Born Into This

by Adam Thompson

  I passed a large family group who had set up on the beach. They had a white poodle that yapped at me. They held it back but made no move to silence it. I avoided eye contact, but I couldn’t miss seeing nine Australian flag camp chairs, another coloured Esky, and two red, white and blue umbrellas. They were rowdy, this crowd – like they’d been drinking steadily all day. Some of the group were setting up beach cricket on the hard, rippled surface of the flats. I veered slightly away from them, towards a patch of clear, wet sand near the water.

  Flick, flick went the metallic clink of flint against steel, unmistakable behind me.

  ‘Yeah, fuck off with your Abo flag,’ came an assured voice. And I felt fear. Not because of the threat – I’d been bracing myself for that – but because the voice belonged to a woman.

  ~

  I laid the kite on the sand and the front lifted and fell a few times before a gust gave it enough loft to catch the breeze. It pulled, hard, and the more line I released, the more I felt the power of the wind. I found myself bracing my feet in the sand, feeling the weight and sturdiness of the kite. It wasn’t like the balsa wood and supermarket bag kites we made as kids. This felt like there was something alive at the end of my line. It felt like a game fish, thrashing and struggling, angry and inconsolable in its plight.

  Boy had wound the long string onto a clap-stick, taken from a set he had no doubt crafted himself. Its smooth finish allowed it to spin freely through my fingers as the kite surged to the heavens. It was the highest thing in the sky.

  Some way down the beach, a man helped a young girl launch a plastic Aussie flag kite. It zigzagged for a while before the string snapped and it floated out over the sea. The child dropped to her knees and threw the handle at her father before pounding her fists into the sand. The man looked around, embarrassed. The frayed, white string trailed below the kite as the wind whipped it well out past the breakers, like a horse loose at the reins.

  Meanwhile, beach walkers stopped to watch my kite. They appeared oblivious to its colours and just seemed to be admiring its movements and its height. I beamed like Boy had when he gave it to me. I was proud of him. My nephew.

  The wind was coming in strongly from the south but every now and again it would drop out slightly and the line would go lax, sending the kite into a steep dive towards the ocean. And as the wind picked up again, the descent would speed up. It reminded me of the muttonbirds coming back to their burrows of an evening – little dive-bombers, built for speed, not accuracy. Then, with a jerk of my wrist, the kite would turn, and its velocity would send it back into the sky, wowing my spectators, and me as well. This went on for a good half-hour.

  ~

  Finally, the wind began to lessen, and the kite lost its vigour. Some of the observers turned away in disappointment. With the spell of the kite broken, all that was left were the colours overhead, weakly descending in a side-to-side motion. I sensed the mood change, and I heard someone use the word divisive.

  With regret in my heart, I wound the kite in. It came back to me with little resistance. When it was maybe forty metres out, something happened. The wind changed direction and picked up speed once more. The kite darted horizontally across the sky with new resolve and then held into the wind above the large family on the beach – the ones I’d passed on my way down. Out of my control, and as if to show off, the kite darted one way and then another as the wind gusts battled overhead.

  One of the beach cricketers lobbed on to a good one and the wet tennis ball drove towards the family. The poodle set off after the ball and took it up in its mouth. Thinking it was a game, the poodle ran with the ball along the beach, with the children and some of the adults in tow.

  A gust sent Boy’s kite up vertically and it flipped over and dive-bombed again. But this time, as I flicked my wrist and tugged at the string, the kite did not respond.

  The kite met the dog at the water’s edge and impaled it into the sand. It didn’t make a sound, but its back legs tried to keep running. One of the young cricketers was clotheslined by the string that had the injured poodle and what was left of Boy’s kite on one end, and me on the other. The child was whipped back into the sand, shocked but unhurt.

  A bystander pushed me down before I could resist, and another pinned me to the ground.

  I didn’t struggle.

  ‘You’re not going anywhere, buddy,’ someone said.

  ‘Not until the police arrive,’ added another.

  On the radio, they’d said that the name of that guy – the one who burned the Australian flag – would be mud, after what he did. But I knew that to many – including my nephew, Boy – he’d be a hero. But what, I wondered, would they say about a man who, on Australia Day, speared a white dog?

  MORPORK

  It all started when I discovered that my brother was sleeping with my wife. It was a Saturday and I was rostered on to work. My boss had asked to me to run some errands in town before heading out to the job site. We were working with a volunteer conservation group, planting trees along rivers. I was semiretired, following a career as an accountant. This was a lifestyle job and it gave me something to do. Something outside.

  It was late September – well and truly into spring – a bright, clear day, heightened somehow by vivid greens and blues in my vision. It must have been some sort of unique combination of weather and my body’s chemistry but, somehow, I was back in my childhood. For a few magic moments I just stood in the sun, on the footpath outside the Launceston mall, taking it all in, knowing that I only had a short time to savour the experience. It was an intoxicating sensory reunion: the smell of the paints I used in kindergarten, a song often heard while I was still learning to walk. Most of the memories were whisked away as quickly as they surfaced. But a few I managed to hold on to and keep, like fragments of a welcome, erotic dream.

  When the memories subsided, and still in a quiet daze, I happened to glance down a narrow alley that led to my favourite restaurant: The Aristocrat. The place I’d proposed to Cindy. At the entrance, partially concealed by the shade of the striped awning, I saw a woman and a man locked in an embrace. The man had his back to me, but the woman’s head was thrown back, her eyes closed, lips pressed in an involuntary smile. It wasn’t the fact that my wife was with another man that wrung my heart out like a sponge. It was the look of passion on her face. A look I hadn’t seen for a long, long time – perhaps over thirty years. And the fact that I knew immediately, from the bold and confident stance and the olive hand intertwined with hers, that the man was my brother.

  Rex. Fifteen years my junior, cocky and swaggering. We had always been miles apart. But as the couple separated – their identities now fully confirmed – I had the realisation that you can have a brother who is not a brother at all.

  I hid myself from view as they walked out of the alley. Out in the open, they became strangers, melting into the lines of bodies streaming along the footpath. The shock of discovery, of finding them together, along with that strange childhood flashback, made it all seem like a dream. I could have happily convinced myself it wasn’t real at all.

  ~

  Following this encounter, Cindy’s love for me didn’t seem to change, at least not on the surface. She continued to use my pet name, rubbed my shoulders while I watched the evening news, and went to sleep cuddling my arm every night. And I didn’t see Rex any more than usual, which was only a few times a year. But when he did come around, there was something there – something I perhaps wouldn’t have noticed had I not known about them. Cindy always placed him next to her at the dinner table and their hands would dip under the table several times over the course of the evening. Rex would agree with the things Cindy said, which was unusual as Rex was a real lefty, while Cindy was more conservative. It all added up, yet I couldn’t understand it.

  Cindy and I were in our fifties. We spent our spare time gardening, our weekends cruising the Tamar River with our ya
cht-club friends. Rex was the CEO of an Aboriginal organisation, often out on the town using his profile and reputation to pull younger women. He was a player through and through. So what was he doing with my wife?

  I became so consumed by their relationship that I struggled to concentrate on everyday tasks, and I couldn’t handle being in the house with Cindy. I began camping out by the rivers where we were planting the trees, telling Cindy it was a temporary requirement of the job.

  It was around that time that I began to fantasise about the satisfaction I would feel if Rex were to die. And, particularly, if he were to die by my hand.

  I’m not a violent man, so the conventional methods I knew of were completely off the table. And I wanted Cindy to feel the pain of his death too – I longed to see her suffering in solitude, like I had been.

  The idea came to me the morning I heard the morpork. It had been a cold night on the river, and I had gone to sleep early. I woke about three in the morning, to the wail of an owl in the blackwood tree overhanging my tent.

  Morpork, morpork.

  The story of the morpork was one of the memories that returned the day I discovered Cindy and Rex together. I was back in my great-grandmother’s red-brick unit, on the old back road out of Beaconsfield. I must have been about six or seven; she in her mid-eighties. Earlier we’d made toffee apples and I’d eaten mine in front of the radiator while we played Memory with a deck of cards. I was sitting on the bed, still sucking the sugar from my teeth, when Nan came out of the bathroom in a paisley nightdress. I always slept next to her – that’s how it was done in our family.

  ‘I s’pose you want a story, boy.’

  I didn’t but I couldn’t say no.

  We got into bed and she yanked the long, dirty string on the ceiling lamp. It was so dark in the room I could see fuzzy flashing shapes in my vision. The room, like my great-grandmother, smelled of mothballs.

  We lay there for a while before she began to speak. Her voice was shrill.

  ‘When I was a little girl, there was a man who lived by himself in a tiny hut at the back of our place. Real dark fella, he was. Way darker ’n us. Old Tom, we called him. Old Tom had a horse named Piney. You still awake, boy?’

  ‘Yes, Nan.’

  ‘Good. Mum and Da used to make me stop with Old Tom when they went off to town. Took a long time, back then, to get from Pine Scrub to Whitemark. Course that was before there were motor cars. They used to use Piney to help carry the supplies back. Be a good day in and a good day back in them days, and that was if Da didn’t get on the drink and go playin’ up.

  ‘Now, some people thought Old Tom was a bit strange, and Mum didn’t like leavin’ me there. But Da didn’t like what people said about the ol’ fella. Old Tom had been to the war, see. One night, as Old Tom was pokin’ the fire, we heard the morpork outside the hut … Morpork … Morpork.’

  When my great-grandmother made the sound of the owl, her voice raised an octave. It cracked and sounded insane.

  ‘“That’s the third night in row the morpork’s been around,” Old Tom said. Poor old fella’s skin had gone grey. “You know what that means, don’t you, my girl? Means me days are numbered.”

  ‘Mum and Da returned the next afternoon. By then, I’d forgotten about what Old Tom had said about the morpork. But, that night, Old Tom’s hut caught alight. Da reckoned it musta been a log rolled from the fire. And we could ’ear him wailin’ and wailin’ in there too. Trapped, like.’

  My great-grandmother was silent for a while. I was clinging to the bed, frightened. It didn’t help if I closed my eyes or not; the scene lingered there in the dark.

  ‘Let this be a lesson to ya, my boy. The morpork is the bringer of death. If you hear it callin’ to ya – morpork … morpork – three nights in a row, means ya gonna die. Now, git to bloody sleep.’

  ~

  I needed to catch this morpork. Before I attempted it, I called Rex to find out when he would be away next, using the pretence of wanting to borrow his lawnmower. He told me he would be in Melbourne the following weekend.

  Luckily, the morpork at my camp came back the next night. I listened to it make its sound until the sun came up. I had to catch it before the next evening or risk hearing it for a third night in a row. At daybreak, the morpork flew to a tree about forty metres from the river and flitted into a hollow halfway up the trunk.

  At lunch I told the boss I wasn’t feeling well and went back to my camp. I scaled the tree and found the morpork asleep in the hollow, surrounded by the delicate bones of small creatures. It tore at my forearms when I seized it and tried to slip a small rubber band over its beak. Its bright, circled eyes and disapproving frown bore into my soul, seeing the pathetic man I had become – the man Cindy and Rex had created.

  It rode next to me in the car, its body wrapped in my pillowcase and only its head sticking out. The rubber band effectively suppressed its call. A teenage boy served me at the pet shop where I bought a cage and birdseed. He eyed the weeping furrows in the skin of my forearms and the streaks of blood on my shirt.

  Once home, I put the bird in the cage with a matchbox full of birdseed and left it in the back seat of my car with the pillowcase draped over it.

  Cindy was happy to see me after the few days I’d been away. I cuddled her from behind as she washed the dishes, then we made love with her leaning into the sink. Afterwards we held hands on the couch and watched TV. It was the most intimate we had been for years, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the morpork out in the car.

  It wasn’t hard to find Rex’s spare house key; it was inside a fake rock next to a potted yucca at his front door. Rex’s house was modern – everything about him was modern. With a high-paying job and no family, he had money for new things. I found the manhole above Rex’s laundry and grabbed the ladder from the internal garage, then I carried the morpork up into the roof space.

  When I took the pillowcase off the cage, the morpork swivelled to look at me. Its head had a disturbing amount of range, and its yellow, unblinking eyes glowed like they were lit from the inside. Much about this bird seemed unnatural. It hadn’t eaten the birdseed, now spilled across the bottom of the cage, and I realised why: it was a carnivore, and its beak had been fastened shut anyway. I shone my phone torch across the sea of insulation and was satisfied from the scatters of mouse droppings that the morpork would find its own food. When I opened the cage, it moved to the entrance, like it knew it had a job to do. It let me remove the rubber band from its beak. After a moment it flew from the cage and landed on one of the roof trusses, where it perched, silent. It didn’t look at me again.

  I packed the ladder away and put the key back in the fake rock. Rex would never know I had been inside. I took his lawnmower from the shed and put it in the car. Before I left, I stood for a few minutes with my head cocked. It was a still, overcast morning, but there was no sound other than cars passing by.

  ~

  Rex died a week later. Cindy took the call from the police, and her fingernails dug into my back as she held me afterwards and sobbed through her words. I smiled to myself as she broke down. Massive heart attack, the police suspected, as Rex had died on the couch watching TV, his dinner half-eaten on his lap.

  I waited for her to stop crying before I spoke. ‘I know about you and Rex,’ I said.

  ~

  Cindy and I separated soon after. I let her keep the house, as Rex had left me his place – I was his only sibling. I made toffee apples on the first night I stayed there, and I sat on Rex’s couch in the spot the police said he had died, thinking about the phone conversation I’d had with him the day before his death.

  ‘I know this is a weird question, but did Nan ever tell you stories about an owl when you were a kid?’

  ‘No,’ I lied.

  ‘She told them to me, but do you think I can remember how they went?’

  ‘Why do you ask, R
ex?’

  ‘No reason,’ he said.

  I let the silence hang for a while before I spoke again.

  ‘Don’t pay any mind to those stories, Rex. Those old fellas were a superstitious lot.’

  Acknowledgements

  I am eternally thankful to the following:

  Aviva Tuffield and the UQP team for having a vision for this book, and for whipping it into shape. The Wheeler Centre staff, judges and fellow recipients of the inaugural Next Chapter initiative – an amazing ride. The Aesop Foundation for your generous financial support. Cate Kennedy and Kate Gordon for your mentoring and friendship. I couldn’t have done this without you. Denise Robinson for your encouragement and assistance with grants. Nathan Maynard and Aaron Everett for your feedback on the stories – and for just being brothers. Varuna, the National Writers’ House and the Copyright Agency for awarding me an inaugural First Nations Fellowship and for providing the time and space to write. Arts Tasmania for your ongoing funding and support. The Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre for all the opportunities, and more importantly, being there for the community all this time. Michael Mansell for your leadership and dedication to the cause. Jimmy Everett and Karen Brown for paving the way with your stories and poetry. Melissa Lucashenko, Tony Birch, Ellen van Neerven, Tara June Winch and Bob Brown, for your generous and thoughtful endorsements. Everyone who showed an interest in my stories.

  The Tasmanian Aboriginal people, past and present.

  And to my grandparents, Elaine and Geoff Anderson, my brother Seth, and to Shenna and Sunni, for your patience and unconditional love.