For the Forest of a Bird

by Sue Saliba

  There was no sense to any of it – it was simply a swirl of pictures and words and as Nella lay there thinking about it in the morning, the strangest of thoughts occurred to her. Maybe Matthew was right. Maybe she didn’t understand the world as it really was. Maybe she really had misunderstood.

  But no, she dismissed the thought as quickly as it had arisen. Matthew had always done that, made her doubt herself, made her feel that all she believed was simply foolish and fantasy.

  She lifted her arms from beneath the blanket, stretched her whole body and she felt a shaft of sunlight slide warm across her throat. And then, she heard a sound along the driveway of the house, near the front fence.

  She listened, slowly lifted herself so she was sitting upright on the couch and then began to creep over to the garage where she would be able to see towards the road. She was halfway across the yard when she heard a car door slam and then the crushing of stones beneath moving tyres, footsteps towards the front door, and the turning of a key.

  Nella held herself. Could it be? Could her father be back? Could her father be home?

  She stayed still in the morning backyard. She heard the front door close, she heard curtains being opened, the kitchen tap being turned on, the clicking of the kettle on the stove.

  She rushed up the steps of the back verandah and reached for the handle of the door.

  ‘Dad,’ she said.

  He was still standing near the front door, leaning over his open bag. She could just see him from the back door.

  ‘Dad,’ she said again.

  He turned slowly.

  ‘Nella.’

  ‘Dad …’

  And she was about to tell him how she understood, she understood everything and she was here to look after him and this was now her home too and she would make sure he got well again and then, when everything was settled and as it should be, she would take him to the swallows.

  ‘Dad …’

  But there was a sound that came from the room beside her. It was a voice. ‘David,’ it called. ‘David, come quick. Someone’s been in our bedroom.’

  Nella stood in the coastal scrub and she felt nothing. She’d run and run from her father’s house, down the back steps and across the yard, over the tumbledown wire of the neighbour’s fence and beneath the shade of gum trees and black wattles, over sticks and fallen branches until at last she’d arrived at the scrubland, breathless and empty and numb.

  There she stood amongst tea-tree and creeping vine and she felt nothing, except for a pressure inside her that was the force of Matthew’s words. It seems you misunderstood. And then other words, words she had not remembered since Matthew had uttered them that night she had gone to the hospital. He told me everything. That’s what Matthew had said of their father. Last night he told me everything.

  Everything. Nella pushed further into the coastal scrub as if the very movement might let her leave behind the knowledge growing fast inside her. Further and further she went. The prickly stem of a young bush caught her ankle and her skin began to bleed, but she did not stop. A sharp twig from an overhanging branch scratched at the side of her face, but she continued on.

  Somewhere, further along, somewhere there must be another place. There must be somewhere else. She had thought it was here on the island, she had thought it was here with her father. She couldn’t help but think now of the swallows – the swallows arriving from their northern homes – and she wanted nothing more than to be with them. There by the creek, to be simply alone with the swallows.

  What had she done? Why had she come to the island? How could it be true that her father had this … friend? And that he had told Matthew? Matthew knew everything.

  Nella was nothing but thoughts and questions and feelings and she ran and stumbled through the scrub forgetting her legs and breath and feet until she tripped on a fallen branch and landed with her arms outstretched on a sudden rise of dirt.

  ‘Are you all right?’ She looked up to see the face of the girl from the side of the road, the girl she had seen here in the scrub, with the wallaby, with the dead wallaby.

  Nella reared back from the mound of dirt, from the girl, from the sudden memory of her father’s house.

  She was caught.

  ‘Are you all right?’ the girl said again.

  Nella looked at the risen earth she’d fallen on. She saw the dirt was fresh. She saw a white cross at one end.

  ‘I buried her,’ the girl said. ‘I buried her to make her safe from the ravens … and because I thought she deserved to be somewhere special.’

  Nella said all in a rush then, ‘What does it matter? She’s dead.’

  But the girl did not answer her.

  ‘She’s finished. Everything that meant anything about her has gone,’ Nella said.

  ‘Nothing’s ever gone.’

  Nella looked at the girl.

  ‘Nothing disappears. It just becomes something else,’ the girl said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean something can’t just become nothing.’

  Nella waited.

  ‘… like the bits of stars we used to be,’ the girl went on. ‘If you look, if you look in the right way, you’ll see they haven’t disappeared. They never can.’

  Nella shook her head then, more confused than disagreeing.

  ‘I have to go,’ the girl said. ‘I’m already late.’ And Nella saw as the girl moved away from her that she held in her hands a little cloth purse with a leaf embroidered on it.

  ‘Already late …?’ Nella echoed.

  But the girl had disappeared along a track towards the beach before Nella’s voice could possibly have reached her.

  Nella had always thought there was only one track in and out of the scrub. She had always thought there was only the pathway that led from her father’s house and back, but now, as she stood and watched where the girl had gone, she was struck by the possibility of a different path.

  How enticing, and how unnerving too.

  Could there be another way? But what if she began, what if she travelled halfway and then realised she was wrong, she was lost?

  For a moment, Nella thought to follow the girl. The girl was heading to the beach, that was obvious and she seemed to have such purpose about her, such a sense of intention. And there was something else too – a strange kind of gap or space – that made Nella curious and even, if she let it fully exist, hopeful.

  How silly; she’d only seen this girl for a moment, only spoken a few words, barely glimpsed her really. What was Nella thinking, to follow this stranger into some unknown space?

  She thought again of her father and her heart stuck. Maybe she had misheard? Maybe the female voice had not said, ‘our bedroom’, but ‘your bedroom’. Maybe it was a nurse who had returned with him from the hospital. Yes, maybe the hospital had sent a nurse home with him in the taxi and she was simply there to settle him in before Nella took over. Yes, that could be it, couldn’t it?

  But no, Nella replayed it all over and over in her mind but this time the story – the type of story she had so readily believed before – would not stick. Something had shifted. Something unseen and not yet understood had changed.

  She’s not his nurse, Nella said to herself. She’s not his nurse and she’s not his cleaner. Matthew knew … and then an awful thought occurred to Nella. She remembered her mother’s words: His heart’s given way. Remembered her mother twisting her wedding ring around and around. Her mother knew. Nella’s mother knew about her father’s … friend.

  Why should it matter, though? Why should it bother her mother at all? After all, she had driven Nella’s father away. If she’d really cared for her husband, if she’d really cared for Nella’s father, she would have found a way to get better. Wasn’t that right?

  But she hadn’t, she didn’t, which could only mean she hadn’t cared enough for him, she hadn’t wanted him to stay.

  Nella heard herself thinking these things, she heard the words inside her, but somehow t
he anger that usually accompanied them, that made them real and convincing, was gone. Something was different and just in that moment she glimpsed something behind the practised emotions.

  A different way, a new way.

  But she dismissed it. No, it wasn’t possible. It couldn’t be.

  She began walking back to her father’s. That was the way she should go, that was the way she could always be sure of.

  She passed tea-trees with their bark now turned to papery shreds and ready to blow away in the next wind. She stopped at a place that in the midst of winter was water and mud and the frenzy of a thousand wings but now would soon be dust.

  One thing turns into another. Winter to spring, anger to understanding.

  Her mother loved her father, that was it. Her mother loved her father and she still loved him. She hadn’t wanted him to leave but she could not stop him. She had wanted him to stay but she could not keep him.

  And Nella loved her father too.

  She paused only for a moment before she continued along the only path she’d ever known.

  Back to her father’s house, back to her father. What did she expect? She hardly knew. To find the woman there or perhaps her father alone, to discover the door locked or even Matthew newly arrived? Everything seemed possible, but despite the uncertainty of it all – or perhaps because of it – Nella could only keep walking the same way.

  Closer and closer to her father.

  Further and further along the familiar dusty road.

  As she reached his house it looked remarkably the same as it had the day before and, for a moment, Nella thought she might have the chance to start again.

  To go back.

  There in the frame of the long window was her father’s shape and as she walked up the steps of the verandah, she knew he had been waiting for her.

  ‘Hi,’ he said as she came through the door. He was sitting with a blanket on his knees, looking thinner. His bottles of medications were on the small table beside him.

  ‘Hi,’ Nella said.

  ‘You were gone a while.’

  She nodded.

  It was like there was a plate of glass between them.

  ‘I meant to tell you,’ he said. ‘About …’

  ‘Yes,’ Nella said quickly. She didn’t want to hear it said – the situation, the experience, or worst of all the woman’s name – since words captured things and made it hard for them to be anything other than what they were.

  ‘I should have told you myself …’ her father began again, and this time Nella recognised his words from somewhere before. From the hospital, from the night she had gone to see him.

  She covered her face with her hands, perhaps to hide herself away from everything outside her, away from her father.

  He was silent. She stayed still within the darkness of her hidden self.

  And then she took her hands from her face and her father was still there but the expression on his face had changed. It was as if he was thinking things through, as if he was just realising something himself.

  ‘Nella,’ he said. ‘Come on, come and rest in the sunroom, at least for now.’

  He edged himself out of the chair and she followed him to the little room at the back of the house that she always stayed in when she came to visit. Her room. Except now she didn’t sit herself down on the comfort of the bed as she usually did. Instead she stayed standing beside its metal frame and she held her arms tight around herself.

  And her father paused as if he wanted to say something but then he turned and left the room, closing the door behind him.

  Solid, shut, or so it seemed. It was only when Nella looked more closely that she saw a gap where the wood of the door did not quite fit the frame. She stood for a long time watching the odd sunlight that made its way through the opening – a small determined stream.

  She walked slowly over to the door. The house must have shifted. There never had been such a space before; Nella was sure of it. She would have noticed since she knew every inch, every moment of this little room. She put her hand out towards the gap, but before she could reach it she stopped.

  Voices were coming from the lounge room.

  ‘I can’t.’ It was her father’s voice, a near-whisper. ‘I can’t, Linda. She’s in there.’

  A pause.

  ‘You can go without them, can’t you? Anyway, I’ve seen another pair in the bathroom, above the sink. I’ll go and get them for you.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Linda.’

  The female voice spoke again. ‘I’m not wearing those, David … they don’t match this jacket. I’m not going out in those.’

  Silence.

  ‘I’ll get them myself then.’

  ‘No, don’t go in there, that is Nella’s …’

  And Nella heard footsteps, distinctly female footsteps, coming towards the room.

  She stood staring at the gap and waited for it to widen, for the stream of sunlight to become a flood. She waited.

  And waited.

  And then a car horn sounded from the road. Once, twice.

  ‘Shit.’ The footsteps stopped.

  ‘Shit. I’ll have to go.’ The footsteps turned and went back through the lounge room and straight to the front door. ‘I’ll see you later, David.’

  Nothing.

  ‘David …?’

  But there was no reply, only the eventual noise of a car driving away. And when Nella opened the door, her father was sitting back in his chair looking at her and she was surprised at the warmth of the sudden sunlight.

  Full and bright, strong. Her father looked larger than real in the sun’s brightness.

  ‘No … that is Nella’s … No, don’t go in there, that is Nella’s …’ She heard the words that had made it to her through the sudden gap in the house. His words.

  Perhaps things were as they always had been. Perhaps this woman was just someone briefly in her father’s life – insignificant. Yes, why not? People had friends … girlfriends, boyfriends … what adults might call partners, but nothing could replace a child, no one could replace your daughter, your only daughter.

  It made sense. Beneath all the flux and minutiae, some things – the very essential things – were always returned to, just as the sea returned to shore and the swallows returned to their home by the creek.

  Yes, the swallows. Nella had not forgotten them. She knew they would be back now, she knew they would be preparing their nests. And her promise – the one she had made beneath the bridge on her last morning in Melbourne – came back to her. Of course, I will bring him here to the swallows … I will bring him back when the young ones fly.

  That is what she had said and she looked at her father now and she knew that the promise had never left her.

  When he is well, when his heart is completely healed I will take him to the creek, that’s what Nella said to herself. We’ll stand together and watch the swallows’ children. We will watch them with their brand-new feathers, stepping out into sky.

  ‘Drifting away,’ her father said. ‘What are you thinking, Nella-lamb?’

  Only her father called her that. It came from the times she would wait eager at the door for him to return home from the shearing sheds, eager to see him, eager to hear of his travels and of the enormous properties, the paddocks of sheep, the tiny bleating lambs.

  She smiled at him. She was right; nothing had changed, nothing important.

  ‘We could sit in the garden,’ she said. And suddenly she couldn’t help herself and she added, ‘Like we always do.’

  He smiled back at her. ‘Yeah … like we always do.’

  Nella helped her father up from his chair and then they sat, side by side, she next to the old fridge on the verandah and he on his seat closer to the driveway. They’d spent many hours like this over the last few years since her father had moved to the island and it felt to Nella, for many years before that. Forever, if that could be imagined.

  While he talked of his travels, she would see lines l
ike magic threads that connected them across the distances. He would tell her of the long journey back and forth across the Nullarbor or up to the outback stations of Queensland and she would imagine that next time she could borrow the swallows’ wings to bring him home faster, so she could tell him of school and all the nonsense she was taught. Together the two of them would look out into the garden.

  ‘Is the leaf-curling spider still up there beneath the eave?’ she asked.

  Her father looked towards the roof.

  ‘Probably,’ he answered.

  ‘And the silvereyes. Are they still enjoying their daily baths?’

  ‘I suppose so. I haven’t been here, Nella.’

  ‘Hmm.’

  Nella squinted into the sun, her father shielded his eyes.

  ‘What about Bluey? Do you think she’s out of hibernation yet?’

  Bluey was the blue-tongue lizard Nella had found one summer afternoon, pushing through the grass and leaf litter of the front garden. Nella had bent down and marvelled at the reptile’s strange patterned skin, at her clear unblinking eyes. She’d knelt beside the creature in awe at the ancient memory that must have linked it to a million secret worlds.

  ‘Bluey?’ her father echoed. ‘I’m not sure, Nella.’

  ‘Not sure?’

  Nella looked out at the garden. She hadn’t looked closely at it before, but she should have noticed anyway. How could she have missed it? Large parts of the undergrowth had been cut away. The native grasses and ground cover had been ripped out, the logs and branches that formed shelters and hiding places had been collected and put in a pile by the fence.

  ‘What’s happened to Bluey’s home?’ she said.

  She stared at the bare, neat earth.

  Her father shifted awkwardly in his chair.

  ‘Linda thought it needed tidying up.’

  ‘Tidying up?’ Nella could feel her throat tighten.

  ‘She thought it was a mess.’