The Chantic Bird

by David Ireland

  I carved a small stone face of a boxer I knew for Stevo, then next we found that he and the kids had made it Jesus. That’s when we sent them to Sunday school; after that they stopped the Jesus bit and called it General Thunderbolt, their leader; reporting, saluting. Even the kids had to have leaders.

  Some houses were opposite then and putting my hands up to my eyes with a little hole through each one I pretended to myself I had binoculars up, searching the bedroom and bathroom windows for naked girls and wives like I used to do when I was a kid peering in at Phyllis Jensen in her bath, singing like mad. She was, not me. I had a lay down in the boat, listening to the water flapping the side, pretending to myself it was the small, dry rustle of the half-dead grass under the girls’ dressing sheds where I used to look up through the cracks. I won’t tell you where, or you might go there and get caught. Boy, was I full of lewd imaginings that day.

  I got those funny words when I read a paper one day about a court case. I don’t often read papers, I think they take the edge off anyone wanting to do anything. And they never show anyone living a happy life. They never give someone’s name, someone like me, and say how colossal he enjoys life and what a good time he has doing just what he wants. No sir, not one stinking word of all the happy clowns like me.

  My boat nearly hit a launch about then. There was no bump, I saw it in time and did what had to be done, but the people in the launch bawled out as if you’d taken their lollies. They had a radio going full blast, which was bad taste, I thought. As if the nice noise of the water wasn’t enough. That took me back to when Bee said she sometimes couldn’t sleep for the noise. The old man next door was deaf and couldn’t afford a hearing thing in his ear, but they were lucky I pointed it out to them before it annoyed me, too. They might have been sore and sorry and a lot worse off.

  Bee’s funny. She’s got her own way of thanking you. After I did that, she didn’t say anything, although blind Freddy could see I did it for her, and she stopped telling me if things got on her works. Sometimes I tried to think up things that might be worrying her, but I don’t have much luck at things like that. It is hard to do other people’s worrying for them. When Bee didn’t look too severe, Stevo would test her and grab something she would use next and start to take it away.

  ‘Don’t do that,’ she’d say. ‘I want it.’

  ‘You cry about it. Go on,’ he’d command.

  I put in to a nice sandy cove, mostly because I wanted to relieve myself. The noise of the boat beaching, however, sent a party of lovers in all directions. That was a fine time to come across four pairs of kids taking a day off work, but just to put them at their ease I went then and there on the sand instead of searching round in the trees and rocks. I could feel them watching me from the bushes and behind rocks. They still didn’t show themselves; they must have been very shy kids, so all I could do was go. There was no sense in destroying their day, they probably worked in Sydney and needed a day off now and then apart from their weekends, which were likely strenuous enough.

  There was not even a titter from them and no attempt to attack me, so I didn’t muck up their clothes or take their transistors, but they could at least have given me a look at them. All I saw moving behind a thin red gum was a bottom, and it turned out to be a boy’s. The age of that bottom was around sixteen, so they were all probably past the beginner stage. I didn’t bother to think about what their parents would say if they knew where they were instead of being off at the pictures in town, like they probably said, but now that I remember it there is a funny side to it.

  I put out again, a bit disgusted. If they were that shy, why make a party of it? I stopped thinking of them a few yards off shore and when I looked back without actually thinking of it, there they were at it again. Don’t expect me to tell you where, but if you like to take a boat up the Parramatta, exploring the whole line of shore, you’ll be very surprised at the nooks you find.

  My head went back to the house where Bee was making a fuss at Stevo. You can bet he deserved it, though; she didn’t pick on them for next to nothing, like most women.

  ‘Do you love me, Mummy?’ he enquired, when she stopped for breath. ‘Or are you still upcited?’ By that time I was thinking I was missing them, so I ditched the boat near a road not far from Halvorsen’s sheds and got a train back home. You don’t need a ticket on these trains, all you do is jump off the back carriage, cross the lines out of sight, and up the embankment. They don’t bother to chase you when they see you’re young and can probably run. When I bowled in, there was Stevo just as I’d last seen him in my head.

  ‘Want a look at my composition, Dad?’ he questioned.

  ‘Sure, kid.’ I’d forgotten what compositions looked like almost. He dragged out a ten by twelve sheet of paper and shoved it at me. The letters were about an inch high, he wasn’t a very good writer. But then again, I wasn’t, and it never worried me.

  This is my pet.

  My pet is a orange bird.

  It can fly, and fly high.

  I feed my pet and I like

  To play with him.

  There was a picture of the orange bird at the bottom. Orange was his favourite colour. Mine is yellow.

  ‘More story, Dad?’ he requested, and I said yes without bothering to think, so he gave it to me from the start. I was looking for a sight of Bee and something to keep me there, but she must have decided I’d have to be interested just for the story’s sake, because she didn’t appear.

  Stevo started out with the tinkling china palace, the miles of garden, the wise men and their books about the Chantic Bird and how the King wanted the Bird and the kitchen maid took them to the little grey bird by the sea. When they brought her back to the King, everyone sat round to listen to the song. She sang so sweetly that the King cried real tears, and everyone was touched by the song but watched the King to see what he would do. ‘It is like glass bells ringing,’ said the King, and the Bird sang more.

  When he got up to reward the Bird, they did too. But the King really appreciated the beauty of the song; however, he knew nothing of the beauty of freedom, especially the freedom of a bird to sing in its natural home of green trees by the water. He gave the Bird a special cage and allowed it out twice a day, but a dozen hangers-on were there to see she did not fly away home. There was even a rope—a silken rope, but still a rope—tied to each leg when she flew out twice a day for exercise.

  I’d heard enough story, so I gave Stevo a bag of lollies I’d bought, and off. Why couldn’t Bee have come around with just a bit of skin showing—a hand, her neck, anything? Just to keep me interested. I couldn’t help thinking of all the bodies on the ground at Berowra and Hornsby and Parramatta park, all over the place, anywhere there was a patch of dark ground, so thick on the ground you couldn’t step between them, and here was me had to knock a sheila down before I did any good, and had to wait around like a spider to catch a sight of Bee, the girl I’d known since I was a kid. The upshot was, I got miserable.

  When did I start? Did they do it hating each other? Did that kid that used to pee off the back verandah or through a hole in the verandah floor, did that kid have to grow up to be me? The one that photographed his mates peeing into a peaches tin at National Park and told the chemist he’d better develop the film or else he’d have no windows.

  Allie and Chris havocked the saucepans just then, and the cake dishes, flour sifters, biscuit pans and baking dishes, and the kitchen was a mass of aluminium from end to end. By the time Bee got there, I was away.

  The boat was still there, so I didn’t have to go looking for another one. I had just got it off the Parramatta River mud and a bit of keelroom under me, when this big covered motor boat hailed me and wanted me to help him moor it. He was alone on the boat and I’m just about to give him a hand when I said to myself, I went easy on those kids before, why should I be always helping people? So I stood up in the boat and thought a bit and while I was thinking I picked up some flat stones from the bottom of the boat and s
kimmed them over the water. The best I did was seven hits, that is, when I skimmed it, it hit the water and bounced up again seven times. I decided this man in the boat might be the fellow I thought was following me; I noticed someone before, if you remember, sort of driving me out of whatever place I was in, stopping me from settling down in any place. Sure as I thought I was right, there he’d be right on me.

  No one can be a nice free island with no one bothering you; everyone has to be nothing more than a bit of dirt along with everyone else. I turned away from that stupid man—let him tie up his own boat and get his feet wet—and since it was getting on to the afternoon, I decided to do something spectacular, as soon as I could get an audience.

  What I did, I heaped the boat with brush and gum leaves and went back downstream until I came to a place where there were factories and I could get near the shore. I waited till it was about five to four and the workers were in the yards waiting for the knock-off whistle. Then I headed her upstream into the afternoon sun and had a Viking’s funeral.

  What you do is heap the brush so you can be standing behind a half-circle of it and when you light it and the brush burns and the gumleaves smoke like blazes, you appear to be standing right in the middle of it. From the other shore, of course, they can see you’re behind it, but the ones near me didn’t know.

  Just before I set fire to it I heard the last lathe or power saw or milling machine, or whatever it was, turned off, and there was a new quiet on the water. My bonfire crackled and smoked and the sun lit me up like Technicolor. People in the waterside streets stopped and pointed and some ran inside to telephone to get the dollar from the papers, the dollar you never get. They always say someone else rang first. All I did was stand still—that always rattles people, they think you’re looney if you stand still—and head west into the sun.

  It wasn’t as much fun as it could have been if a lot of people had been after me. I just went past them, pretty glorious of course, but out of reach.

  The workers looked at me through their wire fences. They couldn’t chase me, though. They weren’t allowed out.

  9

  BRIDGE

  Don’t ever pal up too close with girls. You get too dependent on them. It’s like a tall kid and a short kid, with the tall kid bending down all the time so as to be the same height as the short kid and not to make him miserable, then the tall kid finding it hard to straighten up to his natural height again when he needs to. Girls shorten you down to their size.

  They’re cunning, too. Ever notice how healthy a girl is before you get thick with her, then when you’re saddled with her, she feels free to get sick all the time, and slops back to what she must have been before she put on the act? I get tired of girls very smartly.

  I hope I can keep this story sort of kind, with no hard feelings for anyone in it. Or am I kidding myself? Is it ever going to be possible for me to be kind to others, when I have to suffer these hittings in the chest that come from nowhere and rock my whole body? When they come I can sit down and look at my chest and stomach and see them shake with each heart beat, and my head shakes too, so that my eyes seem to flicker if I’m trying to look steady at any one thing.

  Other times everything is different and I’m on top of the world; the only thing left to beat is myself. But whether it’s good times or rotten times I’m caught up in this sort of hurricane that doesn’t rest, hurrying me on, knocking me here and there. Pursued by people I can’t quite sight properly, that dodge out of the way just as I’m trying to focus on them, and the thought bashing me in the head, on and off, that there is something waiting for me in the future, something not good.

  I forget where I was then, but I remember the sound of a peewit’s wings, fast-flapping wings, scaring off crows. Then later, I remember closing my eyes, just as if I was on the back of a train, and seeing the receding column of the present as it may have been, except I didn’t see it. I was looking at the receding past. That was a depressing thought; I started to think there was no such thing as the present time, only the nearest piece of the past instead. Where was I?

  I remember, too, the sound of a turning car, and the croak of a rubber suspension bush. Then I was on a train. I remember that. There was the green painted leather of the seats, and there was me sitting back thinking about I was only ever caught once doing bad things and making a resolution to go back and get that rotten interferer, but it came back to me that I already did. He was the one I waited for when he was on the way home from the pub at Penno.

  In the train, that’s where. Two men arguing behind me about the coalition of the Liberal and Country political parties, and were they getting stuck into each other. I was turning around to shut them up and I found it was one man. Talking and arguing to himself and taking two parts. I looked at him hard to see if he was kidding me, but no, he didn’t even stop. He had no blank look in his eyes like some people find in loonies’ eyes; they were bright and he looked very interested in what he told himself. A couple of kids with big cases got on, I remember that; they looked as if they were running away from home. One had a violin. They sang madly a lot of the way. I still can’t remember where I was, perhaps I’d had some sort of blackout, I’d know if I’d been on the grog; it’s no use, it won’t come back to me. Yes, the train passed a station where a man and a woman were doing something under the railway steps. It was afternoon and her coat was wrapped round him; that much has come back.

  Oh, and the noise of shunting.

  I’ll tell you what is handy, and that’s a bit of leather from train seats. It’s good stuff and even though they mark it now, there’s a lot of things it’s handy for. I slashed a few and got some good squares, just the sort of thing to pin down on the old wood chairs at home and make life easier for Bee and the kids. A bit of sponge rubber or a cushion underneath and they’d have padded seats. I felt a sort of good thing in my insides then when I thought how they’d like it.

  The train wheels ground and clattered and settled into a steady beat and under cover of the noise I got my leather. There weren’t many workers in the carriage by then, just that half dozen that gets a bit lonely or frightened that there’s someone behind them. There was someone behind them—me, but when they peeped round I’d be looking out the window or something innocent and they’d turn front again. I’ve often thought, sitting behind people late at night in a train, how easy it would be to bash in the head in front of you. To test what it feels like, I’ve sometimes got to my feet and raised my arm, pretending it’s holding a hammer or iron bar, and felt the exciting warm feeling inside that I’d actually have if I brought it down crash. Once I even got up behind a man, with something in my hand—it was a big steel bolt I found on the platform—and you should have seen the face on the man when he saw me in the window and turned round to check if his eyes were telling the truth. He leaped away and I got out at the next station before he could see the guard. No one would have believed him, anyway, he had glasses and looked like a loud-mouthed complainer, and I had a collar and tie and hair done nicely, and a pretty even sort of look on my face. I look very harmless at times like that, specially if I take care to walk in a nice neat manner.

  I didn’t bash any heads that night. I had nothing massive enough, anyway. What I did, though, was wreck a train.

  It wasn’t very wrecked, just eased off the rails. You have to pick a place that’s not too far out in the open, where you can get under cover in case you have to run for it. I got off at the next station and out the back end and into the shadow of an overhead bridge. The way to do it, you can use all sorts of things you find by the lines—blue metal, fishplates, bolts—you build up two ramps to take the leading bogie on a gentle tangent away from the rails, just a skinny angle is all you need. It has to be packed down very tight.

  The other way is to loosen the fishplates and lever the rail out of line; all the train does then is just drop a bit and plough up a few sleepers. I did the ramp bit. The end of the station was dark and no one saw me. A few of the passe
ngers got a jolt when the front carriage lifted nicely and drifted into the space between two sets of lines, but as a crash it wasn’t much. I blocked the up line for about three hours, that was all. You get a better kick out of things like that if there’s blood. Or even hysterical screams. But the workers returning home from their work cages didn’t have a yell in them. Some even got out and stumbled across country, you had to laugh to see them trying to keep vertical, you’d think they were blind.

  As I say, it wasn’t a great success, but it was something. How many people live and die and crawl down into the clay and never wreck a train? You’d think they’d all be going like mad to accumulate a past which is something to be proud of instead of just sneaking through every day with no skin off. That’s it. That’s all the house-owning job-captive wants; to get through to bedtime each day with no bruises and no bleeding. They’re mad; the past is their only possession. Even I can see that.

  A lot of people are going to be upset when they read this. I can hear them asking why I do these things, even though I’ve just told them. They can tell me books full of things I shouldn’t do, but who’s going to tell me what I ought to do? Who? Besides the ratbags?

  You hear people talk about maturity. That’s the end. Who wants it? A mature loaf of bread is ready for the slicer. A mature worker is already on the skids. Did I say everyone ought to be equal? Hell, I don’t know what to think.

  I gave away the thinking and got up for the night under a railway bridge down the line a bit. It was dry, and some warm air left over from daytime was trapped there. In the morning I thought I’d leave another little message for future archaeologists, so I lay on my back and drew on the underside of the concrete, which was only a foot above my face and had the prints of the timber forms on its skin, a cosy little picture of a train being derailed and a kid watching from up a tree. Someone in the future would think there had been a sort of guerilla war going on. I even put the date. No one in my time would ever see it, and there was something good about that. A storm blew up. You could hear it racing towards you making drums out of all the trees, until the first big drops stung you cold. I pulled my head in.