Linda Johnson crouches behind the partly see-through shrub, divesting herself. As she stands and rearranges her skirt, a sense of elation and wellbeing sweeps over her. She steps away, leaving a part of herself on the ground, and walks back to the car, eagerly. Red dust seeps into the tiny creases in her white leather sandals. She doesn’t realise it, but her eyes are shining, her lips are smiling, but inwards, at her own joke. Evan sees this unfathomable look and smiles too, trying to catch her eye. They say nothing as he starts the car, each looking at the road ahead.
Linda has just completed a successful dump and erase. It’s a phrase Evan will come to know well during his tracking station years. As a spacecraft orbits the earth, it will gather long lists of numbers, more every second, too many to hold inside its primitive brain. The solution is to periodically wipe the slate clean so that it can gather new lists of numbers. The request goes out, in spacecraft-speak, for permission to dump and erase. ‘Yes,’ whispers Evan to the spacecraft, ‘you may.’ And the spacecraft delivers its load, dumps all of its numbers into the eager Dish below and moves on, clean and refreshed. And then, like the attendants who once analysed every bowel movement of the Dauphin, the technicians will analyse these figures before putting them carefully away. Like the pages of French copperplate, they are with us still.
Linda Johnson looks out at the pink road and big blue sky. Her mother, Agnes, used to stop what she was doing and stand still for moments at a time. She might be chopping carrots or wiping dishes. Linda would see the blankness come over her mother’s face, this strange suspended animation. And then her mother would look at the half-chopped carrot as if seeing it for the first time, as if wondering what on earth it could be. Then, if you kept watching, you might see the moment of transition as recognition dawned and Agnes reanimated. This was like water soaking into a dry sponge, making it flexible again. It made her father talk. He talked and talked, as if by talking he might be able to come to the bottom of it. With Agnes sitting quietly in a corner, smiling vaguely, he would declaim to a room full of other declaiming men all gathered around the kitchen table. They would smoke and talk and drink the strong coffee that Agnes was always heating on the stove.
At school, Linda learned that her father was a commo, her mother a reffo – a double misfortune. Children whispered that her parents were spies. She was left sitting alone on a school bench in smelling distance of the rubbish bin. She watched how other girls casually approached a skipping game, their bodies already subtly moving in time, the effortless way they moved in over the rope, not missing a beat. The playground filled and emptied, leaving Linda sitting on her bench as though stuck to it. She decided to read books and pretend she didn’t care. She read boys’ books out of the library: Treasure Island and Robinson Crusoe and Ivanhoe, full of adventure and carelessness. She realised she was enjoying her books. Maybe she really didn’t care.
Exactly at this point, when they sensed that Linda didn’t care, a little group of girls approached Linda, encouraging her to come out into the playground under their protection. Linda played this card cautiously. She shook her head and stuck to her reading for a time, making herself the aloof cat that someone wants to pat. She let them coax and coax her. And then, just at the right moment, she agreed. Having studied the moves carefully, she blended easily into the skipping game, jumping up and down to the rhythms of the rope.
All this time, there had been another girl on the far end of the same bench where Linda had sat; a plump girl with psoriasis and uncombed hair. It hadn’t occurred to either of them to form a salon des refuses. Each had eyes only on the main game in front of them; each struggled with her exclusion alone. But now Linda was conscious, as she swayed her body in front of the rope, waiting for exactly the moment to run in and jump, that the girl with cracked and bubbling skin was sitting on the bench watching her.
Linda studied how normal people lived. They seemed to like tennis and other light-hearted pastimes, and if she wanted to fit in, she would do well to learn them. Her parents were of limited use in this regard: her mother was weighed down by the death of most of her relatives in the war and her father was always out at party meetings. So Linda became an autodidact, guiding her own education in tennis, doubles bridge and the best way to cut up a Queensland Blue pumpkin.
Linda got very good at Normal and even began to surpass the usual benchmarks. Like Indian families more British than British, she was more normal than normal. She conducted friendships outdoors and in public places and other people’s homes. It was not that she was ashamed of her parents, it was just that their sadness and fierceness would get her nowhere in the life she wanted to join. At nineteen, she played tennis in a pair of frilly knickers that she had made from a pattern. Her short white skirt would flip up to reveal them when she stretched and twisted. This caught the eye of Evan Johnson, who blushed to the roots of his already-endangered hair. Linda walked boldly towards him, ignoring his discomfort. She seized the opportunity to wriggle away from the claws of Tragedy and History.
She has dumped. Her leavings sit in a small mound behind the see-through acacia bush, garnished with pink toilet paper, under the enormous silence of a perfectly blue sky. Now, she is preparing to erase.
They come unexpectedly upon a sign promising refreshments half a mile down the road. Spirits rise. They pull in at the corrugated-iron roadhouse softened by a massive purple bougainvillea and leggy geraniums in cement tubs. A thin boy with jug ears comes out to fill the car with petrol and squeegee the smashed insects across the windscreen. Rivulets of red water flee from the black rubber strip. Evan, always alive to how things work, notes the sound of a diesel generator. He goes over to look at it, stretching his arms and legs.
Linda takes Jo to the toilet, and then to see the galah in a cage under a small tree. There is a cuttlefish wedged into the wire just above the level of the bird’s head. As they approach the cage, Linda begins to sing: Dance, cocky, dance! The galah looks at her and looks at Jo but continues to stand still, its beak open. It briefly lifts its white crest up and down in lieu of a dance. Jo studies the green and white droppings on the bottom of the cage, the sunflower seed husks, the beak marks in the cuttlebone. She will immediately forget all of this, but Linda won’t, because it is part of the story of her new life.
It is dark inside, after the glare. A bottle opener is tied to a long grubby knotted string that disappears behind the laminated counter. Paper drinking straws with faded red and blue helix stripes stand tall in a metal cylinder.
‘Warm for winter,’ says the boy as he takes Evan’s money. The till throws itself open with a thwack and a ting.
‘It is warm,’ says Evan.
‘It’s hot!’ says Linda. ‘We’ve just come from Melbourne, where it’s absolutely freezing, so for us this is just like the middle of summer!’
The boy glances at Linda and looks away. She is glossy and magnificent, like a racehorse.
‘Heading for the poor?’ the boy asks of Evan.
Evan and Linda look at him. Then Evan remembers something he has been told – that the locals refer to Port Badminton, their destination, as the Port.
‘Yes, we’re off to the Port,’ says Evan.
‘Holiday?’
‘To live.’
The boy and Evan leave it at that. Both are sparing with words. On the front cover of The Lucky Country there’s a painting by Albert Tucker of a man with a beer in his hand, an ace of spades in his pocket, sun and sea and sail behind him, his mouth shut because all of this speaks for itself.
‘Ice-cream,’ says Jo, just as they are about to step back out through the plastic strips in the doorway. These are the only words she needs to use. She can stand back now and watch them take effect.
Evan would like to get going, but he can see that an ice-cream is only fair.
He gets his wallet out again, and the roadhouse boy slides the milky-coloured plastic to one side, revealing two metal
tubs of ice-cream, one creamy white, the other pink. He dips the scoop into a metal milkshake cup and flicks the water off it, awaiting further instructions.
‘Strawberry or vanilla?’ asks Linda, but these words go over Jo’s head. Evan holds her up over the icy, vaporous tubs so she can see in. ‘That one, or that one?’
‘That one.’
Out in the sun, Evan and Linda suck their fizzy drinks through straws, monitoring Jo’s progress with her ice-cream. It is melting in the sun, streams of pink running down both hands to the elbows.
‘Let me neaten it off for you,’ says Evan. He hands Linda his drink and takes the ice-cream from Jo. He stands there in the sun, licking expertly around the edges, getting rid of the melted stuff, leaving a core of the hard stuff.
It was just as Donald Horne described it in The Lucky Country: ‘The image of Australia is of a man in an open-necked shirt solemnly enjoying an ice-cream. His kiddy is beside him.’
Evan is back at the wheel, the motor running as he waits for Linda to reinstall a mopped-down Jo. At this moment, Evan Johnson has five years, twenty weeks, thirteen hours, nine minutes and approximately twenty-two seconds to live. When he suddenly disappears, presumed dead, he will leave a whole neat drawer of long socks, all matched impotently to their mates, never again to be animated by his purposeful feet.
Linda gets in and slams her door. Evan’s right foot, in its sweaty sock, in its humid shoe, presses down on the accelerator.
THREE
Stolen
As Evan Johnson was pressing down on the accelerator, trying to speed up time, I was sitting listlessly in my cage in Clam Street. Time had slowed to a barely moving thing. I sat, and nothing happened. I inched sideways up my perch and sat there. Nothing happened. I inched back the other way. I hooked my claws into the wire and screamed. Nobody came out to see why. I didn’t know, then, that it was five years, twenty weeks, thirteen hours, nine minutes and approximately twenty-two seconds to Liberation. Evan Johnson would fall, and I would rise.
Falling man, rising bird.
I can barely remember how I came to be trapped in the cage at the Kellys’. The memories come in a series of images, of feelings, of darkness and rocking. They grew stronger after I saw a picture in the Australasian Bird Fancier. I was reading over Lizzie’s shoulder – from her shoulder, that is – when we spotted a colour photograph of a baby galah.
It was a tiny thing of translucent pink and grey skin, enormous bluish eye bulges and flipper-like wing buds. It was stuck all over with the quills that would become feathers. After a moment, Lizzie tried to turn the page, but I beaked my way down her arm and put my claw out to stop her. I needed to look for longer, to imagine myself as a baby; to weep for myself.
I was sure I could remember my earliest days, nestled with my siblings in our hole in the gum tree on the bank of Chinaman’s Pool. We squabbled, elbowed each other, fell asleep and woke up as we waited for our parents to return and feed us. We were one mass of tiny birds, only just beginning to differentiate, to express our various personalities. We were learning how to surprise each other; how to laugh and engage in basic slapstick.
And then a human hand reached in, making exploratory movements to the left and right. We had never seen such a thing before. We were so surprised that we simply sat there like idiots, gaping. The fingers passed over my siblings and closed over me.
I was dropped headfirst into a shirt pocket. I could hear the roar and thump of the giant beating heart underneath it. The hand held the opening of the pocket closed. Thus, I was borne away in darkness from Chinaman’s Pool.
My foster parent was a skinny barefoot nine-year-old boy who rarely went to school. You could see his rib cage, you could hear the rumblings in his stomach. He hand-raised me, pushing bits of bread and water into my beak. I loved these meals, the gentleness with which they were administered. I began to fall in love with him. We played gentle little games. Under his care, I grew quickly. My feathers came through. One day he told me I had to raise enough money for a pie. He said if I wasn’t sold, he might have to make me into a pie. He would have to pluck me and chop me up into little pieces and put me in the oven in a pastry case. When I screamed he said, ‘Shoosh, I’m only joking.’
But he was serious about selling me on. He put me in a splintery wooden box with narrow-gauge chicken wire nailed over the top of it, and knocked on doors. I was peered at and admired, but it wasn’t until we arrived at Kevin Kelly’s blue house in Clam Street that genuine interest was expressed.
Little fingers came in through the chicken wire like waving sea anemones. I nipped at them, drawing blood. ‘What did I tell you?’ bellowed a gingery man. ‘Bitey!’
I was moved into a larger wire cage, the one I was to inhabit for the duration of my life with the Kellys. This cage was about two feet by two feet wide and about two and a half feet tall. As I grew to full size, I found I did not have quite enough room to completely stretch out my wings.
My meals were all the same; mixed seed poured into my tin dish. Mrs Kelly barely looked at me as she cleaned my dishes; she wore the same expression as she did when watering the garden or pegging the clothes out on the line.
At the bottom of my cage there was a metal tray to collect my droppings. This would occasionally be removed and hosed out. At these times, I’d enjoy some time on the patchy grass of the Kelly backyard. I’d feel the spray from the hose and get a good view of the sky.
Every day, sometimes for hours on end, I called out to my bird flock. It was a double chirrup, the double chirrup that means:
Where are you?
I’m here!
Wait for me!
Over here!
Over here!
I’m not sure exactly what I was hoping for. Did I think my brothers and sisters were in those flocks? My parents? Did I think they would sneak up to my cage in the dead of night, unhook my little latch and take me with them? I don’t think I knew in any detail; I just wanted release and relief, and that pink and grey flock represented it.
But they couldn’t hear me. They were flying too high, too fast.
I paced up and down on my perch. Trapped. Forgotten.
And then a boy of about my age landed on the fence. It was a quiet interlude; the Kellys were all indoors, perhaps having an afternoon nap or playing cards.
We began to chat, he from the fence, me from my cage.
He came back from time to time. Eventually he told me, shyly, that he was looking for a girlfriend.
I asked him to come over and inspect my latch. He looked over his shoulder, this way and that. The coast was clear. He landed on my cage in a sudden, exhilarating movement. Just inches away from my face, the pink and grey feathers, a beating heart. I could see the individual pink feathers under his eyes; the expressive arch of white feathers in his crest. I vibrated with flock-feeling. The flying muscles in my shoulders began to pull. I felt the urgency and possibility. The young galah looked at the latch first with one eye, and then turned his head and looked with the other. He beaked it, tested it with his tongue, brought a claw up to it.
‘This is easy,’ he said, and flicked the little hook. The door swung open.
And then there was the swish and thwack of the screen door, and Mr Kelly came through it. I froze where I was on the perch, one claw up, one wing out, as if in a game of statues.
‘Marj! Come and have a look at this!’
Marj took a moment to appear, tea towel in hand, a slight frown.
‘What?’
‘Look at the cage.’
Marj approached, not seeing.
‘It’s been unlatched,’ said Mr Kelly. ‘A wild galah unlatched it! I saw it fly off!’
‘Are you sure you didn’t just leave it open?’ said Mrs Kelly. ‘When you did the water?’
‘No, I’m saying I saw a wild galah unlatching the door of the cage.’
&n
bsp; ‘One of the kids probably did it,’ said Mrs Kelly. ‘A wild galah wouldn’t do that.’
‘I saw it, Marj!’ Mr Kelly insisted.
Small children appeared.
‘Cocky nearly flew away,’ Kevin Kelly told them.
The children began to cry. By now I was theirs, and they did not like to lose things.
‘You’ve got to clip the wing, Kev,’ said Mrs Kelly.
Kevin Kelly relatched my cage.
Clip the wing. It didn’t sound good.
Kevin Kelly pins me down top of the ironing board. I struggle and writhe.
‘Hold it down properly, Kev,’ says Mrs Kelly.
His big strong hands press down. He could easily kill me but is choosing not to. I stare up at him with one eye. He seems sympathetic, but he is doing what he is told. Mrs Kelly’s dressmaking scissors come in for a short, sharp snip. I scream my death scream. It comes from deep inside; like my chirruping call to galahs flying overhead, it surprises me, this voice made of pure instinct. I hear a wailing chorus from the children outside the door. They are crying for me. As soon as he releases the pressure, I latch on to Kevin Kelly’s big meaty thumb.
Back in the cage, I crooned over myself. I sat miserably in a corner, refusing to eat or dance. This went on for an age, or perhaps only twenty minutes. I was a very young galah, and easily distracted. As consolation, I was given a cuttlebone. My beak sank into the silky, pleasantly resistant substance. The children were paying more attention to me: they, too, had felt the punishing hands of Mr and Mrs Kelly. I had gained sibling status.
And Mr Kelly planted sunflowers for me.
I heard my name mentioned as he dropped seeds into the ground and watered them in. At first they were too small for me to see, but I watched as the children and Mr Kelly hunkered down around them, discussing the tiny twin leaves that had appeared above the ground. They grew quickly in the Port Badminton sunshine and cold water from the tap in the kitchen. They were giants, like Jack’s beanstalk. Finally, against the sky, the translucent yellow petals. The Kellys admired them and, as they discussed them, they kept mentioning my name.
The Lucky Galah Page 3