She doesn’t want to sleep again. Even with Seth there. The sound will come back. There will be dreams: awful, frightening, heartbreaking dreams. So instead she pulls the covers up to her chin and watches the last minutes of Tuesday tick away on the clock, and tries to convince her heart to slow down and her breathing to return to normal.
She listens to her brother breathing as he sleeps. She tries to match her own breathing to his slow, rhythmic sleep-breath. But she can’t. In the silence between each of his breaths she has a wild fear that he won’t take another one, and her stomach muscles draw tighter and tighter like a bowstring and her own breath gets away from her, speeding up and becoming shallow.
She rolls onto her side and watches the clock, her lonely birthday ticking away from her. And her mind becomes snagged on a thought. It goes back to it again and again. Her birthday last year. This day last year. The three of them then – her mum, Seth and herself – sitting in the early morning in that spot by the creek, toasting Delia’s birthday with plastic cups.
Exactly one year ago, they were sitting in that spot. That exact same spot where today Robin saw a bird: where, today, Robin from Murramunda saw a Bush Stone-curlew.
Wednesday
Delia
One year and one day ago, after the first tough and friendless week of being put up a grade from year eight to year ten, on the morning of her fourteenth birthday, Delia woke before dawn to Seth standing at the foot of her bed yelling, ‘Fore!’ When she opened her eyes she saw he was dressed in golf fatigues: checked pants, argyle socks, golf cap and a golf club resting against his shoulder. He tossed a hollow practice ball in his golfing-gloved hand.
‘Fore! . . . teen.’
She laughed.
‘And that’s not the end of the joke,’ he said. ‘Come on, get up, put these on, take this.’
He threw her some very checked clothing and a slightly bent golf club, salvaged from the junk shed. Her mum appeared in the doorway, sleepy in her pyjamas.
‘What’s happening?’
‘No time for you, Mother,’ said Seth, spinning her around and pushing her out the room. ‘The greens are up, the birdies are calling, and we’d rather be playing golf. Come on, Dee-dee, lickety-split. I heard a rumour that last night someone sank illegal golf holes all over the parklands, and we’ve got to get down there and test them out before the groundskeeper fills them all in again.’
Seth and Delia whacked the little lightweight balls around the parklands in the early morning with the dew rising off the grass and Seth shouting ‘Fore! . . . teen’ more times than was funny. Some guys from Seth’s school came past and ribbed him about it, but Seth could do anything and get away with it. No-one ever thought anything bad about him. He was untouchable. Delia was kind of the same, but in exactly the opposite way. It didn’t matter what Delia did, no-one at school thought anything about her.
Their mum came down with a thermos of tea and a basket: bacon and egg muffins, and the birthday cupcakes she’d made the night before, and one candle for the cupcake with the ‘14’ iced perfectly on the top. They ate breakfast in a little sheltered spot down by the creek where there were rocks to sit on.
‘Where’s Dad?’ Delia asked.
‘Your dad will see you tonight. He’s having a shed moment.’
Shed moments were well known. They were frequent and unpredictable. Everything else had to become quiet and unobtrusive while their father disappeared into his studio shed for days or weeks to follow whatever light bulb of inspiration had flickered on and would become his next great art-documentary film.
‘Typical,’ said Seth.
‘Seth, come on,’ said their mother.
‘It’s her birthday, Mum. Her fucken birthday. She’s been put up a grade at school because she’s amazing, and he can’t even drag himself away from his stinking art to wish her a happy birthday. It’s bullshit. He should be here. He’s like a bloody child!’
‘Seth, it’s alright.’ Delia liked it being just the three of them.
‘Sorry, Del, it just pisses me off.’
Their mother tried to keep the peace. ‘Seth, it’s good he’s in the shed. You know it is. Working keeps him clear of his old problem. He loves us all, he does.’
‘Definitely you. Maybe Delia. But not me, that’s clear.’
‘He does, Seth, really. It’s just that artists’ brains don’t have compartments like other people’s. Everything bleeds into everything else. He does the best he can.’
‘Well, lucky you’re here to translate, Mum, that’s all I can say.’
‘Anyway, this is Del’s party. Happy birthday, Delly.’
‘Yep. Happy birthday, Dee-dee.’
The three of them clinked plastic cups full of tea.
‘Mum,’ Delia said, ‘can I get chooks? Just two. I’d like the eggs.’
Her mum laughed at her, a lot, and that weekend the two of them went and bought a little portable backyard chook pen and two ISA Browns which clucked and scratched and trilled all day outside her dad’s shed.
*
Bright moonlight – leaves, grass, trees and logs – space and stars and smoke. A bird cries – a jumble of distress. Another girl cries quietly – gut-hollowing betrayal – ‘Dad!’ Tears on her face. ‘Dad.’ And then the flames come leaping licking barking like dogs, and the voice rises to a piercing wail and instead of betrayal there is suddenly black grief – and her mother says, ‘Little one, it’s okay, it’s okay.’
She knows she must have been asleep because, when her alarm goes off on Wednesday morning, the day crashes down on her like it does whenever she has been dreaming about her mother.
She feels exhausted. She feels like she has been running all night.
Seth is gone from the foot of her bed, and when she rolls over she notices her lamp is switched off and her teacup is gone. She has a tiny reluctant flicker of hope that Seth may have left something for her, a birthday token to show that he didn’t forget after all. She gets up, conscious of the dangerous hope-bubble around her middle, looks around her room, and then goes to the kitchen. But there is nothing there either, and the sun comes up and slants in the window, and yesterday is gone, and Seth forgot. The only person who wished her happy birthday was a girl she’d known for one day. Robin.
Be calm.
Robin from Murramunda.
Listen. Observe. Be logical.
She goes back to her room and sits at her desk in her pyjamas. She takes out the piece of paper with her mother’s handwriting on it. She concentrates on the feeling of the paper in her hands, its actual properties: colour, weight, texture – pale green, light, crinkly.
Resting the paper on the wooden desktop, she touches her fingertips to the writing.
there are questions science can’t answer yet
She can feel where the pen has been pressed: every indentation, every word.
we are made of the dust of dying stars
She traces the words, reading with hands as well as eyes, as if the cadence of her mother’s speech might lodge in her fingertips, lodge in her body, might once again inhabit flesh.
that beetle, this bird, that tree . . . we are all made of the same stuff
The indentations are evidence: the hand that made them had been real. The energy, real. The life, real. Where was it?
there must be questions that, in fact, we haven’t even thought of asking
Delia can’t breathe.
Her mother couldn’t be gone. She couldn’t just be gone. She couldn’t just have disappeared, she couldn’t just be nowhere, and nothing, and gone, she couldn’t just –
Delia freezes. She makes herself a statue: as stiff and cold and tight as a statue; as incapable of experiencing the pain of that thought as a statue. And while her body tries to breathe, while it is yelling at her to move, the pain passes over her, and she watches it – she can almost see it – while she keeps herself safe and still.
Her lungs spasm, trying to suck in air. She has to breathe. She tries
to get her stomach muscles to let go, but the bowstring in her stomach stays tight and taut, and her breath comes only in little shallow sips.
She has to breathe properly. She has to go to school. She has to be normal. She can’t go to school if she can’t breathe properly. She can’t go to school –
No, she catches herself, not that she can’t – she won’t. If it is a choice, then she is in control. She won’t go to school. She won’t go to school because there are things she needs to do. The tightness around her middle eases off a little, and her breath creeps back in. That’s it. She won’t go to school because she needs to do busy things, investigative things. She won’t go to school today because she needs to collect data.
Her body lets go and she breathes in deeply. Slowly. That’s it. She just needs to be logical, unemotional. She needs to listen and observe. She relaxes, pulling air into her centre.
She just needs to collect all the information she can, and assess it.
Because there are questions here, questions that she needs to be able to think to ask.
Robin
By Wednesday I was ready to pack it all in, I tell you. I was ready to throw everything I owned into a big suitcase, stow away on a freight train, get Amber and her brother Andy to pick me up from the depot in town, move in with the Dooleys – even if I had to sleep in Amber’s cupboard – until I had convinced Mum and Dad that they were both being stupid and that we should all just go back to living in our old house.
Let me just say this: if being at school is bad, being at school when Delia is not there is actually a little bit worse. On Wednesday morning I waited for her at the gate. She was not the sort of person I would usually think of as a friend, but she was interesting. I wanted to figure her out. I wanted to find out if she’d got into more trouble after detention with Mr Krietcher and Ms Megalos, and what she’d done to deserve it. What were her hidden renegade depths? I hadn’t had a chance to ask her the day before. And I actually really did want to know why she’d got all funny at the park. Maybe it was nothing. Maybe she was just one of those people that didn’t really ‘do’ other people. A lone wolf. Perhaps it was just that my company had all of a sudden just got too much and she’d decided to leave, and perhaps, as a person, she just wasn’t very interested in the traditional markers of departure – the customary ‘goodbye’ or ‘see you later’. Even if it was possible that, in the end, there would be nothing to figure out, I found myself at the gate, looking forward to seeing her. This was a small surprise.
But she didn’t turn up, which was suspect in my opinion, because, until her untraditional departure the day before, she had seemed in decent health – tired-looking, a bit pale, but ultimately healthy. So at lunchtime, desperate to have some company after the aimless wandering of recess – and thinking that anyway, maybe this was a chance to make some friends other than Delia – I drew in my breath, took my lunch, and walked over to where Natasha and Linda were sitting with their circle of followers in the middle of the basketball court. They saw me coming, whispered to each other, and by the time I got there, I was confronted with a row of backs, and the three girls facing me from the other side of the circle were studiously looking elsewhere. I said, ‘Hi’, and one of them said ‘Hi’ back, but got such a sharp look from Natasha that she looked quickly to the ground. There was nothing left for me to do but go and find a quiet spot out of sight to eat my lunch on my own.
It was absolutely mortifying. And it was ridiculous. I mean, who does that? How old were they? This wasn’t year nine. They didn’t even know me; they didn’t know anything about me. What could I possibly have done in only two and a half days of school to have them decide that I’m not worth their friendship? Girls! But I guess I knew. There were plenty of girls like them at my old school. I almost was one of them at my old school – I mean I wasn’t, and neither was Amber, but most of our friends were. Just really competitive and mean and not at all trustworthy. So I’d seen up close that it didn’t have to be anything specific for them to close a girl out. It could be nothing and everything. It could be the wrong shoes.
I missed Amber. I missed Dad. And more than that, I missed the country. Having people to talk to mattered more here than in the country, because in the country, if our friends were being a bit bitchy, I could always go home and hang out with Mo our pet magpie, or the ducks, or take Pen-dog the border collie and disappear into the bush for a few hours. But here, in the city, if you didn’t have friends, what did you have?
But at least by Wednesday night we had a couch. When I let myself into the house after school expecting no-one to be home, there it sat, squat in the living room, a tiny floral two-seater, and Mum was standing there smiling expectantly at me. She said, ‘Taa-daa!’ She wanted to surprise me. She said she thought it looked ‘light’ and ‘fresh’ and made the room look bigger, funnily enough, and so when we sat on it, squished up together, I tried to look excited and pleased, for her sake. I didn’t want her to start worrying about me. Not after everything she’d been through. None of this was her fault. Well, not really. Somehow I would just have to make everything okay.
So I tried. I really tried. I really, really, really tried. But the smile froze on my face like the grimace of a crazy clown.
And on Thursday morning I knew I couldn’t try anymore. Not about the couch. Not about school. Not about anything.
Thursday
Robin
On Thursday morning I sat at the kitchen bench, poking at my cereal with my spoon. Mum was in the bathroom, steam billowing out under the door, her singing meandering through the air around me.
‘Use the fan!’ I yelled, but the singing continued. I looked at the book open on the bench in front of me. My Field Guide to the Birds of Australia. I had the page open at a picture of a Black-faced Cuckoo-Shrike, but I wasn’t really looking. I was using it as a window to fall through, to escape, while I tried desperately to think of a way to convince my mother I was sick. And I was sick – very sick. Very, very sick at the thought of going to school. I couldn’t go to school. I couldn’t face another day surrounded by people and talking to no-one.
And I was tired. I hadn’t slept because the attic under the roof was so hot, and because our house was so bloody small that through the night, through the darkness, I could hear Mum’s sighs from downstairs. Sighs or cries, I wasn’t sure which. I didn’t want to know. And this morning she looked so tired, and I felt mixed up and confused about what I should say to her. How should I talk to her? We used to talk to each other really well, but yesterday Mum asked me if I’d made any friends. I said, Delia Mann. She said she knew that, but anyone other than Delia. Delia is in one of her classes, and I think she thinks Delia is a bit strange. And then she recommended some other girls from my form room who were also in her history class.
‘What about Natasha? She seems like a nice enough girl.’
‘She’s okay.’
‘There you are then.’ That was my mother’s version of a problem solved. Well it was these days, anyway. I always to used feel much better after talking to my mum, but lately things were odd between us. Not odd, just . . . oh, I didn’t know. She was still as hard and quiet as after that first wrong day, after the fire, when I came back from stamping out embers behind the dam and she was crying and yelling at Dad to leave. Hard and quiet and sad. And sighing through the night.
Mum was out of the shower. The humming in the pipes had stopped. I heard the door slide back, and Mum’s padding feet come my way. Quick, Robbie, turn down the corners of your mouth, try out a little cough, slump your shoulders a bit. Mum appeared in her robe with a towel around her head.
‘Mum, I don’t feel very well.’
‘Oh, really? Let me feel your head. Seems fine. And you’ve got a good colour. What sort of sick do you feel?’
‘Um . . . like my glands are all . . .’ Mental note: remember to research illnesses before trying to pull a swift one on my mother. ‘And my head is kind of . . .’
‘Well, for a sta
rt, honey, swollen glands are a bit higher than where you’re poking with your fingers. We call that your collarbone.’
‘Oh.’
Mum stood back and looked at me. I didn’t do anything, cough or anything, but suddenly she just changed the way she was being a bit, like she decided to stop pretending to be strict. I’d even tried to straighten my shoulders, you know, buck up against adversity, make her proud, but they fell forward again, and I slumped over my book. ‘But I think you are exhibiting real symptoms of “life-is-hard-at-the-moment-and-I-really-need-someone-to-cut-me-some-slack”. Which is only cured by someone cutting you some slack.’
She cupped the back of my head and looked me in the eyes. I hate it when she does that. It makes me five years old again, not nearly seventeen. Against my will my eyes prickled and got moist.
‘Oh, honey,’ she said and hugged me.
I didn’t want her hug. I didn’t want to feel like this. I wanted to be hard and quiet like she had been. I sat still until she finished.
She straightened quickly. ‘Well, some of us have school today, and it’s getting late. There’s enough food for you to scratch around and find some lunch. And stay inside today, don’t answer the door to anybody and no going out – you don’t really know this area, and it’s not like home, love, it’s not as safe. And also, if you’re pretending to be sick, then I want you to really pretend: wrap yourself up in a doona and watch TV all day. Lord knows that’s what I’d be doing . . .’ And she disappeared into her room.
Obediently I fetched my doona from upstairs and made a little nest for myself on the couch, complete with pillows, remote control, and my Field Guide to the Birds of Australia, my prized sixteenth-birthday present, given to me by Dad before it all went wrong and, quite frankly, much less use to me now in the city than when we were at home. Anyone can identify a sparrow. Mum came out of her room, all stylish, poured out two cups of coffee, handed me one, and quickly drank hers standing at the kitchen bench. She put down her cup and came and sat beside me on the couch. She brushed my hair back from my forehead.
As Stars Fall Page 5