Rain Birds

by Harriet McKnight

  A cockatoo tore the sky with its cry.

  ‘Well,’ Arianna continued, ‘we’ve been in the media. It’s a very important program. These birds are national emblems.’

  ‘Black cockatoos have a number of subspecies,’ Tim said, trying to explain. ‘One of them is the glossy blacks that usually inhabit areas down as far as Mallacoota, but we’re out here in Murrungowar looking for a new suitable habitat. A lot of their land has been cleared for agriculture, that kind of thing.’

  ‘So are you after donations or something?’ the woman – Pina – asked. ‘I heard you lot were in the pocket of that mining company.’

  I thought you didn’t know anything about it, she wanted to say. Her hands were getting more and more agitated. The skin on her scalp raged.

  ‘We have received funding from them,’ Tim said. ‘As part of their lease agreement they were required to put money into a regeneration project.’

  ‘Well, what do you want?’ the woman said to them. ‘This isn’t a great time.’

  ‘Look, it’s those trees and your bird feeders that are the problems,’ she told Pina. ‘They’re a threat to the success of what we’re doing here. They’re drawing the cockatoos away from their nesting grounds.’

  ‘What do you want me to do about that?’

  ‘You need to get them to leave.’

  ‘To leave?’ Pina frowned.

  ‘Yes, you need to encourage them to leave the grove behind your fence, chase them off, and take down those feeders. These birds are a threatened species – they need to be breeding and they won’t do that if they’re kept away from their nesting habitats.’

  ‘You’re asking me to stop a bunch of wild cockatoos going where they want to?’ Pina looked at her as though she were mad.

  ‘What we’re asking,’ Tim said, ‘is that you just consider the impact that you are having on these birds. We like to think that everyone has a responsibility to try to save threatened species.’

  ‘Commercial bird seed isn’t healthy for them either,’ she added, ‘if that’s what you’re using.’

  Pina glared between the two of them, back and forth. ‘You must realise this is completely unreasonable? That you sound insane?’

  Arianna suddenly hated her. Why did people always think it insane to care for the natural world, to prioritise it?

  ‘We’re just asking you to consider our position,’ Tim said, in a conciliatory manner. ‘We can provide you with some foil to hang from the tree branches to scare the cockatoos away, if you like, or work with you to find another solution.’

  Pina narrowed her eyes further. The cockatoos screeched. ‘This really isn’t a good time for me.’

  ‘Can we come back, then?’ she asked. She noticed that the lines that ran alongside the woman’s mouth were very deep.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘To talk further.’

  Pina began to shut the gate. ‘I don’t think there’s anything left to talk about.’

  As they drove away from the weatherboard house and the cockatoos, she watched the paddocks fly past with a feeling of unease. That vacant expression on the man in the garden. They hadn’t asked her what was wrong with him. He didn’t look that sick.

  ‘We all have to make sacrifices,’ she said.

  ‘What?’ Tim asked. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘That woman.’

  ‘Arianna, this program is important, but we have to consider people’s lives.’

  ‘We all have to make sacrifices.’

  ‘I’m not disagreeing with you, but I’m also saying that woman has her own priorities, which is fair enough.’

  She reached up to the left side of her head, wrapped a thin strand of hair around her index finger and pulled. What was his game? She wrapped another few hairs around her finger, pulled again. She rolled down the window and let the cluster slide from her hand.

  You can’t trust him, whispered the trees.

  Was it Tim or her father they were talking about? She wasn’t sure.

  ‘Besides,’ he said, ‘you saw that casuarina grove: they’ve got a good food source. Maybe we come back and try to identify where they’re nesting. We could talk to the woman about moving the nesting boxes up closer to her house. Aren’t you happy? They haven’t gone somewhere unsustainable, just not where you planned.’

  Aren’t you happy?

  Her mother had asked the same question when they’d escaped to that house on the coast without their father. ‘Aren’t you happy that we’re safe now?’

  But it had been complicated. He was still her father.

  ‘Mum did the right thing,’ Caro had insisted later in that beer garden, when they were both playing at being adults.

  But how right did she do? Arianna had still loved him. Not in the way that little girls who can trust their fathers for hugs and games did. But she’d never stopped imagining the father he could have been. Was that the same as love? After all these years, she could identify resentment when she felt it. Who knew where her father was now? She had none of that child’s hope of change left. Or maybe she did and that was the problem. He’d trapped her: she was seven and thirty-two at the same time. She would always be hoping.

  30

  AS THE DAYS passed, Pina was left feeling as though she was bearing a weight on her chest. Like there was mercury in her blood, boiling its way towards her head. They were staring down the barrel now, she realised; their days at home together were numbered.

  Earlier that morning the Country Fire Authority had stopped out the front of the house – they were doing the rounds of the area. A serious man talked to her about the state of her garden, the build-up of foliage close to the weatherboards.

  ‘It’s a huge fire risk,’ he’d said. ‘That distance between the bush and the house, that untended garden, the mulch.’

  She’d felt the sting. Untended. Why were things left to their natural state always considered unnatural, un-normal?

  ‘You got a bushfire plan?’ he’d asked. ‘Because my advice to you is get the hell out.’

  Once he’d departed, she dragged a chair over to the verandah railing and climbed on top, reaching her hand around the edge of the gutter to scoop out dried twigs and leaves.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Alan said, appearing beside the chair.

  She looked down at his face. It was blank. Empty.

  ‘You stay there,’ she said. ‘There’s no one up here.’

  He watched her for a while, as she struggled to clear the gutter, and then said, quietly, ‘I hope you fall off.’

  She clung to the post and stared out at the dry grass, the never-ending bush around their house. It was too big for her. It was too much to carry. What are you going to do?

  She was searching for any kind of sign. Anything that might tell her what she should do. The rare times now the cockatoos weren’t in the casuarina, Alan was out by the front gate, his head flicking up and down the road, tugging at the chain that kept it shut. She could see the desire for flight in him; it felt like a personal affront.

  She heard a car horn and knew that Tracey, despite having a key of her own to the padlock on the front gate, was waiting for her to come and watch Alan. He was trying to escape more and more. She stepped down from the chair and walked around to the front garden, where Alan was already hanging by the gate.

  Seeing her, Alan darted forward, then shrieked and wailed when she put herself between him and his escape, holding him by the shoulders. He hit at her hands, called her all sorts of names.

  ‘Oh, Pina,’ Tracey said once she was through the gate. Alan had scratched her arm, drawn blood. ‘No one would fault you given how long you’ve tried. No one would fault you now.’

  She had waved the words away. ‘It’s fine,’ she said, rubbing the line of blood down her forearm. ‘It was an accident.’

  She walked Tracey into the house and prepared herself to go grocery shopping in Boney Point; picked up her keys and shopping bags from the bench. From the kitchen window th
ey could see that Alan had stormed around to his armchair on the back verandah, where he was sitting and rocking.

  Back and forth, backandforth.

  A couple of cockatoos sat on top of the bird feeders.

  ‘They’re still hanging around, are they? Tracey asked.

  ‘Have you noticed the way he looks at them?’

  ‘Alan? He does seem to be pretty interested.’

  ‘What do you think that means?’

  Tracey’s mouth twitched as though she couldn’t find what she wanted to say. ‘I don’t know that it means anything much,’ she said finally.

  But as Pina observed how her husband watched those birds on the feeders, she thought: It has to mean something.

  That afternoon, once she’d returned from town and Tracey had left, Lil dropped in. They sat out on the back verandah beside Alan in his armchair. He was dozing. The cockatoos had retreated into the casuarina.

  It had been two days since Harley had been taken to Bairnsdale Hospital; Lil had stayed with him until his grandmother had arrived. Earl had driven the old lady up – she wasn’t good at driving such long distances anymore – and it was Earl who had brought Lil back to Boney Point, to where she’d left her car at the pub.

  ‘I can’t tell you how awful it was in the ambulance,’ Lil said now. ‘They were sticking needles in him. He was just lying there, strapped onto the bed, his face all swollen. It felt like they were driving so fucking slowly.’

  Lil told her that they’d been worried about his internal organs, that blunt trauma can damage the liver, the spleen. That Harley had vomited in the back of the ambulance and they’d also been concerned about his intestines. When they got to the hospital, there’d been a whole team of people there waiting for him.

  ‘He cried,’ Lil said, tears welling up in her own eyes, ‘when they were buzzing around him, sticking IV lines in his arms, machines beeping, all this hospital equipment everywhere. He wouldn’t look at me, but I could see he was crying.’

  Lil was a Boney Point native: she was as tough as the stalky sword-sedge grass that lined the inlet, was used to bargaining farmers down on prices of lucerne and mulch, wasn’t a stranger to the occasional violence of the area. Pina had never seen her so shaken before.

  She took Lil’s hand and held it as they gazed out across the garden. The gesture felt inadequate. Once she would have said all the usual things: it will be ok and don’t worry too much. But she knew now that the people you loved weren’t always ok, that things didn’t always get better.

  What are you going to do?

  She had half her mind on Lil and half on the question. Lil gripped her hand with both of hers, trembling.

  A cockatoo screech broke the quiet apart. Alan stirred.

  ‘Anyway,’ Lil said, wiping her wet cheeks with her hands, ‘enough about this shit. How’s things here? Have you decided what your plans are for Christmas?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you want to come over? A few of us always do an orphans’ lunch.’

  She baulked at the thought. Alan and I are not orphans.

  Alan pushed himself out of his armchair and walked down the steps, leaning heavily on the railing. He approached the back fence, paced beside it, gazing up at the birds in the casuarina grove.

  ‘I know it sounds silly,’ she said, cautiously, ‘but I think those cockatoos mean something to him.’

  Lil looked confused.

  ‘He’s always watching them,’ she tried to explain. ‘It’s like they calm something in him, like they bring a little bit of him back.’ She regretted it as soon as she’d said it. Stupid. Lil was sceptical, that much was obvious.

  ‘I didn’t think that’s how dementia worked.’

  ‘I don’t think anyone knows how it works. But I know Alan.’

  It’s me, your wife.

  ‘When’s Harley coming home?’ she asked, seeking a change of topic.

  Lil seemed so tired – the skin around her eyes was creased like linen. ‘Today. Earl’s gone back up to get him. Turns out his organs are fine, but he’s got a fractured cheekbone. He needed ten stitches; he’s got dressings covering the deeper grazes.’

  ‘Have they got the guys who did it?’

  ‘No charges have been laid. No one’s being held accountable for his injuries. As far as I know, the police aren’t even investigating further. Sometimes it’s really hard not to see that as deliberate – that kind of inaction.’

  She wasn’t quite sure what to say. Everything she could think of seemed inadequate.

  ‘Anyway,’ Lil said, ‘have you talked to the doctor about what you’re noticing? What does she reckon about those birds?’

  ‘I haven’t asked her yet.’

  Insects bounced off the flyscreen behind them. Alan was still down by the back fence.

  ‘You just need to keep an eye on him, I suppose.’

  What do you think I do all day?

  She heard a truck slow to a stop out the front.

  ‘Cooee,’ Earl called.

  ‘Hang on,’ Lil yelled. She held her hand out for Pina’s key and walked around to the front to let Earl in.

  When Lil came back with Earl, Pina could see he was deflated. Alan had also moved closer and was standing on the path, several paces from the verandah, glancing behind him at the birds. Earl went down to him, put his hand on his shoulder, ducked his head and spoke gently to him.

  She watched how Alan leant towards Earl’s voice.

  He doesn’t lean into me that way.

  Lil resumed her seat as Earl joined them.

  ‘How was he when you dropped him off?’ Lil asked him.

  ‘It gets me so angry,’ he said.

  ‘He’s going to be ok, though?’ Lil asked.

  ‘Yeah, but how many other times it got to happen?’

  To Pina, it sounded as though they were speaking in riddles. Lil was sniffling again, and Earl put his hand on her shoulder.

  She realised that there was something wrong: she didn’t feel enough. All that emotion in front of her. A switch in her had been turned off; she’d reached her limit. There was nothing left.

  ‘Let me get you a drink, Earl,’ she said.

  ‘If you got a beer …’

  She felt the relief at being indoors; the cool walls. The sounds of the bush washed in through the open windows. She went to the fridge and took out a beer, cracked the top off into the sink and stopped.

  From the kitchen window, she could see him: Alan. He was still standing in the same spot by the hakea, watching the birds as the afternoon light danced on the surfaces of the leaves. The sun was inching down behind the cockatoos; they were using their feet to pass bits of seed pods into their beaks.

  When the birds took flight, the branches flailed around, freed from their weight, and the noise of the air through their heavy wings travelled into the house. Alan turned his face to follow the sound.

  Suddenly it all caught up to her. I’m married. Such a loaded phrase. No matter how much older she got, she always felt as if she was sixteen. I’m fifty-five. I’m married. My husband is disappearing. There had been a time, right back at the beginning, when it hadn’t felt as if Alan was sick. It had felt as if he was leaving her. That he was complicit in the dismantling of their shared life. That he’d had a choice.

  It’s me, your wife.

  If you loved me, you would have fought it harder.

  That was the most difficult, unbearable thing about the disease: it was masked behind her husband’s face, behind her husband’s voice. I hope you fall. The things he said to her, they were all so hard not to take personally.

  31

  IT WAS THE day before Christmas Eve. Arianna drove Tim into town in time to catch the bus back to Canberra. After she’d parked the Land Cruiser near the bus stop, they sat in silence for a moment.

  ‘If you don’t have anywhere to go you can come for lunch with us,’ he said. ‘It will just be my cousin and her family, a few friends. Nothing big.’

 
‘No thanks.’

  ‘The birds will be alright for a few days.’

  ‘I’ll be fine.’

  ‘You don’t have to be alone for Christmas.’

  She was irritated. Did he think of her as a charity case?

  ‘I have places to go if I wanted to.’

  He was lingering, his mouth twitching as though he was working out how to say something.

  Hurry up and leave, she thought.

  That morning, she had put her hand on the side of her head and realised that almost her entire palm was touching naked skin. All gone. She knew what that looked like. Sickness. She remembered the hats and scarves her mother had collected, how she was always wearing one.

  What’s wrong with your mum?

  ‘I want to get back,’ she told Tim. ‘There’s still work to do.’

  ‘What work?’

  ‘Just things to go over.’

  Hurry up and leave.

  He stared at her a bit longer and then got out of the car.

  Instead of heading straight back to camp, she drove out along Wallangamba Road to the blue weatherboard house and stopped a little way from it. The shed obscured her view of the backyard, but she was just close enough to see the casuarina beyond the rear fence.

  Getting some binoculars out of the glove box, she watched the cockatoos shake the branches, knocking seed pods to the ground; the way they bickered and chattered with each other, clicking their beaks together, flapping their wings. They appeared healthy.

  Fuck you, she thought.

  From where she was parked she could see the old man appear from behind the shed and wander into the front garden. He reminded her of a dandelion seed: fluffy and insubstantial, drifting with the wind. She remembered the bellow that had come from him when the woman had tried to shove him up the stairs and inside the house a week or so ago. She understood rage like that.

  There’s no tinsel or anything up, she thought, looking at the house. That’s not very festive. Almost laughed out loud at the irony. She imagined how her own Christmas would unfold the day after next. She would wake to the empty expanse of the campsite and the wild beyond it. There would be no one there but her. She could walk around naked if she wanted, not have to dress hurriedly and coyly inside her tent. Freedom.