The Anatomy of Wings

by Karen Foxlee

  I secretly hoped Miranda's stepmum wouldn't be at home because sometimes she got angry. When she got angry Mrs. Bell bared her yellow teeth and her eyes turned crazy. I'd seen it before in town right outside the Blue Tongue Lounge Bar when she was fighting with another lady on the footpath. They had been fighting each other in the middle of the day but both looked like they were very tired. They had slapped at each other with weak arms, missing each other occasionally. Finally Mrs. Bell had hit the ground and lay there with her yellow teeth showing like a snarling dog that had been kicked. I was watching from the car window until my mother told me to cover my eyes and, as we drove away, to not look back.

  Mrs. Bell's boyfriend, Kevin, came to the screen door. He wore a pair of jeans but no shirt. His chest was covered in thick black hair. On his shoulder he had a tattoo of a roaring tiger but his own smile was full of large white teeth like the Cheshire cat's. He was combing back his wet hair.

  “They might be here or they might not,” he said, grinning, like it was a very hilarious joke. “But wherever they are they'll be up to no good.”

  He winked at us.

  I tried to see past him into the caravan but I couldn't.

  “Come in and have a look if you like,” he said.

  “Why can't you just tell us?” said Danielle, who was (a) angry at being made to walk for kilometers looking for Beth, who she considered a troublemaker, and (b) already very annoyed at having to wear a Milwaukee back brace.

  “Where would be the fun in that?” asked Kevin, and he scratched his balls.

  “Pervert,” said Danielle, and pulled me with her by the arm.

  Mum rang Aunty Cheryl and enlisted Kylie in the search. She said Kylie was supposed to be looking out for Beth. She tried to turn it all around as if it was Kylie's fault. She yelled and shouted and threw things in the kitchen.

  “I give up,” she said.

  Nanna came and told her it was because there was no religion in our house. She said Mum only had herself to blame. When she came she brought a bag of rags. Mum and Nanna used the rags for cleaning. Mum opened up the bag and took out a rag and I saw it was a section of an old pair of yellow shorts that had belonged to me. She started cleaning the wall telephone with it.

  “I just don't know what to do,” she said as she cleaned. “She won't listen to a thing I say. She is like another girl. I don't even know who she is anymore.”

  “She has never been the same girl since the lake,” said Nanna cautiously.

  “Are you still going on about that?” said Mum. “It's that Bell girl that's caused all the trouble.”

  “You must separate them then,” said Nanna, “and you must lock her up.”

  “Don't be silly,” said Mum. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean put her in the room and turn the key.

  That will learn her the lesson. Keep her here for one day. Remember I did it once with Louise.”

  While they planned to lock her up, Beth was in Marco's new car, an old sun-faded Holden with a dark interior and the upholstery spewing stuffing and springs. He was giving her shadow-filled kisses and pressing apart her thighs with his hips. They were at a place in the desert where men took their women. A water hole that people said was bottomless. A place where the sunlight leaped and danced on the rock walls.

  “Do you sometimes feel sad?” she said, touching the pure white skin of his cheek.

  “No,” he said. He climbed off her, back against the door. He spat out the window. “What's that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “Just sometimes you look sad. Inside.”

  He lit a cigarette and after a drag passed it to her.

  “What're you going on about? Are you stoned or something?”

  “I don't know. Don't worry.”

  He grabbed her by the legs and pulled her toward him.

  “Why'd I be sad?” he said, tickling her until he made her laugh. “Hey?”

  “Sorry,” she said. “I don't even know why I said it.”

  Marco dropped her off on Memorial Drive so Mum wouldn't see him. I'd been riding up and down streets looking for her but she ignored me. She opened her bag and took out chewing gum while she watched Marco go. Marshall Murray shook his head from the patio.

  “Tell me what you know,” he called out to Beth.

  “Nothing,” she replied.

  It was late. Mum had already exhausted herself. When Beth opened the door she just shook her head. From our bedroom door I saw her follow Beth down the hallway and I could tell she was thinking about locking her up. When Beth went into her bedroom Mum's hand hovered near the handle but she didn't do it.

  “I'm grown up, Mum,” said Beth.

  “You're not,” said Mum.

  “Please. Why can't you understand?”

  After she started drinking on the hill she was sadder. The sadness expanded inside her. She couldn't sit still for it. She lay on the sofa and got up again. She went to a window. She lay on her bed. She started a biscuit, she threw it away. She rested her head against the bathroom mirror. I saw it. The way she held her hand over her heart when she thought no one was watching. The very faint glimmer of tears in her eyes. I saw it when she chewed her nails until they bled.

  “What are you staring at?” she said to me.

  She sounded angry, like Miranda or a Shelley girl.

  She saved a moth with the map of the world on its back. Its wings contained an inland green sea fringed in arid continents. She held it on her fingertip for a long time.

  “It'll just fly into some other web,” I said.

  “Maybe it won't,” she said.

  “Moths only live a very short time,” I said.

  “You're such an annoying little shit,” she said.

  I hated her and loved her that final winter.

  She saw sadness in Nanna's open-palmed Madonnas suffocating inside the glass cabinets. I saw her try to turn her face away from painful things: struggling insects; a three-legged dog; Kylie, clumsy, dropping her bag, calling out to her across the oval; a simple boy pushing supermarket trolleys; two women staggering across the highway with a carton of beer, tiny specks. On those days she felt everything suffering.

  That winter the nothingness of still days slipped into her, drop by drop. Days when everything was so bright and each and every thing had a shining clear edge: the telephone lines draped across wide empty streets, the frayed edge of a white cloud, the hawks above her with trembling wings, tumbling and free-falling through the sky.

  Sometimes on those days the whole world hummed. She laid her head against it. She heard it whispering like the sea inside a shell. She heard the mine quivering and shuddering and groaning.

  “What's wrong, chook?” said Dad.

  He had come home from the pub and found Beth curled up on his side of the bed. He slipped his flip-flops off and lay down on Mum's side. He turned on the transistor radio.

  “Hey?” he said. He patted her on the back.

  “I'm going mad,” she said.

  “No,” said Dad.

  “Yes,” she whispered, facing the wall.

  “How mad?” said Dad. “Stark raving?”

  “Yes.”

  “That's my girl,” he said. “Come here.”

  She rolled over and put her head on his chest.

  “As long as you're not barking mad,” he said, and she closed her eyes and half smiled against his heartbeat.

  She only had six months to live.

  IN THE BOOK OF CLUES Angela wrote under the title “Deardry”:

  what does she know?

  She crossed out the clue of the tough girl's black rubber-band bracelet. She sang “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” incessantly, in her weak quavering voice. “Don't,” I said. “It hurts my eardrums.” “But I'm training you to sing again.” There was a terrible rumor that Anthea Long was going to borrow Tammy Hoffman's Austrian national costume for the Talent Quest and sing something from The Sound of Music. It would be just the kind of thing she
would do.

  Mr. Barnes asked me if I was going to sing because he said he'd heard I was very good. I thought, at first, that he was making fun of me. I thought it was a mean thing to make fun about but then I realized he didn't know that I couldn't sing anymore.

  “Probably not,” I said.

  I kind of felt sorry for him because nobody was frightened of him, not the way we were frightened of Mrs. Bridges-Lamb. He wore very tight pinstriped bell-bottoms even though it was 1983. When he bent over to write on the bottom of the board the beginning of his hairy bum crack showed and everyone giggled. I called him Bum Cracker Barnsey at little lunch and that made everyone laugh.

  After school in the afternoons Aunty Cheryl came to our house with Kylie and tried to train Mum how to be a mother again. She made Mum get out of her Japanese happy coat. She made her brush her hair. She made her get out the recipe book and pick something to make for dinner.

  “Frankly, Cheryl,” said Mum, slapping the book shut, “I just couldn't be bothered.”

  She poured herself a glass of Fruity Lexia from the cask and clicked the handle on Dad's recliner and put her legs up. She lit a cigarette and clicked the remote control.

  “Well,” said Aunty Cheryl, “what the hell's going to happen to these other two? This one here?”

  She grabbed me and I became an example.

  “This one spends half her days down the creek like a wild thing. Look at her feet.”

  She lifted my feet, which were dark brown. She pulled back my bangs to reveal my eyes. Mum looked at me, then up at the ceiling.

  “Why don't you try losing one,” she said quietly.

  “She's gone,” said Aunty Cheryl.

  “Don't tell me that like I don't know,” howled Mum.

  Kylie, on the sofa, crossed her arms and started to cry.

  Because I was finished being the example I went down the hallway and into my room, where Danielle was lying on her bed crying, and I got the hammer that I had been smashing marbles with and I got my Bionic Woman doll out of the Barbie doll box and I smashed her head in. Her head didn't smash very well because she was made of very strong plastic. It just kept bouncing back into shape and that made me even angrier.

  “Stop it,” said Danielle.

  She covered up her face with her hands and sobbed. And for the first time I wondered why they could put Jamie Sommers back together again but not just an ordinary girl like Beth.

  The worst thing about secrets is that if you let them sit for long enough they grow up and have a life of their own. If you turn your back on them you can get a very big fright when you turn back. When I didn't tell on Beth from the very beginning it became harder and harder to do it later, even when everything was going wrong. I tried to threaten her.

  “I'm going to tell on you,” I said when, for instance, I thought it was Marco she was sneaking out to at night.

  I had spent so many afternoons in front of the house on Amiens Road. So many afternoons when I could have been collecting facts about one thousand different topics and reading volume 3 of the Merit Students Encyclopedia, which so far was my favorite and which began with “bat” and ended in “Cairo.” I was still angry.

  “Don't,” she said. She grabbed me by the arm. “Please.”

  She had grown paler. Her hair had changed to the color of white sand. Her freckles had faded into her skin. Her eyelashes touched her cheeks when she closed her eyes against the glare. She had bright red nail polish, which was chipped. She chewed on it between drags on her cigarette on the back stairs.

  “You don't even know what I'm telling on you about,” I said.

  She didn't care.

  There are three different types of tattling. In the first type you are actually looking for something to tattle on a person for. As soon as they commit the crime, something as simple as burping and not saying excuse me, you walk casually to the nearest grownup and tell. It usually makes you feel good afterward.

  The second kind is when you know someone has done something wrong, for instance thrown a rock through the glass window of the drive-in picture theater's ticket box. You have to decide whether to tell a grown-up or not. Mostly this is because someone may have been watching and seen you in the same general area and you would like to make clear that you weren't involved.

  The third is the much worse kind, when you know a terrible secret. A secret that is much worse than breaking a window or even maybe starting a small grass fire. And then being asked, begged, to keep the secret.

  This is because secrets are terrible things.

  Even the simplest ones.

  For instance when in winter Angela whispered in my ear, “Tina Litvin wears her undies on the outside of her stockings, it's a secret, pass it on,” then all day I had to think about it. The secret grew and grew inside my mind. Why did she wear her underpants on the outside of her stockings? Was it because her parents were from Estonia? Was Angela telling the truth or just spreading a very bad rumor? Had she really seen the underpants on the outside? How could I get to see Tina's underpants to verify the fact other than to ask her to do a handstand, which are banned on the playground? Was Angela telling the truth when she said Estonia wasn't really a country but a place like Disneyland where you have to pay for a ticket to enter?

  Big secrets are catastrophic. However hard you try to hide them and forget them they bob to the surface and you must go over them again and again. They are taken out and touched so often they become worn smooth as a river stone. You have to carry them around inside you like a baby. The secret grows until you feel like all you are is a skin that covers it, a thin skin, easily split, ripe.

  “Tell me what you are going to tell on me about then,” Beth said.

  I could have told on her about how she got the bruise, about the house on Amiens Road, about the drinking on the hill. That would just be for starters.

  “I will tell on you,” I answered.

  I even did some Kylie fist clenching.

  “Jenny,” she said.

  I knew her secret of finger crossing.

  First, only with one hand, for good luck. She did that when she spoke to people. When she said hello. As though something terrible might happen. All of a sudden. And later, with two fingers crossed on both hands. That was to save the doomed. I knew it. I'd seen it. When she took her seat beside Uncle Paavo at the table she double-crossed her fingers and sat on them.

  I knew the secret of her disappearing parts.

  Her shedding of skins.

  At night when the streets were still, emptied of all the people and all their noise, she changed. Night calmed her. She uncurled herself on the bed. She uncrossed her fingers. Each morning she emerged from the night slightly different, stiller and more serene.

  When our mother went to the doctor with bad nerves because of Beth, the clinic sister suggested a nice pamphlet about puberty. The clinic sister said Beth would grow out of the difficult stage. Mum kept the pamphlet on her bedside table. It contained diagrams of girls’ and boys’ genitalia.

  “Girls’ gen-it-al-ia,” read Angela, pronouncing it like it was a foreign city and then adding other exotic locations. “Lab-ia minor, lab-ia major, vulva.”

  “Vulva?”

  “Vull-var. Boys’ gen-it-al-ia. Penis.”

  “Don't,” I said, covering my ears.

  “Penis,” said Angela. “Pee-niss.”

  The pamphlet did not mention the crossing of fingers.

  The pamphlet did not mention nighttime riding.

  It did not mention the unlocking of hearts.

  It did not mention the sensation of doom rushing toward Beth in a wave.

  It did not mention smudged mascara and several types of sorrow.

  It did not mention the giving away of parts of herself.

  It was a very useless pamphlet.

  After the pamphlet Mum got the complete Life Cycle Library from the one-armed encyclopedia salesman.

  She studied them carefully for clues. She read them from co
ver to cover. She spent a lot of time on volume 6, which was the Parents’ Answer Book on Drugs. The girls didn't wear Alice bands or tennis skirts in volume 6. They wore bell-bottoms and ponchos. The boys had hair straight out of Scooby-Doo.

  The volume 6 glossary contained words like blasted, black beauties, coming down, cube head, ripped, roach holder, and Texas tea. We had never heard of these words. Beth didn't use these words. It looked like Mum had been up and down the list one hundred times, underlining some words, circling others.

  Angela and I didn't leave any marks when we borrowed The Life Cycle Library. We took one slim volume at a time, secretly. Eventually Angela grew tired of volume 1 and the diagram of the pee-niss. We graduated to volume 2, which was about having babies. We learned that it was possible after all, despite what Anthea Long, with all her expertise in yodeling, said, that a man and woman could have a baby even if they weren't married. Angela was pleased to have it in writing because she had argued it with the white-haired Anthea at big lunch.

  “See, I knew it,” said Angela.

  All that was needed was some boy's sperm to get inside a girl's vagina.

  “What if Massimo Gentili went to the toilet and some sperm came out and it flew through the air and someone was sitting on another toilet in the girls’ toilets, except not me, and some of that sperm flew up into her?” I asked.

  “Does sperm have wings?” said Angela.

  We were more confused than ever.

  “We need to get the facts straight,” I said.

  “We need to show this book to Anthea,” said Angela.

  I was filled with dread. How could we get it into my schoolbag and out of the house and back again?

  Mum read all of the volumes before she approached Beth. They went into Mum's bedroom together and the door was shut. I heard Mum reading straight out of the text in a wobbling voice.

  “What is a woman?” she said. “Is she tall or short, young or old? Is she warm and friendly or cold and selfish? Can she cry, does she kiss boys, is she afraid of the dark?”

  It was a strange passage for her to choose because, for example, Mum didn't know that Beth went out at night into the darkness, only I knew it, and somehow when she asked it sounded almost like trick questions. Mum should have asked me the questions. I answered them in my head from the hallway. Beth was neither tall nor short but in-between. She did cry. She did kiss boys. She could be extremely cold, especially when she was bored of people, but also very friendly, which was what Mum wanted to talk to her about.