by Inga Simpson
She had swallowed down her mother’s casserole, scraping the sauce off the squares of meat and wrapping each one in mashed potato, so she would be allowed to watch The Sullivans. Afterwards, she had read under the covers with a torch long past lights out and fallen asleep with the untroubled mind of a child.
The second day Michael’s wooden seat sat empty, her whole class was sent home from school. The principal edged into the room and made the announcement, his voice calm but sweat rings spreading out from under his arms. Their teacher, Miss Lander, handed out tissues, though she was in greatest need of them herself. Most of them had been together since prep and would have preferred to see out the rest of the day as one, but parents had been called.
Except hers, it seemed. There was no one waiting for her outside the school so she started up the road on foot. Mandy’s mother pulled over and insisted on driving her. She couldn’t remember if they spoke in the car. Sound had been muted out, and most of the colour.
Her father’s red truck wasn’t in the driveway, even though it was his day off. The dogs hadn’t been fed. The breakfast dishes were still on the bench, black with ants. ‘Mum?’
Her mother was sitting at the dining table, amid a strew of bills, crying.
Jen lifted the phone in the hall to find no dial tone.
‘He’s gone,’ her mother said.
Jen blinked. Michael?
‘He’s left us, honey.’
There was a half-empty glass of wine on the table, in a pool of condensation. Her mother had forgotten all about Michael. Something fell away, inside. Jen tried to catch it and jam it back, to stop the rush of realisation, the terrible clicking into place of all those images and pieces of information – but it was no good. Daddy wasn’t coming home.
Jen knew better than to trust her memories. Not the details, anyway. The kernel of them, though, the emotion, was something to hold on to. Like dreams, they contained important truths.
Her father, teaching her to surf, pushing her out into a set she was not quite ready for. Whooping, for all to hear, when she popped up and cut right, floating along the face of the blue-green wave that spilled out and out in front of her. It was a feeling she carried with her still. As true and clear as a sunny day.
There were others. The last time Michael had stayed over, after they had seen Rocky at the drive-in to hype them up for the athletics carnival. Her stomach hurting from calling ‘Rocky’ to his ‘Adrian’ across the back seat on the way home. She had drunk too much Passiona, and had to get up to use the bathroom. On the way back to her room, she had stopped in the hallway, thinking she heard Michael crying.
‘Michael?’
She had replayed it so many times it had become less clear, like an old VHS tape. He didn’t answer. But the crying had stopped. Perhaps he had been asleep, just having a bad dream. She hesitated in the doorway, but didn’t go in. Earlier that year her parents had sat her down for an uncomfortable talk, and made it a condition of Michael staying over that he no longer sleep in her spare bunk, and that they were not to go into each other’s rooms at night or shut the door when playing. She had not quite understood at the time, but knew it was embarrassing. Michael had rolled his eyes and said he had endured something similar. A conspiracy of parents.
Once back in bed she had tried to stay awake, listening, but there was only silence, and a dog barking far away. And then her father was up with the sun, for work, and whistling in the kitchen.
Something had stopped her asking Michael about it the next day; he had seemed the same as ever, singing ‘Gonna Fly Now’ out of tune, air-boxing like Rocky, wearing all his blue ribbons, and still managing to be encouraging about her third place in high jump. She had been happy to let it go, rolling shot-put balls down the grassy bank of the oval with him and Phil and Glen, until Miss Herford blew her whistle and made them stay back to pack up the whole school’s sporting equipment. Now it was too late to ask.
Regrowth
The change of name had thrown people for a while but there was no hiding in a town this size. The woman at the post office was the daughter of an old schoolfriend and eventually a government letter came addressed to the real her – Jennifer Vogel – and they put it all together. It would be nice to think that you could rely on your sending and receiving of mail remaining private, as it was for people in the city – through sheer volume rather than any superior ethics – but it just wasn’t the case. It was friendly, all right, but there was little privacy.
‘Ah, you bought Mal’s place,’ the manager had said, the day she filled out the papers to rent a post office box. People were still saying it, three years on. More often, they’d say she was living in Mal’s place, as if she was a boarder or some kind of squatter. He must have had some wild parties in his time. It seemed that everyone had been there over the years, able to describe exactly how the place was laid out and having some memory of this or that great night, with belly dancers and drums and fireworks – and likely a whole lot of hooch, judging by the smiles and shaking of heads.
Sometimes she made a point of mentioning something she had changed, her plans to rebuild or repaint – just to assert herself – but mostly she couldn’t be bothered. She had spent a month filling a skip with junk she gathered up from around the place, and that didn’t make for polite conversation. Bloody hippies. Campaigning to save the world, to stop injustice, and all the while burying rubbish in their own backyard because they were too tight to pay for the council service or go to the tip. She was still turning up bits of corrugated iron and plastic. Toy cars.
There were plenty of recycled materials in the house itself, like the old wooden windows and doors, which she appreciated, but there were times when short cuts had compromised the integrity of the building. The recycled screws in the roof were not galvanised, which might have saved fifty bucks at the time but meant that now the iron needed replacing. All the same, she wouldn’t trade it for a standard house, or one of those black-roofed catalogue-order boxes spreading like lantana at the town’s edge.
The house had a much quieter life now; she did not hold parties. She barely had any visitors, except Henry.
Although it was almost a week since she had checked her mail, there was nothing in the box but glass-windowed bills. She ripped them open while waiting to cross the road, as the mobile library laboured up the hill, holding back a string of traffic.
She made it into the cafe before the storm. The library bus brought everyone into town, fuelling up on books, coffee and muffins.
‘Morning.’
‘Morning,’ she said, taking milk and yoghurt from the cafe’s fridge, a loaf of fresh bread from the counter. ‘Half a kilo of coffee, too, please.’ All organic, all local. All unimaginable five years ago.
The chef and owner, Elena, was the real deal. She had trained in Paris, got into organics before it was trendy, and somehow ended up here. Jen figured the town would grow into it in a few more years, the cafe helping bring the mean age down from geriatric, and up from young families on the breadline.
Jen leaned on the counter. According to the local paper’s front page, police were looking for the driver of a blue station wagon seen on Tallowwood Drive the afternoon Caitlin went missing.
‘Terrible, isn’t it?’ Elena said.
Jen nodded. Against police advice, the family was offering a reward for any information.
Jen sat on the back step, in the sun, staring out at her trees. A king parrot called from somewhere high in the canopy, repeating one identical note over and over. Johnny one-note he might be, but what a note it was. And he always had his looks to fall back on.
She thought of it as her forest, but it was just regrowth – third or fourth generation – only forty or so years old. Brush box, tallowwood and bloodwoods all of a similar age, with a scattering of grey gums, ironbarks and flooded gums. In this climate, recovery was swift, and some of the young trees were starting to hit the thirty-centimetre diameter – old enough to harvest again.
The whole area had once been rainforest, thick and dark with ancient life, the great buttressed roots of cedars, bunya and hoop pines poking above the tree line. Canopy, middle storey and understorey, rich with stories that white folks had never bothered to learn. The carcasses of great cedars still rotted on her slopes, left behind because they were hollow inside, too large to haul out – or just forgotten.
The cedar-getters had ended up national heroes, opening up the area and mining a new country’s riches. Bringing those big trees down and hauling them out was seen as a feat of strength, a test of manhood, of nationhood. In just ten years, they wiped the cedars from the landscape and came back for the rest, clearing the way for fruit and dairy production.
She had witnessed the last wave of clearing herself; it was her father who had done it. In those days, just about everyone had worked for the mills in one way or another. He had run a team, and was considered a gun with the chainsaw, so had brought down more than his share. At the time, she had thought them good men, and the work hard but honest. Dangerous, too. Before Michael, the dramas of the town had centred on a timberman’s hand crushed by a log, or a limb severed by a saw. Whenever her father was late home, her mother would start pacing, afraid to go too far from the phone, although Jen would often be at the table doing her homework, and was, by then, quite capable of answering it. ‘Hot chocolate?’ her mother would say, in winter, or ‘Cordial?’ in summer, as if to give her some purpose in the kitchen.
In Jen’s forest, only one original tree survived, a bloodwood, metres thick, and towering above the other trees. Their timber wasn’t any good for building, riddled with veins of blood-like resin that oozed out when their trunks or limbs were cut or damaged. It was a shame all trees didn’t bleed: there might be a few more left standing.
Cuckoo doves called from all sides; they had her surrounded. Her father had called them whoop whoop birds. For that was mostly all they said: whooop whooop. They were big, too, and slow, with tiny heads, so she thought of them as ‘big whoop’ birds. Her ear had attuned early to the heavy flap of their wings, her eye to slim boughs dipping under their weight. They had been plentiful in the early days, when whites first arrived, but they were easy targets, hunted for food and fun, until rare.
Here, they had grown back, with the trees. Like her, they favoured forest edges. Regrowth. If she were a bird, no doubt she would be brown and common, too. Not that cuckoo doves were really brown, more of a rufous to cinnamon, and the females quite auburn on the crown. ‘Bloodnuts. Like your mother,’ as her father used to say.
It was far from wilderness, but her forest was beautiful in its way. Remnant riparian sections clung to the creek, with palms, ferns and sedges spreading out beneath flooded gums. Rushing water roared over rocks in summer.
When she had realised, walking around the property the second time – while the agent took a call – that it was the right area, the trees of the right age, and that she had probably even been here with her father, she figured it was all meant to be. Something had drawn her back to look after the land he had cleared. To make amends.
Studio
It was the birds who saved her. They always did.
A yellow-tailed black cockatoo called from below the cottage, one lonely rising and falling note. It called again, this time answered by its mate, a little further off. It was the season for feasting on borer grubs in the acacias. One bird would rip the bark off the tree while the other screeched and squawked and chuffed from the ground or a nearby low branch.
When she had first heard the ruckus, she had thought the birds in distress, a young one fallen from the nest, perhaps, and made her way down the slope to see if they needed her help. The birds were fine, enjoying their ritual, and barely acknowledging her. Their dining practices pretty much destroyed the tree, exposing its hollow insides, but with that level of grub infestation, its life had already been on the wane.
While the robins were her favourite, she had come to see the cockatoos as her totem bird. They tended to appear whenever she asked for answers – and sometimes when she hadn’t – giving some sort of sign. Hearing them fly overhead, or in the trees, was always a good omen. During the winter of her first year back, when her courage had failed her, only they had come to call her out of the darkness.
The morning she had been unable to get out of bed, still lying amid the white sheets in full sunlight, a dozen had turned up screeching and carrying on in the treetops. Their cries were somehow sympathetic.
Whether they sensed her plans for departure, or had taken in the unmown lawn strewn with sticks, the leaf-filled gutters, the junk mail poking out of the box, and thought her already gone, she was unsure. The cottage, after all, was not unlike a giant bird house.
One cockatoo had perched right outside the window, peering in. Despite herself, Jen hadn’t been able to help smiling at its comical cocked head, the clown-like spots of yellow on its cheeks. Only when Jen got herself up and out of bed did the bird fly off, screeching, settling on a high branch with the others.
She opened all of the windows of her studio, pulling the screens from the frames and depositing them outside. The kookaburras were at it up on the ridge, chortling and cavorting for all to hear. It was difficult to imagine what they were communicating with such volume and gusto, and to fight the feeling that she was the butt of their jokes. Probably it was just a weather forecast. It was Percy Grainger who said that the soul of the climate and land could be heard in the song of native birds. It was in all of the other animals and plants, too, but only the birds had been given a singing voice.
The light had softened, filtering through the trees, and for a moment she was tempted to leave the studio in its own filth and go outside to keep on with the weeding. Weeding, however, was not on her list for today.
Jen sighed. Where to start? She stripped the daybed and put the linen on to wash, dragged the mattress out into the sun on the back deck and propped it against the rail, her nose upturned.
The old canvasses, too, had to come out, their top edges crusted with gecko poop and dust. She sniffed for mould. Perhaps they would be better burned than left to rot away. She carried them all outside, wiped down their exposed edges and set them apart to air, without looking at their fronts.
She emptied the room, her desk and cleared the sloped drawing table. Took down all of the pictures, removed each object and placed them on the dining table. Wheeled her chair out into the light, blinking and smarting in the sun like a wombat.
She extracted the vacuum cleaner from the hall cupboard and set it down in the middle of the room. Pulled its cord and plugged it in. ‘Okay, here we go.’ She vacuumed the ceiling, rafters and windows, knocking down a hornet’s nest, sucking up webs and the spiders that fled them. Then the floor, pushing into every corner, and using the brush attachment to run along the skirting boards and window ledges. She sucked everything out from under her desk and the back of the cupboard.
‘Ha.’ She shut off the machine’s noise. The room was beginning to look habitable. Or, more to the point, workable. Then she would be right out of excuses.
Jen set to cleaning the windows, inside first. The grime of summer came off black on the cloth. Fairy-wrens hopped from branch to branch in the lilli pillis outside, celebrating the beauty of their small lives – lives free of cleaning duties.
She gathered up all of the found objects Craig had given her, arranged on the windowsill in front of her drawing table. The fragment of a paper wasp’s nest in a hexagonal shape, replicating each individual cell inside. The heart-shaped rock, a piece of pale green beach glass tumbled smooth – the colour of her eyes, he’d said – the pair of matching cowrie shells, and the leaf with a gall on one end so large it resembled a snail. It had dried and curled brown now, a husk of its original fresh green. She rearranged them each time she dusted, which wasn’t very often, but they kept their places there, in her line of sight.
She had got rid of some of them over the years. Those rotting or decayed or the worse fo
r wear. Some had disappeared, carried off by ants or mice. There had been so many at first; it had seemed an abundance. Even on a trip to the local shop to fetch milk, he would find some treasure, a butterfly’s wing or an empty chrysalis, and bring it home as if trying to prove that even in the burbs nature survived. That there were forces at work visible only to him.
Now she had to hang on to the few she had left.
At her old place – the flat with the sad-eyed windows – her friend, Mary, one of the other teachers from school, had joked about her ‘shrine to Craig’. Jen had smiled, and said nothing, but had not invited her over again.
Here, at least, there was no one to pester her.
Old Timer
Whenever she left the property, she could see the world in colour patches again. At home, and even in the studio, she couldn’t stop honing in on the ever-changing detail. It helped to be in a moving vehicle, blurring things a little. At this time of year, the blue of the mountain came closer in tone to the green of the trees.
At the ridge she caught the glint of sun on sea, the river winding out to meet it. Her road had once been on the coach route to the goldfields. Now it was a road to nowhere, of interest only as a short cut for tradesmen, or weekenders shopping for real estate – Sunday drivers dreaming of a quiet life, and disrupting the quiet of others. Her road home.
On the edge of town, she slowed to allow a mother duck and her string of ducklings to cross the road near the lagoon, and drove on.
She shopped in the next town, only another five minutes by car. The supermarket was much better, part of the same chain but bigger and managed differently, and the fruit stall was on the way home – and there was less chance of seeing people who might know her.