The Chantic Bird

by David Ireland

  They might just as well send the whole population after me. After all, I’m against the lot of them.

  16

  CAR

  I kept sitting there in the car and waiting, but Bee was a long time coming out. Didn’t they want a ride? This time I’d got a big white American car for them and I’d only be able to have it until the people got back on the train from Sydney; I wouldn’t like the family to be in the car when I got picked up for borrowing it.

  That day I just couldn’t wait. I told myself I’d come back later, but right now I had to keep moving. You know, there’s a madness in the air; all you have to do is reach up and grab a bit of it. And when you do, it works for you.

  You know, all I seem to do is steal. I was thinking about that as the big Chev floated over the bitumen, in and out the traffic. Now and again some birds would play with the car, flying low out from the footpaths and swooping almost under the wheels. The fact that they were laughing at me and the car and anyone that couldn’t get off the ground, didn’t even annoy me. But behind their little games you could see that they would have been very serious if they’d been a ton or two bigger. Instead of dive-bombing the windscreen or the front tyres, they would have carried the whole lot away, and digested me and it at their leisure. The wagtails were skites, their speed seemed to vary when they came from the side, it made it look as if they knew they had everything covered, and I must tell you I was waiting for one of them to swoop past me and go under an oncoming wheel. Or better still, for them to miss another car and for me to get them under my wheels, or splat against the windscreen.

  I felt sort of sarcastic inside myself, as if I wanted to twist my mouth at the world and keep it twisted. Moments like that it would be easy to ease the wheel a fraction to the right and keep your eyes open right up to the crash. I drew a couple of circles with my hands—with the steering wheel inside them—and headed back to the house. Bee and the kids were waiting, which was a better situation.

  Talking to them came hard, the way I felt. There was right through me a sort of anger or madness, I could feel it warming me inwards from the skin, it made my bones feel more lively—they wanted to jump about in their smooth coverings of gristle and muscle—but I knew if I let them, they would only flail round and hit whoever was nearest, and that was the family. I must never hurt the family.

  No sooner said to myself than forgotten. What happened I don’t know. Only that somewhere along the Gosford road the ferment inside me boiled over. It has always fascinated me that all you have to do to crash is move that wheel a fraction to the right and it’s head-on with another car, or to the left and it takes longer off the road. Just a tiny movement. And you’re in control of it. No one else. I made the movement.

  To the left. Whump and off the road, the ground fell away but not too sharply and the wheels didn’t slip much and it was through the trees, missing them—not yet—it was easy enough to go straight for a soft bark red gum or a peeling old stringybark, over a couple of saplings, tasting the moment, spinning it out. Then Bee pushed some words out. She was gripping the seat, but she made no attempt to hang onto me. Now that I think of it, I’m not real pleased.

  The words didn’t come out crazed or anything. She had her panic inside and kept it there.

  ‘If you want to kill us all, why don’t you get a gun?’ And that was one of the cruellest things she could have said. Somehow the feeling inside me had gone away and for a moment I was surprised at the contents of the last minute and what I’d almost done. I put the lid on that, though; I didn’t want to be feeling guilt. You can’t drive properly when you’re guilty. So I took the car over a pretty big bump so that everyone hit their heads on the car roof and the kids thought it was great fun. It surprised me they weren’t scared.

  The owner would be surprised to see tree bark on his bumpers. Some people looked when I put the car back, so Bee told me, but I reckoned it was only because people like us got out of it. We must have looked a pretty young family.

  I was putting the car back in the line-up outside the railway station where all the commuters parked to save themselves walking a mile there and back every day. The original parking spot was gone but the one I found was only a few dozen yards away.

  When I got out and finished wiping the marks off the wheel and windows and seats, there he was. Petersen, I mean. It was his car I’d been using. That’s how I met him. I walked home with him to see where he lived. It was the big old house with the guava trees: when I delivered for old Cowan the grocer, the old lady used to give me a feast of fruit there. In the yard they had a summer house with six sides. That was where I used to meet him to put my story down on paper when his girl friend wasn’t playing the violin there.

  I didn’t go home with Bee and the kids, I went out looking for a car of my own. I wanted one to live in for a while; it seemed to me I had been wasting my time living like a rat in other people’s buildings and all over the place. With a car you could get around. It might be necessary to change the plates every couple of weeks, because that was the time it took for a complaint to be processed and the narks to get out looking for you. The best thing to do was what I did. A kid that I used to go to school with was in the car business; you know, getting in, shorting the ignition, driving up the backboard of his big covered trailer and dropping it in one of his farm sheds out in the cow and citrus country, with spray guns and the works. He used to do a proper job, only a prang and a few fractures would show it up when the police got nosey about the engine number or the chassis. He’d do anything: change wheels, put in new engines, a new paint job or even only a slight paint difference, like a stripe or a different coloured top. I didn’t want him knowing what I was doing, so I went out on the Singleton road to one of his sheds and rolled one away that he’d finished and took with me a heap of rego plates so he wouldn’t know exactly which plates I was using at any time and wouldn’t be able to turn me in with a nasty phone call.

  It was pleasant, living in a nice big car, and I made the most of it; joy-riding, picking up money for food and petrol outside the pubs from middle-aged drunks: it was a neat way to live. I had to pick a quiet place to stop and sleep, otherwise someone else like me might clobber me at night. I slept light and got a few hours down in the daytime, so I wasn’t wearing myself out. I still felt the itch often to turn that wheel a fraction to the right, but I guess I never meant it, because I’m still here telling you about it. I saw some pretty things, driving around. I passed a car with a few kids like myself in it, only they had girls in too. I knew the sort of girls, not like Bee at all. This lot were so used to life that the girl in front who was doing something to the kid that was driving, was talking to her friend in the back seat, who was performing likewise with the boy in the back. I suppose it was a day off for them, unless they had picked on my way of living. Their parents probably thought they were staying at a friend’s place, maybe, but what was more like it was their parents probably knew very well what they were doing and envied them. Very few adult people have done all the dirty things they’d like to have done. The ones I’ve seen are chock-a-block with regret for the lives they haven’t led, the sheilas they haven’t raped, the tills they haven’t robbed, the murders they haven’t done, the sex they haven’t had. They were too honest to try to stop their kids doing the things they would have done if only they’d been game enough. Somewhere along the line they gave up, and tried to please someone else or keep their job or stay out of trouble. They’re failures. You can’t stay out of trouble and still live as you want. The important thing is not to care what other people think, specially police and people in uniforms. Even if the uniform is only a white shirt and collar and tie.

  It was good driving on weekdays. The streets were pretty clear of citizens. Only blokes with jobs were out. And people like me. I was surprised to see so many people like me out in cars, mostly older, but what they were doing was just the same. Somehow I didn’t like that; I’d rather have been the only one to think of it and then I wou
ld have kept it dark.

  I suppose some of the things I did were a bit young, like smashing. The sound of things smashing gets me. It makes me feel easy and warm in my chest. One of my favourites, apart from tossing things off a height, was to carry a supply of bottles in the car and toss them out and cause a sensation. Not at people. At least not often. I shot one at a man that was belting a dog. I couldn’t care less about dogs, but ordinary people say you shouldn’t hurt animals, unless you’re going to eat them, so why shouldn’t I keep this man to what he ought to do? It was a sensation, that one. The bottle didn’t hit him, it hit the dog. Only a glancing blow, and then flew off the dog’s back onto the headlights of a car. The bottle smashed and ginger ale bubbled everywhere and the headlights smashed. The owner wasn’t there, but several people near the shops took the car number and wrote down a description of the man, maybe, or even his name—he could have been a local—and hurried off to the row of public phones to ring the papers or the police or the RSPCA or the man’s wife or boss or neighbours or church, anywhere they could dob him in. The ones that couldn’t get to the public phones rang up from shop phones. They all thought he’d tried to bottle the dog. I slowed down when I saw no one had noticed me. There was only one citizen that tackled the man head on and that was an old lady from last century; she didn’t realise that until the copper got there the bloke might do anything. As it was, he went to shove her away, but she lurched a bit in the ordinary way of walking and he missed. You couldn’t have much respect for last century, though, because as soon as she stopped castigating the man, she walked across the road without looking, as if the world owed her a life, and everyone was going to stop so as not to take hers. Maybe her yelling at the man was as much out of tune as the way she crossed the road. Fancy thinking she had rights on the road when cars were doing fifty all round her. I had stopped the car and reversed, because that was the natural thing to do these days; no one goes by an accident or a fight; everyone stops to gape. I gaped and the old woman stepped right in front of me when I started off again. I threw out the anchors and hit the horn but there was another surprise. Someone had fitted the car with a two-note screamer and the blast from the horn lifted her off her feet. Unfortunately, it lifted her right on to my front bumpers. The circus started again, and the people who hadn’t finished their phone calls reporting the man and the dog were in a fever to get me included too. She untangled herself and I got away, but just in case they reported me with the right car number, I changed plates a few miles on and bought a roll of red sticky tape from a paper shop and stuck it in two strips on both sides of the car. You’d be surprised how a little thing like a red stripe changes the look of anything.

  I had a funny experience when I took the car into the city. I left the car down near the Opera House and went up on the highest of the new buildings. I don’t want to tell you too much, only that I took a little hot Japanese Grand Prix transistor with me—people don’t worry if they see a kid with a radio going, they know he’s harmless—and there I stood up on the top looking over the city. If you were average height you’d have trouble looking over, but I’m pretty tall. I remember thinking when I looked over Sydney that it’d be a great feeling to own a city, you have a lot of those ants and bugs—the cars looked like bugs from there—in the palm of your hand. But just then, in the middle of a programme they had on called Mourning Melody, they stopped and this man came on with a quiet voice, the sort of voice that is thinking you’ll go away if it gets any louder, and what do you think it was saying?

  Cast yourself down. That hit me. I switched the thing off right away and looked straight down. This time it was a voice telling me; back in the car with Bee and the kids there wasn’t any voice, only something in me making me almost do it. I don’t usually think hard about anything, but this time I did. I tried to concentrate away from the voice on to the height of the building, the pretty houses on the north bank of the river, the trains like worms crawling across the coathanger. And down on to the sails of the Opera House, blown ashore in a strong wind, beached and too heavy to push off again, like a helpless houseboat rigged for the America’s Cup.

  As usual, when I ignored the thought for long enough to pass through the action stage, it lost power and left me. I didn’t jump. That day I invented a brilliant new method of stealing. I called it the blitz-steal. The idea was to hit a shop very fast and be on the run before they’d seen you, or very soon after. And I worked out a special camouflage, you could call it the before and after. You had to look different behind from what you did in front. I got an old jumper and painted it red behind—it was black in front—and put a big number on it in white. My hair I made lighter behind with some flour and I made the heels of my shoes different with a different polish. All set.

  I knocked off a couple of transistors from an electrical shop in Crow’s Nest, but there was no kick in it. No buzzard saw me. There was no chase. The trick was to park your car half a mile away to give you time to get away so they couldn’t catch up enough to see the number while you were starting it. I got rid of the electrical stuff in pubs. It’s easy to part people from their cash when they’ve had a few. I got in supplies of food like that, too. You go in a self-service, preferably with trolleys with detachable tops, then when you’re ready for the girl on the cash desk, leave it in the wire basket, put it on the desk, and when the woman in front has moved out of the way to get her goods packed in a bag, lift out something you don’t want, like a leg of months old lamb and drop it at the feet of the cash girl in the little space she has. She’ll try to pick it up and that’s where you beat it.

  They call out and yell a lot, but no one will stop you. Citizens have no guts. It’s all the better if you roll up a white apron under your jumper, already tied round your waist, so you can pull it down in front when you’re getting out. They always think you have to work in a shop if you wear an apron. That’s where people get trapped because of their always thinking in the same way, they get habits of thinking, they learn to recognise things like aprons and different colours and they think they’ve got the keys of the kingdom. To trick them, all you have to use is their own habits.

  I had a joker follow me once that could run. I don’t think I’d have got away even if I hadn’t been carrying a basket of groceries. That was at Hurstville. In the end I slowed down, exhausted practically, making straight for two old ladies. I tried to time it so he would reach me just as we reached the old ladies. They looked up and smiled; no one ever thinks you’re going to crash into them; and I sidestepped. This runner bloke hit them halfway down and carried them about five yards. This time some bystanders took a hand and started kicking this fellow, mainly because he was flat on the ground with two old ladies on top of him. When he started to get up they got back out of reach, which was prudent, because he was as big as me. I was long gone, and the car started at the first touch, mainly because I look at the points and clean them every day and test every single electrical contact in the circuit. I believe in making a car work for me, but also in keeping it in good condition so that it can.

  I remember driving away from that little scene and sweating. The water out of me came down the back of my neck and when I put up my hand to feel it, the hairs on my head were all wet. I just couldn’t help thinking of something Stevo had said when we were in the car. After I’d toyed with the idea of suiciding us all.

  He was in the back seat looking over me, at my hair.

  ‘I can see bottom, Mum,’ he said. She didn’t answer, she was still fairly rigid, sitting there. That was after I’d gone off the road.

  I thought about that all the time I was driving away. And I thought about Bee. So much so that I started thinking about women in general.

  Have you ever gone into the hi-jacking business? I don’t mean with a car full of other slobs, so that there’s a dozen mouths to squeal. I mean by yourself. You only have to say Pass the straws in a milk bar and you can be onto something. Or, Hey Billie Jean, which way to Ostracise? If she stops to say W
here? you’re in. The best one I had was a girl a bit older than me, about nineteen, and she told me where to go. To Balmoral Island. You know that little spit of land in the middle of Balmoral Beach? There. At night it can be very romantic, but this was broad daylight. I wouldn’t have if she hadn’t insisted. It’s my natural instinct against doing things in the open. What finished me with her was I swore once. She was very sexy, but if you swore that was bad. Very bad. She was so loud about it that I took her back home across the Bridge and on the middle of it I stopped and pushed her out.

  Have you ever seen someone on foot in the middle of the Bridge? If she hadn’t been pretty she’d be there now. As it turned out, she got picked up before I was off the Bridge. I waited and watched and she was in with four kids. They were taking no notice of her, working up to it inside themselves in silence. I reckon I knew what would happen to her, the only thing in doubt was where; if she was lucky they wouldn’t take her as far as National Park. There’s something tempting about being in the bush, it makes you think you can do what you like. The only hard work you have to do is dig a hole for the body.

  It’s a mistake to think people know how bad your intentions are; when I got home again Bee didn’t hold it against me that I tried to kill them all; what she held against me was that I had pulled her leg in a pretty dangerous way, but she didn’t mention the danger to the kids. She said she trusted my driving and I wouldn’t take them into any danger I couldn’t get them out of. Then she asked me about the car. That was the first time she ever talked about the cars I took them out in.

  I told her I shut the car and put everything back where it was so the fuzz would know it was only a temporary steal if anyone reported it. The car I got from Russo’s was outside, and I had come in wearing my leather coat. You could sleep in it, and it was warm.