Mateship With Birds - By Carrie Tiffany Page 0,37

work and held the ashtray for him. On Sundays he did things around the house. Even Betty could see the way he held the hammer down near its ears was wrong. He told her brother to hold the nail while he hit it and then he hit it hard so the top of the nail – the hat of it – pushed right through the skin of the boy’s finger and gripped it tight against the wood. The boy screamed and the mother came with a cloth for the blood. The father said, ‘What’s all the fuss about?’ He smiled at Betty. The deep lines on either side of his mouth looked like cuts.

Betty and her brother stood on the step in the morning to say goodbye to him before they got ready for school. The boy never said goodbye so Betty said it lots of times in different sorts of ways to cover up. As the father went through the gate he looked back at them and he said, ‘Buy! Buy!’ because he was going to work selling curtains and it was a joke.

The lady next door went away and they had to feed and water an old carthorse she kept in a paddock across the road. The horse belonged to her dead husband so she didn’t like to get rid of it. The horse had patches of white fur on its back where harness sores had been and yellow teeth permanently on show between its floppy lips. When they put the hay in the hay net the horse didn’t walk towards it or even blink at them, but the hay was gone the next day. They called the horse ‘The Husband’.

The father told them they should clean out the paddock. One corner, where the horse stood, was platformed with layers of hardened manure. It was impossible to break through the manure and they didn’t want to get too close to the horse. Instead they trawled around near the fence collecting pieces of broken glass. They had a small pile of green glass when an older boy rode past on a bicycle. He rang his bell at them, it was shrill and jangly. The sun went behind a cloud. Betty’s brother was suddenly frightened. He said they had to get rid of the glass. He started to pick it up and throw it into the old bath the horse drank from. Betty came and helped him. The glass floated for a few seconds on top of the water and then sank. It seemed mysterious, sacred, watching the glass sink. It felt to Betty like a kind of return. Betty said, ‘Water to water, rust to rust,’ like she had heard in church, then they put hay in the hay net and filled the bath up with water. The rabbit and the parrot had been watching them from the gate. They collected the rabbit and the parrot and went home.

The father’s shirtsleeves were rolled up, but he still had his hat on. He hadn’t put his hat on the hallstand yet and Betty thought that meant it was safe. One of his sleeves was wet. The line between the wet material and the dry material wasn’t sharp like Betty would have expected, it was blurry.

The father took the boy by the arm. He put his other hand in front of the boy’s face. It was cupped full of the wet green glass.

‘Did you do this?’

‘No,’ the boy said.

‘Did you do this?’

‘No,’ the boy said and started to cry.

‘Don’t you dare lie to me.’ The father threw the glass at the wall, then he unbuckled his belt. He pushed the boy towards the kitchen. He said, ‘There are no liars in this house.’

Betty went to get the parrot, but it was too late.

Betty had a job in the food hall. She went to the cool room in the basement and collected the cheeses on a trolley that had PROPERTY OF THE CHEESE DEPARTMENT written on the side, and at the end of the day she wrapped the cheeses in white muslin cloths and put them away. The large cheeses sat on wooden boards and stuck to them and made sucking sounds like a tongue inside a wet mouth when they were prised free. The cheeses were heavy and when she was lifting them she thought they were as heavy as babies. All the young women were cutting their hair and taking up smoking and leaving their long skirts behind. They stood