Whipbird

by Robert Drewe

  She wondered at the possibility of the cherry’s genetic manifestation in her nephews and nieces. Less than 5 per cent chance apparently. Hardly anything. Unlike the haemochromatosis genes old Conor Cleary and one or both of his first two wives had brought with them from Tipperary.

  The main reason she’d come here this weekend, while all the family members were assembled, was to inform them of this. That they’d dismissed both the message and the messenger was saddening and infuriating.

  21

  Carrying a bottle of white wine in one hand and a red in the other, Hugh was circulating, moving around the vineyard, making the rounds of the paddocks, topping up people’s drinks, making sure they were looked after.

  Striding convivially from group to group, kissing old ladies, he endeavoured to recognise the faces surrounding new snowy and impossibly even teeth and beneath new yellow hair, hair dimly remembered as grey or ginger or, looking back further, even blue. You rarely saw blue or purple hair now, except on punkish kids. Old ladies had switched to blonde en masse.

  He clasped knobbly mottled hands, feigned memories of Christmases past and long-gone picnics and pranks; chortled at the childish mischiefs once perpetrated by now-sedate forty-year-olds presently sipping chardonnay in their celebratory party T-shirts.

  Good-naturedly, he corrected their inaccurate recollections. ‘No, brother Simon’s the piano player. I’m a lawyer, for my sins. And. . .’ gesturing wildly to encompass those straggly rows of vines, ‘. . .a celebrated wine grower!’

  Tearing himself away from the chatty old blondes, he patted toddlers’ heads, topped up more drinks until the bottles were empty, all the time making an effort to include the shy folks, the interstate ones, the people whose lives had clearly been less successful than his and Christine’s, and whom he hoped could be induced to unselfconsciously mingle. Maybe then he’d eventually be able to relax.

  Oddly, the boy in the black cut-off shirt kept appearing at the edge of his vision and then disappearing. Just now he approached the twins, grinning and holding out an offering of some sort, and Hugh stepped forward quickly to intercede, to warn him off, to make his paternal presence clear. But the girls drew back sharply and turned their backs on the boy.

  Drugs. Alcohol. Anything that boy was offering to Zoe and Olivia would be risky. Even his conversation. His insinuating manner. Keep your distance. My daughters are only fourteen.

  There was always something to worry about with daughters. Sneaky boys wanting to do things to them. And with them. Molest them. Have sex. Ply them with illicit treats. Alcohol. Drugs. Thoughts. Currently ice was on Hugh’s mind. Ice terrified him. Ice-rage lunacy came before the courts every day. And not only the underclass was succumbing. Not just toothless junkies but everyone, poor and rich. The Melbourne Bar was presently dismayed by the ice-addicted solicitor at Butterworth Emerson, good school and family, who’d been caught buying pet-shop guinea pigs and leaving their dissected bodies in rival legal offices around town.

  Was that too severe a judgement of the boy in black? Maybe he was a Hanrahan. He had the Hanrahans’ dark hair. Maybe he just wanted to say hello. No, now he’d spotted Hugh heading over, he slid into the crowd. Fortunately, the twins were busy tapping on their phones and seemed to have ignored him.

  The boy’s girlfriend, the blissed-out pale girl, was standing nearby though, being studiously ignored by the old aunts. She was glancing sideways at Hugh and smiling at some private thought. Would she be a problem best kept on the sidelines? He grabbed a glass of shiraz from a waiter and went over to her, more cheerily than he felt, but she shook her head at the offered wine. He shouldn’t have done that, he thought. Maybe she was too young to be drinking. Now he felt ashamed and confused.

  ‘I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten your name.’ Her tattooed chest loomed at him, and quivered as she stepped hastily back. Nevertheless he reached out to shake her hand, and discovered too late it was clutching a sodden tissue. ‘You’re here with...?’

  The girl didn’t answer, but slowly shook her head, still smiling vacantly as she adjusted a slipping purple bra strap.

  ‘I’m terrible with names,’ Hugh went on. ‘First sign of senility, my kids tell me.’

  She rolled her eyes, still faintly smiling. Empathetic? Sympathetic? Amused? Drunk? Stoned? It was impossible to tell.

  Why were women always rolling their eyes? Why had facial sarcasm suddenly come into vogue? Even the twins had become great eye-rollers, and Christine’s eyes hardly stopped rolling these days. Sometimes he was surrounded by three sets of eye-rolls at once. No matter what he said or did; even if he was saying and doing nothing but sitting quietly after dinner, after a hard day in court, doing the crossword. In particular, the crossword.

  Why did his nightly crossword make Christine roll her eyes? Especially if he was sitting cosily in front of the fire doing the crossword while sipping an after-dinner Scotch.

  ‘Just like that pipe-smoking husband in slippers in the old Small’s chocolate ads,’ she complained, inaccurately. He shunned slippers and pipes – and chocolate – and smoked only a special-occasion cigar, after winning a complex case, and with his sister, of all people (she always had an enviable stash of Cubans) after Christmas dinner.

  And, Jesus, if he poured a second Scotch he could depend on Christine’s sighs starting, and her cheeks filling with air and her tongue flicking around her lips and her making that impatient popping sound.

  She knew he liked to do both the quick and the cryptic crosswords in The Age before going over the next day’s briefs. Rehearsing his spiel. But by the time he’d begun the cryptic, after breezing through the quick in four or five minutes, her eyes were rolling back in her head like a lunatic’s and she’d left the room, and cupboard doors started to bang and crockery and cutlery clanged in the kitchen, even though they employed Aaeesha from the agency to cook on weeknights and to clear up the dinner things.

  Her eye-rolling had started in earnest six months before, after a discussion unmentioned since, but one that still froze his heart to recall. It was merely pillow talk, he thought, a lazy and intimate moment in bed. Dangerously cordial in retrospect, she’d asked him out of the blue, just one old friend to another, ‘Have you ever weakened?’

  ‘Weakened?’

  She meant had he ever strayed outside marriage.

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘What about,’ she wondered, still conversationally, nonchalantly, and she good-naturedly nudged his belly, setting the trap, ‘with that pretty Lauren Cusack?’

  ‘No.’ His pulse flickered. He hadn’t committed adultery with

  Lauren Cusack. Or anyone else.

  Suddenly aware of the glass of shiraz in his hands, he called, inanely, ‘Cheers!’ to the blissed-out pale girl’s departing back, took a long sip, and once again sought the presence of his wife.

  Christine was still nowhere in sight but in the distance Zoe and Olivia were now undeniably mingling, and Hugh told himself that as long as they were decent family boys whom he recognised, he wasn’t displeased to see his daughters socialising with them. The boys they were talking to were Sydney cousins, and he’d often said that the Melbourne and Sydney relatives didn’t see enough of each other. A ridiculous state of affairs when they were – what? – only 900 km apart.

  He could understand the Brisbane and Perth families being too daunted by distance and air fares to venture south or east very often. The Brisbanites, spoiled for Barrier Reef, Noosa and Gold Coast options, rarely holidayed further south than Byron Bay. And except during the winter football season in Melbourne, the recalcitrant West Australians ignored the eastern states in favour of cheaper, closer holidays in Bali, Singapore, Thailand and Malaysia. But there was no excuse for the Sydney and Melbourne branches not getting together more.

  Bounding from group to group, glimpsing Olivia and Zoe from different angles and distances, Hugh was surprised at how grown-up and unfamiliar their gestures and movements had become. Their comportment was self-assur
ed, their outlines different and less gangly. Almost like strangers, these shapely, long-legged young women in cutoff denim shorts, flipping their straight, waist-length hair and striking elegant poses, although that impression of confident physicality had to be quickly quelled – and was – by the reassuring thought that they were only fourteen, naive kids really, still absorbed by horses and netball and charitable wildlife initiatives.

  The fact that they were vegetarians had actually become comforting lately. Somehow vegetarians equated in his mind with librarians and biology teachers and aid workers – and with unmarried Médecins Sans Frontières personnel.

  Vegetarians were known to be abstemious in their habits, weren’t they? They had a scholarly and altruistic image, one that went with the twins’ membership in Greenpeace and Sea Shepherd, the same sort of good-works, non-druggy, save-the-whales, pony-club, horses-rather-than-boys-till-much-later thinking – no boys until Year 12, or, better still, until university – and for that he was suddenly grateful.

  Of course his gorgeous twinnies loved their dad (more than they loved Christine, he’d always believed: a secret pleasure of his), and he loved them right back a hundredfold and was always struck by how bright and witty they were, how intelligent and studious and kind, and how (unlike Liam!) they never forgot his birthday or Father’s Day.

  Not just a smiley-faced SMS either; they always gave hand-painted cards and thoughtful and original gifts. And humorous ones. The Father’s Day just gone they’d actually given him a pig. The gift pig was a real surprise, especially from two vegetarians. Fortunately it wasn’t a pig on the premises, as it were. Or on the dinner table. It was a 35-dollar Oxfam pig for a family in Laos.

  What could he say about such a worthy present? Thank you, just what I wanted? Anyway he’d now done his bit for Lao porcine capitalism; his daughters, notwithstanding their vegetarianism, pointing out that providing pigs to poor Lao families improved their wellbeing (‘the families’ wellbeing, not the pigs’).

  The twins explained that villagers could borrow from the Oxfam fund to buy a second piglet, then breed them, sell some of their issue to repay the loan and interest, and keep enough money and pigs to eventually profit and build better housing. More pigs and better education and health would follow. With enough Father’s Day pigs, Asian communism would eventually be overthrown.

  After Pigs for Laos, Olivia and Zoe had celebrated his recent fiftieth birthday by donating money on his behalf to fight bear-bile farming. For originality, that gift beat pigs and whales. This was a birthday present, a cause, and apparently an industry, so new to Hugh that he’d framed his birthday Bear-Bile Fighter certificate from the World Society for the Protection of Animals (see, he could be witty, too, he’d thought) to hang alongside the law degrees on his office wall.

  However, the bear-bile situation was a serious matter to the twins, who’d organised a 1000-signature petition at school and around their Brighton neighbourhood, and sent it off formally to the Minister for Foreign Affairs suggesting the matter should certainly determine Australia’s future relations with the countries involved in the cruel practice: China, North Korea, Vietnam and Myanmar.

  Good luck with that lot, thought Hugh, though he didn’t dampen the girls’ enthusiasm. They’d indignantly filled him in on the international bear-bile situation. Apparently there were thousands of bears presently being held captive and suffering cruel conditions in those countries, confined in tiny cages so bile could be extracted via catheters from their gall bladders, and sold for traditional Asian medicines.

  To use one of his own father’s favourite expressions (one like several other boring ones such as ‘by the same token’ and ‘when all’s said and done’ and ‘at the end of the day’ that he seemed to have inherited from Mick, because he realised he used it all the time), Olivia and Zoe were ‘a full bottle’ on the industry. Founts of knowledge. As they’d informed the Foreign Affairs Minister, the ‘battery bear’ most commonly ‘harvested’ was the Asiatic black bear (Ursus thibetanus). However, the sun bear (Helarctos malayanus) and the brown bear (Ursus arctos) were also drained of their bile.

  Zoe and Olivia asked the minister, ‘Are you aware that both the Asiatic black bear and the sun bear are listed as vulnerable on the World Conservation Union’s list of threatened animals?’ The minister thanked them for their letter, commended their conviction and assured them that such products would definitely not be allowed into Australia on this government’s watch.

  It would be a cold-hearted birthday boy not to be affected by this gift, Hugh thought. ‘These days bear bile’s even added to wine and shampoo,’ Olivia told him.

  When visitors to his office – instructing solicitors, clients – remarked on the framed certificate, Hugh liked to joke, ‘While I’ve drunk wine that tasted like bear bile, I didn’t realise it actually might have been. Save the bears, I say.’

  22

  Hugh was chatting to Rosie Godber-Bushell from Queensland and the Donaldsons from Western Australia. Or, rather, listening to them chatter and willing Christine to appear so he could pass them over to her and move on. A highly animated Rosie was quaffing champagne while the four orange-shirted Donaldsons were enthusiastically settled into the red wine.

  His blonde, straight-haired, ochre-skinned and hyphenated cousin, a fair distance from the frizzy-headed, pallid Rosemary Godber of teenage memory, was midway into a bitter complaint about the Chinese buying into Gold Coast real estate.

  ‘They’re dominating the market. The government should step in.’

  Hugh hoped Nigel Hu wasn’t nearby. Or Thea, who had air-ily detested Rosie ever since she was the spunky fifteen-year-old and already non-virgin Rosemary.

  ‘How come there’s so many Chinese millionaires buying our real estate all of a sudden?’ Rosie went on. ‘It’s an Asian takeover by stealth.’

  Hugh glanced warily around the crowd. A couple of drinks and Rosie’s lifelong ability to shock was set in motion. By evening it would be running free. Ever since her precocious adolescence she’d had a tendency to first encourage and then be swamped by complicated and dramatic relations with unsuitable men. And now that she’d embraced social media she was determined to use Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to illustrate and broadcast the self-help aftermaths of those snags and hitches to the world.

  Christine received a daily barrage of them and, thanks to the Facebook and Instagram pages his daughters had set up for him despite his protestations, Rosie even included him in her enlightenments. Though he let them slide past, never replying with the required comment or ‘like’, her current state-of-mind reports were usually mistily illustrated by a line of lone, brave footprints in a sand dune, or perhaps a noble soaring eagle or – the ultimate image – a namesake dewy rose.

  The eagle, the rose, the sand-dune footprints, not to mention a gallery of emoji, from little devils and lightning bolts to angels and teddy bears, all signalled that, sadder but wiser, she was matter-of-factly cleaning up the latest mess. To make sure, she rounded off her daily @coastloverosie messages with an online self-help homily from one of her preferred motivationists, William Blake, Wayne Dyer or Deepak Chopra.

  She got a lot of mileage from Blake’s The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way... And every couple of weeks, after some contretemps with a Gold Coast boutique assistant or American Express or petty officialdom, she felt bound to snappily quote Dyer: How people treat you is their karma. How you react is yours!

  Sometimes the messages from @coastloverosie were simply along the lines of Give yourself an extra big hug today! You deserve it! or a fridge-magnet Blake/Dyer/Chopra/Godber amalgamation such as With unwavering faith serve your biggest dreams on the dinner table and feast on them. Or Don’t try to steer the river or be afraid to swim against the tide.

  Lately she alternated these self-help mantras with illustrated dietary tips involving the obscure and allegedly healthy foliage that was changing her life t
his month.

  ‘If you’re going to blast through your to-do list and function in peak condition it’s hyper-important to start the morning with a major nutrient load,’ she advised her online followers, recommending a murky liquid made of Ashwagandha root, Siberian ginseng, burdock root, hibiscus flower, alfafa leaf, wolfberry fruit, rhododendron leaf, schisandra berries and tribulus.

  ‘Ssshhh! A libido enhancer!’ she enthused of Tribulus terrestris. ‘Yes, it looks like mud! But gals, don’t be put off by its sludgy looks or its devil’s-weed rep. Commit to a friskier you! Add watermelon to take away the bitter taste!’ Seeing her libido had never needed enhancing, this made Hugh laugh. Champagne always did the trick.

  Cousin Rosie had gone to school with Christine, had introduced Christine to him, in fact, and had been the sexiest and drunkest bridesmaid at their wedding. These days she was a classic Gold Coast woman of a certain age. Vivacious about life’s turning points and the many roads unwisely taken, she usually – as she did today – wore something flowing, low-cut and white. (No electric-blue Godber T-shirts for her, not in this lifetime!) Her frizzy gingerness was long gone, her body was yoga-toned and her accent had long since been plumped up from Templestowe via Toorak to Main Beach.

  Rosie had been married twice, both times rejecting the idea of children in order to keep her body in top sensual condition. (‘I asked myself, Do I want a vajayjay like the Sydney Harbour Tunnel? No thanks!’) Until recently, she’d never been without a man. In many cases – especially when in need of an ego boost – doubling up.

  When younger and paddling around the edge of the fashion pond, she’d been attracted to silvertail larrikins, flamboyant rightwing risk-takers, the skiing, polo-playing wide boys that abounded in Melbourne in the ’80s.

  While poised on a South Yarra fourth-floor balcony rail to demonstrate the Geelong Grammar war cry after the school won the Head of the River, Charlie Wishart, her first serious boyfriend, had begun chanting Addidi addidi chickidi chickidi... when, with the whole vigorous Ooly pooly rom pom parly bulk of the war cry still to come, he’d toppled over.