For the Forest of a Bird

by Sue Saliba

  And it was, wasn’t it? Something wonderful was about to happen, or re-happen if that was a word. Nella skipped over it in her mind. Re-happen, and she smiled. It was like that – when she was happy she would hear words sing through her. New words, imagined words, bits of words and sentences that came together and played and left again, sometimes returning and usually forgotten. Whole stories sometimes. She would watch them and listen to them and she would not chase them away.

  Re-happen – what had been before would be again, and just as it had been. She would make it return, she would be part of its returning. The house with its borderless walls would come back.

  She bent to her bag now, zipped it up and lifted it over her shoulder. Then she looked across at the feather. It was resting on the windowsill just as it had since she’d first woken. Weightless, almost invisible. She walked over to it and lifted it up in her hand.

  Weightless, invisible. That was how the most remarkable of things, the most powerful of things, often seemed. This was what occurred to Nella as she walked towards the school gate following the familiar pattern of her weekday journey. Footsteps on concrete. Home to school and school to home. But today something unseen and overwhelming urged her forward, past the gate without turning into the school grounds, beside the outer boundary of the wire fence, along the street where the houses began and into the gardens, green and cold and waiting. Overhead she heard the stirring of sleeping possums. Around her was the breath of every tree.

  On she went, along the dirt track, wet with prints from the morning dogs, out on to Queens Parade with its cars and traffic lights and noise. Somehow in the gaps of all these things, there must be a whisper from the past, there must be a moment that says I am not forgotten, I can re-happen.

  This is what she believed.

  At last she passed the cafes and restaurants of Smith Street, the butcher shop she turned her face from and the little store selling glass beads that she’d often enter and move from counter to counter in, staring at the minute and individual worlds on display there.

  Now, finally she arrived at the op shop. A woman with white hair was unlocking the front door. So Nella would be their first customer. Someone would be sure to help her if she needed it – but she hesitated. No, she did not want anyone to help her, she did not want anyone to gain a sense of her secret. Or at least anyone who might not understand. This is what Nella had learnt, that you cannot speak aloud something special – something that really matters to you – in the presence of someone unsympathetic, without losing the power of that special thing.

  No, Nella would not say anything. She would not tell the shop assistant why she was here, what it was she wanted. How her purchase was going to change everything.

  Instead she slid quietly into the store and made her way down the aisle of abandoned dresses, past boxes of discarded shoes and baskets of faded wool, paper sewing patterns and children’s outgrown clothes. A broken angel stared down at her.

  At last she came to the back of the store. Bedroom Furniture, it said. She touched the strap of her schoolbag and climbed the few wooden steps up into the elevated section. Wardrobes, dressing tables, long mirrors that threw a picture of herself back into the room, Nella passed them all. She continued to the far corner where she saw a mattress leaning against the wall.

  ‘That’s it,’ she said and she pulled out the blue crocheted rug from her bag and walked closer. ‘Yes. It looks just right.’ She held the rug from one edge to the other of the upturned mattress. It fitted perfectly. ‘Yes, it’s exactly what I want.’

  The delivery was set for three thirty. Matthew would be at university and their mother would be at her monthly appointment with the doctor. Nella wrote the time on her left wrist as she hurried back down Smith Street. It wasn’t that the delivery was unimportant and she might forget it for that reason. It was more that she feared her destination might make her forget the detail of things, the sharp edges as they existed in the streets and shops she was leaving behind.

  Down cobbled laneways she went, and back behind the oval of the school. She lifted her head as she passed the red building in the distance. Inside it was the classroom where she should be. Room eleven, eastern wing, period two. Environmental Science. She had chosen the subject herself, no one had forced her to take it. She had thought it would be about rainforests and deep sea creatures, all the animals and the natural world she loved. And it was, but not in the way she understood. Her teacher spoke of ‘managing wildlife’ and there was a unit on ‘Natural Resources’ as if the creeks and trees, fish and earth were inanimate objects to be used only as humans decided.

  Nella continued on, past the milk bar and towards the train station at the end of the street. When she reached the old ticket office, she followed an asphalt path under the railway tracks and came out on the other side where a dirt path began. It was here she felt her heart lift. She was nearly there. She was nearly at the creek.

  Grass and thistles, cloud and sky. At last she stood at the bank.

  In front of her the creek looked still, although it moved on. A darkness that could have been a shadow on the water broke away to become a tiny wood duck. Nella closed her hand in the pocket of her dress, and she felt the feather against her fingers.

  ‘I want to tell you something,’ she said and it did not matter that there was no reply. ‘I want to tell you that he’s coming home. That I’m going to bring our father back and it’s going to be like it was before he went away, before everything broke apart, it’s going to be just like the beginning.’

  There, now she’d said it. She’d spoken it out loud and in a place where it really mattered. The creek, the sky, the birds on their homeward journey had heard her.

  And there was no going back. She pulled out the clock she’d packed in her bag. It was ten fifteen. She twisted the dials on its back and set the alarm for three o’clock. Then she took the blue crocheted rug and she stretched it out on a patch of soft grass and she lay down on it. She closed her eyes and she felt the sun on her skin and she slept.

  How the clouds drifted above her, sometimes blocking the sun and sometimes setting it free. When she opened her eyes the warmth was there again. Light on the water, happiness all throughout her.

  She was bringing her father home. The swallows knew it, the creek knew it, the whispers that existed in the history no human eyes could see knew it. Nothing could stop her.

  She pushed in the button to stop the alarm on the clock sounding just before it was about to begin. She was heading home.

  The streets around her, the final bell for the school day – nothing caught her attention except the thoughts in her head. She would instruct the delivery men to put the mattress in the spare room. She’d lock the door there with the key she’d found fallen beneath the room’s upturned lino. Then she’d go down the hall with her schoolbag still over her shoulder, walk into the kitchen and prepare herself something to eat. Perhaps she’d make herself a bowl of Weet-Bix or maybe a plate of toast – one of her usual after-school meals – as if everything was exactly as it should be.

  Except it wasn’t. Nella turned the corner and ahead of her in the street, she saw the delivery van. It was reversing to a halt in the space outside her house. Suddenly she felt herself running towards it. She’d tell the men to be careful with the mattress, to make sure it didn’t get dirty rubbing against the fence or touching the ground as they brought it inside. Quickly she ran. Against her shoulder, she felt her schoolbag with its blue crocheted rug inside almost slip from her as if to drag her backwards, but she grabbed at its straps and pulled it along. The first stage of her plan was about to be complete and she could waste no time.

  ‘This is the house right here,’ she said as she reached the men at the back of the van. ‘Number fourteen.’ She was almost breathless. ‘I’ll just get the key to open the door.’

  ‘No need,’ one of the men answered.

  Nella looked at him.

  ‘We knocked already. We’ve just backed up t
he truck.’

  ‘But …’

  She turned to the house. How could it be?

  It was unmistakable. There at the centre of the verandah, where the front door should have been locked and firmly shut, the doorway was open and wide, gaping.

  Someone was home. How could Nella possibly explain the mattress? How could she conceal her plan from whoever was there? Matthew, her mother – they would know of course, eventually; they would have to. But by then her father’s return would be an accepted fact, even an embraced one. No one would dispute it. Now, though, before that time, before all the forces that needed to come together had somehow done so, Nella felt unnerved.

  What if she were told her father could never come back?

  ‘Where do you want it, love?’ The older man of the two was bent beside her now, holding one end of the mattress.

  ‘Um …’

  ‘Do you want to show us where to put it?’

  Nella wanted to ask who had answered the door. Was it Matthew with his distance, his anger? Or was it her mother, alarmed, disturbed? Nella suddenly felt herself cold and small and lost.

  ‘We need to put this somewhere,’ the man was saying. He was still holding onto the mattress.

  Nella looked at him.

  ‘Where should we put it?’

  She bit her bottom lip.

  ‘Which room?’

  Nella felt her breath stop, she shifted her feet. And then all in a rush she said, ‘Take it back, please just take it back. I don’t want it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Take it back to the store. Please … I made a mistake.’

  The man looked up at her.

  ‘You won’t get a refund, you know.’

  ‘I know, I don’t care, please just take it away.’ She was almost screaming.

  He looked across at the other man who seemed to shrug and the two of them shuffled back to the rear of the van with the mattress between them. Their feet clanged on metal steps, followed by the slamming of the large back doors and the start of the engine. And then the men, the van and the mattress disappeared around the corner and Nella was left alone in the street. And all she could see was asphalt and fences and gutter.

  Her mother, Matthew? Who would she find inside? Nella stood in the doorway and she looked along the endless passage. She looked at Matthew’s room and she could feel his absence. Then she walked further into the house and she stopped at the open door of her mother’s room.

  The light was on, the curtains were drawn. Upturned boxes, shoes, pieces of clothing trailed from the wardrobe. Her mother moved from bed to dressing table to bed again, back and forth. A pile of pills and medication scripts lay scattered on the floor.

  Nella didn’t have to see her mother’s eyes to know.

  ‘No need to take the pills anymore,’ her mother was saying. ‘No need to see the doctor.’

  Something had pierced her mother’s darkness. Some­thing had flung her to that other end of herself.

  Nella stood very still.

  Back and forth her mother continued. Nella saw her twist the ring she’d never taken from the finger on her left hand. She saw her pull at her dress with its half undone buttons and with the petticoat beneath it worn back to front.

  ‘His heart,’ her mother said.

  Yes, his heart. That was it. The excitement in her mother had been triggered by many things before. The death of Nella’s grandmother, the incident with the police when Matthew had trapped the neighbour’s cat, and now it was this – her father’s illness.

  What a strange thing this crazy energy was. It made Nella’s mother fast and speeding and agitated. It made her wildly hopeful like the world was filled with the greatest of possibilities and she was at the centre of it all about to burst free and live out the largest of her dreams.

  ‘No need to take the pills anymore,’ her mother said again. She was pulling the lid from a small container, preparing to empty the little white tablets into a crumpled bag for the rubbish. It was like this, it was always like this, when Nella’s mother became excited – she was not sick and never had been. It had all been a big mistake, even a conspiracy. She was fine. It was the rest of the world that was not.

  Especially Nella’s father. He was not fine, he was anything but fine. He believed Nella’s mother was sick. He encouraged her to take her medication again, he told Nella and Matthew not to worry about what she said because she was ‘not herself’. He called the doctor, he even once called the police. He told them to take her away.

  ‘He betrayed me.’ That’s what Nella’s mother said of her father. ‘He made them put me in that hospital.’

  And Nella felt, when her mother told her that, that she too had betrayed her mother because Nella had wanted her mother there too. She had wanted her tucked away somewhere safe to become herself again. And Nella had wanted to be somewhere safe too.

  That’s what she felt now, standing here with her mother before her, glassy eyed, hair unbrushed. Nella felt that she wanted to be somewhere safe.

  ‘His heart’s given way,’ her mother said.

  ‘No, it hasn’t. It can’t,’ Nella heard herself say. And her mother looked at her as if – for a moment – she might suddenly be jolted from her own strange reality.

  ‘It won’t give way, not ever,’ Nella yelled and she turned and ran from the room.

  No, her father would not disappear, he would not vanish, he would never fade away to a place where she could not retrieve him.

  I must bring him back, no matter what. That’s what she said. She was pressed firm now against the wood of her closed bedroom door. She stared at the basket in the corner of the room where she had rummaged through skirts and jumpers that very morning. How excited she had been, how happy, how expectant. She had been sure that everything was going to turn out just as it should.

  ‘I’m going to bring our father back.’ That’s what she’d said when she’d got to the creek. ‘It’s going to be just like it was before …’ And then something had changed, something had startled that promise away. The voice of the delivery man, the open front door – such small things.

  ‘I must be braver,’ she said. And she stepped away from the bedroom door and thought again of her father. It wasn’t just a sense of safety she felt when she was with him, it wasn’t just a sense of protection. He made her feel brave, that was it. He made her feel courageous. She was like a bird who could take on the stormiest of winds, could soar in the wildest of skies because she knew he was with her, because she knew he would never let her fall.

  ‘Yes, of course, I will bring him back. Nothing will stand in my way,’ she said. And she did not wait for nightfall or for her mother’s stillness or even for Matthew to be home and obviously tucked away at his study. She walked across to her bed, dragged the top mattress from the base underneath and pulled it towards the door. There she stopped only for a moment to straighten herself before she made her way with blankets, pillows and sheets trailing behind her down the passage to the little room she’d so secretly visited before.

  It was dusty and filled with cobwebs and without all the bits and pieces that might make it a bedroom, but it didn’t matter, not now. Nella lay the mattress with its bedding down on the floor and she closed her eyes and she waited. She still wore her school uniform that she’d dressed in that morning but now it was not a camouflage.

  She put her hand into the cloth of its pocket and there, just where it had rested all day, was the feather. The perfect swallow’s feather. She took it carefully in her fingers and laid it out on the palm of her other hand. And now, suddenly, she was aware of why it had come to her. ‘It’s time to tell him,’ she said aloud and she went to the window and opened it to the near-night sky. Nella had never told anyone about this practice – this private way of communicating with her father that she’d had throughout her childhood. From country towns to North Fitzroy, from paddocks thick with sheep and the cries of crows, and back again, Nella had spoken to a special thing – a discovere
d butterfly’s wing, a piece of beautiful thread – and let it go in the wind. ‘Please come back,’ she had said, but this time she spoke a different version. ‘I’m bringing you back,’ she said. ‘Dad, I’m bringing you home.’

  And she released the feather into the air.

  Matthew would have said releasing the feather was a stupid thing: what a load of rubbish. But it did not matter, not now. She heard Matthew’s movements in the kitchen soon after first light. He’d been out late the night before but he’d woken at the usual time when his alarm went off. Nella had heard it through the house, the sudden blast of it, and she’d turned over on the mattress and faced the door. There she’d felt the certainty of Matthew’s footsteps, the flickering of the fluorescent light in the kitchen across the hallway. She’d heard him open and close cupboards, switch on the electric jug, unsheathe the bread knife from its metal holder. His day was about to begin and Nella already knew the details of it, the morning routine of it. Every other morning, she witnessed it blindly, pulling her knees into her chest and closing her eyes, lying silently in her bed until she had heard the slam of the front door that punctuated its end.

  But this morning was different. This morning she lifted herself from the mattress and she touched her hand to the pocket of her school uniform that she’d slept in all night. She walked to the door of the little room and she opened it.

  There he was, Matthew, across the hall, in the kitchen. He was fully dressed, in his polo shirt and his ironed jeans and he’d positioned a pile of papers in front of himself on the kitchen table.

  He turned his head and looked at her.

  ‘You’re more like our mother every day,’ he said. ‘Don’t you believe in brushing your hair anymore?’

  She felt her hands prickle with the movement of blood.