by Inga Simpson
She had been searching for nests when she met Craig. She’d been up a tree in the Brindabellas, locked behind binoculars, looking for olive whistler nests, when he had come thundering along the path below. He had looked up, thinking her a large bird, though he had long sent every other animal scurrying or flying away with all his noise, and grinned a silly grin. Her bird’s-eye view had afforded a glimpse of his energy, which she had mistaken for something wild.
It had probably been his dimples that called her down, the messy thatch of blond hair, and the promise of a cup of hot tea. She had grown quite cold sitting still so long. He was halfway through a great walk across the mountains, and could only stop for fifteen minutes.
When she ran into him on campus a few weeks later, it had seemed like destiny. He was a semester ahead in the same course, a DipEd, though she was half a decade older. They had tea again, in the coffee shop this time, and he took her number.
He had called three days later, and she had put down her pencil to answer, hoping it was him.
Chainsaw
Jen pull-started the chainsaw on the back lawn, eased off the choke, and made her way down the slope to the fallen brush box. Its centre had been dead for some time, dragging the rest down with it. She began slicing through that section, the saw protesting and sending out the occasional spark. Brush box wood was dense, and actually contained silicon, making the timber part stone, which was great for floorboards and building, but soon blunted a saw’s chain.
She adjusted her stance on the slope, trying to bend her knees to reduce the strain on her lower back. She was into the main section of the trunk now, still green, and no good for burning for a couple of years yet, but she figured she might as well carve it all up while she was at it.
Where the tree touched the ground, she had to be careful not to cut right through. It had not been her father, as it should have been, who taught her to use a chainsaw – though she had seen him wield one plenty of times. She had been too young then to do much more than pour in the fuel and chain and bar oil.
It had been Craig, of all people, who had first given her the opportunity. He had carried a small chainsaw in the back of his four-wheel drive during holiday expeditions, in case of a fallen tree. She had thought it amusing but sure enough, on only their third or fourth trip, somewhere in the Grampians, they had rounded a bend and found a downed mountain ash, the white limbs of its crown shattered over the road.
Craig had started the chainsaw and cut up the tree with some pride, not realising that chainsawing an already fallen tree was unlikely to impress her. She would have taken more notice if he had not been able to do such things. To his credit, he had paused halfway through and gestured for her to come over. He handed her the saw, gave a few simple instructions, and stood by while she cut through the remaining sections. She had remembered her father’s rules, imparted in the truck or when training new men, about relaxing your shoulders, cutting downwards and away from your body, using the tip of the blade and so on. In the end, she liked to think, it had been Craig who had been impressed.
Not long after she moved back, she had made a trip down to the large hardware store on the coast, with the intention of purchasing a saw for herself. The well-meaning fellow, both younger and shorter than her, had tried to sell her a kiddy Japanese saw, and gave dire warnings about severed limbs and the need for Kevlar pants, earmuffs, goggles, helmet and so on: a truckload of gear. She had listened politely but insisted on a McCulloch with a much longer bar and more powerful engine. She demonstrated that she could lift it and wield it, only relenting by purchasing a pair of bright green earmuffs. Most of the loggers, her father included, had been too proud to wear them, and were half deaf as a result. She intended to hear the birds as long as she lived.
The hardware man – Ted, or Tod, his badge had said – assumed she was clearing a block, that trees were her enemy, and she hadn’t bothered to correct him. She came up against that a lot, people of a different mindset. It had frustrated her at first – assuming that because they had chosen the same place to live they must have plenty in common – but she had finally realised there was no point trying to bridge the gap.
Her art school friends would be shocked that she used a chainsaw at all, not realising that not to have one, living among trees like this, and in a subtropical climate, was to be vulnerable.
She started on the thickest section, near the base of the trunk. It would probably be the last she extracted from the saw, and herself for that matter. Her forearms were aching. Smoke chugged out of the machine; it was overheating.
She puffed, and stretched her hands. She wouldn’t be able to do this forever, or climb the slope loaded up with wood. She had seen the tree cutters when they grew old, no longer able to wield a saw. Like shearers, their backs and knees were ruined. Their hands shook, too, from absorbing all that vibration. One fellow could no longer close his hands in any sort of grip, barely managing to lift a beer glass to his mouth at the pub, her father had said.
She baulked at buying wood, though – it was always cut too green and too small for her great fireplace. And they charged way too much. She stamped on the piece she had just cut to break the last wedge free, only to see it roll down the hill away from her, turning faster and faster until it went plop into the creek.
She was breaking her father’s golden rule, ‘never chainsaw alone’, but she didn’t have much choice. She could hardly call the neighbour over every time she needed wood or wanted to remove a tree, and it wouldn’t be right to make Henry stand by. As soon as Kay got wind of it, that would be the end of his lessons. Though it wouldn’t hurt him to learn how to do something practical, or to carry the logs up to the woodpile.
She did make sure she always had her mobile in her shirt pocket. When she was up on the roof, too. There’d be no use calling if she severed an artery, though; by the time the ambulance located the address and found her among the trees, she would have bled out.
She had been with her father, that last winter, when one of the men slipped and cut into his leg, just above the knee. She had steered the truck to the public hospital, and stood on the clutch, while her father changed the gears, holding an old towel against the man’s leg. Her father had remained calm, and taken the time to praise her second attempt at driving, but the dark blood seeping into the seat and the pallor of her father’s face left her in no doubt as to how serious it was.
Jen’s concession was never to use the chainsaw in the rain, or if she was feeling unwell, and she tried to concentrate. She hung the earmuffs around her neck. The birds had started up again, celebrating the end of all the noise. She bent to lift a log with her right arm, loaded another on top of it, and carried them and the saw back up the slope to the house.
Mother
She tried Aunt Sophie again, imagining the old phone echoing up her wallpapered hallway. It was not unusual for her to be out midmorning – she was always busy with bridge or shopping for quilting supplies, or meeting friends. But it was the third time she had tried this week.
‘Hello?’
‘It’s Jen,’ she said. ‘Everything all right?’
‘Fine, love,’ her aunt said. ‘I’ve been enjoying this weather, getting out in the garden.’
‘Planting?’
‘Some more gardenias. Out the front.’
Jen smiled. Her aunt already had about a hundred gardenias. ‘They’ll get good sun there, in the morning.’
‘I think so, yes,’ Aunt Sophie said. ‘Anyway. What about you?’
‘Weeding, mainly and some replanting. I’m trying a native groundcover where I cleared fishbone fern. It has white flowers and edible fruit.’
‘Midyim?’
‘That’s it.’
‘Well, it’s a good time of year for it. And the drawing?’
‘A little. A local gallery wants a few pieces,’ she said. ‘You remember May?’
‘Of course, I love her gallery. It’s hard to know whether to look at the pictures inside or out, t
he view’s so good.’
Jen laughed.
‘I’m glad you’re showing your work again. That’s the best news I’ve had for ages.’ Aunt Sophie hesitated, and Jen could hear the currawongs starting up out the back. ‘I heard about that missing girl,’ she said. ‘Are you okay?’
‘The police called me in. Asking about Dad.’
‘After all this time?’
‘I guess it’s routine …’
‘When was this?’
‘Last week.’
‘Oh, love,’ she said. ‘I knew I should’ve called.’
‘It’s fine.’
‘It sounds awful,’ her aunt said. ‘Is there someone you can talk to?’
‘I’m okay, Soph,’ she said. ‘They haven’t called you?’
‘No. Something to look forward to!’
Jen smiled at the humph in her voice. She could always rely on Aunt Sophie to be on her side.
Losing a parent at such a young age had not been easy. Nor had the not knowing. A lifetime of not knowing. She had always hoped – still did some of the time – that she might see him again. It was a child’s hope. Whatever happened, he would always be her father. She had known him, which was more than some people had.
For her mother, though, his leaving had been the end of their relationship. The end of her. It wasn’t until Jen’s own relationship with Craig had ended that she had really understood what a deep hole that left.
There was the money stuff, too, which Jen had not been able to fully comprehend at the time. Bills and IOUs kept coming in for months. They had sold off all the timber lying around, and the machinery. Jen had taken the cash from the men who came, while her mother slept inside. After the last transaction, she had, on impulse, slipped a twenty-dollar note in her pocket.
In the long months that followed, whenever they could not afford milk or bread, she wanted to give it back, to retrieve it from inside the book Michael had lent her, inside her shoebox of Jen things, hidden behind a loose board in the wall of her room. But to do so would be to admit taking it, and by then even she had realised that there was only so far twenty dollars would go.
The shrink had asked if she had been planning some sort of escape, like her father, and Jen had laughed, but perhaps it had been the first expression of her desire for independence. For distance from the dark mess she found herself living in.
The first thing to go had been the private school enrolment. The Lutheran College offered a well-regarded arts program. Aunt Sophie had offered to pay, but for whatever reason, her mother had refused. And so Jen had started high school at the public school in the next town. She had not been at all gracious about it, throwing a rather teenage tantrum and screaming that her father had not wanted her to go to that stupid school. Her mother hadn’t either; it was rough and ordinary. But it was free and she could catch the bus.
Probably, in the circumstances, and with her grades and acceptance into the arts program, she could have applied for some sort of scholarship, but it wasn’t done then, to ask for help, no matter how much you needed it. And at the time, her mother had not been able to give much thought to the future.
Her mother had barely emerged from the bedroom for months, until Aunt Sophie came and took her to the doctor. She improved a little for a while after that – taking some sort of medication, perhaps – and was able to go through the motions of buying groceries and preparing meals most days.
People had called it a nervous breakdown. They had used that term to cover a lot of things then, especially of women. She couldn’t recall a man ever having a nervous breakdown. Jen’s shrink used the term ‘breakdown’, on its own, without the nervous part, more like an old car. He also talked about depression.
It had shamed her mother, being left like that, though it should only have reflected on her father. But perhaps it was always the woman shamed. When she and Craig had split, she had seen judgement on more than one of her own close friends’ faces. That unspoken question: what did you do?
Glen and Phil ended up at the same high school; that had kept her going. For a while. When the principal suspended her, for the second time, in grade nine, and her mother declined to attend an interview at the school, Aunt Sophie finally intervened. She drove up and tried to talk to her mother. That night, or early the next morning, her mother tried to kill herself. With sleeping tablets – hardly original. Aunt Sophie called the ambulance, and signed the forms for her to be admitted.
By the end of the year Jen was living with her aunt and attending All Saints. At the time, she was relieved to get out of the house, the town, and the state, though she was ill with guilt at leaving her mother. ‘You’ve got your own life to think about, Jenny,’ Aunt Sophie would say. ‘She’s responsible for hers. Not you.’
As it turned out, it was the wake-up call her mother needed. Aunt Sophie had known her better than Jen could ever hope to. She had to turn to the Brethren to do it – they prayed for, and preyed on, people just like her – but it helped her out of the place she had been stuck in.
The Brethren were still hidden throughout the hills, their women barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen, just like the good old days. The biggest grossing cafe at the annual music festival – a replica prairie house – was Brethren-run. The women did all the work, while the men sat about watching the money being made; it was against their religion for men to handle food.
You could pick the women in town, occasionally, from their conservative dress code, but the men tended to blend in. As with hippies, hooch and politics, it didn’t pay to mouth off in front of someone you didn’t know well; you never could tell.
Heath
She found a shady spot for the Hilux in the car park out the back of the national park.
For her first walk of the season, Jen wasn’t doing the mountain summit, which was tough going, but a circuit out through the heathland. It was flattish, with some steady elevation: good exercise and good training. Fewer walkers, too.
She pulled her pack from the back, slipped into the straps and put on a hat and sunscreen. It was still cool, and there were only a handful of other vehicles in the car park. Midweek during the school term was the best time to walk. The best time for everything, really.
It was one of the many advantages of not teaching anymore: no longer being locked into school holidays, setting up camp with hundreds of families. As if she hadn’t seen and heard enough children during term. She and Craig had tried to go to more and more remote places, to avoid the crowds, but the days when you could just camp anywhere were gone. They had kitted out his four-wheel drive so they could sleep in the back, which gave them more freedom. She had only to say, ‘What about here?’ when Craig pulled up somewhere nice, and he would nod and switch off the engine. That had been half the reason she had bought the Hilux, intending to set it up the same way.
She set out with the sun at her back, the path wide and well-worn at the start. She- and he-oaks whispered around her. She bent down to pick up a seed pod; its prickle, and the fissure of the tree’s slim trunk against her hand, gave her the texture she had craved.
There was no sign of the inhabitants of the other cars, further ahead perhaps or doing the summit. It was her goal to climb the mountain again by the end of winter, and take some fresh photographs from the top. If her knees were up to it. There were always plants on top of volcanic peaks, and animals, too, that were unique to that environment.
The Castle, part of the Budawang Range down south, was the best example she had seen. Its flat, mesa-like top, when you finally scaled its walls, was a world all of its own, with Castle-specific pines and gums and banksias, glorious mosses and wildflowers, and a collection of wrens and robins. Camping there – in the holidays during her second year at art school – had been like inhabiting a fantasy story. So much so that she had had to force herself to return to earth, several days after she had run out of food.
The path dropped downhill and curved around, through a carpet of grass trees boasting tall spears fr
om their green umbrella fronds. It was only forty minutes from her own forest, but a world apart. Drier and more open, despite getting a similar rainfall in summer. Another in-between place.
She began the climb up to the next lookout. Jen ran her hand through the cascading straps of a grass tree and watched her feet on the stone steps. She noted the geebungs thickening, and stepped over a cascade of pine cones. The last ten metres had her heart pumping, but she wasn’t in such bad shape after all. She could thank the weeds, and her driveway, for that.
She leaned on the railing, looking out. To the west, she was surrounded by a moat of plantation pines, their dark green uniformity at odds with the native bushland. A mob of wallabies grazed on the slope below. She had a perfect shot, if she were inclined to eat meat, which she was not. She liked to think of herself as self-sufficient, but she did not think she could bear to kill an animal, even if she were starving. A fish maybe, or a crayfish. There were several hundred edible plants in this area; they would have to do. She wouldn’t measure up against the woodsmen and women of the northern hemisphere she liked to read about, hunting elk and grouse. Living off the land was all very well, but she had to be able to live with herself.
Harming another person, let alone a child, was an even greater horror, and yet it festered in all of them: the capacity to hurt, and the fear of that capacity in themselves and in others.
Caitlin’s parents were stuck. They all were. Waiting. No one could even say ‘dead’, although they all hoped she was, because the alternative was worse. Jen surveyed the land spreading out beneath her, running down to the creek, as if it could offer up the answers. For a moment, she thought she heard a whisper – the land speaking to her – but it was probably just the wind in the she-oaks.