For the Forest of a Bird

by Sue Saliba

He pulled the papers towards himself.

  ‘There’s an iron in the cupboard under the sink. Why don’t you use it before you leave the house?’

  Nella didn’t move. She stayed looking at Matthew. So often she had felt herself – her whole reality – fade against the force of him, but today was different. Today she thought of the creek and the swallows, of the animals who had lived here two hundred years earlier – and the feather, the perfect swallow feather – and all of them stood out, strong and bold.

  ‘You wanted to know how Dad was last night,’ she said.

  Matthew was silent; he was staring at his papers.

  ‘You wanted me to talk to you,’ Nella said.

  She could sense that Matthew had already rewritten the map of yesterday, already erased the moment of his vulnerability.

  ‘Well,’ she went on. ‘I have something to tell you …’

  She was ready to tell Matthew now, ready to say that their father was coming back, that she was bringing him home.

  But he turned to her again and she noticed that his eyes were strained, tired even.

  She faltered a little, but then she added, ‘. . . about Dad.’

  ‘You have … nothing … to tell me, Nella,’ he said. ‘Nothing that I don’t already know.’ He stared at her creased school uniform. ‘I went to the hospital last night,’ he said. ‘And I saw him. There’s nothing you can say, Nella. Last night he told me everything.’

  Everything. What could Matthew mean? And then Nella felt as if she had fallen and been caught from a great height. Everything. Her father had told Matthew he was coming home. Her father had heard Nella’s message in the near-dark and he knew she was bringing him home.

  Everything, what a magical word. It left no room for hunger, for wanting. Nella’s father would be here with her, back with her, and there would be no gap of aching, no moments of feeling that the world belonged to everyone else and she was near-invisible.

  She said the word aloud and Matthew looked at her, but she did not disappear in his stare.

  ‘I must get things ready,’ she said and she did not wait to witness Matthew’s surprise, but turned and went to the little room. The floor had to be swept, the mattress aired, the blankets washed. She was already making a list of things in her head that she must do when she walked to the window and looked outside. Strange, it had never occurred to her before but the window of this little room faced the creek. Beyond the slate roofs and iron fences, the brick chimneys, the creek flowed.

  How she longed to reach out to it, to touch it, to whisper to it – no, to speak aloud – that her father was coming home, he really was coming home.

  And with that, she could no longer rest within the bounds of herself; she could no longer concentrate on cleaning or sweeping or washing. She knew that she must see her father.

  How quickly Nella rode to the hospital and what a dishevelled picture she must have presented when she got there, but she did not care. She leapt up the lino stairs two at a time, passing visitors with flowers tight in their hands and young doctors with their pressed white coats. She heard her footsteps echo on the hardened floors and felt her reflection mirrored back at her from every polished surface.

  She was amplified, that was it. She was a million things, everything. She was a profusion, the bursting forth of all things she’d always kept so small inside.

  It will be just as it was, she said aloud. She was turning the corner now beyond the stairwell, entering the long passage of the cardiac ward. She was heading toward the little glass window that was the nurses’ station and soon she would be approaching bed seventeen, her father’s.

  So, Matthew knew everything. That made it better really, that her father had told Matthew, that Matthew had visited their father – that he had wanted to visit their father. It had all worked out perfectly really. If Nella had told Matthew that she was going to bring their father home, how difficult it would have been. But somehow things had worked out with a sense of ease, as if … what? As if this really was exactly how it was meant to be, after all.

  He told me everything. Nella heard Matthew’s words again. How perfect.

  Nella was at her father’s bedside now. ‘Everything,’ she said. She thought of the feather let go in the wind. She saw her father’s eyes closed now, sleeping. And she looked around. A metal dresser, a wooden cross, a card with a corella on it. How curious – only Nella knew of her father’s love for corellas.

  She reached across, knowing that she shouldn’t, knowing that surely it was wrong to read her father’s private correspondence, but she couldn’t help it. Dear … she saw the unfamiliar handwriting but before she could read any more, her father spoke.

  ‘Nella,’ he said.

  She turned to him. She saw his green green eyes. He was looking straight at her. She could tell he was happy.

  ‘Dad … you’re …’

  He smiled at her.

  ‘You’re … alive …’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Of course I am. I’m not going anywhere just yet, you know.’

  He laughed, she laughed too. How well they knew each other.

  And then she said, ‘Well, except for one place.’

  He tilted his head a little and looked at her more closely.

  ‘You’re not going anywhere except for one place,’ she explained.

  He looked curious, a little puzzled.

  ‘Actually,’ Nella said. ‘Matthew told me. I mean he told me that you told him that …’

  ‘He told you?’ her father cut in.

  ‘Yes, he told me that he came here last night and you told him …’

  ‘I told him not to say anything, not until …’

  ‘I know you wanted to tell me yourself.’

  ‘… yes, I did.’

  ‘But why? I always knew that my messages got to you, so I knew anyway.’

  Her father looked at her, half questioning, half waiting.

  ‘So … do you have your things packed?’ she said cheerfully.

  ‘Well, not yet but it won’t take long.’

  ‘Good.’

  And then she added, ‘The room faces the creek. How strange, I never thought of that – but anyway … of course, that’s perfect because I want to take you there, to the creek, because there’s something special I’ve been wanting to show you for so long and now, after … what’s happened to you, it just makes it like I shouldn’t wait any longer … and … I’m sorry,’ she said, suddenly aware she was probably not making much sense but somehow she felt that she had to speak quickly before … before what?

  She took a deep breath and began to prepare herself to tell her father what she had been meaning to tell him for so long – that this year she would take him to the swallows.

  ‘Dad …’ she said, but he began to speak as well.

  ‘I’m glad you understand,’ he said. It was as if he had not heard a word she had just said. ‘I’m glad you understand,’ he went on, ‘because I really should have told you myself.’

  ‘… but it doesn’t matter, really,’ Nella answered, and then she spoke in a matter-of-fact tone. ‘Now, where are your things because I can start taking some with me now … those things you don’t need here and that will make it easier …’

  ‘What do you mean?’ her father asked.

  ‘It will make it easier when you’re ready to leave. I can take them now and put them in the little room and then, when the doctors let you go, you can just come back with me.’

  ‘But Nella,’ her father said, and he looked at her again with his green green eyes. ‘I’m not going back with you, Nella. I’m going home.’

  Home. Nella stood by the creek and she said the word again and again. Home. How could it mean anything but what was here before her? The inky water, black at night. The swallows, lost somewhere between flight and sky.

  What had she even been thinking two hours ago, or was it five, when she had stood by her father’s bed and she had said that she was bringing him home? Was that
what she had told him? Was that how she had said it?

  She felt so deeply wrong, so incredibly foolish, so childish.

  And then there had been that awful moment – she tortured herself with the memory of it now – when he had realised what she was saying and she had seen something in his eyes – was it pity? How she wished to disappear right here, right now, not to wilfully harm herself or to cause her own death but simply to disappear, to fade away.

  She had wished for it before, this exile, but never with such force, such heated desire: to go, to end, to stop being.

  She shrunk into the grass around her, witnessed its wet and its cold, but even this remained distinct from her. She was separate, alone. Except for a figure that appeared suddenly on the bridge that crossed from one bank to the other, from North Fitzroy to Northcote. An elderly man with a little white dog. There he stood, pouring a rainfall of breadcrumbs beneath him for the ducks. They would not be there until morning – eight, ten hours from now – but the man emptied the bag all the same. Expectant, anticipating; such a single sense of faith.

  So the ducks will come back, Nella thought. And the man’s efforts are somehow part of that, somehow involved.

  She felt the coldness of the grass against her now, felt it through her and within her and mixing with her whole body. The night, the swallows, nothing could be kept at a distance. Her father, Matthew, her deep sense of disappointment, her mother.

  Yes, even her mother, because mixed in there with every­thing else, with the whole story of Nella, was her mother. She unclenched her fist so she saw the fingers of her left hand, long and pale, an echo of her mother’s. She saw her mother twisting the metal of her wedding ring around and around. His heart, her mother had said. His heart’s given way.

  What did she mean?

  Nella stood and it was raining – just the slightest of rain – and it seemed that the creek had entered the sky and all of heaven had come down to be part of her. Perhaps inside her mother’s madness there was a knowledge, an understanding that, unravelled, would explain everything.

  But Nella recoiled from it.

  Just as she ran from Matthew, his confident summing up of their father: He told me everything.

  Instead she looked again to the creek. The swallows had not yet returned but she was sure they would, of course they would. And so it was with her father, it had to be.

  It was the words, a simple twisting and turning of what had been said, of how it had been said, of the tone of his voice, of hers, the angle of the light. Of replaying and re-hearing, rethinking. Yes, remembering and imagining and interpreting, and finally, when she looked at it again, Nella was sure – she was almost sure – of what her father had really meant.

  He would return but not in the way Nella had expected. I’m not going back with you. It was simple: it did not mean I’m not returning to you – it meant I am not going back to that house, to your mother’s house; I am going back to my house, to my real home, my deeper home – and you are coming too.

  Yes, now she understood it. Nella touched her hand to her hair and she felt the rain against it and she looked and saw that the elderly man and his dog had left the bridge but that the white tags of bread he had dropped had not sunk and disappeared but rested on the water’s surface, waiting.

  Unmistakable. As unmistakable as the wallabies and fairy-wrens, the emus and sugar gliders shifting in the bush around her. They had not been seen for one hundred and seventy years but they were still there, she knew it. It took a certain kind of looking, a certain kind of belief. The creek with its weeds, its water clotted with bottles and plastic bags, still held the movements of ancient jawless fish, the last journey of dying eels as they returned to their childhood home. And it held the future too.

  Of course, I will bring him here to the swallows. Of course.

  And with that, Nella stepped out of the long grass, one damp shoe and then the other. She walked along the muddy path and then towards the railway tracks. She’d take a train to the city and then she’d leave Melbourne behind.

  Before that, though, before she even arrived at the station, she had one more destination. She turned and walked to the little bridge that the old man had stood on. Its steps began on the bank, but she did not climb the steps; instead she walked beneath the bridge. No one else knew of this she was sure, but here in a secret world existed the previous nests of the swallows: patched of mud and grasses, some discovered string, tiny stones taken from the ground.

  Nella brushed her wrist against the hardened edge of one of the nests now, not to disturb it but to make just a small mark on her pale skin. A tattoo. ‘I will bring him back when the young ones fly.’ That’s what she said to herself.

  And now she was ready to leave.

  She was ready to go to the island.

  Her father had lived on Phillip Island for just over two years. He’d moved there soon after he’d left the family. He could have chosen the sheep stations and red earth like those he’d visited before in Geraldton or Albany, but instead he’d gone to the island only two hours away. Perhaps he’d wished to be by the sea or perhaps he had wanted to stay close to his only daughter.

  Whichever it was, Nella could remember his leaving. How he’d stood at the front door with his two suitcases. ‘You’d better go, now,’ her mother had said. Nella had stopped a little way behind, her hands shaking. He’d looked back, then, along the passage, as if there might be something he hadn’t completed. ‘There’s nothing more to be done,’ her mother said. ‘Everything’s clear now.’

  And it was, Nella understood that. Twelve years old and watching crouched through a crack in her bedroom door. Her father was leaving. Her mother was sick; she was always sick; and her father was leaving. He’d tried. He’d cared for them and he’d tried to care for her mother and now her mother was making him leave.

  ‘There’s nothing of yours left here,’ her mother ended, closing the door on her father. And Nella felt that part of herself shrivel and die, cry out and then disappear. Dissolve.

  She’d wanted to run from her room, then. Scream that there was something, she was something. And she’d wished she had. She’d always wished she had, that she’d had the courage …

  … to leave, to go with her father.

  That’s what she should have done all those years ago. And now she was doing it. Right now. Now she was sitting on a bus marked the island. She was travelling away from that house that her father had left, that Matthew filled with his anger and her mother filled with her sadness.

  She looked out at the paddocks they were passing. So much green that the recent rains had brought, so much life.

  She closed her eyes and felt the movement of the bus through her, the mechanics of her journey. And she thought of what she would do, how she would go to her father’s house when she arrived on the island, walk the streets until she came to the little unmade road where he lived. Find the key he left behind the disused fridge on the front verandah and take herself inside.

  He wouldn’t be far away, she knew it. It wouldn’t be long before he came home and found her there with an apron on and the floor swept, a warm cup of tea and the freshly washed sheets folded back on the bed ready for him. She’d make him pea soup and apple crumble, his favourite. And then she’d set the radio to the horse races just as he liked and turn it up extra loud so nothing could penetrate their world. And when the night came they’d watch the possums black against the sky and the tiny bats emerging from their homes of bark – cracks and crevices invisible by day. And the sea, always in the background would be the sea.

  Peaceful and known, calm. How perfect everything would be. Nella felt the wheels of the bus beneath her turning around and around, taking her closer and closer to her father’s home. She opened her eyes and for the first time, she caught a glimpse of the water before her – just a glimpse of its blue through the spaces of the bush.

  They had crossed the bridge to the island now and she could remember the sense of freedom she felt
whenever she came here, whenever she visited her father. She looked at the seat beside her and pulled the brown checked bag she’d brought onto her lap.

  It was the bag she’d kept ever since that autumn day four years ago when she had been standing at the front gate with her two friends, Mary and Roberta. They’d been giggling, swapping hair clips and talking about the new teacher of their class who was kind and gentle and wore the most beautiful of velvet skirts.

  ‘She’s so sweet,’ Roberta said. ‘I want to be just like her.’

  ‘Me too,’ Mary said.

  Nella nodded. She wanted that too.

  And then the taxi had pulled up.

  ‘I told you to bring me straight here. You’ve driven me halfway around bloody Melbourne. You don’t think I know what you’re up to.’

  A woman was yelling. The passenger window was down.

  The woman got out and slammed the door.

  ‘Nella.’

  It was her mother. Her mother had bags of shopping on her arm. Myer, David Jones, Sussan – she must have been shopping all day. She had lipstick, deep and red, that was smeared from her lips up above her right cheek. She wore shoes, stiletto and lime green with the price tag still attached to one of them. She had her dress, crumpled and stained, caught up in the back of her pantyhose.

  ‘Nella,’ her mother said in an excited voice. ‘The money’s come through.’

  Nella froze. Her mother’s mania had returned.

  ‘I’ve told the bank they’re to have all the money ready for withdrawal tomorrow. Fourteen million. The house will be bulldozed, you’ll go off to a school in Switzerland as I promised, Matthew will have his shooting range and I’ll start building the palace here.’

  She swept her arm toward their small brick cottage.

  ‘There’ll be twelve bedrooms because that’s what we’ll need with all the visitors and of course a special ladies’ room for when the European princesses arrive …’

  Roberta put her hand to her mouth and looked across at Mary.

  Nella could no longer feel her breath.

  ‘Excuse me.’ The taxi driver was calling from his cab.

  ‘Now look at what I’ve bought,’ her mother said.