As Stars Fall

by Christie Nieman

  I was leaning back in my chair and doodling with my pen over the front of the new pink exercise book Mum had bought for me the week before. She said there were other colours but she chose the pink because it was so ‘cheery’. I thanked her, but I don’t think I’m really a pink kind of person. My pen was working back and forth over the front of my new pink book, and I was thinking about how this Delia girl had stood up for me. I would never have done something like that for a new girl at my old school. She must be a bit nuts.

  I looked up as Mr Krietcher finished the last page of his newspaper, clumsily folding it shut. He gave Delia a hard stare, and then stood up and walked out of the room. Delia looked up as the door slammed, but then went straight back to her work.

  I leaned across to her. ‘Thanks for today,’ I said.

  ‘You’re welcome.’ She didn’t look up from her page, and the figures kept scratching out from her pen.

  ‘I really appreciate it. I mean, there’s no way –’

  ‘Can you please stop talking? It’s quite distracting.’

  ‘But he’s gone. You don’t have to –’

  ‘Shh.’

  I sat back in my chair. ‘Jeez. We can hardly get into more trouble.’

  She finally looked up – exasperated I think. The kids at this school certainly were conscientious, that was for sure. And then Delia suddenly stopped looking exasperatedly at me.

  ‘What are those?’ She was looking at the doodles on the front of my book. Only as I looked at them now, I saw they weren’t just doodles. I’d drawn two birds. Long, thin birds. The two of them stood there together, on the pink cover. Delia seemed transfixed.

  I looked at them and laughed. Fancy my subconscious pulling them up and drawing them out through my hand.

  ‘Wow! Ha. I didn’t even mean to draw them.’

  ‘What are they?’

  ‘Well . . .’ I was always cautious when revealing my birdy side. ‘They’re these really cool birds from my old home in the country.’

  ‘What birds?’

  How far to go? I assessed that Delia was risk-free: there was no way she could do social damage. ‘They’re called Bush Stone-curlews.’

  And then she shot me such a look – God, I have no idea what that look was about. It was like she thought I was telling a lie, it was like, I don’t even know: like I’d lied to her about something important. The door opened. Mr Krietcher came back into the room with Ms Megalos, the vice-principal, in tow.

  ‘Well, that’s it then,’ he said. ‘Go on – go home.’

  We stood and started closing up our folders and pushing them into our bags. Delia was quicker than me and was about to leave when Mr Krietcher said, ‘Delia, can you stay back for a moment? We’d like a word. Robin, when you go, close the door.’

  Maybe I had misjudged Delia. Maybe she was a real rebel. Teachers don’t just bring in the vice-principal for nothing. Whatever else she had done, it must have been pretty bad.

  *

  On the train on the way home I looked out of the window to see if I could see any interesting birds.

  So okay, yes, I’m a bird nerd too. I can’t just point at Dad and say ‘crazy bird-lover’ and not fess up to having a twitching eye myself. But when you grow up where I did in the country, it’s hard not to be. Birds are everywhere. And each species of bird has its own way of doing things – its own voice, its own way of flitting about, its own habits. It’s like each species has a personality, and if you’ve grown up with that personality right there, then it’s a kind of friend. I know that sounds stupid, but it’s true. Even when I was out doing stuff by myself, like taking the cows their dinner or locking up the goose shed, if there were birds around, I never felt alone. And there was always someone around: a Grey Fantail, or an Eastern Spinebill, or a Flame Robin.

  The flame robins are cool. They’re small and anxious-looking and it’s as if someone has coloured in their chests with orange highlighter – it’s such a crazy fluoro colour, only a little bit more crazy and fluoro than my own crazy orange-red hair. So you can see where my dad got it from. Robin. Flame Robin. Flame.

  But two months ago, when the fire came through, all the birds disappeared. Dad said it was worse than any fire anyone had seen in decades. He said we were lucky that we’d had all our sheep up in the top paddock: we hadn’t lost any, not like some of our neighbours. The fire was fast and hot, which is bad. It killed someone, some woman up in the hills, not a local, right on the fire track where Dad and I used to go to collect wood. It was in all the papers. And the fire stripped so much of the landscape that only days after it went through, there were absolutely no birds left.

  I should have seen it as an omen, the birds all leaving like that. They left first, and then Mum and I left for the city a few weeks later. And I haven’t been back since. I don’t even know if any of them have returned.

  Sparrows and pigeons, that’s all I saw from the window of the train on my way home from school. And when I got there, the tiny house was quiet as I slipped my key into the lock; no dog leaping about on the other side of the door to welcome me. Mum had got my house key cut from purple paisley metal to make it more fun. Hoping, I suppose, that a ‘fun’ key might stop me comparing this place to my old home, a farmhouse on the side of a hill, surrounded by acres of paddock and bush. We didn’t even lock the doors there.

  I turned the key in the lock, and pushed the door inward. The hallway was narrow. As I walked down it my schoolbag scraped one wall and my shoulder the other. The door shut behind me, making the slide-click sound of a deadlock, and the traffic noise of nearby Punt Road became muffled. I dropped my bag on the lounge-room floor and sat on the beanbag next to it, leaning my back up against the wall. We didn’t have a couch yet. Our old one was far too big for this shoebox.

  I rested my head against the wall and wished my mother would come home. I needed to talk to someone. Someone who actually knew me. Who knew me and loved me. There didn’t seem to be many of those around anymore. I swallowed the lump that rose in my throat.

  The phone rang. Mum. Or Amber, my best friend from back home. I pulled myself up to answer it.

  ‘Is that Robin?’ It wasn’t my mother. The voice was small and sharp.

  ‘Yes. Hello?’

  ‘It’s Delia. Are you free tomorrow after school?’

  ‘How did you get my –’

  ‘Tomorrow. Tuesday. Second day of term. Are you free?’

  Of course I was free. Did I know a single person in this city? ‘Yes, but I’ll have to ask Mum. Why?’

  ‘I’ll show you the parklands.’ The phone clicked in my ear as she hung up abruptly.

  The hallway was suddenly silent. It was darker than before. I stood there holding the dead receiver for a moment or two before slowly hanging up. I don’t even know why, but I started to cry.

  Seth

  The parklands. Seth always ends up in the parklands. His mum used to walk down here almost every day, so now, when he has a row with his dad, this is where he comes. And they’ve just had one, him and his dad: the usual ugly row. If it had been about how Seth had just quit school at the start of his final year, if it had been his father calmly putting his foot down – if it had been his father being a father, well then . . . But it wasn’t. It was the usual. The weakness. The dumb anger. The uneasy ripple of contained violence. Seth had slammed the door in his father’s face. It had felt really good to slam the door like that, to see his father’s face disappear so immediately, so definitely, so loudly. Slam! His father’s hopeless, pathetic face: gone. He’d walked down through the city streets and into the parklands. He felt bad about leaving Delia at home alone with their dad, but justified it to himself, almost successfully: she’s in year eleven now, and even if she is still only fourteen she’s smart enough to have skipped a grade last year. And he’s seventeen: the fact is, he won’t be around much longer; she’ll have to manage without him sometime.

  He sits by the creek in the dusk, alternating smokes and joints and c
hucking sticks in the water, cursing his father, cursing life, cursing the empty sky.

  Out. He wants out. Out of all the grief and the horror, out of the fights, the nothingness, the grey, numbing, nothingness – but he pulls back from that: the nothingness is good, being numb is good.

  He kicks off his shoes. He rolls another joint, sprinkling a good amount of green dope over the dark brown tobacco before licking it closed and lighting the end. He puts his bare feet in the water and draws on the joint.

  If he could just leave, just get out, run away. If he didn’t have to be himself anymore, or even for a moment. The marijuana helps, but he thinks his mum would have disapproved. He looks around, almost frantically; he is looking for something, he doesn’t know what. Anything to stop him from thinking about her. He draws harder on the joint.

  Down here by the creek it is already dark. Although the last glow of day still creeps across the higher grassy parts of the parklands, the creek is a scrubby vein of night. The water glistens blackly around his feet. The nocturnal ants have come out from their daytime burrows and forage around him on the warm rock. The end of his joint glows suddenly bright in the gloom as he inhales, the fire crisp and clean and close to his lips. There is a rustling on the opposite bank. He lifts his head.

  There is a tall grey bird standing there. Some kind of gull or something.

  Seth blows smoke out of his nose and the bird freezes. ‘Sorry, buddy,’ Seth says out loud. ‘Didn’t mean to scare you.’

  Maybe not a gull. The bird looks weird. Big-eyed. Different. He’s never seen a bird like this before – well, he doesn’t think he has, but he doesn’t know much about birds. Birds are his mum’s department.

  Were.

  He allows himself to think: what if she’d been studying something else, not ecology, but something like literature, or accounting, or playing the violin? He lets himself think like this – imagining her safe at home right now, tucked up in an armchair with a book – so that he can feel it again when he remembers. The moment is like a branding. He remembers, and it’s like a burn directly on the surface of his brain. He allows this to happen, again and again, because if he lets it stop hurting, the mark might disappear, and maybe his memories along with it.

  He puts the joint to his lips and drags the bitter smoke into his lungs. It’s a potent batch. There is a different flavour to the smoke and the effect feels stronger than usual; he can look at his thoughts from the outside – this is good, he needs an emotional anaesthetic while he does this. He holds up his right hand and takes the joint out of his mouth with his left. He holds them both up in front of his face, the lit joint and the vulnerable skin of his palm. It isn’t enough, just remembering. He can’t feel it enough. He needs to feel it physically. He breathes out smoke and pushes the glowing end into the centre of his palm. He feels a sizzle and a sharp pain – and then an insane wailing strikes his ears and he drops the joint.

  ‘Jesus Christ!’

  The bird stands opposite him, looking at him with its big sideways eyes and opening and closing its mouth, an alien noise erupting from deep within it. He is stunned. It is such an unearthly sound, strident and full.

  He squeezes his eyes shut against the enormity of the sound as the wailing grows louder still. And then the hair prickles up on the back of his neck, and suddenly he has a sense that, like mineral from a stone, he has simply leached away from himself. Suddenly he feels nothing, nothing at all; nothing of his own.

  Instead, sitting in the darkness behind his closed eyelids, he finds he is looking. He is looking out across the creek; but what he sees is reversed. It is as if instead of looking at the bird across the creek, he is looking back from where the bird is standing. He is looking at himself.

  It is like a film, taken by a camera a few metres away, from the position of the bird: he is seeing a young man, Seth, sitting in the gloom, hunched down and eyes squeezed shut. But it is different to film; the vision is strange. It is sharp, objects glow with an extra layer of light. And he can see everything at once, he is not restricted to looking at himself: his vision is three hundred and sixty degrees, slowed right down, frame upon frame – tiny movements laid bare, movements between movements. Every slow antenna waving on every ant, the shivering of the reeds, the shifting air from the beating wings of city bats passing in procession overhead: he sees it all. And across the dusky dome of the sky he watches the remains of the sunlight withdrawing before the night, millimetre by millimetre; and there on the horizon, the tiny upward steps of the early stars. He sees all of it, the constant incremental action of the night. And then he feels – he feels the nearness of that night sky. He feels its accessibility. Like a bird would, or a bat. Like it would be no harder to go there than to go home. This is no feeling of his own.

  No, it is not like looking through a camera. It is like looking out through the eyes of a bird – that bird, standing there across the creek from him.

  The wailing sound dies and he gasps and opens his own eyes.

  The bird on the opposite bank is standing perfectly still, beak shut, watching him. It is suddenly very quiet. He watches the bird. He waits. For something. Something else. There is no sound except for the wind and the distant traffic, no movement other than the smoke curling from his dropped joint, no perceptions but those given to him by his own small senses.

  He waits, but the bird turns away, lowering its head and stalking smoothly back into the rushes and out of sight. Seth is left alone again. Alone. With nothing but the heedless ants, the murmuring cars and the whispering wing beats of the city bats rowing in their wide river above him: endless, weightless, darker than sky.

  Delia

  A girl at school today drew a picture of a bird. Your bird. Why would you do that to me? What are you trying to say?

  Home by herself and the sun going down. That’s when the sound starts. It isn’t real, but for weeks, almost months, before sunset and through the night, snatches of it float up from the parklands – a thin, whistling wail. Shut all the doors and the windows and it doesn’t help. The sound fingers the windowsills and the gaps beneath the doors, and in the middle of the night it infects dreams and turns them to nightmares. And when she wakes in the dark, there it is still, seeping in through the cracks in the house, finding her ears. She knows the sound. She recognises it. It seems real.

  It started shortly after that day, the one where everything changed. Perhaps a week after. When she was still in the first shock of it all. So she knows. She knows she can’t trust her senses. Therefore she will approach it scientifically. Tomorrow she’ll take the new girl to the parklands, and she will see.

  At school today everything was the same as her before life. Everything the same: form room, people, academic tasks. The same. Except the new way she spoke to Mr Krietcher. Except the Creature and Megalos asking if things were okay at home. Except Natasha and Linda – hating her all last year, now pouting and sympathising and giving her chocolates.

  Chocolates.

  The same except for the new girl.

  The new girl drew a picture of your bird.

  Nine-thirty, totally dark, and her brother and her father still not home.

  The noise.

  She shuts the curtains, locks the windows, turns all the house lights on. Makes a sandwich for dinner. She puts on a record from her mother’s record collection: Buddy Holly, the Andrews Sisters, Ella Fitzgerald. Bright, bright, bright. Drops the needle down on Buddy Holly, turns it up. Mum’s apron, Mum’s old recipe book, greases the cupcake tins and fires up the oven. Her spirits lift. Her mum’s tradition, she’s keeping it alive: her mother baking late into the night to daggy music once a year, so the morning cupcakes are as fresh and light as they can be, and Delia opens her eyes to a cupcake with her new day’s age iced onto the top and her mother singing ‘Happy birthday’.

  Tomorrow is Delia’s birthday.

  The cupcakes turn golden in the oven. She makes a big batch of sandwiches and cuts them up into little triangles the wa
y her mum used to when they were going for a picnic out in the bush. Packs them away in Tupperware containers, hides them in her room. Cupcakes cooling on a tray. Different icings – blue and white and pink – and she dips all the tops of the little cakes into the different bowls and then into rainbow sprinkles. All except one: that one she ices white, and then pipes a neat, blue ‘15’ on the top. Holds it up, inspects it closely. The icing job isn’t as good as her mother’s.

  ‘It will have to do,’ she says out loud.

  The first she knows of her father’s presence is the smell. She turns, holding her birthday cupcake, and there he is, leaning against the doorframe, alcohol fumes curdling the air around him. Watching her. She shoves the top of the cupcake in her mouth.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  Her mouth full of ‘15’.

  He sees her mother’s apron. He smells the kitchen air: baking smells, her mother’s recipes. His ears and then his eyes on the record player – her mother’s music.

  ‘What are you doing? You look just like her. God, what are you doing? Please turn off that music. Please.’