Free Five Bells by Gail Jones Page B

James laughed, but looked terrified. As the headless chicken ran pasthe bent down and swooped it into his arms. He clutched hard, trying to still it, trying to make the lively body die. His eyes entreated – who knows what? – and filled with tears. Ellie could hear her own rapid breathing and knew that time was rocking into shape as water does, pooling around this boy’s face and his blazing desperation.
    When her father prised the chicken from James’s grip his shirt was bloody and bespattered. The boy shook and began to cry, and Ellie opened her arms and took him gently into her child’s embrace. She knew then, even with her own heart galloping and her senses all alive, that she was the calm one, that in the circle of killing she could watch and somehow know not to recoil. She knew too that there was a gap between death and life, a remnant vigour, a kind of puzzled searching.
    Do humans search like this, looking stupidly for what is missing? Would a human body run? Crazy-like, with no head?
    Ellie was possessed by this idea, its exhilarating horror. As an adult it will occur to her that this was her first moment of philosophy, when she found in the world a seductively bamboozling question. Yet in the vast stillness of the moment she saw the answer in James’s face: yes , crazy-like-with-no-head, a human would still search.
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    Ellie decided to walk to Central Station, take the train to the quay, and then return on the bus. She wanted this walk downhill through the Saturday crowds, already trailing out of coffee shops and cycling past with the newspapers, already responding with like heart to the glorious weather. Faces evanesced before her, rose up and fell away, and she thought of the negligent flicker of perception that negotiates any crowd, of how in the champagne morning light they were all caught in flux and lustre, igniting, appearing, lit with energetic purpose. In the grounds of the local primary school a market was being established; Ellie could see stallholders setting up trestle tables and unpacking their wares. They were holding cardboard cups of coffee and lightly chatting. It would be a good day. Even from across the road you could hear optimism ringing in their voices. But Ellie was still thinking of James at nine years old, and of herself, self-centred. She hadn’t really cared for his suffering. She had wanted high drama.
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    Her mother was suddenly there, surveying the mess. ‘Bloody hell,’ she said, ‘what were you thinking, Charlie?’ Ellie noticed her father become submissive at his wife’s reproach. He was still holding the chicken, its feathers mucky with gore, the event a crude wreckage, and the head forgotten, ridiculous, in the sawdust beside the block. Ellie saw him pass the upside-down carcass from one hand to the other, then wipe his left hand on his trousers, leaving a faint greasy smear. They exchanged words, her parents, and then her mother seized James by the wrist and dragged him away. Ellie saw in her mother’s glance that she was also stained; holding James she had printed chicken blood onto her clothes. So there was the blood-print, the sky, her father dangling the chicken. Images lined up for her memory, for the future, for wild or idle surmise, this little collection that made up the blunder of the moment, and of James’s pure fear, and of her own shameless sense of triumph.
    In this pause lay the inkling of a net of relationships. Ellie registered with sure judgement the range of her affections: she loved them all – loved – her mother, her father, her school-friend James, all of them caught in this drama with the headless chicken that would not do the right thing and straightaway, as it should, just lie down and die.
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    Ellie was in the kitchen, dressed in a clean cotton blouse. She had tucked her hair behind her ears, and sat silent, watching,fiddling with the hem of her skirt. James had been on his knees,