For the Forest of a Bird

by Sue Saliba

  Nella stayed looking at the screen. She typed more words to Matthew.

  And I understand that there is a special love that no one else can know – a love between a father and a daughter.

  ‘Nella,’ she heard from the doorway. She saved her message.

  ‘Nella.’ She turned. ‘Hi Nella.’

  Linda was standing there. She wasn’t smiling as she had been earlier. She was looking serious, almost stern.

  ‘You know it’s best that … things are clear from the outset …’ she said. ‘That everything’s made clear.’

  Nella waited.

  Her father appeared from the lounge room. He stood behind Linda.

  ‘Nella, there’s something that you need to know.’

  Linda looked around the inside of the bedroom then. She cleared her throat, she straightened herself.

  ‘Nella, your father and I …’ she said. ‘Your father and I are getting married.’

  Married. The room seemed too small to contain it all, to contain Nella and her new knowledge and her father and Linda and what had been before and all that was promised for the future.

  Married. Nella felt the blood run from her fingers and her feet to somewhere deep inside, somewhere secret and unseen. She looked at her hands suddenly cold and thought of her mother, her mother’s hands.

  Blue, cracked. How they were so often like ice.

  ‘Married?’ Nella heard herself say.

  ‘Yes,’ Linda answered.

  Married.

  Nella turned back to the computer screen. She felt the tightness in the pit of her. She felt like she was waiting.

  Nothing moved.

  Nella saw words of her email floating out at her. She closed her eyes, she heard Linda shift in the doorway behind her. She waited.

  And then she reached her hand out to the computer, scrolled past delete and clicked save as draft.

  Isobel would know what to do. Isobel understood in a way that was not identical to Nella’s but that somehow matched, somehow made sense of things without answering them.

  Without packing them into boxes.

  ‘Are you okay?’ Nella heard her father.

  ‘I’m going to see Isobel,’ she said.

  She stood and walked past her father and Linda in the doorway. Linda stepped slightly back and her father reached his hand out, but Nella kept walking.

  ‘I don’t know when I’ll be back,’ she said, as much to the empty air of the house as to the two adults she left behind in the doorway.

  Married, she kept hearing. With every step as she walked the three streets to Isobel’s house she heard it. Married.

  Stones and fences and gateways and open gutters. She heard it again and again and again until at last she reached Isobel’s house, as secret amongst its mess of bush and tangle as the swallows’ nests beneath the bridge.

  ‘Isobel,’ she said when she got to the door of Isobel’s garden home. ‘You won’t believe what’s happened.’

  Isobel eyes grew wide.

  ‘What is it, Nella?’

  ‘My dad and Linda …’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘They’re getting married.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes, really. They are.’

  Nella felt Isobel’s hand on her sleeve.

  ‘It’s true,’ Nella said.

  And then she felt herself folded inside Isobel’s arms so her head rested against Isobel’s chest and she couldn’t be sure if the heart she heard was her own or Isobel’s or that of someone else.

  She was right, Isobel did know what to do. Together they sat in Isobel’s room and Isobel listened. Nella spoke and she looked at the pictures on the walls, the words as phrases and poems stuck against paint, and she spoke again and she fell silent and she tried to explain things and midway gave up and started again and then began something else. And all the while – for one of the first times ever – she did not feel like running.

  She did not feel like being anywhere else.

  She felt as she did in the coastal scrub or beside the creek but even so just a little bit different again.

  Here she felt that she could be mended, that she could be put back together again. That maybe –

  ‘Do you believe broken things can be fixed?’ she asked Isobel all of a sudden.

  Isobel didn’t answer at first and then she said, ‘I want to take you somewhere, Nella, tonight as it gets dark. We’ll go there at dusk. It’s a journey you can only make at nightfall.’

  Light and dark and endings and beginnings, and the faintest hint of stars. It was just turning to night when Nella followed Isobel down the pathway of Isobel’s house. Nella hugged a borrowed cardigan tight around herself. Isobel walked with her left hand gently clutching something inside it. She had just the faintest of smiles.

  ‘Come on,’ she said.

  They walked along the road Nella had arrived on, but it was not harsh and dusty now but gentle, muted. Even the stones seemed without edge. They walked in a kind of softness, blue-black sky above and the earliest of possums emerging from their nests. A small dark shape that could have been a leaf floated down towards Nella but at the last moment flew away as a tiny bat. A cicada started and stopped and started his song again.

  ‘It’s not far to go,’ Isobel said.

  They passed a fallen tree already hollowed on its inside and at last turned the corner to a little general store. Its lights were on and there were customers inside – a father with a small child, an elderly man holding a carton of eggs.

  ‘Good, she’ll be busy. Come on, Nella.’

  Isobel walked into the front yard of a house beside the shop.

  ‘This is where she lives, Mrs Governor, the woman who runs the shop.’

  ‘What are we doing here?’

  ‘I want to show you something. Now, stay quiet and watch.’

  Isobel crouched down to the ground and Nella squatted beside her. They were sitting on the edge of the yard, looking into a small tree thick with leaves.

  ‘What are we watching for?’

  ‘Shhh,’ Isobel said. ‘He’ll be here in a minute.’

  They waited and watched. Nella felt the sky turning from its deep blue colour to an almost black.

  ‘He’s here,’ Isobel said.

  Nella looked up and saw a winged shape drifting through the air, so graceful she was sure it must be gliding home. It circled once, then twice, then gently dropped, coming to rest on a branch in the tree Isobel and Nella knelt beneath.

  ‘He’s come home,’ Nella whispered.

  ‘Kind of,’ Isobel said.

  They watched the bird shift on his perch, fluff up his feathers, turn his head into the warmth of his breast. Stillness. He was somewhere between flight and dreams.

  ‘How did you know he was here?’ Nella said.

  ‘Because I invited him,’ Isobel answered her.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Isobel opened her left hand. Inside was the little cloth purse with the leaf on one side. She unzipped its top and poured some of the contents into her palm to show Nella. There they rested: small, almost shining beads.

  ‘These are the seeds of the blueberry ash tree. It used to be here, all over this area before the land was cleared for farms and houses. When it went, so did the birds. My mum found a way to propagate the seeds at her nursery.’

  ‘You planted this tree?’

  ‘Yes, four years ago, and then the satin bowerbird came two years later.’

  Nella put her hand out to the seeds. She felt herself suddenly excited like she had found the answer to every­thing she had ever asked.

  ‘You found a way to make things exactly as they were,’ she said.

  ‘Well, not exactly.’

  Nella stopped her hand mid-air between herself and Isobel.

  ‘They can’t be exactly. I mean, you can’t go back to the way things were exactly. There are other things around the tree and the bird n
ow – traffic, houses, people, you can’t change that. And, anyway, even the bird and the tree aren’t exactly the ones that were here before.’

  Nella closed her hand to a fist.

  ‘You can’t return to the exact same things, Nella.’

  But Nella stood and began to back away.

  ‘Some things can be returned to,’ she said. ‘I know they can.’

  She walked further from the tree and from Isobel and from the bird. Further and further.

  ‘I’m going back to my dad’s,’ she said. It was fully night now, black.

  ‘Nella.’

  ‘I’m going back,’ she said. And Isobel’s voice called out, but could no longer reach her.

  What was Isobel talking about? Nella had thought Isobel understood, Nella had thought she was a friend but there she was saying things couldn’t be what they once were, saying things couldn’t be returned to what they once had been. Of course they could. So, Nella’s father was getting married. Nella didn’t like it and she knew it would take some getting used to but it didn’t mean things couldn’t return to how they had been with her father; it didn’t mean things couldn’t be as they once were back before he went away, before he left the family, before he was forced to leave the family by her mother’s illness. After all, Nella was her father’s child, nothing could change that and even more, she was his daughter, his only daughter.

  She moved along the road. The early stars had disappeared, covered over by cloud, and there were few streetlights around. She pulled the cuffs of the cardigan’s sleeves down over her hands to stop the cold air from getting inside.

  Back she travelled to her father’s house. She knew the exact way, she didn’t need the help of lights, she told herself. She’d be back there soon sitting with her dad in his lounge room. Maybe they’d watch something together on the television, simply sit in their own silence and be together since there was no need to talk, she knew that. She knew there was no need to say a thing, especially no need to talk of what had been revealed earlier that day.

  So he was getting married at some time in the future – there was nothing more to be said about it.

  At last she came to the front of the house with its light dim in the lounge room and the glow of the television spreading from a corner. Her father, she knew, would be there in his brown lounge chair watching a program on Channel Two. He would have asked Linda to go and stay at her own house since Nella was coming back; he would have known she was returning.

  Nella would walk inside, simply sit down and be with her father.

  Through the gate, up the driveway and across the verandah, she reached the front door. The television sounded. She walked in.

  ‘Hi Dad.’

  ‘Hello Nella.’

  ‘What are you watching?’

  ‘Oh, just a documentary … . I’m only half watching really … I can turn it off.’

  He reached for the remote control on the table beside him.

  ‘No. No, don’t do that. I’ll watch it with you.’

  Her father hesitated.

  ‘Maybe we should talk, you know, Nella … earlier today …’

  ‘We can watch it together,’ Nella said and she pulled up the other brown vinyl chair that exactly matched her father’s.

  There on the screen was a cat with mauve-coloured whiskers. Someone was saying how there was only a one in fifty thousand chance of this happening.

  ‘That reminds me of the time we went to Collingwood Children’s Farm,’ Nella said. ‘Remember? And we saw the goat with blue eyes.’

  ‘Yeah,’ her father answered. ‘And I told you about the sheep up in Nathalia, at the shearing shed.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Nella.

  ‘Let’s turn it up.’ She reached for the remote control.

  ‘Wait …’ Her father put his hand out to stop her.

  ‘But it’s too low, I can’t hear it and they’re explaining why the cat has those strange whiskers.’

  ‘No,’ her father said firmly. ‘Leave it down.’

  ‘But …’

  There was stillness. Nella felt her throat tighten.

  ‘Just leave it down,’ he spoke again.

  And Nella stared at a tiny black spot on the carpet.

  ‘Linda’s tired,’ he said. ‘She needs to rest.’

  The television went blank, the light was turned off. Nella’s father went to bed and Nella sat in her room on the mattress hugging her knees to her chest.

  Linda needed her rest; Linda who was marrying her father needed her rest.

  Nella tightened her arms.

  Well, why doesn’t she just go back to her own house then?

  Nella looked at the top of the chest of drawers where she kept her pile of Australian Geographics with their pictures of rock wallabies and deep-sea creatures, echidnas and rare platypuses. Somehow their stories of survival and rescue and million-year histories always restored her, but now as she looked at the pine cabinet she saw that the slim volumes were gone. Instead, in their place, rested a thick magazine. She loosened her arms and felt herself lengthen. She moved over to the chest. She reached out and pulled the magazine towards herself so that she could read the title on its front cover. ‘Special Wedding Days,’ it said.

  She stayed still for what felt like a very long time and then she moved towards the door that led onto the lounge room. She walked across to the television and there in the darkness she switched on the set. Light, sound. She turned the volume up.

  And soon enough, in the doorway from the kitchen her father appeared.

  ‘Nella, what are you doing?’

  She ignored him.

  ‘Nella, I told you, Linda needs to rest. She isn’t feeling well.’

  Nella turned to her father.

  ‘She isn’t feeling well!’ Nella felt her voice rise above the sound of the television. ‘She isn’t feeling well! Well, maybe she needs to go and stay at a hospital!’

  Nella stepped towards him and her father stayed standing in the doorway.

  ‘Nella,’ he said quietly. ‘Nella, Linda’s having a baby.’

  Nella paced Isobel’s room, back and forth, back and forth. It was dark, it was the middle of the night. Where was Isobel? Nella needed her, Nella needed to talk to her, she needed to tell her what her father had said. Linda was having a baby. Nella’s father and Linda were having a baby. Nella was going to have a new brother or sister. Her father was going to have a new child.

  She turned on the small lamp in the corner and sat down on the bed. It was a mattress really, simply a mattress on the floor. It was covered in blankets and cushions and rugs and it occurred to Nella that it was more like a nest than a bed. She put her hand beneath its top layers. It was soft inside.

  She looked around the room. The eyes of an endangered pygmy possum stared down at her from a poster above Isobel’s desk. A book of Mary Oliver poems lay open on the floor. A photo of a man on the beach surrounded by sandcastles rested on the dressing table next to the bed.

  Where was Isobel? Surely she couldn’t be still in the yard, beneath the tree?

  Nella waited. She couldn’t sleep. Morning came. Rain fell on the metal roof. Tiny skinks woke to scurry beneath the room’s floorboards. Still, Isobel did not appear.

  Nella stood and she walked around the room. She picked up a beach scene encased in plastic but put it down gently so as not to disturb its glittery sand. She bent to a tiny opened bottle on the cupboard and smelt sea salt. She ran one of her fingers across a sponge, strange-shaped and curious from the ocean.

  And then Isobel was there. The door opened and Isobel came into the room.

  She wore the same jeans and shirt Nella had last seen her in.

  ‘Hi,’ Nella said, a little awkward amongst the detail of Isobel’s room.

  ‘Hi. I thought you were staying at your dad’s.’

  ‘I was. I mean I did … for a little while. And then …’

  ‘And then?’

  Now was Nella’s chance to te
ll Isobel about the baby, about the child Linda was having and her father was having and how for all Nella knew, for everything Nella sensed, it was going to be a girl.

  She looked at Isobel’s face. She saw that Isobel’s lips were almost blue with cold.

  ‘Isobel, why did you plant the tree?’ she said.

  Isobel’s skin on her neck grew suddenly red, she shifted her feet.

  ‘Because I lost someone,’ she answered.

  Nella waited.

  ‘Because I lost someone. And I wanted him back.’

  So Isobel knew; Isobel knew what it was to lose someone, to want them back, to want things to be what they once were.

  ‘Did he return?’ Nella asked.

  ‘Yes … and no. I guess it’s like that, isn’t it?’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like yes and no, light and dark, daytime and night.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘You saw the photo of him on the dressing table.’

  Nella looked to the floor, guilty.

  ‘It’s okay. I don’t mind. It’s a photo of my dad. He was my dad. That’s what I mean, everything’s mixed up, isn’t it? Back then and now, what’s gone and what’s still here.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Nella said.

  Isobel bent down and sat on the mattress. She looked at her hands.

  ‘It was four years ago now,’ she said. ‘I was fourteen.’

  Nella felt herself drawn to Isobel. She felt the urgency of her own anguish begin to fade.

  ‘What happened … to your dad?’

  ‘He was in an accident on the way to Melbourne. It was wet and his car skidded and rolled over. He’d taken a back road and it was late at night when a truck driver found him. He was dead.’

  Nella didn’t know what to say.

  Isobel smoothed the creases in her jeans. She bit her lip.

  ‘It was like everything was useless then,’ she said. ‘Especially school.’

  She looked up at Nella.

  ‘I didn’t want to be around anyone,’ she said. ‘It was like no one understood.’

  Nella felt herself nodding.

  ‘I know my mum felt the same,’ Isobel went on. ‘She didn’t go anywhere except to get food or pay the bills. The only thing she started doing was just sitting on the lawn in the front yard. She’d just go out there and sit. It was just grass and a fringe of roses then.’