by Sue Saliba
Nella tried to picture it.
‘I’d watch my mum through the front window just sitting there and picking at blades of grass. And then one day I saw her go up to the leaf on a rose bush and look really closely at it. And then she started noticing tiny flowers and little plants trying to come up through the lawn. She’d pull away little bits of grass as if she were clearing a way for them.
‘I watched her for so many hours out there. After a while, I noticed she started leaving the yard and going up and down the street, collecting a bit of plant here, a bit there. She’d bring home all these little bits and put them in jars around the house. She’d watch their roots grow and then she’d plant them out in the garden. She’d make sure they had enough water and all the right food and that they were positioned to get the exact sun they needed.
‘She spent so long out there. It was the one thing that made her happy, to be there with the plants.’
Nella smiled.
‘I guess it made sense then that when some money came through – from my dad’s accident and everything – she bought the native nursery.’
‘And what about you?’ Nella asked. ‘What made sense to you?’
‘Nothing. Nothing made sense for a long, long time. I went to school because I had to. And then, when I could, I left. I started helping my mum in the nursery. I liked it; it wasn’t gardening like some people think of it. It wasn’t about hedges and pots and twisting trees to fit some kind of shape that you want them to. It wasn’t that at all. It was about things continuing, beginning and it got me thinking about my dad, where he was, how he couldn’t have just disappeared.’
There was silence for a long time.
‘But that’s not why you came here, is it?’ Isobel said at last. ‘To hear my story?’
Nella thought of her father and his new child, his unborn child and she wanted to say, yes, Isobel’s story was exactly why she’d come here but instead she put her hand to Isobel’s sleeve to comfort her and when she looked again she was sure she saw the mark of the swallow’s nest on her wrist.
Perhaps it was no coincidence, after all, Nella’s glimpsing of Isobel by the roadside as she’d arrived on the island that first morning. There was Isobel crouched beside the asphalt with blood against the chest of her T-shirt and the crumpled young wallaby at her feet.
Nella thought of it now and something struck her about that very moment. In that instant, in that exact time just before the bus had turned the corner and Nella had noticed Isobel, she realised that Isobel had seen her too. It may not have been in a conscious way but something in Isobel had known that Nella was there. Somehow, like the swallows aware of each other at two distant points on their common pathway.
‘Were you close to your dad?’ Nella asked and she instantly wished she hadn’t because spoken aloud it seemed such an insensitive question, and even more, she was sure she knew the answer.
‘Sometimes,’ Isobel said.
‘Sometimes?’
Nella was surprised.
‘I thought …’ Nella said tentatively.
‘You thought what?’
‘I thought you must have been close, I mean, really close all the time.’
‘I loved my dad,’ Isobel said.
‘Yeah … I know, but …’
‘But what? Things aren’t perfect, people aren’t perfect all the time, you know.’
Nella fiddled with a button on her cardigan.
‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘You’re right.’ And something began to unfold inside her. A knot began to loosen.
‘My dad promised to bring me a blue-eyed sheep from Nathalia once,’ she said.
Nella had never told the whole story aloud, even to herself.
‘She was the only sheep he’d ever seen with two blue eyes and he promised me he’d bring her back to me as a pet, as a special companion. I read everything about sheep; what they needed to eat, what medicines they had to have, how they should be bathed, what they liked to sleep on. And then, when I knew he was coming back, I waited.
‘I sat out on the front fence of our house. It was a Saturday afternoon. I waited from just after lunch until late in the day. Then I started to walk to the end of the street and back. I looked for him around the corner and as far as I could see, checking for him. Maybe he’d got caught in traffic, I thought. Or maybe he’d stopped along the way to let the sheep eat some grass. Or perhaps he was buying some of the special medical supplies I needed to take care of her.
‘I waited until it got so cold I had to go inside.’
Nella stopped and then she said finally, ‘I never said anything to my dad. I never asked him why he didn’t come, why he never brought me the sheep.’
‘Why not?’ Isobel asked.
‘I don’t know. I guess I just always thought he should be perfect. That is …’ Nella paused. ‘Maybe I just couldn’t let myself think of him any other way.’
Perfection. Nella looked around the room. The sea sponge that sat on the cupboard was misshapen. The little Buddha statue beneath the window tilted ever so slightly to the left, even the photo of Isobel’s father was creased and almost curled at the edges. And yet, strangely, in each object’s imperfection, in its aspect of incompleteness there was a whisper of possibility, of life. It was as if each had a story to be told, a question to be asked, a journey to be taken that something perfect and complete and closed could never offer.
She turned to the corner of the room and there she saw, resting in the near-darkness, a sheet of white paper. It had tiny objects on it. She moved closer. On the paper were the smallest of seeds. She bent down and picked one up between her fingers, then placed it in her other hand. She reached out and picked up another. Each seed, she noticed, had its own slightly distorted feature: a darkened patch, an enlarged end, a seam that did not run straight.
‘What are you going to do with these?’ she asked Isobel.
‘Plant them in a place I know on the island.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Yeah. I’m putting them on the other side of town where there once used to be an entire forest.’
‘But you can’t go back to the way things were, that’s what you said.’
‘That’s right. You can’t go back to the exact same things but you can honour what was there, you can connect with the past and make a new beginning.’
‘Like the tree with the satin bowerbird.’
‘Exactly.’
Nella looked at the seeds’ varied and imperfect forms and they struck her as entirely beautiful. Can I come with you? she wanted to ask but instead she lifted her eyes to Isobel and she said, ‘When do we go?’
‘Tonight, by the rising moon.’ That was Isobel’s response. The time when everything was in-between, when everything was leaving or arriving or waiting to be, when there was a gap, a moment of change and uncertainty, and, yes, life.
Together Isobel and Nella curled up on the mattress and slept. Outside, the morning turned to afternoon and the sun shifted to the edge of the sky as Nella woke first. She watched Isobel’s sleeping face and she saw the creased image of her friend’s father near the bed. Gently she leant across and picked up the photograph. There he stood in front of the blue of the water, his near-black hair the same as his daughter’s.
Isobel shifted and rubbed her eyes. Nella carefully put the photo back.
‘It must be getting late,’ Isobel said, still moving from sleep.
‘Late and early,’ Nella said.
‘Hmm?’
‘Nothing. Come on, we should be getting ready now.’
Isobel stretched her arms above her head and yawned. She turned towards Nella. Then she squinted and looked more closely at Nella’s wrist.
‘What’s that’s on your arm?’ she said.
Nella had almost forgotten the mark of the swallow’s nest. No one else had ever noticed it before.
‘It looks like a tattoo,’ Isobel said, shifting her head slightly.
Nella thought about the morning she
had touched the swallow’s nest; how she had been leaving the city to be with her father, returning to her father, having him return to her, just like the swallows returned year after year after year. She looked at Isobel now. Isobel understood. Isobel knew what it was to feel loss. Isobel knew what it was to lose a father you loved and to want him back, to want him to return.
‘What is it?’ Isobel asked.
Nella felt herself ready to say, ‘It’s the marking of a nest and it belongs to the swallows and they come back every year and they burst from the sky, right from the deep endless sky, to remind you that nothing ever dies, nothing ever goes away and fails to return. Nothing – no one – ever leaves you.’
‘It’s …’ Nella began but she felt herself stuttering. ‘It’s …’
Isobel stared intently at her.
Nella tried again. And then she shook her head.
‘No … ’ she said.
‘No?’
She shook her head again and pulled the sleeve of her long T-shirt down over her wrist.
‘We need to get going,’ she said.
And she turned and reached for her shoes that sat waiting for her beside the mattress.
Why couldn’t she tell Isobel about the nest’s mark? What was it that held her back? She thought about her withdrawal over and over as she walked beside Isobel on their way to the industrial park. What was it that had stopped her?
They came to the edge of a farm now. The house was off in the distance but in the paddocks that spread out in front of them were cows with their black-and-white patterned bodies and their sudden curious eyes.
How beautiful they looked. Nella slowed to stand still in their quiet gaze and as she did a memory returned to her. It was of Matthew shaking his head and telling her to ‘toughen up’. ‘Get real,’ he’d said. They were standing beside the rush of traffic on Alexandra Parade. She was eleven, he was fourteen. They’d gone to the bakery to buy bread. A truck filled with cows shunted past them and Nella had felt her eyes fill with tears. ‘For god’s sake,’ Matthew said. ‘Where do you think meat comes from?’ And Nella felt herself sick and scared and wished herself completely disappeared until her father had arrived later that day.
‘Oh no, Nella,’ he’d said. ‘Cows are happy creatures. To be a cow for half a minute is to be worth being a human for two lifetimes. Believe me, cows are incredibly lucky – you don’t have to worry about the cows.’
And in that moment – for the longest time – fear and dread and blackness disappeared and Nella felt safe. Her father was there. Matthew and the cruelty of the world, her mother and her madness, the world as chaotic and unpredictable and frightening was banished. Nella could stretch and move and breathe again.
‘Are you coming?’ Isobel called.
Nella was standing still in the paddock and a half circle of cows had gathered at a distance from her. Isobel had moved ahead.
‘Nella?’ Isobel called again.
‘Yes, yes, I’m coming,’ Nella said. And in that moment of movement she realised why she could not tell Isobel about the mark – or rather a part of why she could not tell Isobel about the mark – why still, despite everything that pushed her further and further from her father, the swallows remained only for him.
Further across the paddock they travelled until they came to its edge with the wire electric fence. Isobel slid underneath so she did not touch any of the strands of charged metal. Nella stayed standing inside the paddock.
‘What is it? What’s wrong?’ Isobel said when she stood up. ‘Are you scared?’
Nella didn’t answer her.
‘It’s okay. Just go under slowly and then once you’re through we’re nearly at the place.’
Nella did not move.
‘Come on, you won’t get hurt.’
Nella stayed still. Isobel was right, she was scared. But she wasn’t scared of the fence or of climbing beneath it or of getting scratched on the rough ground.
She was scared of where Isobel might lead her within herself, of what Isobel might open within her.
That was the other part, the bigger part, of why she could not tell Isobel about the swallows.
It made sense now – the apprehension she had felt when she had first seen Isobel by the road, the unease she’d experienced when the two had met in the coastal scrub.
There had always been something about Isobel that threatened the safety of Nella.
‘You’ll have to get through yourself, I can’t hold the wire up for you,’ Isobel said.
And Nella thought of turning back, she thought of her father as a presence through her whole life.
‘I’m not going anywhere,’ she heard Isobel say and across the wire the two of them looked at each other. It was supposed to be moving towards darkness but it seemed that the in-between time – the time of half-light – would not leave.
‘I’ll wait for you, Nella.’
And there, something in those simple words coaxed Nella forward. She bent down and she put her hands to the ground and she edged herself beneath the wire.
On they went, past streets that ended at the water and holiday shacks that sat empty. They walked side by side, almost step for step, and yet still Nella could not shake a shadow of hesitancy. Yes, she felt an urge to continue, even a kind of excitement about the whole adventure, but that other feeling – that feeling of fear – still lingered within her.
A spur-winged plover cried out, the island’s only traffic light stayed stuck on red as they walked through it.
Finally they arrived at their last stop. It was a road of iron sheds and cyclone-fenced properties. There were large pieces of equipment – earth movers, excavators, drilling machines – stored in the yards.
‘This is the industrial park,’ Isobel said. ‘It used to be a forest.’
Nella felt herself stop.
‘Come around the back. You’ll see where people have dumped their rubbish. They’ve used this place as a tip for years,’ she said.
They walked to the back of the industrial park and sure enough, Nella could see what must have once been tea-tree and black wattle and firetail finches and blue fairy-wrens was now plastic bags and weeds and empty bottles.
‘How sad,’ she said.
The wall of weeds was so high and thick, you could see nothing beyond it.
‘It is sad,’ Isobel said. ‘And it’s more as well.’
She led Nella into the tangle of rough grass and draping vine. They struggled at first and then it was as if they had passed through a curtain and another place revealed itself.
Suddenly the weeds with their prickles and thorns, their long tendrils that strangled everything underneath, disappeared and there was a new world instead – a kind of forest. In fact, it was just the sort of forest that would have been here long ago, before the island was cleared and burnt.
Isobel stepped forward and held a salt-berry leaf between her fingers. She bent down and touched a native violet still awake in the half-moon’s light.
‘We have to work quietly,’ she said to Nella. ‘The thornbills are sleeping.’
Nella looked around and saw one of the thornbills’ empty nests disintegrating in a bush. Its gathered twigs and hair were falling to the ground but still she could make out its two doorways, one real, one fake to disarm predators.
‘They’ll build a new one next season, won’t they?’ she said, motioning with her hand to the nest.
‘Of course,’ Isobel said. ‘If there’s a place for them to build it. Now, come on.’
And so their work began, although it did not feel like work to Nella. The fear that had arisen in her had subsided or been overwhelmed by something else. Isobel emptied the bag she’d carried with its tiny plants and its miniature spade and her purse of seeds. She bent down and began digging. One hole here, another there. She moved about the small forest as if she knew every stem and crevice and shadow it contained, as if she herself might have begun there.
‘Put the little daisy bush beside the wa
x lily,’ she said. ‘They’re like companions. They grow best if they’re together.’
Nella followed instructions although it did not feel like she was taking orders. It felt instead as if she and Isobel were connected somehow, working and moving as one.
She saw a eucalypt tree that Isobel had planted sometime earlier, a hedge wattle nearly fully grown. Under the branches of a cranberry heath she glimpsed a shape. It seemed for a moment to be a bandicoot, but no, it couldn’t be. Nella had read that the last of the bandicoots had disappeared from the island years earlier. It made her think of her home in Melbourne, of the cobblestone laneways of North Fitzroy and the thistled banks of the creek where she had sensed the presence of long-gone platypuses, of eagles and owls and the strangest of butterflies, disappearing before they could be named.
‘The past never leaves us, does it?’ she said out loud.
‘What do you mean?’ Isobel raised her head a little distance away.
‘The past is always with us, isn’t it? Sometimes we don’t see it, we can’t, but it’s there.’
‘In a certain way.’
‘A certain way?’
Isobel turned back to face the thick of the forest. Nella noticed how strong the trees and bushes and grasses were, how they seemed to have taken root with such ease, with such energy. It was as if the earth itself had remembered them or as if they – or something about them – might have been waiting, ready to flourish again in a place they had never really left.
‘When we met in the scrub by the beach, that first time, when you had just buried the wallaby,’ Nella said, ‘you told me that nothing disappears. Do you remember?’
‘Yes, I do,’ Isobel said.
‘You said nothing disappears, that it just becomes something else.’
‘Yes.’
‘Is that what you discovered about your dad? Is that what you discovered when you wanted him back?’
Isobel didn’t answer. She stretched out her hand and touched a new shoot on a miniature sheoak, delicate and pale green in the moon’s half-light.
‘Things are never completely lost,’ Isobel said at last. ‘But then they can never be completely found, not as they were.’