As Stars Fall

by Christie Nieman

  She hurries: lifts the needle off the vinyl record and switches the turntable off. He stumbles up the hallway, a few tries and he opens and shuts his bedroom door behind him.

  Sudden silence. Sound from the parklands.

  Don’t believe it, it isn’t real.

  She packs cupcakes into Tupperware. She washes the dishes, wipes the benches, heaves her mother’s big recipe book onto the top shelf –

  – and a piece of pale green loose-leaf paper flutters out of it and onto the floor.

  She picks it up. It isn’t a recipe. It’s a page from a lecture pad. Sentences in black biro in her mother’s neat round hand:

  The scientific method

  Science is a tool for grappling with the world around us, for being curious, for thinking of the next question to ask, and then the next, and then the next. It’s a way of asking where we all come from, and how we all fit.

  And I know that there are questions science can’t answer yet, and there are questions we may never be able to answer. And there must be questions that, in fact, we haven’t even thought of asking.

  But I am so grateful to be living in a time when I can know the things we know: the things we have discovered about our universe, our world and our lives through the scientific method. How great to know that we are made of the dust of dying stars. How amazing to understand that we evolved on this earth, that we share an ancestor with that beetle, this bird, that tree. That we are all made of the same stuff. That we have so much in common. How amazing.

  Delia holds the paper still in front of her. She doesn’t understand it. But she holds it with the reverence of a monk holding a piece of ancient scripture. It is an unexpected moment from her mother. A gift.

  It is her birthday present.

  Tuesday

  Robin

  On Tuesday morning I caught the earlier train, and I am proud to announce that I arrived at the form room on time. Success! Minor success – I distinctly noted some girls rolling their eyes at my entrance, and I thought I saw a note being passed to Natasha. And Mr Krietcher still frowned at me. What was his problem? On the phone late last night I had regaled Amber with stories of my first day, and especially of my run-in with Mr Krietcher, and of Delia chastising him: ‘I believe it is also my duty to speak up, so that you may see and correct the error of your ways.’ Amber nearly killed herself laughing, and said, ‘Oh, she’s the one, Bobs, she sounds ace, you have to be friends with her,’ and she was happy when I told her that Delia had then rung me up out of the blue and asked me to hang out.

  But then Delia ignored me all day. In class we were sitting right next to each other, and she didn’t even speak to me, and she disappeared as soon as each bell went. In fact I probably should have been thankful that she steered clear of me – I got the feeling that hanging out with Delia was not the best way to win friends and influence people around here. But it did leave me with absolutely no-one to talk to. And Delia had rung me. It was hard to figure out.

  At lunchtime I saw Mum walking into the staffroom with one of the other female teachers, and they were talking and laughing together and holding cups of coffee, and all of a sudden I couldn’t wait to be out of school and in the adult world, where people just seemed to talk to each other, whether they knew each other or not. Not that any of the girls were being overtly mean; they just didn’t seem to have time to think about me because they were all too busy thinking about themselves and making sure they had friends to sit with and weren’t left sitting on their own like a loser. Like me. I thought: ‘I should go over there, to that group of girls from my form class, Natasha and Linda and all their cronies. Forget that some of them rolled their eyes at me. That wasn’t The End. I’ll go and smile and sit with them and see what happens.’ And then I thought: ‘Or I could just go and hide in the library like I did yesterday.’

  Delia was in the library. But she was tucked away in the corner with her head down – it seemed pretty clear she wasn’t receiving visitors. She looked tired, too. She looked awful, if you want to know the truth.

  So I was pretty surprised when I walked out the gate at the end of the day and found her waiting for me.

  ‘Did you ask?’ she said.

  ‘Did I . . .?’

  ‘Your mum. Can you come to the parklands?’

  ‘Oh. Well . . . yes, I can, but –’

  Delia just gave a slight nod and started walking towards the station. I was left standing not quite knowing what to do. Why was this all so hard? Okay. I was going to do this. I was going to have a conversation. With someone. Today. I was going to be an adult and ‘chat’. That was how one did things. One chatted. With anyone. Even Delia. So I caught up with her.

  ‘Um, so how do you like Mr Krietcher?’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘How do you like our class?’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘What’s your favourite subject?’

  ‘Maths.’

  ‘Maths?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Christ. You’re nuts. English and art for me. I’d love biology too, but you can just tell it’s going to start getting more like chemistry and physics, which is more like maths if you ask me, and only crazy people like maths. Ha!’

  Delia smiled ever so slightly, and after that she didn’t speak. We got on the train and sat down together and Delia read a book. We got off the train at her stop and walked together.

  ‘You don’t talk much, do you?’

  Why bother inviting me if she wasn’t even going to talk to me?

  ‘Sometimes.’

  We stopped in front of a house.

  ‘Is this your house?’

  ‘Yes. Wait here.’

  ‘Oh. Okay.’

  This was the strangest first hangout I’d ever had. She came back out again quite quickly, holding a basket. A picnic basket.

  ‘This way,’ she said.

  The concrete and bitumen was emanating a dusty warmth, and the air smelled of grit and suburban barbeques, so I really wasn’t expecting it when suddenly we walked into the bush. Well, it wasn’t bush exactly, but it was a really surprising bit of parkland. It was quite scrubby except for the large areas of lawn. The air was tinged with eucalyptus. You could still hear the cars on the roads nearby, but there were moments when the sound of them died down and all you could hear was the wind in the trees and the high-pitched ‘tonk’-ing of the bellbirds. It was amazing. And it pushed on the emotional bruise I had been avoiding. Damn. I couldn’t trust myself anymore, not my eyes, not my damn emotions as tears began to prickle. Oh bloody hell. Breathe. Breathe, Robbie.

  Delia had stopped walking. She watched me fight tears for a minute. Well this was embarrassing. Finally she put down the basket and pulled out a picnic rug. She unfolded it and laid it down on the grass. Then she turned and scrabbled around in the basket and a moment later she was waving a lunchbox under my nose.

  ‘Cupcake?’ she said.

  I blinked and managed to smile at her. ‘Thanks.’

  She sat down in the shade and I sat down in the sun beside her. And then she unpacked the rest of the basket. Well, let me just say, that girl could do food. It was astounding. There was homemade lemon cordial, different-coloured little cupcakes, tiny cut sandwiches. The sandwiches were phenomenal. Smoked salmon and cream cheese, with capers and everything. My mum would have oohed and aahed. Really, Delia wouldn’t have been out of place at one of the old Country Women’s Association meets they used to have in the town hall the second Sunday of every month.

  ‘What’s the occasion?’ I said.

  ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘It’s my birthday.’

  Was she for real? What sort of girl meets a person one day, and then the next day that person is the sole attendee at her birthday party? Suddenly I felt an overwhelming desire to escape. I just couldn’t handle that sort of pressure. My life was complicated enough.

  ‘Well, um, happy birthday.’

  She peered at me for a second while she chewed and then swallowed.

/>   ‘Joke,’ she said.

  Thank Christ. That could really have ruined things, because believe it or not, I had actually started to enjoy myself and the picture we must have made. There was Delia, sitting in the shade with the spread on a rug in front of her, in her big school sunhat and too-long school dress, looking for all the world like one of those olden-days paintings from colonial times, and then there was me, with my school dress hiked up on my thighs, leaning back on my elbows in the last of the sun, giving my legs all the tan-slash-freckles they could get that late in the afternoon. Amber would have thought it was a lark – that’s what she would have said too, ‘a lark’. But the girls from my old school, and even those other girls from my new one – I could just imagine what they’d have thought seeing me here, in such odd company and the wrong shoes (because they were the wrong shoes, I knew it). And I was enjoying that too: that those girls weren’t here, seeing me, judging me. In this park I could enjoy a cupcake with sprinkles. I could wear the wrong shoes. The air smelled good. The food was great. And the company, well, the company was weird, especially as Delia had now brought out her book again and was studiously reading it, ignoring me. But she was weird in a comfortable sort of way: a way that allowed for cupcakes and wrong shoes. Delia was weird in a way that Amber would have called ‘delightfully eccentric’.

  ‘Is that a textbook?’

  Delia looked up. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is that our maths textbook?’

  Delia flipped over the cover of the book so that the title, 11times, was showing. Ha! I laughed out loud. I couldn’t get over this girl. She looked taken aback. Like it was a big surprise that I should be shocked or that I should find it funny.

  ‘Delia, you have no idea how to be a teenager, do you?’

  And then she gave a sheepish smile, the first real smile I’d seen, and ducked her head in a pleased and embarrassed sort of way.

  And when she ducked her head like that, that’s when I saw it – behind her, down by the little scrubby creek, in a gap in the vegetation, next to a strategically placed rock. It was right where you would expect to see one if the context was different, if you were not deep in the heart of city-sprawl but out in untouched woodland.

  I stopped laughing. It was far away, but God, really, there was no other bird that shape. There was nothing else it could be.

  ‘It couldn’t be –’ And then I blinked and it was gone. Totally vanished. I must have imagined it. There was no way it could have been that bird. What was wrong with me?

  I must have looked like I’d seen a ghost. Delia looked wary, and a bit confused. Her baby-smooth forehead had a single furrowed crinkle, right up the centre of it.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘I just thought I saw something down by the creek. But it couldn’t have been. It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘What?’

  I felt like an idiot saying it, even though she wouldn’t know how stupid it was. ‘One of those birds, like I drew yesterday. A Bush Stone-curlew. I’m just imagining it because I drew them. I’ve got them on the brain. They’re endangered in Victoria, and you’d never see one in the city –’

  But Delia had stood suddenly and was looking down towards the creek. She looked stiff and kind of frightened. It was bizarre, and a little alarming.

  ‘Are you okay?’

  She didn’t answer, just kept staring down at the creek.

  ‘I’m sure it’s just because I’m homesick,’ I tried to explain. ‘I saw a pair of them once, ages ago, with my dad, at home on the farm where we’ve just moved from, up at Murramunda. So I’m probably just –’

  ‘Murramunda?’ she said.

  She looked at me for a minute – like she was almost trying to look past my eyes to see something else – then she said, ‘I have to go,’ and pulled the rug out from under me, quite literally, with such force that my cupcake, my sandwich and my wrong shoes with my feet still in them were all thrown into the air. Everything disappeared into the basket and she was off at a fast pace across the grass, up the hill, and through the trees.

  And I was left sitting there with a half-eaten sandwich I rescued from the grass, thinking, ‘What the hell?’ and, ‘What a wacko.’ But I was also thinking about what I’d seen. And I was also suddenly flooded with the memory, so full of sweetness and now bitterness, of the last time I’d seen one of those birds for real.

  *

  I was twelve. I had woken up for some reason, some noise had woken me, had frightened me. I was lying in my bed, on my top bunk up near the ceiling. The bottom bunk was empty with no mattress and no boards, and my chest of drawers inhabited the space that was left – that was my mum’s novel idea for saving space. I had woken up frightened, but I heard the television, and knew my dad was up. He was probably asleep, snoring as the blue TV light flickered across his face. But still, he was there, only running distance from where I lay. And lying there in the dark, only inches from the ceiling, I knew there were the usual spiders up there in the rafters above me, and that comforted me too. Protected by my dad, and my daddy-long-legs. I was just drifting off when I heard it again, the noise: a wailing ‘wee-loo wee-loo’. My eyes flew open again and I sat up, almost hitting my head. I wasn’t scared anymore, now I heard it properly – I could tell it was a bird – but it was so unusual. I swung myself over the side of my bunk and dropped to the floor. I padded out to where Dad lay snoring on the couch. I poked him.

  ‘Dad. Dad!’

  He woke with a gasp, like someone who has been underwater.

  ‘Kiddo. Hmm. What’s up?’

  ‘There’s a noise. I don’t know what it is.’

  He sat up to make room for me on the couch.

  ‘What sort of a noise?’

  ‘A bird, I think.’

  ‘And you don’t know what it is? Come on, Flame Robin, nocturnal birds. What are they? Mopoke? Barking owl? Tawny frogmouth? The lapwings are night-lively lately, could have been them.’

  ‘Dad, I know all of those. It was different.’

  ‘Do an impression.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Come on, how else are we going to figure out if it’s a nocturnal bird or a nocturnal spook?’

  ‘Well, it was a sort of . . .’ and I couldn’t help it but my voice went all soft and husky, I couldn’t be loud enough, I was embarrassed, ‘a “wee-loo.”’

  ‘A “wee-loo”, eh? Huh. Maybe . . . Was it high? Low? Do another impression, put your heart into it.’

  ‘Dad . . .’

  ‘Come on, give it soul, sister.’

  But I was saved from having to do it myself when the cry came again, even more unearthly this time. Four cries in a row: Wee-loo wee-loo. Wee-loo wee-loo.

  ‘Well, hello.’ My dad was speaking to the air around us. ‘I thought maybe it was you. Goodness! Come on, Flame, get your gummies on – we’re going expeditioning.’

  Walking with my dad across the broken ground of the bottom paddock, following the intermittent sound of the mysterious cries and the torch spot on the dirt and grass in front of us, I held his hand, even though I was twelve, and in the dark and in the paddock it didn’t feel strange at all.

  ‘Right, I reckon by the gum over there. We’ll get this torch off; enough moon, I think.’

  And with the torch off, we waited a moment for our eyes to adjust, then moved as quietly as we could in the moonlight, Dad leading me across the crumbling stony ground, leaves crunching under our gumboots despite our best efforts.

  ‘From here on in, no talking, okay? I think we’ve already spooked them – they’ve gone all quiet – so we may have to do a bit of waiting. Hope you’re warm enough.’

  ‘I’m good.’

  ‘And remember, it’s us that are the nocturnal spooks here. There’s nothing for us to get the willies about, and lots for us to give the willies to. So, quiet and respectful.’

  ‘But what . . .’

  ‘Shh. You’ll see, I reckon.’

  We found a log, well worn by twelve years of the daytime feet of
Amber and me, and probably other kids before us. It was a good log, comfortable, and with a view of the corner of the paddock and the creek just beyond. We sat on it, perfectly still. However, after twenty minutes of perfectly still sitting, a log can become less good, less comfortable, than one first imagined. I was just about to shift because my leg had gone numb when the wee-loo returned, sounding surprisingly close. Dad’s teeth flashed a smile in the dark. Twenty minutes and my eyes were so adjusted to the moonlight that it could have been daytime for how clearly I could see. Wee-loo. It was right in front of us, the sound. My eyes searched, straining, trying to locate what my ears told me was right there, but they could pick nothing out, until, there . . . a flicker of movement, and my eyes defined the shape of an elegant bird, mottled like the earth around it, but with wide soft eyes and well-defined white eyebrows. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen it there before, but almost as soon as I’d thought that, I blinked and lost it again. But this time I knew what I was looking for.

  There it was, standing delicately, thirty centimetres tall, long slender beak, soft grey head rounded at the back like a baby, and eyes that looked about as it moved its head for a moment and then froze, and for another moment, and then froze. Eyes that were like a person’s eyes, wide and concentrated, like a person when they are focusing hard on something. I drew in a breath, and Dad reached for my hand again. And then the bird grew. Suddenly it was twice as tall. Where I thought it had been standing, it had been sitting on its bent-back knees with its lower legs out in front of it. In one fluid movement that looked exactly as if the bird had just grown suddenly out of the ground, it was up, and there was another one stalking towards it from the bushes nearer the creek.

  Wee-loo.

  Wee-loo.

  The birds spoke to one another, moving in close.

  Wee-loo.

  Wee-loo.

  They called and responded until their calls got mixed up together and their sound became louder and more intense, the ‘wee-loo’ disintegrating at points into a loud jumble of sound. The bird from the creek stalked up close to the first bird – the way it moved was incredible, it kind of floated along, I could barely see the movement of its delicate legs – and then suddenly it dodged off to the left, running back towards the creek. The first bird followed as the bird from the creek dodged this way and that, froze, ran, froze again. It was a type of game. I could almost see them laughing with the fun of the tricks they were playing. And all the time, their calls tied them together, the wails entwining them around one another.