Nest

by Inga Simpson

  Jen fetched her gloves from the seat of the ute, and walked downhill with Lil. ‘Would you consider getting more help?’

  ‘A carer? I guess I feel like I should do that myself,’ Lil said.

  Jen had felt the same guilt when her own mother reached that stage, though she had never seriously contemplated caring for her. And she’d had the excuse of working full-time. ‘What about the aged-care facility in town? Or the one up the mountain.’

  ‘Put her in a home?’

  Jen stopped and put her hand on Lil’s shoulder. ‘I’d hate it, too. But my mother picked up once she went in. Enjoyed the company. And the attention.’

  ‘At least they could put her on a drip if she refused to drink.’

  Jen laughed. ‘Exactly.’

  Called

  She took her time on the road down from the mountain. It was steep and winding, and the view out to the coast spectacular. There had been a rockfall since she came through earlier, partly blocking the other lane. Jen pulled over onto what verge there was and got out. Whipbirds cracked and chided. She stood for a moment, listening for traffic. It was just her and the birds, and a tractor doing some slashing in the valley below. She crossed the road and rolled the rocks off into the gutter, one by one. The largest of them was shaped like a giant toad, and would look good in her bromeliad garden.

  Again she listened for traffic and, hearing nothing, bent her legs to heft the stone. She staggered across the road, holding it against her body, and just managed to lift it over the edge of the ute’s tray.

  She puffed to get her breath and leaned on the ute as a sports car sped past, throwing up what was left of the rockfall detritus.

  Down the lane, a little ahead, black cockatoos started making a fuss in a big old grey gum. Dozens of them. They were squawking and carrying on – for what reason, it wasn’t clear. Jen bunched a tarp around the rock to try to stop it rolling about and climbed back into the cab.

  The lane meandered off into the foothills. She nosed along, stopping close by the tree where the cockatoos were making such a ruckus. Jen lowered the window and raised her binoculars. The birds seemed to be getting grubs from high up in the tree – borers, most likely – which was generating a great deal of excitement. A celebration of abundance.

  The sun was warm on her face, all the noise somehow cheering. Having finally delivered the pieces to the gallery, she did feel a little lighter. She was pleased with the wenge, in the end, setting off the robins’ eyes. Only tourists ever went through the gallery, and they tended to buy up all of the local landscape painter’s works – brightly coloured hills topped with mad houses – but the robins would at least get some sort of showing.

  It was the best time of year. The air so clear. The colours so bright. The country steepened behind the old grey gum, and the lane disappeared around a corner into a patch of pine forest. The light was so soft, it was almost like a wash over the scene. Pine forest?

  Jen stopped. Lifted her binoculars once again. The hair on her arms prickled. She started the Hilux and released the handbrake, leaving the cockatoos, who seemed to have settled down now, behind her. The road narrowed, dipped, then climbed again. The fence by the road was old and tumbling, disappearing into grassy tussocks. She held her breath as she rounded the bend.

  The pines were over a ramp, on private property. Something about the row of mailboxes, battered old four-gallon drums, felt familiar. She stopped short of the entrance. Brown needles spilled out over the driveway. Her foot slipped off the clutch and the Hilux stalled.

  It was more a feeling than any definite recognition or familiar feature; this was the place she had hung on to. She struggled with the doorhandle, dropping her sunglasses on the floor. The air was pungent with pine sap, persisting beyond memory, and distinct from the wet and dry sclerophyll of her more everyday experience.

  It was barely a forest, an acre or two given over to pines. Probably planted in the early twentieth century. She stepped onto the narrow strip of dirt.

  Jen slid off her shoes to walk on the pine needles. A crow called. She followed the path woven around fat trunks, their eighty or so years of growth more solid than her own, to the clearing within. Her vision spun loose, a blur of russet thatch and flaking trunks, interrupted light. It could be anywhere: any forest, any country, any time. And she was nowhere, stranded between her childhood and now.

  Dry needles cut into her knees. A breath of wind had the trees whispering and shushing above her. Surely the memory would come freely here. Answers.

  Nothing.

  The movement was all around, only she was still. Half her life had gone by – like this.

  She forced herself up and back down the path to the ute, driver’s side door still open.

  Jen passed a yurt and two A-frames, one of the many communal titles that gave away the area’s hippie roots. The road’s potholes sent the Hilux lurching. She loosened her grip on the wheel and dipped her head to see better, each bend promising something familiar, until she ran out of road.

  She pulled up by an old carport, an original structure by the look of it, piled high with evenly cut wood. An old man emerged from between two coffee bushes.

  She opened her door and placed her foot on the ground. As if that would steady her. ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘I’m Jen. Jen Anderson.’

  ‘Wayne.’

  ‘I was Jenny Vogel,’ she said. ‘Your pine grove. I have this memory of having a picnic there when I was a child.’

  ‘Picnic?’

  She stood and leaned on the ute door. ‘With my parents. Peter and Carol. I was only small.’

  ‘Well, we had some great parties in there,’ he said. ‘But I don’t think they would have brought you along.’

  A brush turkey patrolled the edge of the lawn. Beyond, lantana and privet were taking hold.

  ‘Place has got away from me a bit,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you come inside. I was just going to have a cuppa.’

  She followed him into a hexagonal room overlooking the forest.

  ‘Might we have been visiting you?’

  He busied himself with putting the kettle on and throwing some more wood on the fire. ‘It was the seventies, yeah?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘We were all hippies then, and young,’ he said. ‘Thought we were real alternative.’

  Except, unlike the hippies she read about, they had cut down forests instead of saving them.

  ‘Course, a lot of that’s back in fashion now, just been rebadged. Slow living. Organic.’

  Jen smiled.

  ‘We all grew our own stuff back then. Swapped and bartered.’

  The kettle whistled but Wayne didn’t get up. He watched her, forehead wrinkled, waiting for something.

  ‘Oh!’ She laughed. ‘They were scoring pot.’

  ‘Sorry, love, didn’t want to just come out with it. In case you’re all evangelical or something. Coffee?’

  ‘Yes, please.’

  ‘I grew vegetables, too,’ he said. ‘But we had a little business on the side. Good stuff, and just for friends.’ He filled the plunger with boiling water.

  ‘And my father would drive up here to get it?’

  ‘Sometimes,’ he said. ‘Didn’t usually bring you or your mum, though.’

  ‘Maybe he left us in the pine grove, came back,’ she said. ‘I remember a picnic rug.’

  ‘Could be,’ he said. ‘He did take her there on a picnic when they were dating. Said there was a little magic to the place, that anything was possible. Course, a smoke or two helped.’ He waited, then pushed down the plunger and filled two old mugs.

  Jen rescued hers from Wayne’s shaking hands before it spilled over the newspapers on the table. Her father had said once, a little tipsy, that he had asked her mother to marry him in a fairy grove. And her mother, after he had left, said that she had been a fool to marry a man always so far away with the fairies.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Your dad and I were pretty good friends, for a time
,’ he said. ‘Ever hear from him?’

  Jen shook her head. ‘You?’

  ‘No, love.’ He swallowed a mouthful of his tea. ‘Would’ve liked to. Never made much sense, him taking off,’ he said. ‘He really loved your mother.’

  Jen slowed as she passed a schoolgirl walking home. She watched her in the rear-vision mirror until the car going the other way had disappeared over the hill. She was as bad as all the parents around town. Overcompensating. Trying to fix what could not be changed; they had let a child down.

  And now they were letting them all down – to assuage their own guilt. It was one thing for the adults to be watchful, vigilant, as the papers suggested, but all their anxiety was absorbed by the children, at the very time in their lives when they should have no fears or worries. You had to prepare children for the realities of the world – she wasn’t in favour of cottonwool – but she preferred to see their characters free to form within a bubble of endless possibility rather than limited by a world of horror and restrictions.

  They had gone to Fraser Island once, when she was small. Just for the day. She remembered the feeling of swimming underwater in the blue lake, with the snorkel and mask they handed out. Flippers, too. She had not known then to walk backwards up the beach, and each time she came out to tell her parents about a turtle or fish, she had split the wide front end of the flippers – probably perished from the sun – and had to get a new pair. Neither the tour guide nor her parents had said anything, just let her go.

  The memory of swimming in the blue lake was one of freedom, oblivious to anxiety, worry or the future. Before Michael. It was hard to imagine today’s children knowing that feeling.

  One for the Road

  She paused with her cup halfway to her mouth. A pink robin had landed on the edge of the birdbath. She blinked. At least that’s what she thought it was. A dusky pink breast and fat robin shape. On its own, it seemed. No mate. She set down her cup on the table rather than clatter the saucer and reached for her bird book. The robin section was well-thumbed, and thick with notes, but this was a first. ‘Ha!’ Rose robin. Uncommon.

  It was peering at her now, but didn’t take off. She opened her book and made note of the sighting, recorded the date and time, then began making some rough sketches. It was a little smaller than the yellows, more demure. She had a mind to dedicate her day to a study of the rose robin.

  The scream of a chainsaw put an end to all that. The bird disappeared into the trees, and the morning was ripped apart.

  Jen pulled a beanie on over crumpled hair, slid into her boots, and marched up the driveway. On the side of the road, the last threads of the trunk cracked and gave way, crashing down – in treefall – and shaking the ground. The smell of cut timber tickled her nose and throat. Bloodwood, probably; their resin gave off a smell almost like flesh. Particles were caught in the light.

  Three orange-shirted fellows encircled her mailbox, one with an axe resting on his shoulder.

  Jen stopped just short. ‘Can I help you?’

  ‘This has to go. We’re widening the road. Sealing it.’

  She sneezed. ‘I got the notice. But it said you were stopping at my boundary.’

  ‘There’s extra money now – we’re going further.’

  Jen noted the string of trees marked with fresh pink ribbon. ‘Well, no one has talked to me about it. So perhaps you could initiate a conversation before taking to my property with an axe.’

  ‘It’s on council land.’

  ‘The mailbox is on the side of the road, like everyone else’s, so that the mail delivery person can pull over and put my mail in it,’ she said. ‘And I’m pretty sure it’s on my land. As are the majority of those trees. Perhaps you would like to confirm where the boundary lies, and get me something in writing?’ Which would give her a chance to object, on paper, rather than placing her body between them and the machines.

  One of the fellows behind the axe-wielder smirked. The woman by the side of the road holding the sign spun it to slow and let a trickle of traffic through. Jen returned a wave from Alan, her neighbour from up the road. Great, caught standing on the side of the road still in her pyjama pants, for all to see. Tyres growled on the raw gravel. The mailbox, handmade from an old packing case, had been a gift. It was a bird house, the sense of humour of her found-artist friend, Geraldine, before she moved back to Western Australia. Jen was fond of its little rails and deck, and the circular hole, although it meant the postie had to roll up her mail to deposit it. It was in sympathy with the setting, and to scale with the landscape – unlike the standard little metal boxes.

  The axeman examined the base of the pole it was resting on. ‘We could shorten this. Reset the base.’

  She breathed. ‘If, in fact, it is on council land.’

  ‘Right,’ he said. ‘And just move the box back.’

  ‘Fine,’ she said. And sneezed.

  ‘I’ll talk to head office and get back to you.’

  ‘Righto.’ She turned and headed back down to the house. The woodchipper roared, jaws hungry for freshly cut trunks.

  Jen had tried working through the rumble of the grader and the beep beep beep of reversing machinery, without success. She took her sketchbook and an apple down to the far end of the block and lay against a log.

  Her father had loved trees, in his way. He appreciated the physicality of them, the process of bringing them down, transporting them, and turning them from tree to lumber. He admired big trees, in particular, standing back, hands behind his head, to take in their height and girth. He would caress their trunks, assess the timber within, and gauge the best place to cut. After they came down, with a great crash that shook the earth on which he stood, throwing up a cloud of forest dust, he would admire the grain across their stump, breathe in the scent from their fresh-cut wounds. He loved them as he killed them.

  He supported selective logging rather than total annihilation, and abhorred waste, bringing home scraps to burn in the fire or to build something from one day. He believed in using the whole tree, breaking it down as if it were an animal he had killed. And he knew no other work. He needed to put food on the table, and it was the job of the timberman to drive the forest from the country.

  Jen put a hand on the log on which she leaned. She was a timber child, grown from fallen trees and sawdust. Standing on stumps before she knew them for carcasses and gravestones. She had counted centuries’ worth of rings – a knowledge of fire and a rainforest world reaching back far beyond the arrival of the white ships – without any consciousness of loss.

  As a child, Jen told her father that the trees spoke to her, and he had not seemed surprised. They spoke to her still. They gentled her, had allowed her to put down roots, and extend them – albeit tentatively – into the ground.

  Turkey

  Jen stepped out of the shower onto the bathmat. She reached for her towel, gathering it around her like a great cape, but her skin had already goosebumped. She padded out to the fire to dress. Although the sun was shining, the house, still in the shade of the trees, was cool; it was the time of year when it was often warmer out than in.

  The log she had dragged inside burned red at one end and smoked from the other, like a fat cigar. She had just pulled on her jeans when she heard the scratching at the herb garden at the side of the house. She burst through the doors onto the deck and down the steps to catch the brush turkey red-necked, spraying mulch over the path and lawn.

  ‘Piss off, you ugly buzzard!’

  Just when she got a garden bed settled, along came a turkey and dug it all up.

  It stepped down the lawn, head bobbing, crop swinging, but slowed after a few metres and looked about.

  ‘Go on, or I’ll eat you for dinner. Brainless fucking bird!’ She bent to pick up a stick fallen from the rose gum, long and straight. She lifted it above her shoulder and threw it like a javelin. What was left of her bare breasts slapped with the effort. The stick flew through the air and struck the bird in the rump, bouncing off i
nto the lomandra. The bird ran on down the slope towards the neighbours’, making the noise of an animal three times its size on dry leaves.

  She was a little relieved she hadn’t managed to spear the bird – she had never been much good at javelin, that had been Phil’s area of athletic prowess. Her father had brought a turkey home – accidently killed on site – when she was a child. His rule had been that if you killed an animal you had to eat it. Or perhaps times were tougher then than she remembered. After her mother had prepared it for the oven, it did resemble a turkey bought from the supermarket or butcher. She had tried to approach the dinner table with an open mind, but the bird had been tough and gamey and she didn’t fancy eating one again.

  Some of the hippies hanging on in the area still had the same ideas. She had heard someone tell a story at the co-op, of eating the goanna they had killed to protect their hens’ eggs, as if it made them self-sufficient. Since the goanna belonged and the chooks didn’t, it would have been fairer, and tastier, just to eat the hens.

  But who was she to talk, a middle-aged woman standing half-naked in the middle of the lawn. Henry was due soon and she was within clear sight of the driveway.

  She scurried inside to finish dressing, hung up her towel, and combed the tangles out of her hair with her fingers. The woman in the mirror bore less and less resemblance to her imagined self. Neither young nor old, her hair more grey than brown; she was slipping into a hinterland all of her own, and mirrors were best avoided. She rubbed vitamin E cream into her cheeks and lips, dry from the cooler air and tending the fire.

  She sat on the step to put on socks and boots. Soaked up the sun. A fantail in the birdbath splashed water over her shirtsleeve from above.

  The lemon thyme was uprooted, splayed out on the path. She replanted it, gathered up mulch and patted it down around it. At this time of year, the brush turkeys came in looking for food, though she suspected they also enjoyed scratching loose soil and mulch around. Making a mess. They were the only native birds that she wished ill.