Nest

by Inga Simpson

The quail were at it again. Flecked brown, low to the ground. Chirping. A covey of at least twelve scuttling off into the undergrowth with a clumsy waddle, as if they couldn’t fly. Only when she was a few feet away would they launch into the air and then plunge into cover again, watching her out of the corner of their red eyes.

  They turned up in drier years, and not always then. She hadn’t seen the pattern to it yet. Despite the dry, they looked out of place, their subtle browns showing that her world was still relatively green. It was easier to imagine them in dusty fields and dun-coloured grasses – open spaces. But the books said they also inhabited rainforest edges.

  ‘Mmm, lunch,’ her father would have said. Just to stir her up. And she would have resisted the urge to run after the birds to try to catch one. She’d had a child’s affinity with all things small in those days.

  ‘I don’t eat quail,’ she had told the birds, more than once. She did not eat birds or animals of any description. They saw her as a predator nonetheless. It was sad, their lack of trust in the human race – but understandable.

  The Bureau were at it again: ‘chance of a shower’. More than a dozen such forecasts within the last seventy-two days that had amounted to almost nothing. ‘Bollocks.’ Lil didn’t believe it either, ringing early to cancel their current regeneration project. ‘Even the wetlands aren’t wet,’ she said. ‘We’ll have to wait until it rains. And that could be some time.’

  Jen had been a little relieved; she needed an extra day in the studio. But she would try to finish early to spend some time with her own trees instead, fertilising, remulching and watering the younger citrus in the orchard.

  It hung over the town like a rainless cloud. The thing that no one was saying but everyone was thinking: it’s been too long; she’s gone and her body is buried somewhere. At the co-op, the post office, the servo, they had stopped talking about it. Waiting for whatever came next. Locking their doors and watching their children. Wanting answers – but beginning to realise they might never get them.

  Parents would share a look, over dinner, during the news: their private thanks that it was not their child who had been taken. Remembering Caitlin’s parents, living with it all, walking among them. Pretending to keep on living.

  Gum blossom covered the path in a sweet carpet. Great streamers of bark lay about the flooded gums. A robin worked to flip one over to find what was hidden beneath.

  After pumping up this morning, the underground tank was nearly empty. It was ridiculous to think that she might have to buy water in the subtropics. Her next windfall was going on an additional tank.

  The only plant thriving was the sage, imagining it had been returned to the Mediterranean, with the lack of rain and higher than usual temperatures. If there was an upside, it was that the weeds weren’t growing either.

  Jen gathered a handful of salad leaves from the vegetable patch, already wilted despite a heavy watering last night and early this morning. Only the rocket was going to make it, the rest fried off before reaching maturity. She had planted the crop a little late, but had not anticipated the sudden heat and sustained lack of rain. The tomatoes were happy, though, ripening as she watched. That was a positive; mostly they mildewed on the vine.

  Paint

  ‘How dry is it?’ Henry no longer knocked, figuring the car in the driveway and his stamping down the steps announcement enough.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It will rain tomorrow.’

  ‘Sunday, they reckon. Chance of showers.’

  Jen grinned. ‘I counted sixty iris out this morning; it will rain tonight.’

  ‘Whoa,’ he said, seeing the easel set up on the deck, cradling a small, home-stretched canvas.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Today we’re going to paint.’

  ‘You mean I’m going to paint.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  He pushed up his shirtsleeves, a little ragged on the edges and spotted with stains in the way of boys’ clothes.

  ‘I don’t want you drawing first, or worrying too much about shape or definition. Just prepare your pallette and focus on the colours.’

  He forced some white out of the tube. ‘How long since you used these?’

  ‘A while,’ she said. ‘You can help me use them up.’ Modern organic oils were too bright for realist landscapes. Even around here. She had spent all her Henry money on four new pots from a fellow who was making paint in the old style using the mineral pigments of the masters.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Why leave it so long?’

  ‘I wanted to focus on the drawing,’ she said. ‘And I lived in an apartment, for a time, which didn’t help.’

  Their life became geared up around the trips away. It was easier to pack a sketchpad. And she had wanted to shed the bird lady tag. Craig had latched onto that one, especially once she became thin and angular with all the walking and, in the beginning, making love all over the landscape. There was something about a rushing stream, mossy bank or freshly plumbed cave, that fired up the earthier part of the connection between them. That had been enough – more than enough – for a time.

  Henry sorted his greens first, then brown and blue.

  ‘Did you know that green is one of the hardest colours to create?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, it’s all around us, right? Natural. But the old masters had the hardest time making green paint. And all the successful ones were completely toxic.’ Scheele’s green was the best, and the worst – full of arsenic. It would have been easier to clean your teeth with your paints every morning than cut off an ear or shoot yourself.

  Henry recoiled from the easel.

  ‘These paints are fine,’ she said. ‘Organic.’

  ‘Huh. Got a bigger brush?’

  ‘In the studio,’ she said. ‘But from the green jar. Not the red.’

  He wiped his hands on his school shorts and ducked inside.

  ‘You’ve been painting, too,’ he said.

  She turned. ‘That was covered for a reason!’

  He stood in the doorway, as if scared to come out. ‘Is it a man or a bird?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  He chewed the end of her paintbrush. ‘A man turning into a bird.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘I don’t think you’d want a bird to turn into a man,’ he said.

  ‘True enough.’

  She followed Henry up to the top of the driveway and paused at his mother’s window. ‘Hey, Kay.’ She smiled at Montana in the back, who looked up only briefly from her computer game. Henry opened the front passenger door, placed his bag between his feet.

  ‘Hi, Jen.’

  ‘I’m having a little show, at a gallery down on the coast. If it’s all right with you, I’d like to take Henry to help me hang the works,’ she said. ‘It will be a Sunday, in a month’s time.’

  Kay switched off the radio, turned to Henry. ‘You’re keen?’

  He nodded.

  Something was worrying her. Money, perhaps. Or sending her son off with the artsy daughter of a suspected murderer.

  ‘I thought it might be interesting for him,’ she said. ‘And he’d be helping me. There are twenty-nine pictures to hang – I couldn’t do it on my own.’ One of the kookaburras swooped over the car, prised something from beneath the mango tree in the orchard. ‘It’s not a lesson,’ she said. ‘And I’ll shout him lunch somewhere nearby. Have him back before dark.’

  ‘Sure,’ Kay said. ‘He’ll enjoy that. We don’t get out much at the moment.’

  It had turned dark and heavy outside, and the temperature had dropped ten degrees while she had been lost in her book of Margaret Olley’s interiors. What a woman. Jen’s favourite was one of her last: Yellow Room, Afternoon. No surprise there.

  Jen sniffed the air. Almost. But no rain yet. She listened to the bush, waiting. There were fresh green tips on the bunya pine. ‘Ha. It’s coming.’r />
  She sliced mushrooms for her omelette, blanched broad beans for the salad. They were on the small side, but she had grown them herself. The first spots almost didn’t register. The smell of rain on thirsty earth and dry eucalyptus leaves made it real. It was raining. Properly raining.

  She stood at the kitchen sink watching it come down, washing dust from the leaves, refreshing the lawn. Returning her forest to itself. She found herself breathing more easily, her own face and skin plumping up again. She no longer had to worry about running out of water, and all those jobs she had put off could begin. Tomorrow.

  Gutter

  She stepped off the ladder and onto the roof, taking care to place her boot on the screw line. The iron was almost rusted through and gave a little beneath her weight. Water had been getting in for some time, around the screws, rotting the timber beneath. That’s what had brought the termites.

  She threw off the larger sticks and brushed out the flashing around the chimney, swept all the leaves from the roof. It was hot already, on the iron, but she paused to look through the treetops to the mountain. Heat haze diluted blue and green, washing them together.

  She squatted by the gutters to clear out the leaves and muck, flicking them onto the garden beds below. Despite her gloves, she managed to nick her wrist on the sharp edge of the iron. Blood oozed from the ragged line. She worked her way around the section of roof. A march fly had found her already – although it was not March – drawn by her sweaty scent, buzzing around her head. She swatted at it, nearly losing her balance.

  A flock of lorikeets passed overhead, all noise, on their way to somewhere else.

  She moved the ladder around to the side of the house. Here she had to stand on the very top of the ladder to reach, flipping leaves out over her shoulder. She climbed down again, moved along a few feet, and clambered back up. Everything was still damp in the corner, where the gutter hadn’t been laid right, and her gloves were soon soaked through. She climbed back down and peeled them off.

  She had intended to do the whole lot, but the sudden heat and humidity left her light-headed and shaky. It didn’t pay to be shaky on roofs and ladders. She should have started earlier, instead of lingering over breakfast and the birds. Or waited until later in the afternoon.

  She slid off her boots, shed her stinking clothes in the laundry and stepped into the shower. She ran mainly cold water, just bearable, to get her body temperature down. The pressure, gained from gravity from the tank at top of the hill, was weak. She had to scrub at her skin to get it clean. A plumber had suggested putting in a pump, incredulous that she should still be living in the dark ages, but gravity-fed systems were quiet, required less power, and meant she was not without water in a blackout.

  Sometimes, coming into summer, she wondered what the hell she had done, moving back. She scrubbed under her nails and washed her hair, then shaved her legs and under her arms. If the weather held until midafternoon, she would get down into the water, walk along the beach. Swim.

  She dressed under the fan: shorts and a singlet. Tied her hair, still dripping, back with a band and hung up her towel. She poured herself a tall glass of iced tea and set up at the table with her books. How anyone ever got any work done further north, in the real tropics, she didn’t know.

  A pair of red-browed finches chirruped about the pond, picking insects from grass stems and heads. The flashes of red over their brows and on their rumps were bright against the green, their world small but complete.

  Jen took the paper from the bench and sat down at the counter in the window to wait for her coffee. The post office was already busy, cars backed up waiting for a park and blocking the street.

  After-school care was in the headlines again. Legislation had been proposed to ensure that children were supervised until they had left school grounds, with no child left alone. Teachers were campaigning about the need for additional resources, and increasing demands on their time. One city principal had said on talk back radio that a school’s role was to educate children, not parent them, enraging her community.

  On the drive home, she slowed to get a better look at the paper sign taped to a bloodwood on the side of the road: MISSING PARROT. A male Eclectus. Two hundred dollar reward. Ha! If she was lucky enough to see him, she would not be ringing his captors. He would be vulnerable, if he were still alive, it was true – and lonesome – but at least he was free. He hadn’t flown off because he was happy with his grain-fed life behind bars, that much was sure. He would be most welcome in her forest.

  Backslide

  She woke early, when the rain stopped. The frogs had sung all night, reconstituted as if by magic. She dressed and hurried out onto the back deck. The air was washed clean. Green had returned to the land, moss refreshed, birds out hunting. Even the lettuces were sitting up in a way they never did after hand-watering.

  Mist drifted up the valley, enclosing the cottage and orchard with a moist caress. The bark of the spotted gums had turned orange with the rain, as if the trees had laid it all out to be wet. Or perhaps they had wanted to be bare-trunked when the rain finally came. To have an unencumbered wash. The weather bureau would do better looking at the trees and flowers and birds than all their charts and satellite images.

  The orchard had greened up, the ragtag of weeds at varying lengths she had let go now an irritant.

  She slid the ride-on into low gear and released the brake. Still the back wheel spun, midair. She had lost concentration while reversing, hitting the non-functioning brake rather than putting it in a forward gear, sending her flying back into the gutter the other side of the steep driveway.

  She hopped off, hands shaky. If it hadn’t been for the tree against which the machine was now wedged, she would have continued right down the slope. She collected sticks and half an old brick, to give the wheel some traction.

  She started the mower, released the handbrake. What the thing needed, at times like this, was a throttle. Still the wheel spun. A pair of kookaburras laughed from their position in the twin-trunked bloodwood. Jen pulled her hat down over her eyes. It was warm, humid, and more rain was coming. She needed to finish the lawn before it arrived.

  She put the machine into neutral and hopped off again. From behind, she leaned forward to release the handbrake. A little weight shifted back onto her, but it stayed as it was, anchored by the tree. She took a long breath and pushed forward with all her strength. Something popped in her shoulder and she had to strain beyond all she had, but she got the back wheels out of the gutter and onto the sealed driveway.

  Of course, now all the mower wanted to do was roll back, full force, and she was the only thing standing between it and the creek. She could not quite reach the handbrake, not without shifting her weight. She turned the steering wheel, trying to direct the machine across rather than against the slope. She strained again, one more big push, but lost more ground than she gained.

  She was doing damage in her back now; she could feel it. She turned herself around, so as to push backwards, in the hope that using different muscles would give her enough leverage. The birds had gone quiet. What breeze there was had stilled. ‘One, two, three.’

  She was superhuman, roaring with strength, inching the mower – all five hundred kilograms – up and across the slope. And then her boot slipped on a spray of gravel and all that weight came back at her. She rolled out of the way and watched the mower crash back into the gutter, out the other side and down the slope, crunching into a log.

  ‘Fuck!’

  She lay on the ground, staring up at the sky through the leaves of the bloodwood. She had all sorts of tricks, to turn the world into patterns and shapes and shades. A type of seeing that required a relaxing of focus, forgetting what you knew. In this case, forgetting about the damn mower and the pain that was coming when she stood up.

  The birds hopped and sang and flitted in the leaf light, oblivious to her ‘epic fail,’ as Henry would call it. Light in the canopy had been one of her favourite subjects for a time,
seeking to see what the birds saw, a world of dappled shades and whispering breezes, a bounty of insect life.

  For all her years of striving to see like a bird, be like a bird, in the end she was only a lumpy human. And not an especially gifted one at that. She was barely coping on the ground, let alone going to fly, and there was nothing as sad as a bird without wings.

  Help

  Glen knocked while she was still having breakfast. She hobbled to the door, tying her bathrobe more securely about her.

  ‘Morning.’

  ‘Hey.’

  ‘Saw the mower,’ he said. ‘You’re lucky you didn’t kill yourself!’

  ‘I’ll just get dressed.’

  ‘Righto. See you up there.’

  She tipped out her tea, put the plate and cup in the sink and picked up her work clothes from the laundry. They were rather ripe, after resting in sweat and petrol fumes overnight.

  It hurt to bend, to put her arm through her shirtsleeve, and she struggled to do up her buttons. Everything hurt – particularly her pride. She leaned on the front door to slide on her boots. This was what it must feel like to be really old.

  She walked up the steps and the driveway, to where Glen was standing.

  ‘You all right?’ he said. ‘Did you come off it?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Brakes not much use on a slope like that.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Gotta keep across the grain,’ he said. ‘Opposite to wood.’

  She smiled.

  ‘Righto. I’ve hooked up the tow rope. I think the ute will manage. I’ll go nice and easy – you right to steer the beast?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Don’t hop on, mind. Just kinda walk beside it. Okay?’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘I’m going to pull it right up to the top of the drive, then you can drive it across, back onto the lawn.’