The Anatomy of Wings

by Karen Foxlee

  “Yes,” I said.

  “My dear,” she said, and she let go of my hand, and I didn't have to tell her everything if I didn't want to.

  “It hurts,” I said.

  “I know,” she said. “Do not fear. It is not forever. I know these things.”

  When the sun started heading down at the end of that day I went and sat beside Beth on the trampoline.

  She had her fingers double-crossed and laid across her eyes.

  “What are you doing?” I asked, although I'd seen her do it before when she lay on her bed.

  “Listening,” she said.

  “Listening to what?”

  “To everything.”

  The sun, sides bulging, squashed itself between two hills. It sent up a flare of golden light. The sky, patterned with a million tiny clouds like fish scales, was illuminated.

  I lay down beside her and put my hand on her arm.

  “Tell me,” I said.

  Inside Mum and Aunty Cheryl did the dishes. I could hear them talking and laughing together at the sink. Earlier Nanna's news that my voice was missing had barely caused a ripple because it was just the type of thing she would make up.

  “She's just having a bad day,” Mum said.

  “Too much birthday cake,” said Dad, and he poked me in the stomach. He plucked me from the ground and threw me over his shoulder and turned me around and around.

  Beth, with her double-crossed fingers, didn't tell me anything. She just lay very still. The bulging sun disappeared. A cloud of cockatoos passed over toward the creek. I didn't know how she could lie so still for so long. I fidgeted beside her.

  “I'm going to tell Mum,” I said.

  “Tell her what?” she asked. She removed her double-crossed fingers from her eyes and opened them. She looked at me.

  “Something terrible is going to happen, you know,” she said when I didn't answer. “I can feel it.”

  “To who?”

  “To all of us.”

  “I'm really telling now,” I said.

  I thought the terrible thing would be everyone, a whole carful of us, careening off a high cliff into the ocean. Or all of us being in a boat like the Titanic and sinking. Or all of us being in a seaplane flying over the Gulf and crashing into the water to be eaten by crocodiles. All of my possible terrible things involved cars and boats and planes and accidents.

  I got off the trampoline because I was sick of her and all the trouble she caused and how she always ruined everything.

  I went up the back stairs and slammed the screen door open and shut.

  “Beth says something terrible is going to happen to all of us,” I told Aunty Cheryl and Mum.

  Mum stopped washing dishes. Aunty Cheryl stood with the tea towel in one hand and a wineglass in the other. Their faces shone beneath the electric lightbulb without a shade. They still had their paper birthday hats on.

  Mum opened the sliding window and called out to Beth.

  “Why did you say that, Beth?” she called out. “Come inside right now.”

  Beth turned on her side so she was facing away from the window.

  “I'm talking to you,” shouted Mum.

  Aunty Cheryl shook her head and turned back to the drying rack.

  “You've scared Jennifer,” shouted Mum. “And on your birthday too, when we've all been so nice to you.”

  None of my possible imagined terrible things involved anything as simple as the girl who fell.

  MARCO WENT IN LATE JULY. The wild winds had come back again. They blew across the ranges and split apart the clouds into single wispy hairs. Our breath caught in our throats and ached. The place was at a bend in the road, a turn like the head of a question mark. The land fell away on either side and rose again into the fat rumps of two red hills. It was a place of curves: the rounded descent into the ditch, the series of hills like women bending over in a field, the two black tire tracks curling off into nothing.

  Beth didn't say anything when she found out. She put the phone down and crossed her arms.

  “What's wrong?” said Mum, and she tried to unfold Beth's arms and get her to lie down but Beth wouldn't be taken anywhere.

  She did not want to close her eyes or she would see it: the car turning in the air, Marco flying upward after he was ejected in a violent arc, his back bent, the pocketful of change raining from beneath him.

  Beside her, Mum's mouth moved open and shut like a fish out of water.

  Marco came down in scrub among the spinifex and anthills. He landed on his head, which broke his neck. The car cartwheeled past him, threw back a wash of shattered glass that glittered in the sun.

  In among the glass and spinifex and anthills he lay. Behind him the car rested on its back. Someone moaned from within its dark interior. Someone said shit. The shadow of a bird that had fallen backward through the air to study the damage slid over the red scrub floor. It cast a shadow over his face. It circled.

  Among all the strange confetti—the beads of glass, the copper ones and twos, the winking twenties, Redheads matchsticks, and crumpled tinnies—a silver-plated half-a-heart pendant lay shining in the sun.

  Beth refused to go to his funeral. She lay on her bed for days with the blinds pulled shut. Mum, who had never met him, never liked him, and even made fun of him, now whispered about the tragedy to Aunty Cheryl on the phone. Dad didn't know what to say. He stood at Beth's door and only shook his head. Everyone tiptoed backward and forward past the door and looked in at her sadness like it was an exhibition. A jewel inside a case.

  “It won't always feel like this,” said Mum, sitting at the end of her bed.

  “Yes it will,” Beth said.

  “Do you want me to make you something to eat?”

  “No,” Beth said.

  Nanna came.

  She stood at Beth's door.

  She said, “What on earth will we do with you?”

  Miranda arrived, tear-swollen. Mum relented and let her in. They lay on the bed together, Beth and her, side by side, crying.

  At school Mrs. Bridges-Lamb had to interrupt my bird-watching again and again.

  “When the youngest Miss Day has come back to earth we will proceed with our math lesson,” she said.

  She had trained us already to be very quiet. Some days the only noise was the fan wobbling very slowly from the ceiling. We had learned how to open our tidy boxes very softly. We had learned how to cross our arms and wait for instruction. We had learned not to scrape our chairs. Not to chew on our pencils. Not to jump like grasshoppers when we raised our hands for answers.

  But she had failed at training me not to look out the window.

  I had been watching hawks wheeling over the oval from between the louvers. They weren't interesting hawks but plain hawks. Brown. Not letter wings or whistling kites. There were no wedge-tailed eagles. That was what I wanted more than anything. It would be a sign that everything would be all right. I tried not to think about Beth but she wouldn't leave my mind.

  After Krakatoa exploded the sun turned green. Laika was the first dog in space. She suffocated. Millions of people were killed when the Yellow River flooded. Millions. People's shadows were frozen on walls when Hiroshima was bombed. The shadows showed people doing ordinary things like talking to a neighbor, eating breakfast, skipping rope. They sent mice into space and more dogs, monkeys too. Only some made it back safely. All the people in Pompeii probably thought there was nothing to worry about.

  “Deary me,” said Mrs. O'Malley. “Take a breather for a minute.”

  I took a long shuddering breath.

  Mr. O'Malley walked past, humming softly under his breath.

  “Mr. O'Malley, young Jennifer here knows all the disasters of the world,” said Mrs. O'Malley.

  “Does she now,” said Mr. O'Malley.

  Mr. and Mrs. O'Malley always had conversations without looking at each other, as though they were reading from a script, even when they were standing side by side.

  “She does, Mr. O'Ma
lley,” said Mrs. O'Malley.

  “I suppose she knows all the big ones,” said Mr. O'Malley.

  “All the biggest,” said Mrs. O'Malley.

  “Any of the small?” asked Mr. O'Malley.

  “None of the small,” whispered Mrs. O'Malley.

  They looked at each other then.

  A glimpse, a little piece of their story, flapping like ribbon in the wind.

  “Now,” she said, “young Jennifer Day. You've nothing to worry about here in the middle of nowhere. Nothing can happen to us.”

  Beth lasted five weeks at Our Lady's Secondary College. Each morning when she got out of the car all the girls in their checkered uniforms and brown socks moved back from her as she passed. In the corridors they held their hands over their mouths and whispered into each other's ears.

  Here was the girl who gave blow jobs.

  The girl with the boyfriend whose neck got snapped.

  The strange blue-eyed girl.

  In the small airless demountable classrooms the nuns treated her harshly because they had accepted her as a difficult case that needed to be fixed. Right from the beginning they needed to get on top of her behavior. But they had expected a lot worse.

  They could only fault her on small things. For instance her daydreaming and her sliding brown socks. When she chewed her fingernails she was made to swallow the chewed pieces. That was all.

  Beth made unlikely friends. At first only one or two, girls curious of the strange newcomer with her sand-colored hair and the bored, slightly disappointed expression. But then there were more. Later they flocked to her like moths to a flame.

  Mostly they came with the intention of meanness.

  “We know all about you,” they said.

  “We've heard what a slut you are,” they said.

  “Lucky there are no boys here,” they said.

  “She'll probably try to do it with Father Matthew,” they said.

  Beth didn't say much back. She shrugged.

  “So what if I do.”

  They shivered in their brown socks and thin white skins.

  They found her irresistible.

  These were good girls, immaculately groomed, with charm bracelets and white sandshoes. They played tennis. They went to band practice. They were pretty and unattainable. They wanted to talk to her about sex. They wanted to know things. They had questions about kissing and love bites and hands on breasts. They sat on the brown grass near the cement tennis courts and listened to Beth talk about it. She liked to watch them squirm. They were both excited and revolted. Sometimes they squealed and held their hands over their ears.

  They reminded Beth of porcelain dolls in cellophane wrapping with their polished skin and shiny ponytails. They were sterile and scentless.

  They jostled for her attention.

  Beth held her pencil to her lips like a cigarette. She was like a still-faced Saint Catherine looking skyward before being strapped to the wheel. Sometimes she looked straight through them but when she came back to earth and smiled it was like the explosion of a star shell.

  Everyone wanted a piece of her.

  Just to touch her checkered uniform, a part of her pale skin, to be the recipient of one of her smiles. Mostly they didn't know why. They undid their top buttons just like her. Let their socks fall down. They smoked their pencil cigarettes in class. They tried to imitate her calm disinterested features.

  The Shelleys came in boyfriends’ cars and parked alongside all the mothers in their brand-new station wagons waiting for the last bell to ring. They laughed at Beth's uniform and called her a cattle tick. She pulled her black rubber-band bracelet from her pocket when she stood beside the car and put it on. Miranda, sitting in the front seat, said she'd stopped going to school. She flicked her cigarette ash out the window. She stared right ahead as though she didn't care if she saw Beth or not.

  “You should do something to get expelled,” Miranda said. “Anything, it wouldn't take much, would it?”

  “You shouldn't be talking to those girls,” said Mum when she arrived to pick Beth up.

  “Why not?” said Beth.

  “Because they're more than half your problem.”

  It was the cooking sherry that she brought to school that was her undoing. And the classroom full of polished girls who smelled of it, and later the parents crying in corridors.

  “But it was only a small bottle,” Beth said.

  She said it to Mum, who had her head in her hands in the living room. She was going through the telephone book looking for faraway boarding schools. She wanted a school with locks on the dormitory doors and occasional caning.

  Beth said she wasn't going. She said she was getting a job. There was mostly a lot of screaming and crying.

  “I've had enough of you,” shouted Mum. “I really have. I can't get it through to you, can I? You can't just do whatever you want.”

  “I'll get a job,” said Beth. “I really want to get a job.”

  “You think you loved this boy?” said Mum. “You think just because he died your whole life is over? You don't know anything about love. How long did you know him? A month, two months, do you think that's love?”

  She sounded like she had been waiting a long time to say that.

  Dad came home but he didn't even make it up the steps. Mum banged open the screen door against the patio railing.

  “She's bloody done it again,” she said.

  “Dad,” said Beth from behind her.

  He sat down on the step and put his crib port beside him.

  “What have you done now, little mate?” he said.

  He looked at her properly, for the first time in months.

  “She took my cooking sherry to school. She's bloody been expelled,” said Mum. “I had to walk past all those wretched women crying because their daughters were plastered. She thinks she's not going to boarding school, that she's getting a job. She's just fourteen, for Christ's sake. I can't stand it. I can't stand another minute of it. Why don't you sort her out for a change? Tell your father, tell your father now what you've gone and done.”

  “You were fourteen when you finished,” said Dad, rubbing his eyes.

  “I knew it,” screamed Mum. “I knew you'd do this.”

  She threw her arms up in the air.

  Mr. and Mrs. O'Malley came out onto their front patio and pretended to look at the sky for rain clouds.

  Mum slammed the screen door again when she went inside. Dad patted the space beside his crib port and Beth sat down with him on the step. He looked at her and shook his head.

  “I'll try really hard,” she said.

  She pushed her hair behind her ears. It had grown back to just above her shoulders. She looked down at her toes. She chewed her nails.

  “You give it a go,” said Dad, “but it's tough. I reckon you'll only last a month or so. But that's not the point, is it? You're only young. You can go back to school later if you need to.”

  “I want to try it,” said Beth.

  “I want you to be a good girl,” said Dad, putting his arm around her. “What happened to my good girl?”

  “I'm trying,” said Beth.

  “I know you are.”

  Dad got Beth a job at the Mission Street Mechanics. For a little while things settled down. She didn't ride her bike at night. She stopped drinking at the water tower with Miranda and the Shelleys. A fever had broken. She had changed. It was much better. She wasn't so restless.

  She opened up a bank account and saved some of her money. She could lie on the sofa without getting up again every five minutes to look at herself in a mirror, to feel her face to make sure it was still there, to pack her bag, to smoke a cigarette, to start an orange and then throw it away. Danielle asked her what she was saving for but Beth just shrugged.

  She started wearing a knee-length skirt and little black pumps and she took out all the earrings from her ears, which she had pierced with sewing needles. She didn't wear any makeup. She brushed her hair and rolled it
into a bun the way she did when she danced. Our mother ironed her white shirts with fake pearl buttons. When she entered the workshed she didn't look up.

  Beth's office at the Mission Street Mechanics was the size of a small cupboard. Summer came early. It arrived with a blast. The temperatures soared into the hundreds. During the day the shed heated up like an oven and a small dirty fan blew hot air that smelled of grease and smoke and men. The front wall of the office faced into the workshed and was made of clear plastic. Beth was like a rare flower in a glass hothouse.

  Mr. McNally, who owned the business, was short and sweaty and permanently grease-stained. He handed her piles of pink and green invoices with blackened hands. He was Scottish. He called her lass. He smiled at her whenever he could because he'd told Dad he'd look after her. Beth added up the numbers on a grimy calculator bolted to the desk.

  “Mission Street Mechanics. May I help you?” said Beth when she answered the phone.

  She practiced it at home in the evenings and made us laugh. Mr. McNally puffed out his chest when he heard it. Business was up for the beginning of September.

  “Mr. McNally to line one, please,” she said over the public-address system.

  It made the mechanics and their apprentices look toward the plastic window.

  Beth was very good with numbers.

  “She is just like me,” said Uncle Paavo.

  “Only not an arse-tight,” said Nanna.

  Beth took the green and pink invoices and separated them. She added, multiplied, subtotaled, and totaled them again. She skewered the copy when she was done. She sorted through years of old accounts. She scrubbed the filing cabinet clean. She swept her hothouse floor. She stayed inside at lunchtime so she could answer the phone even though Mr. MrNally suggested she go across the road to one of the highway cafés.

  Beth didn't go outside until the second week. She asked Mr. McNally first. It was just for a cigarette at morning and afternoon tea. Mr. McNally laughed at her choice of words.

  “Are you expecting fine china, lassie?” he asked.

  Beside the shed there was a gravel yard enclosed by a tire fence and behind the fence the dry riverbed lay. Beth used a jerry can to climb onto a metal drum. She smoked her Winfield Greens. Two at morning tea and two at afternoon tea. She drank from a chipped and stained cup that read REPCO 76.