The Chantic Bird Read Online Free Page A

sleep and leave him alone. I suppose it was anti-social, but your family has to come before the filthy public.
    Bee got a bit extra that week to buy fruit for the kids. I told her to get herself a haircut out of the rest, she was always pushing this goldy colour hair out of her eyes. But that wasn’t right away; after I’d rolled my first drunk I got back to the Zoo.
    All round Sydney lights were on, all the people were sitting up in millions of houses filling in insurance policies on their fowls, their wrought-iron railings, concrete paths, light globes, their health, funeral expenses, borers, carpets, insuring against loss of work, loss of clothes, loss of conjugal rights, loss of money, loss of friends. I wonder if they had policies that could protect them from me.
    I kept on like that for a few days, getting a bit here and there, quite a bit in fact, but something happened in the Zoo that got me kicked out. They didn’t actually kick me out, but if they caught me they would have.
    These people were looking round the Zoo, at the animals, making happy noises and plenty of litter with milk cartons, soft drink cans, lolly papers, sandwich crusts, and there was a kid there younger than me, about fourteen I’d say, a girl, with darker hair than Bee’s and boy, was she pretty. She was that dark sort that has to shave their legs a lot later and right then the hairs on her legs were starting to grow, she was about that age, but I didn’t worry too much about that, she had these beautiful red cheeks on her face. Apple-cheeks.
    I couldn’t help following them just to get a bit of a look at her now and then. You don’t have to worry, they didn’t notice me. But it got too much for me, and ever since I’d taught myself to roll a drunk I’d got more impulsive, if you understand me, and what did I do but buy a little bag of fruit and go up to her when she was a bit away from the others and give them to her. Or tried to, rather. I think I was even pleased that she said no thank you, that showed she wasn’t too cheap and likely to say yes to anyone. But I felt a fool having to eat the whole bag myself—a bag of apples—so I asked her again then sort of put them in her hands. She had brown eyes that the sun got into, the sun sort of got under the brown and shone them up very shiny.
    Well, they got too wide to be pretty. She started making loud screams and a lot of people took out after me. In twenty minutes everything was quiet again, I’d lost the chasers and the girl was looking in at the snake cages where the poor old snakes were having a snooze since their cages faced the sun. She even forgot the apples enough to start tapping the glass cages to wake up the snakes. I watched her, a bit disgusted; she tapped every cage. But I couldn’t forget those apple-cheeks. And until I left there I had the feeling I was being followed. Any minute I thought someone would come up behind me and say, ‘This is the one that raped that girl in the Zoo.’ I didn’t rape her, you know I didn’t, but everyone knows how these things get blown up when the public gets hold of them. They don’t care what happens to the original facts, they don’t even know if the original facts were facts.
    I had to go; they were on to me and I didn’t want to be shot out. I tell you what, I felt so good that no one could catch me—a sort of energy or power—that I ring-barked every tree in the park with my knife. There was a silly war statue there, too. I knocked the arms off that, they were the only things on it that I could twist. Boy, did they make a fuss about that! Don’t they act up when you touch their property! Do people think their silly old property will ride proud and shiny before them into heaven?
    I had felt quite at home in the Zoo. The peacock was one of my favourites. He’d lift his tail up to impress you and there’d be staring eyes all over it, looking through you. Come to think of it, I felt quite at home in the whole world, doing