The Chantic Bird

by David Ireland

  So there I was. Clapped out at sixteen and three-quarters. They set a wardsman in a brown uniform to watch me, and I was so weak in their rotten bed that I didn’t even object. For the first few days. Then it got to me that here was a uniform that had caught up with me and I started to worry. What if this joker had something to do with the others that had been following me?

  I had to get out of there. When he went out for something I started to leave, but I was so weak on my pins I decided I’d better go back and put up with it until I was better.

  The worst break I had in years, when I got back to the ward they strapped me down, rolled me onto a trolley, raced me down a corridor and down a ramp and whipped out my tonsils, just to teach me a lesson, and when I was back in bed the next day a kid I hadn’t seen for years or at least months visited me and gave me a swig out of his bottle of gin.

  13

  SCHOOL OF ARTS

  Sometimes everything in my chest swirls. I think I must have got away from that hospital too soon. They all had smiles on their faces, thinking of the lesson their surgeon taught me about not getting into the hands of anyone with some authority that you get from a piece of paper. I wonder if they had anything more to smile about? They didn’t tell me what they found out about me.

  The best thing seems to be to take pretty deep breaths, not too quick, then relax and breathe out; if I force the breath out I get the thump in the chest. This way it’s only a tumbling in the chest, like the waves that hit the rocks then tumble and swirl about in the crevices and gaps as the sea sucks them out again for another attack. I was hiding up in a sort of loft inside the School of Arts, amongst the kids’ medicine balls and caretaker’s ladders and old advertising boards. You get to it by going in the room just inside the front door, the room with the sink and cupboards and the manhole in the ceiling. When you get up there you take the step-ladder with you, and also, if you don’t like dust, you take up a wet rag and wipe over everything. The loft thing projects into the main hall and has a wood decoration in front of it, so you can’t be seen from the stage, neither can the mess of wood and cardboard things.

  If you’re hearing a steady stream of noise and something gets between you and the noise, you’ll notice the interruption. The gutter water in the street after the rain was dribbling its little quick song and I heard it suddenly cut in two. It hit me with a hard blow, I was liking the sound of that gutter water. A leg with a lot of bone in it hit the metal of a car, the venetians on the front windows of the School of Arts clattered as the door opened. An old man’s neck clicked. It was a society meeting, I had to lie low for a couple of hours, trying not to laugh at the things they said. They wouldn’t have liked the thought of a stranger listening to their minutes and their points of order and their votes and notices of motion.

  They wouldn’t like me at all, and what that sort of people don’t like is bad. Very bad. Delinquent. They’re the ones that are always saying how bad the juvenile menace is growing. But nowadays there’s more juveniles, so naturally our output is up, but you can see from what I’ve told you that there are a lot of kids that don’t do much harm at all. I do enough for a couple of dozen.

  The kids that belonged to the Church Youth had a lot of fun with their games of kiss in the ring and postman’s knock. Until I saw them at it I had no idea there were still such old games going on. From where I was up there I was the only one who could see what they got up to when their head man, about forty, was out.

  I tried to teach myself to play the piano at night after the last of the meetings had finished, and after a few days I could get a tune out of it, but it sounded so thin just playing the one note at a time that I couldn’t stand it any longer. I just couldn’t get the idea of thinking about the bottom notes at the same time as the main tune.

  One man worried me. That was the man who had a notebook and a pen and counted the people at most of the meetings. It seemed to me I had seen his kind before; not that he was in a uniform, unless you count a dark suit, white shirt, and tie as a uniform. He got on my works so much that I got down from my perch one afternoon when there was a church fraternisation meeting and walked out in front of the lot of them as soon as he went round the back of the hall to the toilets. One look at my leather coat and they all saw I came from a bent and badly broken home where no one went to church. There was a feeling in the air as if all I needed was to go back to church with them and all would be well.

  I was halfway out when I felt the feeling of the meeting change. All of a sudden I had become the ringleader of the gang of kids that enticed the innocent young High School girls down into the backyard of the hall of an afternoon and forced them to sell their bodies to the High School boys for the modest sum of a few shillings or a packet of potato chips or the promise to take them to a dance on Saturday night. I was the cause of the pregnancy rate in second and third-year girls being at an all-time high. I was so sure of the way they felt that I said to them all, ‘Calm down, people. There’s schools out past Parramatta that leave these High Schools for dead. There was a hundred and three pregnant girls last year at one near Blacktown.’

  I was out the door while they still had their mouths open. I didn’t tell them about the little girls that paid the boys two or three bob just to find out what it was like. Perhaps they weren’t thinking that at all. I mean, about me being the cause of schoolgirls’ moral downfall.

  Maybe I had made a mistake and the feeling in the air was just like the one that used to be around at home when I had taken my sick brother’s friends. I didn’t use the ladder getting down; I would have to move a table over under the manhole if I was going in there again.

  What a fluke! That my parents had me. They could easily have had a girl. Maybe they’d have lived longer.

  I wish I knew who’s got Ma’s photos. They should have left me a share, I don’t even have one with the old man when he was a kid in the war, or Ma when she was a girl. I know they all thought I got the good ones, but I was the only one that didn’t rat them out of the old photo box.

  I went home. I wish I could have cabbed it. But. No dough, I had to leg it. It was a relief to hear the voices of the kids.

  ‘What kind of day did you have at school?’ I asked Stevo. That was the sort of question Bee usually asked him.

  ‘Oh, fairly splendid and a bit ordinary,’ came the answer.

  ‘Any composition today?’ I asked him.

  ‘He wrote you a poem today,’ Bee answered. She fished a paper out of the kitchen drawer. It said,

  To Daddy—a poem. Shoes.

  Shoes, shoes, shoes, who wants shoes,

  Shoes at Grace Brothers, shoes at Woolworths,

  Shoes in windows like tree leaves pointing at you,

  Shoes, shoes, who wants shoes.

  I was about to say what a good poem it was, but he had a whip.

  ‘Look at this whip,’ he ordered me. It was a whip of plastic-sheathed wire and a deal handle. ‘It’s fast and fascinating.’ He slashed it about. I whipped out of the way; if I hadn’t, I’d have lost skin. You’ve got to have skin.

  ‘Pass the soap, Stevo,’ Bee asked. We were in the kitchen. He passed the soap.

  ‘No more asking for things.’ Doing what he was told was a considerable strain. I liked that.

  ‘Brush your hair, sonny boy,’ commanded Bee. And gave him the hard brush. It used to make the kids’ faces and heads shine. He brushed.

  ‘It looks marvellous at the back. It looks marvellous at the front, too.’ She hadn’t bothered to teach him to be nasty to himself and always say his own things were crook.

  ‘Do your hair as soon as Stevo’s finished,’ Bee said to Chris.

  ‘Can’t. I’m busy crying.’ She was. She blubbered a lot.

  ‘You can have fresh water in your bath,’ promised Bee.

  ‘Can I wash my hair?’ pleaded Chris.

  ‘All right. It won’t hurt her,’ Bee explained.

  ‘Wash my hair in cool fresh water, then,’ demanded Chris. If
you gave her one little favour, she bargained for half a dozen more. While Bee was getting Allie ready for bed, Stevo and Chris made a pretending house to live in, right down to a television set.

  ‘Get out of my way,’ I heard Chris say. ‘That’s the TV. Get out of my way, I can’t see the TV.’ I suppose Bee must have done all the work she did mainly to be there when they came out with things like that.

  ‘What did you learn at Scripture today, Chris?’ asked Bee. Must have been Wednesday. I don’t usually keep track of the days, one is just like another to me.

  ‘Kiddies that have things and bring them out in the playground should share them if they’re lollies,’ answered Chris.

  ‘Where does that minister at Scripture get all his ideas from?’ demanded Stevo, then went straight on to ask me to put my finger in his fist. He made a fist with a hole in it, and the hole pointing up.

  ‘Now put your finger in.’ I did that.

  ‘Now stir it round.’ I did.

  ‘Now you’re cleaning the toilet!’

  ‘Where did you get that sort of joke from, Stephen?’ asked Bee, looking severe. But she spoiled the effect by being in the middle of getting them some biscuits with butter and jam on. Stevo took advantage of that. You can’t say he wasn’t quick on the uptake.

  ‘Can I help you, Mum? You can butter it and I’ll jam it.’

  Naturally she forgot her question, but Stevo was so used to winning that sort of skirmish, he didn’t even look triumphant.

  ‘How about some Chantic Bird tonight?’ I asked. I wanted to stay on the good side of Bee and also I was starting to get pretty curious about the bird. He didn’t hear.

  ‘What about that frantic bird, man?’ He managed a bit of a smile. I’ll say this for him, he didn’t always pretend my weak old jokes were funny. I kidded him along a little and pretty soon he got onto the story. I was hoping he would start it and go right through—I liked hearing it over again. But no. All he would do was take up where he left off.

  The bird was a captive. Someone must have been jealous, though, because the King received in the post a box with a clockwork bird in it, a bird covered with diamonds, sapphires, rubies. Only one of the real bird’s tunes in it, but everyone liked looking at the sparkling jewels rather than the grey feathers of the real bird. The new bird with one song was something they could be proud of.

  The real bird flew away to her green trees by the sea and the fishermen were glad and the common people, but the King banished her because she took her freedom. Without even waiting in her cage to beg for it.

  One day, after a thousand performances, the clockwork bird cracked a spring and all the wheels gnashed against each other. They repaired it well enough to have it sing once a year.

  Then the King caught asiatic flu or something and was dying. Death sat on his chest, and his bad and good deeds were peering at him round corners.

  But the Chantic Bird had heard and came to the palace and sat on a branch outside the King’s window and sang all her sweetest songs, like bells of glass tinkling in the evening of the world. The Bird enticed Death away and earned the only reward she wanted, a tear from the King’s eye. This time she demanded freedom to fly about outside and to come and sing when she wanted to. The King said yes, since his bargaining power was nil.

  Stevo lost interest after this and I didn’t feel like begging anyone to carry on with something they didn’t want to do.

  I went for a walk, it was still light, and as I walked I thought what a queer individual I must have seemed, playing football down on Pennant Hills oval and dreaming half the time. If the day was nice and I didn’t really feel like it, I’d look over the tops of the trees surrounding the ground, and let my head fly away in dreams. Miles away. The people in the stand and barracking on the hill must have wondered who was the one with concussion.

  When I look back at the pages done, I surprise myself that all those words were in the typewriter keys.

  My folks carried me round in a suitcase when I was a baby. They had no baby pram. There was even a photo of me and the case. I wonder who got that one, too?

  It was such a clear afternoon and seeing the workers come home from captivity made me feel so good that I decided Bee should have something to celebrate with. I got into a certain church nearby—there were seven in half a mile—and helped them get rid of a dozen bottles of altar wine. And while I was there I took a Bible for Ma, and it wasn’t until I was outside that I remembered she was dead. I kept it, anyway.

  I had a bad feeling about the way Ma died. Of all the family that died, I visited her the least. The others went in shifts, to cover the times when she’d be without visitors, but not me. No one was actually game to tell me I ought to go, but I could feel the way they thought. I was there when her old ticker stopped, but she didn’t know. I was doing a pretty complicated sum about interest on a quarterly reducing balance at four and a half per cent the day she was in the coma, and I had hold of her hand when she took the last few breaths. For some reason, the others didn’t want to see the last of her.

  As I remember it, there were thirteen steps up our old back verandah and Ma had to climb them a million times a day. No, there were fourteen steps. You had to count the one at the top to make it fourteen, but that still is fourteen.

  Sometimes I can go into a sort of trance and bring back people I knew once. I was thinking of the fourteen steps and how they made no difference at all to my old man; sick or well he didn’t let steps beat him; I was thinking very hard, forcing my head muscles in the hope that they’d bring fresh thoughts along with fresh blood to my brain, when it started to work. My eyes were tight, my face straining in concentration and the face of my old man gradually appeared in a sort of whitish mist, giving it the look of glowing. There was a rushing sound, as if he had come on a high wind.

  I couldn’t call it a coloured dream, there was only the face by itself. The rest was darkness.

  Without thinking about it, I had strolled back to the School of Arts and I rubbered into the first room, without noticing how easy it had been to get in. The door was open, and I heard the sound of a hat being pushed back on a man’s head. I cornered towards him and there was a man inside the main hall, with a pad and pencil in his hands, making notes. He was pretending to count the chairs, but I knew right enough that he was probably on my track. I got out of there.

  When I left the School of Arts I felt sort of hungry.

  14

  OFFICE BLOCK

  Sheilas with great thick kneebones had been sitting at those office desks all day, and there I was after everyone had left, making drawings under the boss’s desk. It was like being in a forest of parking meters, in a way, or in a drive-in when no one else was there; there was space for people and you knew people were there every day, but without the people the desks and the chairs were just waiting, helpless. It wasn’t time for the cleaners yet, I had to go upstairs and really hide when the cleaners got there.

  I was looking upside down at the underside of this big desk, wondering how many years it would be before my little message got through to some office explorer, when I got itchy on the left side of that big bone that sticks out at the back of your neck where your neck joins on to your back. At the same time as I scratched it with my fingernail, I got a tingling feeling on the left hand side of my face halfway between the ear and the jaw and a bit underneath. When I stopped scratching, it stopped tingling. When I did it again, it tingled; very piercing it was. I started to wonder if there were a few wires crossed somewhere, there must have been a hook-up between two sets of nerves; maybe the one nerve was doing two jobs. I tell you, it got me in. But only for a while. You can go queer if you let yourself think about little things like that for too long.

  Did you know you can have the use of a toilet in the city any time you like? All you have to do is walk in, no one asks who you are, no one owns the places, no one cares what happens to them, no one is game to ask anyone else questions in case he gets a kick in the face or a sava
ge reply. But some of them are locked. Bosses have to have privileges, not waiting for others to finish, and not to have to use the seat that others have sat on with their dirty bottoms. You can be sure that not everyone has sat on those toilets; no worker is going to ask the boss for that key. If you want to use those locked ones, climb over like I did, and if the owner comes along and rattles the door trying to get in, all you have to do is make a terrific noise, with shouting and singing out and all that; people in the city hate noise in the toilet. They get embarrassed, which is funny; they always reckon they’re so sexy and loose, but in my opinion country people have it all over city people as far as sex goes. And all sorts of natural behaviour.

  There was a carpet in the office I had, and it was good to lie down on; you couldn’t feel the cold of the concrete underneath. It gave me warnings, too; the sound of feet scrooching on hard office carpet, when you’ve got your ear to it, is a give-away for anyone coming.

  Across George Street, in the doorways of the old Millard’s building, there was a man and a woman, in broad daylight, doing their best to get together. They were only tormenting each other; if they’d been out in the country they could have hopped in the car and driven out on the highway a bit and ducked into the scrub and laid down like beachtowels, together. I couldn’t see that they’d do any good in a doorway.

  As a sort of accompaniment, or sound cover, an old Broomwade compressor was doing about fifteen hundred revs, from the sound of it, twenty yards from a team of workers with jackhammers, making another hole in the streets of Sydney. The lovers were getting on with the matter in hand, people were looking at the noise more than at them, and I thought I’d give them a hand; I went down to a newsagent in Castlereagh and got some bangers, went back and threw them down in George Street. That scattered the street-people and the two in the doorway did more and more to each other, until I couldn’t stand it any longer and kept away from the window. What I did wasn’t as bad as when I got up the top of the Mutual Insurance Building—that’s a place that’s wide open; you can go up the top any time and climb onto the top of the lift well—that was when I threw pies down into Hosking, or over the wall into Martin Place.