Fauna

by Donna Mazza

  ‘Thank you. You are doing a great job, Stacey. She looks healthy and is developing really well. I will book another appointment in a month, unless you have any concerns.’ I pick up Asta and wave her hand at Dimitra. The screen stills and her frozen image stays for a few minutes, until I exit out of it and take Asta to feed on the couch. On the television, a record-breaking fire tears through the Canadian wilderness and a coal-seam gas plant has exploded. Dead geese are heaped with a bulldozer. I change to the cooking channel.

  On Saturdays we follow the fixtures for netball and soccer, regardless of the state of the weather. Jake has been absorbed into his under eight team like a hero returned, proudly wearing his black and blue strip for the whole day, despite the whiff of it. It is their first year using full-sized goals, girls and boys tearing about and giving it all they have. The cold gives me an excuse to rug Asta up and no questions are needed about why she hides there in her pram. I sit on a fold-out chair beside her, shoulders turned away from the other spectators, spurning chit-chat. Isak often runs the line, flag in hand, or stalks the edge of the pitch, cheering them on and shouting encouragement.

  Asta dribbles with teething, front ones this time, at the bottom. I give her rusks but she bites them with her molars and smashes them up, so it is little comfort. Despite my aversion to them, I have given her a dummy and she loves it but often pierces the teat with her back teeth. I keep a three-pack in the back of the pram for Saturdays. Emmy runs off to play with girls from school who have siblings in the team. After the end-of-match talk by the coach, we drive across to the netball courts. Soccer shifts each week, different grassy ovals in various places, including some of the small rural towns nearby, but netball is always in the same place, cold and windy and too close to the beach for winter sport.

  The girls were hesitant to include Emmy at first but she is such a good player she quickly became a contender for the regional junior team, so now they all adore her. Jake is always bored and hungry during the game, dragging Isak away with his demands for food and company. I watch every move, determined to give her the attention she needs. I see mothers on their phones during the game, missing goals shot and agile intercepts, mothers talking to each other on the sidelines. I stand apart a little, just enough to shun their conversation, frozen with cold and attentiveness. My mother never let me play netball and, even if she had, we never stayed anywhere long enough for me to feel part of a team. I want better for Emmy, for her to feel part of things, even if I am on the outside. More so now than ever before. Now I am on the outside of the outside.

  When the courier delivers the baby food, I put it on the kitchen bench and, while Asta has her nap, walk out under the trees to dig a hole. Under the canopy, the wind roars loudly and my face is cold. I choose a place discreet enough for Isak not to notice. Ground breaks easily, rasping against the spade. It is dark sand, denuded of most undergrowth, probably by years of cattle grazing under the trees.

  A few arum lilies have popped up in place of the native species— leschenaultia, zamia palms and grass trees. Long trampled, seeds unviable without a blaze. I dig deep through the wet soil, blackened layers. Make a wide hole to swallow whatever rare creatures have been processed into pink mush for Asta. I will not risk feeding her mammoth. I will plant something here to restore the native bush instead. I imagine a row of blue-blossomed leschenaultia enriched by those nutrients, growing longer with each delivery of pink food.

  I take control of the BubBot app, diligently filling in all the details required. Organised and accurate, just as they want it. Isak makes jokes about my newfound approach, but I know he takes it as a sign of recovery. It is a sign of descent. I am controlling the ruses, covering my deceptions. I have tried to raise myself above my mother—to be stable and organised, which she would admit as her two biggest weaknesses. There are reasons for dishonesty though, I tell myself; rationalise that it is for Asta. I should be grateful that I have learned techniques for subterfuge from my mother. The worst of her weaknesses—I was never sure what was true.

  Asta loves scrambled egg and cooked apple and oats. I bake field or Swiss mushrooms and process them in the blender. Isak roasts venison on his barbecue under the back patio on the weekends, grinning with his beer. I know he misses his family, wonders how we will ever be able to travel again, now we have an unregistered child. It means so much to him. I could stay here, I have told him. You could go next year, take the children. Asta will be older then, easier. But as I say it I feel sick inside, as though a fist is clasped around my entrails, tearing long strands of me out onto the floor. Go. Don’t take the children.

  He can’t leave me alone with a baby, he says, charring his venison to give it that campfire taste, and anyway he was there last year. He cuts a slice off for Asta while it’s cooking, still red inside. She gnaws easily on it with her robust teeth.

  ‘Better tell them she’s done that.’ Isak laughs, ruffling her hair, her long head normal to us.

  ‘You love her, don’t you?’

  ‘Of course I do. She’s gorgeous, aren’t you?’ And he picks her up from her high chair on the patio, holds her on his hip. ‘She’s getting heavy.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Dad-dad-dad,’ he says to her.

  She smiles. ‘Dad-dad-dad.’

  ‘She hasn’t said anything else, has she?’

  ‘No, I would tell you if she did. And she doesn’t really say that much either. I think she will, she’s probably just not ready yet.’

  ‘It’s a bit early though, even—you know—for normal it’s a bit early. I hate using that term but I don’t know what else to say.’

  ‘It’s okay, Isak.’ I stand on tiptoes to kiss him; baby under one arm.

  Sometimes I feel as if I am watching her unfold through a fissure in time. It’s as if a crack has appeared, shining a ray of light onto her broad, bare feet. We are the first to witness her walking, those first uncertain steps. Knees stiff, feet unfamiliar on the earth, her arms held up to save herself when she does, eventually, fall. A cushion of grass around her feet, toes lifting slightly. The sea breeze shifts her hair, now growing slightly over her ears, fanned across the nape of her neck. I kneel beside her on the grass and she turns to me with her toothy smile and I lift her above my head. Hold her high and laughing. No child can ever come near the wonder of her.

  She grows quickly now, with solid food and as she gets more confident on her feet. The months of settling into this place and this child are giving way to a version of normality. A precious window of safety.

  When she was born, the awe of her existence was fresh and intoxicating. A year later, only a little further south, the spring has been rainy, with only small punctuations of sunshine. I am more in awe of her every day.

  On her birthday, we walk in the wind by the estuary, a cold front marking out a line of dark cloud. Across the fluttering water, the peninsula is a dark green mass, high sprigs of the canopy marking itself above the rest at various points. Belvidere is dark and appears wild. Patchy sections of bald sand. It is over there, another space populated with snakes and nocturnal eyes. In summer Isak plans to take a small boat and explore. Drive the LandCruiser across the narrow causeway and over to the beach.

  We walk the narrow trails cut between thick stands of reeds, broken by narrow openings to the water. It laps and foams, tannin stained against the muddy ground. The torn leaves of sub-marine grasses suspended within. Stoic river-gums and she-oaks shake in the wind—thick and stunted; they may be hundreds of years old, yet they are squat and hunkered against the elements. Whispering to me.

  Asta smiles, broad and toothy, at a crow landing on the water’s edge and picking at a small fleshy thing rocking in the waves. Its tatty wings lift at our approach and she waves both arms at it, mimicking its flight. She is not so unlike my other children, who both loved to be outside watching, but she is perhaps more attentive to nature and focuses her big eyes on a single thing for a sustained time. They said they expected her to have more acute
vision than we do so I wonder what she sees—what level of detail, what unseen forces. One day soon, perhaps, she can explain but for now we walk, pushing against the westerly wind.

  A quick clip of flight and a cormorant distracts her, efficient and purposeful in the business of survival.

  TWO

  Through the living room window, late in the morning, three twenty-eight parrots walk across the grass, seeking out something, biting then looking up, beaks moving. It is windy and the treetops flail about but the determined little trio, their green feathers wet, hunker into the tufted lawn with its yellow flowers. This time of the day is one of the few regular feeds Asta still has and she is heavy on my lap, fills my arms with her warmth. The time of weaning is bittersweet and we are both unwilling to give up on it entirely. She is latched on, eyes closed. Sometimes she smiles, laughs a little while she suckles. I watch her, occasionally looking up at the birds outside, but drawn back constantly to stare at her, relishing these last days, imprinting the vision of her.

  Her skin has grown milky, strong and fair but quite translucent. In the light I can see the sky reflected in her arms and legs, the endless magnitude of it captured within her. Blue—broken by floating clouds, shifting in the breeze. I need no windows with her. I could live in a cell and still bathe in the light, be mesmerised by the heavens as long as she was with me.

  Reluctantly she drops my depleted nipple and shifts over to the next. We are instinctive together and don’t need to communicate this change. Latching on, she smiles at the rush from the fresh breast. Soon, she drops into a satisfied sleep. I hold her until my arms ache, unwilling to leave this moment. Holding fast to it for as long as I can. Fear and love are tangled around us.

  Every night I sleep bare-breasted beside her, Isak relegated to the far side of the bed. He often moves to the couch or the trundle bed in Jake’s room if we are too disruptive. Grumbles about the bad habit I have got her into. Occasionally he has picked her up, fast asleep, and lain her in the cot in her room. She will stay there for hours, but I lay watchful, waiting for her call. Soon, I tell him, this will all be over. She will completely wean herself soon. He tells me I’m not trying to help and I know he is right but I argue with him anyway. She’s a month past the fourteen months when they told me to wean her but I tell him that’s not long enough to worry anyone. I lie to BubBot about it and he scolds me unfairly.

  Weeks later, she sleeps through the night in her own bed for the first time and the scent of breastmilk slowly fades.

  Matilda the chicken is broody. She is a silver-grey Dorking, one of the oldest breeds. We marked her nine eggs with a black X and I scrawled the date on the rafter in the chicken house. Each day when Asta and I dole out cups of seed and kitchen scraps, Matilda rises from her nest and we sneak in, taking only the unmarked eggs. Asta thumps along with her heavy, cautious steps carrying the bucket of scraps, and the chickens mob her, pecking at her fingers as she flings bits of yesterday’s meals out into the yard. She laughs at their pecking and the rooster’s feeble attempts to ward her off, as he propels himself at her legs. This is part of our daily ritual and Asta has bonded with the birds, wandering around in the pen without shoes, knobs of poo squashed under her flat feet. Then one day, before they are due to hatch, one egg is broken. A tiny form, slick and dark with a visible eye and feathers, surrounded by crushed shell. Asta sits on the straw by the nest.

  ‘Dat,’ she points at the mangled chick. I explain to her one of the chickens must have squashed it.

  ‘Uh-oh,’ I tell her.

  ‘Uh-oh,’ she repeats in her fine, raspy voice.

  I take her hand as Matilda comes back from breakfast, ready to puff her feathers over the remaining eggs, and lead her out of the yard. This bit of language development is good information for the BubBot. I don’t like to tell them everything but if I don’t give them enough of what they want, then I end up with messages or phone calls—which is worse—asking after our wellbeing. Dimitra’s visits are now all via video chat every three months. She has not been here yet and I wonder how she would fare among the chickens in her fancy shoes.

  Sometimes I am lost in this domestic life, in our daily routines, and I forget the wonder we have created and that we continue to create each day, in each step that she takes upon the earth. Sometimes I forget, but she soon reminds me with a glance of her wide eyes, glittering like prisms in the light outside. I shrink from the world, happy here on this land with her and with them. Until the roar of it becomes audible again.

  The school sports carnival is on a Friday and, despite it being wet all week, it clears up for the day. So now I am torn, and have no simple excuse. Jake and Emmy are in blue faction and both get up early to anoint themselves in blue zinc and spray their hair blue. I pack them extra snacks, fill bottles of water.

  ‘I can’t get off work until midday,’ says Isak. ‘Most of the main events are over by then. I’d really like you to go, Stacey, it’s important to them to have someone watch them.’

  ‘I know.’ I’ve done it before but not last year. I have avoided any kind of relationship with the parents, just a few hellos.

  ‘Please, Mum.’

  ‘Please,’ echoes Jake. ‘Asta will like it.’ And he jumps around in front of her, reciting the blue mantra, making her laugh.

  I try to make eye contact with Isak to let him know it’s a private conversation but he ignores my signals. Raises his eyebrows and jerks his head towards Emmy. He is rarely so directive but with this I know I must go. Her last year at primary school. She sits quietly, meticulously tying up her shoelaces and listening in to our conversation. Isak packs up the dishes and Emmy takes his chair, sits close.

  ‘I understand, Mum.’

  I want to cry.

  ‘I know it’s because of Asta and that you’re embarrassed of her and don’t want the parents asking you questions.’

  ‘I’m not embarrassed of Asta, darling.’

  She gives me a look of disbelief. ‘I’m not stupid. She’s not like us kids. I love her, with all my heart but, gosh, Mum, I know she’s a bit weird looking. Not in a mean way though.’

  ‘I know you’re not mean to her sweetheart. Asta’s not like other kids, she has a genetic condition.’ I hate saying it. She is not abnormal by her own measure.

  Emmy looks at her with a sweet smile while she sits in her high chair chewing on a mangled apple. ‘She doesn’t even eat like us.’

  ‘She has to have a special diet, you know that. She has a sensitive stomach.’

  Emmy looks up at me, eyes searching mine, ‘Do you think it’s your fault, Mum? Is that why it upsets you so much?’ She melts me with her truth.

  ‘Yes. I do think it’s my fault.’

  She hugs me tight around the chest, taller and bonier than I’m expecting. ‘I’ll be okay. Don’t worry about me. Why don’t you open this?’

  A parcel arrived a couple of days ago with a new hat I designed— on the outside it looks like a normal bucket hat, but it has a stretchy mesh liner which grips to Asta’s head. I hoped it would make her head fit into a normal hat. Emmy pulls the hat from the packaging and fits it onto Asta.

  ‘Looks good, Mum. You can’t even tell she has a melon head.’ She laughs and I see the rare seed of a little cruel streak, newly arrived in her.

  ‘That’s unkind, Emmy.’

  She gives me a matter-of-fact look, ‘So are you coming to our carnival? Or do we need to hurry up so we can catch the bus?’

  ‘I’ll come. But you two can help me get everything ready.’

  She nods and strides off to the bathroom, calling to Jake.

  I don’t like this attitude but I can only accept it and view it as something I have created. My mother slapped me many times for the cruel streak I cultivated against her when I was just a little older. I will not slap but I lash myself for it instead.

  I weave the pram through the scrum of early arrival parents, seeking out a corner of shade. Most parents are caught in conversations already, decked ou
t in primary colours, so I set up a folding chair and the pram among them in silence. It is easy to slip through the cracks when they already all know each other. Asta holds a protein bar I made in one hand—a hard, pasty creation of ground nuts and egg with a little maple syrup—grinding it up with the side of her teeth. The bucket hat and her sunglasses hide half her face. She is stocky though, her russet hair very striking, and people do glance at her, despite my icy attitude. Inside I am a growling wolf mother, warding them off.

  There is cheering and flags, colour and noise, and Asta is awake and animated, flailing her arms and shouting at the teams of children in their flag race, as mothers and fathers lean across the rope barrier, calling out ‘Go-go-go’.

  When it is Emmy’s team up, she looks over and waves at me so I stand to watch. She runs so hard a spray of sand curls up behind her feet, hammering the flag into the bucket and bolting for the finish line, a tense knot across her face. I clap and she looks over, lifting the blue ribbon off her chest to show me. I raise a hand as she walks past, pump my fist in the air.

  When I turn back, an elderly lady is at the pram, engaging Asta in chatter. Hackles rise and I turn to her so quickly she starts.

  ‘Ooh—I was just having a talk to your little girl,’ she says.

  ‘Dat,’ says Asta pointing to her protein bar on the ground. The lady picks it up and hands it to her. Asta drops it again.

  ‘It’s a game.’

  ‘Yes, I know. They all do it at this age.’ And she picks up the bar and hands it to Asta. I fold my arms to lock her out but she doesn’t get the signal. Maybe I should be pleased to hear that Asta is one of ‘they all’.

  ‘What’s her name?’

  I tell her and the lady is satisfied. The loudspeaker announces a change in the proceedings to leader-ball and she is summoned by a dark-haired woman standing on the sidelines. She cheers at a small grandchild who is distracted and drops the ball. It is hard to remember when I last had a normal conversation with anyone outside our family and LifeBLOOD®. Part of me wants her to come back.