The Curlew's Eye

by Karen Manton

  ‘Come with us to the gate,’ they said, setting off on their bikes and shouting for him to catch up on the quad bike.

  Greta smiled to herself, knowing they’d be working on him to keep Rex, who was doing the faithful thing and running alongside them all.

  She went to check on the garden until Joel came back. She could tell he was going to pretend the night before didn’t happen. He’d say, It was you I saw with the lantern.

  She had a mind to go and photograph it shattered on the killing floor.

  Take me with you. The girl’s face was etched into Greta’s mind.

  The quad bike returned. Joel stood at the vegie patch fence, hearing about mould and insects. ‘The water tank’s arriving today,’ he said when she was finished. ‘They rang yesterday.’

  ‘No rest for the wicked.’ She squashed a grasshopper between her fingers.

  Neither of them spoke for a moment, each looking at the other, as if there might be an answer in their eyes.

  ‘I thought you were out there for a couple of weeks longer,’ Greta said at last.

  ‘Changed my mind.’ He smiled at her. ‘Missing you too much.’ His hand was on the rickety gate between them. ‘And I want the cabin finished.’

  The truck with the water tank drove in as Brynn and Greta were leaving to go up to Darwin. Greta felt a hint of guilt but was glad for a few hours away. A ride to town with Brynn would be a welcome distraction.

  Her eyes followed two brown pipes running parallel to the road that went all the way to Darwin.

  ‘One for beer, one for water,’ Joel had said the first time they’d passed them.

  Toby had believed him.

  ‘You’re a quiet one today,’ said Brynn, accelerating to pass a road train.

  ‘And you’re a leadfoot, my friend.’

  The highway had an apocalyptic look, with steam rising off the tarmac after a downpour they’d just missed. Up ahead a kite was feasting on a dead lizard. Brynn beeped. It flew off just in time. She switched on the radio and delved into her tobacco pouch. Greta took it from her, rolled the cigarette, lit it and put it in her friend’s mouth.

  ‘Ta,’ said Brynn, blowing smoke out the window. ‘Find me some music on this radio, will you? I can’t stand these endless talkers.’

  Greta went through the channels until she found a blues song.

  ‘Do you want to hear my news?’ Brynn asked.

  Greta turned to her.

  ‘Someone stole my giant pumpkin.’

  ‘Are you for real?’

  ‘Carted it away in the night.’

  ‘You didn’t hear anything?’

  She paused. ‘I was back late.’

  ‘Over at Ronnie’s, eh?’

  ‘What’s with your mind, girl? I was on my way back from Katherine.’

  Greta wondered what Brynn was up to in Katherine, and who’d steal an overgrown pumpkin.

  Brynn shrugged. ‘It was starting to rot,’ she said. ‘Would’ve lost it in the end.’

  She turned up the music and said no more. Greta dozed off into a surreal world of giant pumpkins and carcass hoists. A car horn startled her awake. The hot glare of concrete, tarmac and tall offices with windows like mirrors leaned in on her. Brynn pointed to a metal arch over the main street.

  ‘Latest solution to hot cities. Grow a vine shade and cool us down. Uproot trees for car parks and other architectural wonders. The oldest milkwood in town went yesterday. Can you believe it?’

  She dropped Greta at the supermarket with a request for haloumi cheese. Greta braced for queues, jingling Christmas music, fluorescent light. Hazel was a pleasant surprise, over by the fruit and vegetables. She smiled to see Greta, and asked her to fill a bag with oranges that she couldn’t quite reach.

  ‘Young Griffin says you’re going south for summer. Swapping crocs for white pointers, eh?’ She chuckled.

  Greta laughed. ‘We’re not sure where we’ll go yet.’

  She put the oranges in Hazel’s trolley and asked her if she needed anything else.

  ‘No, all good dear.’

  ‘We’ll see you before we go I hope,’ said Greta. She wanted to say something more, to say she would miss Hazel, and that she wished they could stay longer, get to know her.

  The old woman smiled and said, ‘You’ll be back, for sure. No one leaves forever.’

  As they neared home Greta asked, ‘Do you mind a quick detour?’

  Brynn glanced at her. ‘Is this an adventure?’

  Greta told her to slow down and pointed at the track to the lake.

  ‘You’re not going to murder me, are you?’ asked Brynn.

  ‘I was thinking of it.’

  Brynn moved carefully along, watching out for the points of young termite mounds.

  ‘What’s this for exactly?’ she asked as they pulled up at the meatworks.

  ‘Photos.’

  ‘I didn’t realise you’d sneaked the camera along with us.’

  Greta took the camera bag and tripod from the boot and brushed through grass to the missing section of wall. Up on the killing floor the lantern was gone. Only scattered glass remained, scattered across the floor. It could have been from years ago. She searched for other clues from the night before. All she found was a curlew feather.

  The light was shifting. She’d have to be quick. Practice shots, she told herself, choosing the knocking box, the hoists, hooks and skinning cradles. In the chiller she found an old vat for cleaning meat hooks. A pile of them was still inside. At the end of the building she discovered the butcher room, with a stainless steel table, a meat band saw, and Vadik’s old mincer. The blast freezer’s door was stuck half open.

  There, she was done. She’d come back when the light was better. On her way out she picked up the curlew feather, and heard Vivian say, Nothing’s ever as it seems.

  There was a hush through the building. Rain pattered softly on the roof. She stuck the feather behind her ear.

  ‘Are you finished yet?’ Brynn called from the hide table. ‘Your frozen peas’ll be melting.’

  The car skidded softly up the muddy firebreak.

  ‘Did you find what you were looking for?’ Brynn asked.

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Me neither. I’ve never found what I’m looking for.’

  Later that afternoon, Greta and Joel started tiling the cabin’s bathroom. It was a cramped, hot task. The fan gave little relief. The tiles were cheap and slightly different sizes. They didn’t match the spirit level’s line. Joel cursed while Greta kept on with her section, pasting glue on tiles and trying to see through a blur of perspiration.

  After a couple of hours the fan screeched to a halt. The room filled with the smell of burning plastic. Joel said he was finished—for the day and with bathroom tiles in general. Greta sat next to him on the bath rim. The children’s voices drifted over from the banyan tree.

  ‘I have to know, Joel.’ The words were suddenly out.

  ‘Know what?’ He put the lid on the glue.

  She could have killed the question then. She could have swallowed it back down.

  ‘Is she yours?’

  He looked at her nonplussed. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘The girl, Joel. Down at the hut.’

  ‘God, Greta,’ he whispered.

  ‘I know you think you didn’t see her, but she was there last night, so close she could’ve touched you.’

  He looked at the floor. His jaw muscle twitched.

  ‘I’ve had enough of this.’ She sighed and stood up.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The way you avoid, avoid, avoid. Every time.’

  Rexie followed her to the shower behind the shack. She was still clutching the glue trowel. She stabbed it in the ground by the door.

  She turned the water on hard. Mud spattered across her feet.

  Joel’s boots came crunching over gravel. The shower door swung open.

  ‘What kind of an accusation is that?’ His body blocked the doorway.r />
  ‘It’s a question,’ she said through falling water.

  He smiled incredulously. ‘She’s not mine, Greta. You are. You and Raffy. Toby. Griffin. There’s no one else.’

  ‘How would you know, Joel? You shot through after the house fire. Came back and shot through again.’

  He was stunned. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘You always told me you left and that was it, but you came back, fifteen years ago!’

  ‘It was a month, two maybe. Fifteen, twenty-three years—what’s the difference? It’s ages ago.’

  ‘Her name’s Elena!’

  He reached under the water and turned off the tap.

  She snatched her towel from the hook. ‘Your mother’s middle name, Joel.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So it makes me wonder if there’s a connection. If she’s part of us, our family.’

  She held the towel against herself. He stormed out. She listened to him march off and skid to a stop. The footsteps were quicker on the way back. He was in the doorway again.

  ‘I’m going down there to tell this girl to clear out!’

  ‘No, Joel, you can’t do that.’

  ‘Why not? She’s squatting illegally on my land.’

  ‘It’s not yours—not entirely.’

  ‘Oh, come on!’

  ‘You’re just passing through, Joel. What if she has nowhere else? What if her home isn’t safe?’

  ‘Home’s never safe, Greta.’

  She let him go. Above her the clouds were shifting. Thunder rumbled in from different directions. At her feet the reddened water swirled in patterns. Grains of dirt that had splattered apart were converging, spiralling in.

  Joel was the last to the table for dinner. He settled into the chair with an odd smile for her. A challenge or a triumph. The children looked from one parent to the other. There’d been a rift, they knew, and their father had disappeared until sundown. The air was taut.

  ‘These are delicious omelettes you’ve made, Toby,’ Greta said.

  ‘With our own chickens’ eggs,’ noted Griffin.

  ‘Not mine,’ mumbled Raffy, whose newest hen had gone the way of the old, under the rufous owl’s claw.

  They ate in silence then, until Joel said, ‘Danny’ll be here for Christmas.’

  An electric fizz passed between the boys. Raffy knocked over his water. They broke into chatter about the uncle they’d never met, where he’d sleep, the fishing trips to arrange.

  Joel took a toothpick from the belly of a grinning ceramic koala in the middle of the table. One paw was up in a permanent wave. Raffy had bought it from a second-hand stall at the markets. Greta found it ugly but he wanted it on the table.

  ‘They’re going extinct,’ he’d argued. ‘They won’t be here when I grow up.’

  Slaughtered under clear-felled trees, burned by ferocious bushfires, mowed down for development. When she was a child she couldn’t have imagined they might disappear.

  She told the boys to carry the plates inside and wash them.

  ‘He’s taken his time to show up, your brother.’

  Joel picked at his teeth. ‘Danny’s on a different clock.’

  ‘One that doesn’t go tick tock!’ Raffy sang through the screen door.

  ‘Still knows when to fly in from outer space for turkey and plum pudding,’ Greta said, smiling.

  Toby called Raffy to the sink. Joel tossed the toothpick to the heliconias.

  ‘No one’s there,’ he said. ‘At the hut.’

  ‘Is that right?’

  He looked out to the escarpment, the softer light across the country. His fingers tapped the beer bottle.

  ‘Have it your way then,’ she said, knowing the girl would have been hiding up in the mango tree.

  He went inside and helped the boys finish the dishes. Before long it became a soapsuds fight.

  She set up at the outside workbench to make frames for her photos and repair the swan boy’s one, which had taken a knock and come unstuck. Her ears stayed with the action inside the shack. They’d calmed down and were all cosied up on the couch. Joel was reading a chapter of Journey to the Centre of the Earth. The lilt in his voice made her hands dreamy, so the hammer nearly slipped when she aimed for a nail.

  We’re travelling to the centre of the earth, you and I, she thought, but from different hemispheres. No one ever really knows anyone.

  She’d never pried into Joel’s past, or he into hers. It had worked for them. But something was shifting in this place, on this land; under the gaze of the old house, and in the presence of the quiet, breathing lake. The respectful silences they’d kept were tipping. Now it was concealment.

  Insects flew at the lantern. The swan boy watched her from his frame. How long did it take Joel to sketch the wing? Each feather was drawn so delicately—the shaft, the tiny strokes of a vane.

  She’d glued and clamped two photo frames by the time Joel finished reading. The boys started asking him questions about the old meatworks. He took them through the steps from kill to skinning, cutting quarters, boning. How he cleaned up hides, took off hooves and tails. Salted and folded them. Some hides were covered in ticks. They came off like fish scales on the back of his knife.

  Toby wanted to know about skinning and boning knives.

  Vadik sharpened them, Joel said. There were no fancy air compressor ones. A saw was used to quarter the animal.

  He ushered them to the laundry trough to clean their teeth. They kept on with their questions, about ‘the chiller’ and ‘the blast’—how cold they were; and who worked where.

  ‘Old Devil was on the killing floor with Fedor. Vadik was in the butcher room making mince and salami. Radek, Danny, Gabe and I worked where we were told. The other boys too sometimes. But whoever was in the butcher room stole the best cuts for our mother. Say goodnight to yours now.’

  ‘Goodnight,’ they called in unison, as they passed her.

  ‘Your dad Fedor was the boss at the meatworks, right?’ Griffin stepped up into the bus first.

  ‘That’s right. Donegan owned it, Fedor ran it,’ Joel explained. ‘It was small, unregistered, but people knew Fedor’s meat was good. They had bigger plans but Donegan lost his money.’

  ‘And Devil ran it when Fedor was sick with his gammy leg?’ Toby confirmed.

  ‘Tori says Devil was a weirdo,’ Griffin added. He’d learned to be all ears around Tori. ‘And everything stopped when the law changed and all the unregistered meatworks closed overnight.’

  ‘You know your history,’ Joel said.

  ‘Not mine, yours.’

  ‘Why did we close down?’ Raffy’s voice chimed in, confused.

  ‘Someone died of salami.’ Toby had his facts. ‘Not Vadik’s, though.’

  Joel told them goodnight and came to find Greta at the workbench. The questions had wearied him. He rested his chin on her shoulder to look at the swan boy sketch.

  ‘Is that you, do you think?’ she asked.

  ‘Nah.’

  ‘I think it is.’

  ‘Have it your way then.’ He rested his hand on her shoulder, and then left for the cabin.

  She stayed on to make two more frames. How different tonight is from last night, she mused. She wanted to make sense of it, the eclipse night, but the scene in the meatworks kept misting over in her mind.

  Joel was asleep when she finally went to bed. The moon’s face was in the sky window. The mark on his chest gleamed white, and the six scars reaching for his back were the skinny fingers of a moon wraith. The streaks on his arm glimmered. They could be feathers in the swan boy’s wing.

  25

  Greta spread out her photos on the old door she’d set up as a makeshift table in the cabin’s spare room.

  Outside, Gabe’s angle grinder screeched through metal. He and Joel were building a platform for the cabin’s water tank.

  Greta had a fan blowing behind her. The photos were held down by small pebbles. The tendril roots of the banyan tree, the boul
ders near the creek with their ghostly knowing. The cycads in their stages, from the first elegant curl of a new frond to a burned trunk with whitened fronds to a pod holding seeds like treasures.

  She liked these images with all their black-and-white tones. They had a truth that colour missed.

  She’d decided on a few different series—cycads, the homestead and hut, car wrecks. A portrait of the bush stone-curlew. And a triptych of chimes.

  Raffy had taken a photo through the knothole in the hut’s wall and caught the nearest set. She found her photo of the same ones. The odd thing was, in her photo there was an extra string. She looked at it more closely and saw a run of diamond-shaped beads. Vivian’s necklace.

  We steal from each other.

  She’d thought Elena was talking about the bowerbird.

  Joel whistled to her through the louvres.

  He appeared in the doorway and leaned wearily against the architrave. ‘Ronnie’s coming tomorrow with the crane to lift the tank.’

  ‘Is Gabe still here?’

  ‘He’s gone to pick up someone from the clinic.’ He came to the table and walked around it, admiring the photos. ‘You could be a professional.’

  ‘That was my mother. I’m amateur all over.’

  ‘They’re looking pretty flash to me.’

  ‘Any of these cars familiar?’ she joked.

  He smiled and pointed out a few. Seb’s first Holden driven to death. Vadik’s ute, left to rot where it stopped up behind the homestead. The station wagon Danny stole and then burned in a panic. He perused the others. Magdalen’s birth car, and the many vehicles Greta had discovered after the fire.

  ‘You must’ve walked the entire place,’ he said.

  He wasn’t far wrong. The abandoned cars obsessed her. The angle of a vehicle, the way a door was jammed open or a bonnet had buckled and lifted. She wondered about the vanished humans who’d driven them and been passengers. The cars took on a character of their own. Forlorn, forsaken. With a scurry of cloud overhead or a watchtower termite mound behind. Forgotten vehicles made present.

  She was glad she hadn’t photographed the car near the mango farm. She had come to believe Trapper’s story must be right. Tori had seemed hesitant to talk about it.