As Stars Fall

by Christie Nieman

  ‘Flame Robin?’ Mum called again, but I knew she would be getting changed into her home clothes and I didn’t have to hurry just yet. I closed my eyes again and felt for the air of home, trying to remember the smells in weather like this, the heavy eucalyptus scent on pre-storm air.

  But then I heard something. I didn’t create that sound in my imaginings. The call of a Bush Stone-curlew was rising in the air around me. I stopped and my eyes flew open. I twisted my head up and then around, looking at the sky, and then at the roof of the factory opposite, where I thought the sound had come from. But there was no sound anymore, nothing, and I couldn’t see anything there for the brilliance of the setting sun.

  I shook my head to make the echoes of the sound, and the feeling that went with it – sadness, grief, loss – vanish. Why would my mind do that to me? First the parklands, and now this.

  I didn’t like it here. It was making me strange.

  I heard Mum climbing the first stairs of the ladder to my room.

  ‘Robbie, are you in your room?’

  Shit. ‘Yes, Mum!’ I called towards the window. And I heard her retreat again to the bottom of the stairs.

  I swung myself back in my window and went and sat on my bed. My bedroom wall was covered with photos of home – photos of me and Dad, photos of Pen-dog and Mo, photos of the hills and the bush – all framed with the stack of odd and mismatching frames I’d found at the op shop up the road. It was one of the first things I’d done when setting up my new room. I’d even framed the photograph I took of the pinnacle right after the fire, the one I’d taken from right up close when Dad and I had gone up there for a look that last day – the last day I saw him. The day he turned up at home unannounced and said he was moving away.

  I don’t know where he’d been staying for that fortnight since the fire, but it wasn’t at home. And I knew that it wasn’t with that woman, either, because Amber told me she’d gone to Queensland to work for a few months. But then Dad came over and told me and Mum that he was going there too, to Queensland, the next day. He asked Mum if he could take me for a drive, and Mum had let him, hadn’t hassled him about anything, not like in the weeks before. Dad and I jumped in the Land Rover and he said, ‘Let’s go and look at the hill.’ We drove up through the bush reserve, ignoring the ‘do not enter’ signs. ‘Don’t tell your mother,’ he said. The trees were stripped totally bare. Everything was black. We stayed on the bitumen where it was safest and took it all the way to the top, to the lookout point next to the pinnacle. We sat on the bonnet of the car and looked at the vista: and at the huge rock, and the devastation all around it. There was nothing left alive.

  ‘It’s all ruined,’ I said.

  Dad took my hand. ‘Don’t worry, honey, it’ll all grow again. Give it time.’

  I couldn’t believe he was leaving. I was so angry at him for doing this to us. But it was hard because I also loved him so much. I couldn’t believe I wasn’t going to be living with him anymore. Or seeing him every day. I started to cry.

  Dad got down from the bonnet and went around to stand at the back of the car for a moment, and when he came back, his voice was all husky. ‘Got your camera?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘You should take a picture of it all now, so you can remember the bush like this. You won’t believe how quickly it all comes back to life.’

  Dad left, and a few weeks later, Mum and I left too. Before Dad told us he was going away, Mum had got herself a job in the city at a really good school, and she said that they had a place for me there too. She told me, in that hard way she now had, that it didn’t matter that Dad was the one leaving now, she’d already arranged stuff, and it was too late to change. She said it was an excellent career move for her, and that it would also be a great advantage for me to do my final years of high school there. That everything had worked out well. Well?! She didn’t even consult me. Within weeks we had packed up, moved our sheep in with the neighbour’s flock, and left Pen-dog and Magpie Mo over at the Dooleys’. And even as we drove away from our house for the city, I could see the blackened hills misting up with the faint green of new life that Dad had promised would come. But we were driving away from it.

  I couldn’t see the picture on my wall anymore through the mist in my eyes. It had started to rain softly, surprisingly, and it made a much louder noise than you would expect on the tin roof just inches above my head. I blinked and got off the bed and moved over to the top of the ladder, and from there, away from the sound of the rain, I could hear onions frying. I could smell onions frying. Onion-frying is a great smell. It smells like you’re home, no matter where you are. As I climbed down the ladder I was thinking about how I was going to ask Mum if she’d had a good day at school and if she had any homework and if she’d played nice with all the other teachers. I wasn’t going to be sad. But halfway down the ladder all those jokey thoughts flew away. I could see her, hunched over the stove, stirring mechanically. She had changed out of her stylish school clothes and into a grey t-shirt and tracksuit pants. With the kitchen bright white around her she looked small, and old too, and she looked very, very alone. I climbed down the remaining rungs and stood at the edge of the hallway.

  ‘Mum?’

  She looked up. She squinted as though the white neon hurt her eyes.

  ‘Hello, love. Doing your homework?’ She looked quickly back down at the pan and kept stirring. There was something in her voice I hadn’t heard before. A struggle. Suddenly I knew I couldn’t just let that moment go by, that it was desperately important that I do something. I walked into the kitchen, stood behind her and put my arms around her.

  ‘I love you, Mummy.’ It was a little girl’s voice, not the one I intended at all.

  She patted my hand and said, ‘I know you do, love.’

  That was not what I meant. I tried again. I went to the cupboard and took out a long tall glass. I filled it with ice. Mum glanced at me. I got the bottle of gin out of the freezer.

  ‘Hey!’ she said, and reached for the bottle.

  I slapped her hand away. She said, ‘Ow!’ and laughed. That was better. That was much better. I poured a slurp of gin over the ice, got the tonic from the fridge and filled the glass up to the top.

  ‘That better not be for you, missy,’ Mum said. ‘Where did you learn to do that?’

  ‘Quiet observation.’ I pulled her away from the stove and sat her down on the new couch. I handed her the drink, and went and stirred the onions on the stove.

  ‘What’s for dinner?’ she said, and smiled.

  ‘I have no idea,’ I said, and continued to stir.

  Squashed in close on the new couch, we ate in front of the TV, which was something Mum never would have allowed back home.

  ‘Well,’ said Mum, setting aside her plate, ‘whatever you decide to call that, it was bloody yummo. We’ll have it again, please.’

  ‘That’s what it’s called: Bloody Yummo.’

  ‘Looks like you’re cooking at least once a week then.’

  ‘Crap.’

  ‘Don’t worry, there are benefits.’ She got up from the couch. ‘Seeing as you cooked, I’m on hot-chocolate duty.’ She went into the kitchen and began chopping cooking chocolate with a knife. Mum’s chocolate was the best. I hooked my legs over the armrest and lay back down across both sides of the couch, pleased with my efforts. Maybe we could be okay. I hated school, but then again, who didn’t? If I could just pass and get out of there, I’d be fine. And who knew, maybe a better school would do me good. Maybe it would get me somewhere. I had started to feel as though my old school was perhaps not the best launching pad; God knows Amber and I had complained about it enough. And Mum seemed to have cheered up. I just had to help her out a bit more.

  There was a crash of thunder outside the window, and then there was a crash in the kitchen behind me.

  ‘Shit,’ came my mother’s voice.

  ‘Roberta! Language!’ I called.

  ‘Shit, shit, shit, shit!’

>   Mum wasn’t joking. I rushed into the kitchen to find her sitting on the floor, clutching her finger, the knife on the floor beside her. I grabbed a tea towel from the bench and wrapped it tight around her bleeding finger.

  ‘Shit, shit, shit,’ she said, and tears escaped from her eyes. ‘Shit, shit, I’m so stupid.’

  I sat down on the floor next to her and put my hand on her shoulder.

  ‘You duffer,’ I said. That was what she would have said to me if it was me on the floor clutching my hand. But it sounded like that, like an impersonation.

  ‘I’m so stupid. I’m bloody useless.’ She wasn’t talking to me. The cut wasn’t bad, but her tears kept flowing. She put her head forward on her knees and her shoulders shook. She kept holding the tea towel. Outside it started to rain.

  ‘Mum?’ My voice shook a little as I touched her softly on her back, and she pressed her face into her knees and rocked back and forth, drenching her tracksuit pants with tears.

  I rubbed her back and said, ‘Shh,’ like she used to do to me when I was little. I didn’t know what else to do. I just kept rubbing and shh-ing, and the rain outside the kitchen window kept shh-ing and shh-ing with me.

  Friday

  Seth

  By Friday afternoon Seth’s hand is in a bad way. He managed to hide it from Delia the night before, when he got back from the parklands, but now there is a bubbly layer all over it, and if he moves his fingers or his wrist the wrong way, the blisters burst and weep. He has to smoke with his left hand. He is sitting up on the parklands hill, where he imagined Delia and the red-haired girl sitting, and he is smoking his way steadily through the last joint from the tin. The guy in the city said it could make him paranoid, deluded, to watch out for that. He doesn’t feel paranoid. He smokes his tainted joint, looks at it, wonders if it’s dangerous – if he should be scared. He isn’t scared. Not about that, anyway: not about the absence of reality.

  He looks at his watch. Delia’s train.

  Seth runs all the way, pelting through the parklands and up into the streets, not because he’s late, but just to feel the running, just to feel his body at its best, to feel his muscles at full stretch, just to be in it. He jumps the ticket gate and pelts down the platform, leaps onto a bench with an acrobatic flourish, bows to the surprised commuters, and then scowls at them when they continue to stare. He taps a regular cigarette out of the soft-pack from his jeans and, although he doesn’t really feel like it anymore, lights up. It’s a waiting activity, and it gives him a sudden contrasting feeling of stillness as he perches on the back of the bench to wait for his sister.

  The glowing line on his cigarette inches closer to his scalded fingers. His hand throbs. He swaps hands. His head feels strangely hot, and he feels dizzy for a moment. He looks at his hand. Among the reddening blisters he can see the browning around his thumb and forefinger – testament to the browning of his lungs.

  The station is grey, but the afternoon sun has turned slabs of the platform to gold. He sits on the bench in the shade, and with a deft flick of his fingers sends the cigarette spinning off through the shaft of sunlight and onto the tracks. The train pulls in, the sunlight burning all the effectiveness out of the headlights. It slows, stops. Beeping fills the air. People flow from the doors.

  He can’t see her. He looks up and down from where he stands. He climbs up on the seat for a bird’s-eye view into the small crowd. Anything could happen to her between the school and here. She has no friends to look after her on the train. All she has is him, and he has lost her. He’s let it happen. It’s all his fault. He hasn’t been good enough.

  And then he feels her hand slip into his, and she is in front of him, looking up at him quizzically where he stands on the bench with his neck stretched out like a turtle. He winces and she looks at his hand where she’s grabbed it.

  ‘What did you do to your hand?’ She turns it over and he winces again. ‘You’ve burned it.’

  He pushes her away, but she grabs it. In the flush of blistered flesh which covers his whole hand, the earlier cigarette burn is still visible in the centre of his palm. She looks into his face. She’s reading him. He pushes her away again, roughly this time, and she falls back a little, losing her balance and stumbling. Guilt and responsibility well up in him, making him feel sick, overheated.

  He steps down from the chair. She’s carrying a bag, stuffed with books by the look of it. She has a folder full of paper tucked under one arm. ‘Want me to carry anything?’ he says. He reaches for the folder, but she snatches it away.

  ‘No,’ she says. ‘I can do it.’

  Seth puts his unburnt hand on her shoulder as they walk up the ramp. Through the thin cotton of her dress, her bones feel small and frail under his fingers, with no flesh between them and her skin. Her shoulder blade digs into his palm as she swings her arms back and forth, her face looking so tough, but her body feeling so frail. Sometimes he’s not sure which one to believe.

  He drops her home and then he walks. He pretends that he doesn’t know where he’s walking to. He puts his head down and lets his feet take him, turning street corners and crossing roads. He turns off thought; thought just ends in confusion.

  He walks. And when finally he reaches his destination, in the city, around the back of the cathedral, the guy is waiting for him.

  ‘Ah, you liked it,’ says the guy. ‘You want it stronger? It’ll cost you.’

  Seth pulls the empty cigarette tin out of his pocket. ‘Yes,’ he says.

  Delia

  Seth drops her home and then leaves again straight away. She didn’t want him to, but she didn’t say so. She knows that what she wants doesn’t really matter anymore. And a tiny part of her actually did want him to go away. He is making her edgy. He keeps watching her out of the corner of his eye, like he’s going to ask her something, and then he doesn’t. She thinks she knows what it is, and she doesn’t want him to ask it: it will be about the curlew in the parklands – he must have seen it too, because he always sits down there, where Robin saw it – and if they talk to each other about that, then they will have to talk to each other about everything. Everything.

  And then there is his hand, burnt. With no explanation. And the way he pushed her, like he’s never done before. No, she didn’t ask him not to go.

  On the way down the hallway to her room, she passes by her dad’s door. He is there. It is a surprise. He is sitting on his side of the bed, staring at the window. Delia drops her bag and the folder on the hallway floor and stands in his doorway. ‘Dad?’

  It takes a moment for him to notice her. When he turns his head to look at her, it’s like he’s looking through a fog.

  She goes into the room and sits on the bed next to him. ‘Dad, what are you looking at?’ she says.

  He reaches out two fingers towards the window. His whole arm wobbles. ‘The window’s cracked,’ he says. He rests his fingers on the glass and his arm grows still.

  ‘It’s been cracked for ages,’ she says.

  ‘I’ll have to get it fixed.’ He leaves his fingers there for a moment and then puts his hand back on the bed and stares at the window.

  She sits quietly next to him for a moment, and then suddenly it’s like he notices her there all over again. He gets flustered. ‘Did I forget to do something?’ he says. ‘Is there something . . . should I have done . . .?’

  ‘No, Dad, no, it’s okay. You haven’t forgotten anything. Everything’s all taken care of.’

  He seems reassured but he is more agitated than he was a minute ago. Delia goes to the kitchen and makes a coffee and delivers it to his bedside table. He says, ‘Oh, you’re a good girl,’ but makes no move to drink it. She stands there for a moment longer, but when he looks up at her, he doesn’t see her, and it’s like a cold wind whistling through her bones. She quickly kisses his forehead and retreats.

  In her room she sits at her desk and tries to breathe normally. The bowstring is back, drawing tight inside her. She props the clearing-and-curlews photo
in front of her. She pulls two manila folders out of her bag and lays them side by side on her desk. One folder has all the originals of her mother’s writing: the typed lecture notes and the green leafy handwritten notes; and the other has exact photocopies of these. The school library copiers had a workout today.

  On the floor next to her desk are the other papers from her mother’s office, things she didn’t make copies of – charts she couldn’t understand, tables of numbers, dense articles from scientific journals:

  ‘State-and-transition models: the impact of changed fire regimes in north-eastern Victoria.’

  ‘Disturbances and thresholds: Australian case studies.’

  ‘The link between land-clearing and reduced abundance: regenerating farmland to reverse declining Victorian Bush Stone-curlew populations.’

  The last one has her mother’s name. A summary at the top, an ‘abstract’, says the curlews are in trouble: land-clearing, fires, foxes.

  The curlew in the parklands and the words in the folder. This is the evidence, the data. Now she has to ask a question and propose an answer: this is science. She has collected data, she must make a hypothesis, test it, draw a conclusion. And then have someone else replicate it. And if their result is the same, then the hypothesis is probably right.

  The hypothesis, her hypothesis, is that the curlew in the parklands is from Murramunda. That it is one of her mother’s curlews.

  She has identified a method, too. From the notes it is clear there should be leg-tags, and the leg-tags should tell: they should be diagnostic. No tags or tag colours outside the test group will reject the hypothesis; tags of red, yellow and black will confirm it.

  So, the folders – folder 1: her mother’s lectures, her mother’s green paper notes, a map and a field work schedule; and folder 2: photocopies of same – are folders of data, exactly replicated, ready for someone else to test her hypothesis.

  Who will test it?