The Anatomy of Wings

by Karen Foxlee

  Frankie was the first to join her. He reminded her of Marco with his white skin and glossy black hair. He planted his feet apart in the gravel and showed off the muscles in his arms at every opportunity he could by leaning forward to pick up a handful of gravel, by straightening a tire along the fence line, by yawning and stretching his arms above him. Because his last name was Toscani the others called him Toss.

  Then came Whitey. He had faded skin and white hair. He turned the metal drum on its side and made a charade of not noticing Beth when he sat beside her and then jumping with fright when he did.

  “You're a bloody dickhead, Whitey,” said Toss.

  Jeffrey was third, the shyest. He had the face of a cherub on the body of a giant. He built Beth an awning over her drum chair without ever having said a word to her.

  “I really like it, Jeffrey,” she said.

  “You'd get burned, that's all,” he said with his head down, pawing the dirt with his foot like a flighty horse.

  Gavin came last. He was barrel-shaped with thick black hair on his forearms and sticking out from his collar like stuffing. He wore a tight fixed smile. He came under the pretense of looking for an old Sigma part that had been left in the yard. He watched her with dangerous eyes.

  Beth flourished in the young men's eyes. She grew more beautiful each day. On the third Monday while she was bored she took her hair out and put it up again. Mr. McNally, noticing something different in the air, looked up from his blowtorch and found every face turned toward the plastic window. He sent Beth on an errand to the newsagent's. He stewed on it for a day before he exploded.

  Toss was dancing past Beth's window. Mr. McNally grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and walked him backward toward his station.

  “Keep your bloody mind on your bloody job,” he shouted.

  He threatened to dock Frankie's pay if he looked up from his work.

  “That's ridiculous,” said Frankie.

  Gavin stared at her through the window. She stabbed an invoice onto her paper stake knowing her days were numbered.

  Whitey's trick was to visit the cupboard office to check up on parts he had only ordered five minutes before. On the bottom of his order forms he wrote in block letters YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL, in pencil, so that she could erase them. Mr. McNally watched him closely.

  “Watch it, boy,” he said under his breath whenever Whitey passed.

  Jeffrey drank gallons of water from the water fountain beside the office. She listened to Jeffrey guzzling while he watched her with one eye.

  “Don't think I'm not onto you, laddie,” said Mr. McNally.

  “I'm really thirsty, Mr. McNally,” said Jeffrey.

  “But you're not a bloody fish.”

  Gavin grew louder and his grin tighter. He walked backward and forward in front of the office without looking at her but occasionally rubbing his hairy arm against the plastic the way a tomcat marks its territory.

  On the last day at smoke break she took her seat and waited.

  Toss struck a pose and tried some dance moves in front of her. His feet sprayed gravel and cigarette butts.

  “I've already seen it,” she said.

  “No wait,” he said. “I got more.”

  He patted out the borders of an imaginary window.

  “She said she's seen it,” said Gavin, and snapped forward like a thrown rope and pushed Toss to the ground.

  He lay in the gravel with a surprised look on his face like Marcel Marceau and then Gavin was on top of him, pummeling him with his fists. She sat very still on her overturned drum with its awning. Whitey leaped onto Gavin's back and attempted to prize him off. Gavin was speechless, red-faced. Hate bled out of him.

  “Stop it,” she said.

  She stubbed her cigarette out on the ground. She picked up her handbag. She walked inside. She bumped into Jeffrey's chest.

  “Quick,” he said. “I think Mr. McNally's having a heart attack.”

  After Mr. McNally was taken away in the ambulance she went home. She walked the whole way along the highway toward an ever-receding mirage.

  The day throbbed with heat. She lay on her bed and listened to the silence. The phone call came in the evening. Mrs. McNally was very polite when she spoke to Dad. Beth would not be welcome back.

  “She's a sweet girl, I know,” said Mrs. McNally, “but trouble follows her everywhere she goes. Some people are just like that. We wanted to give her a go but your girl's beyond help.”

  Dad said thanks very much for what they tried although he couldn't see what it was in particular and especially how Mr. McNally's dicky heart had anything to do with Beth. Mum hovered in the background.

  “What's going on, Jim?” she said.

  “Elizabeth got the boot,” he said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “That was Mrs. McNally. They don't want her back.”

  “Why not?”

  “How would I know? She was talking in riddles.”

  “You should have given her to me.”

  “She asked for me.”

  “I'll get to the bottom of this,” said Mum, but then sat down in the living room and chewed her nails exactly the way Beth did.

  Dad lit up a cigarette and pulled the recliner handle to put his legs up. They thought Beth was in her bedroom. They would collect themselves and then talk to her. On The Sullivans Kitty was being precious. She was arguing with her parents. Mum and Dad watched her as if it was the most interesting thing they had ever seen. When Mum finished her smoke she went down the hallway but Beth was already gone.

  Mum wanted to go to the police but Dad told her not to be stupid and cause a big fuss over nothing. Aunty Cheryl said if it was her daughter she'd be jumping up and down on the spot.

  “That'd help,” said Dad.

  Nanna came and prayed to Saint Dymphna, who is the patron saint of runaways.

  “For Pete's sake,” said Dad.

  It was the first time Beth had run away for more than two days but she wasn't really missing. Danielle said she had seen her on her bike doubling Miranda.

  “You see,” said Dad. “Just wait and see. She'll realize how hard it is in the real world and she'll come home.”

  Beth was sleeping in the caravan with Miranda or at Michelle Wright's flat. She went with the Shelley girls into town and drank with them on the amphitheater steps behind the town hall. She was extravagant. She gave Michelle Wright money from her savings account to buy real wine in the liquor store where her boyfriend worked.

  The real wine was called Lambrusco. It was red and bubbly and they drank it warm. They all said it tasted good. They drank from the bottle and it stained their lips red. Miranda got up and called out to voices she could hear down along the riverbed. The voices answered back.

  “Want to have sex?” she shouted.

  “Where are you?” someone shouted back.

  “Just up here, baby,” shouted Miranda. “Come and get it.”

  They ran through the streets. Past the long line at the cinema that stretched out onto the footpath. Past the hotels, doors flung open, light and shadows falling onto the footpath. Past the boys showing off their cars in front of the post office. They ran until they had no breath from running and screaming and laughing.

  They went to a place called the Oasis on the highway, nearly out of town. It was a bar and a motel and a service station. The barmaid wouldn't serve them so they sat along the gutter watching the semitrailers pulling in and out.

  Beth kept drinking after the others had finished. She went up to the parked cars and offered money to men to buy her drinks.

  “Come home,” said Michelle.

  “You can't even stand up,” said Miranda.

  “It's only early,” said Beth.

  She knew there was something happening somewhere. She just had to find it. She asked people coming out of the Oasis where there was a party. Sometimes the men in the cars offered to take her there. But she went with the Shelleys back along the highway into town.<
br />
  In town she drifted apart from them deliberately. In front of the all-night café she slipped down an alley. She crossed the pale stone river. She heard them calling out to her along the streets and along the riverbank, then their voices faded.

  There was nothing else to drink. She threw her bottle down beside the bridge. She listened to the night like she was underwater. The muffled conversations along the riverbed, campfires flickering. A car, tires squealing in the distance, accelerating, decelerating, dissolving. Sprinklers chattering across parks. In the streets beneath the mine the sudden roar and hiss of copper being poured. She didn't know how many hours she walked for. She didn't count the number of darkened streets.

  In the blue light of dawn, when a small chill rose from the ground, she crossed her arms and hugged herself as she walked. From the water tower she saw the earth flush first pink, then gold, all the silver rooftops illuminated. The blue highway, a ribbon tacked down with white stitching, stretching out to the ranges. She wished she could see beyond the hills.

  She knocked softly on the caravan window beside Miranda's bed.

  Mum went out each afternoon looking for her. We drove up and down the streets, slowly, looking for her bike. Beth was good at hiding. Miranda's caravan, Michelle Wright's flat, or any of the other addresses that she kept, the street names and phone numbers in her childish leftward-slanting hand, scrawled on scraps of paper, the bottom of chocolate milk cartons, liquor store brown paper bags, all tied together with a rubber band.

  Once we saw Beth's bike at Miranda's caravan. Mum had driven straight down the main street of the caravan park. She told me to wait in the car. Miranda came to the door and scowled at Mum with her black eyes. Beth leaned against the door and chewed her nails. Mum told Beth if she didn't come home she'd call the police.

  “I'm fourteen,” said Beth. “I'm allowed to do whatever I want.”

  I sat in the car and the sweat trickled down my back and my legs stuck to the vinyl seat. Mum was silent the whole way home. When we pulled into the driveway, Mum stayed sitting in the front seat and I stayed sitting in the back. We didn't say anything.

  In the end it was a policeman who brought her home but not because Mum had phoned one. It was the middle of the night. She had been trying to help a man in the street. He had stumbled out of the Imperial Hotel onto the footpath and spewed onto the road. It was beneath the harsh light, the flashing neon sign:

  GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS

  He was going to die. Beth was sure of it. She double-crossed her fingers so she could save him. She was so drunk she could hardly stand up. She didn't say anything, just stood near him. The inside of the bar was roaring beside them. Words were stretched and slowed. Like a tape played backward. Glasses crashed. There was a high-pitched peal of a woman's laughter. The cars flew past, leaving trails of light floating on the street. The stars blazed in the sky.

  “Do you like me?” she asked.

  “What?” he said.

  She asked it again.

  “Do you like me?”

  She reached out and touched the man's checkered shirt. He grabbed her arm tight. His hand was red from holding her.

  “Come with me,” he said.

  He led her toward the laneway beside the hotel where the kegs were stored behind a chained-up fence.

  The banging on the door woke us up.

  Beth's face was very small in the backseat of the police car but she was glowing.

  “Get back into bed,” Mum said to us.

  There were no charges laid. The policeman who brought her home said it was a real shame. A young girl like her.

  “Look at her,” he said, as though perhaps Mum had never seen her before.

  “On the streets,” he said, “with a man old enough to be her father, or her grandfather more likely. Lucky I seen them going down the lane.

  “What's wrong with you people?” he said to Mum, who was the only one in the room because Dad was on night shift.

  After he'd gone, Mum turned on the shower.

  “Clean yourself,” she said to Beth. “You're disgusting.”

  THE BOOK OF CLUES STAYED AT ANGELA'S HOUSE. She didn't open it up again until September, the month of the Talent Quest. She hadn't written anything after:

  the braid.

  jennifer's voice gone.

  the reason for everything.

  Anthea asked me if I was singing. I didn't even bother to answer her. She practiced her scales on the playground. Miss Hope, who taught the choir, didn't even make me come to the front of the classroom to try a note. I had to walk straight to the door to where Mrs. Bridges-Lamb was waiting to collect the choral speakers. I had never been with the choral speakers before but they'd always scared me. Choral speakers had happy voices but sad eyes.

  “Hello, Miss Day,” said Mrs. Bridges-Lamb.

  “Hello,” I said.

  I looked at the ground but I could feel her studying me for a long time with her glasses on. She pushed back the bangs from my eyes.

  “Is everything satisfactory under there?”

  “Yes thank you,” I said.

  But it wasn't.

  At home I had committed the crime of the century. I had broken Dad's Easy Rider sunglasses. His favorite glasses. The glasses he wore to the racetrack and when he wore them I could tell he wished he had a motorbike, not a green family station wagon.

  “Christ oh bloody mighty, what the bloody hell happened here?” he shouted when he found them.

  I had to look shocked.

  “What's going on in this frigging place?” he said.

  I shrugged.

  Everything was going on in this frigging place.

  Everything.

  Bum Cracker Barnsey had asked me to stay behind when the class finished again. He wanted to know why my mum hadn't been in to see him yet. He also wanted to know why I wasn't at school last Wednesday or the Friday before because as far as he could see I never brought a note.

  “Come on,” he said when I didn't come up with an excuse straightaway, “I need an answer.”

  “I don't know,” I said. My mind was blank.

  “Well we'll have to give a letter to your mother and father to come for an interview,” he said.

  “All right,” I said.

  “All right what?”

  “All right, Mr. Barnes?”

  “Yes, thank you,” he said, and I was totally confused.

  I thought maybe he was trying to trick me and see if I'd call him Bum Cracker straight to his face.

  When I told Angela she said, “You better stop skipping or you're going to get the cuts.”

  “They don't give cuts to girls,” I said, but I wasn't sure.

  I was back in the redback panel van. On the way home from school I showed Angela the envelope that contained the letter that Mr. Barnes had written to Mum and Dad. We lay on the red velvet bench seats and talked to each other by way of the mirrors. Mr. Popovitch drove to the high school, where we had to pick up Angela's sisters, Rolanda and Natasha. Rolanda and Natasha never ran away from home or made Angela lie. They did their homework. They didn't sneak out at night. They didn't stand on caravan steps and pretend they didn't know you.

  We didn't pick up Danielle at the high school because she wouldn't come in the redback panel van. She said it was because of her Milwaukee back brace.

  She couldn't bend down to get into the back. Mr. Popovitch said she could easily sit in the front but Danielle said she'd rather go on the bus. It was only so she could have tough girls call her a cripple and then write sad poems about it later.

  At the high school I saw Danielle waiting at the bus stop. I sat up and saw her through the back window as we passed. I saw her seeing me but both of us didn't wave. I remembered how many times she had held my hand after everything happened and how we hardly ever talked to each other now.

  Angela and I watched each other in the mirrors and then the blue sky slipping past the back window.

  “We still have a chance,” said A
ngela.

  “For what?”

  “For you to go in the Talent Quest and beat Anthea.”

  “How?”

  “Number one, we talk to Miranda,” said Angela. “Number two, we find the owner of the address.”

  My stomach sank. I crossed my arms across my chest and closed my eyes.

  “I don't think that's a very good idea,” I said.

  At home Mum was sitting in the recliner. Speed Buggy was on television. I handed her my letter from Mr. Barnes and backed away. She took it but did not open it. She brought her legs down.

  “Come here,” she said, and when I was near her she held on to my arms with both her hands.

  “Something has happened to Nanna,” she said.

  The hospital walls were pale green and in some places the paint was peeling. Beneath the green paint there was pale blue paint. I chipped some off with my fingernail near the old wooden elevator, which made loud clanking noises as it headed down to us.

  “Stop that,” said Mum when she saw what I was doing.

  She'd put on proper makeup, including Autumn Plum lipstick, and a good dress because in our family everybody dressed up for disasters. She made me wear a white cheesecloth dress with embroidered flowers on the front and puffed sleeves and she pinned my bangs back with bobby pins. She didn't say a word while she did it, just breathed in and out through her mouth.

  Danielle walked beside me with her arms hanging at her sides. She hadn't been allowed to not wear her Milwaukee back brace. It might have upset Nanna even more and made her have an even bigger stroke that would kill her completely. Mum said that from the front seat as Aunty Cheryl drove us to the hospital. Kylie sat between us in the back. Her faded Hobbytex T-shirt said BEAUTY QUEEN.

  Nanna was propped up in a bed in an empty ward with more peeling paint and faded black and gray tile floors. She had her head turned toward the large window that gave a view of the black mine stacks belching smoke into the dirt-colored sky. Because her head was turned I didn't see at first that her mouth hung down on one side.