The Anatomy of Wings (10 page)

She went straight to her room and lay on her bed with her knees drawn up to her chest. Mum came and stood at her door.

“How was Tiffany?” she asked.

“Good,” Beth said.

“I think it's really nice you're still friends with Tiffany,” said Mum. “Even though you've got this new friend. You always need more than one friend.”

“Yes,” said Beth.

“Did you play with Tiffany's sister?” Mum asked me.

She seemed extra nosy.

“No,” I said, “but I found this.”

I held up the possible whistling kite feather and twirled it.

“Don't bring that inside, please,” said Mum. “It could be covered in bird lice.”

She tried to take it off me but I dodged her and took it into my room. I opened my cupboard and took out my box marked
FEATHERS,
and put the feather inside. She didn't try to chase me.

“Come and wash your hands, Jennifer,” she said.

Mum came to my door and I closed the cardboard lid.

“You know small children who handle bird feathers can get terrible diseases and some of them have even died,” she said.

“Show me the facts,” I said.

She made an annoyed noise.

We heard Beth go into the bathroom and turn on the shower. We heard her slide the lock. Mum went away and then came back. The shower had been running for a very long time.

“What are you doing in there?” said Mum with her ear pressed to the door.

“Nothing,” Beth said. “I'm coming out now.”

“Are you all right?” said Mum. “You look very pale.”

Beth looked at her like it was a difficult question. A dangerous question. She crossed her arms. That she hadn't been to Tiffany's house was burning in painful letters all over her skin. She looked at Mum like she thought she already knew. Mum was trying to trick her. She could read the writing.

“I just feel sick, that's all,” she said.

She lay down on the bed and let Mum stroke her hair.

I sat in the hallway with a pile of magazines and started ripping out pictures.

“What are you doing?” Mum asked.

“I need pictures of animals with fur,” I said. “I told you it was mammal week.”

“Well don't rip them,” said Mum. “It's too noisy. Cut them with the scissors. Don't you know your sister is unwell?”

I was cutting out a picture of a wombat when Beth sat up and vomited over the side of the bed. The vomiting caused a wild commotion. Mum went running for a bucket. She wanted to call Dr. Cavanaugh. She wanted to take her to the hospital.

“It's so colorful,” said Danielle, looking at the spew. The pastel shades of intermingled lolly hearts.

I looked for messages.

“I hope you don't die,” I said.

After vomiting she fell asleep. We were allowed to have a look at her before we went to bed. She was sleeping on her side. The moon was gazing serene-faced through the window and illuminating her cheek, with its one mole.

It was only in the morning that I realized part of her was missing.

T
HE MISSING PART WAS A SECTION OF HER EASY LAUGH, THE BIT WHERE SHE TILTED HER HEAD BACK, HELD ONE ARM ACROSS HER STOMACH, AND CLOSED HER EYES.
That had vanished. She had the same blond hair, the same almond-shaped eyes, the same constellation of freckles across her nose, the same mole on her cheek just like mine. But she was different. On the outside no one noticed it. Not Mum. Not Nanna, who noticed everything. Beth still held me down and tickled my ribs but sometimes when she did it she stared right through me at something else.

Beth grew suddenly beautiful. It surprised us, the speed at which it happened. Her eyes were a deeper shade of blue. Her lips were rose-petal smooth. She moved with a new grace. Everywhere people could not tear their eyes from her or could not look at her because of her beauty.

The grade 9 boys couldn't look at her. They
averted their eyes when she moved past them like a vision. The grade 9 girls fell at her feet. She sat with them in their tight circles at lunchtime with Miranda at her shoulder like a shadow.

She used their language, copied their wide-eyed innocence. She tried on their giggles and shrieks. She slouched her shoulders. She wore her hair in one plain braid. She tried to blend in but she was different. Everyone smelled it.

Grade 10 boys followed her like a pack of dogs wherever she went. The grade 9 girls watched her in amazement as she dealt with them. How did she know what to do? How did she know how much to give and how much to
not
give? The boys followed her down to the laneway beside the science block. She rested her back against the wall. She brought her braid over her shoulder and touched it as she talked to them. She fiddled with the rubber band like she might undo it.

They waited for her on the footpath outside the bike racks but she rode straight past them with a smile over her shoulder. They followed her and Miranda, a small flotilla, home along the straight highway.

Dardanelles Court became steadily crowded with bikes. Boys rode up and down the cul-de-sac hoping for a glimpse of Beth. Some with older brothers came
in cars. They did burnouts at the entrance to Memorial Drive. Marshall Murray unwound his garden hose and threatened to wet them.

“Get,” he shouted. “Leave her alone.”

Mrs. Irwin called her three girls inside.

Miss Frieda Schmidt opened her venetians with two fingers and shivered.

Mr. O'Malley sang to his new audience; he sang songs about tall ships and sea spray and storms.

At first Mum was unaware. She sat at the table doing Hobbytex. She opened up the blue Hobbytex tin and took out all of her colors and arranged them in a neat line. Then she clipped a T-shirt with the iron-on transfer stencil onto the work frame.

She had made me a T-shirt that said
GOING MY WAY,
which had a big purple thumb beneath it, and a T-shirt that said
DADDY
’
S LITTLEST ANGEL.
She made Danielle a T-shirt that said
COOL,
which was big enough to go over her Milwaukee back brace, and when Danielle said she wasn't going to wear it Mum said she was extremely ungrateful.

“I don't want a T-shirt that says
COOL,
” said Danielle.

“Well what do you want?” asked Mum.

“One that says
WORLD
’
S BIGGEST RETARD,
” I said.

“Jennifer,” shouted Mum. “Don't say retard.”

I couldn't stop laughing.

“Shut up, arsehole,” said Danielle.

“Arsehole,” said Dad, and that made
him.
laugh. He was reading the form guide with a pencil stuck behind his ear.

His T-shirt said
WORLD
’
S BEST DAD.

“Put those scissors away from your mouth,” Mum said to me.

“They weren't even near my mouth,” I said.

“They were,” said Mum. She took the scissors off me.

“That's how children die,” she said. “They slip and the scissors go into their brains.”

“Cool,” said Danielle.

Mum leaned over and opened the blinds. She looked out at the boys on bikes going round and round in circles.

“Where are all these boys from? They don't live in this street.”

“They're from the high school,” said Danielle. “They're all Beth's boyfriends.”

Mum put down the color she was using.

“What are you talking about?”

“They're the boys who love her, only her real boyfriend is Marco,” said Danielle.

I started going through the Hobbytex catalog pretending I wasn't interested and that I knew nothing about anything.

“Is he outside?” asked Mum, her voice rising just a little.

A quiet fell over the room. In the quiet I could hear Mum's breathing and the cap of a Hobbytex tube being screwed on and the sound of bicycle wheels circling on pavement.

“I doubt it,” said Danielle, casually leafing through her perm scrapbook. “He doesn't go to school anymore.”

“Are you listening to this, Jim?” shouted Mum.

Dad looked up from the paper.

“Hey?”

“Where's Beth now?” demanded Mum.

She looked at Danielle and then slapped a hand on the catalog so I had to look up as well.

“Where do you think?” said Danielle.

Beth and Miranda had been riding to Marco's house in the afternoons after school. After the first time it wasn't so bad. It didn't hurt so much. She took three drags on a thin joint in his messy bedroom. She coughed violently and while she coughed he laughed and then she lay back on the bed with her long hair hanging over the edge. Marco kissed her. He didn't shake as much. His breath didn't burn her cheek. He didn't hold her down with one arm across her chest. She watched his neck and his chin moving above her. Afterward he lay on his back beside her with his eyes shut. He reminded her of a statue, he lay so still; he was like a marble saint with a carved face.

After Danielle told on Beth she was supposed to meet us each afternoon to ride home from school. We waited at the back side of Memorial Park, shielding our faces from the sun. Danielle and Kylie always got sick of waiting. Kylie said her mum knew Beth was going to be nothing but trouble. They went up through the rain trees and over the hill into the park.

I rode my bike to Amiens Road and found Beth's bike outside his house. Those afternoons when Beth came out her blue eyes shone. She wore a calm face even though when she got home Mum was going to yell at her and follow her from room to room and tell her that she wasn't going to stand for it, she was going to put an end to it if it was the last thing she ever did.

When Beth saw me waiting outside the house on Amiens Road she sometimes smiled, other times she picked up her bike and started riding like I wasn't even there. She never asked me if I was going to tell. She unwrapped some chewing gum to disguise the cigarette smoke on her breath. She gave me a piece as we rode. When she looked at me she had that same face as when she'd rescued a moth from a spiderweb.

That's how I knew she was saving him.

In March Angela received four new underarm hairs overnight and three pubic hairs. She showed them to
me in her bedroom. To be even I told her I had a secret.

“What is it?” she asked, pulling up her knickers.

I told her that I had secretly been to the flat to visit my nanna and I had gone inside and drank water backward from a cup to try and find my voice.

“What if your mum finds out?” she asked.

Angela was a little scared of my nanna. She didn't like the way she always hoarded lots of fruit in her little flat and kept it until it turned. Or the way she had a lot of dead flowers wrapped in bundles from the feasts of saints. And how she always asked Angela what religion she was and then clicked her tongue when Angela said she didn't know. Angela made a face.

At home when I passed Mum in the hallway I wondered if she could see in my face that I had been to Nanna's flat. If she could she didn't show it. I wondered if Angela could see in my face that I had torn up the Australian cricket team cards that had taken Angela and I weeks to collect. Tearing them made me feel better for a little while but afterward I had to worry about what I would tell her when she asked to see them, especially Rodney Marsh, who was her favorite. I decided that I was going to tell her my mother threw them out because she was Crazy with Grief, which is exactly what Aunty Cheryl said was the reason we had to go to her place each night for dinner.

Angela changed the subject from my nanna back to her.

“Don't worry about not having any hair yet,” she said. “Everyone's puberty is unique.”

She had read that in
The Life Cycle Library,
which Mum bought from the one-armed encyclopedia salesman when she was trying to make sense of Beth.
The Life Cycle Library
contains six thin volumes and was for Young People like Beth and Very Frightened Parents. Mum had unwrapped them and placed them in a neat pile beside her bed. When Angela and I wanted to read them we crept in softly, even though she wasn't in the room, and took one volume at a time.

Angela always wanted volume 1 because it had a large section on a boy's anatomy. She always said oh my god look at this and her cheeks went red even though it was the same diagram of a penis that we'd looked at one hundred times before. In volume 1 of
The Life Cycle Library
all the boys had side parts and all the girls wore checkered skirts and Alice bands. None smoked Winfield Greens and faintly glowed.
The Life Cycle Library
was full of underlined paragraphs and words from when Mum was trying to understand just what was going wrong with Beth.

Mrs. Popovitch came into Angela's bedroom. She asked me how my mother was doing. She said she'd seen her trying to hang out the washing and she was
just skin and bones. I told her Mum couldn't eat very much. She put the food in her mouth and then it made her feel sick. Sometimes she made a vomiting noise, a bit like a cat coughing up a fur ball. I did an example of it.

“Oh, darling,” said Mrs. Popovitch. “That's terrible.”

“She doesn't wear lipstick anymore either,” said Angela.

Mum had always worn lipstick. Lipsticks with names like Mystic Mauve, Melon Shine, and Deep-Sea Coral that lived in straight lines on her dressing table. Mrs. Popovitch didn't wear lipstick. She said she didn't believe in it. She dyed her hair red sometimes with henna but she never put makeup on her face.