Rain Birds

by Harriet McKnight

  The anger and the swearing – she still wasn’t used to them yet. Not that she and Alan had ever held back with each other during arguments; just that now he was so different – she couldn’t read him anymore.

  She collected herself and walked towards the back door, slowing at the dresser in the hallway where there was a photograph: she and Alan in front of a sea of wheat, the 1990s, her hair bobbed. Western Australia. She picked the photo frame up. Her cousin, Nico, had been behind the camera; Pina’s father had died and they’d been pulled back across the continent to the golden wheatbelt of the West. Back to the raking gaze of family, the musty rooms, the flaking wallpaper. After collecting them from the airport, Nico had driven them home past her old high school. It was dusk and it looked imposing, all lit up; the sharp-edged walls more like a women’s prison than a school.

  ‘Bring back memories?’ Alan had asked. ‘Bet you were cute in your uniform.’

  They’d arrived to a gutted house – her father’s three sisters and their children had already cleared everything out.

  ‘He never left that house,’ her father’s eldest sister, Rosa, said when they got inside. ‘Your mother’s house.’ As though it was something to be admired when really all it meant was that he’d wanted to keep her mother within grabbing distance, even in death.

  She set the photo down again. By the time she reached Alan at the back door, the rage in him had subdued somewhat. He was muttering to himself but stood calmly as he stared out through the glass panel next to the door. She could see what held his attention: the casuarina branches were again filled with cockatoos, and one pair were perched on the edge of the closest bird feeder. She flicked the lock and stood back as he pushed past her; watched from the doorway as he paced along the edge of the verandah. The disease came in waves – she knew – and by now she was almost used to the rollercoaster of his mood swings. Or was at least numb to them.

  When she was certain Alan was safely distracted, she returned inside to lift the dirty linen from the bed and take it to the washing machine. Tried to breathe through her mouth to avoid the stink. Washed her hands and arms roughly in the laundry sink. Back in the hallway, she paused again in front of that photo on the dresser.

  Before they’d set off for the funeral, she and Alan had walked through the empty rooms of her family home, noticing the dents and dust-lines in the carpet that marked the ghostly outlines of furniture unmoved for decades; the bay window, with its lace curtains that her mother had made and hemmed by hand; the wood-panelled hallway; and the shell-pink bathroom – so 1950s, so vogue at the time.

  ‘That bathroom was the one thing I couldn’t deny your mother,’ Pina’s father had often told her, as though all his other denials were insubstantial after that gesture.

  One morning, when she was thirteen, maybe fourteen, she’d heard her mother vomiting into that shell-coloured toilet; had listened to the sounds of her heaving and coughing. She hadn’t gone in to comfort her. She couldn’t. It’s not what they did. There had never been any explanation of why she didn’t have siblings.

  At her father’s funeral, her aunt Isabella had asked, ‘Why did you even come back now? You know there’s nothing for you in the will. You give nothing, you get nothing.’

  Later, at the wake at her aunt Rosa’s house, everyone looked the same – the dark hair, the dark clothes – except for Alan. He was lightness. His fair hair and white shirt like a beacon across the room.

  ‘How are you holding up?’ he’d asked.

  ‘I just can’t stop seeing her everywhere in this town. It’s hard to believe she’s gone.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘My mother.’

  He took her fingers, rubbed them between his own. ‘You do know that we’re here for your father’s funeral, not your mother’s.’

  ‘My mother knew me best – she knew everything about me.’

  Alan appeared hurt, let go of her fingers.

  ‘I mean, you know me,’ she said, grasping. ‘But a mother knows everything.’

  ‘You know everything about me,’ he said.

  ‘I’m sure I don’t know everything. I’m sure there are some things you’ve kept to yourself.’

  ‘I thought that’s what being married was.’

  ‘You’re not allowed to do this now,’ she said. ‘We’re at my father’s wake. You’re not allowed to get cross with me.’

  ‘Oh, so now you remember where we are?’

  ‘You cannot speak of him yet,’ hissed an eavesdropping relative. ‘You will tie his soul to earth.’

  We wouldn’t want that, she’d thought, we’ve only just got rid of him. She began to laugh. Relatives glared at her as though she were the devil, and Alan had had to drag her out onto the verandah, where she repeated the joke to him and they’d clutched each other and trembled with mirth, the sombre wake another world behind them. On the way back to the airport, Nico had stopped on the side of the road and made them pose against the sunset and the wheat stalks.

  She traced her thumb across their faces in the photograph. Her left shoulder was tucked underneath Alan’s right armpit – he had been tall enough for her to do that then – her head leaning against his chest. It was as if she was looking at a photograph of distant relatives: that’s how far away she felt from that moment. She turned the frame over, opened it and took the photo from inside. She held it in both her hands briefly, folding it in half and slipping it inside her jeans pocket.

  As the washing machine churned in the background, she went outside. Alan was still pacing on the verandah. The rest of the flock had come into the garden and were now hanging off the bird feeders, searching for bits of seed. There must be an old packet under the kitchen sink, she thought. She made a mental note to find it later on.

  With one eye on her husband, she walked down the back steps, crouched, and began to tug weeds from around the base of the hakea bush. From down there, she could watch Alan’s body language. His attention was focused in a single direction, not flitting back and forth, not sliding off continuously to something else. Just on those cockatoos. Transfixed. But then he moved towards them, and the birds were spooked; they heaved themselves up into the air as one and flew to the safety of the casuarina. The spell was broken.

  ‘You ok?’ she called as he began to pace again.

  He glared at her and stamped up the verandah stairs to his armchair.

  She closed her eyes and breathed in the thick scent of decomposing leaves and soil. She was probably imagining things; it was stupid to think that a couple of birds could change him. What would happen, she wondered, if she just got up and left? If she headed off down the road and didn’t turn around? She could let the garden go back to the wild. That was the natural progression of things. Everything returned to the earth. Cycles. But instead, she stayed and tugged at the weeds that were creeping through the mulch.

  ‘You could look at increasing the medication,’ Tracey had told her at the end of her shift yesterday afternoon, ‘but I’m not exactly sure what you’re going to achieve.’

  They’d both been watching out the window as Alan paced along the back fence, drawn again by the cockatoos in the casuarinas. Even from that far away, they’d been able to hear the three-note tune from his pursed lips.

  ‘He’s just so agitated all the time.’

  ‘What you probably need are antipsychotics,’ Tracey said. ‘But I don’t know if you want to go down that path – a lot of people turn into zombies when they’re on them. Real sedated.’

  ‘What about his Doxepin? Or his Alprazolam?’

  Tracey ignored her question. ‘Pina, I noticed the bedclothes in the lounge room. Are you sleeping there?’

  ‘He gets confused in the evenings,’ she replied, embarrassed. ‘It’s so he doesn’t have to feel so confused.’

  ‘About who you are?’

  She nodded.

  It’s me, your wife.

  ‘What are you hoping to prolong if you did up the medication dosage?’ Tracey asked. />
  ‘Him. I want him here with me.’

  She got up from beside the hakea, dusted her hands on her thighs and walked up the verandah steps. Alan was watching her move closer out of the corner of his eye. She pulled a chair across to sit beside his armchair and put her arm through his, following his gaze out to the garden and the cockatoos, which had resettled in the trees over the fence.

  ‘The garden’s come up nice this year,’ she said.

  ‘Yes.’

  They sat together as the late-morning shadows began to creep across the ground. Two cockatoos returned to the bird feeders and sat clucking at each other, their feathers ruffling up and then falling back into place.

  ‘Aren’t they wonderful?’ she said.

  His arm felt thin beneath her hand. His shirtsleeve hung from his shoulders in a straight line, no shape.

  ‘Alan, do you know who I am?’ she asked him.

  ‘Oh yes,’ he said.

  It could have been true. It was impossible to know for sure.

  In the middle of the night, she was woken by the first rumbles of thunder and the barking of Bruce Holloway’s dog. She realised she’d been hearing the noise in her dreams. It remained hot; the wind was gaining momentum. She could feel it leaning into the weatherboards of the house with more and more urgency. The thunder was scattered, frenetic. Crackling and breaking in unintuitive patterns.

  She lay on the couch with a growing nervousness. It didn’t sound like normal thunder – it was too violent, too wild. She knew something wasn’t quite right. The summers were getting hotter and more vicious.

  For an hour or so, the frenzied thunder got into her bones and put her on edge, but the storm never broke. It moved overhead and out to the ocean. And still their neighbour’s dog barked.

  24

  ARIANNA NOTICED SOMETHING strange on her scalp: a small patch above her right ear was tingly, cold even. Different from the rest of her head. Lying in her tent, she turned on her left side and, starting at her hairline, let her fingers slide up and over her skull. Her thick hair caught on her hands until she found it: a bald spot the size of a grape above her ear.

  She ran her fingertips around it, worrying at the edges and tugging the spider-web tendrils. Not again. She sat up, still feeling the bald spot. There were bits of hair strewn across her pillow.

  It’s not that bad, the breeze whispered to her. It’s not that big – it can grow back. All she had to do was simply stop now, before the patch grew any larger. It was a matter of willpower.

  She recalled her mother reading her fifth-grade report card aloud at the kitchen table, her elbows up on the tabletop so that the card was held slightly higher than her eye-line. Her mother had shaved her hair off by then, and there was something about that buzz cut that’d made her look childish, as if they were the same age.

  ‘Oh dear,’ her mother had said.

  ‘What? What?’

  ‘Arianna is a capable student but at times she is wilful and doesn’t listen,’ her mother read.

  ‘Why are you laughing?’

  Her mother wiped her eyes. ‘I’m not laughing at you.’

  ‘What does wilful mean?’

  ‘It means you’re stubborn.’

  Arianna wasn’t sure if that was a bad thing. ‘I’m a good student. I get all the questions right.’

  ‘I know – it says you’re a good student. I’m not laughing at you, sweetie. Just at the way the teacher wrote it.’

  Arianna looked it up later.

  wilful / 'wιlfƱl,-f(ә) l / having or showing a stubborn and determined intention to do as one wants, regardless of the consequences.

  She’d always been good at research. Present tense, that was the thing she struggled with. People weren’t truthful the way facts were. All those questions at school she couldn’t answer: What’s wrong with your mum? Don’t you know who your father is? What’s wrong with your hair?

  Inside the sticky nylon walls of the tent, she forced her hand away from the bald spot, dragged her hair back into a tight ponytail, feeling to make sure that the patch was covered by the rest of her hair. She tipped all her clothes out of her bag onto the tent floor. Dug out the creased cap she’d thrown in somewhere near the bottom. Underneath the shady canopy of the eucalyptus forest, she’d had little use for it, but it would add an extra layer between her hair and her fingers. She reached back into the pile to find clean clothes – there was nothing; she needed to do some washing – then dragged on a shirt that didn’t smell too bad.

  Outside, she could hear that the insects were already loud in the heat. The last few days had been scorching and, after almost four months in the bush, all of her t-shirts had gathered sweat in the armpits and hardened, rubbing her skin raw; the crotch of her shorts as well. Her hair and skin had layers of grime, and perspiration that she seemed unable to get rid of no matter how hard she scrubbed.

  Everything was burning: the earth, the bush. Everything seared to a dangerous temperature, as if the twigs and the leaves might burst into flames. She’d had to remove the fly from her tent and now, at nights, slept lying on her back, face upwards, watching the trees. But she knew that eucalypts were prone to dropping full branches in the summer months to conserve water. Widow makers. She’d enter sleep only to find images of bleeding, headless birds calling her, and branches the size of tankers falling out of the dark sky.

  In the leaf litter outside, she heard footsteps.

  ‘Arianna.’ Tim kicked the side of her tent with his boot. ‘Get up.’

  The first three nesting boxes they checked were empty. No birds. The woodchips on the base of the boxes were grey and hardened as though there had been no feathered bodies in there to keep the elements off them for a long time.

  As they walked towards the fourth box, thunder rumbled in the distance.

  ‘Is that close, do you reckon?’ Tim asked.

  ‘Not really.’

  She’d taken off her cap to wear her helmet while she was climbing, and kept touching the side of her head to make sure the small bald patch remained covered by her ponytail.

  He was looking at her strangely. ‘Are you ok?’

  ‘Fine.’

  His gaze lingered, though. She tried to make sense of it. He was behaving oddly, not her. Asking all those questions, staring at her as if she were a skittish beast. Thunder again.

  ‘After this one we should head back,’ he said. ‘Can’t have you getting electrocuted up there.’

  She hoisted up the fourth tree to retrieve the monitoring camera positioned near the entrance, twisted her body to peer into the nest. Again, there were no birds.

  She put both hands on her rope and sat back into her harness. The smell of the treetops was pungent: cooking eucalyptus and burning bark. Out on the horizon, towards the ocean, the sky hung heavy and purple. A small group of heathwrens played in the high branches of the tree, hopping from perch to perch, twittering. She watched the wispy cirrus clouds drift overhead beyond the uppermost leaves.

  A breeze lifted thin tendrils of hair from behind her ears. There was something going on, she could feel it. The way Tim was watching her. She felt a swell inside her chest, but tears never came.

  On her descent, her hands were sweaty and weak, and she slid down too fast, jarring herself as the ascender and carabiner bit into the rope.

  ‘Watch it,’ Tim called.

  She hit the ground hard and felt pain shoot up her ankles and calves. The blood rushed into her ears, and the bush was loud and harsh around her.

  Back at camp, they downloaded the contents of the camera. Empty. The footage was just shimmering gum leaves and the slow-motion circling of the sun’s shadows. Nothing.

  She left Tim to watch and went back to her tent. She wanted to wet a towel and run it across her face, but she was conscious of their water usage, so instead, once at her site, she simply took the cap from her head and used it to fan a little breeze towards her.

  Those purple clouds hadn’t moved; she could see them between
the lower trunks to the east. These last few afternoons, storms had brewed out that way, sucking the air up with them only to pass over and not break open. Nothing. Summer was setting in.

  She often thought she heard voices drifting back towards their camp on the wind, felt ripples of aggression through the earth. Now, as she listened to the wattlebirds chatter in the hakea bushes nearby, she twisted a section of hair just above her right ear, next to her bald patch. Too short to stay in her ponytail, it curled around her ear and tickled her neck. She twirled and twirled it through her fingers. Suddenly she saw the entire length of hair wrapped around her fingers, no longer attached – she’d twisted it right out of her head.

  She heard her sister’s taunts. ‘Like a plucked chicken. Bruck, bruck, bruck. Like a mangy dog.’

  When Caro had left home, she’d had only her mother. You bald bitch. In the eighth grade, when she’d torn out half her hair, her mother had taken her to a doctor. They’d said that it might be hereditary, this kind of condition. She wouldn’t end up like her mother. Back then she’d just forced herself to stop. Wilful.

  She rolled the strands between her palms into a clump. She would just stop. She let the breeze take the ball from her hands, and it caught against an ant’s nest. Caro had always had the beautiful hair; people always commented on it. She’d missed out on a lot that Caro had managed to have. Another rumble in the distance. The air seemed charged.

  25

  IT WAS JUST after lunch, and Pina was watching the cockatoos as she watered the back garden. The temperature had risen even further in the last day or so, now they’d entered December. The bush felt fragile, dehydrated. She thought the bulky cockatoos may have driven away some of the smaller, quieter birds. There seemed to be less movement in the trees around her. Just the steady click of the cockatoos’ large beaks. Did birds become lethargic in the heat? She had no idea.

  As she moved about the garden with the hose, the cockatoos dug at the bark on the casuarinas, tossed seed pods in their beaks and let them fall down through the fronds. She’d dusted the tops of the bird feeders with seeds that morning, but so far the birds had stayed in the casuarina grove, scrutinising her. Afternoons were now full and heavy with their cries, their wingspans. They somehow monopolised the space.