Library all the boys had side parts and all the girls wore checkered skirts and Alice bands. None smoked Winfield Greens and faintly glowed. The Life Cycle Library was full of underlined paragraphs and words from when Mum was trying to understand just what was going wrong with Beth.

  Mrs. Popovitch came into Angela's bedroom. She asked me how my mother was doing. She said she'd seen her trying to hang out the washing and she was just skin and bones. I told her Mum couldn't eat very much. She put the food in her mouth and then it made her feel sick. Sometimes she made a vomiting noise, a bit like a cat coughing up a fur ball. I did an example of it.

  “Oh, darling,” said Mrs. Popovitch. “That's terrible.”

  “She doesn't wear lipstick anymore either,” said Angela.

  Mum had always worn lipstick. Lipsticks with names like Mystic Mauve, Melon Shine, and Deep-Sea Coral that lived in straight lines on her dressing table. Mrs. Popovitch didn't wear lipstick. She said she didn't believe in it. She dyed her hair red sometimes with henna but she never put makeup on her face.

  “And she doesn't … you know,” I added, and pointed to my hair and made a curling motion. I couldn't bring myself to say it. It made me sadder than everything.

  Mum had always curled her hair. For a normal day she just used five or six big rollers but for a dance she used nearly twenty. She put them in after breakfast and they stayed there all day. She wore a yellow scarf around her head and practiced dance moves in the kitchen while she made our school lunches.

  We were allowed to unpin them at the end of the long wait, when the sun was going down and great drifts of galahs were crossing over the house toward the creek. Even though we tried to savor the uncurling, sometimes we rushed. Somewhere on her head was the last curl and each of us wanted it to be ours.

  Mrs. Popovitch prepared a tea party for Angela and me. She brought it on a tray into Angela's room with the red velvet bedspread. There was real tea in a little teapot and real sugar in a sugar bowl and real biscuits. Mum would have never let us have boiled water at a tea party. She would have said that's how hundreds of children got scalded and scarred for life and had to wear masks over their faces to hide their disfigurement.

  “You need a haircut, darling,” Mrs. Popovitch said, and pushed aside my bangs so she could see my eyes.

  When she was gone Angela opened up The Book of Clues. She looked through the list of things in the box: the ballet shoes, the tough girl's black rubber-band bracelet, the half-a-broken-heart necklace, the advertisement for secretarial school, the blond braid, the hair combs, the address in leftward-slanting script.

  “We've only crossed out one thing so far,” said Angela.

  “I know,” I said.

  We drank our tea.

  I recited “Eye of the Tiger” like a poem.

  “Try and sing it,” Angela said.

  “I can't.”

  “Try.”

  “I can't.”

  Angela sang it. She had a weak quavery voice but she tried her hardest. “We've only got four months until the Talent Quest,” said Angela when she had finished.

  THE GRADE 10 GIRLS FROM THE PARTY ON AMIENS ROAD WERE CALLED THE SHELLEYS BECAUSE TWO HAD THE FIRST NAME MICHELLE AND ONE WAS ROCHELLE AND THE LEADER, DEIDRE, HAD THE LAST NAME SCHELBACH.

  The Shelleys didn't like the way Beth came to school more beautiful each day. It hurt their eyes to look at her. They gave Beth a bruise in Memorial Park on the way to school. I was there. In return for the bruise I saw Beth perform a small miracle. After it was performed we all pretended that we hadn't noticed it.

  Beth and I wheeled our bikes into the park through the turnstile gate. Danielle had to walk beside us because of her Milwaukee back brace, which glinted in the sun. Kylie was waiting for us on her trampoline and she jumped the fence.

  “I've told you not to jump the fence,” shouted Aunty Cheryl. “You'll break a bone.”

  Kylie ignored her mother. She showed Beth her new charm for her new charm bracelet, which was an anchor.

  “Do you like it?” asked Kylie.

  “It's OK,” said Beth.

  “Do you think I should've got the roller skate?” asked Kylie.

  “Probably,” said Beth. “It may've been trendier.”

  Beth was trying not to encourage Kylie even though Mum said she should let her hang around at school.

  Already at the top of the hill we could see the group of girls beneath the trees. One girl was swinging on the swing. It was not ordinary for other girls to be in our park first thing in the morning. The only girl that was ever in our park was Angela, waiting for us. She was nowhere to be seen.

  I sang the beginning of “Gypsy Rover” before Danielle told me to shut up.

  “I think you should've got the dice,” Danielle said.

  “You're not even at high school yet,” said Kylie.

  “Doesn't mean she can't make a suggestion,” said Beth.

  “Can you get an eagle charm?” I asked.

  “No,” said Beth and
Danielle together.

  “You can get a bluebird,” said Kylie.

  “Maybe a blue-winged kookaburra?” I said.

  “You're weird,” said Kylie.

  The blue-winged kookaburra was my seventh-favorite bird after (1) the wedge-tailed eagle, (2) the brahminy kite, (3) the letter-winged kite, (4) the wandering albatross, (5) the black-shouldered kite, and, (6) the whistling kite.

  I hadn't ever seen a wandering albatross, although Nanna had. I had never seen a brahminy kite. I may have seen a black-shouldered kite. I had definitely seen a letter-winged kite and a whistling kite and the wedge-tailed eagle. I'd only ever seen the eagle from a great distance and once through the car window feeding on a dead kangaroo. I couldn't say why I loved them so much.

  Once Mum bought me Skipper, who was Barbie's sister, so that I could be normal. She said I had to leave Mr. Edgerton, who was the president of the Outback Bird-Watching Association, which I was not allowed to join until I was at least twelve, alone.

  As we got closer the girl stopped the swing by running her foot along the dirt. She stood up.

  “Hey,” she said.

  It wasn't a hello hey.

  “What?” said Beth.

  “We want to talk to you.”

  “What about?” said Beth.

  The girl was Deidre Schelbach. She was the Queen of the Tough Girls. She had a sweet face with soft brown skin and a little nub of a nose but it was all ruined by her yellow hair with a stripe of black roots down the center and two or three teeth that were turning brown. When she started shouting her words were accompanied by a very bad smell. Deidre wore her high school uniform very short with her top two buttons undone. Her skinny legs protruded from her round body. She wore flip-flops instead of school shoes. Seven thick black rubber-band bracelets adorned her left arm.

  “About the party,” said Deidre.

  Kylie's two buckteeth made a sucking noise on her bottom lip that she only ever made when she was nervous. Deidre reached forward and grabbed Beth's bag from her shoulder in one quick movement and threw it behind her onto the grass. The act produced a chorus of snickers from the other girls, Deidre's handmaidens, who had moved forward to watch.

  “Don't you understand English?” said Deidre.

  Beth didn't say anything.

  “You should have kept your hands off him,” said Deidre. “We bet you're sorry now.”

  Deidre always said we. She never said I. She said we know what you're up to. We know you think you're better than anyone else. We're going to smash your head in if you do it again. She said we know you've been going round to his place. We know you're a little prick teaser. Do you know what happens to little prick teasers?

  “Go to school,” Beth said to us.

  We kept standing where we were. Our feet couldn't move. They had put down roots into the long unmowed grass of the park.

  “Go,” she said.

  “Shut up,” shouted Deidre, and the smell of her mouth drifted past in a cloud.

  “You didn't listen to what we said, did you?” said Deidre.

  She grabbed Beth by the top of her dress and looked around for something to push her against because she had obviously done it before.

  “When someone says hands off, you keep your hands off,” she shouted.

  She pushed Beth into the trunk of one of the figs and both of them stumbled a little in among all the roots, which spread out around the tree like rays. And the tree seemed very sad to be involved in such a thing and it hung its dark head over them.

  Deidre held Beth's neck with one hand, pressing her into the trunk. The free hand slapped her face from time to time. They were big, open-handed slaps.

  “Don't you understand English?” asked Deidre again.

  “Leave her alone,” shouted Danielle.

  The handmaidens turned their eyes from the slapping to Danielle.

  “Shut up, cripple,” said one.

  Tears filled Danielle's eyes. Kylie opened and shut her fists.

  Deidre stopped slapping Beth because Beth wasn't fighting back. Beth looked resigned to her fate. She was staring straight past Deidre at the slope of the park and the sky. Even if she could have got past Deidre there were the others and Danielle had the brace and Kylie wasn't a good runner.

  Deidre was built like a barrel. She pressed her chest against Beth's. She was going to squeeze her to death.

  “See this,” said Deidre, holding up her fist. “I'll use this next time. Then you won't be so pretty.”

  It felt like the end of it but I wasn't sure. I kept looking at the grass hoping it was over. I had a feeling I was going to wet my pants. Also my heart was beating very fast and I thought I might die like Nanna said Grandad did, bang, right there at the kitchen table.

  I heard Kylie and Danielle let out a quiet collective sigh and I looked up. Deidre was releasing her grip but then Beth smiled. She took her eyes off the sky and smiled at Deidre. It was only a small smile but it turned Deidre's face purple with rage. Beth's eyes wandered all over Deidre's face like she was looking for something. She looked very sad but she kept looking and the looking made Deidre angrier and all the angriness made Beth look even sadder. And the sadness and angriness increased.

  “Don't look at me like that,” said Deidre quietly.

  But Beth didn't stop. The sadness came out of Beth like light.

  “I said don't,” said Deidre.

  This time there was a whining note to her voice. She backed away one step from the tree. Beth reached her hand toward her. With her first two fingers she touched Deidre on the forehead. Deidre looked shocked. Her mouth opened up. A deep sound, a moan and a sigh, rose up from her chest. Beth removed her hand like she had been burned. Deidre's fist smacked hard into her face.

  “Get out of here,” Deidre shouted.

  She shouted it like she was in pain. She went down onto the ground onto her knees and held her head in her hands. Her handmaidens moved toward her but she screamed at them also. Beth, holding her right cheek in her hand, didn't say anything. We followed her.

  I looked back at the beginning of the dirt track that led to the back side of the park. The girls were gathering around Deidre in a circle. She was still on her knees and leaning forward with her head in her hands. From where I stood it looked like she was praying. She looked very small in a very big day. The sky stretched upward toward heaven. The grass bent over and stood up behind her in waves. The hot wind carried the sound of her tears.

  At school the teachers begged Beth to tell them who had hurt her but she wouldn't tell them. She said she had fallen on the basketball court and hit her head. They rang our mother but she was with Aunty Cheryl shopping so she wasn't at home. The school nurse examined her and made her look upward and downward and follow her fingers.

  Mrs. Simpson was the deputy principal who dealt with girl matters and Beth was brought before her. Mrs. Simpson began by interrogating her because she knew that there was something more to the story. She asked her quick questions to see if she could make Beth slip up. Beth kept to her story. She had been running because she was late for class. She had chosen the shortcut across the oval because it was quicker. She had tripped on the rock, it was flat and shiny, the type you can use to skip across water. She had fallen face-first.

  Mrs. Simpson tried to think about more difficult questions. They began to form inside her head and then disappeared.

  “I still think we must contact your mother,” she stammered.

  “Can I ring her at lunchtime?” asked Beth.

  “Yes,” said Mrs. Simpson, who could not disagree. “I suppose that will be all right.”

  Mrs. Simpson didn't know how good Beth was becoming at lying.

  The bruise grew on Beth's cheekbone. She tried to hide it with her hair. She didn't want to go home in the afternoon and have Mum see it. We waited for her on Campbell Road in front of the caravan park for the last leg of the ride home.

  “Go away,” she said.

  “Why?” I said.<
br />
  “Because I'm not coming with you.”

  “Mum said you have to ride home with us every afternoon,” said Danielle.

  “Aren't you listening to what she said? She's not going home with you,” said Miranda.

  “Who asked you?” said Danielle.

  “You're not even related to us,” said Kylie.

  “Meaning what, spaz?” asked Miranda.

  “Don't call her that,” said Beth.

  “Take it back,” I said.

  “Yeah retract it,” said Kylie.

  “God, why can't anyone be happy?” said Danielle, who was the most miserable person in the world since she got her Milwaukee back brace and all she ever did was draw sad pictures and write sad poems.

  Beth watched us all arguing and then she pushed away on her bike along Campbell Road toward the highway.

  “Beth,” shouted Miranda. “Do you want me to come?”

  “She would have asked you if she did, wouldn't she?” Kylie said as she crossed the road into the back side of the park.

  I rode behind Beth all the way to the highway but she had a good head start.

  “Go home,” she shouted over her shoulder.

  The denim-colored highway stretched out of town in a straight line. She didn't ride on the soft red dust shoulder but right on the pavement. She only got off when a car or truck was coming. I had to wait awhile before I could cross.

  “Go home,” she shouted again when I crossed.

  “No,” I shouted back.

  She sped up. She stood up on the pedals of her bike.

  “Where are you going?” I shouted.

  She rode past the last turnoff to Memorial South. A road train went past and the smell of cattle hung in the air after it was gone. She didn't answer me. We went past the entrances to the half-built streets of Sunset Place. She rode straight past them on the highway heading out of town.