The Anatomy of Wings Read online

  There was a long silence.

  “What are you doing?” asked Beth.

  “We need to talk about things,” said Mum.

  “No we don't,” said Beth.

  “We do.”

  “We don't. I already know about it.”

  “You know about it but you don't know it in the right way,” said Mum.

  I wished there was a hole in the wall that I could peep through. There was nothing but silence on the other side. I traced my finger over the gold pattern in the linoleum while I listened.

  “If you're so clever,” said Mum, “why don't you tell me how it all works?”

  Nothing.

  “Do you know about using a condom?”

  Nothing.

  “Are you going steady with this Mark boy?”

  “Going steady” was in the glossary. It said going steady usually led to engagement and marriage.

  Nothing.

  “Because look, look here, there is a whole chapter on dating. Look, it has the pros and cons of going steady.”

  “Stop saying going steady.”

  “Are you smoking ghanja?”

  “What?”

  “Texas tea, grass, greefo, hay, Mary Jane, pot?”

  “Texas tea?”

  “Have you been getting blasted?”

  “What?”

  “Getting ripped?”

  “Can I go now?”

  “No,” said Mum.

  Mr. Bum Cracker Barnsey made me stay behind in the classroom after everyone left. He said he needed to discuss something with me. He wanted to know why my project on Australian prime ministers was only half finished when I handed it in and why I had drawn a mustache on Malcolm Fraser when he didn't even have one.

  “I don't know,” I said. “I thought he had one.”

  “Come on,” he said. “You can't just hand things in like this. You didn't even finish your last sentence.”

  I had been tired. Dad had been trying to help me before he went to night shift but Aunty Cheryl kept disagreeing with everything he said.

  “Don't you know anything?” she kept asking him.

  Mum was watching A Country Practice. She couldn't help me because she had drunk too much wine but she thought the mustache was funny and then she started crying in the middle of when she was laughing and that's when I decided to go to bed.

  “I got very tired and I fell asleep and then when I woke up it was morning and the project was due in,” I said, because everything would be too difficult to explain.

  “That's not good enough,” he said. “You're over halfway through grade six, you know? Can you ask your mother to come in and see me?”

  I tried to imagine it.

  She would be in her yellow Japanese happy coat and her pink fluffy slippers. She would say, “Frankly, Mr. Bum Cracker, I don't give a damn.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  That afternoon I didn't tell Mum. I'd finally agreed to open the box again with Angela. She said we must have been missing something. The clue to my lost voice, the answer to everything, was somewhere inside.

  We made sure Danielle wasn't around. We took the box out from its shelf and walked with it slowly through the kitchen and out the back door. We sat beneath the back steps. Angela bit her bottom lip while she waited for me to open it.

  This time I was ready for the smell of fifty-cent-sized raindrops hitting dry earth. Of bicycle tires humming on hot pavement. Of bare feet running through crackling grass. Of the lake breathing against the shore.

  I picked up the gladwrapped braid. I removed it from the plastic. It shone in my hands. Angela touched it timidly with just two fingers.

  “This is it,” she said, “isn't it?”

  “You don't even know anything,” I said.

  “I do,” she said. “It's to do with the braid. I can see it in your eyes.”

  “I wish you'd get rooted,” I said.

  “I wish you weren't such a freak of nature,” she said.

  She said that was it.

  It was the end.

  I'd never step foot in the redback panel van again.

  When she was finished shouting at me she climbed out from under the steps and picked up her bike and went.

  I wrapped up the braid again and put it in the box. I closed the lid. I walked up the back steps slowly and into the kitchen. Mum was standing with her back against the kitchen bench waiting for me.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “Just looking,” I said.

  “Did you ask anyone if you could look?”

  “No.”

  “I wish you would have asked me,” she said.

  It was the most words she had said to me for a very long time. I started crying. I didn't mean to. I cried with my mouth open and my eyes shut and with the volume turned off. I just made small noises in my throat, almost like a grasshopper clicking its wings.

  “Give it to me,” she said.

  I gave the box to her.

  I leaned against her and cried. She tried to hug me. It was hard for her. I could tell it was making her feel sick. She made the cat-with-a-fur-ball noise.

  “Nanna loves you,” I said.

  My voice came out like a squawk.

  “I don't want you to go round there anymore,” said Mum.

  “Why?”

  “Because she's a maniac. You hear?”

  She pulled her dressing gown tighter around her. She lit up a cigarette and watched me.

  Angela and I did not speak for the whole weekend but mostly because she went to the Territory with her father for a panel van rally. Mr. Popovitch came second place to the silver siren panel van, which was black with a silver spiderweb all over it. It also had a lady with fangs and long blond hair with a dead straight center part. Angela said it had even won the section for soft furnishings for its shiny silver seats. She didn't mention anything about the braid or how she knew everything about everything.

  I didn't mention anything about the braid either even though I could still feel it in my hands. I wanted to touch it again. I wanted to go to the box in the linen closet and open it up and touch every item. One by one. Each centimeter. Each millimeter. In the open. Without secrets.

  I wanted to touch everything so I could cry again. I needed to be punctured so the tears would fall out. When I had cried something had loosened in me, a small section had peeled, and for a little while the new exposed part had throbbed. I had felt everything. After I had cried against my mother I had not felt numb. My bedspread scratched against my skin, a magpie sang outside my window and I listened to it.

  I had an idea.

  All we had to do was take the box and sit down at the table, Mum and Dad and Danielle and Nanna.

  We needed to remember Beth. All the days, not just the last. How she ran along the footpath in her leotard and her happy shoes, dancing and laughing. How she did pirouette after pirouette in the dirt beneath the rain tree. How we lay side by side on the floor and divided up the moon.

  All those days had been removed, simply and precisely, whole weeks brimming with cloudless blue skies neatly severed and discarded.

  We needed Beth's name to be shouted, not whispered.

  But I was too scared to tell my plan to anyone.

  Instead I lay in bed at night and thought about it. I thought about the box being there closed up, forever. I thought about why Mum had chosen to keep those things that had been with Beth when she died. Why she had placed the ballet shoes among them. I thought about how long everything would last before it was nothing but dust.

  My new raw part sealed over like a scab.

  I tried to think about Babylon, which was once a great city. I knew that it takes thousands of years for an ancient city to vanish. Some ancient cities simply crumbled and fell apart. Some were swallowed up by desert. Some were taken over by newer cities. Some fell into the sea. I thought it would take even longer for our cities to vanish because of the stronger building materials like steel, which are virtually
indestructible except in the case of a nuclear war, where everything is reduced to nothing in less than a blink of an eye.

  And then I thought that in one thousand years Memorial would probably have disappeared. The plaster of Paris footprint casts we made with Mrs. Bridges-Lamb would have turned to dust. Only parts of the mine would poke out of the red sand and rock in places. All the streets scratched into the desert and all the exactly-the-same houses wouldn't be visible anymore. And if a team of archaeologists came and dug down into my room and found it exactly the way it was when everything stopped in November 1982 they would find two beds and a writing desk and a cupboard with a built-in mirror.

  They would find the green and yellow geometric shapes wallpaper and they would shake their heads and exchange knowledgeable glances and say, “Circa 1977.” They would be interested in the matching ballerina bedspreads but even more interested in Danielle's sketchbook with all her drawings of the end of the world.

  They would throw up their hands if they found the bookshelf. They would open up drawers and find T-shirts decorated with Hobbytex artwork and neatly pressed rose-embroidered jeans and Mickey Mouse sandals. Jewelry boxes with bluebird earrings and necklaces. And on the inside of the cupboard doors they would find posters tacked: Luke Sky-walker with a light saber, Olivia Newton-John, Blondie.

  And they would confer before exclaiming, “An excellent and well-preserved example of the times.”

  But would they feel the sadness in that room?

  Two girls crying into each other's hair.

  Two girls holding each other tight to stop from shivering.

  Nanna had a new plan for unclogging my songs. She didn't tell me straightaway, only hinted at it.

  “Today we will try something new,” she said.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Patience,” she said. “Patience.”

  First I had to help take out all the ceramic dogs from the cabinets and dust them with a dry rag. Then Nanna wiped them over with a wet rag. It was the first time in months I had seen her do anything other than lie on her bed or sit in a chair.

  “Your Aunty Margaret tells me your mother is improving, that she is getting out of bed and cooking dinner again?”

  She asked it like a question for me to confirm.

  “If she is feeling better I am feeling better,” she said.

  Then she started crying.

  What I would have mostly liked to talk about was olden-day stories of the town. How everything looked when she first arrived with Uncle Paavo a long time ago. When the streets were dirt and the bridges wooden and on every corner there was a pub and people bought their groceries wrapped in newspaper and carried them in string bags.

  Her two hair curtains had grown long because she still hadn't been outside the flat to get them cut. She said her nerves were shot to pieces. Her hands shook too much to drive. She'd seen a teenage girl ride down her street just yesterday, a girl with blond hair. She'd seen her out of the corner of her eye and thought it was Beth. She got a pain in her heart and down her left arm. She hadn't stopped shaking for hours.

  The two hair curtains closed over her cheeks when she leaned forward and wept.

  “I will not take it back,” she said. “I was telling nothing but the truth.”

  I would like to have heard about how she always carried in her apron pocket the Saint Jude card the priest had given her on the ship after their mother had died because Saint Jude is the patron saint of the hopeless. How it was worn thin from being held. How she touched it each day in her apron pocket when she cooked for all the men in the boarding-house with impossible names like Timmo Vitikkohuhta, Yrjo Lamminmaki, and Manu Matinpoika.

  Some mornings these men went down the hole and never came back, killed by a rock fall or stepping off dark stopes by accident. Their funeral processions stretched along the dusty streets and they were buried beneath the long rows of quartz graves in the dirt cemetery. And the men at the front of the processions carried trumpets and trombones and their feet kicked up the dust as they walked so it looked like they were being carried on a cloud. The sky was impossibly large and faultlessly blue.

  “Why must I say she did not see an angel?” she asked me. “What could have we done? What should have we done?”

  Desert angels would have skin like moonlit ghost gums. They would have silver eyes and dirty feet. They'd ride willy-willies just for fun.

  “We thought she would grow out of it,” said Nanna, wiping her nose with her handkerchief.

  After that we went outside.

  Nanna wound down the communal Hills hoist as low as it would go. She clicked her tongue before she unpegged her neighbors’ drying and put it in a basket. She turned her empty bin upside down and made me stand on top of it. She made me hang from one of the clothesline's metal arms.

  “Now bring your legs up,” she said. “Bring them up so you hang only from your legs.”

  “I can't,” I said.

  “What do you mean you can't? You must perform this on the monkey bars every day. Pull your body up through your arms.”

  “I'm not Nadia Comaneci, you know,” I said.

  It was a perfect still winter day and everything was very bright. When my legs were up she made me let go with my hands and hang. I looked at the large clear blue sky and desert upside down.

  “Good,” she said.

  Then she took one end of the clothesline and started to walk fast with it and then she broke out into a little trot and then an almost run. And I spun around upside down.

  “Nanna,” I shouted because she was going really fast and I thought I was going to fall off or she was going to fall over.

  “Yell something,” she shouted.

  I screamed, “Stop this thing.”

  Nanna stopped pushing. She stood back but she didn't stop the clothesline from going around. I kept passing her and she was smiling at me and her too-big false teeth were almost dropping out of her mouth. She was breathing hard from her running and she put her hands down on her knees.

  “Go on,” she said. “Yell something.”

  “Help me,” I yelled.

  “Try a song now.”

  “Which one?”

  “Try ‘Oh! Susanna,’ ” she said.

  “Oh! Susanna,” I said, “don't you cry for me.”

  “That's not singing,” she said.

  She let the clothesline wind down slowly. I couldn't stand up straight when I got down.

  “It was worth a try,” Nanna said, and she held out her arms for me.

  I could feel her bones through her cotton dress and she smelled like dust. She hugged me for a while and after the while was up I still didn't feel like letting go. We both squinted our eyes against the sun.

  “Do not tell your mother that I made you do this,” she said when we moved apart.

  “I won't,” I said.

  And for some reason it made both of us laugh.

  2 DARDANELLES COURT

  PHILIPPA IRWIN HAD EXHAUSTED THE YOUTH GROUP'S STRING-ART SUPPLIES THE DAY SHE FIRST EVER THOUGHT OF RUNNING AWAY. She opened the sliding glass door and went out into the late afternoon heat. She walked along the outside of the hall. The windows were plastered with the cellophane stained glass they had made. Her stained glass had been the star of Bethlehem. Pastor Greg had made her stand at the front of the group and explain why she had chosen it.

  “I just really like stars,” she had said, stuttering on the r in “really” and the s in “stars.”

  Once she had told her mother she was going to be an astronomer. Her mother had told her to stop being silly. She knew her mother wanted her to be like her eldest sister, Maria, who had found a nice husband. Her mother was sure her next sister, Monica, would do the same and then Philippa after that. But Philippa could still remember when Maria wanted to be a clarinetist in a real orchestra. When Maria had asked her mother about going to live in the city and playing in an orchestra her mother had been shocked. It was as though Maria had asked for a rocket
ship to fly to Mars.

  Philippa never told her father about wanting to be an astronomer except in her head. In her head she told him she had been accepted as the youngest child ever into astronomy school and, by the way, it was in America. No one told her father anything unless they were responses to his questions.

  “Think about it before you answer me,” he usually said.

  Philippa rounded the corner to where the large outdoor air conditioner whirred and rattled. One of the big boys, Shane, was standing in front of it. He put his hand up in a stop sign.

  “You can't go past here,” he said.

  “Why not?” she stammered.

  “Because I said so.”

  Even though the air conditioner was loud she could hear the laughter from the other side. It was the breathless, high-pitched cackling of boys.

  Shane grabbed her around the waist when she pushed past him. She was a lot smaller than him; she squirmed out of his arms.

  “Red alert,” he called. “Red alert.”

  Boys jumped up from behind the air-conditioner unit, five or six of them, coughing, straightening their pants, giggling, punching each other, pushing each other. Monica was sitting cross-legged on the dry grass; she was pulling her shirt down.

  “What are you doing?” Philippa stammered.

  “What are you doing?” Monica asked in return.

  When they were all in the discussion circle Pastor Greg and Pastor John carried a wooden ark into the center.

  “Give me those,” said Pastor Greg to Shane.

  Shane had two wooden donkeys humping one another.

  After that Pastor John started asking questions about the Bible story of Noah's ark. He had his Bible pages all marked out so he had the proper biblical answers. Monica sat opposite, legs stretched out, red-cheeked, chewing her Hubba Bubba.

  Philippa hoped she wouldn't get asked any questions because she would stutter and everything would go silent except for the crickets and cicadas.