Fauna

by Donna Mazza

  It is late autumn so we are permitted to burn. In the evening, Isak pours petrol on the branches and throws in a match. It booms and flashes blue, then takes hold on the wood. Asta and Emmy wrap potatoes in foil and, after the initial rage of the fire, we place them in the orange coals and roast them for dinner. Isak threads thick sausages onto a curved piece of wire hanging over the glowing remains, smiling widely and telling the kids how his uncle always cooks on campfires back home. The picture is his idyll, tinged with love and melancholy. Afterwards, he is quiet and the fat of the sausages falls and hisses.

  ‘You could go if you want to,’ I tell him, knowing well enough that he is afraid to leave me alone. ‘Take Emmy and Jake.’ Though, if they went with him, perhaps he would feel so liberated of me he would not return at all.

  ‘No, Stace, it’s not fair. I can’t leave you here on your own.’ He pokes at the sausages with a knife, checking on their readiness and avoids eye contact. He is a good man.

  ‘You want to.’ I sit Asta on my lap, smoke drifting over us. I love the smell of wood-smoke and she is warm, tucked close. ‘We’d be fine—Tayto can look after us.’

  He laughs. ‘I don’t think that furball can help.’ I watch his longing as he pokes at the fire, beer in one hand and eyes focused on the flames, which quiver with memories for him. I want to tell him I’m sorry but the words don’t come, instead he drifts to his own places and I cling to Asta, who is now too heavy to sit on my lap. My legs ache but I suffer it anyway. When the sausages and potatoes are ready, she springs off me, excited by the food and the fire.

  In the morning it is all reduced to a circle of white ash, still smoking slightly. The burned patch doesn’t generate any grass and Asta often returns to it to dig in the ash. Weeks later, she still comes into the house smelling of smoke.

  Occasionally I return to the new-look website of Ärva-LifeBLOOD® to seek out some guidance but there is really nothing new there. Even though Dimitra was cold, she offered some support, but I’m afraid of this new, detached company even more than I was of the one that patrolled our lives for the first year. I record Asta’s milestones, her height and weight, send it every half year via email to Jeff. There is something frightening about the way they have left us. Though I’m not sure I would like it better if they hadn’t. Then he emails me to arrange a video chat—tonight with Isak when the kids have gone to bed.

  By eight-thirty Jake is busy with a game and Emmy has disappeared to her room. Asta is asleep and Isak sends Jeff a message to say we are available. Immediately the call comes. He barely asks how we are and says he will get ‘straight to the point’. Anxiety prickles my skin all over, I can barely breathe.

  ‘Can the two of you bring Asta up here next week to the transplant clinic? Are there any commitments that might get in the way of that?’

  Isak shakes his head for us. Looks grave.

  ‘I need you to leave her with us for a day so we can harvest some cells from her for a patient. Young girl born with a congenital heart problem. You see it’s rather urgent and this is one of the last resorts.’ He looks at us then, trying to elicit some empathy, I think.

  ‘What does that involve exactly?’ Isak holds my hand, sits closer. Knows the pound of my heart.

  ‘Well we have some of the girl’s sister’s heart cells and we’re going to sequence them alongside Asta’s to give her a stronger organ. We’ll grow the heart and get it functioning then do the transplant. It’s ground-breaking stuff.’ He shifts and sniffs. ‘Asta will be under anaesthetic and we’ll go in and harvest some cells from her heart under CT scan. Very low risk, non-invasive.’

  I am cold and hot, panic rises.

  Jeff can see me in the webcam. ‘Don’t worry, Stacey. I have substantial investment in her wellbeing too.’ Turns from me. ‘Isak, you will need a day off work. Better make it two just in case. We’ve booked you a hotel in the city and you can bring the kids. Make it a holiday.’ He smiles, his sparkle-eyed smile. He charmed me once but now it’s strange and cruel.

  ‘It’s no holiday, mate,’ says Isak. ‘Look at her, she’s already crazy with worry.’

  I jab him with my elbow and whisper, ‘Don’t say that.’

  Jeff laughs a little, raises his eyebrows.

  ‘You need a holiday, Stacey, I said that last time I saw you. Please, please— don’t worry. She’ll be fine. The parents have raised money to have this done privately. The girl’s life depends on it and it means a lot for the company and our project. The costs to create children like Asta have been huge and there have been very few returns yet.’ This is a return—a piece of her heart.

  Soon, the call ends and he is gone.

  Isak gets us both a glass of red wine from the kitchen. I lay on the bed and cry.

  ‘I could go if you would prefer that.’ He sits beside me, handing me the glass so I sit up. ‘You can stay here with Emmy and Jake.’ The wine is rich and soothing. ‘We’ll go and come back and you don’t need to put yourself through it.’

  ‘I’m sure you care about her less than I do,’ I snap at him.

  He raises a hand as if to stop me. ‘Don’t go there, please. You know well enough that I love her but I think I’m more balanced about it and what she means to our family.’ I feel ready to explode but what I might say would be too toxic. I take the wine and walk silently into the garden. The ground is damp with dew and I walk into the unlit places under the trees and sit alone in the circle of cut logs. Wish myself into the rich dark, above the trees and away.

  In the end he takes her there alone. Firm and aggressive with me, he draws up a shield. Leaves with her in the front seat as I do when I go driving.

  I tidy the shed while he’s away; assess the condition of the camping gear and fill the gas bottle. It’s always good for an emergency or an escape.

  A humid storm weights the air and rampant squawks of cockatoos in the distance draw closer. They gather in the treetops late in the day, dropping green sprays of leaves and mangled gumnuts. More come and, instead of the squawks and echoes across the treetops, they synchronise into a thrum, which contracts the thick air with its rhythm. I stand under the trees, watching small teams of red-tails as they shift from one branch to another, walking up the limbs and being out-ranked by others. I start to count them and stop at about sixty, though there are more camouflaged amid the trees. In the dense evening, their chorus like a unified breath. I long for that unity, that Asta and I could be part of something that chants with one voice, one purpose. At an invisible cue, several groups depart at different angles and head inland.

  Isak’s car pulls up in the driveway and Asta jumps out, runs across the yard to me. She clings to me, points to a tiny plaster on her chest.

  ‘See, she’s fine. Just a tiny stitch.’ He looks in my eyes, seeking some sign of things being well between us.

  Curses pass through my thoughts—authoritarian, bully—but I stop myself. Asta pulls at my hand and we return to the house as more large raindrops resonate on the patio roof, beating ever faster into a crescendo. Stop just as suddenly as they began. He seems pleased that I tidied up the camping gear and takes it as a sign of forgiveness.

  One day when he comes home from work, Isak stares at me with fresh eyes and holds me close to him so that I wonder what has happened in his time away that day. He kisses me carefully and runs his fingers through the grey hair gathering at my temples, looks sad.

  ‘I do love you, I’m sorry I upset you.’

  There are, surely, women at the plant where he works—women who are younger and more attentive to their appearance, have more interesting lives and witty things to say.

  ‘I understand.’ Perhaps I do partly. ‘It’s tough love.’ Something my mother said when I complained about her enforcements.

  I never imagined it would be like this. My reclusive life takes me further from the world where he dwells, where Emmy and Jake will step further away with each passing year. Where Asta will be taken from me.

  SIX

 
After a full, red moon last night, the tide has receded bringing to the surface all manner of tangled weed. Sandbars permeate the skin of the estuary like bands of scar tissue. This revelation brings out the stalking egrets, solitary hunters on divergent paths working their way through the sea grasses, sifting out tiny fish. There are more than I have ever seen but they are a scattered community, slow and spare across the expanse. In patches the water is so still it is reflective, smooth as glass, in others it is yellow with the proximity of sand. The stubs of fence posts mark out a submarine boundary, their dark wood soft with rot and slowly falling away. The egrets prefer the ruffled surface where fine underwater foliage shifts with the movement of the water.

  I have driven to the long jetty, a remnant of industrial shame, when toxic sludge was piped out into the dunes, settling and poisoning the peninsula. The structure has been reworked into a long rocky walkway, piercing into the middle of the water, and now provides a haven for cormorants, its wake moulding a sheltered bay. Tayto pulls on his lead, desperate to bring on the exodus of the birds but he is no match for Asta, whose firm grip is immovable. He pulls and gasps but I tell her to keep him at her side, focusing her attention on training him, telling him to ‘heel’. The cormorants twist their heads, agile as darts, do their best to ignore us, but their well-trained eyes don’t allow us too close. They rise and shift as we pass.

  At the end of the jetty is a well-used deck spattered with white guano and I reward Asta with a rest and a drink, sitting with her on the grey wood and laying out a picnic snack. A cormorant is perched at the opposite corner, eyeing a seagull, which draws slowly closer, and we watch the stand-off between the two, competing for the high perch. It’s like the sleeping chickens, I tell Asta. Whichever one sleeps at the highest spot is the boss chook. The cormorant holds its ground against the seagull, which veers off with the breeze.

  The air is ripe with brine and weed and all the living and dead brought to the surface at ebb tide. The dog holds his nose high and twitching. He and Asta both stop and watch the cormorant’s head twist, its wings held aloft, their raggedy black edges moving in the wind. There is a hold in the air and all of them are poised, waiting, while I seem to be missing out. The dark webs of the cormorant’s feet bend around the wood of the jetty, its eyes wild. Then with the current of air, it lifts and dashes into the water, narrowed as a needle. Tayto and Asta jerk around in unison, watching it emerge again, water beading off its black neck. A visible lump in its throat. I wonder what she sees—what level of detail, of movement and heat beyond my vision.

  ‘Duck,’ she says when I ask her. ‘Col-duck’ when I press further and she narrows her hand into a point, darting it down like the cormorant piercing the water. There is nothing dart-like or narrow about her hand. It is more like a mitt. If she had the opportunity to play sport she would be a good catcher with her sharp eye and big hands. I pack our picnic and lead the dog back along the jetty. He is slower now, tired from pulling and the thrill of birds, and lopes along at a steady beat. Asta skips ahead with the wind in her hair, stooping sometimes to collect feathers, which she holds in the breeze, letting them go and watching their journey in the air, their drop into the water. Halfway back to the car she stops and looks north towards home.

  ‘Ma!’ She points out into the water. I peer out and see nothing, walking closer to her side. ‘Fish, Mumma.’

  ‘Where?’ And we wait, silent and watching the surface.

  ‘Dere,’ she points. And seconds later, they appear in the distance—two dolphins trailing each other. I think she saw them through the water. As they come closer, she smiles widely and grabs my hand but the dolphins soon alter their course back to deeper water. She watches the place where they were long after they have gone and I explain to her that they are not fish, but dolphins. Dol-fins. Waiting for her to repeat. Her lips are red and wet in the wind and her mouth open, showing the monuments of new teeth. I touch her shoulder—‘Dol-fins, Asta.’ And she looks around at me.

  ‘Dol-fin,’ she parrots. And I feel a small victory. ‘Not fish,’ she adds. Reminding me she has been listening. I kiss her hand and lead her back to the car, past an elderly couple walking their dog.

  Time is slow as tar some days, dripping through each day in stretched moments of silence. It is only when I look at Jake’s lengthening feet, growing knobbly with the approach of his teens, or hang young-girl bras on the line that I am reminded of its relentless progress. Sometimes things seem changeless as if it will just go on and on and sometimes it seems to dart by me, over before it began. Even Asta is changing before my eyes, leaving behind the cute little toddler that she was and becoming someone of her own. Since the heart cell donation, one nerve of her has been extracted from my flesh. It is me that gave the cells.

  On Saturday Isak sets his alarm and takes Jake to play cricket down in Busselton. I have never seen one of the matches but Isak sits in the car or under a tree for several hours watching the boys in a slow and concentrated stand-off with the other team. He makes breakfast for Asta and I stay in bed a while. When I wake she is having a second breakfast with Emmy, who is laughing at something on her screen. I make tea and sit with them on the couch.

  ‘Dad left you a note,’ Emmy tells me, pulling a folded paper out from under Asta’s plate.

  Your mum rang!! Told her you’d call back. I fold the note, sigh and Emmy looks at me. ‘I haven’t seen her since I was eight you know.’

  I nod, acknowledging that it’s a long time.

  ‘And she’s never met Asta.’ She eyes me with her knowing look. Accusing.

  ‘I have invited her over here,’ I lie. ‘She always has something on, she’s very busy.’ I tidy the dishes, busy myself in the kitchen to avoid the call. Emmy lurks around with a tea towel, helping a little but her presence is force. I send her to feed the chickens with Asta and find the number while they are outside. Hands damp.

  She answers quickly, her hello unusually soft. ‘Did Isak tell you the news?’ Her style, always a little dramatic; she cried wolf to me so often I can no longer tell—‘It’s Marco, darling, he’s gone.’ On the quiet line I can hear the chatter of caged birds.

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that, Mum,’ I concede to her. ‘How are you?’

  ‘Obviously not good, love.’ Despite myself, tears come as she details his long struggle, the remission and the different treatments she sought for him.

  ‘He was a good man,’ I tell her, meaning every word. ‘He was good to me, when we were always fighting.’ He cooked, calm and rocking his hips in the breezy kitchen, smells of fresh basil and home-grown tomatoes. Peaches from his garden remain the best fruit I have ever had. Despite her wandering, she always returned to him—his was her only fixed address.

  As I’m ending the call the girls come back inside and Emmy catches me in time to take the phone. She wanders into her bedroom, talking in low tones, probably about me. Perhaps I should have offered to go to Mum’s but I don’t know how I’d leave Asta. I know Isak pines for his mother but I never had that kind of bond.

  When Emmy finally hands the phone back to me she announces, ‘I invited her over,’ turns and walks back to her room. Despite not having spent much time with my mother, she has somehow adopted this habit of drop-turn-run with information and it incites me to follow, a pattern worn into the soles of my shoes since childhood. I resist and concede, as I have done so many times before. Find her sorting schoolwork on her bed, unsurprised when I arrive.

  ‘She’s coming?’ I wait, knowing Emmy has the power.

  ‘Maybe.’ She tells me something about money coming to my mother from Marco’s estate.

  Two weeks later, Isak is driving to Perth to collect her from the airport and Emmy takes the day off school to go with him. I spend the day weeding both the vegetable garden, and the soft plastics and pharmaceutical medicines from our house. Hiding the evidence, he reminds me, lifting his eyebrows with a mischief I rarely see now. His crooked smile appearing again through layers of silt.

&nb
sp; They return home in the depth of night, Emmy staggering straight to bed, a wide cloth bag of presents under her wing. I am thankful to greet Mum with Asta asleep. To get those moments in first—the long hug, soft and oil-scented. I breathe it deep. ‘Rose and sandalwood, for grief,’ she whispers, stepping back to look at me, her smile a little more folded into her face than it was. I wonder how she was such an overpowering figure. Just a little lady, her long hair growing fine and pale, still trailing down her back. Her dress a little more draped and layered than it was once.

  Isak ferries in several bags and lodges her in my sewing room, which I have transformed for her stay. I make chamomile tea in my best cups and sit beside her on the couch, our slow and soft conversation filling in the details of Marco’s sickness and her journey through alternative treatments. Photos of their long holiday during his remission then him slowly withering. There is no doubt she has suffered and it has worn down her fire. She has inherited his lovely cottage in the mountains, so he will keep her in one spot now, she jokes, even from beyond the grave. Despite myself, I am softening to her presence, becalmed with sadness. In the early hours of morning, I show her to her bed, which I have covered in a beautiful batik bedspread she sent me years ago.