My Year Without Matches

by Claire Dunn

  A kookaburra flies in on cue, offering itself as a life model. It perches on a branch, bobbing its head as if in agreement with some invisible presence on the ground. I note the stretch of its Zorro mask, the ring around its eye, the grey-green of its legs and feet, the sky-blue markings on its wings. A fan of tail feathers exposes an arrow-shaped painting of rusty stripes and spots. Look at it now – it’s hooting with laughter, but stumbling and brash, like a young lad learning to whistle, practising over and over again. I can’t help but laugh, both at it and with it and just because I can. My bird book tells me that according to Aboriginal legend, the kookaburra’s laughter is a signal for the sky people to light the great fires that illuminate and warm the Earth by day. To imitate the laugh is taboo, for the sky people may take offence and plunge the Earth back into darkness. Oops, too late. They seem to have forgiven my transgression this morning, as the sky remains bright.

  I hop down from my throne to examine some fresh pademelon tracks. My sit spot is somewhat of a moveable feast these days. I used to have to wait at least twenty minutes for the birds to get over the shock of my presence and settle back to their natural baseline, but they seem accustomed to me now. I’ll often sit for only ten or fifteen minutes, just long enough to plug in, before wandering off in pursuit of some curiosity. Although I spiral out in wider and wider circles from my sit spot, it remains home base, an invisible string tethering me to it from wherever I roam.

  Spying an old fence post, I follow it up and along a line of lichen-covered boulders to where it disappears in the middle of a reed-choked swamp. A row of gnarled she-oaks hangs over the edge, the breeze rustling through it like tinsel. It sure feels like this place hasn’t had many visitors for a good while; it’s a little bit Picnic at Hanging Rock. It’s amazing how quickly the land changes. Snatching the binos from around my neck, I’m in time to see a grassbird dancing on top of the garnia. A new bird! Today, I’m going to really sketch it. My eyes snap a hundred photos in a matter of seconds, from every angle. The rusty red of the wing feathers, the small white smudge near the eye.

  I lean against a heart-shaped granite boulder, and watch as storm clouds stir up the blue, stirring leaves around my ankles, stirring my thoughts within. The sounds of the wild are everywhere and moving in everything – in the fresh crunch of gum leaves underfoot, in the tizz tizz of the grassbird. All of it, me, gloriously untameable and free.

  The grassbird flits away. I tip my head and let my senses expand out, drinking the morning in, dissolving into the sea of blue-green leaves above. A sudden blur of dizziness has me reaching for the rock to sit on and resting with my eyes closed. When I open them a few minutes later, a mouse the colour of leaf litter skips across the rock face not metres from me: an antechinus! It stops, its long pointed nose sniffing, the mushroom pink of the inside of its ear tracking for sound. It hops closer, a miniature rabbit. Closer still … a ruler length from my feet. Oh, you little magical burr of fur, I see you. I wonder what you are seeing? My toes do look a lot like brown rocks. My God, it isn’t – it is! – sniffing my big toe, tickling me with its whiskers. I let out a held smile as he scurries away.

  How can Chloe bear to leave? I can hardly stand the thought of leaving in a few months. Leaving is the wrong word. It feels like abandoning. Who will sketch the birds? Who will warm my shelter? It will grow cold and lonely. My heart aches at the thought.

  *

  As I approach the Gunyah, Dan fiddles to connect his iPod with the battery-operated speakers on a camp table outside. He’s decided Chloe’s send-off is going to be a daggy disco. I wince as Cyndi Lauper blasts, and wait for him to adjust the volume.

  “Had a fight with a lawnmower?” I say, borrowing Dad’s standard haircut joke. Dan looks up and grins, his head now bald except for a monkish fringe at the back.

  Nikki is stringing up some bush-style bunting along the guttering, Ryan lighting a fire in the clearing. I sit my plate of geebung and dianella berries down amongst the more traditional party food. Kate and Sam are away visiting family but sent up some macadamia-and-riberry swirl jam for making fairy bread.

  “Where’s the keynote?” I ask.

  “Dunno. Eloped, maybe?” says Dan, crunching into a corn chip.

  “Here she comes,” I say, as Chloe’s figure appears down the trail. I see she has her city civvies on – blue jeans and Blundstone boots, a white embroidered top and hoop earrings, her hair pulled back in a loose knot.

  “Daaa, da-da-da,” sings Dan, running to offer his arm as if walking her down the aisle. Chloe slaps at him playfully.

  “Jealous?” she says, twisting his arm into a hug.

  I busy myself with organising bowls and cups, trying to ignore the churning in my belly. Why do I feel so hurt?

  We gather for a grevillea-steeped tonic water toast.

  “To Chloe and her twitcher – may they live happily feathered after,” says Dan, tipping his glass. As Chloe and I clunk glasses, I catch her eye. She looks a little sad. I look away.

  An doof-style Irish jig is on, and Ryan has launched into an impeccable Michael Flatley impersonation. We look at one another incredulously.

  “You think you know someone …” Nikki says, laughing.

  Chloe nibbles tentatively on some popcorn and looks down at her watch. She must be like me. I hate goodbyes. I’d much prefer to just disappear.

  “Okay, I’m off,” she suddenly announces, picking up her backpack.

  “What – already? But you haven’t even had a dance,” Dan protests.

  I stand at the end of the hug line-up. Why am I so nervous?

  “Well, I guess this is it,” says Chloe, shrugging her arms out to me.

  “Well, at least you’ll have twenty-four-hour access to a bird encyclopedia,” I say, masking the emotion in my throat. Chloe laughs awkwardly. We embrace. I have the sense she wants to hold it longer, but I pull away. Turning to leave, Chloe spins back around and grabs my hands. My heart thumps.

  “You know, Claire, it’s like Claudia said: why we think we’re doing something generally never turns out to be the reason.”

  I resist the urge to retract my hands and instead relax my hands in hers, lifting my head to meet her gaze. Her moist eyes are more grey than blue tonight, and flecked with green. Strands of her ponytail have fallen out and curve around her heart-shaped face. Her lips press together in a slight smile, questioning and soft. How many times have I looked at her face this year and not seen it? I haven’t wanted to. I’ve been clinging on to an image of the person I wanted her to be, rather than the one right in front of me, full of optimism, hope and uncertainty. No wonder I feel abandoned whenever I look for the Chloe of the past, who isn’t there anymore. She presses my hands in hers to signal release, but this time it is me who clings on. It’s time to really see her. Chloe’s eyes widen slightly. I soften mine into wide-angle vision. There she is, the Chloe I remember. Underneath, she is still the same, just like me, searching for happiness, for connection, freedom. For truth.

  “Take care,” I blurt out.

  “You too,” she says. Like a runaway bride, she disappears down the track with a wave. The Block suddenly feels empty, as if a chunk of the past that has taken up so much space has left with her. High on sugar and the lightness of a burden lifted, I dance with the others as if wonderfully drunk, unable to stop moving under the stars, unable to think of a reason why I shouldn’t be madly in love with everything and everyone.

  3.

  “Brain milkshake, anyone?” Ryan offers, holding out a frothing pink bowl that looks scarily like a strawberry smoothie. I take a whiff and gag. Urrggh. Who needs the smell of roasted coffee at breakfast when you can inhale sheep’s brains, instead? My hide is thirsty for it, though, sucking it up in great gulps. I look up at the line of cirrus clouds creeping in. Not now, I tell them sternly. I’m not in the mood for an all-nighter. Once brain-soaked,
the hides have to be continuously stretched until they’re completely dry in order for the brain juices to fully infiltrate the fibres. Too hot, and they’ll dry before they’ve properly softened, too wet and they won’t dry at all. It looked promising this morning from the eagle’s nest pine, clear pink light spreading a broad smile across the eastern horizon, the dew a dusting of icing sugar on the fresh red shoots of the gums.

  I make sure I’ve got snacks close by before retrieving my demanding charge from the brain soup. Flecks of brain juice splash up in my face as I throw it over the wringing beam lashed between two trees. Folding it into a donut shape, I feed a smooth stick through the hole and twist it hard in opposing directions, washerwoman-style. The hide bubbles and gurgles as it releases rivers of pink juice onto the ground and up my arms. It’s stiff with raised wrinkles when I unwrap it, and I have to dig my knees in to stretch out the creases. My hide is already a completely different beast since the brain bath. Its current incarnation is a cross between a chamois, plasticine and a rubber mat. Nikki grabs the other side of it and pulls against me, both of us leaning out to lend our weight to the stretch, slowly spinning the hide clockwise, pulling and stretching it like a pizza base.

  “Work it, baby, work it,” Ryan jokes, looking up from where he is rubbing his hide in fast bursts over a smooth log, like he’s using a rag to polish a boot, the hide almost doubling in size.

  “So, what’s news on the possum front?” I ask Nikki.

  “You wouldn’t believe it – he’s completely disappeared,” she says incredulously.

  “What – since the stick?”

  “Yep, since the stick.”

  “Wow, that’s wacky … just goes to show …”

  Nik nods in amazed agreement. “Possum magic, eh?”

  Nikki and I have both been graced by overly familiar possums around our shelters in the last few months. The cute neighbour factor wore off as their nightly raids on our food supplies grew more brazen. Even more annoying was the complete disregard the marauders showed for our attempts to scare them off, my possum barely bothering to scamper a few feet off the ground when I launched out of my shelter brandishing a knife and yelling obscenities, Nikki’s going so far as to steal bread out of her hand. So far they have correctly called our bluffs. The night one broke into my macadamia butter jar, the last of my cuddly possum sentimentality disappeared. After much talk of ethics and practicalities, Nikki and I decided that it was time to tan these possums’ hides. While my talk of trap setting has so far amounted to just that, a week or so ago Nikki walked into the forest with the clear intention of finding a killing stick, whittled the one she found into shape, sat it next to her sharpened knife, cooked dinner, then sat in (trepidatious) wait. For the first time in weeks, that night and every night since, the possum was a no-show.

  I’ve heard that Native Americans never go out explicitly to hunt, only ever “taking their arrows for a walk”. The whole idea of mental camouflage doesn’t seem so far-fetched now. It’s similar with birds. When my thoughts are quiet, I scarcely raise a flutter as I walk, as if my humanness has disappeared, and along with it all the usual inter-species rules, as I saw with the antechinus toe-nibbling incident. But when my mind is full of argument, I can just as easily scatter a flock of wrens from fifty yards away.

  I had a wren moment recently. Hanging out at my shelter, I couldn’t work out why I had started to feel jumpy. Ten minutes later Dan revved up the main drag. He’s been spending at least as much time off The Block as on, doing odd jobs at Terri’s and hanging out at Kate and Sam’s. When I saw him that night he was defensive, as if picking up on my judgment without my saying anything. It’s been increasingly like that with the whole group – we know exactly how the others are feeling, even if it’s left unsaid. There’s nowhere to hide here. You’re naked, whether you like it or not. It’d be impossible to stay this sensitive in the city – I’d short-circuit. The city, where I’ll be in less than three months. Where has the time gone? And just three of us left (well, three and a half, if you count Dan). How sad that just as I’m ready to come out of hibernation and play, I’m left mostly on my own with a couple who are in constant relationship turmoil. I’m afraid my prediction might be right – it’ll all end in tears.

  “Any news on the traps?” Nik asks. I don’t answer immediately, too busy abrading my hide across a blunt dovetail edge cut into a stump. Any kid-glove treatment I offered the hide is long gone. In fact, it seems to enjoy the fiercest beating I can give it, palms of soft suede already appearing.

  “Nope, none since the chew-through,” I say, puffing, thinking back to my lacklustre check on the traps this morning. They had seemed saggy, but in no particular physical way. It was more as if they had lost their trap-ness, and were now just a collection of string and sticks tied together. It’s getting harder to motivate myself for the morning trap loop, as I’m already assuming I’ll find them empty. Maybe I should take them down, though the thought of that saddens me.

  *

  The clouds recede. After discovering more ways to stretch and bend a hide than there are yoga poses in an ashram, by mid-afternoon I hold it against my cheek and detect not the faintest moisture.

  “It’s dry!” I call excitedly, wrapping it around me and catwalking a Clan of the Cave Bear strapless dress (albeit with a wicked split up the side). I can’t take my hands off it; it has such a deliciously velvety texture, I could almost eat it. Another successful recipe in the ancient book of bush alchemy – take one hairy stink bomb of a hide, add ash, elbow grease, brains, more elbow grease and voila, a frock fit for Cinderella at a primitive ball.

  “Wilma Flintstone, eat your heart out,” says Ryan, with a wolf whistle. “You’d just better hope it doesn’t rain, you’ll turn back into a pumpkin.” He’s right, the recipe isn’t quite complete. Unless smoked, my primitive prom dress will turn back into a stiff board at the first hint of water.

  Ryan starts digging out three small pits for the smoking. I sit nearby, my back resting against a tree, using sinew we saved from the Achilles tendon of the roadkill roo to sew up some holes that stretched open during the softening process.

  “You gonna quest?” Ryan asks, between shovelfuls, referring to Kate’s recent suggestion of another group vision quest.

  “Nope, not me.” I answer, a little defensively. “Not feeling called to it.”

  “I’m going to,” Ryan offers.

  “Same,” adds Nik.

  “Really? You feel like questing again?” I say, with a strain in my voice.

  “Yeah, may as well now while I’ve got the time. Who knows what’ll happen back out in the unreal world,” Ryan says, glancing over at Nik.

  The decision that felt so clear a few days ago suddenly feels a bit shaky. Maybe I should quest – up the ante a bit before the end of the year.

  We’ve been over this a million times, I remind myself. My edge is in learning how not to push myself – following my heart, remember? I know how powerful the quest is. I’ve been there. It’s not something you do just because your mates are. The argument is persuasive enough to calm me. Good. The last thing I need is another crisis.

  Bob Kull is in the midst of a crisis, though, in Solitude. His exploratory boating forays have all been lead-ups to a glacier trip eighty miles away. As the time draws closer, his excitement is turning into a freak-out about the boat breaking down or some other catastrophe stranding him in an icy wilderness. He is stymied and can’t work out whether he is stubbornly pushing forward on some unnecessary hero’s mission, or whether his fear and resistance are justified human concerns for the real risks – and that underneath he really wants to do it. You’re already doing it, Bob, I want to tell him. You don’t have to go. But I can tell he won’t be satisfied unless he does.

  I watch enviously as Ryan barely raises a puff to produce his coal. I don’t need a man; I’ve got a hand-drill. It provid
es all the on-again, off-again, love-hate relationship drama I need. It might be off for a while now, the sheep brains having softened the calluses that have taken most of the year to harden.

  After lighting a fire the size of a dinner plate in his pit, Ryan passes me a lit stick. Once a coal base is established, I throw in green leaves and sawdust, plumes of thick smoke rising up into the hide, which I’ve loosely sewn together and suspended over the pit. I peg it down with rocks at the base. It fills like a balloon, smoke wisping out from between the joins. Paranoid about it catching fire, I shovel in more sawdust, and the smoke evaporates. Damn. Nothing to do but collect more kindling and start over. Ryan has pinned his hide to an op-shop denim skirt to get some distance between it and the fire. He sits back, laughing, as I cluck around my pit. Of course, always Mr Practicality. Eventually, the coals are smoking again and I can relax.

  As the light fades, so too does our conversation, lapsing into the spaces between the languid pinging of the yellow-faced honeyeaters, between distant screeches of white cockatoos returning to roost. Venus rises and Nikki nestles some eggs on the coals to cook. I rest against a tree, absorbed by the stain spreading like a slow-burning grassfire across my hide, in hues of smoky summer suns, darkening at the edges.

  *

  This morning all I need is a grass mat just big enough for a caterpillar like me to curl upon, a paperbark roof just sturdy enough to keep me dry, and a fire just large enough to warm my toes. My small movements are habitual: feed the flames, look out at the trampolining of raindrops on banksia leaves, and back to the book.

  Poor Bob is still sweating the glacier question, tormented by a voice telling him he is failing – that after nine months of solitude, he should have cultivated either the clarity to know what he wants to do, or the equanimity to let any well-intentioned plans go. Ouch, I know how he feels. We’re both questing beasts, although my glaciers are comparatively risk-free. It’s painful to read how harsh he is being on himself. You wouldn’t inflict such harshness on your enemy, so why do we do it to ourselves?