The Chantic Bird

by David Ireland

  I had to go; they were on to me and I didn’t want to be shot out. I tell you what, I felt so good that no one could catch me—a sort of energy or power—that I ring-barked every tree in the park with my knife. There was a silly war statue there, too. I knocked the arms off that, they were the only things on it that I could twist. Boy, did they make a fuss about that! Don’t they act up when you touch their property! Do people think their silly old property will ride proud and shiny before them into heaven?

  I had felt quite at home in the Zoo. The peacock was one of my favourites. He’d lift his tail up to impress you and there’d be staring eyes all over it, looking through you. Come to think of it, I felt quite at home in the whole world, doing what came into my head. But I must admit that sometimes I almost stopped to wonder who put all these things in my head in the first place. I used to laugh at the animals and tell them they were in hell. Get it? They’d been bad in Africa or South America or where they came from, so they were sent here to hell in cages. They were just the bad ones. And when I left the Zoo I remember thinking it’s just the same for people. Or maybe it’s just the same. This is hell now, the after-life we were sent to because we were bad where we came from. That’s why practically everyone you know has such a lot of bad in them.

  It seemed a good idea when I first had it, but I soon got tired of it. I get sick of everything very quickly.

  2

  CAVE

  I walked all the way back to this cave I knew, seventeen miles from midnight to five o’clock. The darkness was warm. It was when I was near streetlights or shopfront lights that I felt the cold. I lay back and had a rest till the sun was up a bit. I thought of myself lawless as a meteor, burning what I touched.

  The cave, if you lay back and looked out of it, was nothing more than a hole in the rock, aimed one way at the cooling core of this poor old dying planet, and the other way at a big sweep of outer nothing. Before I got round to getting something to eat, I started to scratch some drawings inside the roof of the cave with the pig-stabber end of my knife. It was a high cave and I had to get some thick saplings stuck in side ledges to reach up there. I cut fairly deep into the sandstone, then rubbed in some dirt and ashes from the floor. They were pretty coarse drawings. I got rid of the saplings and dusted off the marks they made.

  I thought I heard a footslip noise outside. When I edged my head round to look there was nothing, only maybe a peewit had rattled a stone loose somewhere. But something saw me. The first I heard was a drumming on the soft ground, a rabbit bobbed away uphill. I chased him till he squatted, crept up on him, he started away in a big circle, then ended up near the cave again, where he went to ground. I used some of his scrape to block up his holes, then dug him out from his main entrance. Rabbits have to die alone, their mates clear out when there’s trouble.

  I stretched him, headed him, skinned him, gutted him, chopped off his hands and feet and had him for breakfast. There’s nothing like meat in the morning.

  And there’s nothing like the great sound of things breaking, splintering, crashing and smashing. With the meat in me I hurled big stones down and toppled three mighty rocks from the top of the hill; you should have seen them go bashing down through the trees, knocking everything flat bash to the creek. The grass and flowers moved and shook so much you’d think they were laughing, too.

  I reckon any of the ordinary people who could have seen me then would have wanted to be me. But it was a weekday and they turn into workers on weekdays, not humans any more. They’re bricklayers, accountants, truck drivers, doctors, coppers. Humans on weekends.

  Now and then I had trouble sleeping there in the cave. I must have had it on my mind about someone following me. Things were always running around in my head one after the other, chasing one another. Even the things in my head had other things following them! That made me laugh.

  I hate to be a member of anything. Member. It’s a cow of a word. It’s all right visiting people, looking in on them, but the word membership…Come to that, all those words with ship on the end give me a pain; friendship, membership, kinship, relationship.

  Stealing, stealing…That was all I ever did, practically. Just a matter of taking what you want when you like. Stealing other people’s friends, stealing money, food, even stealing a bit of shelter from those who didn’t miss it.

  One bad day a year ago I spilled bath water on little Stevo’s leg. We had to heat up the water in the copper and carry it up the steps, fourteen steps—I made them myself out of fenceposts from the bush; the holes that used to carry the eight-gauge wire made good drainholes—you carried the water up the steps and poured it into the bath, but if someone was in the way or mucking about near the edge of the bath they could easily get a gallon of boiling water over them. Stevo did. I knew I could have stopped it splashing him if I’d wanted to. Why did I want to hurt him? Was it because when they were really hurt they ran to Bee?

  You know, there was a spoon in our family right from the time I was very young up to the present day. It was worn thin and it was mainly used for the castor oil Ma used to drop into the kids, but I liked that spoon. Funny, how you can like a thing that’s got no life in it, when you don’t like most of the things that do have life. Remember, I’m only telling you these things because you want to know.

  When we moved into the old place in Short Street some kids had shot rocks all over the floor in every room in the house. The old man didn’t say much, I reckon he’d done his share of shotting rocks, but poor old Ma was the one that had to clean up the mess. My cousin Jim, the one that was in some place called Changi many years ago, used to visit us. I remember him riding his motorbike full bore up the hill to Chiswick, and taking me to the Art Gallery. He was an artist and drew pictures to decorate the officers’ tents in the war—you know, naked women—he even studied later at the Julian Ashton Art School, but we gave those Gallery attendants a few good afternoons. They really earned their money keeping on our tracks.

  They must have had some rule about people not touching the paintings, because if you let your finger stray too close to the paint, the attendants would start walking towards you very fast. And if you took your finger away, they would stop where they were and pretend to turn away. I suppose the point was, if you weren’t dressed very well and you were young, they got worried. Course, if you put your finger out again and again, they would keep stopping and starting. Worry makes them very nervous.

  The old man used to try to sell fish then, that was after the old brethren disapproved of his good insurance job. He didn’t like it either, then, what with most of the people having to surrender their policies, he thought it was cruelty, but he could have said to hell with the brethren, couldn’t he? Did we mean less to him than his principles? I reckon we did. But I’m not sore about it any more, it’s no use anyway, he’s dead and buried.

  There was the bomb shelter I dug in the backyard. I ought to fill it in, you can’t expect Stevo to know the difference between a red-back and a blow-fly. You asked me to tell you what I remember, didn’t you?

  I shouldn’t have bashed that porcupine to death. Not with my tommyhawk. Not with anything. I could have dug him out and given him to Stevo as a pet.

  Why did they? Why me? Of all the people I could have been, why did I come out as me? I could have been anybody. It must have been the way they did it, the wrong time or the wrong way or something. When Ma was expecting me, she walked along George Street and was just in time to see a couple of coppers belting the shine off the old man for loitering. Actually he was waiting for her. And me. He must have talked back and you can’t do that unless you’ve got some standing in the community. And before I came she saw one day at the foot of Napoleon Street a mass of loyal workers, showing solidarity through the boot, kicking a scab to death. Maybe those little episodes soured me right from the time I was an egg.

  I called in at the house just on dark. Stevo was about to be got ready for bed. I waited around while Bee tucked the others in.

  �
��When you taking us to Wisem Beddy?’ said Stevo. He meant Wiseman’s Ferry. I’d forgotten I’d promised.

  ‘See? I say Wisem Beddy.’ Bee must have been trying to correct him. ‘Boots says it.’ Boots was some character on the TV. I got them a set off one of those delivery trucks that double park while the driver hefts into the appliance shops the cartons of new stuff from the manufacturers. It’s simple. You wear ordinary clothes as if you’re offsiding on the truck, then hit the goods as soon as the driver’s on the footpath with his load. You carry your own load towards a shop then go down a lane or through a shop out the back. If you watch the delivery routes and only hit the manufacturers’ trucks you can’t go wrong. I don’t believe in knocking off the owner-drivers. They’re on their own, like me. It wasn’t a big set.

  ‘Time to go sleepy-byes,’ said Bee, a bit severely.

  ‘I wouldn’t not like no seepy-byes,’ said Stevo. ‘Want to stay and watch the snow-pens.’ That was the penguins. They were on the TV too. Practically everything was on TV. If you had enough money, you could almost kid yourself you were living, by watching the thing all the time it was on.

  ‘Get your night suit, then I’ll give you your bath.’

  ‘You hab a bath, if you want to.’ But she swung him off his feet and headed for the bathroom.

  ‘Would you like to get his night suit. Under his pillow,’ she called back to me. I knew she must be tired, it wasn’t like her to ask for help. I got it, anyway, although I don’t like doing things for people. I went in the bathroom and shot the pyjamas over the towel-rack. It squeaked a bit in its brackets, it must have been getting rusty.

  ‘Don’t do that! Mustn’t! I told you!’ Stevo ordered. ‘That not the place!’ Bee must have told him to put certain things in certain places. I didn’t see any difference, myself. I was about to put the pyjamas somewhere else, when Bee whipped them off the rack and shot them on to a little sort of table. I reckon she had those certain troubles. I’ve noticed that the ones that are anxious about men or the future are the ones that have the most trouble. And of course you only suffer like that with nerves if you don’t take the things you want right away, when you want them. That’s what I always do. I have no anxiety, that I know of. It’s the only way. She probably thought to herself that I was a problem kid from a good girl’s point of view, who falls in love immediately and forgets absolutely the next moment. Mind you, I don’t know if that’s what she thought, but if she did, she was right.

  Anyway, Stevo was in the bath and looking for some way to stay out of bed. I thought I’d get out of the road before he started on his Chantic Bird. It was probably only a kid’s fairy story and didn’t mean a thing. He could see I was going to vanish, and the way he looked at me wasn’t quite the same as when the bathwater hit his leg. I was glad of that.

  I always get to my hidey-holes as quiet as I can, and when I got back to the cave and crept round the entrance, the sound of the cave’s inside wasn’t the same as before. That was my first idea there was someone there. It wasn’t as echoey. Not as hollow. I was always a bit worried that someone might be wanting to latch onto me and tag along behind. A sort of side-kick. But I’m no good with someone else. I have to do things my own way, I don’t even like anyone watching.

  Then I heard whiskers. The sound of a hand rubbing upwards the short bristles at the back of a head. The sort of head that gets a short back and sides. A man, most likely. When he clicked his torch on I could see it was, too. Apart from his short haircut he was an arty sort of joker. And what was he doing? He was trying to follow the aboriginal cave drawings he’d discovered on the ceiling of the cave. He couldn’t reach them, but there he was, copying them down in a book. I bet he never saw cave drawings like that before. Made by ten-foot high aborigines. Then I startled myself a bit. He moved his old torch a fraction and it seemed someone black slid around the cave wall at me. It was only shadows, though. When he had the torch unsteady you’d swear there was a crowd of people up the back of the cave.

  He was a nuisance. Odds on he had no money with him. As I walked away very quietly I cursed him and wished he had a job. At least a job would have kept him out of my way. That’s what jobs are for, to keep people off the streets.

  3

  BUSH

  I didn’t sleep long enough to want to bounce up fresh as soon as I woke, I was camped out in the bush, but when I did get around to having a wash in the creek—it was the start of the Lane Cove where I was—I had to climb up into the trees, the morning felt so good. I sprang a bit from branch to branch, actually I called it flying but I don’t think I was anywhere near as pretty as the glider possums that do that sort of thing all the time. Naturally I had to fall. Only about eight feet, though, onto what we used to call Indian Rock, since from the side it had a hook nose and a fierce face. Where I hit, a paper-thin layer of stone whispered up loose from the rock. I crumbled it into the sand it was and started to feel my leg. There was a bit of a rip just above the knee. I got some cold water on it and stopped the blood. I knew my way about cuts like those. A few miles away, some jets dived and climbed, then raced peacefully high up, leading a white vapour trail back to base.

  I wandered about through the bush, had a good drink at old Roach’s pool—old Roach, I knocked down my first pedestrian outside his house on the footpath; it was a little kid and I was on a pushbike and he got me a mention in the local rag—listening to the crickets in the grass and the little waterfalls in the creeks. If I’d had some meat I could have had some crayfish for dinner if I’d had some string to tie the meat to.

  I lifted the bark of a young red gum and did a little drawing with my knife on the wood of the tree. The cambium layer, they called it in school. I put back the bark, hoping it wouldn’t die, and went away hoping someone would get a surprise if they were passing by when the bark peeled around November. When I thought about it later, I had to admit there wasn’t much chance anyone would pass by just at that time, but there was something like a shadow of a chance.

  I felt like some fruit, so I crossed the rusty railway lines and trotted through the bush to Dural. There was plenty of fruit there, always. On the way I remember thinking it was the same bush I walked in when the old man tried to tell me the facts of life. Someone put him up to it, because he didn’t want to. I could see that. Mostly it was because he didn’t really take to me, I didn’t look like his side of the family, in fact I was dark and reminded him of Ma. He liked the ones with fairer colour and blue eyes.

  It was in that bush that I got flowers years ago and pressed them in a botany book and got special commendation, whatever that was. Actually, it meant nothing; they often used to give a prize a big name if there wasn’t actually any value in it.

  I went by the little old house where a dog came at me once so fast that he left a bruise, a ten-inch bruise on my leg for months. He was running so fast I thought he was going on past. The collision must have dazed him a little for he just stood there and shook his head. I grabbed it, the head, with my hands over his mouth to clamp his jaws shut, put my legs round him, then sat on his back and rolled over. That had him in a neat scissors. You have to watch out for their paws even if their claws are blunt. The scissors was around his waist and all I had to do then was bend him back; usually their backs break. This one was a bit whippy in the spine, so I had to choke him. I threw it on the front verandah of the little house. It was one of those old houses with a lot of bushes around the front door, like so much fur. I thought it was pretty suggestive, but that might have been my lewd imaginings, like the censorship says.

  A few hundred yards away from the house is the ti-tree bush, we called it tick-bush, the very bush where a kid called Willie started his family. Just before he got married. A few times I broke a bit of that bush off and stuck it in his front door; it was a laugh for a while, but I got sick of that too.

  I had a shirt full of fruit, then I got the idea of digging out a rabbit and having a feast. I planted the fruit, started a bunny, chased it to its bur
row, blocked up the escape holes and dug through from the main entrance. I got to his legs and tried to pull him out, but he was halfway round a corner, so I broke his back legs and dug down to him. I think he would have bitten me if he could, but I stretched him.

  The next thing was something to drink. There was a church nearby, not more than a mile away, so I got in there and the place I got in was some kind of room where the minister had his office. The churches where they don’t have much space, all you look for is a store-room; if there is no store-room, you look for a divan with frilling down the sides to hide what’s underneath. I got a whole case of altar wine there. Not a bottle missing, and that’s handy when you have to carry it; there’s no rattles. I got it out a side door and over the fence.

  I stayed there in the bush near the orchard about three days, until the wine was gone. The first night went quick; in no time at all the sky disappeared star by star and nothing but a blank glare was left. There was light everywhere.

  I remember making myself a mattress of branches; I slaughtered a few small trees by breaking off their tops, and arranging them in a sort of trench that kept the wind off me, and I remember a few of the things that went through my head.

  Naturally there was the old one that always kept coming back: something’s going to happen to me. With a skinful of wine I could afford to treat this one lightly. And there was the sound of rain on corrugated iron. Ever since I was young I remember listening to the rain on our tin roof, it was a good feeling to pull the sheet and the blanket over your head and let your breath warm you up and all the time the rain pelting down, roaring onto the rusty roof, and you there snug, knowing it was that piercing sort of cold, rain-cold, outside.