The Chantic Bird Read Online Free

going in the room with her and breathing her air.
    I walked away remembering the warning we’d had from one of the new people that moved in the street; they only had the story we’d given the kids, they thought we were their parents. They warned Bee, not me, about breeding like rabbits. They didn’t have any kids themselves, so I don’t think they worried Bee. She came from a big family, like I did. I didn’t do anything to those people, it was too near home. I wasn’t always there to fix any trouble.
    It was dark. I passed over a spot in the yard where something moved. I just had to sneak back into the house and get my rifle and blast it, but it was only an old mother bandicoot. When I turned it over with my foot the babies were struggling to get out of it; all the skin along its stomach was torn open. For Bee’s sake I trod on them and shoved them under a rock; I didn’t want her to have to look at sights like that. It might put her off later when she had her own babies. She was used to me blasting away, so she didn’t ask what I shot. Come to think of it, she probably thought I missed, but she didn’t like to say so. Girls often think you’re no good at things, when you really are.
    And even if you prove it they never believe you.
    Up the street I thought of my old grandmother and how she used to walk miles, when she was alive, just to get apples a bit cheaper. That took me back to my great-grandfather who was supposed to have got his eye torn out in a fight in Pitt Street and clapped it back in his head and chased the man that did it. That was before this century. My old man told me that one. We still had the eye in the family, because when he had to get a glass eye—the other one was never any good even though he clapped it back in—he put his real eye in a bottle with some metho before it went bad. It’s still in the family. You have to change the metho now and again. At least they told us kids it was the same eye. The others may have got Ma’s photos but I got the eye.
    I’d been dawdling along, until I suddenly found myself running. That was me, running or dawdling. I could keep running for a long time. I felt pretty strong. There was rain, grizzling in the gutters and getting guzzled down the drains.
    I get ideas when I’m running. The idea I got this time was to do what I’d seen two men in Hyde Park doing. One sort of kept looking around while the other one knelt down by this sailor who was drunk, and turned him over gently and took all the money out of his pockets and the watch off his wrist and a ring off his finger that had a square black stone in it. I was only a small child when I saw that, but it made a big impression on me. It looked such an easy way to get something for nothing. So what I did, I waited outside the old Railway Hotel at Hornsby—it was a bit of a bloodhouse then before they knocked it down and built it up again—until closing time. I saw a prospect picking his way carefully and at great length down the top steps to the footpath. He wasn’t out of the pub fifty yards before he wanted to use the gutter as a toilet. I was behind him, but just as I hit him his head rolled to one side as if the wires were a bit slack.
    Do you know that funny moment when you’re mad in a rage and you bash out at someone and it all goes funny before your eyes and you think you’re going blind? The old brain seems to shift and twist and you can’t see what you’re looking at? Well, I suppose everyone knows what I mean; everyone gets mad.
    I hit him then. Properly. Several times, it was. Maybe a few dozen good hits. I didn’t forget to get his money, but he had no watch. I had to wipe my hands on his coat and at the finish there was so much blood and slobber everywhere I had to take out my thing to wash it off my hands and down the gutter. I hosed him down a bit, too, part out of spite, I reckon, and part to tidy his face up a bit so anyone who passed by would only think he was a drunk gone to