As Stars Fall

by Christie Nieman

  ‘Things will get better, sweetie. I promise. We’ve just got to hang in there, you and me. Okay?’

  ‘Okay.’

  She kissed my forehead and floated out the door in a cloud of perfume, saying, ‘I’ll call at lunchtime to check up on you.’ The door shut behind her.

  Mum was wrong. Things would not get better.

  I flicked on the TV with the remote. Morning television. A wasteland. But it stupefied me for hours before I managed to flick it off again. The house was quiet with the television off, and with no Mum. This was the longest time I’d spent alone in this house. The traffic noise outside seemed to make the inside of the house feel even stiller, and even quieter. I opened my Field Guide and flicked through the pages. I took in a breath and turned to the well-thumbed page of the Bush Stone-curlew. In my mind, the curlews were so linked up with my dad that it made me sad just to look at a picture of one. It made me think about everything I had lost. And it made me wonder if I’d started losing my mind. Had I really seen one in the parklands?

  The phone rang. Maybe Dad. I jumped up and ran for it, half remembering on the way that he wouldn’t be calling in the middle of a school day – he’d have no idea I was at home – but still hoping . . .

  ‘Hi, honey.’

  ‘Hi, Mum. It’s not lunchtime.’

  ‘No, I’ve got a meeting at lunchtime, so I thought I’d call you now. How are you feeling?’

  ‘I’m fine, Mum, remember?’

  ‘Shh. You’ll get us both into trouble.’

  ‘Yeah, right. Cough, cough. A little better thanks, Mum.’

  ‘I’m going to be home later than I thought. Do you think you can hold out for a late dinner?’

  This wasn’t new. Back home my evenings were often spent just with Dad, both of us sitting up to dinner, looking at the clock for a while before deciding to eat without her. ‘Fine.’

  ‘I’ll cook when I get home. If you get hungry, there are dry biscuits in the cupboard and some nice cheese in the cheese section of the fridge.’

  ‘Mum, I know where the cheese lives.’

  ‘Good girl.’

  ‘Mum, I’m practically seventeen!’

  ‘And don’t leave the house.’

  ‘Mum!’

  ‘Promise?’

  ‘Alright, I won’t, I promise.’

  But hanging up the phone and looking back at the tiny doona nest on the tiny couch in the tiny lounge room, I wanted nothing more than to leave the house. To escape. To walk out the door and walk and walk until I left all the cars and buses and roads and factories and trains and houses behind. Until I was just walking on a dirt track through scrub and trees, the sunlight flashing as the leaves moved, sighing, above me.

  Seth

  Thursday evening Seth and Delia eat the spaghetti he made. His sister leaves a bowl in the fridge for their dad, who isn’t home, who is never home at the right times, and then disappears into her room with a tower of books and papers. He snaps the TV on, some cop drama, but he can’t concentrate. He can’t follow the plot. He turns it off. He is hot. The air is sticky with humidity. Wandering around the house, picking things up, putting things down, he feels constrained. The walls are moving in. They are leaning. He looks into his sister’s room and she hastily covers a sheet of green paper with a book.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  She looks at him like only a teenage girl who thinks you’re an idiot can.

  ‘It’s something to do with books . . .’ she hints.

  ‘Okay. Alright.’

  She goes back to reading.

  ‘I thought I saw you in the parklands, having a picnic.’

  Delia keeps reading without looking up.

  ‘No,’ she says simply. ‘Not me.’

  He remembers the girl, and his gut, with its contradictory messages; and he remembers Delia’s fear. He breathes out, long and thankful. Not her. The drug. His own mind. Not her. Good. That’s good. ‘Can I get you anything?’ he says.

  She looks up again. ‘I’d drink tea.’

  ‘Okay. I’ll get you a tea and then I’m going to head out for a bit, okay?’

  The words were out before he knew he was going to say them. She looks panicked.

  ‘It’ll only be for a moment. It won’t be a moment. You won’t even notice, you’ll be absorbed in your books.’

  ‘Do you have to?’

  Does he have to?

  ‘Yes, there’s something I need to do.’

  She still looks panicky, but she says, ‘Okay.’ He goes to speak, to explain further, to shoo guilt away with words, but he can’t. She is nervous and he’s leaving her even though he doesn’t need to. Part of him protests. She’s old enough, she can be home alone at night, she’s not his responsibility anyway. But he knows that’s not the point. There are the nightmares. Every night. Last night, and the night before, and the night before that, for weeks now. And he remembers again imagining her face when he was tripping in the parklands, the terrified face she actually wore for real the day their mother died; he shivers to get rid of the image, and the guilt settles in. He delivers the tea to her and slips out the door and onto the street.

  The sun has almost finished its descent, pouring faint orange light into the spaces under trees and between houses and still carrying a last sting of heat. The air is thick. In the distance, dark clouds cluster over the city, pushing down from the sky. He heads down to his spot by the creek. He hurries this time. The thought of his sister being home alone urges him on, but it’s not only that. He feels driven, like he won’t be right until he gets down there and lights up. The last of the sun is touching the trees at the top of the hill, but the creek gully is dark. He finds his spot, and he sits. He gets out one of the angel joints from the tin and cups the end while he lights it. He inhales deeply, the smoke from the drugs harsh on his throat, and he feels the blood thin out around his temples. He closes his eyes and concentrates on the feeling, the lightness in his head, the sense that his mind is everywhere and nowhere. He hears the high mumbling of the creek. He hears the quiet movements of creatures around him. A moth passes close to his face. Is this focus just his normal senses tuned in, or is it angel dust?

  He sits with eyes closed. He smokes. The reeds shift and rustle. He opens his eyes and sees movement on the other side of the creek, a feathered grey back, and then the strange big eyes of his imaginary smoke bird. And this time he doesn’t even need to close his eyes. He is seeing himself from over there, seeing everything, hearing everything, knowing, understanding, watching it all from inside the bird. And then he is drawn up, away from the earth, and he is in the sky where the sun is still bright. And he’s flying. Flying. Him, Seth, flying.

  The air is warm and thick, holding him like a cushion, and thunderclouds pile high on one side but the sun still cuts through, still sends long daggers of light at him as he flies over the parklands, over rooftops, over and along the railway line towards the city. The sunlight gilds the edges of the buildings as he moves past them. There is extra light, extra detail, in everything he sees. There is a rushing of air through feathers. He is a bird, a flying bird. He nearly yells for joy, tries to yell, makes no noise.

  He is given over to the bird, this bird in his mind; he will go where it wants to go.

  He is descending. It’s a wonderful feeling, falling slowly out of the sky, giving in to the gravity of the planet, but at the same time using the thickness of air to temper the fall. And then he is stopped, somewhere grey. A rooftop. An old factory rooftop in the inner city.

  Heat radiates from the iron beneath him, and he stalks on his bird legs into the shade behind a chimney stack at the edge of the roof. A voice from somewhere, a disconnected voice, calls out.

  ‘Flame.’

  It is a strange word to hear just then, sudden and loud, detached from what he is seeing. He reacts like a bird, startled, and he skitters to the edge where he can see out over the street below; a row of old inner-city workers’ cottages on the opposite side of th
e street.

  And just below him, sitting on one of the small roofs across the narrow road, there is a girl. She is covered in the same added layer of light, multitude of detail, as everything else. Her skin glows, freckled but brown too, and the last of the sun catches tiny golden hairs all over her body, her face, her arms, even her bare legs. Her hair is red and tucked behind her ears.

  It is the same girl. His girl from the parklands.

  ‘Flame Robin?’ The floating voice comes out of nowhere again, perhaps from inside one of the houses.

  And then he hears it start up: the mournful wailing, that heart-stopping sound, the bird, crying the same as the first time, enormous inside his head.

  The girl looks up, straight at him, right into him again, but also, he realises, squinting, looking directly at the setting sun. But she cocks her head to the side as if she hears it too, the sound. The bird cry dies, fades out to nothing. The girl stands for a moment longer, squinting in his direction. And then decisively she twists her body over the corrugated-iron peak of the roof, and swings herself acrobatically inside the full-length window, her lithe body folding around the eaves and disappearing into the dark square. And as he watches the way she moves her body – supple, confident, unafraid, sexy – suddenly, very suddenly, he can feel his own male human body in the parklands again, charged and electric.

  *

  He is lying slumped on the rock, and there is smoke in his nose, and when he opens his eyes there is a burning patch of grass around his fingers where his lit joint has fallen, and his hand is in the fire.

  He yanks his hand away. His sleeve has caught and flares as he moves. For a moment, he is frozen with fear, and then he is frozen with something else. He holds his hand in front of his face. Flames from his sleeve flick upwards and dance over the skin of his palm, the back of his hand, over his fingers. Flame. He holds his hand steady and watches. The fire grows and the pain increases.

  This is what it would have felt like.

  He rolls over and thrusts his searing hand into the creek and then sits up, shaking cold water from his swelling fingers. He should be cursing his stupidity: getting so fucked up on drugs that he’d passed out holding a lit joint. He could’ve killed himself. How on earth would his sister have coped with that? But as his burnt hand swells and blisters he’s thinking that it wasn’t odd after all, the way that he had heard that word, Flame. And the way the girl in his head, the girl in the park, the girl on the roof – his fire girl – had flame-red hair.

  On the ground tiny flames spit and gutter in a slowly widening circle, grass heads curl and blacken. He stands and scuffs his boots around the trickling fire until it dies, and then heads slowly for home. And as if the sky were trying to cool him down, douse a little disturbing fire that had flickered on inside him, the clouds push down and fat drops of rain begin to fall.

  Delia

  The house is deadly quiet. No clatter in the kitchen, no TV in the lounge. Seth gone out after her white lie about the birthday picnic. Does he remember last year? He would feel shame at forgetting her birthday if she told him, sadness at the memory of that first picnic, and she is embarrassed about trying so clumsily to recapture it: so the lie was told for his own protection, and for hers. And because she still doesn’t know what it meant, what happened there.

  The white lie told, and Seth now gone again like smoke. No-one in the house but Delia in her room in her mother’s cardigan, and a manila folder on the desk in front of her.

  It had taken one hour to get to her mother’s university by bus, five minutes from the stop just outside the campus to walk to the sciences building, fifth floor, postgraduate room 511, where her mother’s name was still printed on the door. ‘Selina Antonella’ and three other names on an A4 sheet of paper. Someone said, ‘Come in,’ but she stood and waited until the door opened from the inside.

  ‘I’m Delia Mann Antonella. I’ve come for my mother’s things.’

  A woman’s face, a hand on her arm.

  ‘Delia! Remember me? I’m Sonya. I met you a couple of times when you were here with your mum. Come in, please. I’m so glad you’re here. I’ve been waiting for someone to come and help me with her desk. I didn’t want to touch it alone – it seemed wrong somehow. I miss your mum so much.’

  Delia didn’t respond, so Sonya showed her to her mother’s desk, sparse and clean on top, but with drawers brimming, and together they sat on the floor side by side, sliding drawers open and picking through the contents: papers, articles, charts, typed lectures. Riffling through the pages. Sonya held a handful of typed sheets in front of her, Selina’s lectures, reading them. ‘Succession theory, state-and-transition models . . . This one’s on ecological disturbance. Her lectures were so much better than mine.’

  Delia found a photo of a clearing in the bush – no, of two grey birds standing in a clearing in the bush; one standing, and the other lying with its neck stretched out, both nearly invisible.

  ‘That’s them,’ says Sonya. ‘Your mum’s Bush Stone-curlews.’

  Delia holding, looking, and Sonya saying, ‘I’ll put the kettle on, shall I?’

  And then the lowest of the drawers at the bottom on the right was slid open to expose sheets and sheets of paper: light green, crinkling, black biro lines, words and words and words in black pen. Delia caught her breath and Sonya stopped still, looking at the pages. ‘I didn’t think I’d find these here,’ she said. ‘Your mum always kept personal notes while she was out doing fieldwork. She always wrote them on green paper so she wouldn’t mix them up with her other notes.’

  Sonya looked sad as she reached into the drawer and collected the pages in a green, crinkly handful. ‘I said to her once that I thought that was such a good idea, keeping her objectivity and subjectivity separate like that – scientists like to think they’re being objective, you know. But she looked me straight in the eye,’ and Sonya looked Delia straight in the eye, ‘and she said, “Sonya, I’m not trying to protect my objectivity from my subjectivity. I’m trying to help my blinkered objectivity notice those things it usually ignores, things that my subjectivity picks up, things that are important.”’ She sighed and touched the paper with her fingertips. ‘I didn’t realise she had such lovely handwriting.’

  She held the sheaf of green out to Delia. ‘She was a unique woman, your mother. I’d love to read what she has written here. I hope one day you’ll let me.’

  Delia took it all: lecture notes, maps, articles and subjective field notes, all stuffed into her schoolbag. Sonya squeezed her goodbye. ‘Selina was a good friend of mine. I miss her so much. If there’s anything I can do for you, anything at all, please ask me.’

  And Delia squeezed back, just a little.

  The manila folder on Delia’s desk in front of her is full of the papers from the office. Words and words and words. The last words she will ever have from her mother. With her lamp drawn low over the desk, Delia opens the folder and begins to read.

  Robin

  It was about seven-thirty and I was sitting out on the roof, waiting for Mum to come home. I’d been up there for ages, escaping by imagining the wattles, and the eucalypts, and the magpies and the masked lapwings, and the white-faced heron, and the Australian wood-ducks down on the dam, with their strange cat-baby cries, and when I saw the dark curly head of my mother pass through the front gate beneath me I felt a rush of joy like when I was little. Like in summer when it was still light when she got home, and Dad and I used to walk the kilometre up to the top of the drive and take a gate post each, and wait for her little silver hatchback, and she’d drive up and stick her head out and yell, ‘Hi-ho, Silver,’ and slow down just enough for us to climb on the roof and ride the little car all bumpy down the corrugated dirt road all the way home. As she walked through the gate beneath me, she didn’t look up. Lucky. I had a sense that seeing me out on the roof might inspire a fairly high crank-factor in her. Even though, strictly speaking, I hadn’t really left the house. I was just on it, instead of in it.
>
  I closed my eyes again, feeling the heat of the last bit of the sun on my face as it slanted out from the city. And I did it again. I left this new house, new life, and let my old home overtake me, just as it was in the weeks before I left. I let it grow more real than the place I was in. More present. No longer in the past. And I really felt it. I was linked with the place. Not another rooftop in sight, just rolling paddocks on every side, disappearing into the dark valley below . . .

  . . . and the sun peeking at me over the mountains to my left. And I’m up in a tree and my hair is being blown softly across my face in front of my eyes. The setting sun catches the strands so that they glow red. The mountains at my right are all blue and hazy, because the air is still full of the smoke from the fires. The big granite rock that gives the hill opposite me its oh-so-familiar outline – ‘the pinnacle’ – appears to be hovering in that blue air, hanging in space like some kind of heavenly landscape. I’m sitting in a peppermint gum and its leaves are long, thin and elegant, and they are grey-green except where they catch the sun, and then they are bright streamers of red too, like my hair.

  And I look out through the leaves and see the hill sloping away from me, down to the creek where all the wattles grow. I can smell the flowers, even from way up here. The evening air is warm, and the sweet wattle smell mixes with the complicated smell of dry eucalyptus leaves. It makes me feel alive.

  If I wanted, I could just step right off my tree and float on that smell. I would float down across the creek, and then over the farmland on the valley floor, all the way to the mountains. And I could float and float. All that wide, open space. All that air. It’s incredible . . .

  ‘Flame?’

  My eyelids opened and my view ran into the factory wall opposite. It was such a claustrophobic sensation. So close. And everything was different to before; everything had that odd greeny-yellow tinge it gets before a summer storm and I felt like I was trying to breathe steam.