The Lucky Galah

by Tracy Sorensen

  She swims two wide circles and returns to the bank. She climbs out of the water, the Dogger’s sight moving from breasts to belly to the triangle of dark hair. She dresses quickly and then sits down on the smooth trunk to buckle her sandals.

  Then she gets up and throws a stone into the water. She watches the concentric circles until the biggest one reaches the riverbank. She’ll go home now.

  ‘Can you make it skip?’ There’s a disembodied male voice coming out of the bush, a friendly voice with a little laugh in it. A barefoot man has materialised. His clothes are caked in red dust. He has the beginnings of a black eye and a cut on his forehead and a streak of dried blood across it.

  ‘No,’ says Linda. ‘Can you?’

  They know each other, but they’ve never spoken personally.

  ‘Nah.’

  They both laugh. She doesn’t mind that he has been watching her. He’s in worse shape than she is.

  ‘How was your evening?’ she asks, looking at his face.

  ‘It didn’t go too well,’ he says, feeling at his eye and forehead with his fingers. ‘How was yours?’

  ‘Not much chop. I drank too much and did something silly. Were you in a fight?’

  ‘Musta been,’ he says. ‘Were you?’ And they both laugh.

  ‘Oh, don’t make me laugh,’ he says. ‘It hurts.’

  Linda looks at him openly. He stands there allowing himself to be looked at. Galahs watch with interest from the trees.

  ‘Can I bother you for a ciggie?’ he asks.

  She lights one for him and passes it over. She sits on the tree trunk as he smokes, saying nothing. Their pheromones mingle in the air between them, getting to know each other.

  ‘I’d better get going,’ she says.

  But she doesn’t move.

  Their pheromones are dancing the mazurka.

  He sits down next to her on the smooth trunk. His hangover is dissipating like magic. He is careful to sit close but not actually touch. They sit quietly side by side for a long time – perhaps as long as thirty seconds – before she turns to him, noting that he is filthy, blood-caked and reeking of alcohol. Without further hesitation, they dive into the sweet water of opportunity.

  Before she even turns the corner into Clam Street, wild galahs have carried the latest gossip all over town.

  Linda goes to pick up Jo. Jo is sitting in Marj’s washing basket with two small Kellys, pretending it’s a boat. She holds out her arms when she sees Linda, just as she did yesterday. Kevin Kelly is there, sitting at the kitchen table in a white singlet. There may be a slight leer on his face – or is she imagining it?

  When she gets home, things are in the same places on the kitchen bench, in the bathroom, in the laundry. Everything is just going along as usual, inviting her to do the same.

  Linda swears off the entomologist and the Dogger and all men who are not her husband. She cleans the house with great vigour.

  But just as the galahs tuned the Dish, the Dogger’s pheromones have tuned Linda’s body. She is like a radar, now, sweeping the vicinity, hoping for answering blips from a dirty Land Rover. She imagines him driving out into the red-earth country, over stones, among wildflowers, a radius of hundreds of miles. He sets his traps and comes back to shoot the dingoes neatly between the eyes.

  From the top floor of the old meatworks, through the crumbling open rectangle that was once a well-made window, he sees her sliding down the back of the sand dune. She is walking this way in her tennis shoes and slacks, casually, turning her head to scan the horizon. The coast is clear. It’s a hot, windless day, but it’s never silent. There’s always the hum and thrum of life. There are insects teeming both above ground and below it. Lizards scuttle out of the way; ants are crushed under the pressure of Linda’s shoes. The cat fur rug is soft against her bare back.

  Linda and Jo run into Harry at the supermarket. Linda is very smooth. She stops and wants to chat, even though it would seem that Harry would like to get away. She detains him in the aisle, asks him about his research, what he is reading. She even asks if he is still troubled by insect bites. Her early-morning visit to his tent has been airbrushed from history.

  Jo sinks to the floor to study the bottles of turpentine and methylated spirits on the bottom shelf.

  Harry tells Linda he has gathered all the data he can about the adult banana weevil and he’ll be leaving shortly, going back to Perth, where he’ll write a paper. He has also decided to accept his publisher’s invitation to write The Wonderful World of Australian Birds. He doesn’t mention the chiming wedgebill.

  Linda is interested in all of this. She imagines herself writing a paper; she hears the satisfying ding of the typewriter, feels the weight of the carriage return under her hand. She will miss Harry and his attention to her mind. Nobody else cares about her mind.

  ‘Well, hooroo, then,’ he says.

  ‘Bye,’ she says, bending down to set Jo on her feet.

  The Dogger is driving along the red dirt track, expertly avoiding sand traps that could keep him bogged for days. He has a load of scalps in the back, and pelts, and whole dead kangaroos in a pile. He would like to make a little extra money, make some new small improvements to his home, now that it sometimes – this is still astonishing – plays host to Linda Johnson.

  He is making good progress when the temperature gauge suddenly begins to climb from C to H. His fanbelt has snapped.

  In among his tools and necessaries, there’s an empty red cardboard box. Printed on the flap is a sentence that he has paid no attention to until now. DETACH END FLAP AS A REMINDER TO REORDER.

  He is in trouble. The vehicle will not get far without a fanbelt. He is in the middle of nowhere with little food and water. There’s nobody – with the possible exception of Linda, but this is by no means guaranteed – to miss him. It might be weeks before the Shire wonders why the Dogger is taking so long to deposit his scalps. His concerns shift rapidly down the hierarchy of human needs from sexual satisfaction to the requirements for basic survival.

  He does, however, have a pile of moist kangaroo bodies and a knife. He could eat them down, suck their blood. But this is not what he has in mind. The skin of a kangaroo is, after all, a type of leather. Fanbelts for Land Rovers are normally made of cord and rubber, but they could be made of leather.

  He sets to work in the hot sun, skinning and making strips. His hands and arms are covered in kangaroo blood; it soaks into his shirt, smears his trousers.

  He fashions a series of fanbelts. He knows the raw leather will stretch immediately and have to be replaced, frequently. He gives it a burl. It works.

  The Dogger finally coaxes his vehicle into town.

  He heads straight to the Port Hotel for food and icy beer.

  On his way, he sees a group of workmen standing beside a truck. One nods to him. The workman is holding a bundle of something, a bundle of hessian of the sort used for making sandbags or temporary windbreaks. For some reason, when he first saw it, the Dogger thought the man was holding a baby.

  Over afternoon tea with Marj, excess saliva suddenly springs into Linda’s mouth, too much for the mere ginger nut biscuit she is bringing to her lips. A hot, prickly sensation sweeps over her. Pregnancy. She looks at Marj, feeling she could vomit the truth at any moment. So she keeps her mouth shut and waits for the sensation to pass.

  The sun goes down in a blaze of orange and pink and yellow and grey. It’s a moonless night. There is a low, deep growl, possibly a moan, emanating from the black holes out in space.

  Out over the starlit sea, humpback whales pass by the town, singing. The One Mile Jetty reaches out towards them, but they’re much further out, past the islands. The whales swim parallel to the coast, mothers with calves, their throats covered in barnacles and teeming lice. Phosphorus swirls around them like moving cities seen from a passing satellite.

  Linda
Johnson stands at her kitchen sink at midnight, grating yellow Sunlight soap over boiling tea towels. The yellow gratings drop gently down onto the blue-and-white-checked fabric. The refrigerator hums. Linda is boiling her tea towels in a big pot over a gently hissing gas burner. Bubbles gently rise under the fabric, creating heaving bosoms. Linda pokes at them with a wooden spoon, drowning them under soapy boiling water.

  The bulging fabric rises up taut over a lump of air. A tiny mote of soap dust drops gently down. The soap strikes the fabric with infinitesimal force, but strikes it with more force than all the radio waves striking all the radio telescope dishes in the world. The refrigerator stops with a little shudder of its rounded shoulders, creating a sensation of absolute silence in Linda’s kitchen.

  Linda empties her hot tea towels into the sink and runs cold water over them. She wrings them out and pegs them on the line, under the stars.

  She dreams one of her recurring dreams. She is standing in a line, the sort of line you stand in when you’re buying tickets to see a movie. The destination is a kiln with an open mouth. The line shuffles forward every time someone goes in. This is not the only line; there are lines of people as far as the eye can see to left and right, and each line is inching towards its own kiln. But people are not visibly distressed. The atmosphere is one of passive resignation. Linda, just a child, turns to her mother and asks, ‘Why are we standing in this line? Why don’t we run for it?’ Her mother looks slightly annoyed by the question, as if the answer were obvious. She shrugs and says, ‘Well, everyone else is going in.’ And then Linda tries to scream, but no scream comes out, just the tiniest little rasp, and it is always at this point that she wakes up.

  ***

  I wake with a start, feeling that something is terribly wrong. I open my eyes, flick my neck – as I do after a long sleep – and look at the floor.

  It is morning at last. The cyclone has passed, and it is time to survey the wreckage. There, below me, are the shredded remains of Lizzie’s precious hardcover collectable book, The Lore of the Lyrebird.

  How could I have been so stupid? How could I have given in to temptation so easily? I remonstrate with myself. Stupid dickhead. I’ll have to charm my way out of this one. A lot of charm, a lot of pathos.

  I begin to croon. ‘Oh, poor Lucky. Oh, poor Lucky!’

  I say it aloud, in English, not caring if I wake Lizzie. She’ll come out and see what I’ve done. She’ll be angry. It’s best to get it over with.

  But she stays in bed, sleeping off her threnody.

  If I could, I’d clean up the mess myself. But I can’t. A captive galah can never clean up her own mess. She can never stop making a mess.

  TEN

  To the moon

  Linda and Jo meet Evan off the plane. Three months is a proportionally large part of Jo’s life; she has almost forgotten her father. But when she sees him it all comes rushing back. She reaches for him, curls her arms around his neck.

  Linda’s great need is to convert the unofficial child inside her into a plausibly official one. Evan is surprised and delighted by her overtures.

  They name their new daughter Stella, in honour of outer space. Linda is not so sure about this – she can’t help but think of Marlon Brando shouting the name – but she is not in a position to argue. When Stella is born, Linda says the baby was premature, in case anyone decides to do the maths. Evan accepts this explanation. Doubt might have tried to creep in, after dark, but it is shunned. It is not entertained with even the tiniest drip of Emu Bitter or crumb of Jatz biscuit. Stella Johnson, bearing his name on the label fixed to the underside of the lid of her tiny kindergarten case, looking up at him, asking him questions, can only be his daughter. At work, he is known as a man with a wife and kids. It’s all very simple, really.

  Similarly, the Moon Landing may seem complex, but at its heart lie the sturdy maxims of Newtonian physics. To leave earth’s orbit, all that is necessary is to reach escape velocity: the minimum speed necessary to overcome the gravitational pull of the earth. The formula can be expressed thus:

  where G is the universal gravitational constant (G = 6.67×10−11 m3 kg−1 s−2), M the mass of the body to be escaped, and r the distance from the centre of mass of the object.

  Tracking stations around the earth are now sending and receiving signals from spaceships named after the Greek gods: Mercury, Gemini, Apollo. One explodes on earth, causing temporary confusion and dismay. But others succeed, and become ever more audacious.

  In December 1968, three astronauts set off to fly all the way around the moon for the first time. They immediately come down with the flu. The muscles in their weightless bodies eject waste from various orifices. Pulsating balls of vomit float around the cabin.

  ‘You’re riding the best bird we can find,’ says Houston, to cheer them up.

  As the astronauts near LOS – Loss of Signal behind the moon – Evan and his colleagues stare, transfixed, as all the lights go out on their console. Communications have ceased. Three human beings are alone on the other side of the moon. The disconnection is absolute. Can it be survived? Perhaps this was a mistake. A giant, expensive mistake. The trackers sit it out, not daring to speak, waiting for the lights to come back on. When they do, the trackers cheer. It was not a mistake. It can be done.

  So, what was it like, around the back of the moon?

  Nothing special, says astronaut William Anders. ‘The backside looks like a sand pile my kids have played in for some time. It’s all beat up, no definition, just a lot of bumps and holes.’

  Stella Johnson holds a cat’s-eye marble to her eye and sees how the world can curve and distort. She notices the differing qualities – of colour and taste, despite similarity in texture – between the green and the red jelly wobbling in her dessert bowl. She is aware that the fridge sometimes falls silent, creating an intensity of silence that is almost overwhelming.

  Whenever she gets a chance, she asks her father questions. Why is the sky blue? How do clouds stay up there? He answers patiently and accurately. The answers don’t entirely satisfy her, because she doesn’t understand them, so she asks another question and another, hoping to get to the bottom of something.

  Despite his denials, she believes that he is an astronaut. She thinks he changes into his astronaut suit when he gets to work. He flies up to the moon and back within a workday, changing back into ordinary clothes before he comes home in the twelve-seater van.

  When Evan is unavailable, which is most of the time, she directs her questions to Linda or, as a last resort, to Jo.

  With Jo at school, Stella and Linda like to break up their day by spending time at the Kellys’ place. Stella is often left to mingle with the younger Kellys while Linda goes off to do some shopping or a few errands.

  ‘A committee meeting,’ says Linda.

  Marjorie nods, and Linda might be gone for hours; much longer than a committee meeting. The extra child is absorbed among her own, and doesn’t eat much.

  One day, at his console, with his earphones on, Evan feels a little push from his colleague, causing his chair to swivel. He catches sight of his younger daughter just inside the doorway, loses his grumpy expression and opens his arms to her. She has been brought to see Daddy’s work for herself, to correct her belief that he works on the moon.

  She comes trotting across the room, and he lifts her onto his lap, telling her she can’t touch anything. ‘I know,’ she sighs. She looks at the knobs and switches, greedily taking them all in, imagining her fingers on them. Evan gently spins the chair all the way around, like the spinning of earth on its axis. Once, twice, three times, but no more. And then, slightly dizzy and listing, she is trotting back across the room and out the door, and he is turning back to his console.

  For now, Evan Johnson has time. He has no idea it is precious. He considers it infinitely available, like water in the ocean. Here at the tracking station, his task is to
measure and manage it, to deliver it up in useful mathematical equations. He enjoys this work enormously. As soon as Stella slides off his chair, this work refills his mind.

  There is a Casper comic on the brown carpet near Jo Johnson’s feet. A wooden pencil case is fanned open at her elbow revealing sharpened-down coloured pencils in varying lengths. She is lying belly-down, looking at the crisp new How and Why Wonder Book Linda has just given her. The word STARS is printed in bold white type on the front cover.

  As Linda pads barefoot to the couch, Jo restrains herself from opening the book until she has properly studied the cover. She examines the photograph of a long, smooth, light-grey telescope floating in pitch-black space, surrounded by a speckle of white dots. After she has finished studying the cover, taking note of the price (sixty-nine cents), she turns the page and sees a boy and girl looking heavenwards, surrounded by a blue watercolour puddle of sky and more white star-dots. The boy has his mouth open, smiling so hard he might be laughing. The little blonde girl beside him is unsmiling, wide-eyed and slightly bewildered. While the secrets of the universe will reveal themselves easily to her confident, laughing brother, it might take a little longer for the sister to catch on.

  Jo has a little sister just like this one. She likes the way Stella looks up at her trustingly with wide hazel eyes, a little sprinkle of freckles over her nose and little translucent plastic green balls, called bobbles, holding her hair in pigtails on each side of her head. Sometimes, though, Stella is exceedingly irritating, and Jo has to tell her to scram.