All the Birds, Singing

by Evie Wyld

  It takes me three goes to ring home. The first time I dial the number and hang up immediately. Then I let it ring once. The next time, Iris is quick and answers on the first ring.

  ‘Oh,’ she says, ‘it’s you.’

  I struggle to get my voice out. ‘Hi, Iris. How are you?’

  She snorts. ‘Never mind that. You get the money? I didn’t think Mum should’ve given it to you, but we didn’t know how else to get a response.’

  ‘What’s the money from?’

  ‘Dad’s dead. An accident at the marina.’

  The last time I saw Dad, his face tight with anger, and then a time before when just the two of us went surfing, when I was ten. He had salt in the sun-creases of his eyes. My mouth struggles to open.

  ‘When?’

  ‘Nine months ago. Give or take.’

  I am dipped in silence. ‘I can’t believe it,’ is all I can say.

  She snorts again. ‘Yeah, well. I can’t believe a lot of things that go on.’

  The silence is broken by the pips on the phone and I put in two more dollars. The news has not hit my body yet, or my brain.

  ‘How’s Mum?’

  ‘She’s batshit.’

  ‘Is she there?’

  ‘No.’ But Iris keeps her voice low and quiet.

  ‘The triplets?’

  ‘They’re meatheads. Look, I’ve got stuff to be doing.’

  ‘Will you tell her I rang?’

  ‘Sure,’ says Iris, and I know, I remember the tone that means she won’t. ‘Just what she needs is a good long chat with you. You’ve always been so supportive.’

  Iris hangs up without asking how to contact me. I don’t even know how Dad died. An accident at the marina? Was he still at the packing yard? Was he drunk?

  On the drive back to the station, Dad feels like an orange in my sternum. I repeat the words over and over in my head, Dad’s died, Dad’s died, until they don’t mean anything. None of it means anything if I ignore it; my father was alive until I went to the bank and saw the money there. I won’t tell anyone about the money, or that my father is dead. I won’t touch the money unless I have to.

  9

  I woke curled around the stool, with a headache. Dog was in the bed, under the covers.

  The shed was empty. The blanket was folded neatly and hung from the teeth of the rake. Up on the paddock crows dive-bombed something, seagulls formed lazy circles above them. There was spit in the air, but dark brown clouds hanging low promised something more impressive was on its way. Here and there on the slope of the field were old tree trunks whose roots had been too deep to pull out when the land was cleared, long, long ago. Some were split and hollowed out, eaten by wasps, and grew a fungi that Don called Jew’s ears. Those trunks sitting there, with the wars starting and finishing around them, horses being overtaken by tractors, the birth of Don, probably the birth of his father, certainly his father’s death. It made me feel lonely to think about it, that old English history in the dark and the wet, the short days with no electricity. It made me want to go and sit in the truck, rev the throttle, just to remind myself of my century, just to feel the modern dry heat of the engine. My feet squeaked inside my boots, wet already. I lit a cigarette to dry the air around me. Sheep followed behind, with lazy questions about feeding time. At the top of the hill, I watched a merlin sweep the edge of the woods, like she couldn’t find a way in, like no tree was quite the right tree to settle on. She let out a screech and was suddenly gone. A burst of small birds jumped out of the treetops and then sank back in. The trees appeared to swell and shrink with the rhythm of breath.

  Over the other side of the hill, I found a pregnant ewe stuck in the drainage. Her muzzle was black with mud, like she’d been trying to lift herself free with her face. I lowered myself down to her, trying not to make sudden movements, but she thrashed about anyway honking like a goose.

  ‘Calm now,’ I said, ‘come on.’ But she took no notice and things weren’t helped by Dog, who raced up and down the edges of the drain barking shrilly.

  She was in up to her armpits, and while I wrapped myself around her middle and pulled hard, she shifted only the smallest amount and when I let go the mud sucked her deeper. Her feet had already made holes for themselves and she farted back into them. I caught my breath and looked up at Dog who was still barking.

  ‘Will you shut the fuck up, you arsehole?’ I shouted, and he lay down and whined. I moved around the sheep and tried pulling one leg out at a time, but the rest of her sunk deeper in. I could feel the panic in her, and that I was hurting her. After fifteen minutes I was sweating and worried that if I left to get help, whatever that might be, she’d drown.

  ‘Hi there.’ A shadow fell over me; it was him. I strengthened my grip on the sheep like I could use her to swing at him. Dog stood up and wagged his tail and for a moment I was speechless. The man looked at me down in the ditch. ‘I wondered if you could help me out.’ Sober, he had the voice of a news reader. He took a mobile phone out of his pocket. ‘There’s no signal here – I was using the map but it’s gone.’ He held the phone up and squinted like he was reading something from it. ‘I’m a bit stuck.’ He had dark rings around his eyes. He squinted at me. ‘It was you last night in the shed, wasn’t it?’ The ewe let out a wail. ‘I recognise your . . . hair.’ He cleared his throat. The blood in my calves was cut off by the weight of the sheep, but I could feel the pulse in my legs fast and heavy.

  I swallowed. ‘I could really do with your help.’

  He suddenly looked like he might just run away. ‘With the sheep?’

  ‘That’s about what I was hoping.’ I tried to keep my voice steady but didn’t manage it.

  His arms hung at his sides. He clenched and unclenched his fists. ‘Won’t it work its way free on its own?’

  I felt the rattle of the sheep’s heartbeat and she shifted her weight further down into the mud. I tried not to shout or swear.

  ‘I need to get this sheep out,’ I said in a clear and careful way.

  ‘You’ll need to get that sheep out,’ Don called. I turned and saw him leaning against the fence at the top of the hill with a perfect view. He jabbed a finger towards the sheep. I gave Don the thumbs-up for a moment too long, and he gave me a double thumbs-up back, smiling broadly.

  ‘Couldn’t you ask that guy? It’s just I don’t know all that much about sheep. He looks like he would know an awful lot more.’

  ‘Please,’ I said. Teeth. ‘If you don’t help me my sheep will drown in the mud.’

  A look of helplessness passed over his face, but he took his jacket off and laid it on the ground. He lowered himself down the bank. Dog got up and put his mudded undercarriage onto the jacket.

  ‘Right,’ he said, and fell to his knees, landing with a smack in the mud. The sheep let out a horrified mew and wobbled about, straining to get away from him. He stood up, squelching.

  ‘Right,’ he said again and tried to offer a hand to shake over the sheep. I looked at the hand; it was a large man’s hand with puncture wounds on it from Dog. I was glad my arms were underneath the sheep. He retracted the hand. ‘Name’s Lloyd.’

  ‘Jake.’ I nodded at him and he clapped his hands loudly, making the sheep lurch forward, then rubbed them together.

  ‘Where do you want me?’

  The sheep foamed at the mouth.

  ‘You’re scaring the sheep.’

  ‘Right,’ he whispered.

  ‘If you grab her around the back end, I’ll get the front end.’

  ‘The back end,’ he repeated to himself. ‘Good.’

  I gripped her under the armpits and felt the give while I waited for him to prepare himself at the other end. It involved a lot of stretching and huffing. He kept looking like he was going to put his arms around her and then leaning away at the last minute into a shoulder stretch. Finally, and with his head straining away from the sheep, he got hold of her.

  ‘You’re doing well,’ Don crowed from up the hill.

&
nbsp; ‘Right,’ Lloyd said. ‘Right.’

  ‘On the count of three, pull upwards, and keep hold of her.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘One, two, three,’ and we both pulled and the ewe’s legs sucked in the mud, and she popped out like a cork. She started to kick and tried to scramble, and before I could tell him to keep hold he let out a yell and fell backwards. The ewe kicked and kicked, horrified by the noise. She bored past my grip and I fell face first into the mud. Dog ran up and down the bank barking and rearing about. The ewe took about three leaps before getting stuck again. I dragged myself up and went over to where the man sat in the mud holding his chest, white and staring.

  ‘What happened? Are you all right?’ I said. He looked up at me with disbelief, and I thought, Jesus, is he having a heart attack? He puffed out, long and slow, and then started to cough again.

  ‘I just didn’t expect it to move that much.’ His eyes were watering. ‘They’re so much bigger close up.’

  Up on the hill, I could hear Don laughing. ‘You’ll need to give that another go!’ he managed to croak out.

  The man looked at me from his seat in the mud. ‘I think I might be afraid of sheep,’ he said.

  10

  Otto is watching his soaps with his sun-browned and knotted hands resting snugly on top of his groin. He’s told me before that the heat those parts make is good for his arthritis. In the time I’ve been here, he’s grown so used to me that on hot days like this he doesn’t bother to put his shorts on.

  I pretend to go out to the dunny, but instead, once I’ve made sure Kelly is not watching from her bed on the veranda, I nip into the tractor shed and peer into the open bonnet of Otto’s spare truck, the truck that was supposed to be mine, which I know works, because I’ve heard the engine. It’s greased all over and I have to be careful not to get any of it on me. I use a creosote-stained rag and I reach in and yank at the wires towards the back of the engine. I don’t know what I am doing, and those could just be the wires that make the windscreen wipers go, and so I also take the monkey wrench that’s resting on the edge of the bonnet and I take out three important-looking washers, cringing at every squeak they make. But I can hear the television spewing out of the house, and so really it’s just Kelly I have to worry about. I think about taking the keys out of the ignition too, but I imagine Otto passing by and seeing them gone. At least with the engine, he might not see it straight away. There is nothing I can find that is sharp enough to pierce the tyres, so I have to leave it at that. When I come out of the shed, I turn away from the house and throw the washers one by one as far as I can into the tall dry grasses of the paddock where they can sink into the rest of the rusted scythes, the broken cages and the bicycle tyres. I can smell the carcasses of the sheep we killed last week, and I keep my gaze above the line of the grass, because yesterday, I caught sight of the ewe with the black-spotted nose while Kelly was moving her body around the place, deeper and deeper into the paddock. I rub my hands in the dirt to get rid of any trace of oil and then I count my steps back to the house, and it’s my countdown, there’s nothing to be done now, my hands have made the decision for me. I’ll need to be gone by the next time Otto starts work on his truck. Please god not today.

  I pass Kelly out on the veranda, on her rag rug, and she lifts her head to smell me as I go by. It’s not a smell of Hello, it’s a smell of What are you up to?

  Back inside Otto looks up from Shortland Street and gives me a smile. He is always happiest at this time of day, with a full belly and a beer in his hand, the show on the TV, which I have to pretend to enjoy. A woman dressed as a nurse orders a lime and soda in a pub and my hands clench. I will go in the morning, that is when his old bones are slowest.

  My night is sleepless, and I listen to Kelly snoring outside my window. She cries in her sleep. When the sky starts to lighten, I hear her get up and go and pee a little way from her sleeping ditch, and then I hear her slump herself back down for the final rest before the day. If she is awake, she watches the blue come into the sky, and a single bush curlew from another place cutting across the open spaces of the paddock. The flies start to thicken the air.

  By the time Otto unlocks my door I have filled my pockets with everything I can carry without looking suspicious. Before I leave the room, I look at all of the things that need to stay behind and say goodbye to them. I slide the knife from under my bed into the very back of the cupboard, where it might never be found. Even after everything, I wouldn’t want Otto to know I’d ever thought about slitting his throat.

  I cook a breakfast of chops and eggs, and he wipes a slice of white bread around his plate and sighs happily. I force down an egg on a heel of bread, to look normal, but it starts to come back up, and I have to run to the loo and Otto rubs my back when I come out.

  ‘Remember last week? Maybe it’s the morning sicks,’ he says, hopefully. ‘When my mother was preggo with my little brother we had to give her meadowsweet just to keep water down. I’ll pick some up when I’m next in town.’ Not: when we’re next in town. That time has long passed. I wonder how long it would take for him to get me pregnant. Every time we finish, I squat in the shower and try to flush everything out.

  ‘Roight,’ he says, slapping the meat of his gut, ‘to the day’s business.’

  He scrapes back his chair and lays a large dry hand on my shoulder as he passes by. The last time, I think, and it sends a jolt through my belly, and when he thumps down the steps of the veranda, and heads out towards the dunny, throwing Kelly his chop bone as he goes, I feel a prickling on my skin. The key for the ute hangs over the oven and it catches the light. I take the can of money from under the sink, and the key from its hook, and I walk as calmly as I can out of the door. Kelly is chomping her bone, standing with her legs planted far apart, and she looks up at me from hooded eyes as I pass by, considering. I tell myself I am fetching something from the truck, so that if she can read my mind she won’t know. But the second I slot the key into the ute’s door, she drops the bone from her teeth and starts up, jumping on the spot with fury, loud loud loud.

  The dunny door opens, and Otto crouches with his trousers around his ankles, a red face, his yellow legs bowed. I’m inside the ute and the door is closed, and the key is in the ignition. Kelly jumps at my window. I have to keep a calmness in me so that the truck doesn’t stall, but Otto has left it in gear which I didn’t notice, and so it does, and he has pulled up his trousers, and the panic is setting in on me, I’m already trying to think of an excuse, that I was practising my parking, or that I thought I’d drive up to the sheep, nothing I know that will wash, and Otto is running at me, shaking the rolled-up comic book he’s been reading, like he’s going to flog me on the nose with it; his face is an open hole of anger, and the truck starts again, and I jerk away from the dog, and Otto reaches me just in time to slam his whole body onto the bonnet and we look each other in the eye for the count of one and I know somehow that this will be it, that if he catches me, my body will end up in the tall dry grasses of the paddock, with Kelly shifting me deeper and deeper in every few days and the flies will blow me as I bloat up and the sun peels the skin from my bones.

  I put the truck in reverse and Otto flops forward onto the ground, and there is a squeak from Kelly and I go backwards for a long time, until Otto is standing again, and running for the shed, and I have to hope the things I pulled out of the truck were the right things.

  I turn myself around slowly, carefully, see Kelly in my wing mirror, lying on the ground, and despite everything, I feel bad, she is just a dog, and then I go, and I don’t stop for the wooden gate, I smash through it, and it’s so old, it flies off like it’s made of paper. I turn left on the road towards town, and I keep going. I do not look in my rear-view mirror. I drive past the town, in case someone recognises the ute, and then I just drive fast, not seeing more than two cars by the time I have used up a third of a tank of diesel. I can go straight for as long as the truck will take me.

  The air is dif
ferent out here, the sour meat smell is gone, and I keep all the windows down, even though the wind bangs at my ears. The smell is not of old unwashed places or of fat and eggs frying, it is of hot leaves and earth and bitumen. I take as many sharp turns as I can, and wind my way through three or four small towns so that when he comes looking I can throw him off. I wonder in what way Otto will come after me, because I am certain that he will. There’s a possibility that he might call the police, I guess, but the idea of a cell is not so bad. They don’t know me out here.

  When it feels like the sun has crisped my eyelids and it has started to edge down over west, I pull into a motel. I park badly across a set of lines, but no one else is in the parking lot so it doesn’t seem to matter. The truck’s engine ticks like a panting dog.

  I ask the lady behind the counter if there’s anywhere I can park that won’t be seen by the road.

  ‘You in some kind of trouble, missy?’ she asks in not a nice way. Her hair is creeping out of the red handkerchief she wears on her head.

  ‘I’ve left my boyfriend, I don’t want him to find me.’

  ‘Been roughing you up, has he?’ I nod, and the lady’s face softens. ‘Well,’ she says, ‘pay up-front and I’ll show you round to the back where Eddie keeps the boat.’

  I peel off three notes from the roll in Otto’s tin and she’s happy. Once I’ve parked, she gives me a key and also a bar of chocolate. ‘You drown your sorrows with that, missy,’ she says. ‘You get trouble, dial nine and I’ll send Eddie round with a bat.’

  Eddie’s boat is a speed boat with a shiny red hull. I am so far from the water, and I think of the smell of it, the winds and the chuck and gulp of water lapping at the fibreglass. I will drive to the coast tomorrow; I won’t stop until I get there and I can float face down in the waves.

  ‘It’s never touched the bloody sea,’ says the woman, and reknots her hair into the handkerchief as she walks back to reception.