by Sue Saliba
‘But …’
Isobel looked at Nella.
‘But,’ Nella said, ‘if I just tried hard enough.’
Isobel put her tiny spade down on the ground.
Her voice was low and soft.
‘Nella,’ she said. ‘That is exactly the problem; you are trying so so hard.’
You are trying so so hard. What was wrong with trying hard? What did Isobel mean? Wasn’t it a good thing to try, to want, to desire?
Nella thought of her life earlier, dreaming and imagining as she sat by the creek, her mind a million questions, her afternoons with her father at the kitchen table or sitting out on the back step, marvelling at the intricate journeys of tiny insects or the night-time voice of the crickets and grasshoppers. The world had seemed endless then, forever changing. And yet, somehow, sometime, it was true, things had become forced, frozen. At some point she had wished for things to be a certain way – and a certain way only. If only he would come back, if only things were as they once were. If only …
Nella noticed the moon had shifted in the sky. Even the moon – forever present, every night returning – shifted, moved, never stayed still.
She thought of Matthew and she said to Isobel, ‘I have a brother, you know. I’ve always thought we were so different, me and him, but now I’m not sure.’
Isobel listened.
‘He pushes everything away – emotions, people, all the beautiful things. And, me, I hold onto them, I cling, I will not let them go. But really, isn’t that just the same thing?’
‘In between,’ Nella went on. ‘Somehow in between where there is light and dark and movement and good and bad and everything mixed in …’
‘Yes,’ Isobel said.
‘Where my father is imperfect and the satin bowerbird returns and …’
‘And?’
‘And …’ Nella couldn’t say it. She could only think it, see it, feel it. And … where Isobel stood at the side of the road, angry and sad and gentle and warrior-like, her T-shirt streaked with blood.
‘And?’ Isobel said again.
‘And … where the world is alive,’ Nella finished. ‘Deeply alive.’
Alive. Moving and flowing and unstuck and exciting and frightening. Yes, there was somewhere like this where plans and schemes and twisting everything into a way that you wanted it to be did not have a place.
Nella saw the plants of the reborn forest, old and new all in one body, reaching out to the sky in every possible way. Anchored and searching, growing.
‘I think our work is done here,’ she said to Isobel.
Isobel handed her the last seed they had still to plant. Nella put it carefully into the pocket of her cardigan.
And together they walked back through the veil of weeds out into the makeshift tip, around the back of the cyclone fence that surrounded the yards of the industrial site. On they went along the edge of the silent town, across the farm paddocks with the cows now distant and still.
Nella thought of the shifting moon and she thought of the blue-black night and then she thought of the very reason she had gone to see Isobel last night. Before the reborn forest, before the story of Isobel’s father, before the journey in the half-light, there had been her father’s news of the child. Her father and Linda’s child.
How she had tried to cling to her father’s return – her father’s perfect return – and shut out the truth.
No, she had not told Isobel about the child. Perhaps it was a final step, a point from which she could not crawl back.
‘Isobel,’ she said.
The sky had gone dark now and Nella did not know if the deep night had finally come or if the moon might emerge with its light again.
‘Isobel, I told you that my dad and Linda are getting married, but, you know, there’s something more, something bigger than all that …’
They were travelling at last along Isobel’s street, about to walk down the driveway to the house, when Nella said this.
‘Really?’ Isobel answered. She carried her bag, now without the plants and seeds; it contained only the tiny spade.
‘Yeah.’
Nella knew that as soon as she said it, spoke it aloud – there would be no going back, no return.
‘Yeah,’ she said again.
They were finding their way through the dark now. The back garden was thick with black.
‘Watch you don’t stumble,’ Isobel said.
Nella pressed her hand to the pocket of her cardigan.
‘Hold on, I’ll open the door and put the light on,’ Isobel said.
Nella felt herself ready to speak.
Isobel reached the door of her little room and then the light flooded the tiny verandah and doorstep.
‘My father,’ Nella said. And she felt the words ready to explode from her. My father is having a child, he’s having a daughter, a brand-new daughter.
‘My father …’ And she looked down at the doorstep and there she saw a piece of paper with her name on it.
Nella, it said in her father’s bold handwriting.
It was a note from her father.
I’m sorry it’s all been so difficult for you – me getting married, the baby, Linda. Nella blinked and forced her attention to the opening of the message, the very beginning of the note.
Dear Nella,
I’ve come around here to Isobel’s looking for you but I don’t know where you are. You seem to have just disappeared and I am very worried. I need you to come back, to come back to my house.
I’m sorry it’s all been so difficult for you – me getting married, the baby, Linda.
I wanted to tell you myself but then it seemed Matthew had told you but then it seemed he hadn’t.
Please come and see me, Nella. You know you are welcome here, you know you can always come back.
Love, Dad xx
You know you can always come back. Nella read the last line again.
‘What is this thing about your dad that’s bigger than him and Linda getting married?’ Isobel asked as if the note did not exist at all.
‘I can always go back. He says I can always go back to him.’
‘Are you sure?’ Isobel said. It was more an instinctive response than a real question.
‘Yes, that’s what he says,’ Nella answered.
She thought again of the swallows then, of how she had wanted to tell her father about them, of how she had wanted to take him there, to stand beside him as in an instant he, too, understood them and all they meant.
‘I’m absolutely sure,’ she said. ‘Come on. I want you to come with me.’
They travelled together although Nella walked a little way ahead, just a foot or so but enough so that it was she who seemed to carve a pathway through the darkness. It was cool now, the air like prickles against her skin. With one hand she held her father’s note and with the other she touched the tiny seed she’d brought from the remembered forest.
‘It’s late. Do you think your father will still be awake?’ Isobel said from behind.
‘Yes,’ Nella answered without hesitation. He would be up, she knew. He would be sitting in front of the television, his feet on a stool, his head resting against the back of the brown vinyl chair, its matching one looking back at him empty from the other side of the room. He might have a book on the little table or perhaps the form guide for the races. The bottles of medication would be gone. He still needed them, he always would, but they would be tucked away in the bathroom cupboard now that he was getting better. He was getting better all the time, Nella knew that.
‘Yes,’ Nella said again. ‘He’ll still be up.’
They passed beneath a streetlight and then along the driveway and up the front steps onto the verandah of her father’s house.
Yes, the light of the television spread from its corner. Yes, the shape of her father could be glimpsed resting in his chair.
Nella thought to knock but then shuffled her feet heavily on the mat instead before opening the door. Isobel hes
itated for a moment, for the first time seemingly uncertain, seemingly uneasy as if she might be re-entering a point of her own story.
‘Nella.’
Her father immediately turned. The light of the television fell on one side of his face and the dark of the room on the other so briefly it seemed half of him was lost. He leaned over and turned the small table lamp on.
‘Nella, I was worried about you.’
‘I know, I got your note.’
Nella stepped into the orbit of the light.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
‘Yes.’
‘About … everything,’ he said, as if he needed to add more.
‘Yes, everything,’ Nella said.
Everything.
There was that word again.
Everything. What did it mean?
Matthew had known it all along: before Nella had gone to the island, before their father had left the hospital. Perhaps her mother had known it also, or a version of it.
And now Nella was to know it too, or to know her own understanding of it.
‘I’m glad you’re back,’ her father said as Nella moved out of the light and into the darkness of the room she had slept in.
‘I’ve made sure your room’s okay for you,’ he called softly after her.
Isobel followed Nella. She had never been in Nella’s room before. She put her hand to the light switch but Nella stopped her. Nella didn’t need the electric light to see. The curtains over the large windows had not been drawn and the sky seemed to enter the room.
She walked across to the chest of drawers where she knew Linda’s magazine – her guide to weddings and brides – rested. She put her hand out expecting to feel its glossy surface but there instead she felt something else, something familiar and scruffy and old – her encyclopedias of ancient animals and dog-eared copies of books on Australian marsupials. Her hand moved across the lifted cover of one and her fingers felt inside. There, warm and soft as when she had first taken it into her palm on that childhood day at her mother’s front door, rested the fleecy curl of wool.
So everything could include the vastness of all experience, of future and of memory too, of promises given and those withheld, of light and dark and in between as well.
‘He said I could come back,’ Nella spoke. She still held the note in her left hand. ‘You can always come back,’ she said, holding up the piece of paper.
‘That’s right,’ a voice said from the doorway.
It was her father.
‘Nella, you know you can always return. I’ve spoken to your school and you can spend the term here.’
Nella looked at Isobel.
‘I can always return,’ she said.
She thought of the swallows, of their arrival every year on that fourteenth day of spring, of how she had stood by the creek and waited for them, willed them closer, felt that their return could make everything in her life okay, everything safe and beautiful and magical and exactly as it had been when her father had lived with her family and he had not yet gone away. If only she could tell him about the swallows, if only she could take him to the swallows … that is what she had come to think.
I will take him there and everything will be as it was. That is what she’d believed.
‘I can always return,’ she said again to Isobel now as they stood in the little room. Her father had stayed standing in the doorway.
‘Yes, I can always return … but not in the way I thought.’
She looked up at her father as if to speak but then stopped herself. There was no need to say anything.
‘Isobel,’ she said, turning instead to her dark-haired friend. ‘Isobel, when the time is right there’s somewhere special I want to take you, something special I want you to see.’
They travelled together from the island, Nella and Isobel. Side by side they sat on the bus, a backward journey of what Nella had experienced earlier. Bush and farms, paddocks and swamps became houses and freeways and townships.
At last they were heading to the city of Melbourne, its apartments and office towers rising above them. They were only a tram ride away from their destination, a small time away from the creek.
Nella looked at the people hurrying in the streets and she thought of how she had knelt to push the tiny seed into the ground as she had left her father’s house. It would grow slowly, recklessly at any angle it pleased – a black wattle tree with its dark branches and forked leaves reaching out to the sky, not a home to the corellas her father loved but a favourite visiting place, a moment’s rest.
‘Is it much further?’ Isobel asked.
It seemed that for once Nella’s friend might be in foreign territory.
‘Not far at all,’ Nella said.
They walked finally along Falconer Street and behind the railway station and at last to the creek. There it rested just as Nella had remembered it with its thistles, its brown, shadowy water.
‘What am I to see?’ Isobel asked.
‘You have to wait,’ Nella answered and she led Isobel a way along the unused track until they came to the bridge that crossed over to the other side. There, above them when they looked into the bridge’s structure, rested the swallows’ nests.
‘They come back every year,’ Nella might once have said. ‘They never fail to return.’
Now she looked at the nests, tattered and worn from the parents entering and leaving.
‘They’ve all gone,’ Isobel said.
‘Not quite,’ Nella answered.
And she heard a tiny rustling of wings and then from a nest off at a distance all by itself emerged a swallow. Young, alone, new to the world, it struggled out and was finally free, lifted off into the sky to follow in a path just like its parents, but also, Nella saw suddenly, on a path that was uniquely its own.
Thank you to Amy Thomas, my editor, for her gentle and wise guidance; to Pippa Masson, my agent at Curtis Brown, and my publisher Laura Harris, for their ongoing support; and to Allison Colpoys for her beautiful artwork on the cover and throughout the book, as well as my designer, Marina Messiha.
Also, thank you to Ann Shenfield whose special friendship continues to nurture and inspire me, and to the members of my workshop group, Jim Bott, Phil Canon, Elisa Evers, Josh McDermott and Chrissie McMahon.
Thank you to Antoni Jach and the other writers of Masterclass IV whose passion and commitment energised my novel and me.
Thank you to John Eddy and Christine Grayden for generously sharing their extensive knowledge of the lost flora and fauna of Phillip Island with me.
And a special thank you to my wonderful husband, Bruno, and to my constant and dearly loved companions, Minou, Sally and Charbon.
PENGUIN BOOKS
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First published by Penguin Group (Australia), 2015
Copyright © Sue Saliba, 2015
The moral right of the author has been asserted
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no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission
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Cover and text design by Marina Messiha and Allison Colpoys
© Penguin Group (Australia)
Illustrations by Allison Colpoys
Colour separation by Splitting Image Colour Studio, Clayton, Victoria
Excerpt on p.vii from Judith Wright, ‘Birds’, A Human Pattern: Selected Poems,
ETT Imprint, Sydney, 2010, reproduced with permission.
penguin.com.au
ISBN: 978-1-74348-504-0
THE BEGINNING
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