Whipbird

by Robert Drewe

  Do I feel an eyebrow twitching? The faintest nervy tap of foot? His fingers drumming lightly on his thigh? On remembered piano keys? A syncopated rhythm? A shallow sigh?

  9

  Ryan’s hangover needed air and the sharp chlorophyll charge of trees and grass and maybe even the faint respirations of young grapevines. And he needed to speak to Hugh. After the mixed response to his vineyard blessing and anti-global-warming spiel, he felt uncomfortable asking him for any favours, even indirect ones. But he’d had no chance to speak to Hugh all weekend.

  The crowns of the gum trees over the creek were waving under the gritty northerly. Some cars were beginning to leave for home, people shouting goodbyes as they headed down the driveway to the highway. The family crowd was thinning but there were still plenty of loud, laughing stayers who’d recommenced drinking in the party paddock. And hungry ones. The Posh Nosh and Agrarian Revolution cooks had fired up the barbecues for an early supper, and meat eaters and vegetarians alike were grabbing beef or veggie burgers: fodder to help soak up the weekend’s alcohol.

  Ryan saw Christine ushering two Asian males and a veil-shrouded woman from the vineyard towards the house while Hugh bustled behind them in a knowledgeable but self-conscious fashion: the dusty, horny-handed vigneron checking his irrigation drip lines and trellises and wires and under-vine mulches. Showing his visitors how this wine-growing caper worked.

  ‘Can I collar you for a second?’ Ryan asked his cousin.

  ‘No lectures, thanks.’ Hugh wearily puffed out his cheeks. ‘I didn’t create global warming, you know. Just recognising it exists. Luckily it’s helpful to grapes.’ He brushed dirt from his pants. ‘Everything is God’s will, anyway. Or have I got it wrong?’

  ‘The Bible’s sketchy on climate change. But I’m guessing the Pope likes pinot noir and I take my lead from headquarters. Sorry if I offended, but I wanted to get the message across.’

  ‘You sure did. Now the family thinks I’m some sort of climate-change villain.’

  ‘Bullshit. They think you’re a pragmatic pinot noir villain. Listen, the other day I got an email from an Irish academic friend who wants to come here on one of those government working visas.’ He was trying not to sound too eager. ‘Fruit picking, that sort of work. It’s a chance to visit Australia on the cheap for her PhD thesis.’

  He’d agreed to help with the thesis he’d discussed online with Siobhan ever since Ireland. Ever since the hangover breakfast in McDonald’s. Templemore to Richmond: The Tipperary Diaspora. With the Cleary family and Aunt Eily’s family tree taking centre stage. The family would be ecstatic. Agreed to help? He’d suggested it.

  Her? Hugh straightened a trellis. ‘Fruit picking? Look around. My grapes aren’t ready to be picked.’

  ‘The government advertises hundreds of harvest jobs around the country for backpackers. Not just grape picking, also vine pruning.’ Ryan pulled crumpled printouts from his pocket and began reading. ‘“Australia needs workers for pruning, for pulling out canes, for rolling canes onto wires, for spur-pruning wine-grape varieties...” You understand all that vine info? The government is into wine in a big way.’

  Hugh gave his cousin a look. A woman? A pocketful of research? Ryan was being strangely avid about this. Still a priest, right? A Jesuit. Not one of your lowly Catholic toilers. What was this all about? ‘Yeah, yeah. But I’m not pruning until next year.’

  ‘Next year’s what I’m inquiring about. Vine pruning is best in winter, I understand.’

  ‘It’s pretty tiring. Is your female friend young and fit?’

  ‘Sure.’

  Even more intriguing. Hugh was in a hurry to join the Yips but he couldn’t resist. ‘A pretty young colleen, is she?’

  Ryan would have preferred not to blush. ‘Just an academic I met in Templemore, where old Conor came from.’ Academic was stretching it: Siobhan wasn’t exactly a professor. He hoped the Templemore connection legitimised it.

  ‘It’s OK for her to work here,’ Hugh said, winking as he walked off. ‘Can’t wait to meet the hot new girlfriend.’

  ‘That’s bullshit,’ Ryan called after him, as embarrassed as a teenager, but suddenly self-consciously, guiltily happy. Elated. Not a sensation he’d experienced for a long while. His hangover was finally fading.

  Siobhan the grapevine pruner. Sideline any guilty feelings, he told himself. Yes, vows swirled about and tussled with reflections on impossible outcomes – and memories of her eyes. Look, you’re just helpfully considering how Siobhan can inexpensively visit Australia for her studies. (And how about the similarity of her eyes to Audrey Hepburn’s?)

  How about the Micks being welcomed to Australia 160 years on, he thought. Not to fight each other this time, or dig for gold, but as vineyard and orchard labourers, to pick fruit and prune vines on a ‘working holiday’.

  The government described the vineyard work as ‘repetitive but richly rewarding’. Foreign workers with no agricultural experience would be instructed in correct pruning techniques. ‘You will be paid on piecework rates,’ said the government. ‘The more vines you prune the more you get paid.’

  It all sounded like a pastoral idyll to Ryan. Visions sprang to mind of smiling peasants pitchforking hay onto carts pulled by Clydesdales. Rosy-cheeked women in straw hats bent over loamy soil, nimble hands picking nutritious fruit while they gossiped in lilting accents. All churchgoing Catholics of course.

  As he continued his walk around the vine rows, he thought Dry twigs to wine. Brown sticks to prize-winning pinot noir. A big leap of faith involved.

  In perfect tune with his rare upbeat mood, parrots burst from the bush at the vineyard’s boundaries and skimmed over the creek. Rosellas. What a joy it always was to see parrots on the wing. The sight of their vivid colours and darting speed of flight. So fast, the colours merged and streaked and tinted the air. The birds left their colours hanging there. God had done a marvellous painterly job with the Australian parrot.

  His eyes were following the birds’ skittering and shrieking progress as they crisscrossed the creek when he spotted something half-submerged in the muddy shallows. Rubbish, pollution. Torn from its frame, Miner with Pan and Shovel was snagged on a tree root in a stagnant backwater.

  10

  The Vivaldi ringtone of Christine’s phone, turned up to full volume so not to miss a call from Liam, caused Hugh and the Yip family to look up from their conversation and drinks on the verandah.

  Christine excused herself and carried the phone inside the house. Hugh frowned. The meeting with the Yips was still inconclusive, perhaps faltering. He needed her to help him put up a united front, and now she was doing her disappearing act again.

  For about the hundredth time he recalled her adultery question in bed, back in May. Her avid curiosity, all winks and nudges, that made him feel irrationally, baselessly guilty.

  ‘Come on now!’ she’d urged. ‘Maybe back in the early days?’ So long ago it didn’t matter. ‘Perhaps at that legal conference in Darwin?’ She painted the picture. ‘A tropical night, young lawyers relaxing after dinner.’ She imagined sunsets over the gulf, drinks under the palms. ‘A very cute girl, I’m guessing, Lauren Cusack.’

  What? Shit a brick! His mind tracked back to the Darwin conference. For a start, he and Christine weren’t married then, or even dating. It was twenty-odd years ago. Anyway, how did she know about any Darwin conference, for God’s sake? Or about the existence of Lauren Cusack, who’d been the firm’s principal partner’s secretary when he was a young barrister?

  Plump, raven-haired little Lauren Cusack. Shorthand speed of 160 words a minute, he recalled, and with a boyfriend whose name, So he remembered that – and that Russell was a plumber.

  ‘Don’t let Russell Pitman escape!’ he’d advised her. ‘Forget about snaffling a lawyer. Not with what plumbers earn these days.’

  Why was that stuff occupying Christine’s brain space? Cuddling up to her that night – to his understanding wife! – he’d murmured, honestly puz
zled, ‘The Darwin conference was way back in ’94.’ He went on, confident now. ‘You and I hadn’t even met! How do you know about it? You would’ve still been tangled up with Gordon Sinclair.’ Her ex, the doctor. In any case, Lauren had left the firm shortly after Darwin. He’d never seen her since.

  ‘Sleeping with her, I’d understand perfectly if you had,’ Christine said.

  Oh, Jesus! ‘Just that once,’ he said.

  Christine instantly stiffened beside him and slid out of bed. Six months since that night, much of it in separate bedrooms. And twenty years since Darwin. Extreme behaviour and – good God almighty – a bloody surfeit of eye-rolls.

  11

  It wasn’t Liam on the line. It was Lauren Cusack yet again. Her fourth call of the weekend. Even by Lauren’s regular phone-calling standards over the past six months this was exhaustive. Too much. She was relentlessly on the case.

  ‘So,’ Lauren declared. She didn’t sound like a cute young shorthand wizard. She sounded like an impatient middle-aged woman with a bee in her bonnet. ‘What’s happened? It’s now Sunday. How are they getting on?’

  What should she say to Lauren? Stop bugging me? That frankly she didn’t know how to engineer what Lauren wanted, for God’s sake? Not her problem. Why was it left to the emotional bystander? She didn’t have the necessary introduction skills.

  Who did? Tell him yourself, Lauren. No, don’t. Say nothing. Let it go. Let Nicholas make the approach. No, Hugh needs to be warned first. And punished somehow. Why punished? Didn’t Lauren and she both want that? But why on earth? Poor Hugh. Bad Hugh. No, he wasn’t bad at all. Just let it go, Lauren. Fat chance. Nor could she.

  Despite it having consumed her since May, now it came to the crunch she wanted to totally avoid the issue. Anyway, she told herself, how come I’m suddenly in cahoots with this woman? Just because she once slept with my husband (before he was her husband, she reminded herself) I don’t owe her anything. How come I’m suddenly some forlorn character in a TV soap?

  Why didn’t Lauren tell Hugh that one morning back in May, recently divorced, and doing the crossword in her coffee break at her desk at VicRoads, she’d spotted the announcement Hugh had placed in The Age’s Public Notices column, which adjoined the crossword?

  Descendants of Conor Cleary, late of the 40th (Somerset) Regiment of Foot, who arrived in Melbourne on the Jupiter in November 1854, are invited to the 160th-anniversary celebration of his arrival in Australia. Details: clearyhugh@bigpond.com

  ‘The name Cleary jumped out at me from the paper,’ Lauren told Christine. After twenty years of silence she couldn’t waste any more time.

  On reading of the Cleary anniversary she immediately phoned their house. Hugh was still in court but Christine soon realised that a complicated, envious and bitchy part of Lauren preferred to break the news to Hugh’s wife in any case. To lay all this on her, to ruffle her presumed charmed existence. And rely on Christine to pass on the news. News carrying much more disruptive potential if the wife delivered it.

  As if she was testifying in court or discussing a historic event – D-day or the bombing of Pearl Harbor – Lauren declared solemnly, ‘I gave birth to a baby boy on April 21, 1995. Nicholas was conceived in the Arafura Palms Motel in Darwin on July 7, 1994.’ She scanned and emailed Christine a copy of the birth certificate that very evening.

  Not Nicholas Pitman any more, Lauren stressed on the phone to Christine. She was recently divorced from Russell Pitman. Though opposed to outright sex before marriage, Russell, her plumber boyfriend back then, had apparently been easily convinced that his backseat Baptist fumblings had accidentally proved productive.

  Until one Thursday night on Channel 9 last year when the elite forensic investigation team in CSI: Crime Scene Investigation gave Russell the brainwave to have his physically poles-apart son and himself DNA-tested. Nick was now legally Nicholas Cleary. The dates checked out. The tattooed boy in the black shirt.

  ‘I’ll get back to you shortly,’ Christine said to Lauren now. ‘It’s frantic here this weekend.’

  ‘I wouldn’t put it off too much longer. He’s a very spirited boy. This news has been very exciting for him, naturally. And unsettling of course. Swapping one father for another.’

  ‘Spirited?’

  ‘I won’t say it’s been an easy road the past nineteen years. Quite the reverse. But his therapists say many young people have hyperdramatic mood swings.’

  ‘Oh.’ Would it be possible to feel more bewildered than she was now? Too dazed to appreciate that of course Hugh was right: he and she hadn’t met until 1 September 1994. The first day of spring. In their early romantic years it had served as another anniversary.

  Lauren said, ‘The mood stabilisers usually help. The Seroquel is pretty effective. But he needs to meet his father and Hugh needs to accept his paternal and family responsibilities. Boy, this is a load off my back. I look forward to catching up with you, Christine. It will be so nice to become friends. And I’m pretty sure Nicholas is thrilled to be a Cleary.’

  12

  ‘Sorry, there’s another call waiting,’ Christine told Lauren. She disconnected, breathed deeply and took the next call. Her head was throbbing.

  ‘I’m very unhappy with you, Liam,’ she began, and her voice broke. In the trees over the creek a warning chorus of magpies burst into territorial song. Emotion and the birds’ mocking warbles took the stridency out of her voice and she had to repeat herself.

  She was interrupted by the sound of Liam’s hoarse, subdued tones. The phone reception was bad. He sounded miles away. ‘A spot of bother, Mum. I need someone to come and get me from the cop shop.’

  She could hear other voices, the crackle and dialogue of a police radio. A clearer female voice, then a snort of male laughter.

  ‘What’s happened? An accident? Are you all right?’

  ‘I’m OK.’ And not. He told her an abridged version. That halfway back from Melbourne he’d been stopped by the police on the Western Freeway. They were randomly checking cars out of Melbourne: waving through the family sedans, SUVs and weekend sports fans but stopping the muscle cars, anything shiny red or fluorescent, and the V8s with spoilers and doof-doof speakers, and any cars with P-plates, or surfboards on the roof, also the rust buckets and Kombi vans. Young people’s vehicles.

  ‘Some sort of police campaign,’ he told his mother. And then his phone battery ran out.

  The cops had known what they were looking for. In the actual situation, a chummy little policewoman had leaned into the Mazda. Tan cheeks peeping through the window, blonde ponytail sprouting out the back of her baseball cap. A sprinkle of freckles on her nose. A surfer chick, Liam reckoned. Couldn’t be more than early twenties. Tits pushing out her police shirt. Quite a babe in his opinion.

  She was smiling. ‘Good afternoon, mate.’ He smiled back. What a great thing was a pretty chick’s smile. Even a cop chick’s. ‘Had a good weekend? Just a random test. Won’t take a second. Please lick this test pad for us.’ Did she wink at him? He was pretty sure she did.

  Still, it made him a bit nervous poking out his tongue – it seemed sort of intimate and wrong. The blue-and-red lights flashing in his rear-view mirror, the sudden shock of overt policeness, had dried up his spit. His tongue was like wood.

  The cute cop’s face was close to his. Her carefully plucked eyebrows rose questioningly. ‘Better try again, mate.’

  Then the roadside drug unit’s saliva test didn’t go so well. From his arid mouth and cardboard tongue he eventually mustered up some liquid which (Oh, my God!) tested positive.

  Now the cop said, ‘We’re a party dude, are we?’, and ordered him out of the Mazda. He stood on the gravel verge, shaking his head – ‘No, not me’ – feeling strangely immature. A young kid. A girlfriendless gamer. A virgin. Just a wobbly Star Wars and PlayStation loner nerd. She steered this gangly child in the direction of the nearby mobile police lab.

  From babe to law-enforcement officer in a split second. Walking be
side her in the forbidding spinning lightshow of the police vehicles, the gravel crunching ominously underfoot, her hand firmly on his elbow, he was abruptly aware of her official accoutrements. Her hips and waist swelled and jiggled with holsters and pouches. Commanding cop stuff. Gun, baton, spray, handcuffs, radio. She rasped and squeaked as she strode. Her head came only to his shoulder but she was a forceful walking armoury.

  No ‘mate’ this time. ‘We need you to dredge up some more spit, son.’ To carefully screen his reluctant drop of dribble took twenty minutes. The sputum tested positive again.

  At this stage the officer became even more brusque. Frowning, she delivered the official spiel: ‘I’m authorised to ask you to hand over your car keys. You’re prohibited from driving for twenty-four hours. Your second oral fluid sample will be sent to a laboratory for further analysis. If the presence of one or more of the drugs THC, methamphetamine or MDMA is confirmed by the lab, you’ll receive a court attendance notice on a charge of driving with the presence of an illicit drug in your system.’

  ‘What do I do now?’ He was near tears. He was exhausted, still coming down from the night before. A night in which he’d actually, undeniably, finally ended up in her queen-sized bed in her Brighton mansion beside Charlotte Falconer. In his coolest, pre-planned underwear. And she in hers, too, which had matter-of-factly displayed around the edges a great deal of the flesh he’d fantasised about.

  However, Charlotte had turned out to be fiercely reticent about shedding these lacy bra and knicker fragments or tiptoeing even one step further. She’d instantly faced the wall and fallen asleep, and snored with little pup-pup-pup sounds, and in no way allowed his outflung hands – even while lying heavily enough on his right arm to give it pins and needles, and whimpering in a dream and occasionally lightly breaking wind from the bourbon and Coke they’d drunk – to touch anything fleshly relevant.

  And he’d lain there all night, arousal gradually diminishing, unable to move, his phone out of reach, until he was, mortifyingly, at the furthest distance from stimulation.