by Inga Simpson
She walked on, and down, quadriceps straining on the giant stone steps. At the bottom, a red-faced man leaned against the timber sign in singlet and shorts.
‘Hi,’ he said.
‘Hello.’
‘Worth it?’ He pointed to the path she had just come down.
‘Definitely,’ she said.
‘Righto,’ he said. ‘Thanks.’
He set off up the steps with a great deal of huffing and puffing. She should have offered him some water; he didn’t seem to be carrying any. Hopefully he wouldn’t give himself a heart attack.
Up and around the next bend, on a drier and narrower path, she dropped into a shallow mallee heath valley. The grass trees were bigger, and the geebung. The banksias, dwarfed and gnarly, were a sea of yellow candles, lighting the understorey. Fire came through here more often, seeding not only the banksias but the grass trees and wattles.
She had taken her mother on this walk, when she was still mobile. As a Mother’s Day or birthday present. Packed a picnic lunch and carried it in. Chicken, potato salad, a French stick. Things Jen never usually ate. Her mother had eaten it all up, and gazed about. ‘This is just lovely, Jenny.’ She had even asked a Japanese tourist to take a photo in front of a stand of paperbarks, which was a turnabout. Jen still had it somewhere. She had been struck, when she saw it, by how much she looked like her mother, and how much her mother looked like someone else.
Jen took a drink from her water bottle. Fantails and honeyeaters flitted about as if she wasn’t there, well accustomed to walkers and photographers.
There were pictures everywhere. The spiky zigzag leaf of the wattles she had seen only here – Acacia hubbardiana – as if they had been cut with pinking shears, or the flaking trunks of paperbarks, shedding stories. She had drawn from this scene many times and would draw it again. She lay back on a cushion of grass trees and held up her hands to reduce the frame.
It was impossible, though, to capture what it was like to be in the clearing, immersed in birdsong and soft floral scents, warm air. Not the work of one picture, but of many.
Jen scanned the undergrowth through binoculars. It was Gore Vidal who had suggested that ornithologists were tall, thin and bearded so as to imitate trees as they watched for birds. Not that she was a ornithologist. Or had a beard. Though a few unwelcome bristles had begun to appear – so who knew, given enough time. She couldn’t imagine Vidal leaving his desk and seeing any ornithologists in action out in the wilds. Perhaps he had met one at a cocktail party. Vidal had probably never seen a banksia, either; they were rarely tall and thin.
Ha. There it was: the red-backed fairy-wren. This one’s shawl was more orangey than usual but still striking against the black body, the intensity of colour impossible over such tiny bent sticks for legs. She watched him hop about on a limb, enjoying his time in the sun. He was the sun.
Jen imagined ornithologists becoming more and more birdlike, nesting in their hides in the trees. Beginning, over the years, to imitate the behaviours they observed.
Ornithology would have been her first choice when deciding to do further study, but it wasn’t offered in Canberra and teaching had seemed the more sensible option. She had already gambled on her art, and failed. Teaching meant she wouldn’t have to give up drawing altogether – or so she had thought.
The return journey looped through paperbarks and scribbly gums, the occasional blackbutt. For a time the path ran parallel to an access road. A gum had come down, now a great bench seat looking back to the mountain. Jen made her way around grass trees to sit on its trunk, and run her hands over the undeciphered messages on its skin: a full body tattoo.
She returned to the path, eyes skyward, to follow the progress of a goshawk watching for small mammals she might flush from the undergrowth. Jen crossed over a brackish creek on stone steps, listening to its trickle and tell. The banks were lined with bent she-oaks, their fallen needles forming an inviting brown carpet. It was always tempting to lie down in this whispering, burbling world, but it gave her the feeling she might never wake up.
Instead of crossing the access road, she continued along it, drawn by a smell. At the edge of the pine forest, she stopped and listened, gauged the slope and light. One of her earliest memories that she could be sure was her own, not born of Aunt Sophie’s stories or augmented by photographs, was of entering a forest clearing, its sharp smell, the needles crunching beneath her feet. Her parents had set her down on a bright, chequered rug and returned to the truck for something – the rest of the picnic gear, perhaps. For a few moments she had been alone in that old grove, the breeze murmuring in its needles, the outside light shafting in soft lines, and she had not been afraid.
She had always wanted to know where that forest had been and why they had been inside it, when the sun shone so brightly outside. To be sure that it was really a memory, and not some dream harking back to old Europe. But that’s what she got for not asking enough questions while her mother was still alive.
She had explored all of the pine forests for miles around, – even the plantations with their torn skylines so at odds with the soft curves of eucalypt forest – driving and on foot, and had not found the spot. Although it had felt extensive, she did not have the sense it had been a plantation; the trees had not been uniform or in rows. And yet she had walked miles of these forests, on forestry roads and trails, just in case. Of course, if it had been a plantation, it would have been cut down and consumed long ago.
This wasn’t it: too low-set, too young. She walked inside all the same. The shushing above was somehow calming, like being by the ocean. Sometimes she thought there was no pine forest, no memory. Just a dream she had latched onto, a fairytale gone wrong. She envied people with firmer childhoods, their parents pulling down album after album of pictorial evidence of time shared, of happiness and solidity.
Melting Moments
She plated up her attempt at melting moments, which were all somewhat lopsided. The kettle squealed. She turned off the gas and flipped the lid, filled their mugs almost to the brim.
The deck was wet from the rain overnight, so she had set them up inside.
‘What happened to your husband?’
Her tea scalded her tongue. His mother again. ‘Who says I had a husband?’
‘Partner, then.’
She smiled. He’d been pulled up on that one before. ‘There was someone once. A man. We’re not together now.’
‘But Mum says your name is different.’
‘I use my mother’s maiden name. Not his.’
He gathered crumbs on a damp finger. ‘But you like men, right?’
Was that the talk? ‘I like men fine, Henry,’ she said. ‘I’m just happy on my own right now.’
He chewed on that, along with another biscuit.
People seemed to think she was missing out, and maybe she was. There were not the highs, it was true, but she was better off without the train wrecks. There had been enough of those. Great blanks of life.
Outside, a treecreeper perched on the edge of the birdbath threw its head back to let loose a string of loud notes in a rippling trill, exposing its clean white throat without self-consciousness or doubt.
‘Jen?’
‘Sorry?’
‘What should I work on today? You said something about shading?’
She opened her folder. ‘You can keep going on your still life, but I want you to experiment with some different shading techniques. You seem okay with crosshatching and tonal, but there are other options: accent, lines, smudging and so on.’ She put the sheet down in front of him. ‘Is that copy clear enough?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Would you like me to go through it? Or just have a play around?’
‘I’m okay,’ he said. ‘I think I’ve done some of the lines before.’
‘Great,’ she said, watching his pencil movements. ‘Been in the water lately?’ Henry had been learning to surf – a rite of passage. She had been thinking of giving him her old boa
rd, but then there was always the idea of getting back out there herself.
‘Dad’s been too busy.’
‘What’s he do? For work?’
‘Paints houses and stuff,’ Henry said. ‘But he’s been doing more with the church. On weekends.’
A young male king parrot sat on the edge of the birdbath. She nudged Henry. He looked up, pencil paused. They watched the bird dip and swallow, one eye on them. A female called from a branch of the maple at the edge of the clearing, more cautious. When she flew off, he followed.
‘They only ever drink,’ Henry said. ‘Not wash.’
‘That’s true,’ she said. ‘I hadn’t thought of that. Perhaps if I had a deeper bath?’
Henry shrugged and returned to his drawing.
The cuckoo doves didn’t bathe either. Except when it was raining. She had burned her toast the other morning, watching a female raise one wing and then the other as if washing her armpits in the shower.
‘Do you go to church, too?’
He shook his head. ‘Neither does Mum – it’s Dad’s thing.’ He snapped a pencil lead, pushing too hard, and reached for another. ‘Mum says when he did the painting job for them, they did a job on him.’
Jen covered her mouth and composed herself. ‘Was that the pretty little church on the other side of town? Near the oval?’
‘Yeah. And the hall. Took weeks.’
‘It looks nice,’ she said. It couldn’t have been more than a few months since it was finished. Eggshell blue. Around the time Caitlin went missing, so perhaps Henry’s dad’s religion was just another passing phase. There was nothing like a tragedy close to home to focus your own fears.
Some of the boy’s lines were a bit dark today. ‘Keep your hand relaxed there, don’t forget to breathe,’ she said.
He shook out his wrist. Sighed.
‘Sometimes it’s not your drawing that’s the problem, but your connection with the subject,’ she said. ‘There’s a story there, you just have to find it.’
He blinked.
‘I think of those objects as artefacts of the forest, but you might like to think of them as something else.’
‘What’s an artefact?’
‘There’s a dictionary on the shelf behind you.’
‘You could just tell me.’
‘I could,’ she said. ‘Or you could look it up for yourself.’
He sighed but fetched the dictionary, flipping the pages over more roughly than was required. He found the word, read through the meanings. ‘But these things aren’t man-made.’
‘One definition is an object made or shaped by some agent or intelligence,’ she said. ‘Do you think we are the only creatures with intelligence?’
Henry looked at her for a moment, then stood to move the pieces.
‘Good,’ she said.
He stepped back, assessing the new arrangement through the frame of his hands, and sat once more, turning a fresh page.
She tossed another log on the fire and flicked stick ends from its edges to the centre. The lights dimmed and spluttered, but rather than switch over to the generator, she put down her book and lit some extra candles. The shorter days – and today had been a cloudy one – often meant shorter nights for reading as well.
Jen stretched out in front of the fire and watched the flames, the wood she had cut warming her once again. A train passed through the next valley, the familiar screech of metal on metal as it rounded the bends, the great shifting of air somehow comforting. Familiar. A gecko scuttled off into the rafters.
She had probably not been in a very good state of mind to make decisions then, after Craig, after her mother’s death. Aunt Sophie had suggested as much, in her gentle way.
Jen had come back looking for somewhere to call home, somewhere safe to recover. It was only now, here in her little house, that she sometimes felt something like contentment.
Still Life
She hurried her oats along with the wooden spoon, cut the flow of coffee into her mug, and set a bowl out on the counter next to the brown sugar and milk. A fantail flitted between birdbaths, only to be dislodged by a troop of white-naped honeyeaters. No robins.
Birds marked the seasons with greater accuracy than the shifting of the sun and the shortening and lengthening of days, or even the appearance of flowers, which were sensitive to the influences of rain and fluctuations in temperature. Every year, without fail, the robins disappeared for several weeks at the end of autumn, though she still didn’t know where to, or why. The first year, she had been worried they had fallen prey to the owls she heard about her every night, or worse, had eaten the termites she’d had a man out to poison, and died. Without those flashes of yellow, she had become very glum indeed.
Then, in the first few weeks of winter, they had returned. Perhaps they had been off building nests or searching for mates. Now that she knew they always came back, she could get through those colourless times.
Jen sprinkled sugar over the oats and added milk, then put the saucepan in the sink, filled it with water and left it to soak. She wiped her hands on her pyjamas, took a sip of her coffee and carried her breakfast into the studio.
She turned a new page and sat for a while before picking up her pencil. Sometimes, when you looked at a thing too long, you stopped seeing it. Today she needed to focus on what had drawn her to the nest in the first place – its shape, and relationship to the larger nest, the promise of what might have been inside.
Jen knocked on the water tank at the top of the hill. Almost empty. She crouched to shut the valve down to the house, opened the other, and walked around the vegetable patch, down to the underground tank. Something slithered away into the gristle ferns.
She uncovered the pump and switched it on, sending water chugging back uphill. More epiphytes had made their home on the shady side of the tank, which was nice, although suggesting its leaks were getting worse. Pumping up was a pain, but the extra height gave her more water pressure.
While the top tank filled, she swept the path with the old broom she kept for outside jobs. Once left out in the rain, its millet head had swelled and mildewed, turning out on one side like an asymmetrical haircut. She paused mid-swish. In some magic of the light, her forest was aglow, like Mondriaan’s Wood with Beech Trees.
Her trees were third or fourth generation survivors. There was some comfort in that – that the earth gave second chances. Brush box, with their rough, flaking trunks, flourished where others had once been, growing anywhere from open woodland to rainforest, and specialising in the transition areas between the two. Out in the open, they would spread out into a massive, broad tree. In the rich damp of the rainforest they grew fat and gnarly. Here, set close together, they were tall, thin and collegial, the heart of her wet sclerophyll forest.
Jen leaned on her broom. There was a picture everywhere she looked. She had given up trying to capture the place with the camera – it only broke things into parts. And the light was being tricksy.
The limbs of the brush box tended to horizontal, like a reaching arm, and their leaves were large and flattish. New shoots began as a pale green bud, emerging in early summer, vertically, like a flower, before opening up into a hand of leaves, giving the trees the look of a sculpted bonsai. Their real flowers were white stars, sticky with honey. For a time, the new shoots and flowers were all on display at once. As summer progressed, the leaves relaxed into a darker green, and their abundance enclosed her within the canopy. Coming into winter, the leaves dropped and thinned, allowing more sunlight in – and giving her a view out.
She resumed her sweeping, the job at hand, letting the green fall away into the background, and opening her peripheral vision – such that she was sweeping on a forest stage.
At the front deck, she changed directions with the broom, sending leaves flying over the edge into the garden bed. She stopped in front of the hanging basket. The fern was doing much better. But there was something else, someone in the nest: a scrubwren, her yellow eyes scowling ben
eath white eyebrow markings.
Jen backed away, and left the broom leaning on the wall. The top tank was overflowing, and she hurried down to switch off the pump.
While drawing her empty nest, she had imagined its lost inhabitants, trying to bring life and loss to the page. Somehow, she had drawn life to the nest instead.
Gorge
Jen headed home along the river. She tried to get down to the coast at least once a week. It was a chance to walk on the beach and swim. Today it had been too windy. Everyone was swimming inside the river mouth instead, crowded along the narrow strip of sand by the parkland.
It was also better to see specialists out of town, to avoid any gossip. Her mother, when Jen was small, refused to purchase even head lice treatments at the local chemist, but drove to one several towns away. ‘I don’t want to give them anything more to talk about,’ she’d say. She had grown up in this town, too, so she would know.
Since coming back, Jen had heard them for herself, gossiping behind the counter, caught the raised eyebrow as someone came direct from the doctor’s surgery next door with another script for Prozac or Viagra. Her doctor had referred her to the shrink as much for his location as his reputation.
Jen pulled over in a cul-de-sac by the river, beneath a straggle of paperbarks. There were flyers stapled to all the power poles, even down here. There was Caitlin, right in the middle of the windscreen. A heaviness trapped Jen in her seat. The girl was dead. All these pictures, all the fundraising in the world weren’t going to change that. She had a sister – Briony. What of her childhood, her grief? Sometimes, you had to focus on the living.
Jen unclipped her seatbelt and opened the door. The breeze was stiff, she set off with it at her back. It was high tide, the water lapping right up beneath the mangroves. A new path had been laid, winding through native plantings, piled high with fresh mulch.