The Anatomy of Wings Page 3

  At home our mother noticed the stain on her shorts, and in the toilet even the blood on her underpants shone.

  “Do not be afraid,” whispered Nanna at the toilet door.

  She said the prayer for young girls who are menstruating.

  “I'm not afraid,” said Beth.

  The door lock shone like new silver. Light beams rained from the toilet doll's upraised arms.

  “It is a normal thing,” whispered Nanna. “All girls must have it happen.”

  “Leave her alone, for God's sake,” said Mum from the hallway. “Give her some space.”

  “I'm all right,” said Beth.

  On our bedroom floor I sang “Speed Bonny Boat” because it was a song about having to leave everything behind and saying goodbye to everything you know and because I was definitely going to run away as soon as possible. I had never wanted to break anything before, but when Dad told me to ping off because I didn't know what I was talking about, I felt like breaking something for the first time. I took out the box of Barbie dolls and the first thing I broke was Ken's legs. They weren't easy to break. I broke one off where the joint was. It took a long time. First I did it with my bare hands and then I used scissors. I felt better but only for about ten minutes. Then I felt bad and I went out to the Drawer of Everything in the kitchen and found some sticky tape and Mum saw me and said I thought I told you to go outside.

  “I'm busy,” I said.

  Nanna clicked her tongue and followed me down the hallway and I only had time to throw Ken back in the box and push him under the bed and didn't get to tape up his legs till later, after she had gone.

  “What did you mean she was shining?” she asked when she came into my room.

  “You shouldn't say ‘she,’” I said. “ ‘She’ is the cat's mother.”

  “Be quiet,” she said. “Tell me what you meant.”

  Nanna told me to get off the floor and sit beside her on the bed; she could be very nasty if she didn't get her own way. Nanna had blue-gray eyes that bulged slightly and she leaned in close with them and I could see the very old blackheads on her crooked nose.

  Nanna grabbed my hands and held them between her own. This was called the Hand Press. It was very important to keep our hands in our pockets if we did not want to tell her the truth. When Nanna held our hands between her own there wasn't enough air. All we could do was answer the questions.

  “She was just shining,” I said.

  “What do you mean shining? I don't understand this talk. Was the sun shining on her face?”

  “Yes, the sun was there but she was shining too. She was looking past us at the sky.”

  Nanna took a long deep breath in.

  “Holy Virgin of virgins, Virgin most wise, pray for us,” she said.

  She released my hands for a moment, crossed herself, and then placed them in the press again.

  “I couldn't see what she was looking at,” I said.

  “Shush, shush,” said Nanna.

  “Dad shouldn't say I don't know anything,” I said. It was the thing that hurt me the most.

  “I know, I know,” she said, and she released my hands before I could say anything else. “Don't think about it now. Everything will be all right. I know these things.”

  Before everything happened, that year Angela and I were ten, my second-greatest love was collecting facts. Danielle said it was an unusual love and why couldn't I just collect cereal packet Crater Critters like everyone else or ceramic dogs and Virgin Mary statuettes like Nanna or have a hobby like Hobbytex crafts, which was our mother's number one passion.

  Some of my fact collecting rubbed off on Angela but sometimes she didn't understand that you can't just say something is a fact because you believe in it strongly. Facts are found in fact books or in encyclopedias and if they aren't there you have to do research, for example, by asking someone who knows a lot about stuff. For example, Mr. Willow would be the man to ask about the history of macramé because he taught it in grade 7.

  My mother liked to use the word “fact” a lot. Her favorite saying was “It's a fact.” Her facts included our faces being frozen into a frown when the wind changed direction or how lots of children are killed by chewing on their pencils and getting lead poisoning or by accidentally slipping and having the scissors they had in their mouths enter their brains. I didn't know any children who had died that way. She said there were lots of them. Whole cemeteries. Children buried on top of children. She said it was the most common cause of death apart from drowning but I could tell she was making it up.

  “It's a fact,” she said.

  “It's not a fact actually,” I said.

  “I think you're getting a little bit too big for your boots lately,” she said.

  “I'm not wearing boots actually,” I said.

  “You wait until your father comes home.”

  Because my number one passion was birds my favorite facts were facts about birds. A good fact about birds is that despite having wing bones very similar to human arm bones, birds are more closely related to reptiles. The Merit Students Encyclopedia said birds were only glorified reptiles, which is weird, and I think it was written by a man who was probably a herpetologist.

  The Merit Students Encyclopedia didn't mention the wedge-tailed eagle of Australia, which is my favorite bird, because it was written in America and they don't live there. Another fact is that I could sing. I could sing beautifully. My mother said it was a gift from heaven even though when she fought with Nanna she said there was no heaven or no hell. Also when my singing voice went away she didn't notice for quite some time. It would be Nanna who first pointed her bony finger into my chest and asked me where it had gone.

  I learned all my facts about Dardanelles Court from Mrs. O'Malley, who lived opposite our house in number 3. She lived with Mr. O'Malley, who never said much but usually sang songs about the sea. He usually sang them when the sun was going down and some of the heat had gone out of his cement yard. His voice drifted through the streets. Usually I went to Mrs. O'Malley when no one would listen to me at home. For instance I may have told Danielle that a starfish broken in half can become two new starfish and she may have said do I look like I care. Mrs. O'Malley always said go on, or you wouldn't read about it, or you're pulling my leg, aren't you.

  Mrs. O'Malley was short and round and she owned one hundred colorful dresses made out of nylon that billowed outward from a puckered circle at her neck. She rocked from side to side as she walked because her hips were very bad. Her gray hair was often stuck down to her sweaty red forehead. She collected facts about people like I collected facts about birds and North American capital cities and the great disasters of the world.

  When I went to tell Mrs. O'Malley a fact she usually said come round the back with me. This was so we could get away from Mr. O'Malley's singing because he usually wanted me to join in all the choruses with him. Their whole yard was cemented in except for one small square with an orange tree. There were a lot of cracks to break your father's back; you had to be careful to not accidentally step on them.

  Mrs. O'Malley knew who was married to who and who their children were and if they had any problems, for instance, a harelip or a clubfoot. She knew when they had first arrived in town and how and from which state or foreign country. She knew who was born in the new maternity wing and who was born in the old hospital and who was buried in the cemetery. But mostly she was an expert on our street.

  “The stories in this street,” she said. “The things I could tell you.”

  Mum said she was nothing but an old stickybeak but I didn't agree. We traded facts like collectors.

  “A nighthawk flies with its mouth open swallowing insects,” I said.

  “Marshall Murray in number one is dying from regret,” she replied.

  “The New York Public Library has over four million books,” I said.

  “A secret. Those Irwin girls in number two are plotting a great escape.”

  “Sunflowers turn their head
s to face the sun.”

  “That Miss Schmidt lost her touchable skin when she was just a child.”

  My mother warned me: she said take everything Mrs. O'Malley says with a grain of salt. And some afternoons at Mrs. O'Malley's house it did feel like she was stuffing me full of strange, ripe stories.

  Only she never once told me her own.

  And she never once told me ours.

  Instead, on that very last day, when Dad collected us from school long before any bell had rung, we turned into Dardanelles Court. From the car window I saw her standing on her patio.

  That very last day, stumbling from the car we could hear our mother screaming in circles. When we climbed the front stairs it was like walking a gangplank onto a ship in high raging seas. I looked back once at Mrs. O'Malley from across the street before going inside. She didn't say anything. She only nodded at me.

  The cicadas were singing a song.

  It was one-noted, one-worded; the word sounded like “please.”

  They were singing and singing and singing and the whole world was falling down.

  Once Angela had decided to find my voice there was no stopping her. It was all she talked about. She carried the exercise book with her everywhere.

  Just after school started she got six new underarm hairs and a training bra even though she didn't have any breasts. She counted the hairs every morning and also at night. She showed them to me. I didn't have any underarm hairs at all. Angela said her mother told her it was probably because of shock that my puberty had been retarded, and I said shut up.

  We were in Angela's house, which was a house with no doors. There were only bead curtains and bits of tie-dyed material swaying in doorways and Angela's mother had made Angela's bedspread out of leftover red velvet from their redback panel van, which had won the Panel Van Club Van of the Year twice in a row. The panel van had red velvet benches in the back and mirrors on the ceiling. It had two red stripes painted down either side even though a red-back only has one stripe and any arachnologist would know that.

  “So you still had your voice at the lake?” asked Angela.

  “Yes.”

  She wrote:

  still singing at the lake.

  “Did you lose it after you got home?”

  “No.”

  “What happened next?” Angela asked.

  “How would I know?” I said.

  “God,” she said. “Don't you want to sing again? I bet you don't even care if Anthea Long wins the Memorial Talent Quest. I bet you don't even care if you never get pubic hair.”

  “Don't say pubic,” I said.

  “Pew-bic,” said Angela loud and slow.

  I covered my ears.

  I said what if instead of underarm hair at puberty girls got two little wings budding on their backs and all their friends and sisters and mothers and aunts and grandmothers praised the day they appeared.

  And steadily year by year instead of girls getting more hair under their arms and down below and instead of larger breasts their wings would grow.

  They would start off downy and colorless but end up the velvet green of a peacock's tail or budgerigar blue or the crimson of a king parrot. Every girl would be different. And in the afternoon, after school, they would practice flying in their backyards.

  “I think my wings would be very pink,” said Angela.

  My wings would be brown. I knew it in my bones. They would be earth brown. Mountain brown. Riverbed brown. They would be the magnificent wings of a wedge-tailed eagle. When they unfolded, the golden tips would be revealed.

  “I would never have brown wings,” said Angela.

  The Merit Students Encyclopedia says that like other animals birds face many hazards in their lifetime and many chicks do not get a chance to grow up. For example, it says, two robins might have eight chicks but only two will survive until springtime. They might get blown away by the wind or drowned in their nests by rain or eaten by a snake or a lizard.

  I used to think that maybe it was the same for humans, that one out of three young in a family might be always going to die. Then I realized that the only other family I knew where one of the children died was the Martins and that child was Ben and he got run over by a truck and sometimes kids went to look for the stain of him on the road.

  “Let's start again,” said Angela. “I don't think the blue hair combs were a real clue.”

  “Der,” I said.

  “I wish you'd take this seriously.”

  Mrs. Popovitch came to the bedroom door. She was very pretty with long amber hair. She wore see-through caftan tops, which Aunty Cheryl said was an absolute disgrace. She smoked roll-your-owns instead of tailor-mades like my mother. She gave Angela a look from the door and then gave me a look too. The look she gave me was one I was getting used to. Angela's sisters, Rolanda and Natasha, looked at me the same way. It was with sadness and interest and pity all rolled up into a neat face with a smile. No one ever mentioned Beth's name.

  Now I knew what it must have felt like to be the brother or sister of Ben Martin when they saw children whispering and planning excursions to see the stain of their brother on the highway.

  On the first day back at school Mrs. Bridges-Lamb was on lunch duty and she came up to Angela and me where we were practicing Classic Catches on the parade ground. She told us it would be better to do it on the oval rather than on the cement. I hadn't talked to her since the year before. The last thing she had ever said to me was “And what does three-sixths equal?”

  This time she asked me how I was traveling as though I was on some kind of holiday. I said not too bad and I might have said more—for example, that my mother mostly just sat in the recliner and watched television and didn't brush her hair—but some kids thought we were getting into trouble so a crowd had gathered to watch.

  When it was my turn to collect the cafeteria basket I heard the cafeteria ladies inside talking about Beth. When I rang the bell the lady who came looked very ashamed but tried to cover it up by patting me on the head and I felt like growling and biting her hand.

  Our new teacher, Mr. Barnes, was not very strict and didn't watch us the way Mrs. Bridges-Lamb had watched us, which was very carefully. When Mrs. Bridges-Lamb watched us she wore her glasses and she did not move her head. Her eyes moved, though. They were a flat gray-green and impenetrable as a crocodile's. They slid slowly from side to side.

  When Mrs. Bridges-Lamb took off her glasses and began to wipe them with her handkerchief it meant someone was in trouble but first she had to think about it. Without her glasses her eyes were smaller. She peered into the classroom as though we were all in the distance. She forgot about not moving her head. She moved it from side to side, slightly, like a snake listening.

  Aunty Cheryl had heard Mr. Barnes was very laissez-faire and thought we might all go wild after being so strictly schooled the year before. It made me think of the whole class suddenly going crazy and hanging out windows. I wished I could have told Nanna because it was the sort of thing that would have made her laugh but we were banned from visiting her because she was a religious maniac. I hadn't seen her since the day of the funeral.

  The Merit Students Encyclopedia didn't have an entry on famous maniacs, which I had hoped for, but the dictionary said a maniac was an obsessive enthusiast. That made me think of when Nanna made me help her take out all her Virgin Mary statuettes and put them in the bathtub full of soapy water and they bobbed there like a boatload of ladies lost at sea. And after we had tea-towel-dried them she kissed each one and they all went back into the glass cabinets beside the ceramic dogs, which would get bathed another day.

  After Mrs. Popovitch was gone Angela lay back on her red velvet bedspread and opened up The Book of Clues. She took the pencil from behind her ear.

  “What happened after the lake?” she asked a little quieter.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  Angela raised her eyebrows.

  And everything.

  When Beth met Miranda Bell i
t was two weeks to Christmas and the whole world still shone. At first she told us it openly.

  “Can't you see it?” she said.

  “See what?”

  “The way that tree is shining, or look, look at Mum's hair, it's on fire. Don't you see it?”

  But then, after a while, she stopped asking.

  Mum took her to Dr. Cavanaugh, who ran his soft white fingers, which radiated a soft glow like candlelight, slowly over her skull. When he sat down he folded his arms and leaned back in his chair. His wood-paneled office sat in the shadow of a mountain of black slag. It was near the first gate, where a thousand miners entered each day to go down the hole. The train tracks ran behind the walls. Dr. Cavanaugh shut his eyes while the bell signaling the boom gates closing rang out. All the plaques and certificates rattled on his wall as an ore train passed.

  “Simple hysteria,” he said once things had quieted down. “Quite common in relation to the onset of menstruation and quite common for young girls to faint too. Perhaps this light, these halos she sees, are the tail end of a moderate concussion.”

  “Keep up the fluids,” he said. “Very important.”

  Beth was in her blue leotard embroidered with gold flowers when she met Miranda. We didn't know she was Miranda then. She was just an angry-faced girl with long brown hair going backward and forward slowly on the swing. The swing was in Memorial Park, the slice of knee-high yellow grass laid down like a blanket between the houses of Memorial South.

  Beth had her tutu in her bag. She had her shorts over her leotard and her ballet shoes strung around her neck. We were wearing new happy shoes, which had tags that said MADE IN JAPAN. We'd been at the dress rehearsal for the end-of-year breakup concert for Miss Elise Slater's Jazz Ballet Dance Academy.

  “Hey, why've you got that stuff on?” the girl on the swing asked.

  The swing was beneath a small crowd of Moreton Bay figs, which bowed their dark heads over her. The girl came in and out of the shadow as she swung.