All the Birds, Singing

by Evie Wyld

  ‘What’s next?’ he asked; the visible parts of his face between his hat and his beard were flushed.

  ‘We just keep watching,’ I said.

  ‘How long before they go to market?’

  ‘Shhh,’ I said and turned away. ‘When they’re ready.’ There was a long silence, just the noises of Lloyd raking out the pens and the occasional bleat from an occupied stall.

  One ewe with triplets was not interested in the smallest one. It struggled to get close to her and got squashed out by the other two. After a while it settled itself down on its own and cried. I picked her up and she didn’t struggle, wrapped her in a blanket and gave her to Lloyd to hold while I made a bottle ready. ‘Not sure she’ll make it,’ I told him.

  ‘Why is this all so sad?’ he asked. He stroked the bony head and the lamb nuzzled against his jumper looking for a teat.

  Back at the house, we wrapped the lamb in a blanket and put it in front of the stove on Dog’s bed, and locked Dog in Lloyd’s room. I set the timer on the stove so we’d wake to feed her, and Lloyd went into the sitting room and made a fire. We sat on the sofa watching the flames.

  There was just the hollow ticking of the kitchen clock. My head itched underneath the bandage, but there was no energy left in my arm to scratch it.

  A knock at the door.

  Don stood behind Samson, who had had a wash since I last saw him. Then Marcie stepped out of the dark, holding her arms around herself and looking embarrassed.

  ‘Caught these two out by the woolshed,’ Don said.

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘Pissing about.’ Don’s face was hard. He gave Samson a small shove in the back and Samson stumbled over the threshold. Marcie followed and Don closed the door behind them.

  ‘What were you doing?’ I said turning to Samson. He looked at the floor.

  ‘We were just looking at the lambs, that’s all,’ Marcie said.

  ‘Did you hurt any of them?’

  ‘No!’ She sounded upset, but Samson was just quiet.

  ‘He had firelighters on him and matches,’ said Don. There was a slight swelling on Samson’s face, a redness about his eye like he’d been hit.

  ‘We were just—’

  Don interrupted Marcie. ‘Shut your trap, I don’t want to hear it.’

  ‘Please don’t tell my dad,’ she said quietly and started to cry. Samson moved his hand across to her and held on to her little finger. All of us watched that.

  ‘Samson,’ I said quietly, ‘what were you doing up there – what were you going to do with those firelighters?’

  He looked up and I saw suddenly Don’s old face in his, and I felt sad.

  ‘We were just up there to watch over them. That’s all. Was going to make a fire – outside – to sit around, and just watch them. Keep them safe.’

  ‘Safe from what?’ asked Lloyd, but Samson didn’t reply, just chewed his lips and looked at me, held my gaze until Don chafed him on the back of the head.

  ‘Well, answer him,’ he muttered.

  ‘It’s okay, Don,’ I said. Marcie sniffed and wiped her nose on the back of her hand. Mascara muddied the whites of her eyes. ‘No harm done.’

  Once they’d gone, Don marching them out, telling Marcie she was getting driven back home and a word in the ear of her parents, Samson all the while gripping on to her little finger, we sat down at the table.

  ‘God almighty, what do you think they were going to do?’ Lloyd said.

  ‘I think they were going to start a small fire to keep warm and sit around it and watch over my sheep. I think they might have smoked cigarettes and drunk beer and had a pash.’

  ‘You’ve changed your tune. What happened to the kids chopping up your sheep?’

  ‘I think Samson’s seen it.’

  ‘Seen what?’

  ‘The thing out there that’s getting the sheep.’

  ‘The fox?’

  ‘It’s not a fox.’

  There was a long silence.

  ‘I get the feeling,’ said Lloyd, ‘that you’re very tired.’

  The buzzer on the stove sounded.

  26

  Flora Carter’s memorial service is attended by everyone in the town other than her father. We fill up the jetty, and I imagine it creaking and then collapsing, throwing all of us into the water. Hay Carter stands alone, with space around her, and all I can think is that I’ve never seen her in black before. Only cut-offs and white singlets with the bra straps showing. Today nothing shows, she is swallowed by the black dress, bodyless, just her feet poke out the bottom, heels that she will struggle to walk back down the jetty in, that will stick in the cracks of the soft sun-bleached wood.

  People say different things about Flora. Someone sings the song from the Titanic movie. The triplets fidget next to me, whisper to each other and then Iris smacks one of them on the back of the head and they are quiet again. I don’t hear any words, but I do hear the splash of the wreath as it’s thrown into the water. I see Denver’s mother is watching from the edge of the trees. I think we look each other in the eye. She takes three slow steps backwards into the shrub and she stands still. The human eye senses movement before all else.

  Back home, Mum pours a glass of wine, does nothing about making lunch for the triplets who bang through the cupboards, looking for food. Iris is already upstairs, out of the way of us all. I perch at the kitchen table with Mum, and Dad opens a beer and stands with his back to us.

  ‘That kid ever wakes up,’ he says, ‘he’s in for a helluva shock.’ I look up at him, his fists on his hips and his hat low over his eyes. ‘Steve Warren says they’ve put round-the-clock security at his bedside – reckon people might get ideas.’ He turns around and looks at us, swigs his beer. ‘Reckon they might have the right idea.’ Mum looks up sharply.

  ‘John! Don’t say things like that.’

  ‘If that was my daughter, dead in the ground, it’d take more than a couple of cops to stop me getting to the little hoon.’ When he says the word ‘daughter’ my father rests his hands on my shoulders.

  ‘Don’t swear in front of the children.’

  ‘Hoon?’

  ‘They don’t know he did it,’ I say quietly. Mum and Dad stop arguing and both look at me.

  ‘Jake. Don’t you get all lefty here – they found him over where the fire started, reckon he was after Flora all along. Who knows what he did to her before he started the fire. Covering his tracks more than likely.’

  ‘He wouldn’t do that.’

  ‘You don’t know anything,’ Mum snaps in a way that seems to surprise her, and she stands up, leaving her wine, to get on with the laundry.

  From what I have heard about comas, they reckon you can still hear, even if you can’t move. I wonder if Denver lies there listening to all these people talking about what will happen to him if he wakes up and if it will make him decide to die instead.

  I follow the burnt trail down to the beach, but I go the long way round so I don’t pass the spot I last saw Denver. I stop when I come across a wombat, swollen and on its back. He looks like someone has taken a blowtorch to him, all his hair is missing, and his skin is flaky charcoal. He looks like he would pop if I nudged him with my foot. I nudge him with my foot and he doesn’t. There’s still a smell to the bush, like it’s thinking it might go up again, and I know I’m not supposed to be there. The trees don’t want me there, they are black stakes and behind lots of them are small piles of ashes that could be the remains of animals sheltering. There is not a single bird to make sound, not a cicada or a cricket, not even a mosquito to whine at my ear. Down by the sea, there’s a blackness to the water and to the beach, ash rolls in the waves and dead birds have washed up out of it. Flies are the only things that have made any headway out of this, and they rise in flocks when I walk by the bodies that must have dropped out of the air. Some of them are perfect, a kookaburra, a honeyeater, a bowerbird.

  You’re not supposed to swim this time of year because the whalers come in close
to feed on the mackerel. I drag the boat out to the water and it makes grooves in the sand, and I think that might be the last they’ll know of me, deep large footprints in the sand and the surprising strength of a fifteen-year-old girl. I row until I’m just past the reef, and I drop the small anchor, feel it catch and the boat turns in a circle. No one can see me out here, so I take my T-shirt off. I fix myself up with the goggles, which make my eyes bulge because they’re too small, and I fix the snorkel to the side of my face, bite down on it. I sit lightly on the side of the boat like scuba divers do, thinking I’ll go in backwards, but the boat nearly capsizes, so in the end I just jump out like a mad kid. The water is warm and clear. Butterfish scoot in and out between each other. I dive down to the sea floor. It is not deep, not deep deep black blue which would be frightening. The seabed is soft and sandy, and when I feel it with the flat of my palm, white sand billows up, sparkling gold and silver and floating like dust motes in the small swell. Prawns with long moustaches walk the water around me and I look up and see a flock of birds so clearly my goggles fog. The sharks fly with the urgency of ice melting. There is no thrash, no gums bared and raw-meat teeth, no rolling eyes and fat green blood-cloud. I only have a few moments before I have to go up for air, have to rise up between them, but I don’t move for what feels like the longest time, not until my eyes feel like they might start to bleed from the pressure. One bubble at a time I let my breath out. They feed in this quiet way, occasionally darting forward a few feet to swallow a small fish, barely opening their wide mouths, sucking soup from a spoon. They sing to each other – it is just the pressure in my ears, the sound of needing to breathe, of course it is, but I can hear a high-pitched ticking, a noise like air let slowly out of a balloon, and I imagine it’s their song. When the last air bubble has left my mouth, I let myself float to the surface, coming face to face with a dozen of them, and they do not care, they don’t want me, and only turn in a tight circle when I put out my hand to touch them, turn in a tight circle and fly away. When I break the surface, I breathe in and in and out again, and there’s a sharp pain at my temple, and black spots appear and then disappear from my eyes. It’s now, looking down, that I feel uneasy, and I see how far I have gone from the boat in coming up, not keeping my eye on its shadow, and I lap across the top, with those great birds underneath me, watching me like I have watched them, hearing the beat of my heart, the mess I make of the top of the water. One of them brushes gently against my foot, but it doesn’t bite, there is just, when I pull myself into the boat, the smallest of grazes, and I lie in the bottom of the boat, jumping with sea lice, feeling them moving underneath me, and I get the feeling that nothing matters all that much any more. When I close my eyes, I see smoke-blackened people with hard eyes and red-licked lips and I know I will visit Denver and talk him out of his sleep.

  The buses are running, out-of-town buses mainly, because the depot went up. There are people on board who don’t belong, who fumble with change and can’t understand where the stops are. The cars were part of the problem, I’ve heard it said in so many different ways, the explosions, the reignition. The bus is crowded, and the grapes I found at Four Square are pressed against my shirt. I hope they are seedless. I watch over his shoulder as an old man blows his nose into a white handkerchief, and what comes out is black. The man stares at it a moment before folding the handkerchief and putting it back in his pocket. It’s inside of us all.

  As we leave town, the ash becomes less thick, but it still draws my eye, it still creeps in. A lot of people get off with me at the hospital. There is not much talking. I hang around in the lobby trying to work out where to find him. The place feels like a maze. I don’t want to ask at reception, so in the end I follow signs to ‘Burns Centre’. It’s visiting time, and there are people in there with no hair, in bed with flowers around them. A lady has a bandage over one eye, and a doctor stands by her bed while her husband locks his hands in front of him with nerves. Incredibly lucky, is what the doctor is saying, and from behind her bandage the woman smiles. Denver is not there, and I walk the squeaky aisles feeling lost.

  A policeman is sat outside a room, and this is how I know I have found him. The policeman is one of Dad’s friends, I’ve seen them at the pub together, but I don’t know his name. He nods at me with a look of confusion when I say hello.

  ‘I’ve come to see Denver,’ I say and he blinks.

  ‘No visitors, I’m afraid. Just family – as if they’d come.’ I shift legs. The man’s eyes fall on the grapes. ‘He can’t swallow, love,’ he says. ‘He won’t be swallowing down anything any more – the throat is gone.’

  How can a person’s throat be gone? I think – it must be a figure of speech. How would the head connect?

  ‘Reckon he’s got his own punishment being left in a state like that – no eyelids, no lips. Not enough skin to see him through the grafts.’

  Lead weight gathers in my belly. ‘Please,’ I say. I’m not sure what it is I’m pleading for, but it has some effect on the man. He squints at me.

  ‘You’re John Whyte’s daughter.’ I nod and he sighs. ‘Look, I’m going to assume you’re as good a bloke as your old man. I’ve got the toilet to use, while I’m gone you can do what you like, just don’t touch him.’ He picks up a paper he’s been sitting on. ‘Leave those grapes outside, and remember – I know exactly who you are.’ He puts his thumbs into the space between his stomach and belt, ‘And if a nurse comes in, I didn’t see you.’

  I put the grapes down on his empty seat. ‘Thanks,’ I say.

  He walks away, his shoes squeaking on the floor. I open the door to Denver’s room, where he is encased in a plastic cover, like a small tent. There’s a smell in the room, at the same time familiar and so alien that the breath stops in my throat – the deep-fat fryer.

  A machine pumps air into the body inside the plastic. The sound is calm and regular, a steady wheeze. I can only catch glimpses of Denver’s body, dark patches of pink between white bandages. If he is awake I wonder what he knows, this new order of things, no arms or legs to use, just flesh, cooking while he sits inside it and stares at the ceiling through the tent. My mouth is bone-dry. There’s the smallest sound from the tent, like a squeal, the noise of fat spitting in a pan. The thing under plastic lives, and I wipe my palms on my thighs and move closer.

  ‘Denver?’ I am waiting for an answer that won’t come. ‘It’s Jake.’ Somewhere a series of beeps sound. The pump feeds him air. ‘I’ve come to say I’m sorry.’ I move closer and try not to look at his face. His eyes are covered over with pads of cotton, so he cannot even stare at the ceiling, but I am glad not to have to meet the gaze of the eyeballs. In the moist cave of his mouth is a thick plastic tube. It is impossible to tell which of the other tubes carry urine or pus or drugs, all of them are Dettol-brown. I breathe in through my mouth to avoid the smell, but I still get the taste.

  ‘I don’t know if you can hear me,’ I say like they do on the TV. ‘I just wanted to say that I didn’t mean for this to happen.’ I leave a long pause like he might respond. I can’t remember any more what it is that I expected to happen. ‘And I want you to know that if you wake up, I’ll tell them it was me, I won’t let them hurt you.’ It had sounded so heroic when I’d practised it in my head. But in my head, Denver was still a complete body, maybe with a few scars about him, maybe even an oxygen mask over his face for the smoke inhalation. He was not this wet wound of meat. ‘I’m so sorry,’ I say again. ‘It’s all my fault, I never thought it would get so out of control. The fire—’

  ‘How do you mean it’s all your fault?’ Behind me, at the open doorway, stands a nurse and the policeman. I push past them and into the hallway.

  ‘Hey,’ the policeman calls, but he doesn’t follow me. I look back and they are both just standing looking.

  ‘Who is that?’ the nurse asks the policeman.

  ‘I know her old man,’ he says.

  For an hour I walk the blackened main street, and people turn to look at
me, in a way that I can’t read. I try to smile back at some of them, some sympathetic sort of smile that would be appropriate, but they turn away if I do that. There’s a silence of so many people looking. No one asks questions. No one says anything, they just look and all of them see me. And all of them look that quiet look.

  The post office, the pub and the co-op are fine, but the fish shop is dead, and outside it I can see the fish man sitting on the bonnet of his car and just looking. There’s no one there to help him because everyone is looking to their own problems. He must sense me watching because he looks up, and he just stares at me. I put my hands deep in the pockets of my shorts and keep my head down. I think I hear him shout something, but probably not, probably no one heard. I don’t look behind me, I turn down the street that takes me back down towards the beach. Somewhere I hear the scratch of a walkie-talkie, I hear my name on the wind.

  I take myself far far away from what I am worried about, I think only about how I will sit for a while on the beach, and then I will go home and at home I will go to sleep and in the morning I will start to think straight again, I will wake up a changed and better person and I will be able to think clearly about the past week, about Flora, about Denver, their parents and the town. I walk quickly and soon, in the baking heat, I am on the beach again, the place with the reedy dunes where the soldier crabs pop their heads out of their holes and tick their moustaches at you, but today, no matter how still I sit, no faces appear out of the sand. There is nothing to be frightened away by a flung-out hand, nothing will be conducted in the way that it should be, and I am still not thinking clearly.

  I hear twigs snap behind me and I ignore it. Up the beach come six or seven men and a woman. I don’t move. The human eye. If I move, where will I end up? If I move I’m guilty. And I stay put until I can see who they are, walking with a purpose, all of them. One man is Andy Carter and my blood bellows in my stomach. The woman runs the bread shop. I have a memory of her when I was younger, giving out the stale iced buns to kids on their way home from school. The fish man is with them, with the same look he’d given me half an hour before. The other faces I recognise but not enough to name – I have never been interested enough in learning these people’s names. I keep still, like a leveret; my shorts are sand-coloured, my T-shirt green, they will not see me if I remain still. But I catch in Andy Carter’s face that he has seen me, and I wait a breath to try to work out a plan and at the last moment, I get up and run. There is a shout behind me, a scream from the bread-shop woman and through the earth I feel them coming. If I can make it round the headland, I can hide until I can take my boat and get away. I am a fast runner for my year, I am tall and long-legged.