The Anatomy of Wings

by Karen Foxlee

  He had fallen and hurt his back, oh, how his back ached.

  “Bend over, see if you can touch your toes, there, you see, it can't be that bad.”

  He had injured his arm in a drunken football match.

  “Show me, bend the wrist, can you feel me touching your fingers? It seems fine to me.”

  They met first on the hospital grounds beneath the cockatoo-laden hospital tree. Then later, in the evenings, after he had taken his brother home from the pub and cooked him dinner, he walked back into town and talked to her over the nurses’ quarters fence.

  They promised to meet each other in their dreams.

  The matron reprimanded her for kissing in public, waving her hand at the white wards and the shining linoleum and the pale faces with the sun streaming in through the windows.

  “How can you risk losing all this?” she asked.

  Arthur was angry with his brother.

  “You'll be left with nothing,” he said. “Trust me.”

  Marshall drove May for a picnic by the water hole. When he held her he was still filled with the miracle of it. When she leaned into him. When she looked up at him. But she ruined everything when she hinted at marriage and children.

  “It's not so easy as all that,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “Well I have Arthur to consider. I can't just up and leave him.”

  He remembered the sunlight there. How the trees had hung their heads in shame. Later they had walked a short way up the hill to the painted rock but she had been tense beside him, fighting back tears, silent.

  Soon he forgot to walk by the hospital in the morning to kiss her good day. He stopped coming in the evening to kiss her sweet dreams.

  “Where have you been?” she asked. “I waited all yesterday.”

  “Do you think I've nothing to do with my time? I'm building a house with my own bare hands. My brother has one arm.”

  “Don't you love me anymore?”

  “Don't.”

  “Don't what?”

  “Don't try to trick me with all your questions.”

  In the afternoons when she went to buy stamps or an apple or the Women's Weekly she looked into the dim interior of the public bars and saw Marshall's back beside his brother's. She cried into her hands at home. She cried into her starched dress, onto her brown stockings, into her small room, into her small life. She handed in her notice. She packed her brown suitcase. She was heading farther inland, deeper inland; there seemed no other road to take.

  Before she left she walked to the house the brothers had built. When she stepped onto the land Arthur sensed it. He stood up from his seat and walked to the door. Marshall came from the back, where he had been washing in a bucket.

  “I came to tell you I'm leaving,” she said.

  He wore a blank face.

  “I'm sorry to hear it,” he said.

  “And that I love you.”

  He looked confused, ashamed; she saw it. He was embarrassed.

  “It was nice to meet you,” he said after a long time.

  Arthur stood at the door. He didn't move. He watched them both carefully. The bush waited. It was still and quiet and emptied out of everything.

  “Good luck then,” Marshall said.

  He did not come any closer.

  When she turned she couldn't see for her tears and she stumbled and almost fell but corrected herself. She never knew a grief like it again.

  All those years, there was nothing confusing about it, yet still it confused him. Each night, after Arthur had gone to bed, he remembered her. He put his head in his hands. He remembered her as she was then, a young lady, only twenty-five, turning away from him, leaving Memorial. But now they were old, both of them, and all those years and all that land grown between them.

  Each night it was the same.

  That day after she had gone Marshall turned back to the house. He was made of stone. His heart did not beat. Blood did not move through his veins. The river inside of him dried up. The bush began talking again but he did not hear it. He did not hear it again after that.

  IN THE BEGINNING BETH DIDN'T TRY TO SAVE ANYTHING BUT INSECTS: A BLACK BUG FROM A REDBACK SPIDERWEB, A THREE-LEGGED GRASSHOPPER STAGGERING AWAY FROM AN ARMY OF ANTS, A LACEWING STUCK BEHIND A SLIDING GLASS WINDOW.

  “Oh God,” she said when she saw something struggling. “Poor thing.”

  “But it's only a moth,” Mum said. “If only you were so interested in schoolwork.”

  School had begun. Beth's brown-paper-covered notebooks rarely emerged from her canvas bag.

  “Give her time,” said Nanna. “You are too hard with her.”

  “Kylie does hours of homework each night,” said Mum. “Cheryl told me. I haven't seen any homework here.”

  “Cheryl,” said Nanna, “she exaggerates, you know this.”

  66

  Kylie had started grade 9 too. Beth complained about her.

  “She won't leave me alone at school,” she said. “If I smile at her she thinks she can spend the whole day with me.”

  “That's the meanest thing I've ever heard you say,” said Mum. “Did I raise you up to be so mean? She's your cousin.”

  “I know.”

  Kylie and Beth were born only a month apart and were nearly the same height.

  “Look at them, will you, like two peas in a pod,” Aunty Cheryl always said.

  But Kylie was a much paler copy. Her hair was thin and lank. Her pink scalp showed through it. She was sallow-skinned. Her large front teeth were stained from too many antibiotics.

  “You're supposed to look after her,” said Mum. “Here, you'll rescue a moth but you won't look after your own cousin. Your cousin hasn't had it as easy as you lot.”

  By that she meant that Kylie didn't have a father. It didn't matter that she had the Barbie campervan and the Barbie town house, a fashion stencil set, and a real rocking horse, not a hobbyhorse, which is only just a horse's head on a stick, and even though she had grown out of all these toys they were never handed down. She had a wardrobe full of brand-new clothes, her own record player decorated with love-heart stickers, and an orange bike with pristine white handlebars. Mum put her finger to her lips when I started to remind her of all this.

  “She had to grow up under difficult circumstances. I want you to always be good to her.”

  “I am being good to her,” said Beth.

  “Otherwise I'll worry all day,” said Mum.

  Dad said Mum was a champion at worrying.

  Nobody bothered about Beth's saving of insects. She had always done it. Being smaller I could not remember a time when she hadn't. But she seemed sadder now when she found things that were beyond hope. She cried over a troop of ants stuck in a pool of spilled honey on Nanna's kitchen bench. They were struggling, tiny legs swimming through the thick tide.

  “Stop it,” said Mum. “Why are you crying like that?”

  “I just can't bear it,” she cried.

  “Bear what?”

  “Just the thought of it.”

  “Stop it,” said Mum. “It's nonsense.”

  “It's their own fault,” I said. “They wanted the honey.”

  “They paid the ultimate price,” said Danielle.

  “Be quiet,” said Mum, wiping the honey and the ants up with a rag in one movement.

  Nanna, who was at the little kitchen table, didn't say a thing. She reached her hand out and held Beth's arm as she passed. She tried to get Beth to look at her but Beth kept her eyes turned away and shrugged herself free.

  Beth was only just beginning to change but we still didn't know it. None of us could sense it yet. It would have seemed impossible if we'd been told that Beth, ballet dancer, prettiest girl in school, would change so much. That rushing toward us, unseen, were all of the angry words and turned-away faces. All the slammed doors and keys turned in locks and all the rivers of tears. We didn't know that she would ride down the long straight streets away from us.

  Beth went and s
at in the backyard of Nanna's council flat. The flat was in Memorial West, where all the houses were lemon-colored, in the last street, where the backyards faced into the desert. It was a good place for thinking. The backyard didn't finish in a straight line with a fence. There was no fence at all. The dry lawn was trying to grow out into the desert, which was patched with spinifex and pale hummock grasses that shimmered in the heat. And the desert was reaching back into the yard, spreading its red fingers and erecting small anthills and sucking the color from Nanna's garden beds.

  Nanna's flat was like a long thin caravan put up on blocks. It had three front steps and a sliding front door. We sometimes slept there for the weekends and Nanna told me secretly about the nine choirs of angels and the saints and taught me songs even though Mum said she wasn't allowed to be religious with us.

  Mum packed me, Beth, and Danielle up with sleeping bags and pillows and inflatable mattresses with a bicycle pump to blow them up. I hated getting out of the car at Nanna's because there could be, for example, a nuclear war and then we would be separated from Mum and Dad forever.

  “Don't worry, possum,” Mum said, reading my thoughts. “You worry too much.”

  She held my face between her hands and kissed me. Her lips were painted in Frostiest Mauve and the purple kiss was left behind on my cheek.

  Nanna always had her hands on her hips when we arrived. She shook her head when she saw all our bedding.

  “You don't think I have beds?” she asked.

  Nanna had two rickety camp stretchers with thin mattresses. Before the inflatable mattresses Beth and Danielle slept on the stretchers and, because I was the third, I got to sleep beside Nanna. She had a hard bed. Every time I moved it creaked. After each creak Nanna sighed and moved and the bed creaked again. All night we creaked backward and forward at each other without saying a word. During the day Nanna usually smelled like Yardley's lavender perfume but at night she smelled different. Up close to her in the bed in her threadbare rose-covered nightie she smelled like dust.

  “Don't go on about the saints,” said Mum as she handed us over. “It scares Jenny.”

  Nanna liked to tell me how the saints died, which was most often horribly and included being roasted on stakes, flayed alive, fed to the lions, or marched out into winter forests and shot once in the head.

  Nanna only kept small traces of her old life before the ship that brought her fifteen thousand kilometers to here. The small traces included the way she stirred her giant stews and baked on Saturdays as though the world was about to end. She also sometimes said words back to front like “arse-tight” instead of “tight-arse” when she described her brother Uncle Paavo. When she said it she covered up her mouth and even though she was old her eyes shone like a young girl's.

  She only had a little trace of her accent, where Uncle Paavo had kept nearly all of his. She said it was because she was only thirteen when she came to Australia and Uncle Paavo was nearly seventeen. Nanna had scrubbed herself clean of it.

  Nanna sang songs with me at the kitchen table. She sang me old songs that her mother had sung to her in Finland and on the boat trip. The words in these songs felt old and well worn; they belonged to each other like threads in a patterned blanket.

  We sang at her little kitchen table while we peeled potatoes. Beth and Danielle got up and went into the tiny living room and braided each other's hair.

  “Don't worry about them,” said Nanna. “They do not have good voices.”

  Sometimes after Nanna had taught me something she started to cry, which was perfectly ordinary. She put her head in her hands.

  “God be merciful to us,” she said.

  Beth, who was sitting in front of the television, rolled her eyes as she braided Danielle's hair.

  “Mum said you're not allowed to talk like that,” said Danielle.

  “I'll talk how I like,” said Nanna.

  “Suit yourself,” said Beth.

  “Don't be smart,” said Nanna, and then she started talking in biblical phrases.

  “I know thy pride and the naughtiness of thine hearts.”

  “O-K,” said Beth, pronouncing it slowly and widening her eyes at Danielle.

  “You are all from the basket of bad figs. So bad, so evil, they cannot be eaten.”

  Danielle started laughing.

  “Out, out,” said Nanna, and she would send us out into the backyard.

  Usually we sat beneath the rain tree and if it was in bloom let the nectar rain on us and plucked the sickly sweet pom-pom flowers and held them like powder puffs to our noses. Or if it wasn't we picked the yellow rattlepods and opened them carefully and examined the small brown seeds sleeping in their little beds.

  And sometimes Beth stood up and cleared a patch of earth with her bare foot and did pirouettes one after another until she was dizzy. Or sometimes handstands. Or sometimes cartwheels. Nanna would open the kitchen window and yell at her to stop it before she broke her neck. Beth would roll her eyes when Nanna had shut the window again.

  Sometimes we'd step over the blurred edge of the yard into the desert, just one foot, the way some people test the temperature of the sea.

  Angela was impatient with The Book of Clues. She thought all the answers should come at once. She carried the book with her on weekends when we walked along the dry creek bed through the sunbaked suburbs. She carried it in the back elastic of her shorts. She twirled the pencil in her fingers. All she had written inside was:

  still singing at the lake.

  everything glowing.

  beth meets miranda.

  She had crossed out hair combs in the list of things in the box as a clue to anything.

  On the cover she had drawn a girl in a love-heart dress. She had long yellow hair rolling over her scrawny shoulders. Her eyes had eyelashes straight as toothpicks.

  “Who's that supposed to be?” I asked. “No one,” she said. “It's just a picture.” “It's pretty dumb,” I said. “It better not be Beth.” “Don't get your knickers in a knot.” I was still breaking things. Small things: Danielle's bluebird necklace, the handle off Aunty Cheryl's special teacup that she used when she came to visit us, Kylie's left-behind wristwatch. I hadn't stopped since the day when I broke Barbie Ken's legs.

  I thought if I could get hold of The Book of Clues it could accidentally go missing. But Angela guarded it carefully. I thought she was stupid for thinking she would ever find my voice, that it was all a simple puzzle that could be solved. But I didn't say anything. If I told her it was way more difficult than that, then she would ask me to explain. And I couldn't, not properly; not Beth locked up in her room like Rapunzel, the running and falling with scissors, cicadas screaming and a storm, the lake breathing slowly against the shore.

  Angela thought if we could find where I lost my singing voice it would be given back but I knew that wasn't true. I knew I was never going to sing again. We walked up the slope of Memorial Park to the swing, to the place where Beth first met Miranda. The swing was empty. There was only the groaning of road trains on the highway. A cloud of red dust had blown into town and settled over everything. It sat at the bottom of the sky. It covered the swing seat and the splinter-filled seesaw.

  There were hawks twisting in the sky.

  I wanted to see a letter-winged kite. The letter-winged kite's Latin name is Elanus scriptus and it is my third-favorite bird. It has a body white as snow and black wings. When its wings are closed it looks just like the black-shouldered kite but when it soars it has two Ms written beneath like black lightning strikes. Once when I did a talk on the letter-winged kite Mrs. Bridges-Lamb asked if the class had any questions and Massimo Gentili put up his hand.

  “How come if they live around here nobody ever sees them?” he said.

  I wanted to say you have to be patient to see a letter-winged kite. I wanted to say you have to spend a long time looking upward. You have to look up for so long that you might even get a sore neck and sometimes you can only see them at night when they shin
e by moonlight.

  But I couldn't get the words out.

  I just shrugged and it was like I had made the whole thing up and Elanus scriptus wasn't even a real bird.

  We stood near the swing for a long time thinking of what might be a clue and what mightn't be a clue. Behind the swings and the Moreton Bay figs the park changed into pale scrub, white grass, and ashen trees peeling bark. We climbed up to where the fence had been erected around the water tower. We walked around the perimeter. The February sun burned our faces.

  “Everyone blames Miranda,” I said so we could think of something else.

  Angela's hand went to The Book of Clues in her waistband and hovered.

  My mother blamed Miranda. In the end she'd hated her. She thought Miranda Bell was the problem, not Beth. My mother had hissed the name Miranda when she said it but mostly she didn't say her name at all. She said she and her and that girl. Miranda had led Beth astray.

  “Astray” sounded almost like a country. It would be populated by Astraynians. There would be a queen but probably not a king because it seemed to be mostly girls who went to live there. When Beth was led astray she took hardly anything with her, just her little canvas bag. When she came home she never brought anything except something in her eyes. A secret she kept from us. When she came home she sat on the sofa and looked exactly the way that she always had only the hidden thing made her seem very different.

  “We'll need to talk to Miranda,” said Angela.

  “God,” I said, “as if that'll help.”

  We walked back through the park. We had to be careful near Kylie's house because if she saw us she'd want to come. We went past the opening of Dardanelles Court, where Mrs. Irwin in number 2 was unloading her groceries from her car. Mrs. Irwin had thick black eyebrows and impossibly green eyes. She had dark hairs growing on her top lip almost like a mustache although if we mentioned it Mum put her hand up and made us stop.

  Mrs. O'Malley said she didn't know why Mrs. Irwin was so high-and-mighty now as she knew for a fact she was brought up in a tin shed and would've had to wipe her bum with gum leaves when the newspaper ran out. “And now she's gone and home-schooled those poor girls,” said Mrs. O'Malley, “so they'd never get to make a proper friend. Ruined them,” she said.