As Stars Fall

by Christie Nieman

I could look out on this road, and these paddocks, and listen to the frogs and the curlew, and pat Penny’s head, and imagine that everything was the same.

  But it wasn’t. Everything was different.

  Sunday

  Robin

  I walked through the door of the tiny house in the city early evening on Sunday. I had in my hand the envelope addressed to my mother in Dad’s writing, which he had handed to me when I had stopped by his camp on the way to the station. The envelope wasn’t sealed, and I took it as a great sign of my maturity that I survived a two-hour train trip with the letter in my sole possession, and I hadn’t opened it at all.

  Mum hugged me and said, ‘Hey, bub, I missed you. Did you have fun?’

  ‘Yeah, it was great. Mrs Dooley wants to call you for a chat during the week. She says to let her know when.’

  ‘Lovely.’

  ‘And Amber and Andy are driving down on Wednesday for their chook day. I said they should hang around afterwards and come over for early dinner before they drive all the way back.’

  ‘Fine.’

  Andy and Amber had been raising and trading rare chooks since they were little. They were the state’s youngest members of the Rare Poultry Breeds Club, and for the past few years they had convinced their mother to let them take a day off school to go to the city and show their chooks at the annual Club Day. The day was mostly oldies, retired people. Amber and Andy loved it; they revelled in the dagginess of it. And they could get away with dagginess like no-one else could. That golden skin of the Dooleys – shit just didn’t stick to it.

  ‘Um, and . . .’ I fingered the envelope, but Mum beat me to it and handed me a big yellow envelope with my name on it – my nickname, and my name.

  ‘This came for you. It was in the box when I went out this morning.’

  I took it from her and said, ‘Snap,’ and handed her the envelope with her own name on the front, no Roberts though, just Roberta.

  ‘What’s this?’ She took it casually, maybe thinking it was from Mrs Dooley. She took it into the kitchen, and absent-mindedly opened the flap of the envelope while she pushed the dishwasher shut and pressed the switch. She pulled the letter out of its envelope and when she read the first line, her face changed.

  ‘He was camping down by the creek,’ I said.

  She looked at me as if I was someone else, or not there, and then looked away, screwed up the letter without reading it, dropped it into the bin, and fiddled some more with the controls on the dishwasher.

  I stood frozen for a moment, staring at her, and then, leaving the yellow envelope with my name on it on the bench, I went upstairs, threw my backpack on the floor and kicked it hard. Then I got some of my clothes out of it and folded them into a drawer. Then I pulled the entire drawer out, threw it onto the floor, and kicked it too. I hurled a book at the wall and it fell onto the bed and then slipped off and onto the floor. And I kicked that as well, as hard as I could, across the room where it slammed into the opposite wall, exploding against the wood, its bruised covers flying apart and spreading a fluttering of pages across the floor.

  Finally I sat on the bed. My eyes prickled. The least she could have done was read the letter. What was it going to hurt, just seeing what he had to say? Well, if she didn’t want it, if it was just rubbish to her, then it didn’t matter if I took it. I would listen to him, even if she wouldn’t.

  I wiped my hand across my wet eyes and climbed back down the ladder. Mum was in her room with the door shut. I went to the fridge and got out some juice, got a glass from the cupboard and put them both on the bench next to the bin. Not that I was doing anything wrong, but it was good to have a cover just in case. I poured the juice into the glass, but when I leaned sideways to look into the bin, my arm hanging down, ready to grab the letter and stuff it into my back pocket, I saw that it had gone. I looked again at Mum’s closed door.

  The package addressed to me was lying on the bench. I picked it up and turned it over. No return address. It must have been hand-delivered. It was strange that it had my nickname on it – a bit cheeky. Perhaps it was from Dad, though how that could be I didn’t really understand. I took my juice and the package upstairs to my room. I dragged my pillow and doona off the bed and dumped them on the rug by the full-length window where the glass met the floor. I sat cross-legged on my pillow and tore open the envelope and held the contents in the light from the window. It was a folder full of loose photocopied sheets, some typed and some handwritten. On the top of the first page it said: Lecture notes for Ecology: 271–203, and it had the name ‘Selina Antonella’ handwritten across the top. I scanned the first typed page. It was some talk about ecological disturbance, or something. It seemed quite dry. I didn’t know who Selina Antonella was or why someone had sent her lectures to me – it was really strange. And it definitely wasn’t from Dad.

  I lay down on the floor and cried quietly into my pillow, and then after a while I rolled over on the floor and, through my tears, stared out of the window at the factory opposite and the strip of sky above it. Pigeons were circling there, gulls too, landing and taking off from the factory roof. Again it just made me think of home, of the birds there, of the lapwings, the sparrowhawks, the white-faced heron. With my dad, years ago, seeing the curlews play together by the creek, and then last night seeing the old curlew come back. And then the curlew I’d imagined I saw in the park – and for an instant I thought one of the gulls out there on the factory roof was a curlew, soft grey instead of stark white. And I felt somehow touched, comforted, befriended in my sadness, not so alone. But I blinked my tears clear and there were only gulls and pigeons. Only a city factory wall. Only this life I had now. So it was true. Both now, and in the park, I had only imagined a curlew to make myself feel better. To make myself feel comforted, to feel more at home. I shouldn’t let myself do that. I shouldn’t let myself imagine anything different to the stupid situation I was in: it didn’t make me feel good for long, and after that, it made me feel sad. It made me feel lost, and totally powerless to change anything, or decide anything, or have any influence over anything, anywhere, ever.

  I wanted to be home. I couldn’t be home. And that was that.

  I didn’t move. I lay there and stared at the strip of sky and let the tears leave my eyes in a steady stream. Mum called out to me. ‘Flame.’ At least I thought she did. It seemed to echo right inside my head. Flame.

  I sat up. ‘Yes?’ I called downstairs.

  ‘What?’ she called back.

  ‘You called me?’

  ‘No I didn’t.’

  I went downstairs and opened her bedroom door without knocking and sat on the end of the bed where she was sitting, propped up against the wall, her fingers toying with the corners of the opened letter, where it lay next to her, limp and rumpled, having given up its contents.

  ‘You didn’t call?’ I said. She shook her head. ‘Well that was weird.’

  Mum looked relaxed. It was the first time in ages. Not that tight, sad thing she’d been doing.

  ‘What did Dad say?’

  ‘Oh . . .’ She tossed the letter away from her own reach. ‘Many stupid things.’

  Was that a smirk? Just around the corners of her mouth there, a twitch?

  ‘Oh. Did he say he was going to live there again?’

  ‘God only knows. He’s saying something about setting up some sanctuary for some bird. Said you’d know all about it. But really, who knows what ridiculous ideas that man has in his head.’ Another smirk? ‘Sorry, hon, I shouldn’t speak like that. He’s your father and you love him.’

  ‘So do you.’

  Too far. My mother’s lips shut tight; the old tightness, the old hardness, back again. Like she was on the other side of a steel gate. I wanted to ask what he’d said about the sanctuary, it sounded like an amazing idea, but I also wanted to say something that would get her interest back. ‘I opened that package.’

  ‘Oh yes. What was it?’ She looked distracted. She sounded distracted.
/>   ‘I don’t really know – some pages about science and conservation. I still don’t know who it’s from.’

  ‘Probably someone at school who knows you like birds and animals and nature.’

  I wanted to jump up and down on the bed, shake her. Instead I tried again to interest her. ‘I’ve flipped through it. Some of it’s handwritten. It looks almost like a journal.’ That’s normally the intriguing stuff she’s right into: anonymous manuscripts, personal diaries. She didn’t blink.

  ‘Maybe it was Mr Krietcher; I may have mentioned you were something of a twitcher.’

  Suddenly I could see how this was going to go, and I hated it. ‘Mum! I don’t want the Creature knowing anything about me, and I really don’t want him knowing that. He’s not my dad – he’ll never be my dad!’

  ‘Good gracious, child, you sound like a soap opera. And no-one ever said he was.’

  ‘You want him to be! You don’t care what I think, you’re selfish, you don’t care, you’re horrible!’ It felt so good to be firing these bullets at her finally, but for the moment it seemed she was bullet-proof behind that steel gate.

  ‘Slow down, missy. You don’t know what I want. I don’t know what I want, and no-one else gets to decide for me, not you, not your father, not Thomas, no-one but me. When I do decide, when I act, it will be my own decision. I will listen to what you all have to say, but I won’t be pushed around.’

  ‘You get to decide! Well good for you, Mum!’ I was shouting, I couldn’t stop. ‘Well bully for you!’ An expression of Dad’s, I knew she’d hate it. ‘You get to decide. But what about me? Everyone else gets to decide for me. When do I get to decide? It’s not fair!’ I hated the way I sounded as I said it. I sounded like a little kid who wasn’t allowed to have cake before dinner. And I stomped up the ladder like a little kid too, and slammed my trapdoor like a little kid, and flopped down on my bed like a little kid, and howled.

  I’d held it all in until now. For her sake. I knew she’d been hit so hard by everything, I wanted to be so good for her. But I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t be happy about any of this. And as I cried my eyes out, I felt again that desperate need to escape. I felt crowded in, powerless. Everything was decided for me. I couldn’t change anything. I needed to get the hell out of there – and not just for the weekend. And why shouldn’t I? If Dad was camping on the property, why couldn’t he just move back in? And if Dad moved back in, why shouldn’t I?

  That was it: I had to make my own decisions. I knew what I wanted. It was clear and simple. I wanted to go home. It didn’t matter what anyone else had to say about it. I was going. I had to. This place was making me strange. And it was only a matter of time before I went completely off my nut.

  *

  I got out on the roof. It was the closest thing to escape I could manage at that moment: it got rid of the feeling of claustrophobia and gave me enough space to think about my plan – how I was going to get myself back home. I sat on the roof in the last of the sun, wiping my face with my sleeve. I took a moment to close my eyes and let the last two days fold back over me: two difficult and wonderful days. It had been great to see my dad and to be at home – well, sort of my home: Amber’s place was close, but it wasn’t quite the same. On the roof there, I just wanted to close my eyes and, like I had the other day, imagine my home, but this time in the hazy mist of autumn, the way it would be soon, when I was living there again. But when I closed my eyes and tried to imagine it, I found myself instead imagining that I was walking that little fire track in the hills where Dad used to take me in autumn and winter to collect firewood, the track where that woman had died in the fire. It’s not even really a track; it’s so rarely used that it’s all overgrown with grass. From our house you couldn’t even see it through the bush, even though you could stare right at the spot on the hill where it was. But if you’ve got a four-wheel drive you can get a little way down the track. Dad used to take me there, from when I was really little, to replenish our firewood supplies – it was some council-delegated area or something. Dad would split the air with the sound of the chainsaw and I’d run off through the undergrowth and explore like a wild thing, getting tangled and snared and dirty, and trying to get far away from the civilisation sound of the chainsaw. I wouldn’t come back until I heard the car horn, and then I’d return to find Dad with his feet on the dash, football on the radio, snoring. I hadn’t been back there, but it would be all different now, after the fire. From the distance of our house I’d watched the line of fire plough right through it.

  I hadn’t meant to think of the fire track, and it was kind of against my will that my mind went there, but when I thought of the word ‘home’, that’s what my mind brought out. And it’s funny: even though it was always autumn or winter when Dad and I went up to the fire track to fetch wood, as I sat on the city roof and walked the track in my mind, it was summer: blazing, harsh-edged, cicada-shrilling summer.

  Seth

  If it is real, if she is real, then it is all true: him, the bird, everything. Delia in the parklands. Delia afraid. If the red girl is real, she made Delia terrified, so terrified that she looked frightened for her life. He remembers the girl looking into him, peering right into him.

  What is happening? How is it happening? Is she doing it? Why is she doing it?

  He needs to know more. He only knows one way. But now he is afraid. He sits by the creek and pulls out an angel joint, fingers shaking, waiting for the bird. He is not in control. Who is? The red girl? Perhaps he shouldn’t do this. Maybe he could lose himself completely. Is that what she wants? What if he never comes back? What if he, the Seth he knows, used to know, ends up nowhere? But, in a way, that is what he wants: to be nothing, to be nowhere. But what happens to Delia if he gets lost, really lost?

  He feels around his pockets for his lighter, comes up empty. Considers the joint, bites off the end of it and begins to chew. This is for Delia, he reminds himself. He swallows. He has to do this to understand, to make sure he can keep her safe.

  As he chews through the second half of the joint the bird appears, right on cue. He sees it out of the corner of his eye, standing by the rushes. He doesn’t turn his head, he keeps his eyes down. The bird stands perfectly motionless in the blur of his peripheral vision, almost invisible – but he knows it’s there: waiting for him.

  He’s frightened, but he wrestles his fear down. This might not be just his own mind. This could be real, the girl could be real. There could be real danger, for himself, and for Delia. He breathes in, his heart speeds up, and he lifts his head to look at the bird. And the bird, standing there patiently, looks back at him; and instantly he drains away from himself, lost to his own sensations.

  And then there is a picture of Seth, that boy-man, sitting over there by the creek; and also there is everything else, the whole environment at once. And the sky is right there. It is so near. It is terrifying. Surely this time it will suck him up, the great shining vortex of it, and he will be lost. But instead he is gently drawn up on soft grey wings. He is flown out of the parklands, over the streets and roofs and yards of the suburbs and, like last time, the joy of flight takes over. Gulls and pigeons calmly wheel about in the sideways sunlight, and he is part of it: this wonderful inhabitation of air.

  The bird brings him again to the roof of the factory and, in the fading light, lands there. The experience of sky dissipates and he moves to the edge of the roof and looks to the street and house below. For a moment Seth thinks that the girl isn’t there, but then he sees her, inside the attic room this time. He watches her through the window. She is lying on a pillow on the floor in front of the window with her hair flung out. She is crying – her eyes puffy and red, her face wet.

  He watches her and forgets everything else. She cries easily. Her tears come effortlessly and unrestrained, and her body trembles, shaking out the sadness. Seth’s mission fades. Instead he finds himself envying her free-flowing tears, her easy sobs. He longs for it, that release. He wants to be ab
le to lament like that. To give way. He watches her, longing for the same for himself, and something begins to happen. He begins to feel that release, feeling it through her. It is his head on that pillow, his eyes looking out at a factory wall, his sense of loss that she cries for. Through her, he feels an easy grief, a sadness readily expressed; his face against the pillow is satisfyingly wet with tears. The flow of such feeling is like a balm.

  And then he experiences a wave of empathy, for her, for the girl – her weeping demands it. And the feeling of it surprises him. It feels like power. The power to soothe. He lifts her own hand to her cheek in comfort. Feels the softness of the skin there under her fingertips, his fingertips. He says her name in his thoughts, just once. He sighs the word in his mind.

  Flame.

  And she hears him. She answers. She sits up from the pillow and says, ‘Yes?’

  *

  He jumps up from the rock by the creek like he’s been shocked. He runs up the hill paying no attention to his direction. His mind skitters and jumps along with his body. He has to understand, it’s important. He saw what she saw, felt what she felt, said her name in his mind, and she heard him. He has to understand. He doesn’t understand. He slows to a stride, putting distance between himself and the creek, himself and that bird, himself and the girl. And when he feels the distance is enough, he slows to a normal walking pace, walking with his head down, walking for a while.

  When he raises his head there are too many trees. He’s gone the wrong way; he must have. He must have looped around, headed back on himself, accidentally found another way into the parklands – into another part of the parklands. It’s almost bush, there are nowhere near the number of houses there should be at the edge. The further he walks, the more scrubby it becomes. He has no bloody idea how he got here, and no idea in which direction to head to get back home. Shit. He grips the cigarette tin in his pocket tightly. He didn’t go ten minutes from his house, the house he’s lived in all his life, and he’s lost. It’s a big park, he tells himself. There must still be areas of it that he doesn’t know. He clenches his fist in his pocket and fresh liquid seeps from his blisters. Has something happened? He feels less of himself. He feels partial, like something has been left behind, or something in him replaced. As if now, when he walks around in his own flesh, the world around him can move and shift and play tricks on him as it wants, can suck him into darkness or strange landscapes. He doesn’t have the same relationship with the world that he had before. He can’t trust it.