As Stars Fall

by Christie Nieman

  Their game was taking them away from us, back towards the creek. The leader wanted to dodge in, around, and under bushes and branches, and their circling and chasing eventually took them out of sight, down past the fence line and into the scrubby depression the creek made, so that only the sound of them hung in the air.

  Dad squeezed my hand and said under his breath, ‘Good time for us to sneak out of here I think. Quietly now.’

  And we slid from our log and walked carefully back across the paddock, only switching on the torch once we were past the big gum tree.

  ‘You’re a very lucky girl, my dear.’

  ‘What were they?’

  ‘Bush Stone-curlews.’

  ‘They were so beautiful . . .’ But I found I was speechless. ‘Why am I a lucky girl?’

  ‘You’re lucky that they are here at all, and lucky that you have a dad who knows where to find them. Nesting pairs used to always use that spot before you were born, but they haven’t been here for about fifteen years or more. And years and years and years before that, there would have been huge flocks of them gathering around here after breeding. But the environment’s no good for them anymore, it’s over-cleared. Now it’s rare even to hear them, let alone see them. And I’ve never seen them play like that. You’re a very lucky girl.’

  I had my hands in my pockets, but I took them out as we walked across the uneven ground, and Dad grabbed one of them and we walked the rest of the way in silence.

  *

  Sitting in the city parklands in the late-afternoon sun, I wasn’t sure what to believe. I felt like my eyes had really seen a curlew. I wanted to go down to the spot by the creek and have a closer look. But the sun had moved across the sky enough that the bottom of the hill there was already quite dark. And I was a bit spooked. I was spooked by Delia’s strange reaction and the way she left like that. I was spooked to be out on my own in a city park when the light was fading. And I was a bit spooked by my own head. That it would draw a curlew yesterday, without me even knowing, and then today would play a trick like that on me.

  And then I was suddenly way too spooked to go down there because I realised I was being watched. Down by the creek, there was a guy standing in the shadows. He was just staring at me. Just standing there in the dark under the trees, staring and smoking – I could tell by the little orange dot that flared as he inhaled. Why was he looking at me like that? Was he trying to scare me? He was kind of rough-looking, with dark hair and dark eyes. And I was struck by the way he was standing – it was the exact same pose as my imaginary curlew – all elegant and upright and alert. He was kind of beautiful.

  For a moment I was torn between staring back at him or leaving. Better safe than sorry, I thought, and legged it.

  Seth

  Seth is lying on his back in bed smoking cigarettes. It’s early afternoon. He hasn’t got up yet. He hasn’t eaten breakfast, let alone lunch, but it doesn’t matter: there’ll be no food in the kitchen anyway. He’ll stay here a bit longer, and then he’ll have a cup of coffee. After that, he’ll go into the city and hang around. He doesn’t see much point in doing anything else.

  He gets up and pads out to the kitchen in his underwear. He fills the saucepan from the tap and puts it on the stove. His eyes fix on the delicate little teapot and matching teacup, upside down on the side of the sink, all neatly washed up for use the next morning – his sister’s tidy work. The matching tea set was a gift to Delia from Seth, two months ago, just before it happened. Not for any reason. Just because. Just because he saw it and knew she would like it. And now every morning when he sees the pot and cup upturned on the bench he feels a little bit connected. He sees it and a little pulse of warmth throbs once in his chest and glows there, as he thinks of Delia sipping delicately in the early morning, like a tiny English lady, and treating his pot and cup as precious objects, washing them up with fastidious care.

  He spoons instant coffee into a chipped mug – his favourite, some chance item his mother picked up in her travels; ‘Myrtleford Rodeo’ with a picture of a man chopping a log in half, standing on the log and hauling the axe high above his head with meaty arms. He slops milk into the cup and pours water from the saucepan. He takes the coffee and the last bent cigarette out onto the back step in the sun. Their two chooks, Ripper and Slasher – Delia was determined these would be their names – are commenting softly on the state of life at that present moment: ‘shit’, it seems to him by their muted clucks, until one of them finds a spider by the fence, and then everything is excitement and exclamation until the spider is fought over and ripped apart, and everything returns to normal.

  He holds up his hand and briefly examines the cigarette burn in the centre of his palm before picking up the coffee cup again. Today should be just like any other day. He should go into Game, play a couple of rounds, see if he can break his own record. Or he should go up Swan Street to the doggies – he knows a good hole in the fence there, the VIP entrance he calls it. He should do this. He should go to the spot behind the cathedral where he knows a guy who sells weed. That’s what he would be doing today, only he can’t quite imagine it anymore. Not after the parklands last night.

  Last night.

  Seth still hasn’t figured out what happened last night.

  It is all still there, today, in his head. The bird, himself, the wild sound from the bird all around him. And then seeping out of himself, escaping himself, seeing everything in that new way. That guy behind the cathedral must have snuck some really trippy weed into his stash.

  Ripper and Slasher cluck with lazy self-satisfaction in the afternoon sun, and as they scrape away at the surface of the gravelly backyard, Seth watches them, drinks his coffee, smokes his smoke, and sees, really sees, the pointlessness of the day ahead of him – images in shades of black and white and grey.

  *

  He pulls on his jeans and a t-shirt and goes and opens the door to his parents’ room. Correction: his dad’s room. He can usually scrounge a cigarette or two from the crumpled packs that litter the floor beside the bed. He hasn’t thought about the possibility of the room being occupied. But as he steps into the room a form in the bed moves, rolls over, gasps for air. Seth freezes, hoping that if he is motionless his dad won’t see him. He steps quietly backwards, trying not to see the empty bottle by the bed, or to smell the fermented, second-hand air that fills the room. But his movement has been spotted.

  ‘Seth? Seth.’ His father’s weak voice emerges from the tangle of covers. Seth freezes again. Maybe his dad will slip back into unconsciousness. ‘What day is it, Seth? What’s the time?’ He sounds pathetic. Seth wants to throw something at him, hurt him physically. It’s an urge so sudden and so strong that he trembles with the effort of resisting it. ‘Make us a coffee, Seth.’ Seth begins to withdraw and his father speaks more into the pillows than to him. ‘Then I’ll drop you both off at school.’

  Seth, back in the kitchen, spoons coffee into a mug, hitting the spoon loudly against the side, hoping the high-pitched noise is causing pain to the head up the hallway. He spoons coffee into his own mug too, the Myrtleford Rodeo cup. His fingers close around it. His hands are shaking. He hurls the cup against the tiled wall, and for a moment the smashing noise satisfies and relieves him, before the reality of the lost cup, in pieces on the floor, nearly crushes him with remorse. It’s overwhelming. He nearly cries with grief for the cup. He sits at the kitchen table with his head in his hands. Why that cup, Seth? Why that one? That cup meant something.

  Oh well. Not anymore. It doesn’t have to mean anything anymore. Good.

  Seth leaves the mess in the kitchen, leaves the coffee half-made. Leaves the house, closing the front door quietly behind him.

  *

  He goes into the city to see the guy he buys his weed from. He tells the guy about the night before, how the last joint really loosened him from himself, really drew him out of himself – how while he was high he was, quite literally it seemed, out of himself: hallucinating, being a bird,
being and seeing everything at once. And the guy says, ‘Shit, no kidding. That’s where my fucken Sally D went. That wasn’t straight weed, man. Fuck man, you owe me money.’

  Seth asks the guy for something like the stuff he got. Maybe something that would take him even further.

  The guys pauses, looks at him sideways. ‘You liked it, eh? Man, you’ll shit yourself at my special blend then: Mary Jane and Sally D mixed up with a little PCP – my “angel” joints. They’re cool. Really gentle.’

  He produces a small flat tin-case with a number of pre-rolled joints. The joints are pre-rolled to keep the PCP powder in – the ‘angel dust’. He gives Seth the tin.

  ‘Consider this a one-time buy-one-get-one-free offer. Buy these, and if you want more, I won’t charge you for the Sally D you already fucked me for.’

  Seth hands over crumpled notes and the guy stows them in his jeans pocket. As he turns away from Seth he says, ‘Careful with that shit, but. Sends some a bit agro, a bit paranoid. But this is just a touch of it. You’ll be sweet. This’ll get you right out of yourself. You’ll dig it.’

  Late in the afternoon, down by the creek, Seth’s fingers shake as he pulls one of the angel joints out of the tin. But not because he is scared. Bugger that, how could he be scared of anything now? He shakes because he is still angry. He cups his hand in front of his face and flicks his lighter at the end of the joint. He draws back deeply. Kids’ voices cut through the air. The sound irritates him; he wants to take a swipe at it like it’s coming from a swarm of mosquitoes above his head.

  He inhales again. He sits and waits. He needs that calming hallucination. He needs to get outside himself and be a dog, a tree, a seagull, whatever it is this time. He breathes in and tries to relax. But the drugs don’t kick in like they did yesterday. It just isn’t happening. Stuck in his own body, his skin feels claustrophobic and unbearable. He’d like to peel it off, bust out of it, escape.

  He opens his eyes and swears in frustration. He pulls hard on the rollie, taking in enough to get an instant head spin. Then he realises, with something like fright, that there are eyes on him from the other side of the creek: that same bird again, the gull or whatever, staring at him.

  ‘Oi!’

  The bird crouches, alarmed.

  ‘You!’

  The bird doesn’t move. Still staring intently, just like it did yesterday. Then he gets it. The drugs are working. The bird is a hallucination. A bird made of smoke. But today it’s giving him the creeps. Those big weird eyes. He doesn’t want to see this bird again today. Today he wants to have visions of something else. He picks up a stick.

  ‘Go on, bugger off!’

  He hurls the stick. It misses the bird by centimetres and the bird hops low and sideways, but not out of view. He picks up another stick anyway, and is about to hurl it when he sees the bird isn’t staring intently at him, it is looking past him up the hill with a strange alert look. Instinctively he swivels around to see what it is looking at, and through a gap in the bushes he sees two schoolgirls having a picnic up there on the grass.

  One of them is his sister.

  This is a shock because Delia doesn’t have friends. She never has. She had acquaintances in primary school, girls who let her hang around at the edge of their group, but she’s never had those bosom buddies that young girls are supposed to have. And since she started high school, not even a group. She hasn’t seemed to need it. She hasn’t seemed to need anyone.

  The girl she is with looks older than Delia, maybe about the same age as Seth, or just a bit younger. She has extraordinary red hair. Her limbs are long and fair and not quite graceful. He watches her raise a plastic cup to her lips, and the curve of her wrist seems like something he’s never seen before. Awkward and graceful all at once. She drops her hand and throws back her head and laughs with such goofy abandon that Seth laughs a bit too, at her. She’s gorgeous. Delia drops her head and laughs as well, and it swells Seth’s heart to see it. He hasn’t seen it for so long. He is smiling, a strange feeling around his mouth – of muscles stiff and stale from disuse. Who is this girl? He’ll ask Delia.

  Suddenly the girl is looking in his direction. Staring hard. Why? Can she see him? He doesn’t think so. He looks around to see what else she could be looking at. There is nothing there, just trees and rushes, even his made-up grey bird-of-smoke has vanished. He looks back up at the scene. Delia is looking at the girl, not laughing anymore. He sees the girl’s lips move. He sees Delia pull back in horror and then jump up. Delia looks frightened. Really frightened. The last time he saw Delia so frightened was that day – that awful day. Even after her nightmares, the ones she’s been having every night for weeks now, even when he goes in to comfort her – terrified and shaking – it has been different: it has not been the same bewildered animal fear he saw in her that day. He swore he would never let her be that frightened again. She’s that frightened now. It makes his stomach plunge.

  What did the girl do? What did she do to his sister?

  He pushes aside the branches and watches as Delia grabs her things and walks quickly away across the grass. He nearly follows her, but he is stopped by the sight of the red-haired girl. With the sun behind her, her hair blazes. She doesn’t seem quite real. Delia has left her holding a sandwich completely still in mid-air, and she looks faintly ridiculous, but something about her . . . It would make more sense if it wasn’t real, if it was the drugs – his mind inventing. It would make more sense. Delia doesn’t have friends. Delia doesn’t laugh. Delia being that afraid can never be allowed to happen: it is easier to believe that it didn’t.

  The girl is still staring in his direction, her hair a fire dancing on her head. Without taking his eyes off her he stands up and steps out into the clearing, into full view. A test, to see her respond, to see if she’s real. But she seems perfectly frozen. She doesn’t blink, just sits there with her sandwich held high, staring down at him. Ha! The tricks his mind plays – it’s almost fun; he almost smiles again. But she’s still there and he feels as though she’s looking right into him. He is unnerved. The almost-smile fades from his face.

  She seems at once to come out of it and to see him standing there. She stares at him for a moment, and then gets up quickly, instantly again that gorgeous gangly graceful girl, gathers her things without taking her eyes off him, and strides away across the grass.

  Seth watches after her, his instincts charged and confused as both compulsions and warnings, belief and disbelief, clamour inside him.

  Seth slowly lifts the joint to his lips and takes another slow, hard draw.

  Delia

  the sky red and thick – heat crowding in – flames roaring – dogs barking – flames licking her ankles like dogs – turn away, run away, don’t want to see the fire anymore – pink lines, pink birds, sketched, flying all around her – someone says ‘Murramunda’ and there’s another sound, an animal screaming, a high, thin wail –

  She wakes up crying. Eleven forty-two p.m. Pitch-black.

  ‘Seth!’ she cries. ‘Seth!’

  Her brother’s footsteps come along the hall. Her door opens. The light falls across the bed. Her brother brings his arms tight around her.

  Dogs are still barking: the neighbourhood dogs, yelling at each other over fences, egging each other on. But the other sound is there too, low in the background, coming from the parklands. Can Seth hear it? Does he recognise it too?

  His voice soothes. ‘It’s okay. It’s okay now. We’ll just sit like this. We’ll just stay like this for a minute, and then when we’re all calm, I’ll put the kettle on. Everything is going to be okay.’

  He brings her tea and she wraps her fingers around the mug to warm them, and he lies down across the foot of her bed, keeping her feet safe. The sound from the parklands fades, and before she has finished her tea, Seth’s breathing draws out and, with the light still on, he falls asleep.

  He mustn’t have heard it. Or he doesn’t recognise it.

  Delia heard it. And she k
nows what it is.

  Her mum had a playlist on her laptop that she used in her fieldwork in the bush: Bush Stone-curlew calls, for playback. There were four tracks. She would play them to Delia because she thought the sound was the most beautiful thing in the world. But Delia hated it. Even then. It was a crazy noise, full of sadness and menace, growing from a small quiet wail into a hysterical chaotic jumble that sounded like distress. But she had hated it in a fun kind of way, like when someone rubs two bits of polystyrene together to make you squeal.

  But now, with the sound beginning once again to waft out of the parklands, building again slowly from nothing, it isn’t fun. It is frightening.

  She tries to calm herself. Approach this scientifically. Listen. Observe. Be logical. Only measure those things that are real, that are tangible, that are there in front of you, that can be proven.

  The sound builds. Seth sleeps on. Against all instincts she convinces her body to lie still. Her mum loved this sound. Her mum told her that the birds weren’t at all distressed, they were singing with each other. She lies stiff in bed and listens. She follows the lone bird’s song up and down, she allows herself to feel its curves. But it is awful. She feels like her anguish has been given voice, been given freedom to drive her mad, and as the bird presses on through its crescendo and finally pushes forward its last rising note, she has to jam her fingers into her ears to stop herself screaming.

  The sound suddenly fades down to nothing again. She slowly takes her fingers out of her ears and places her hands by her sides and lies straight and neat, nothing out of line.