Mateship With Birds - By Carrie Tiffany Page 0,30

the air instead. It swings viciously on the rope; the handlebars jackknife sideways one way and then the other. When he leans over to check the oil pan, to see if it is finally filling up, the back tyre catches him on the side of the head and neck. It clocks him hard, bounces away with the impact and comes back for another go. Harry has his arms up by then, protecting his face. He lets himself fall over sideways so he’s flat against the bricks. The bike swings above him. He lies still, fingers his cheekbone for a break and rubs his temple where the tyre tread has broken the skin. The oil drips from the swinging bike and traces a figure-eight pattern on the ground – some of it within the pan, some of it outside. It’ll need shovelling up and covering with soil so the cows don’t slip in the morning. Harry puts that out of his mind for now. He lies still and listens to the sound of the rope sighing where it is pulled tight around the rafters. He watches the oil making its pattern; slower, slower, slower. He puts out his hand, feels the oil slide across his thumb and seep between his fingers. ‘Yes,’ he says. And, ‘Yes,’ when it comes past again.

Harry takes his sore head over to Betty’s for an assessment. She has a pot of something for bruises – arnica? They’ve just finished tea. Dora from the poultry farm is making up the foursome at the kitchen table – completing the family axis – making it square. Dora, Betty and Little Hazel are hunched over a magazine. It’s a picture of young Queen Elizabeth smiling with her neat, chalky teeth. Dora traces the Queen’s hat with her fingertip – it’s a flat oval-shaped cloche pinned across the middle of her head like a saddle. Dora says she’s thinking of knitting something similar. Harry comes in for a closer look. Nobody has noticed the blood on his temple. ‘You could achieve the same effect with a placemat, or a large pikelet, even,’ Harry says.

Little Hazel giggles. Dora closes the magazine and takes a handful of Michael’s shirtsleeve in her hand.

‘Come on, you, we’ve got homework.’ She leads Michael towards the front room.

Betty looks at Harry. ‘They’re “study-buddies”,’ she says flatly.

Harry and Betty hold each other’s eye. They don’t like the sound of this: it’s American, it’s show-offy – it’s not their way.

Harry has no idea what makes a girl like Dora tick. He hasn’t even imagined her naked. He sees her and Michael go down to the channel to catch dragonflies after school while he’s grubbing out thistles along the bottom track. There’s a lot of shenanigans with the long handle of the net and the girl’s dress. She’s a thin girl with big knees. She picks her feet up without thought. She turns her head immediately when she hears the kookaburras in the trees. She talks easily. She laughs loudly. She’s a running tap, Harry thinks, a swig of water.

Not like Betty. His Betty is heavier, more complicated. Betty meanders within herself; she’s full of quiet pockets. The girl Dora might be water, but his Betty is oil. You can’t take oil lightly. It seeps into your skin. It marks you.

Harry and his mother are staying with Aunty Bev at Kangaroo Flat. His mother and his aunt have gone shopping together in the big emporiums of Bendigo. They always come back exhausted from these trips; parched for a pot of tea and needing to soak their feet in basins of hot water. Seven-year-old Harry has been left on his own for three hours. He has the front garden to weed and two encyclopaedias he’s brought from home – J–L and S–T. Three hours is three viewings of the wooden bird that springs from his aunt’s cuckoo clock. A set of plaster ducks fly up the wall of the good room. Above the mantelpiece, its weights dangling like polished acorns, hangs the cuckoo clock. At four minutes to ten Harry wipes the grass grease from his hands on his shorts and pushes the door of the good room open. Four minutes. Harry stands to attention in front of the clock. He quickens his breathing, puffing in and out to speed things up. Time, in Harry’s understanding, is measured in the body. It has something to do with the lungs and the taking in and expelling of air. At school they march