The Curlew's Eye

by Karen Manton

  ‘Magdalen? Ear infections. Screamed for days, poor kid. First one was the worst. Her ears were never the same after that.’ He licked his fingers clean and dropped the bone into the fire. ‘Neither were mine.’

  Raffy fizzed a nervous laugh.

  ‘Just kidding.’ Joel smiled weakly. ‘It was nothing for us compared to her. She always had infections after that, wonky hearing.’

  ‘Wonky how?’

  ‘Sort of muffled, like hearing underwater. Not all the time, but enough to frustrate the hell out of her. Other times her ears turned super sensitive, and every sound was magnified. Then she’d hear things we never could.’

  ‘Who’s this?’ asked Griffin, holding up the boy with his catch of fish.

  ‘That’s Uncle Danny,’ said Raffy, with a quick look across to Greta.

  ‘No,’ said Joel, ‘that’s not your uncle.’ He handed Gabe the photo.

  ‘That’s Lennie,’ said Gabe. ‘Lived down the hut with Devil. His father.’

  ‘Devil?’ Toby moved nearer to Gabe, keen for more.

  ‘Meatworker,’ said Gabe. ‘But Lennie, he was more a metalworker. Horseshoes, hooks, knives, frypans—anything you wanted, Lennie could make it. He had a forge bowl, you know? Made one from a brake drum off an old truck. He could make anything that Lennie. Young fella, but clever.’ Gabe paused. ‘I reckon Devil was jealous.’

  Griffin took the photo to see Lennie close up. ‘How’d he get in Magdalen’s jewellery box?’

  ‘She was sweet on him.’ Joel stood up to hook a stick under the full billy’s handle and lift it onto the coals. ‘Him too, for her.’

  ‘Before she died?’ asked Raffy.

  ‘Of course!’ Toby swiped the top of his little brother’s hair.

  ‘How old was she?’ asked Griffin. ‘You know—when she died?’

  ‘Fifteen,’ said Joel. ‘Just for one day.’

  Toby picked up a stick to prod a branch deeper into the flames. ‘She died on her birthday?’

  When he sat down Joel took the stick and made an adjustment from a different angle. ‘That’s right.’

  The children were silenced. Only the fire spoke with its soft hissing and the sudden pop of a stick exploding into flame.

  ‘I like that drawing of the boy with the wing,’ said Raffy from under his mosquito net on the verandah. Greta had promised them earlier that they could sleep the night there. ‘It’s not like his other drawings,’ he added. ‘Not like the ones for us.’

  ‘True,’ remarked Greta.

  She stood on a chair to hang up Griffin’s net. He pulled it around the swag and crawled inside.

  ‘Dad never says much about his sister or that fire in the car,’ Raffy went on. ‘About how he saved her.’

  ‘No, he doesn’t.’ Greta stepped down.

  Joel never spoke about the accident with the children. She tried to shield him from their questions, and told them to ask her about it, not him. Tonight she’d wondered if she’d said too much to them.

  ‘But why not?’ Raffy persisted.

  ‘Because heroes don’t boast, that’s why,’ Toby mumbled into his pillow.

  Greta struck a match to light the camping lantern on the table.

  ‘Do you think she knows we’re here?’ Griffin asked her. ‘Magdalen?’

  ‘Of course she doesn’t!’ Toby’s pillow flew into the side of his net. ‘Once you’re dead, you’re dead! That’s it!’

  Joel shoved a log into the flames. Sparks shot up into the night. Greta set down three mugs with teabags and poured the water from the billy. Gabe nodded and smiled when she passed him the cup.

  ‘Gabe and I’ll have that roof on the cabin before we go out to Connor’s,’ Joel said.

  ‘The kids say they’re not moving from the bus.’

  ‘More room for us then.’

  ‘How far away is this station again?’

  ‘A few hundred kilometres.’ He glanced at Gabe for confirmation.

  ‘Yeah, about that.’ Gabe gulped his tea.

  Greta was overcome with tiredness. She drifted in and out of hearing the men chat and laugh softly together, then drop into their silent bond. The fire held her gaze, the orange shimmer under a log. The coals were like coral, the heat like wavering water.

  When Gabe stood up to leave, she stirred.

  ‘I’m all good, mate,’ Greta heard Gabe say to Joel, who was ready to walk with him. ‘You stay with the missus. Fire’s still goin’.’

  As the ute pulled away, Joel stretched out on the ground to rest his head in Greta’s lap.

  ‘I hope it wasn’t too sad for you, talking about your sister and Lennie.’

  ‘Nah,’ he said. ‘I’m okay.’

  She paused, ‘What happened to Lennie?’

  ‘He left in the end. Before Magdalen died.’

  They were quiet then, listening to the fire, and sounds of the night. A masked owl winged over them.

  ‘I wish this grass had been burned off,’ Greta said.

  ‘We have to wait for the rain now. Ronnie’ll keep an eye on it; he’s with the firies.’ His forefinger lightly brushed her chin. ‘Don’t worry yourself.’ He was charmed by the sky. ‘We could sleep here. Watch those shooting stars.’

  ‘We’ll be eaten alive.’

  ‘Not under a mozzie net. I can hang one from that tree behind us.’ He stretched his arm back to point at it.

  The fire had died down to hot coals when Greta woke to a sound drifting up from the creek. She’d heard it in her sleep, but here it was again for real. Joel wasn’t beside her. She looked through the mosquito net to the fire, and beyond into the dark. The sound returned, the low moaning of an animal—a cow, perhaps.

  She listened for Joel’s footsteps. There was only the rustle of cane toads and the dull thuds of a wallaby on the move. She’d convinced herself she’d imagined the sound when she heard it again. This time she wondered if it was Joel. She left the swag and pulled on her boots. The torchlight was weak. She wished she’d thought to change the batteries.

  She made her descent in line with the banyan tree to find the track she knew. Everything was cast in an unfamiliar light under this three-quarter moon. The heads of cycads, the faces of rocks took on a different character. She felt as if there might be spirits among them, watching the newcomer pass.

  Above her the Milky Way was a spill of stardust. She thought of early sailors, longing for night’s trusted planets and constellations. Navigation is everything.

  She headed down towards the black boulders. They too seemed altered by the night. Their presence was intensified. Her hand brushed against a pandanus frond; it cut a sting along her finger.

  She heard the soft moan again, and found Joel leaning against one of the stones, passing some torment of his mind into it. The moonlit fan palm behind him was so close he seemed part of it. An odd-angled frond stuck out at his shoulder, like a giant wing with splayed feathers.

  Never wake a sleepwalker, her mother used to say.

  She couldn’t decipher his whisperings. The frond wing moved slightly with him. When he started walking away she let him go. He shuffled around to the other side of the boulder. After a moment she followed, to make sure she didn’t lose him.

  He wasn’t there. All she saw were the luminous trunks of the paperbarks and the dark line of the creek.

  Behind her came a deep sigh. A moonlit cow was watching her. Its hooves were shiny black. A tag was pinned to the animal’s ear. Trapper’s errant heifer, she guessed. Four other cows looked on from further off. Greta backed away slowly. The cow snorted and trundled over to its friends. They left in a line, heading for the mango trees.

  ‘Joel,’ Greta called softly.

  He was nowhere. The night, the ground, the rocks had taken him in while she wasn’t looking. Perhaps it was her who’d been sleepwalking, seeking the ethereal noise that could have been the creek or could have been the soft, low, secretive grief of a man.

  The sharp crack of a stick sounded a little way up th
e hill. A dark shape moved between the silhouettes of trees and cycads. It was him.

  The beat of a hammer on metal sings out and echoes back. The fire bowl is brimful of fierce coals, a rush of flame. With his tongs, Lennie holds a glowing piece of metal across an anvil. He hits it with the hammer several times then returns it to the heat. His chest is wet with perspiration. His face is a ruddy glow. Behind him are objects he has made or mended or twisted into a new form. Horseshoes, hooks, a bell. Iron spirals and curled shapes, pipes and shafts. The workbench is strewn with his tools and an array of metal parts.

  Standing not far from him, Magdalen watches.

  She is leaning into a red bead tree, her arm around the trunk. Curling pods are scattered on the ground. The seeds have spilled, are bright red like pellets of blood.

  She is captivated by the dreadful fire in the bowl, the loud banging of the hammer. Fire and metal. There’s a fierce mystery in it.

  14

  With school holidays and Tori’s children coming for sleepovers, it was another week before Greta developed the photos. They reminded her of crime scene pictures, pegged up side by side. She felt sure the girl was there, hiding. She searched for any sign of her in the hovering shadows behind the curtain, the cobwebbed light at the window. The eight bracelets on the wall intrigued her.

  It’s all about how you frame the image, her mother would say. How you see.

  ‘And what do you see?’ she whispered to herself.

  The one-eyed rabbit stared back at her, knowing.

  As she was packing up, a woman’s voice spoke outside. The words were distorted, amplified, riddled with static. Her words had a musical lilt.

  Greta opened the door of the darkroom. The sudden sunlight was so strong she saw nothing at first, just a flare that hurt her eyes. The sound was coming from the four-wheel drive, parked between the shack and the new cabin. The children were crammed in the front. Both doors were wide open. Toby was behind the wheel, Griffin in the passenger seat and Raffy perched in the middle, squashed to one side against the gearstick. Their eyes were all fixed on the cassette deck.

  Greta reached in across Griffin’s legs to turn down the volume.

  ‘It’s her,’ Griffin said. ‘It’s Dad’s mother. She’s reading The Six Swans.’

  ‘I don’t think she’s reading it,’ Toby added. ‘I think she’s telling it her own way.’

  ‘Yes, I know, but you can listen to her quietly. Your father mightn’t want to hear her voice.’

  ‘Why not?’ asked Raffy.

  ‘Because it’s like waking the dead,’ Griffin told him.

  ‘You certainly have it loud enough for that.’ Greta turned the volume down another notch.

  ‘Oh, man!’ Toby’s hands grasped the steering wheel.

  ‘I can’t hear!’ Griffin’s fingers brushed hers aside to rewind the tape. ‘You’ve lost the place!’

  Joel’s face appeared at the driver’s window. ‘You’ve got it working then?’

  ‘Yes.’ Raffy frowned. ‘But now you’ve interrupted and we have to start again.’

  Greta looked across the three of them to Joel. ‘Are you sure you want to hear it? They can listen another time.’

  ‘Doesn’t bother me.’

  He was cheery enough. He might have stayed to listen, but the sound of Gabe’s electric saw drew him away. They were working on the wall frames, kneeling on the cabin’s floor to put together studs and noggins.

  Maria’s voice resumed, turned up louder so they could hear it over the intermittent sawing.

  Greta went inside to make bread. By the time the yeast was frothing she was mesmerised by Maria’s soporific voice. She could see Maria in the armchair and Magdalen’s head resting against her mother’s knee. And Joel drawing each feather in his swan boy’s wing at the family table, and the doors open to the hot night.

  The dough was hard to knead, her fingers felt weak. She rested in the hammock while the bread rose in its tin, and the fire she’d lit in the oven settled to coals. Hearing Maria tell the story changed it for her. She wondered if Joel’s mother saw a connection between her own six sons and daughter and the ones in the story. It saddened her to think of both mothers losing their children through their own untimely deaths. Maria wouldn’t have known it when she recorded herself telling the tale. Greta felt a new poignancy in the plight of the dead queen trapped in a ghostly realm witnessing her children’s abuse and metamorphosis.

  What had Magdalen thought of this tale’s cruelties? Greta wondered. Or was it the end she loved, when the swans return to be brothers and the sixth one lives in her castle, always there to put his wing over her?

  The story finished. There was a stretch of crackling static.

  ‘Turn it off!’ she heard Raffy say.

  But Maria’s voice returned in a haunting song. The notes passed down into the valley and out to the escarpment. A lament, a supplication. The children were quiet. The power tools stopped. Greta felt the song move through her. It had a strange effect, like a gentle current bearing her into dream. She saw Joel walking the fence lines seeking comfort for a grief he couldn’t speak. And his mother too, traipsing the land, holding her anguish and her children. While the bush stone-curlew stepped ahead, or behind.

  ‘It’s finished!’ yelled Griffin.

  The spell was broken. The children’s voices babbled over the sudden absence of Maria and moved across to the banyan tree.

  The car was abandoned, the doors still open. Greta went to retrieve the tape. It was warm from playing. She put it on the shelf by her father’s tin. There was something in it, the dead man’s ashes and the dead woman’s voice, up there on the shelf.

  ‘I’m sad for you,’ Raffy said to her that night. ‘You don’t have your mother on tape.’

  Greta wasn’t sad at all. She was quite certain she wouldn’t like to hear a recording of Vivian. She adjusted the mosquito net around Raffy’s bed and cleared toys from the bus floor.

  ‘Mum?’

  ‘Yes, Raffy?’

  ‘You know that hut down near the creek? With the rabbit and the music box?’ He propped himself up on his elbows. ‘I think it’s exactly like the hut in The Six Swans. The sister finds a woodcutter’s hut in the forest. Her swan brothers fly there every sunset and secretly change from swans back into boys. Just for quarter of an hour. Then they change back to swans.’

  He was quiet, and she knew he was imagining himself shapeshifting from a boy to a swan and back again.

  Griffin stamped up the bus steps and threw himself on his bed. Toby followed him in, whistling.

  Raffy’s voice drifted after her as she walked across to the darkroom.

  ‘How long is a quarter of an hour?’

  ‘Fifteen minutes,’ came Toby’s reply. ‘Fifteen times sixty seconds.’

  Greta could feel her father’s watch ticking in her back pocket. Quarter of an hour. Enough time for swans to turn into men and back again. Enough time for a woman to walk into the ocean and disappear. It was that short and long a time. From when her father last glimpsed Vivian and the moment she was gone forever. When he walked into the wind and the rain calling, calling her name, and found her soggy headscarf wound around a tree root sticking up out of the sand.

  Greta took out her contact sheets from the photos she’d taken. She was thinking about a new photo series for Janna’s art and craft show. She looked over the thumbnails with a magnifying glass—car wrecks, animal bones, the homestead. Dead cars and dead creatures. Dead house. They were reliable at least. They didn’t move or do anything unexpected. The cycads are alive, she thought in her defence. And the bush stone-curlew.

  She started developing the negatives she’d chosen, experimenting with different exposures and tones, not caring about mistakes. Unlike her student days she made sure she rinsed them properly.

  It’ll eat its own medium, Vivian had explained to a curious Greta, watching water run through a rack of prints. It was a mystery to Greta back then, why the magic solution that r
eveals a picture would later turn and attack it.

  A knock startled her. She braced herself for Toby claiming insomnia.

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Brynn. Here on my weekly stickybeak. You’re the only person I can visit this late.’

  Greta opened the door.

  ‘What’s with the bus?’ Brynn stepped inside.

  ‘Joel’s idea of the kids’ bedroom. Toby says they’re driving off in it if we work them too hard.’

  ‘I thought it was my school bus come back to find me.’

  Brynn examined the pegged-up prints.

  ‘Griffin tells me they’re bizarre,’ said Greta. ‘In a good way.’

  ‘He’s not wrong.’ Brynn laughed. ‘Show me this garden.’

  They meandered around the rock-lined beds and tyres converted to planters, with Brynn shining her torch on the thriving plants.

  ‘You must fence this vegie patch, Greta. It’s a miracle the pigs aren’t in.’

  She stopped to see the cabin’s few skeleton walls.

  ‘When’s this cabin going to be finished, the day you leave?’

  ‘It’s moving faster with Gabe here,’ said Greta.

  She diverted her friend to the dip of land below the shack. The cycads were waiting for them.

  ‘I love the nights here,’ she said. ‘The darkness.’

  ‘And these cycads, I see from your photos.’ Brynn’s hand touched a frond.

  ‘I can imagine them moving around at night,’ said Greta. ‘Swapping places, watching us sleep.’

  ‘You really are odd, Greta, on top of being a southerner.’ Brynn cupped her hand to light a cigarette.

  A curlew wailed from the rocky outcrop. There was a silence between the women. When the bird called again, Greta shivered. ‘It goes right through me that cry.’

  ‘Harbinger of death, some people say. Or endings and beginnings.’ Brynn wandered closer to the edge. ‘Undid those first white settler women. Poor things. Sail to the antipodes, set up house in the bush like a white sore thumb, and then hear that in the night. It’d scare the living daylights out of you, wouldn’t it, if you were on your own, a fresh know-nothing from the other side of the world.’ She peered downhill as if she might spot the bird. ‘Reminds me of you Greta—only you’re a know-nothing from this side of the world.’ She smiled over her shoulder.