Tim Winton - Eyrie

I hated him, that grimy old bastard.

He had a bad leg. No, a club foot.

Caught me in his yard once. Lookin at the budgies and the finches and the cockies. Said he wouldn’t tell no one. He got me by the hair, the plaits, pushed me up against the wire and all the birds are goin crazy, all claws and beaks and flappin. And he says things to me a little girl shouldn’t have to hear. All the time, those birds rushin at me, my face hard in the wire, and he’s got his hand right up me, like a bloke pullin the gizzards out of a Christmas turkey.

Keely’s gorge rose. He sat beside her, close but not touching.

I shoulda told your mum, she said, her voice flat, almost deadened. Nev woulda fuckin killed him. And I wanted him to. But I was embarrassed, afraid — ashamed, I guess. And I wanted to fight, you know? Fix it meself.

But. Eight years old.

I got petrol from the can near the mower. Nev’s mower. Tipped it into a shampoo bottle. Waited till Bunker was out — the races or somethin, down at the pub, I dunno. Went around the back, squirted everythin. Whole cage. Them poor birds goin spare. Just lit the match. And whoof! Lucky I didn’t set meself alight. They were like crackers goin off, all those poor birds. Just flames flyin and screamin. Like Catherine wheels, they were. It was fuckin horrible. I wish I’d done his house instead. Wish I never done it.

That was really you?

I used to wonder if they suspected and didn’t let on. Nev and Doris, I mean. Protectin me. Sometimes I wish they hadn’t. Because afterwards I had no fight left. I just put up with it. Not from Bunker. He didn’t dare. But there were other blokes.

Gemma, I had no idea.

Well, I never told, did I?

We should have known. They should have stopped it.

Back then, nobody was lookin the way they look now. Ya mum’n dad, they didn’t see it. And I couldn’t tell em.

Keely thought of the plume of smoke, the fire engine arriving, the almost festive air in the street, and Faith’s pronouncement at dinner that whoever incinerated those poor birds didn’t deserve to live. Were the Buck girls there at the table?

He died, y’know. Years later. Old Bunker. And I reckon he always knew. I went to his funeral for a laugh. I was as pissed as a rat, but it felt great.

She reached for her dress on the floor, fished around for her ruined knickers but cast them aside and stepped into the dress.

Look at you, she said. Buyer’s remorse.

No.

Doesn’t matter. I got what I came for.

Chicken and sage in white wine.

Yeah, she said with a hoarse laugh. Here, zip me up.

You’re only a couple of doors down; it’s dark out there.

Girl’s still got standards.

This evening notwithstanding.

As she presented her back he felt a pang of lust but resisted the urge to pull her to him. He saw that old man with her hair in his fist, pressing up behind her. Keely touched only the zip and stepped back as she turned to survey him in the crooked light.

It’s alright, he said. I’m still safe.

Safe enough. Anyway, it was a oncer. There’s the boy to think of.

Sure.

But it was fun, eh. I always wondered.

Well, I guess now you know.

She smiled and he followed her through to the door, and heard the bars of the walkway still jangling after she was gone.

It was there again. The stain. Or a dirty great blotch just like it. Right in front of the slider. Only a step or so from the balcony, on perfectly dry carpet. A ghostly macula at a distance, but close up there was no missing it. The size of a sleeping dog, curled in front of the smudged glass. Smelt of nothing but nasty nylon carpet, though underfoot it was crisp, almost crusty. Shit a brick, he didn’t need this at the beginning of a new week, staggering bright-eyed and bushy-tailed into the frigging Shroud of Turin. And having woken this early and so clearheaded he wasn’t about to squat here all day scratching his head and reading entrails. Rare as rocking-horse turds, these days, feeling halfway to decent, with barely a sick twinge, and he was damned if he’d waste it.

Even though the sheets smelt sweeter this morning, he stripped the bed and bagged them with a couple of other loads he left churning in the laundromat on the ground floor. Walking past the soup kitchens and dosshouses, he considered starting the day at Bub’s where he was safest, where there was less to provoke a flare-up, but he felt sturdy enough to sit out on the Strip and watch the weekday circus stir itself into inaction. He didn’t know if this was confidence or masochism, but he strode along the avenue of coloured brollies and set himself down on the prime corner where the view was good and the coffee decent. He marked his territory with his sunglasses and a Rupert-rag he filched from an abandoned table. He went indoors, as was the local custom, and queued up to order. You had to love it, the way a cafeteria could still pass itself off as an actual café. Well, so be it, he thought. When not in Rome. Et cetera.

Due to the early hour there were only five or six in line ahead of him at the counter and it wasn’t such a long wait by Freo standards. Even at the top of his game, when his social capital was enviable and the glaze of his armour seamless, this procedural ordeal was like being paraded in front of the class, like a perp walk, with the haughty baristas before him and the watchful lurkers at every table behind. Keely focused best he could on the comestibles in their brightly lit cabinets, the delicious oily reek of milled beans. He crabbed his way to the cash register, stood in the receiving line like all the other supplicants, and emerged unmolested with a pretty decent double espresso and a blueberry muffin like a bloated toadstool. His ten-dollar sunglasses were still on the table but the shopsoiled newspaper had been botted by someone else. No matter, it’d served its purpose, which was worth a nod in the great man’s direction. Wherever that was. Now that he was ubiquitous, multinational, omniscient, perhaps even eternal.

The sun was out, the shadows black and deep beneath the awnings. The first suited skateboarders were hurtling by with backpacks and briefcases. Women in pencil skirts and four-inch heels minced their way towards the train station. Keely settled in, nursing his mood as much as the coffee, in order to watch and marvel.

He felt a rare and comradely magnanimity as locals arrived to stretch their yogic limbs and kick off their Berserkenstocks.

Here and there, once his eyes adjusted, he recognized the odd face: a chanteuse fiddling with her manky dreads, a couple of Labor Party grifters, the retired QC and his jaunty little mutt. Across the street at safe distance, a Greens claque conferred behind a stockade of bicycles and to his relief followed their daffy MP into the juice joint in the alley beyond. All around him dogged Aquarians discussed positive energy, bodywork, and the Real Causes of Cancer, and it was nothing to him, water off a duck’s proverbial. Close by, right at his elbow, a spidery Amazon with a shock of henna began to shout into her phone about social evolution and personal transformation. She’d moved on from revolution, she said, but she still believed passionately in radical change. She was rather fetching in her saffron tanktop. Perhaps she mistook his indulgent grin for something untoward, for she snatched up her towering soy latte and stalked off to another table, sallying on without a comma.

By nine almost anyone who did anything productive in this burg had cast off their lines and steamed out to sea or hustled to the station for the express to Dullsville. Which left quite a crew of idlers like himself who seemed to have nowhere to be and nothing to produce. He wondered how many trust funds kept the bustling Strip in business, how much could be attributed to middle-class welfare. The moment he thought it he began to feel his serenity give way to pangs of unfocused guilt and anxiety. The entire scene was a festival of procrastination. And it was amazing how snugly he fitted.