A mosquito landed on Alan’s forehead, and she reached up to brush it away. The insect smeared beneath her fingers, bright red. He was still shouting.
‘Come on,’ she said.
A cockatoo screeched nearby. She gripped Alan under the arm and steered him closer to the back steps; almost had to lift him up. He grasped the handrail; it seemed that the only thing propelling him forward were the slurs he was muttering. She could sense eyes on her back.
Once inside, Alan continued yelling, meaningless venom that echoed across the wooden floorboards. She quickly drew the heavy curtain across the back door and rushed to do the same at the front. All exits hidden from Alan. But even from behind the dense fabric, she could still hear the bip, bip, bip sound of technology floating through the air.
27
WHEN THE OLD man in the garden had begun yelling abuse at the woman, she and Tim had turned towards the noise. Tim had even taken a couple of steps in the direction of the house before stopping.
‘Should we do something?’ he asked her now.
She didn’t know, said nothing. And by then the woman had wrangled the man inside, in any case.
‘I’m just not sure that we should do nothing,’ he said. ‘Didn’t that seem full-on to you?’
‘They’re probably fine.’ She couldn’t tell him she was the wrong person to answer a question like that, and just turned back to the cockatoos.
But Tim came up beside her and took her arm. ‘We should go back to camp – it’s getting late.’
She tried to pull away from his grip. ‘We can’t monitor them if they start to nest around here. It’s too close to town; there’s bound to be cats. What about other predators? We can’t protect them here.’
‘What’s it going to change if we stay right now? We’ll come back tomorrow, work out what to do.’
He was right, she knew that. She followed him to the Land Cruiser and got into the passenger seat.
As they drove past the Boney Point Hotel on their way back through town, she thought of the two birds lying in its freezer: their cool-room tomb. Panic swilled at the back of her throat. To fill the silence in the car and to distract herself, she put the radio on.
Voices flowed around them as they headed out the other side of town. News, old news, repeats. This was a record-breaking year for temperatures; a summer that the previous charts couldn’t hope to match. Globally, it was the hottest year since records began in 1880, according to NASA. Two men had been caught stripping the Murrungowar National Park of expensive tree ferns and timber. Tried to sell the plants to nurseries in Traralgon and Dandenong, closer to Melbourne. Eyes watching her from the bush. The estimated haul amounted to $1.2 million. They said the men had brought in bulldozers and caused $12 million in damage to the bush. That was the strangest thing, she thought: everything was quantifiable; even the wild had a value, a worth.
When they arrived back at camp, dusk had set in. There was a twittering, singsong sound coming from the radio receiver; nothing that she could find an explanation for.
‘Can you hear that?’ she asked Tim.
He stared at her with a frown.
She unplugged all the equipment, but the sound was still there.
‘I swear I can hear something strange,’ she told him from where she was sitting in the dirt of the eating area, bits of the disassembled radio receiver lying around her.
‘Are you alright?’ he asked.
‘Fine. Why?’
‘Arianna, really, it will be ok. This isn’t like last time. Nothing bad is going to happen.’ He walked off towards his tent.
She put the receiver back together and tested it some more.
Last time. Three years ago. She’d been assisting one of the university’s most experienced ecologists, Professor Margaret Sweeney, with a reintroduction program at a sanctuary north of Canberra. It was Arianna’s first program after her appointment to the faculty; bush stone-curlews had been locally extinct from the area for forty years until their team had arrived with fifteen birds at the Stony Creek Woodland Sanctuary. The site had been a purpose-built, predator-free enclosure, twenty kilometres from the outer suburb of Duffy and off behind Mount Stromlo.
When they were a week away from completing the program, Margaret Sweeney had come to find her. ‘Do you have your phone with you?’ she’d asked, ashen-faced. ‘You need to call your sister – she’s been trying to get hold of you.’
Arianna had been focusing on her work; the mobile reception was poor so she’d kept her phone switched off.
A bad feeling. She’d dialled Caro’s number, who had answered on the first ring. There was only sobbing from her end.
Mum fell over in the hallway four days ago. She’s at the hospital. On life support. They say she’s brain dead.
The world had dropped away. All bush noises in Stony Creek silenced. She couldn’t breathe.
‘Keep her alive until I get there,’ she said. ‘Please.’
‘I couldn’t get onto you,’ her sister wailed. ‘I couldn’t reach you. Where have you been? I can never reach you.’
She returned to Canberra immediately, caught the first flight from there to Sydney. Her mother was still alive when she arrived, but within a day they started transferring her organs to patients who had been lined up to receive them. Caro had decided to donate without her.
‘Someone needed her heart. I waited two days to hear from you, but the doctors needed a decision. They needed her organs to help other people live. She had no brain function; she was already gone. I waited two days. I couldn’t stand seeing her with all those tubes sticking out of her.’
The balance of Arianna’s world was gone. What she hadn’t expected was to feel so untethered. Her mother was – used to be – her entry to the world. Her father had always been a dark threat; her sister had abandoned her when she left home. Her mother had been the only safe and constant presence.
‘Please, don’t get angry,’ Caro had pleaded with her in the hospital’s foyer. ‘I couldn’t get onto you. You’re always working.’
‘What do you want for dinner?’ Tim asked, breaking into her memories as he reappeared holding two freeze-dried meals. ‘Beef curry or spaghetti bolognese?’
She clicked the last pieces of the radio transmitter back together and immediately turned it on.
‘I don’t mind,’ she said.
‘I know it’s not a five-star meal,’ he said, tossing the curry towards her, ‘but you have to admit that food tastes better out in the open.’
She nodded distractedly and listened to the static for the singsong sound in the radio.
Nothing bad is going to happen.
Later, once she was lying in her tent in the dark, she heard the noise of fingernails scratching down its side, but when she climbed from her sleeping bag to investigate, there were no tree branches anywhere close to the nylon walls.
Who will want any of you?
The bush around her was loud with voices. It was a swirling whirlpool of static and screeching. The earth pulsed beneath her. Her hand flew to her head, scratching and tugging. Her scalp was covered in ants. Possums howled and screamed above. Koels wailed the messages of ghosts.
Standing outside in the night, her mind returned to her mother’s death. After the funeral, she’d stopped answering Caro’s calls. There was her first birthday without her mother, the first Christmas. One evening, after those milestones, she’d been about to turn into the driveway of her apartment building when she’d noticed her sister waiting on the doorstep; she kept going and drove back to the office instead. She’d always been good at pushing away the things she didn’t know how to deal with.
Please, Caro had begged in her most recent voicemail, only yesterday, we only have each other. You’re my only family. I want my baby to have an aunt.
Over the last three years, Arianna had replayed the events around her mother’s death in her head, over and over. What if she’d turned her phone on? What if Caro had waited? What decision would she ha
ve made? No doubt she would have hated seeing those tubes in her mother as well. It had been long enough now that she could recognise that Caro had probably done the right thing by their mother, even though it had been the wrong thing by her. That was what she found hard to let go of. We only have each other. All she had to do was pick up her phone, call her sister back.
That night the bush threw itself against her tent like storm waves onto rocks. She slept with the whirl of the wind in her ears. Patricia, Patricia. Children changed things, her mother had always said. Three people took more hiding than one. But when she finally was alone, she’d felt as though she’d been left exposed; she didn’t know where to hide any longer.
28
THE NIGHT WAS wild. Pina was awake for much of it, watching trees being whipped around out of the lounge-room window. Their tin roof creaked and cracked under the strain. She lay on the couch and imagined the wind tearing the roof from the house, sucking both her and Alan up into the endless black heavens. Relief.
Towards dawn she snatched a few hours’ sleep and woke to a morning of unusual stillness as the bush recovered from its battering.
Once she had got Alan up and given him his breakfast, she tried to persuade him to have a shower. In the bathroom, she dragged the plastic shower chair under the nozzle and manhandled him into it; almost did her back in. Somehow, overnight, his general discomfort at being washed had turned into full-blown refusal.
They were due to see Doctor Nash for a check-up later that day, and he was beginning to smell the way old bodies always did. Sour, rotten.
‘Please,’ she begged, turning the shower on and adjusting the temperature, ‘just wash.’
He hit out at her, striking weak blows with sharp-boned hands against her soft middle; tried to get up again. He’d never hit her before he got sick.
Again she directed him forcefully backward into the plastic shower chair, and turned the warm shower spray towards his body.
He closed his eyes tight. ‘No, no, no, no,’ he said, leaning back against the chair as the jets of water hit his skin, holding his arms up against his chest like chicken wings.
‘It’s ok,’ she reassured him. ‘You’re ok.’
But neither of them were.
It was only once they were sitting in Doctor Nash’s office that she realised that, while she had managed to shower Alan, she’d forgotten to wash herself before they left. She tucked her arms closer to her body and hoped she didn’t smell.
After the usual tests, Doctor Nash gave Alan some pencils and paper before taking her aside.
‘How’s he going?’
‘Oh, you know,’ she said.
‘Well, actually I don’t. That’s why I’m asking you.’
She watched her husband move the pencils around the table the way a fussing child would push food around on their plate.
‘I guess I don’t know anymore. It’s all shit. I can’t tell if it’s more or less shit than it was before.’ All she heard in response was the scratching of Doctor Nash’s ballpoint pen against paper as she took notes. ‘Am I allowed to swear in front of the doctor?’
‘Pina, honestly, you have to think about care facilities. This isn’t sustainable. But, yes, you can swear if it helps.’
She was told to bring Alan back in two weeks, shortly after Christmas. She bit her tongue and didn’t comment on how soon that was.
Once Alan was in bed that night, Pina sat in the darkened house, her face lit by the blue light of her computer, typing various words and questions into internet search engines.
care facilities dementia gippsland
how much do nursing homes cost?
She felt guilty even typing those words.
At some point in her search, she found a video of a man talking about his wife’s dementia, how he’d had to put her into a facility. He gazed earnestly at the camera, said things like, You’ve got to care for your spouse while also prioritising your own health, and There is life after Alzheimer’s. She watched him talk with disdain. If you’d loved her, you would have fought harder, she thought.
It was close to midnight when her phone rang. Lil. Her friend never called so late.
‘It’s Harley.’ Lil’s voice was shaky. ‘We’re at Bairnsdale, at the hospital. Some fucking arsehole beat him up.’
She tried to get Lil to calm down, slow down. Her words were a jumbled flood; they poured down the line. She gradually pieced it together. Harley had been with a group of boys who’d been out protesting at the Sol Petroleum site. They’d wandered into town and to the hotel for a drink. Lil had been there when the brawl broke out; she’d called the ambulance, had ridden with Harley to Bairnsdale Hospital, made sure he was safely in the hands of medical staff. Now she was calling her from the car park.
‘Pina,’ Lil wailed. ‘I’ve got his blood on my shirt.’
‘Why Harley?’ she asked. But she already knew. That business with Sol Petroleum had split the town down the middle. Locals often spoke of the division as between ‘rednecks’ on one side and ‘greenies’ on the other. But she knew it wasn’t as simplistic as that. There were some who saw the value in the employment opportunities the oil company would bring, who were already living hand to mouth as it was, who couldn’t afford to prioritise wild places. You couldn’t begrudge struggling families that. But she also knew that, for others, it had provided their already present anger with an excuse – a cause to hide their hate behind. Combustion. It was the uglier side of their community.
‘He didn’t do anything,’ Lil told her, ‘not until one of them called him something disgusting and said, You all just end up on welfare anyway so don’t take away our jobs. Can you believe it? They said that to him.’
Lil said she’d seen the rush of violence rising up in him, and he’d smashed the guy’s nose into his face. Broke it in two places.
‘Then they all jumped on Harley, hitting him, kicking him. Pina, there was so much blood. I thought he was dead.’
She imagined Harley lying in a hospital bed and knew Lil must feel helpless. It took some getting used to, that feeling. She was aware of what the rest of the country thought, too: that there wasn’t any racism in Australia.
She listened to her friend sob down the phone. Heard her husband begin to howl in the bedroom. The koels calling in the dark. All the while, her head pounding, a wave of something mounting.
It’s coming.
Don’t relax.
29
ARIANNA AND TIM were sitting inside the Land Cruiser, the windows up, the aircon on, parked on the grass verge once more. She had convinced him that morning that they should drive back along Wallangamba Road to the blue weatherboard house where they’d found the flock two days before.
‘We have to do something,’ she said to him now.
‘What?’
‘I don’t know but we’ve found the birds – we can’t let them stay here.’
Tim sat turned towards the house for a long time. ‘You can’t just barge into someone’s home.’
She could feel her scalp itching; stuck her fingers under her thighs and pressed down on them. Just ignore it. ‘Those plants, they’re attracting the birds. They’ve got what look like bird feeders up.’
They watched as a couple of the cockatoos landed on the wooden platforms, tossed their heads around with happiness.
‘It’s unnatural,’ she said.
‘Well, we could ask them not to put out bird seed.’
‘That’s not enough.’
‘The cockatoos have got a good food source right there,’ he said, pointing towards the casuarina.
It was true: the grove just beyond the house’s fence was thick and mature.
‘But the program is fucked if they stay here,’ she snapped. ‘How will they nest? How will we monitor them? What effect will it have on their breeding?’ She tried to calm herself. ‘It’s a reasonable request. We just need to plead our case.’
She got out of the car and tugged her shirt down at the bottom, smoothed
out the creases. Tried to appear friendly, approachable. She heard Tim’s door close.
When she reached the front gate, she noticed it was held shut by a heavy padlock.
‘That doesn’t look very welcoming,’ Tim said. ‘Do you think we should just leave?’
She could feel herself getting shaky. ‘Hello,’ she called towards the house. ‘Hello.’
A woman appeared from around the side. She was middle-aged, maybe fifties, broad-shouldered. Her hair was glossed like some sort of animal.
‘Can I help you?’ the woman asked.
‘Is this your house?’
The woman glanced around as if to say, who else’s would it be? Her eyes were hard and narrowed. There were dark smudges on the skin beneath them.
‘I’m from the Glossy Black Cockatoo Reintroduction Program.’
The woman leant against the fence and crossed her arms.
‘Ok.’
‘I’m Arianna Brandt.’
‘Pina.’
‘G’day,’ Tim said cheerfully. ‘My name is Tim.’ He reached out to shake the woman’s hand. Something in her relinquished a little, and she gave a small smile as she took his hand.
‘I reckon I know you from somewhere,’ he said, still gripping her hand. ‘You don’t work out at that lovely nursery, do you?’
Why do people always like him? she thought.
‘I do,’ the woman said. ‘Or, I did. Hang on, I’ll get this open for you.’ She pulled a key from her pocket and unlocked the gate and swung it wide between them.
‘You’re probably aware that we’ve been working in the Murrungowar National Park on a reintroduction program of several nesting pairs,’ Arianna said. ‘This is a program that’s been many years in the making. It’s taken a lot of funding and resources to get this far.’
‘Right,’ the woman said.
Tim cleared his throat behind Arianna.
‘It’s been in the papers, on the news, lots of stories,’ she continued.
‘I don’t watch the news.’
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