The Anatomy of Wings (26 page)

“Hey, Marty,” he called out.

There was no reply.

“Marty,” he yelled.

“What?” came Marty's voice from a way off.

“You want seconds?”

When she tried to get up he punched her in the stomach so she fell back on the ground.

Afterward they drove back to town. John sat in the back between them this time. Miranda rested her head against his shoulder, her long brown hair draped across his arm. She wouldn't look at Beth. There was the smell of sex and vomit in the car. Peter turned the radio on and beat the time out from a song on his thigh. Every now and again Marty wiped his sleeve under his nose and shook his head in disbelief.

Dawn rose, gold-lighted, turning the cliff faces pink and the bush grass incandescent white. The lake disappeared between the two walls of rock like a closing eye.

They dropped Beth at the highway end of Memorial Drive. Miranda had her eyes closed, pretending to be asleep. Beth looked at Peter in the front seat but he didn't turn to face her. He stared straight ahead down the highway.

There were road trains stopped, five or six of them, parked one behind the other. She walked between two. The cattle stamped and moved. The smell of them turned her stomach. She walked along Memorial Drive past the butter-colored slice of park
and then vomited into the gutter. She could hear the car accelerating along the highway. She sat for a while at the corner of Dardanelles Court with her head between her knees.

Her stomach ached. She wished she had swum in the lake. She wished they'd left her there. She would have taken off her clothes then and swum out and watched the sun rise, floating on her back. She would have been cleansed.

Everything ended where Nanna said it began.

A
FTER MUM AND DAD WRESTLED AND CRIED IN THE HALLWAY THEY DIDN'T TALK TO EACH OTHER MUCH.
Just hello and goodbye. What's for dinner? Sorry I'm late.

Dad didn't tell us he was leaving until he left. It was nearly a year since Beth had died. He got up one morning and decided to leave. First he sat on the side of the bed for a long time thinking about it. He had his head in his hands.

“What are you doing, Jim?” asked Mum because he was supposed to be getting ready for work.

“Nothing,” he said, and let go of his head and let it fall backward and then he stared at the ceiling that way for a long time.

I climbed onto the bed beside him. I lay on my stomach with my chin in my hands and watched him.

When he finished looking at the ceiling he looked at me. He smiled and shook his head.

“Oh shit,” he said.

He got up and stood beside the wall and rested his head against it.

“Oh shit,” he said louder. “Shit, shit, shit.”

Mum came to the bedroom door. She had her hair in rollers because Aunty Cheryl said she had to start taking pride in her appearance again. She had her yellow Japanese happy coat on. She had put on her lipstick but not her eyes.

Dad stopped leaning against the wall and went down on his knees beside the bed. I didn't know what he was doing. He went down so quickly. His knees hit the floor hard. He reached under the bed and pulled out a suitcase. My mother's red lips opened into a circle.

Dad dragged the suitcase out and lifted it up and slapped it onto the bed. A cloud of dust rose up into the air. He made a noise deep in his throat. It sounded like a frog croaking.

“Get up, get up,” Mum said to me.

I crawled backward off the bed. Dad went to the cupboard. He started throwing clothes from the cupboard across the room into the suitcase. A shirt with arms outstretched. A pair of trousers with legs flying. A handful of belts, buckles rattling.

Mum said, “Don't you dare.”

Dad said, “Don't what?”

He stopped throwing the clothes and looked at her with arms hanging down at his sides.

“I can't,” he said.

“Can't what?”

“I can't,” he said. “Anymore.”

Mum lay facedown on the bed and screamed. Dad dragged the suitcase down the hall. It was hard cardboard with plastic edges. It scraped along the wall. It left a scrape mark, a long gentle arc.

He picked up the phone. He phoned a taxi.

“Day,” he said. “Four Dardanelles Court, yes, one, thank you.”

Danielle came out of her bedroom.

“What?” she said.

Mum had stopped screaming. Dad looked at Danielle and me. It was very quiet. His hand went down to the suitcase handle.

“Where are you going?” asked Danielle.

“I can't,” said Dad. “I just can't.”

He shook his head from side to side. There were tears dripping off his nose. I went to go toward him but he put his hand out.

Stop.

The taxi horn beeped.

“I just can't,” he said.

Mrs. Irwin noticed Beth under Frieda Schmidt's spreading poinciana tree. We had heard her yelling across the road and into Miss Schmidt's front yard because she thought that Beth was dead. We heard her from the kitchen, where we sat at the table watching Mum slowly and precisely butter the bread for our school lunches.

“What the hell is going on?” said Mum, going to the front door with the butter knife still in her hand.

“Jean,” shouted Mrs. Irwin from Miss Schmidt's front yard.

When Mum crossed the road Miss Schmidt unlocked her front door and stepped gingerly onto the front porch. She was fully dressed with her stockings and blouse and lace-up shoes. Only her hair hadn't finished being done. She looked afraid of being in her own yard.

Miss Schmidt put a foot on the front lawn as though she had stepped into another country. She looked at Beth lying beneath the tree and at Mum with the butter knife. She looked at Mrs. Irwin holding her hands over her mouth like a cartoon of someone scared.

“What happened?” she whispered.

Beth was sleeping where she had fallen. Her bare feet were brown with dirt. Her hands were held together beneath her head. The first of the red flowers had fallen while she slept and adorned her hair. Her
name tag was still in place on her white work shirt. It read:

“Get up,” said Mum.

She said it quietly, so quiet that it would never have woken Beth up. Danielle and I stood behind her.

Mum stood above Beth with the butter knife.

“Get up,” shouted Mum.

All along the street screen doors and sliding windows were being opened. Mrs. O'Malley came out onto the footpath pretending to check the mail. Marshall Murray, who was watching from his patio, shook his head and closed his eyes.

“Get back inside,” Mum said to Danielle and me, who had knelt beside Beth. “Go.”

Beth didn't know we were there. The sun shone through the leaves onto her luminous face. A little rash of freckles ran across her nose just beneath where her long eyelashes rested. Her lips were slightly parted.

When she woke up she got a fright to see Mum standing over her with the butter knife. She sat up slowly and held her head, remembering.

Mum started yelling at her straightaway.

“You say sorry to this lady,” Mum shouted.

Beth stood up and stumbled toward Miss Schmidt
and took one of her hands. Miss Schmidt didn't have time to snatch it away.

“I'm really sorry,” said Beth. “I'm really, really sorry.”

“It's fine,” said Miss Schmidt. “It's fine.”

It was because the whole of the street witnessed it that it was the final disgrace. Dad used that word.

“You're a disgrace,” he said once she was inside and he had been woken up for the event. Mum and Dad thought the neighbors had no idea what was going wrong in our house.

Beth looked hurt by his words. Then she recovered herself and shrugged at him.

“Suit yourself,” she said.

For some reason that made Dad laugh. He rubbed his eyes and shook his head.

“You're bloody unbelievable,” he said.

When Dad said Beth was a disgrace it was his first and last harsh word to her. She was sitting on the sofa with her grown-back hair rippling over her shoulders and the black mascara smudged around her blue eyes. All the shouting had been left to our mother. She never used any
Life Cycle Library
words. She never said Passion Pop. She never said sexual intercourse. She spoke in vague terms.

It wasn't good enough. It had to stop. Things were going to change.

“All I'm hearing are bad reports about you,” she shouted as though Beth had been on the news. “You know, I haven't even told your father about the police that night.”

Beth was barely listening until Dad spoke.

Her foot had been tapping the floor. Her eyes had been drifting to the television as though she was bored by it all. But his words raised a reaction. For a second her eyes shone with tears. She chewed on a fingernail. It looked like she was going to say something but she didn't. Dad's words rung in her ears. She only came home once after that.

She showered and got ready for work. The sun blazed at the bathroom window. The water made her body ache. She combed her wet hair and braided it. She packed what she could fit in her little canvas bag.

She rode to work. The hills had lost their fantastical color. The mine was a black stain. The sunlight was solid, thick; she had to push her way through the day.

“You're late,” said Sandy, coming out of his office, fingering his silky handlebar mustache.

“I'm sorry,” she said.

“Who's had a late night then, hey?” he said when he had had a good look at her from foot to head. Her unironed shorts and shirt. The dark rings beneath her eyes. He broke out into giggles like a boy.

“Hey?” he said. “Here I am thinking you're a good girl.”

She stood in front of him with her eyes on the floor.

“I think you better do bottom shelves today then, hey,” said Sandy. “You'd be no good on a ladder. You'd fall off. I'd have to pay compensation. That'd be all I need.”

He laughed like a maniac.

“What about doing the lures today?” he said. “That's a good job for a bad girl.”

He led her down the dusty aisle to the fishing lure cabinet. He took out keys from his back pocket.

“What'll we need?” he said. “Some window cleaner, right. Some soapy water, hey. Rub-a-dub-dub, hey?”

He nudged her with his elbow.

“Fuck off,” she said quietly.

“What did you say?”

“I said fuck off.”

“Hey, hey,” he said, putting the keys on the cupboard and smoothing down his mustache with both hands. “That's not the way to talk to your boss.”

“Why'd you say rub-a-dub-dub?” she said.

“I didn't mean anything by it. Just a bit of fun, that's all. You've got up on the wrong side of the bed, haven't you, hey, no more late nights for you?”

She took her badge off her shirt. She placed it next to the keys.

“You won't get to go on the registers acting like this,” he said.

“I don't want a go on the bloody registers.”

She heard Moira's chair scrape backward, her surprisingly soft footfall into the cricket bat aisle.

“I quit,” said Beth.

“You're fired more like it,” said Sandy.

“Suit yourself,” she said.

The morning Dad left I didn't go to school. I rode out of Dardanelles Court and met Angela at the end of Memorial Drive. I told her I was going climbing in the hills. I begged her to come with me. She begged me not to beg her. I said I know how to do your mum's handwriting.

“Jenny, don't,” she said.

We hid our bikes at the bottom of the hill behind the roller-skating rink where we knew there were caves. We climbed with the shale and powder rock slipping beneath our feet and with the spinifex cutting our legs.

We ate our school lunches as soon as we found the first cave. I took out four Benson & Hedges cigarettes that I had stolen from a crumpled packet that Dad had left behind. We smoked one, passing it
backward and forward to each other until Angela stood up and vomited into the yellow grass.

The town stretched out in front of us. Our silver-topped suburb huddled in among green trees like it was frightened. The sun inched its way slowly up the sky. Only two hours of school had passed.

We spent the day petrified, which means very scared or turned into stone. But I didn't feel like stone. My heart was beating fast. I tried another cigarette. I felt very alive. Angela cried. She said everyone would know it, everyone, her mother, her father, Mr. Barnes, the whole class. They would know she'd lied. They would know she'd skipped. I tried to calm her down but it was difficult.

She begged me to go home with her and own up to what we'd done. She said it was the only thing we could do. I told her I probably wasn't going home ever again. I was going to live up in the caves.

“Don't be stupid,” she said.

“I'm telling the truth,” I said.

“I wish you were the way you used to be,” said Angela.

“Nothing can stay the same,” I said.

“I'm telling on you,” she said.

And she went down the hill away from me.