For the Forest of a Bird

by Sue Saliba

  Nella’s mother pulled a silk petticoat with black lace straps from one of her bags.

  ‘Marion, this would look good on you.’

  She moved to put the cloth against Mary’s chest, but Mary stepped back.

  ‘Excuse me,’ the taxi driver continued. ‘You haven’t paid me yet.’

  ‘Oh, for goodness sake!’ Nella’s mother yelled out.

  She rustled around in the leather bag that hung from her shoulder. Her hands shook wildly.

  ‘Take this,’ she said, marching over to the cab and throwing an empty chip packet through its window.

  Roberta and Mary moved closer to each other. Nella noticed a look pass between them.

  ‘Come on girls, inside,’ her mother said.

  Nella was cold all over.

  ‘I have to go,’ Mary said, looking to the ground.

  ‘Me too,’ Roberta echoed.

  They were holding hands now.

  Nella saw them back away and then run off down the street. She knew that tomorrow at school everything would have changed.

  ‘Come inside, Nella.’

  Nella turned to her mother. Her friends had gone now. The taxi driver, at last giving up, had screeched his tyres angrily and left the street. And Nella followed her mother inside.

  ‘This is where the ballroom will be,’ her mother was announcing, but Nella felt herself disappear. She pressed herself against the wall of her mother’s bedroom. She heard her mother enter the kitchen and begin to move the table and the chairs around. Nella looked to the space beside her mother’s wardrobe. There she saw, as her eyes adjusted to the light, her father’s brown checked bag. It was the bag he took with him whenever he went on his longest of trips and somehow now he’d left it behind. Nella moved towards it. She bent down, she picked up the bag with her right hand. It was lighter than she’d expected. She smelled it. Beneath the dust and perfume of her mother’s room, she smelt the wool of newly shorn sheep, the scent of her father’s adventures.

  Quietly, carefully, she crept with the bag across the passage into her own bedroom. There she sat for the longest time holding the bag to her chest. Her mother shifted about in the distance. Nella hugged the bag, outside it grew dark. She took a pyjama top from her drawer and wrapped it around the bag.

  ‘For places somewhere else,’ she said.

  And she pushed the bundle beneath her bed.

  And now, sitting on the bus, Nella looked at the bag in her lap. And she knew that soon, soon she would be with her father.

  On they travelled, avoiding a pothole here, a branch that had fallen onto the road there. The driver manoeuv­red the bus with such ease it was as if every­thing they came across was an expected and known part of the journey: embedded, integral. Even the last little swerve he made just before they turned the final corner.

  Nella found herself swaying with the motion of it. Perhaps he had swerved from a stone on the bitumen, maybe a dislodged hub cap.

  But no, when she looked out she saw something else.

  There by the side of the road was a girl. She was crouched and looking at something down at her feet.

  Nella pushed herself closer to the window. Was it blood on the girl’s T-shirt?

  The bus swung quickly around the corner.

  ‘Last stop,’ the driver called. ‘Last stop coming up.’

  They had reached the centre of the island. Nella had been here many times before, but as she stepped out onto the sandy dirt of the main road this time felt different.

  The bakery still stood where it always had with its display of lamingtons and lemon slices, the grocery store was there with its familiar faded greeting, but suddenly Nella felt herself strange and lost. She clutched the brown checked bag tight to her chest and through its cloth she could feel that her hands were trembling.

  ‘Just walk,’ she said to herself. ‘Just walk.’ And she began, down the main road and around the corner, into the street with the faded holiday shacks and the broken paling fences. On and on she went but all the time this feeling would not leave her, this feeling of newness and strangeness, of discomfort. What was the girl doing there? she asked herself and she could not help but think of the girl by the road and the blood, and the crumpled mass at her feet.

  Keep walking, just keep walking.

  All roads led to her father’s, she knew that. All roads led to him, it was true. Foraging on unfamiliar beaches or lost in unknown bushland, Nella had always found her way back to his home. Every path, every track seemed to lead there. It was as if she needed only to think of him and something guided her back.

  Keep walking, just keep walking. Past sudden swamps and the remnants of old farm houses, over gentle rises and beyond. With each step Nella could feel herself moving closer to her father and further and further from the girl by the side of the road. ‘Soon you will be safe,’ she said aloud. And she was surprised to hear the sound of her own voice.

  Her father’s house stood just around the bend of the road. An old fibro shack with its rambling garden, two mismatched chairs on the verandah and the disused fridge Nella could never remember working. It had stood silent beside the door forever, a gathering place for spiders and slaters, baby skinks and snails. A sanctuary.

  Yes, soon she would be safe.

  And she was. Nella looked down at her hands resting against the torn green fabric of the chair and they were still, quiet. She felt herself relax. The crooked rose bush and the huge pine tree were just as they’d always been and as she turned her left hand palm-up she saw, against the white skin of her wrist, the mark of the swallow’s nest as clear and strong as when it had been made beneath the bridge.

  She was here. She kicked her feet into the air in a childish way, as a kind of thrill. And then she turned to the old fridge where she knew the key was. It had never scared her before, to put her hand in where cobwebs and baby mice grew, but now, just for a moment, she felt a flicker inside herself. Was it fear?

  She pushed her fingers further behind the fridge and there she felt it. The key to her father’s house. Out she pulled her hand and the silver metal was just as she remembered it, except something was different. Instead of being covered in dust and spiders’ threads. Nella’s hand was clean, as unmarked as if she had dipped it into vacant air.

  She got down on her knees and she pressed her face to the edge of the fridge so she could see the gap behind it and then she bent even further down and looked underneath. How strange it was. Not a single cobweb or grain of dust was there. Even the fiercest of winds could not have blown it all away so clean.

  Never mind, she thought, I have the key. And the idea of entering her father’s house, of unlocking the front door, of padding quietly from room to room, of lying wrapped in the old blue rug on the lounge-room couch; all these things filled her with excitement.

  Excitement, and a kind of comfort, if there could be such a feeling.

  Happiness, was that it?

  And she turned the key and waited.

  But it wasn’t happiness that rushed out at her; it wasn’t excitement and it wasn’t comfort. It was a feeling of uncertainty. The lounge-room couch with its mess of newspapers and cushions had been tidied and the blue rug had gone. The television lamp with its odd-fitting light shade was missing and a light pink papier-mâché one stood in its place. There was a vase of plastic petunias on the dining-room table where her father’s garden tools had always been.

  She stepped closer to the kitchen bench. Just above it in the glass cabinet stood the photo of Nella that her father had always kept down near the window. It was pushed behind the wall of a flour tin now. She didn’t need to look at it to remember its image. There she’d been on a spring day, soaked from a sudden rain. She and her father had run back from the beach and she’d had to peel her favourite swirly-patterned T-shirt off and put on the flannelette shirt her father had lent her. ‘You look like a little tomboy,’ her father had laughed and taken the photo of her. And he was right, all her girliness had disappeared bu
t in its place she remembered something else – something warm and protective in the roughness of his shirt.

  She had planned now to go to her father’s room, to look out at the garden, to lie on his bed. Yes, even that, to lie on his bed. But suddenly, she walked instead to the shelf above the fireplace. It was a place where all kinds of mysteries were kept – tiny intact eggs, minute bones found buried in the bush, strange patterned skin from fish that had been washed ashore – and amongst it all, Nella had always secretly stored something special. It was the curl of wool – the very first gift her father had brought her from his travels to sheep stations all those years ago when she and Matthew had stood side by side and greeted him at the front door of the house they all shared together.

  Her father never knew Nella kept it on the shelf in his home and she’d go there when he was out watering the gardening or sleeping on the back porch. She’d go to the shelf and she’d gently push all the other pieces aside and she’d check that the slip of wool was exactly as she’d left it. And then she’d cover it up again – and feel that everything would be all right.

  And now she made her way to the shelf above the fireplace where the curl of wool had always rested.

  But before she arrived there, she felt herself slow and hesitate. What if the objects had been moved? What if the curl of wool was no longer there? She stopped where she was standing and her body tightened.

  And then she turned and left through the open front door.

  On she went, along the roadway of dust and stones. Down the lane into the bush and at last, along the hidden track to the coastal scrub. Nella could not stop moving and as she travelled along it she felt her breath catch inside her so she was not a thing of ease, not a moment of flight like the swallows as they glided through air but something stiff and unwilling, resistant.

  ‘It should be as it always was,’ she spoke out loud. And she pushed deeper into the bush.

  It was here, to this place of tea-trees and native vine, of banksias and paperbark, that Nella often came when she visited. It was the one place on the island she did not share with her father. If he asked her where she’d been she might answer the sand dunes or the wetlands, the foreshore or the rock pools, but never the scrub. It was a kind of sister place, if she thought about it, a kind of island companion to the creek. It was a place that if she closed her eyes and imagined hard enough she might just hear the swallows.

  But she didn’t. Instead she looked down at the white of her wrist and there it rested, the mark of the nest, although now it seemed to have faded.

  It’s only the light, she told herself. There’s too much sunlight, some things cannot exist in so much light and she moved into the shade of an overhanging branch. But just as she was about to look at her skin in the new dim light she was disturbed by the sound of footsteps. They were coming from the side of the scrub that backed onto a road. No one ever came that way. There was only the track that Nella had made from the direction of her father’s house.

  She heard twigs breaking, the crushing of leaves. The sound of footsteps heavy in the undergrowth.

  Carefully, very carefully, she slipped behind the shelter of a nearby bush. Silently, through the pattern of its leaves, she watched, and into the clearing emerged a shape, a kind of composite, really, that she might recognise the bits of, but that when put together didn’t quite make sense until it separated. Down to the ground it bent and one part rested there as a damaged, bloodied wallaby and the other stood up as a girl.

  It was her, Nella knew it straight away. It was the girl she had seen at the side of the road.

  Nella watched her stand in the sunlight: the darkness of her hair, the blood on her T-shirt and on her hands did not fade. She was older than Nella had first thought – older than Nella anyway.

  Nella made to move back, but as she did she was overwhelmed by a feeling she could not name and looking down at her wrist she saw that the mark she had made beneath the bridge was stronger now, darker.

  How bold it seemed. Nella looked at the mark again as she sat in her father’s lounge room. There was an energy about it that refused to dim and somehow amongst all her feelings, Nella recognised a feeling of hope. Surely things couldn’t be entirely bad, she thought. She looked around the room now. She saw the bookcase had been freshly dusted, the curtains recently washed, and it occurred to her suddenly that perhaps a kindly neighbour had come in – perhaps after they’d heard that her father was sick. Or maybe her father himself had paid for a cleaner to tidy the place up? Yes, that was probably it. After all, he wasn’t to know that Nella would come back to look after him and much as he would have wanted her to, he would never have asked her, never wanted to take her away from school.

  Yes, one of those hospital social workers would have organised it all when her father told them that he lived alone. They would have looked up a local cleaning agency and had a casual cleaner come around.

  Well, that was simple. Nella would just tell the cleaner if she came again, that she wasn’t needed anymore. Nella was here now to look after her father. Nella would take care of him.

  She looked around the room. The fake flowers on the table had to be removed and the original light shade had to be returned to the lamp on the television. She’d start with the light shade. She knew whoever had come into the house would not have thrown it away – that would have been too intrusive – so she decided to search the long cupboard in the laundry where her father kept all kinds of odds and ends.

  She began at the top shelf, which she had to stand on a chair to reach. She was halfway through pushing aside tangled extension cords and piles of magazines when she came across a brand-new-looking box. It stood out amongst everything else that seemed to be worn and used and somehow to belong. This box was glossy, almost reflective. Nella pulled it from its wedged-in position and she saw written on its side, laptop computer.

  How strange – she didn’t know her father had a computer. He’d always said he didn’t need one, that he was happy to be far away from technology and machines.

  Nella stepped down from the chair. The box was empty; the computer must be somewhere. That’s when she decided to go into her father’s room. She hadn’t wanted to, something told her she shouldn’t. Something told her to stay outside. But now she pushed the door of his bedroom open very, very slightly and she looked through the tiny crack she’d made and then she pushed it further so the gap widened and she stared inside.

  Darkness turned to dimness and then she could make out the shapes of furniture in his bedroom. The bulky old-fashioned wardrobe, the familiar dressing table she’d helped him choose at the local Salvation Army op shop, the large double bed. And then, near the window, beside the closed curtain, she saw what looked like a table. She moved closer. It wasn’t a table exactly, it was a desk. Its surface was neatly organised with pens and a pencil in a glass holder, papers stacked into a perfect pile, a digital clock facing the chair and in the middle rested a computer.

  Why hadn’t he mentioned it? Perhaps he’d been a bit embarrassed – he was often teasing Nella about how strange it was that she found out so many things about nature and wildlife through a computer. He did know her email address, though – she’d written it for him once on the back of a bus ticket when she’d left the island – so perhaps he’d sent her an email. Perhaps he’d sent her a message to tell her when he was coming home.

  Nella fiddled with the catch on the casing and then opened up the computer. She pressed a button, the screen lit up and she typed until her email inbox appeared. Yes, there was a message. There’d been a message received at 9.09 this morning.

  Nella clicked it open without reading the sender. It could be no one else.

  I didn’t think I would need to explain it all to you. It seems you misunderstood. I know you’ve gone to the island. You need to come back.

  Matthew

  She hadn’t expected Matthew. She pushed herself back from the computer, her hands like fists against the edge of the desk and her
arms outstretched. Nella looked at the floor, then closed her eyes as if invisibility might make her brother disappear forever. But it didn’t.

  Even there in the stillness, in the darkness, she felt Matthew.

  It seems you misunderstood. His was the voice she fled, and had tried to push herself so far from. If she had been in Melbourne now she would have gone to the creek, she would have gone to the swallows. Take me away with you, she might have said because, after all, that was the other side of their return – their leaving. Take me away, please take me away. That’s what she might have said if she could put words to it, if she could translate the forces inside her into some kind of language that made sense.

  Instead she opened her eyes and she went to her father’s bed. She pulled the blanket from the top of it and she held it close to her. What did Matthew mean anyway? It seems you misunderstood. What did he know of understanding, of her understanding?

  For him, life was school, study, a career. That’s probably what this was about, Nella needing to return to school. But Nella hated school. She hated the uniform she had to wear, she hated the subjects she had to study, she hated the lunchtime conversations she was never part of. She was staying here on the island with her father and when he was well, when he was completely well, she’d take him to the creek, to the swallows as she’d always wanted to, to their children born new and unowned and full of possibility.

  She hugged the blanket closer to herself now. She’d sleep under the stars. Why not? She’d sleep under the sky that the swallows travelled by navigating without map or study.

  Nella went to the back door and it was already turning to twilight – in-between like the journey from the city to the island or the coastal scrub with its neighbouring sea and bush, or even the creek where one thing is ending and another beginning – and she put the blanket over the couch on the back verandah, made a little bed and climbed inside.

  How tired she was. How she slept and slept. It was not even darkness but she fell asleep and dreamt and dreamt and did not wake until late morning. There was Matthew speaking to her in the night but she could not hear him, the swallows flying into the sky on their northern migration, her school with its bell ringing again and again and her mother saying those words over and over – His heart’s given way, his heart’s given way.