All the Birds, Singing

by Evie Wyld

  To the west, the concrete wall of the island’s prison came out of the woods, and in a few places the Military Road was visible. Soon, once spring came in, the road would be invisible, the prison gone.

  A movement caught my eye past the blackthorn at the foot of the slope. I stood up hoping to see my lost sheep, but it was Lloyd, digging. I watched for a while, his great sweeping movements, letting the spade take its own weight as it cut through the heavy wet ground. Dog lay next to him, watching, his head on his paws. Lloyd had his back to me. He was singing something, I caught a note on the wind. He looked right with a shovel, alone in the pit of the hill.

  A light spit came on, or it could have been sea spray, lifted over the cliffs by the wind. Dog described a circle around the spot Lloyd worked on, smelling and nosing the things that were unearthed. I walked down towards them, not sure what I would say when I reached them. Lloyd squatted and pulled something from the hole which caught Dog’s attention. He trotted over and smelled it for Lloyd, who touched Dog’s head in acknowledgement. Dog returned to his business, and Lloyd weighed whatever it was in his hands like a fillet of beef and then threw it to the side. His shoulders tensed. I stopped and followed his gaze up into the white sky, where a merlin hovered. They eyeballed each other. Lloyd started to sing at the bird, but all that reached me on the breeze was a murmur. He dropped his shovel and flung both arms out, the wind blew his hair so that it stood straight up at the back, wild and grey. He did a little dance and the bird dropped down lower to watch. He sang louder, he howled, ‘I wish that every kiss was never-ending!’ and a bellow of wind came up behind me and blew my hair over my face. A second later it hit Lloyd and he wobbled in his dance, patted his hair back onto his head and turned towards me. The human eye senses movement before all else. Lloyd raised his hand at me and I raised mine at him. He looked up for his bird, which had let itself be blown away by the wind. He scanned the empty sky a moment longer, then sat down with his back to me, next to the hole he’d dug. Dog stood and barked once, and I made my way down to them.

  ‘Digging a hole?’ I asked.

  ‘Is it okay?’ said Lloyd.

  ‘What are you burying?’

  ‘I’m just digging.’ He kept staring up at the spot where the bird had been. There was silence, and I sat down next to him.

  Dog tried to lick my face but I pushed him away.

  ‘Seeds,’ he said.

  ‘What are?’

  ‘I was going to plant some apple seeds.’ There was silence again.

  ‘Okay.’

  To prove himself, Lloyd took an apple out of his pocket and turned it in his hand in front of me. ‘Ha!’ he said, then flung the apple as far as he could into the blackthorns. There was more silence and then he said, ‘When I was a kid I was into reincarnation.’

  I caught the smell of whisky. ‘Seems like a comforting thing to think,’ I said, for something to say.

  ‘I’m not sure I believe in it now. But I like to pretend I do.’

  He was really going to get in the way once the lambs started coming.

  ‘Do you believe in an after-life?’ he asked with another gust of his whisky breath.

  ‘No I don’t.’

  ‘Then what are you so frightened of?’

  I stared at him. His eyes were glassy.

  ‘So the seeds?’ I said. ‘Tell me about the seeds.’

  He leant back and breathed in harshly through his nose and closed his eyes. ‘In remembrance.’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘The Jews do it. The tree of life; they call it something, the holiday. The Queen does it too – she plants a tree.’

  Dog whined. I fidgeted. Lloyd closed his eyes. The wind dropped and the whole place slowed down.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m not making the best sense.’ He inhaled deeply. ‘It was nothing special,’ he said, his eyes popping open. ‘He was alive in the morning and then by the afternoon he was suddenly dead.’

  ‘Who?’

  He pointed to the empty space where the bird had hovered.

  I twisted a blade of grass until it produced juice. Lloyd took from his carrier bag a quarter-empty bottle of whisky. He took a swallow that was longer than would have been comfortable in the throat. He wiped the top off with the underside of his wrist and offered it to me. I nearly said no, but I didn’t.

  ‘Look – I’ve got the last of his ashes in an envelope.’ He took from his breast pocket a small packet that looked badly weathered. ‘But they got wet. He’s more mud now than ash.’ Lloyd looked inside the packet and then refolded it and sighed. He sat himself up straight, and spoke with a new authority. ‘The idea was I’d go to the furthest points of Britain. This was my last stop. I do a little ceremony at each place – the first three were okay. I went to Suffolk and I had a little toy wooden sailboat, and I set it on fire with a little bit of him on board. It was dark and the sea was flat and nobody was there, and it went so well.’ He smiled and closed his eyes again. ‘I watched until he was out of sight and I thought, when this is done, I will feel better.’

  A large moth wobbled between us. I watched it settle for a moment in Lloyd’s beard and then take off again in the direction of the sun.

  ‘John O’Groats!’ Lloyd barked, opened his eyes and gave me a look like I was arguing with him. I picked up the bottle from where it sat next to him and drank a little more. It was smokier than I liked.

  ‘At John O’Groats I made a circle out of stones and sprinkled him all over them. Like decorating a cake. That was nice. I sat down next to him and drank champagne. And then I threw him off a cliff edge in Cornwall. It was all good. But here – I can’t get this last one right.’ He looked at me, crestfallen. ‘I’m bored of it, sick of it.’ He looked at the envelope in his hands. ‘I could just pass by a bin outside a chip shop and drop him in.’

  ‘Who was he?’ My throat was burning.

  ‘He was mine,’ Lloyd said, and smiled widely. ‘He was mine and he was hit by a truck on his way to work. BAM!’ he shouted, and giggled and then was quiet.

  ‘Your son?’

  ‘No – not my son.’

  My insides listed and turned like a shoal of fish.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said. I stood and brushed my trousers down. Lloyd conducted the air around him with his hands.

  ‘Shall we go now?’ I asked. I didn’t want to go back to the house without him.

  20

  Working at the Hedland is different from Darwin. In Darwin someone told me it was safer at the Hedland where there were fewer tourists who came and went, and that the sex was more average because they were the people who lived and worked there. At the Hedland, they weren’t off their tits on excitement because they were on holiday. It made sense, and I did some reading up on the place, which is a mining town, and so I expected it to look like a Western film, but when I got off the Greyhound it looked just like a shitty little town. And as it goes, the sex is just the same for bored men as it is for over-excited men. I guess they’ve had the chance to really think about the things they’d like to do to a person. But not all of them are like that. Some are kind, but even kind people use other people for sex. You come to see that.

  I share a room and a bed above a rotisserie chicken shop with Karen. She’s been in Port Hedland two years by the time I get there, but she doesn’t tell me why, and I don’t tell her why I’m there either. We just rub along together, and she makes me laugh. She’s the beautiful type, straight out of a magazine, with long hair and a small waist, and I try not to think too hard about how she, looking like she does, could have come to be in the same place as me.

  We try and make the place look decent, even if it smells bad from all the cooked chickens, and Karen refers to a thing she calls ‘ombionce’ which is brought about by scented candles and a red and orange rag rug over the only window. She also talks about ‘fung shuay’ and throws a fit when I move things around while she’s out, so that the foot of the bed faces the door. ‘That’s how you get carried out
when you die!’ she wails, yanking the bed across the room to where it had been before, so it gets in the way every time you walk by it, and you smash your shin on it.

  ‘So what?’ I say. ‘You’d rather go head first out the window?’ She doesn’t laugh.

  We try not to bring work back to the room, both of us prefer to work in a bloke’s truck or their place, but sometimes if it’s cold out you get more done if you can take them somewhere yourself, so we figure out a rota so that she gets the odd hours, I get the even. She works harder than I do, she says she has a hunger to get out of the Hedland. One afternoon we’re sipping Cokes and ice outside the Four Square on the main street, and Karen points to an Aboriginal girl down an alleyway, leant up against the fence, her eyes closed with the sun in them.

  ‘See her,’ says Karen, ‘that’s what we got below us. That’s the level down. Those girls haven’t got the drive to get to a better place than this.’ I look at the girl she’s nodding at, a girl about my age, or maybe younger, wearing a soft blue T-shirt and a skirt that doesn’t look comfortable to wear. ‘That one there, I’ve seen her go for a can of beer.’ She turns to me and says in a softer voice, one that I’m not used to hearing come out of her, ‘Don’t ever think that we’re stuck here like her, we’re not, we got a way out if we want it.’

  Karen gets picked up pretty soon after that, and I stay there looking at the girl who screws for beer money and I wonder what the difference is. She sees me looking and faces me with her two feet planted apart, and stares back in a way that lets me know there is something different there, but not something I know anything about. I move along, because she scares me.

  For a couple of months the Hedland feels safe. I can walk around and I don’t feel eyes on me. I sleep, I don’t wake up and have that feeling someone’s crouched in the corner, that they’ve slunk in the window and they’ve been waiting for me to see them. But on my way to work one night I’m aware of the sound of footsteps close behind me. When I hurry, they speed up. The main thing is not to look, and I push into an all-night café. No one follows me in and I sit on a Coke for an hour and then the waitress starts staring at me and it could be because I’ve only bought a Coke and I’ve stayed too long. She starts walking towards me with a sour look on her face, and an older bloke with a thick middle comes up and sits with me.

  ‘She’s all right, Marg,’ he says, ‘she’s with me.’ He smiles at me in a way I haven’t seen in a long time, and the waitress rolls her eyes and goes back behind the counter. ‘Beer for your thoughts?’ he asks and gets the waitress to bring two. He’s lonely, and you can tell that he’s not just worried about getting his leg over, he’s worried about talking to someone.

  ‘Was reading here,’ he says, showing me his newspaper, ‘about how they found a six-foot carpet snake under this old lady’s bed – she’d been dropping food down for her cat when her nurse brought it in. Snake ate the cat and then ate the leftovers too probably!’ He laughs and I laugh too. The waitress looks over.

  ‘I always wanted a pet at home,’ I say but I shut up about that because the word makes me feel hot and sad. ‘You live far from here?’ I ask the man, wondering if he will try to pick me up later.

  ‘Yeah. Fair way,’ he says. ‘Come into town now and again for some decent food and stave off the boredom. Was in town tonight to see a film as it goes.’

  ‘What are you going to see?’

  ‘Missed it now. They were doing Lady and the Tramp – loved that film.’

  I smile. He’s a soft old git. ‘Sorry if I made you miss it.’

  ‘Nah,’ he blushes a little, ‘don’t be sorry. It’s a treat to talk to someone.’

  When we finish our drinks he doesn’t ask for anything, or try to make me stay with another drink. He just tells me to keep safe. ‘I’m in here every few weeks,’ he says, ‘if you ever want a talk and a beer – a night off.’ He shakes me by the hand. ‘It’s been a pleasure talking with you. Name’s Otto, hope we’ll meet again.’ He slips me $20 and leaves $10 on the counter for our drinks, then leaves the café without even a squeeze at my boobs. When he walks he goes from side to side as well as forward.

  ‘The way I see it,’ says Karen, lighting the second half of her last cigarette, ‘is that you just go straight down. You just dig to China.’

  I frown. ‘China’s to the side.’

  ‘It’s a figure of speech.’ Karen frowns back and inhales the stale cigarette, passes it to me and I know we are friends. ‘England, then. If you want to be specific about it. The main point is, we’re not supposed to be here, us whiteys. The place is trying to spit us out all the time.’ I pass the cigarette back, careful not to take more than is polite. Karen puts it in her mouth and leans forward at me, pointing to her lip, almost burning me with the tip of the cigarette.

  ‘See this?’ There’s a small white scar there. ‘I’m twenty-three, I had a cancer burnt off there last year.’ She sits back, holds the smoke in her lungs and lets it out in waves. She folds her arms in front of her. ‘Who knows what else is going on with my face right now.’ She feels her cheeks like she’s looking for bits that will fall off. ‘Did you know our mum never gave us anything to cover over our faces? And that was the era of Slip Slop Slap – we did a whole fuckin’ school assembly on it.’ She stands up and does a little performance. ‘“Slip! Slop! Slap!”’ she sings. ‘“Slip on a shirt, slop on sunscreen and slap on a hat.”’ She does a turn and some jazz hands, then stands on one hip with her arms folded. ‘I was the bloody bird – even then, even then she couldn’t be bothered to zinc us up.’

  ‘You want a cup of tea?’ I ask, getting up off the floor.

  ‘This is our problem, right, I’ve worked it out,’ she says, not listening. I put the kettle on the stove anyway. ‘We shouldn’t be here, we shouldn’t have come to Australia to start with. Look at us – crusted with skin cancers. The sea wants to kill us, the bush wants to kill us. You know there’s a shell in the north – you pick it up on a beach, thinking you’ve found something pretty to hang round your neck, the fucker shoots out a poison arrow that’ll disintegrate your kidneys? It’s fucked, and we shouldn’t be here.’ Karen points the dying end of her cigarette at me again. ‘You – you are not supposed to go into the sea – it’s like a nest of snakes in there.’ She lets her head loll back and says quietly, ‘Fuck it, even the dry bits are a nest of snakes.’

  ‘You want mint tea or regular?’

  Karen sighs, flings up her arms without looking at me. ‘I want flaming English Breakfast Tea! And a scone!’

  ‘Well, we’re out of milk.’

  ‘For god’s SAKE!’

  I like it when she gets like this, it’s better than watching TV. She leans up to accept her black tea. ‘I wish I had some mull,’ she says dejectedly. I pour hot water over a regular tea bag. She blows into her mug and then takes a sip, grimaces, sighs again and sets the mug on the floor, where it spills over a little. She looks at the burnt-out end of her cigarette and puts it back in the empty packet. I try not to worry about the thing still being alight.

  ‘In England,’ she goes on, ‘they take teatime seriously. Know what a Devon cream tea is?’

  I shake my head and let the steam from my drink work over my face. It’s hard to take my eyes off the cigarette packet, to not think about what is going on inside, what tiny spark might be left.

  She leans forward and cups her hand like she’s holding something. ‘They take a scone, some jam and some cream, and they make little scone sandwiches out of them.’

  ‘Doesn’t sound all that exciting to me.’

  ‘But that’s the point!’ she says, showing me the palms of her hands. ‘They make eating a boring little cake a real event. With parasol umbrellas and silverware. You can do a Devon cream tea on a boat, going down the river, or you do it on a lawn.’

  ‘I’d rather be fishing if I’m on a boat,’ I say just to rile her, and also to distract from the fact that I’ve stood up to take her cigarette packet. I empty out the bur
nt stub and run it under the tap in the sink.

  She flaps her hands. ‘But that’s my point, exactly.’ She gets wet-eyed and earnest. ‘You take the time to do things, gentle things, you make the act of having teatime a beautiful thing. Here’ – she smiles, picks up a box of crackers from the side table that we’ve reserved for dinner – ‘here, we’ve got fuckin’ Chicken Crimpies.’

  Usually the Hedland is baking dry, but out of nowhere one evening there’s a cyclone, which lasts a week. It’s pelting rain outside, and so if a bloke doesn’t want to do it in their car, me and Karen have to use the room or else hire one out at the pizza parlour, which is a waste of money. We only have two sets of sheets, so it’s a question of being careful, putting down a towel and leaving the place as you’d expect to find it. Karen takes down her poster of a unicorn, because she says men don’t find that sort of thing sexy. Above the bed is a depressing picture made out of wood shavings. It’s a cattle station, or it’s supposed to be. Just looks like wood shavings to me, but because it was there when we moved in and because it is in a frame, and because behind the picture there’s a gash in the wall where someone’s thrown something heavy, we keep it there. I have a sneaking suspicion that Karen likes it and thinks it adds to the ombionce.

  It’s still stinking hot, even with the rain pouring down, and we’re both busier than we would normally be – I suppose people get bored when they can’t go out, I suppose they get thinking about other things, and then they want to have sex with a girl. We get in a muddle because, firstly, once you get into the room and the two of you are soaked, it’s rude not to give them a towel, and by the time you’ve both dried off enough to get down to it, part of the time is ticking away, but you can’t tell them that, they won’t have it. As far as they are concerned the hour they buy is an hour of sex, and if it happens to be raining hard enough to soak you to your undies, then that’s your bad luck. A couple of times I walk in on Karen and she walks in on me, so we take to hanging a bead necklace on the door handle if we are in and working. Sometimes it means waiting around in the hall and making conversation with the bloke, while you can both hear the squeakings and the gruntings that are going on inside the room. Sometimes it puts a bloke off, but all in all it is better than having someone walk in on you, because now and then he’ll turn nasty if that happens. Like his mum’s walked in on him or something.