The Anatomy of Wings Read online

  She turned off the highway onto a road that curved toward the train tracks. It was the road that led to the tailings dams. There were lots of signs that said MINE PROPERTY—KEEP OUT but no gates. Beth ignored the signs and kept riding.

  “We're not allowed here,” I shouted. “It's called trespassing.”

  My legs ached and my mouth was dry. She stayed ahead of me the whole way, only looking behind her every now and again and shaking her head when she saw me. The pavement ended and the road became dirt.

  The few trees there were thinned out even further. The trees had leaves that were curled and brown. Some had no leaves at all. They held up their bare branches and the bark hung in long dark strips like flayed skin. Even the grass was dead. It had turned white and fallen out of the ground at its roots. There were no birds in the sky.

  Finally, the chain-wire fence that surrounded the mine dam appeared and behind it, glittering, the expanse of blue. Beth dropped her bike to the ground and walked toward the fence. She rested her whole body against it, her fingers curled through the wire. When she turned to face me she had the imprint of the fence on her unbruised cheek.

  “You can't swim,” I said.

  “I know,” she said.

  “It's poisonous.”

  “I know.”

  “How do the birds know not to drink it?”

  “Why did you have to follow me?”

  “I didn't want you to be lonely.”

  “I'm not lonely.”

  “This is a long way from home.”

  “It's not really that far.”

  She sat down in the red dirt with her back against the fence. The poisonous blue lake sparkled behind her. She folded her hands over her knees and put her head down on them. She started to cry.

  A very hot wind was blowing. It felt like it came right out of the red center. It scoured the landscape. It rolled the grass that had fallen out of the ground in bundles along the dirt road. It spun the dirt in small circles for something to do. It rustled the flayed skin of the trees. It blew our hair over our faces. It made me feel scared.

  “Don't cry,” I said.

  “I'm not,” she said, lifting up her head and wiping the tears from her eyes.

  She had a look on her face. It was the first time I ever saw it. Later she would always wear this face. This stillness would steal into her features. It wouldn't matter if she was hurt or happy. Her cheeks and nose and forehead were quiet. Her mouth was slightly parted. She was thinking. She was thinking and she was listening. It was like she was trying to work out a difficult puzzle.

  She squatted and with a stick wrote her name in the dirt.

  ELIZABETH JANE DAY.

  “Everything feels wrong,” she said.

  “Here?”

  “Everywhere.”

  “Why?”

  “I don't know.”

  The sun was falling down below the hills fast. There were storm clouds building in the west. Big swollen clouds piling on top of each other but which would come to nothing. She stood up. The wind was already sweeping away her name but she kicked the dirt also so it was erased. There was nothing to say we had been there. We rode back along the road toward town.

  A phoenix usually lived to be five hundred years old. It's quite easy to poison someone if you have hemlock. Some deep-sea fish have lights in their tails. Eagles are from the order Falconiformes. Anthea Long was descended from a convict. She did a morning talk on it.

  “Slow down,” said Mrs. O'Malley. “You're making me dizzy.”

  The rain clouds had come to nothing. A quick panic of wind, a sudden rush of rain.

  “The earth is one hundred and forty-six million kilometers from the sun.”

  “Is that right?”

  “I read it in a book.”

  “It must be true then,” Mrs. O'Malley said. She took out her bra-strap hankie and wiped her forehead. “If only it would rain and rain and rain.”

  From across the road at our house there was still a lot of shouting going on. I could hear Mum's footsteps thumping up and down the hall.

  “Trouble?” asked Mrs. O'Malley.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Come round the back,” said Mrs. O'Malley, “and I'll tell you something new.”

  When the bruise was found all hell broke out. Mum found it even though Beth tried to hide it with her hair and by moving very fast past the kitchen door. Mum pounced out after her. She had her Continuous Coral lipstick on and her hair in curlers because she was going to a dance. She stalked Beth down the hall. “God,” she screamed when she saw the bruise even though she told Nanna she didn't believe in him.

  “It's nothing,” said Beth.

  “Nothing?” screamed Mum. “Nothing?”

  “I fell over on the basketball courts,” Beth said.

  “Why didn't you show me?” asked Mum. “If you did it on the basketball courts you would have showed me.”

  Everyone stayed quiet waiting for the answer. Danielle with her pencil poised about her sketchbook, me standing in the hallway tracing a toe on the gold in the linoleum.

  “Who did it?” asked Mum.

  “No one did it,” said Beth.

  “What's going on with you?” shouted Mum.

  “Nothing.”

  It was their usual conversation.

  “I'm really disappointed about how you've turned out,” shouted Mum, like Beth was a slightly burned biscuit.

  “Leave me alone,” said Beth. She lay facedown on her bed.

  “Let me help you,” pleaded Mum.

  But she only stood at Beth's bedroom door wringing her hands and crying because she didn't seem to know what to do.

  Don't be silly, what were you doing out in the desert? Sit up. Show me this bruise. We will invoke the saints and angels who will protect us.

  This is what Nanna would have said.

  She knew the saints and angels who guarded against storms and strife and disasters. She knew who protected bicycle riders against animal attacks and helped find lost things. She knew which angels to call upon.

  I wondered if there was an angel for confused insect-saving girls who chewed their nails and suddenly didn't feel so right inside their skin.

  After my first secret visit to Nanna I told myself I probably wasn't going back. But whenever I closed my eyes I saw her all alone in the flat with the fly buzzing against the window. So I visited her most afternoons on the way home from school. I brought her food: a piece of bread that had wilted in my lunch box, a lone potato, an apple. Anything I could steal from home. I gave her the food even when Uncle Paavo had started to bring her some groceries once a week. Nanna did not leave her little flat.

  Sometimes Angela came with me. She looked a little frightened when we opened up the sliding door because Nanna had all her curtains pulled and sheets put over the top of the curtains and it made the flat very shadowy. And inside it was very still. You could hear every small noise, like Angela's belly rumbling or the click of Nanna's lighter as she lit up a Craven “A.” Angela also brought Nanna food because I'd told her that she was starving, usually some powdered sherbet or a white paper bag full of lolly teeth. Nanna said thank you very politely.

  “I have been thinking,” she said once she had kissed my head. “What if you performed the drinking from the wrong side of the cup with a fizzy drink. Lemonade perhaps or sarsaparilla.”

  She didn't have any lemonade or sarsaparilla in her little flat. Angela and I sat in the tiny living room side by side on the old sofa. All the dusty Madonnas held their palms up empty-handed. The ceramic dogs smiled.

  “Each day I pray, Jennifer,” said Nanna. “First I speak to the Archangel Michael because he has protected us this far. I pray only for today. Not for what has passed. Then I ask for the blessed saints Felicity and Matilde, who are the protectors of mothers grieving and mothers who have lost their babies, and Our Lady of Sorrows, who is the protector of those whose hearts are overflowing with sadness.”

  The apple I brought t
hat day was blood-red. It sat on the table in front of us. I knew she was being especially religious because Angela was there.

  “Tell me, both of you, can you feel them?” asked Nanna.

  “Who?” I said.

  “The angels.”

  I tried to feel them. I closed my eyes. Angela closed hers. I tried to imagine them crowded in the room with us.

  “Not really,” I said.

  “I'm not sure,” said Angela in case she got into trouble.

  But Nanna didn't seem upset.

  “I will tell you the truth now,” she said. “After the lake Beth came to me, you know. The sliding door was working well so I didn't hear it opening. I was sleeping in this chair because it was the afternoon. Do you know what she said to me?”

  Instead I wished she could have told us about when she first came to town all those years ago. When the mine hills were still red not blackened and the men's barracks were still being hammered together and everywhere makeshift houses were being built out of gidgee gum trees and canvas in haphazard streets that meandered beside the creek and gullies.

  “She said at the lake she saw an angel.”

  Angela chewed on a fingernail. I remembered Mum rising up from the sofa.

  I don't believe you, you witch.

  “She said it was after she fainted. It didn't have arms or legs or a face, only lightness.”

  I didn't say anything because Mum said that was the way you didn't encourage her.

  “Beth said, ‘Do you believe me?’ I said, ‘Would you lie about such a thing as this?’ Beth said, ‘But maybe I only imagined it.’ She said afterward it never seemed real, only like something she had dreamed of a long time ago. But it filled up everything with light and afterward everything was beautiful for some time. This is what she said to me.”

  “Then what?” I asked.

  “Then she said her head ached and I gave her a teaspoon of Alka-Seltzer and she lay down on the sofa right there and slept, curled up, and when she woke she did not ever mention it again.”

  I opened my mouth with a question but it was only half formed.

  I imagined what desert angels might look like. They'd have the wings of hawks and robes the color of spinifex after the rain.

  I didn't say it. I wished we could watch television. I wished I had never come or brought the food to save her.

  When I was stealing the food from the kitchen cupboards I thought it was like the time Angela and I stole the food to keep the stray kitten alive and it had worked for three weeks until I grew too bold and was pouring milk straight into a bowl in the kitchen and I was caught red-handed. And the kitten went to live at Angela's after great floods of tears and later it had a litter of deformed kittens, which caused more sorrow, and Mr. Popovitch said all that cat ever did was cause grief.

  And I thought Nanna was similar and a very strange pet to try to keep alive. Instead of growing bigger she would grow crazier. And then I thought where would she be taken when someone found me out?

  “Be honest now, Jennifer,” she said quietly. “Tell me what she said to you.”

  I felt Angela shiver beside me. I saw the goose bumps on her arm.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “Nothing?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing at all?”

  “Ever.”

  She pressed her back hump into the sofa in a dejected way. She needed miracles. All the light shining and whispered golden words floating out of mouths and rainbow-colored angel wings and heavenly voices.

  “I don't believe you,” Nanna said.

  5 DARDANELLES COURT

  WHEN EVERYTHING WAS CLEAN, WHEN SHE HAD VACUUMED AND WIPED DOWN THE PLASTIC SOFA COVERS AND DISINFECTED THE KITCHEN, FRIEDA SOMETIMES ALLOWED HERSELF A GUILTY PLEASURE. This small pleasure was a memory. Afterward she felt dirty just thinking it but she told herself it was normal. It was perfectly normal to have memories. All people had them. The memory was of her sister, Greta, and, in particular, Greta's skin.

  She didn't know where Greta was now. She had been living in an apartment in Munich last. Frieda had phoned there but Greta had moved on. The man that answered the phone had a thick accent. Antwerp, he said. Frieda could smell the dirt on him through the line. She sterilized the phone using steam.

  She had been ten, her sister nearly twelve. It was sultry, a day when curtains of rain slid across the cane fields and glided over the rambling farmhouse with its peeling skin of paint and its banks of rotting wooden louvers. They lay side by side on an old daybed, downstairs beneath the house, where their mother said it was cooler. Everywhere outside it was green and dripping; raindrops quivered on the ends of leaves. This was how she remembered it: greenery, wetness, and her sister tracing a slow circle in her palm.

  They could hear their mother up in the house. She was running from room to room and shrieking with laughter. Their father was chasing her round and round through the twists and turns of the old house. They listened to them run through the kitchen above them, crockery rattling and chattering, along the long hallway, in and out of bedrooms. He chased her, clattering up and down the sleepouts, down the back steps onto the wet grass, and with wild laughter back again stampeding through the house. There were no neighbors to hear.

  “Now you do it to me,” said Greta.

  Greta lifted her own hand so Frieda could begin.

  Frieda touched her fingertip to her sister's palm. She drew a circle first. Then a star. The letter G. A heart. An eye with eyelashes.

  The footsteps went thundering past upstairs.

  “That feels funny,” said Greta.

  “Can you tell what I'm drawing?”

  “Only if I close my eyes.”

  “What's this?”

  “Is it… a horseshoe?”

  “No.”

  She remembered laughing. Her sister's skin, darker than her own, the type that browns to a honey color, could not read the letters she traced. The smooth firm palm was blind.

  “You haven't got very clever skin,” Frieda said. “Try this one.”

  She drew a house with her fingertip, a square with a triangle roof. A door. One window. A chimney.

  Upstairs, the rumble of feet passed overhead, a long squeal of laughter.

  “I can't tell,” said Greta.

  “Silly, it's a house.”

  “Let's draw at the same time on each other,” said Greta.

  They crossed arms at the elbow and drew circles on each other's palms.

  “I can't tell which hand I'm drawing with anymore,” said Frieda after a while.

  “I feel like my hand is yours and your hand is mine,” said Greta.

  A loud crash upstairs. The footsteps stopped.

  “Gus?” said their mother. “Gus?”

  Frieda could not be touched after that. After her father's funeral the mourners walked along the dirt road to their house and it seemed to her that their purpose for coming was to touch. How her skin had ached inside her sleeves. Heavy-handed women in hats and gloves demanding her to stand still before them, holding her. Oh yes, they said, oh yes, she has her father's eyes all right.

  She did not like to be patted or tapped or poked or brushed or tickled or scratched. She did not like the friction of skin. For a while she thought her sister had stolen something from her with that last game. Greta let the heavy-handed ladies hold her and wipe the large glistening tears from her cheeks. This is how she remembered it: greenery, her sister's skin and tears. Later she knew, of course, that it was irrational. Nothing had been stolen from her. Part of her had simply ceased to be.

  She could not be kissed.

  “If you cannot kiss how will you marry?” said Greta, who later ran away from home, then her husband, then the country.

  “It cannot be helped,” said Frieda.

  She could not bear to be handled.

  The red-haired psychiatrist with the pale freckled face said Frieda had both separation and intimacy issues. He ran his hands through his hair as he ta
lked and shut his eyes. Just being opposite him made her skin crawl.

  She hurt no one by being untouchable. Was it such a bad thing? she asked Greta when they still spoke by phone. Of course not, said Greta, you are who you are. From her voice Frieda could tell Greta was thinking of something else completely; she could hear her filing her nails.

  After their father's funeral the landlord said they could have five weeks in the house. He knew their mother couldn't do any work around the place, but he wouldn't kick them out just like that. But he had to make a living what with the cane crush coming. Her mother spoke softly to them then. She whispered orders: stand up tall, you must not cry, we will be all right. Their mother sat on the back steps looking out across the cane fields because she could not bear to be inside.

  When they left Frieda wondered would the crashing footsteps go round and round the house forever. That wild, merry game of chase that they never mentioned and then left behind.

  Years later at her mother's funeral she remembered Greta had tried to kiss her on the cheek. She had moved just in time; she was skillful at such avoidances.

  “I'm sorry,” Frieda said when she saw the hurt it caused.

  “You're a freak,” said Greta, “with a capital _F.”

  Later Greta said it was only a word. It was when she was feeling remorseful, a year later. She had left the commune she'd been living on and needed a place to stay.

  “It was only a word, Frieda,” she cajoled. “I could have chosen any: strange, oddball, loony tunes. All right, I shouldn't have said it, it was wrong.”

  But “freak” had already settled through the cracks in Frieda's skin.

  When she first came to Dardanelles Court the house was brand-new and she didn't have to worry about others having left behind their dirty fingerprints and stale breath. She was in her late thirties by then. She had a good job in the technical library where she filed dead books into the compactors and mended spines and covered new acquisitions neatly and precisely.

  When she spoke at work her voice, to her own ears, sounded brittle and unused. She hated the sound of it. Her face flushed each time she spoke. She preferred the silence of her small sterile home. She was considered quiet and strange but harmless.