by Inga Simpson
She opened up the laptop. Waited. Friday, the calendar said. There was an email from Aunt Sophie. Hoping she was okay. Apologising. Four days ago. Jen scrolled down. Nothing else worth looking at.
She opened the bio she had spent days fiddling with, all those careful sentences detailing her professional achievements and family connection to the area. She selected the text and pressed backspace – on purpose for once. She stared at the blank page. She had a great deal in common with that page. Jen Blank.
She tapped her fingers on the desk. Looked out the window at the warm brown trunks. Imagined herself swinging from a branch again. Free as a bird. Finally, she typed a sentence: Jen Anderson is a local artist with a particular interest in birds. She copied and pasted her major achievements from her résumé. That would have to do.
The birds were making such a fuss off the deck it could only mean one thing. Snake. Jen leaned out over the railing. The Lewins and white-naped honeyeaters were flying about, dipping and calling. A baby python wound its way up a tree, thinking itself well-camouflaged and obscured by vines, but the birds were sounding an early warning for all to hear. ‘Snake, snake!’ Other species understood the snake alarm, and frogs and bandicoots and so on would have already tuned in and taken off to make their families safe. She felt a little sorry for the snake, with his specially designed camouflage, who thought himself a master of stealth; how did he ever manage to catch a feed?
She poured a glass of wine and sat out on the deck with the birds. It was the shrug that made her wild. Craig had been quite cheerful on the way home from the barbecue, droning on about some new abseiling gear Ken had shown him, and ideas for their next big trip. If he noticed she was quiet, he chose not to acknowledge it, or perhaps that was why he was so chatty. She had forgotten she’d said she would drive, and having had several too many wines, was also keeping her eye out for police.
He was right. They hadn’t discussed it. Not since early days, and none of that had been very realistic. Still, she fumed. That shrug. As if it was nothing. That he would presume to speak for her in front of their mutual friends. It was always the woman people judged when a couple decided not to have children; she was the one going against biology. Against nature.
It was as if a door had been opened and a light had come on. She saw his arrogance after that, all that she had been blind to. He probably wondered at her new-found prickliness – insisting he do more of the housework, or snapping whenever he made a sexist remark or put some tedious triathlon on the television without asking – but she had just been trying to find spaces to assert herself in.
Shrink
‘Sorry about last time,’ she said.
He looked over his glasses, typing straight into his tablet, or whatever he called it. Prescribing her a tablet might be more productive. ‘Everything all right?’
‘Fine,’ she said. ‘I went camping. Just lost track.’
‘How long were you away?’
‘A few days.’
He wrote that down. ‘And how was that?’
‘Camping?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good. It was good to get away.’
‘How long had it been?’
‘A few years,’ she said.
His hands paused.
‘Seven,’ she said. Though it was closer to ten.
‘The first time on your own?’
Since Craig. ‘Yes.’
He typed. Left one of his little pauses. ‘And how did your trip to see your aunt go?’
Jen frowned at the artwork opposite the clock. A bright abstract print. Just what you’d expect in a shrink’s office. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘She’s getting old.’
‘How does that make you feel?’
‘Old.’
He had stopped typing. It was encouraging, really. She had always suspected he was actually emailing his lover, not listening at all to her whining. ‘Did you stay with her?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Just tea and cupcakes.’ The bowl of green apples in the middle of the side table was the best thing about the room. What would he do if she walked over and picked one out to eat? ‘And calvados.’
He smiled. ‘Calvados?’
‘The apple liqueur.’
‘I know the stuff,’ he said. ‘It’s quite a long drive just for tea and cupcakes, isn’t it? Even with calvados.’
She picked at a thread sticking out from the seam of her pants. ‘I asked some questions,’ she said. ‘Something I’d come across. It turns out that my father is not my father.’
He typed. More quickly – or so it seemed.
‘My mother had an affair with her sister’s boyfriend. My aunt’s boyfriend.’
‘Your aunt told you this?’
She nodded.
‘Do you think your father knew?’
‘He found out,’ she said. ‘The man – my real father – came to town.’ Stan the man.
His fingers moved over the screen but made no sound. ‘And where does this leave you, Jen?’
‘I guess it explains a few things,’ she said.
‘Such as?’
‘Why my father left.’
‘And how do you feel about that now?’
She swung her legs, in the hot seat. The man was just too damn neat and controlled, always pushing at her. ‘It’s better than not knowing,’ she said.
‘What about when your aunt told you – how did you feel?’
‘Angry.’
‘Tell me about that,’ he said. ‘Angry at who?’
‘Everyone! My aunt. My mother. My father. The other man.’ Her real father.
‘Why your mother?’
‘She lied,’ she said. ‘I felt sorry for her. They all lied, for years and years. My whole life was a lie.’ She was a damn cuckoo, raised by others out of some weird sense of obligation.
‘All of it?’
‘Yes.’
‘You have strong memories of your time with your father. Does this change any of that?’
Jen began to sniffle and reached for a tissue from the box in front of her.
‘Does knowing this change that?’
She blew her nose. ‘Yes! He’s not even my father.’
‘Isn’t he? He raised you. Loved you,’ he said. ‘You loved him.’
Great. Now tears were streaming down her cheeks. And he just sat there in his neat fucking silence. ‘He still left me. Changed his mind when he realised I wasn’t blood.’
‘It sounds like he left the relationship with your mother. I imagine it would have been difficult for him.’
‘And never contacted me again.’
The shrink put down his tablet. ‘We don’t know what happened,’ he said.
She shrugged.
‘What about your biological father?’ he said. ‘What’s his name?’
‘Stan Overton.’
‘Do you want to get in touch with him?’
Jen shook her head.
‘Why is that?’
‘He didn’t try particularly hard, either,’ she said. ‘Having split everything apart. I’m done chasing after people.’
He paused, lowered his voice. ‘It’s pretty tough for you to find this out now.’
Jen felt more sorry for the little girl she had been. So trusting. So stupid.
‘It’s a lot to process. But I’m pleased you went camping,’ he said. ‘I think that was important.’
She wiped her nose.
‘How are things going for the exhibition?’
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I’ve been working on another new piece. A painting.’
‘That’s great,’ he said. ‘Especially with all this going on. Tell me about it?’
‘It’s a self-portrait,’ she said. ‘Of sorts.’
‘Have you done anything like that before?’
‘No,’ she said.
‘Interesting.’
His smile didn’t reveal exactly what was interesting, but a smile was as good as it got in this room.
‘When do you
think you’ll finish?’
‘This week,’ she said. ‘If it stays fine.’
‘I’m impressed,’ he said. And then the pause. ‘Is that an okay place to end up for today?’
Jen shoved her tissue in her pocket and stood. He held the door open in a way that meant she had to pass close by his arm, in a without-touching hug. ‘Take care,’ he said.
She paid, and took two red frogs from the white bowl on the way out. At the rate he was charging, he could afford to give away a few lollies, the sugar hit no doubt intended to counter the trauma of the session.
She chewed. Sucked the last of them out of her teeth. When they were children, she and Michael had dissected red frogs at the kitchen bench, giggling, even though they weren’t meant to touch his mother’s knives.
Michael had never had to grow up and do the real thing, in high school, laying out poor frogs on the lab bench and making their legs twitch.
He’d never had to grow up at all.
Portfolio
‘I have to put together a portfolio. For my application to the creative arts program,’ Henry said.
‘Okay.’
‘Mum said you might be able to help me,’ he said. ‘Like what should go in it and stuff.’
‘It’s really just a selection of your work,’ she said. ‘But I can show you mine, if you like.’
‘Okay.’
‘Well, it’s in my studio, leaning against the other side of the drawing desk. Black.’
She sipped her tea, cold now. Somewhere above them a catbird called, heeear-I-aaam. Jen searched the treetops for the telltale patch of green, usually perched on a horizontal branch.
The boy returned with the portfolio and placed it on the table with more reverence than was warranted. She wiped off gecko poop and a layer of dust and insect crud.
‘How long since you’ve used it?’
‘A while.’
He unzipped it, spread it open like a book and stayed standing to turn the pages. He frowned at her résumé. ‘You won all these things? The Dobell Prize, the Wildlife —’
‘They were mainly just short-listings,’ she said. ‘You only need to do one page. Put your details, your prize. Your class with me, I suppose.’
‘What happened here?’
‘What?’
‘There’s all this stuff and then a big gap between 1990 and 1995, and then from 2003 until now.’
She moved their cups and plates out of the way. ‘I was teaching full-time,’ she said.
He turned the page. Examined each drawing. ‘Where can I get a folder like this?’
‘Yours wouldn’t need to be very big for now,’ she said. ‘We could even make one, if you like. I think I have the materials.’
He had stopped at the thumbnails from her first solo exhibition and bent over to examine them.
‘These are cool.’
‘Thank you.’
She had been told not to read the reviews but of course she had. The work had been a little naive, she had only been twenty-three, after all. Not long out of art school. It was expected that young artists have something to say, a little more anger, edginess. She’d had plenty of anger – she had just put her mother in yet another institution, albeit a nursing home this time – but she didn’t see that she needed to pour all that onto the page.
She had been trying to capture what, to her, was the most mysterious thing, the essence of animals and plants. It was, after all, the essence of them all – though buried deep in most cases. She was pigeonholed as a wildlife artist then, which there wasn’t much of a market for. Unless you went for that big photographic style; people seemed to snap that up.
‘I’ll get us some materials,’ she said. ‘We should get started.’
He had stopped again, frowning at one of the pieces she had done in the States: an aspen grove in a sea of leaves.
‘You don’t like it?’
‘It’s different from everything else.’
‘It’s more abstract. I worked with someone who encouraged me to explore a little,’ she said. ‘Groves like that are all one tree, one organism.’
‘Cool.’
She took a few breaths in the studio, gathered the things together and returned. ‘You can have another look later, but we should start on this.’ She plonked down the cardboard, Stanley knife and cutting board.
‘I don’t have enough to put in mine.’
‘No?’
‘There’s the one I won the prize for, the feather, the first still life, the bunya cone, and the running man.’
‘What about your animation?’
‘Oh, yeah.’
‘What else did you do in art?’
‘Pottery.’
‘Anything worth keeping?’
‘I gave a raku vase to mum. She puts flowers in it.’
‘You could take a picture of it,’ she said. ‘If you email it to me, I can print it for next time.’
He nodded and placed the A3 sheet of paper on the cardboard.
‘Okay. So you want it a bit bigger than that. Maybe a ruler-width wider on all sides.’
He picked up her old wooden ruler, whacking it down for effect, and began marking out the border in soft pencil. ‘Did they still give the cane? When you were teaching.’
‘I’m not that old!’
‘Dad says he got the cane when he was at school.’
‘Did he?’ Queensland had been one of the last to ban it from public schools. Now you couldn’t even touch the students at all. Sometimes all a kid needed was a pat on the back. It was sad.
‘So I just cut it?’
‘Yep. Make sure you keep it on the board, though. And cut away from your fingers,’ she said. ‘That’s right.’
The king parrots had varied their song, adding in a kind of chirrup. ‘Now we just need to put a hinge at the back. Two sets of two holes.’ She marked the spots with his pencils.
He picked up the hole punch, hesitated.
‘As far in as you can, that’s the way,’ she said. ‘And just one on the front.’
‘Ha!’
‘Now, do you want ribbon or metal rings for the hinges?’
‘Metal rings at the back and ribbon to tie it at the front.’
‘Good.’
‘What about the pages?’
‘We can do plain paper and attach the pictures from behind, or clear plastic sleeves.’
He looked again at hers and frowned. ‘Sleeves?’
‘I think so, too,’ she said. ‘Easier to work with.’ She watched him line the sleeves up with the holes in the card and feed the ring through. ‘Good. Do you want to put something on the cover?’
‘Like what?’
‘Your name,’ she said. ‘And what about a single frame from your animation?’
His mother tooted the horn in the driveway.
‘I forgot. I have to go a bit early today.’
‘Okay.’
He packed up his things in a hurry, struggling with all of the folder’s parts.
‘When’s it due?’ she said.
‘Not till the end of the month.’
‘You could leave it here if you like,’ she said. ‘I’ll pack up.’
‘Thanks.’
Jen held the door open and watched him jam his feet into the front of his still-laced school shoes, squashing the backs down. Not for the first time, judging from their crackled finish. It was going to be a tight race between destroying them and growing out of them.
She smiled. ‘Don’t forget about Sunday.’
‘What?’
‘The installation,’ she said. ‘I’ll pick you up about eight?’
‘Oh, yeah,’ he said. ‘Cool.’
Heat
It was too hot to draw. Her hand kept sticking to the page, even with the fan on flat-out, and the paint still hadn’t dried on her portrait – she was running out of time to apply the final touches.
She refilled her glass with iced tea from the jug and sat out the back on the deck, hoping for s
ome movement. The tops of the trees were shifting every now and then, suggesting something was coming. Usually she could rely on the cool sea breeze by early afternoon, but this weather was proving to be not only unusual but stubborn.
A tail hung down from the gutter. Jen peered up. ‘Hello?’ A young female king parrot flew down to the birdbath. The first female progeny, her green feathers lush and her red pantaloons circus-bright. She bobbed up and down to some tune of her own and peered at Jen, curious but not afraid.
Jen reached for her sketchbook and pulled a pencil from her hair, knotted up at the back. Two or three other king parrots called from nearby. They had synchronised themselves, or dropped out of sync, perhaps, to sound three slightly different notes – a family song.
She put off going to bed until after ten but the change still hadn’t come through. The cloud cover was only keeping the heat in; the stillness was oppressive. She left all the doors and windows wide open, cut the lights and lit a mosquito coil to set up in her bedroom. It was possible something larger might wander in through the night but hopefully it would soon wander out again.
Opened up, it was no longer a house, but a shelter. A bed in the forest. Even a year ago the feeling would have bothered her, left her feeling vulnerable or worried about her things, at least. Now she lay under the sheet listening to the night’s music – frogs and toads and crickets and bats and owls – quite at peace. More so, if anything.
The change had finally come; she’d had to pull the doona up from the bottom of the bed in the early morning. She didn’t bother to close up the house after breakfast, leaving everything open to catch as much fresh cool air as possible. To breathe, while she headed out to walk and breathe herself.
She followed the ridgeline, to keep the sea breeze in her face, and then cut down to the riparian zone along the creek. It was like dipping into another world, another time. Cool, dark and quiet. She climbed up onto an old stump, wider than she was high, though now hollow inside, and coated in green moss. It was well preserved, more like stone than timber, almost petrified. Cedar, surely.