Slowly, they withered and died. The black seeds sloughed off their fuzz, revealing themselves in a dazzling spiral.
‘It’s nearly time to give the seeds to the cocky,’ said Mr Kelly one day.
I danced eagerly, greedy and impatient.
But nothing happened. I screeched for hours, nobody knew why, and I couldn’t explain. I said, in a raspy dry little voice, ‘Cocky want a drink’ and ‘Dance, cocky, dance’. I used every phrase, every sentence, in my repertoire. I couldn’t find the magic key, the word that would open the door to the experience I craved. I screamed blue murder.
And then, one day, it happened. My patience had paid off. I sat calmly, quivering only slightly as they pushed pieces of the giant seed head in through the little gate in my cage. I gorged. I steadied the piece of sunflower head in one claw and dipped my beak in among the black seeds packed closely together. I nuzzled into them, picking them out one by one, rubbing the shells between upper and lower beak until they cracked and the grey inner seed emerged onto my tongue. I swallowed down and then dipped in again. I did this, systematically, until the bottom of the cage was a carpet of spent cartridges. I felt ill, but I still eyed off the remaining heads on the old table near the back door.
‘She loves it, doesn’t she?’
And then I saw him. The wild young galah.
He was sitting on the fence with his girlfriend, casually, as if nothing were amiss.
I screeched in rage. The girlfriend rolled her eyes and flew off, out of sight. I could hear her calling him, telling him to hurry up.
I quieted down and looked at him. He was handsome, bursting with flight and possibility. He looked at me, wordlessly. If things had been different . . .
I would like to say that I was fully present to this moment; that I inhabited the grief and sadness; that I said a dignified goodbye. The fact is, I was waiting for him to leave so that I could quell my stabbing jealousy and rage by tearing into the seed head. I gorged until I’d eaten everything in the cage and then screamed for more. It was only later, looking back, that the sadness welled up and became almost unbearable.
I was now, truly, a caged galah, a pet. It was easier to choose not to hear the exuberant calls of the flock. I began to lose the language of my birth and to think in English. I learned it along with my new little human flock. From babble to simple commands to whole sentences; experimental applications of the rules of grammatical structure. These sentences began to run together, to become richer, capable of being deployed to beg, to taunt, to entertain. During daylight hours, the yard was a scene of constant vocalisation and movement: calling, shrieking, fighting, flailing, flushing. I was on a permanent campaign to make them notice me, to join in.
Sometimes Kevin Kelly would scratch me behind the ear. I’d enjoy it for a moment, purring like a cat, and then sink my beak into his big wide finger.
I couldn’t help it. I’d bite before I knew what I was doing. I’d bite out of excitement, joy, neediness, desperate attention-seeking. I soon had a poor reputation.
‘It bites,’ the Kellys would warn visitors.
As a biter, I was shunned. Shunned, I became dull and sometimes irritating company.
I wasn’t happy, but I got used to it. I sat in my cage and watched the Kelly family and its attendant relatives and neighbours. There were nicely dressed ladies, some wearing perfume, who hurried across the yard to the toilet. In time I understood that these were Mrs Kelly’s customers; she was making dresses for them.
Every now and then the lazy ginger cat would absent-mindedly rub itself on the corner of my cage. I’d stealthily stretch out a claw and squeeze its tail. The cat would jump and hiss. I found this hilarious. I was always looking for the cat, hoping it would come my way.
At dawn, sometimes, I’d catch a whiff of a smell that reminded me of the eucalypt I was born in.
I’d watch the moon rise from over the back fence, behind a tree, and then clear the tree. Then it would disappear behind the roofline of the back verandah, leaving just moonlight. Sometimes the Kellys stood out in the backyard, not far from my cage, and discussed the moon. There would be three or four people of different sizes and a caged galah, looking up at the moon together. They said a man was going to walk on the moon. That’s why there was a Dish.
A dish, a moon, a spoon. I misunderstood most of what I heard.
The Kellys would all go back inside the house, the screen door closing with a little thwip. I’d think about the moon. I imagined a man hanging on to the side of the moon as it rose in the sky. The surface looked slippery; I couldn’t see how his feet could possibly get a grip.
And then I’d prepare for bed by turning my face back over my body, nestling my beak into my own feathers. And sleep.
***
Lizzie tried again to turn the page. I nipped her on the hand. She said: ‘Stop it, you little mongrel,’ and swept me roughly off the magazine so that I toppled onto the floor.
I sulked, waddling across the floor, climbing up my perch. I muttered angrily, in words and phrases that had the rhythm and vowel sounds of cussing and swearing, if not the correct dentition.
I continued my reverie, my brooding.
***
I began to take an interest in stories. Perhaps this was a genetic, instinctual trait: galahs are consummate storytellers, playful and freewheeling. They embellish, exaggerate, play for laughs. Sitting alone in my cage at the Kellys’, I knew nothing of this tradition, but I found myself leaning forward, listening closely, when the children – my new siblings – began to tell tales. For example:
‘Mum, Susan put her pants on her head.’
‘Did not!’
‘Did so!’
‘Stop it, you two.’
‘But, Mum! Susan put her pants on her head!’
I can see – now – that this is not a particularly good story. But to a young galah there were possibilities. The imagination fired. Yes, a child would look very funny with its pants on its head! I screamed with laughter. Pants! Head! I hung upside down in my cage and screeched, throwing my head from side to side. If I’d had tears in my eyes they would have been running down my face and onto the floor of the cage, to be soaked up in the dry newspaper there. If I’d had arms I’d have been clutching them at my sides from laughing so hard. I screeched until they all turned to me and said, ‘Shut up, cocky!’
And I said, ‘Shut up, cocky!’
And they all thought that was funny. This was how I joined in.
I wanted to tell stories of my own. I wanted an audience, a listener, someone. But there was a problem in transmission. I could think them up, but I could not make myself understood.
I would become despondent, but I never quite gave up. I made up stories, kept them in my mind, went over them, improved them.
I worked with the material at hand. I studied the geraniums and vinca in the foreground and the riot of purple bougainvillea in the distance, beyond the toilet. At night, insects would gather around the dim light bulb on the back verandah if it was left on by mistake. The cat, wide awake through the night, might arrive with a rabbit or a rat. The sunflowers. The arrival of the second-hand electric twin-tub washing machine that turned Mrs Kelly’s life around. The garden hose spraying water in a great glittering arc. Oh, how I loved that water! Sometimes on a sweltering day I’d be carried out, cage and all, to a spot of scraggly dry grass in the backyard to be hosed lightly in a fine spray. Most of all there was the toilet, and the to-ing and fro-ing. Eventually someone would appear for a toilet run. They might be in there for a brief time or a long time. Others might gather at the door, banging on it, pleading or demanding.
‘Hurry up! I’ve got to go!’
There might be a small, miserable reply.
‘I can’t.’
I pieced together information about the world beyond the yard – places like School and Down the Street
– through repeated phrases and fragments of story.
‘I’m just going Down the Street. Anyone want to come?’
Or:
‘Stop it now. You have to go to School.’
‘No!’
‘Do you want a smack on the bottom?’
Down the Street was popular; School unpopular.
At the mention of Down the Street they’d all come running out the back door and disappear around the side of the house. There would be the sound of a car engine firing up – or quite often the sound of an engine desperately turning over but failing to ignite – and then the deep silence that would ensue once all Kellys were off the premises.
Then, without the noise, I could hear it: the sound of the galah flock in the distance. An aching, painful, aerial sound. I would block it by shrieking, by thinking, by flapping. I preferred not to listen.
Then they’d all be back. They’d have milk and bread and sometimes prizes like a tin of sweetened condensed milk or little white bags of mixed lollies to be savoured but also fought over and cried over, sometimes in front of me.
I started small with my stories. The cat is walking on the moon with its pants on its head. Or: The washing machine is biting the buttons off all the school shirts.
Then I began to develop my ideas.
The bougainvillea rustles out of the yard in the middle of the night and goes down the main street of town. It rustles right down the main street, dropping its papery purple flowers all the way, and comes back before dawn. The bougainvillea comes back with milk and bread held in its branches. It holds them there greedily, hiding them under its flowers and leaves, not eating or drinking them, until the bread goes hard and stale and the milk goes yellow and smelly. Two weeks later a boy finds them and says, ‘What’s this bread and milk doing in the bougainvillea?!’ He looks bamboozled. He has the look of a cartoon character with a great big question mark over his head. The end.
Are you laughing? Well, probably not. But it was one of my earliest stories, and I’m fond of it. You can see that I’m beginning to sustain a narrative, to get movement on the page, to explore the idea of puzzlement.
I told myself stories, lots of funny stories. I laughed to myself a lot. Sometimes I’d make myself weep. I’d spend days crafting something elegant, something funny, something snaking this way and that, doubling back on itself like a galah in flight, something to make you wonder, something to stop time, something to pass time, something to make you sit beside my cage, spellbound. I had the story, I was bursting to tell it, but I had no way to tell it. I’d have the words on the tip of my bulbous tongue, but when I opened my beak, all I could say was:
Dance, cocky, dance!
or
Cocky want a drink?
or
Hello, cocky!
or
Shut up, cocky!
That’s when I’d scream in frustration. There was no greater frustration than that. I’d have the funniest, wittiest, cutest little story – and no way to tell it.
When I finally saw Down the Street and School, I was amazed. They were nothing like what I had imagined. Down the Street was altogether less vivid. There were no great vats holding lollies, no camels carrying monkeys on their backs, no aeroplanes landing on the tarmac. School was surrounded by a low fence, easily scaled by any child; the gate at the front was easily unlatched. Any child could have escaped at will.
The Sea, by contrast, was more powerful, more dazzling, than anything I had imagined. I saw it on my second walk with Lizzie. The glittering Indian Ocean. This was Kevin Kelly’s realm, and he had barely mentioned it in all those years. We went out again at sunset, when the sky over the dark sea was lit up in pink and orange and grey. I almost swooned off Lizzie’s shoulder.
It was on Lizzie’s shoulder, as we made our way about town, that I was able to reconnect – to some extent – with my galah colleagues, wild and caged. We could shout a few words to each other as Lizzie and I passed under the gum tree near the post office where galahs liked to land and gossip; we’d stop to talk to a pet galah in a cage on a front verandah.
These connections are transient, and bittersweet. Among wild galahs I find teenage tales about who is pairing off with whom of little interest; older galahs become impatient with my blank stares when they discuss the merits of different types of hollows in mature eucalypts or hilarious prickle feasts on the town oval. Pet galahs can be narrow, depressive and incurious. I try to talk about my reading, or test my stories, but these topics fall flat. Still, there is something to be said for these remnants of pink and grey company. They remind me: I am a bird.
***
Lizzie comes wheedling back to me making little kissing noises, holding out a bony finger to scratch me under the ear. I give in, and soon we are back at the table eating biscuits and drinking tea. I understand, all over again, how lucky I am.
FOUR
The wooden salad bowl
Linda and Evan had studied the place, Port Badminton, in Evan’s old school atlas. They’d looked at how Shark Bay jutted out halfway up the west side of the continent; at how the town was just a tiny speck surrounded by nothing but outback on one side and the Indian Ocean on the other. It would always be warm there, at that latitude.
On the day of the interview, Linda rang Evan’s office to say he was sick and would not be coming in. Evan took the tram across town, feeling hot and uncomfortable in the same suit he had worn for his wedding. When he was shown into the interview room, he saw immediately that he was overdressed. The two men opposite him were wearing open-necked shirts, their sleeves rolled up. It seemed Evan had caught these men mid-stream in a discussion that had begun some time before. They looked up, stood, and shook hands. Then they sat down and resumed their conversation. Evan, assuming they were waiting for someone else, a third interviewer perhaps, joined the discussion. He was still waiting for the interview to begin when he realised it had ended and that he was being ushered out. Afterwards, he stood on the street for a moment, wondering whether it had gone well or badly, not knowing whether to feel one thing or another.
When he got home, Linda zeroed in on the problem of the suit and the interview’s inconclusive start and finish, and decided it was hopeless. She even cried about it, because the idea of Port Badminton had begun to grow on her. Then, believing it was hopeless, she turned her mind to other things. She had almost completely forgotten about Port Badminton when she found an envelope – On Her Majesty’s Service – in the letterbox. She put it in the middle of the table.
Glancing at the envelope as the afternoon wore on, she allowed herself little rills of hope. At four o’clock she put a small vase of flowers next to it, to dramatise it. Then she held it up to the light, hoping to read through the paper. Yes or no? Heads or tails? Here or there? But it was opaque.
The answer, of course, was yes. Good fortune was smiling on Evan Johnson, a man who happened to be in the right place at the right time with an ideal set of technical skills. Had he been born twenty years earlier, he might have been presented with different challenges: being shot at over the sea in a fighter plane, for example, or trying to survive a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp.
Instead, he was being offered the perfect job for a man of his interests and abilities, for which he would be paid handsomely. He bought a brand-new blue EH Holden station wagon and, on the same day, drove Linda and little Jo to a department store, where they selected a complete set of modern, light pieces of furniture that could easily be packed and sent ahead. They sold or gave away their dark, heavy, second-hand things.
The miles on the posts have all been consumed. The Johnsons have arrived exactly thirty minutes after their Estimated Time of Arrival. They get out of the car in front of their new house in Clam Street, slightly wobbly on land. Evan lifts the lid of the new letterbox beside the front gate. Inside, as expected, there is an envelope, and inside that, a brass key. ‘Look
at your new house, Jo!’ says Linda. And Evan says: ‘Everything is all set. It’s all working like a charm.’
Children in pyjamas run out of a house further down the street, shrieking, ‘They’re here! They’re here!’ only to disappear again.
The Johnsons mount the stairs to their front door. It swings open, easily, on oiled hinges. In the brand-new kitchen – the smell of newness still rising from surfaces – Evan and Linda find a childishly rendered WELCOME sign hanging from string. The refrigerator is on and purring. There is an electric jug on the bench, and teacups and saucers. There is a note written by the wife of one of Evan’s colleagues. This is an invitation to a welcoming barbecue tomorrow night. But we won’t disturb you tonight – we’ll let you settle in!
Evan shuts himself into the toilet while Linda and Jo run up and down the length of the house, opening doors, looking into rooms, all of which already have some useful furniture in them. Cold, struggling Melbourne, dark heavy furniture, woolly coats, itchy stockings all seem a long way away. Watched by Linda, Jo runs into Evan’s arms when he reappears in the kitchen after a triumphant flush of the toilet. They all do a little jig, even though Evan normally doesn’t dance.
The next morning, a twelve-seater van turns up in front of the house to collect Evan for work. Linda and Jo stand near the letterbox as Evan hops in. He is wearing a new pair of long white socks, unleashed just that morning from their cellophane packet. Through the van’s windows Linda can see him shaking hands with the other men. They wave briefly to Linda or nod their heads. Linda and Jo stand beside the letterbox, watching until the van disappears from view.
In the van, Evan eagerly joins the banter, signing up on the spot for the Trackers, their own basketball team. Like Evan, some of these men are wearing horn-rimmed glasses in the style of Donald Horne himself, as seen in the author photograph on the back cover of The Lucky Country. All, including the driver, are wearing shorts and polished shoes and long socks.
The Lucky Galah Page 4