Nest

by Inga Simpson

  She filled her watering can and wet the herbs down, trying to settle them back in. When she heard Henry slam the car door, she went inside to wash her hands.

  ‘Mrs Dunbar says I should enter the Regional Art Prize this year.’

  Jen looked up. ‘You should.’

  ‘It’s high school, too. And all the private schools.’

  ‘Which piece were you thinking of?’

  He shrugged. ‘The owl feather one, maybe.’

  ‘What about your portrait of Caitlin?’

  ‘She didn’t say anything about two entries.’

  ‘Do you have the form with you?’

  He extracted a crumpled piece of paper from his pencil case, flattened it out on the table.

  Jen peered at it. ‘There’s the age category – they’ll just do that based on your date of birth – and an overall prize. But there are also open categories for still life and portrait. I think you should enter both,’ she said. ‘Does it matter if you didn’t do it at school?’

  ‘Mrs Dunbar said we can enter anything, just to give it to her and she’ll organise it.’

  ‘You feel okay showing her the picture of Caitlin? No one else needs to see it, right?’ Unless it placed, in which case it would be exhibited. But one step at a time.

  He bit his lip. Fiddled with the crumbs of his muffin.

  ‘I think it’s really good, Henry. Enter it for me?’

  ‘Okay.’

  House, a Home

  The male scrubwrens had appeared. At first she thought mother and male very busy indeed, but after watching for a while, she identified several different males bringing insects. It was all action outside the front door, chirruping and flitting about. One of the books said that female scrubwrens took several mates, and as they couldn’t be sure which male was the father, they all contributed – taking the opposite approach to humans.

  She walked down the path around to the back of the house, sweeping. She did not need to whistle as she worked; the king parrots were doing that for her, one on each side of her back lawn. She bent down to gather a few clutches of leaves and sticks of a good length for lighting the fire, and turned back to the house. There, climbing one of the corner poles of the back deck, was a terrible meandering trail, all the way to the roof. Termites!

  She leaned the broom on the deck railing and placed the sticks and leaves on the top step. With her nail, she flicked off a section of crumbly tunnel. It was a white ant highway inside, some travelling up, some down, all to invisible road rules. She followed the trail along a crossbeam and into the soft timber above the back doors. ‘Great.’

  She dragged a chair over and climbed up to take a closer look, tapped the beam. They were all through the strip of oregon – it was nothing but a papery maze of tunnels, all leading inside. ‘Far out.’

  She followed the trail backwards, down and around the pole, to a section of rotting timber around the tap.

  She could call the termite man, but that would cost a few hundred dollars, and he would pump the pole full of toxic chemicals and spray the deck timbers, fussing about identifying where the termites had come from. She had fallen for it at first, until she realised that there were nests and termite-addled trees all around. There was no getting rid of them, but there was plenty of tastier wood, out there, where they belonged. It was rotting timber that drew them in.

  She dropped the sticks and leaves in the kindling basket, slipped out of her shoes and padded inside to put the kettle on. She could see the little train continuing inside now, climbing the beam up towards the peak of the ceiling. How had she missed all that? Daydreaming.

  The kettle squealed. She turned off the gas, filled an infuser with leaves – a new herbal concoction promising calm – and sat on the back deck.

  She sipped her tea. The robins came hopping about near the termite workings she had unveiled, pecking up the wriggling morsels, which gave her half an idea.

  She fetched the vacuum cleaner from the laundry cupboard, plugged it into the power point on the deck and began sucking up the termites, workings and all. They showered down all over her, into her hair, biting her arms as they plummeted, confused. She pushed the brush into the corners and dragged it along the beam, making her way down the pole until all sign of their trail was gone.

  She went through the same process inside, wherever she could reach. After something of a wrestle, she managed to return the vacuum cleaner, full of dying termites, to the cupboard. She put on gloves to apply surface spray at the point where the timber munchers had entered the house, to the beam they had infested, and around the rotten timber by the tap.

  She removed her gloves and washed her hands and arms, the flare of red marks evidence that termites were quite fierce in their own way. She sat down with her cold tea to watch the robins pecking up the last strays from the table and deck.

  It didn’t pay to relax her guard; the house needed her and she needed it.

  Flight

  She lay in bed listening to the birds. The sky was clear, sounds carrying clean and far in the cool, dry air. She frowned at the warbling of currawongs, close by, for the second morning in a row. Their song was pretty, but if they stayed, they would scare her small birds away. The canopy was thinning, giving predators a clearer view. Their range was spreading because of clearing and climate change.

  She stretched out her limbs and back, yawned. Sunlight streamed in over her bed. ‘Up, up, up.’

  Something about the light, and breakfasting alone, had her thinking of her mother’s house. Once her father had left, her mother had lost her centre. Perhaps she had never had one of her own, just the appearance of constancy through being anchored to her father. As it had turned out, he was not one to set your course by, but without him Jen’s mother was buffeted this way and that by whatever the wind blew in.

  Once the Brethren had set her back on her feet, there was the Bowen ‘cleansing therapist’ who ran a neat store in the old main street for a time, and for whom her mother had been a part-time receptionist. Her mother had a corresponding health kick, an overly organised home and a stack of expensive hardcover books from the States. She had taken Jen along for a colonic irrigation in hope it would cleanse her ‘moods’. It hadn’t. Though she had been pleased to weigh in several pounds lighter that night.

  Then there was the community bank manager. Her mother’s wardrobe went from rainbow to monotone, and their financial affairs were at least temporarily in order. Until he was transferred out west.

  Her mother found some work at the co-op, which led to a revival of the flowing coloured clothes, a house stocked with vitamins, wheat shoots and carob, a tattoo on her ankle and a new library of soft-covered books on permaculture, organics and clean living.

  It drove Jen crazy – albeit from a distance by then – and sometimes she had not been able to stop herself thinking that if that’s who her mother really was, she understood why her father had slipped his mooring.

  She shut the front door behind her and leaned on the wall to put on her boots. The scrubwrens had been chattering since sunrise, their feeding program struggling to keep up with their babies’ growing appetites, despite the extra help. She stopped. A chick was out of the nest, all scrawn and skin, a single spiky feather protruding from its back. It was hanging from the basket by its neck, beak wide and gasping.

  Scrubwrens were hopping about in the fern, and one flew close to the chick, landing briefly on the chain securing the pot and their nest, chittering and fussing all the while. But there wasn’t much she could do without hands. One of the males returned with a worm. Jen peered into the nest. There was still at least one chick inside. They usually only had two or three. Had they tried to cast one out to focus on the other, intending it to land hard on the deck below? Was there something wrong with it? It seemed unlikely that it had crawled there itself. Its skin was transparent, revealing its insides – stomach, lungs and veins. Its slowing heart. It wouldn’t live long out in the morning cold. Still, Jen hesitated. She should
n’t interfere.

  She slipped her hand up inside her sleeve and lifted the chick free of the basket edge, placing it back at the entrance to the nest. Surely they hadn’t meant for it to die. She forced herself up to the vegetable patch and began a half-hearted weed of one of the beds.

  She slowed as she approached the front deck. The nestling was no longer in the opening of the nest, and for a moment she allowed herself a rescuer’s smile. She had been worried that the parents would reject it. Or not be able to get it back inside.

  Then she saw the bodies of both chicks on the boards beneath the hanging basket. She dropped down beside them. ‘No.’ The breeze fluttered the fluff on their little heads. One was dead, neck broken. The other was still breathing. A scrubwren flittered and chirped around Jen and the spilled chicks. Distressed. The mother, surely. Was it Jen’s fault for interfering? Did they hold her responsible?

  There was no saving them now; they were too young, too damaged. She should put the still gasping one out of its misery, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t make herself crush it or freeze it or break its neck or any of the things she should do; she just couldn’t take a creature’s life.

  She slid out of her boots and retreated inside. It was a miserable day. She washed her hands and dried them on the towel then padded over to put on the kettle. Birds were fussing all around the house, the word of alarm or distress sounding far and wide. It was most unsettling. She could not get the image of those two little bodies out of her head.

  Dry

  Jen’s skin had shrunk, like all of the timber in the house. It was a record dry spell: fifty-six days without rain. Her face was tight, hands flaky, her back itching, as if she was wintering down south, where she had always felt desiccated. Craig had rubbed moisturiser into her back through winter, his hands as soothing as the cream. Her own attempts to smear it onto those areas she could reach after her shower were just not the same.

  The gesture had been, in part, an apology for keeping her in the cold and the dry. Although they had spoken about moving to northern New South Wales – to be closer to lush forests, rivers and the ocean – they were waiting for her to finish college, and then he had scored a job with one of the better state schools. He had rented a flat and she had moved in to save money. It all made perfect sense at the time, and perhaps it still did.

  It was to be more than twenty years before she moved north again, but she had soon adapted, shifted back. Forgotten what had gone before. So much so that the cooler months now felt like a Canberra winter. The summers were so humid that late winter and spring felt dry, and they were. The screen doors no longer closed, retreating from their catches by a quarter of an inch. One of the kitchen cupboards had developed the same problem, swinging open with a creak whenever she walked past, or in the middle of the night.

  She imagined the native mice – Antechinus flavipes – prising it open with their hands, and hosting midnight feasts of dry pasta, flour, oats and sugar. Or perhaps pushing their way out under the cover of darkness, having sneaked in while the door was open, only to have her close it on them. The colder weather, and the dry, always brought them in. They seemed to view her cottage as their cold store larder, or winter house, so a self-opening cupboard was not ideal. Not that doors necessarily kept them out; somehow the mice could flatten themselves to get through the tiniest of gaps. They dwelled in the spaces inside the walls, especially near the stove, where it was warm. They were cute creatures, with their dark eyes, long tails and jerky movements, and at first she didn’t mind sharing her home. Hearing them hop down the stairs to the kitchen for breakfast was quite companionable, but they soon began to make a mess – and smell.

  She had found a swarm of babies once, in a drawer of her desk, dozens of the little wretches in a messy nest – a mest – of receipts and leaves and, from goodness knows where, a gob of wool. She had pulled the whole drawer out, in disgust, and carted it outside. Several of the young, with more initiative than their siblings, had scampered away into the corners of the room, while their mother looked on from the rafters. The rest clung to home, too afraid to move, as they sailed outside into the world.

  They were too young to release into the bush. She had found a plastic bag to tip the whole lot into, intending to put them to sleep in the freezer. But they had looked up at her with such imploring eyes, as if understanding that their lives were in her hands, and she had let them out beneath the trees, to give them a fighting chance. The mother had come and carried her pink babies away a few at a time, clinging to her thighs. Each of those mice had probably had a dozen families of their own by now, and soon she would be overrun.

  She gathered sticks and leaves, filling the fireplace cavity and her basket by the back door. She had enough wood cut for another day or so and didn’t feel like disturbing the stillness by starting the chainsaw.

  Fairy-wrens flitted and flirted in the grevilleas, treecreepers sang their way up trunks. Jen filled her watering can and topped up the birdbaths.

  It wasn’t quite ‘the dry’ of the tropics, but by the end of winter, her forest was a different country. Moss and mould had disappeared, and the leaf cover thinned, allowing a view out to the valley. The colours paled, green to brown; the light softened. It was pleasant to work in the sun through the middle of the day. She lingered inside longer, ate breakfast and dinner in front of the fire. Vines and creepers died and fell back, and a coating of gravel dust built up on the leaves near the road. The place began to resemble bush. Dry sclerophyll rather than wet.

  She cut a piece of rye bread and dropped it in the toaster, then sliced a piece of cheese to put on it.

  Her father had worked flat-out all winter, when cutting timber was easy, he said. He also used to say it never went sixty days without rain, and the high cloud moving in suggested he was right.

  She heard them before she saw them. Currawongs at the birdbaths. She ran through the house and out onto the back deck. ‘Hey!’

  They flew off – rather guiltily – and came to rest on a branch downhill. Still too close.

  ‘I said HEY! You interlopers.’

  They flew off a little farther, to the other side of the creek.

  ‘That’s better.’ She looked around. Listened. It was too late; not a small bird in sight. Not a chirp.

  She emptied and cleaned the birdbaths, soiled with regurgitated, seed-filled muck, and refilled them with cool, clean water. Henry had once spotted her trying to rescue a moth from the waiting tongue of a gecko, and said she shouldn’t interfere with nature, and he was right, but she needed her birds around her. She had created a space they considered safe, and it was her job to keep it that way.

  Break

  She was halfway through rubbing butter into flour before she remembered it was school holidays. Henry would not be drawing today. She sighed. At least she had known what day it was.

  She kept on with the scones, nonetheless; she could do with a treat. She had woken to the deep grunting of a male koala outside her window in the night, and the high-pitched scream of the female. Mating season had begun. Jen had smiled in the dark, knowing she wouldn’t be getting much sleep, but relieved to know they were still out there – and breeding.

  Her mixture now resembled breadcrumbs, as the recipe said it should. A pair of bar-shouldered doves roamed the lawn. They worked from one end towards the other, on opposite sides but coming closer together now and then. Cooing. She would have to look up what it was that they liked to eat, from among the grass in her little clearing, at this time of year.

  Henry had said they were going to Stradbroke for a week, which wasn’t far but a world away. Camping, he said. She had asked him for a drawing, which was probably a bit mean. He didn’t need homework in the holidays, but going to new places meant seeing new things with fresh eyes, and that was good for his training.

  She had never been on a family holiday. Except that week in Sydney with Aunt Sophie. Going on the Manly ferry and visiting Taronga Zoo were the highlights of her childhood.


  She looked up at the sudden whack against the window above her desk: a bird trying to fly through. The trouble with so many windows and, possibly, keeping them so clean, was that the birds saw a path through the house. Or perhaps they didn’t even see it as a house. She stood and leaned out, searching the ground below. A rufous fantail lay motionless among the leaves.

  She raced to the door, slid into shoes and ran around the house. It was limp and still, its pretty tail spread. All she seemed to do lately was kill birds.

  But she was not without hope. She had been caught out before, beginning to bury a female rosella only to have it return to life. This fantail, too, might just be in shock. She took off her shirt and gathered the bird up, carrying it inside – lest it become lunch for a kookaburra or currawong. She popped shirt and bird in a box and sat it inside the open front door.

  When she had finished setting up her watercolours and brushes and changed the water in her jar, she checked on the bird. She found it blinking – as if waking from a deep sleep. She would have liked to believe he knew her as a friend and didn’t blame her for hanging invisible glass weapons in his way. She opened the shirt up a little, resisting the urge to caress him, and backed away.

  Sketching out the next robin piece was the most difficult part – committing pencil to paper.

  The fantail was scrabbling against the cardboard, confusing the image in her head. Rufous over yellow. She focused on the lead trailing across the grain of the page, and the robins returned to the foreground, where they preferred to be.