As Stars Fall

by Christie Nieman

  There are no houses now. He wheels around, hoping to spot a brick veneer through the bush, trying to see an electricity pole standing out above the trees. Nothing. He is standing in open woodland, the ground beneath the trees messy with bush debris, and the ground beneath his feet is the same, dust and loose rocks, and long grasses folded over. No footpath at all.

  Instead he seems to be standing on some sort of overgrown vehicle track. The air is full of cicadas, and a bird calls a long note with a flick at the end like a whip. There is no traffic noise, no voices, no concrete, no houses. The cicadas, the shrill whine of the dry bush, are a drill into his head. The sun is harsh and his nostrils almost sting with the eucalyptus air, a faint trace of smoke. Through a gap in the trees made by the vehicle track he can see higher up the slope, where, hanging above him, a large granite boulder pushes against the sky.

  There is bush on all sides: trees with sparse shrubby undergrowth between them. Everything is still. He’s unsure of what to do. No matter which way he turns he can’t see anything familiar. And now his vision, it’s happening again, the extra levels of light, he can see everything at once, three hundred and sixty degrees.

  But he didn’t choose this. He didn’t choose it this time. This is being done to him.

  And then in the distance something moves. He can’t see it, but a bush shudders. He stands stock-still, he’s not sure why, but he feels like stillness is safe. He feels like he can stand frozen and see everything and not be seen. Suddenly a nearer bush shudders and shifts. Something is coming towards him, between the trees. He flattens his feathers.

  What?! No!

  Seth wills everything to make sense, to feel like himself again, to remember the way he walked, and to remember the way back. He wills the world and himself to rematerialise the way they were. But the bush still surrounds him. The shuddering in the undergrowth is closer. He sees something move between leaves, a flash of orange – red hair, fox fur, or fire, he can’t tell which. It is getting closer. It is coming for him. He reaches for a weapon, a fallen branch, something to swing at the approaching threat, but he reaches with nothing, with no arm or hand. He is not really here. Seth closes his eyes, shuts out the view. He opens his mouth to hear himself, to let out his own voice, but there is nothing except a wailing cry in his ears, and the clacking of a beak.

  Delia

  Delia hears him from inside the house. She runs out the front, thinking he’s had an accident, and finds him outside the front yard, crouching on the footpath next to the fence. His eyes are squeezed shut and he is yelling: guttural noises without words. A yelp of fear.

  ‘Seth? What are you doing? Why are you shouting?’

  She stands behind the gate, leaning out so she can see him. She has her hand on the latch, but for some reason she doesn’t open the gate. Seth opens his eyes and looks at her, but then he squeezes them shut again and begins reaching around, blindly scrabbling with his fingers in the dirt by the fence. The neat white bandages Delia delicately wound around his hand and wrist yesterday are already brown and frayed, the raw skin surface she carefully disinfected and dressed exposed to the dirt. What is he looking for?

  ‘Seth, what are you doing? You’re hurting your hand.’

  She unclicks the gate but as she opens it and steps through she sees his fingers lock onto a fallen fence paling lying discarded under the hedge. He grasps it and pulls it out from under the vegetation and, opening his eyes, he looks at her and brandishes it like a weapon, holding it between himself and her. He looks terrified. She steps back inside the gate. He is looking at her, and then past her, and then all around himself. He brings the lump of wood back over his shoulder like a baseball bat, ready to swing. Delia pushes the gate shut again between them and steps back from it.

  ‘Seth?’

  At her voice he spins around to face her, wildly swinging the paling in her direction. She raises her voice in panic. ‘Seth! What are you doing?’

  He stops mid-swing. He looks at her, a strange direct look, and then suddenly he seems confused. On the other side of the fence, Delia stands motionless as he stares at their house as if he’s never seen it before. He looks at the makeshift weapon in his hand and then without letting go he drops his arm so it hangs by his side. Then he turns oddly and takes a few steps away from their house, walking up the street with the paling still in his hand. Delia can see Mrs Finke halfway up the hill, standing under the gum tree in her front yard and looking at Seth with growing concern as he walks towards her. Mrs Finke waves slowly at Seth. He doesn’t wave back.

  ‘Seth,’ Delia calls out to him. She sounds steady, but she isn’t. ‘Why are you going up there? I think you should come back here.’ He looks back at Delia. He’s a few metres away, in front of the neighbour’s fence. Then he seems to become aware of the wood in his hand again, lifting it up vaguely to inspect it more closely. And then, with a look of growing horror, his eyes move from the fence paling to Delia, at her shaking hand reaching out to him. With a little cry he throws the lump of wood away from him into next door’s yard, and suddenly sits down in the middle of the footpath.

  Mrs Finke is no longer in her front yard, and Delia can see a corner of curtain in her front window drawn back, and Mrs Finke peering out. Delia gives her an ‘okay’ wave, and the curtain twitches shut. She steps out of the gate and quietly creeps closer to Seth and puts her hand gently on his shoulder. Seth grabs her hand, and then with his other hand, her arm. His touch is hot. He looks intently at her. He is trying to tell her something.

  ‘Don’t go near her,’ he says. He is grasping her arm so tightly that blood begins to show through the bandages on his hand. ‘That girl, the real girl. Until we know. Stay away.’

  She tries to help him up. ‘Come on.’

  He responds to her tugging and stands up on his own, but he won’t let her go.

  ‘Come on,’ she says quietly. ‘We need to redo your hand.’

  Looking at his hand he seems to remember himself. He nods slightly and releases her arm. He says, ‘Thanks,’ and then, ‘Thank you,’ like he can’t quite remember the right form of gratitude to use for his sister. She holds the gate open for him and leads him inside and sits him down at the kitchen table. She collects the first-aid kit from the bathroom and as she re-enters the bright fluorescence of the kitchen she stops short as she sees him sitting there, dazed, looking at her but not seeing. A cold wind whistles through her and plucks a hollow note on the tense bowstring inside.

  She sits down opposite him and begins to peel away the dirty bandages, systematically cleaning and dressing his wounds, attending to the damaged outside of him, trying to fix all the bits she can see.

  Monday

  Robin

  I woke up having dreamed about birds. I dreamed about strange, magnificent birds that I couldn’t identify. I dreamed up something like a Collared Sparrowhawk, but which had a fantastically long tail like a peacock’s that trailed behind it as it flew. And another kind of bird with grey plumage sticking out of the back of its head, like a night heron or something, but with soft and intricate feathers like an emu, and a large, vicious hooked beak like a predator bird, a raptor.

  And then I dreamed about seeing that curlew in the park. I was looking at it down at the creek in the parklands, and it was staring at me, really intently, and then, as I watched, it morphed into that scary dark-haired, dark-eyed guy. It started at the eyes. The bird’s eyes were looking at me – big and dark and round – and then they were that guy’s eyes, staring at me like he had done, and slowly the bird body changed into his body, and I had a strong feeling of being watched from somewhere really close, almost from the inside out. And then the creek in the parklands became my creek at home, but instead of being at the bottom of our paddock, it was running down the centre of the fire track.

  It was pretty psychedelic, but when I woke up I had a strange sense of certainty. I sat up in bed, unzipped the top of my schoolbag, picked up my binoculars and packed them into the top.

&nb
sp; In the car on the way to school Mum got all talky on me.

  ‘Robbie, you had a point about decisions. You haven’t been given much of a say in things. I think I’ve been underestimating you for some time now. But I don’t really know what’s going to happen from here. I don’t know what’s right, I don’t know what the right thing to do is. I don’t know what I can cope with, so I guess I haven’t really been good at recognising whether you were coping or not. I’ve been selfish, I’m being selfish, but I’m at a bit of a loss really: I don’t really know what else I can do. But I am sorry.’

  It’s disturbing to have your mother apologise to you out of the blue like that, especially when you probably should have apologised to her and didn’t have the guts. And especially if you’d never heard her apologise before, like, ever. One thing you have to know about my mother – when she decides how things are, that’s how they are. And if, once she has outlined reality like that, you find yourself outside that picture, like me and my dad often did, you’d better step in the frame quick, and apologise for your heresy while you are at it. She is such a teacher. So I’d never heard her speak the way she was speaking and it sucked the words from my mouth and made me feel all queasy. And it made me mad, too. After all this time, now she wants to apologise? I don’t know why, but I didn’t want to give her an inch.

  ‘It’s fine.’

  ‘This . . . thing. With your father. And his . . . “friend”. Well, it happened to me, Robin, but I guess it’s happened to you too, in a different way. So I’ll listen if you’ve got any ideas.’

  ‘Mum, I just don’t need this right now, okay? I’ve got a lot on my mind.’

  Maybe she was right. Maybe I was too young for this. She went silent, and I felt bad. But what else could I do?

  ‘Like what?’ she said.

  That threw me. A direct question. Um. Right . . . ‘Look, I’m going to Delia’s after school, okay?’

  ‘Delia’s?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Mum drove for a moment, looking straight ahead.

  ‘Flame, when you were there last week, did you meet Delia’s brother?’

  Well, that was out of left field, because a) it had absolutely nothing to do with the subject we were discussing, and b) I’d had no idea Delia even had a brother.

  ‘What does that have to do with anything, Mum? Why do you want to know? Are you checking up on me? Delia’s an A student, she’s been put up a grade, there’s absolutely nothing you can object to in Delia.’

  ‘I don’t object to her. Not at all. I’m just . . . worried.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well . . . No, it’s nothing. I think it’s good that you’re going to Delia’s. I think it’s good for her.’

  I reminded her that she didn’t like Delia, and that she wished I were normal and cool, and had normal and cool friends, and that it was her fault that I didn’t have any friends anymore and that she didn’t even care because she always had to have things her way. And then I slammed the car door and stormed off.

  Of course I knew that I was mad because it was easier to feel mad than to feel upset or embarrassed or whatever, but I was still mad when I went up to Delia at recess – she was hiding in the library as usual – and said, ‘I’m going to the parklands after school to look for that bird we saw the other day, and you can come with me, or not come with me, and I don’t really care which.’ Stupid Mum, Stupid Dad, Stupid Creature, moving in on my family like that. Delia looked at me. I can’t bloody read that girl. I had no idea what that look was, it was about five looks at once – all angry and proud and scared and also kind of happy. Okay, four looks. She said, ‘I’ll meet you at the gate after school.’

  So there she was, after school, waiting at the gate in her thick socks on a hot day. We walked instead of catching the train. It was only about fifteen minutes away. Delia was carrying her massive bag – she takes her textbooks everywhere, like she might suddenly fail a subject if she puts one down for five seconds – but it didn’t seem to weigh her down at all. She was small, but strong.

  Anyway, believe it or not, she was being quite normal. She wasn’t reading a textbook or anything. She was asking me questions. She wanted to know all about Murramunda, what it was like. And so I told her about the creek and about Penny and Mo and the ducks and Amber and Willaroo corner with the Willaroos in it. I didn’t tell her about my dad. She wanted to know about the surrounding countryside – what it was like. I said it had all changed a lot recently, because we’d had the fires, and she waved her hand at that, dismissing that bit – what was it like before? So I told her about the eucalypts – the apple box and the grey box and the peppermint gum and the ironbark – and I told her about the wattles, and the blackberries that had come in and taken over but which were delicious, and about the currawongs that say ‘gotta-go’, and all the other tiny birds – the flame robins, the thornbills and the pardalotes. And I told her about the curlew I’d seen there over the weekend. And how I’d only seen them there before, once, years ago: a pair.

  She was listening to me. And I don’t think she thought I was an idiot or wacko or a nerd or anything. It was nice to talk about it all. It was nice to talk to somebody about it.

  She fired questions at me about the curlew in the park. I told her that we didn’t know that that was what it was yet, that in fact it probably wasn’t, but she waved that away too. She wanted to know how unusual it was that it should be there. Where did I think it had come from? I told her that a curlew free in the city somewhere would have to be an escapee. Maybe from one of the zoos or wildlife sanctuaries in the city, or on the outskirts; they were the closest places that a curlew would be. If, in fact, that’s what it was.

  ‘It is,’ she said.

  She said, ‘It makes noise at night.’

  ‘What? You’ve heard it?’

  She said, ‘It wakes me up.’

  I was excited. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said simply. ‘It sounds exactly like you said.’

  ‘I can’t believe it. I knew it somehow – I had this dream . . . Wow. It’s really a curlew then.’

  Delia nodded. ‘It’s been making the sound for nearly two months.’ And then she added quietly, ‘It’s a bit scary.’

  ‘God yes!’ I said. ‘First time I heard one, I nearly crapped my daks, I had no idea what it was. It’s halfway between the hounds of hell and that noise those women make in the Middle East or wherever when someone’s died. It sounds like that.

  ‘My dad –’ I almost stopped, but talking felt so good I kept on – ‘my dad told me this story once. He said that there are stories from different indigenous groups all around Australia, and in this one Victorian story the curlew actually made that noise for the first time when it was feeling sorry for a woman who had just lost her child. The baby got taken by a wedge-tailed eagle, and the woman was so upset that she did that wailing sound, and the curlew heard her and felt her pain, and wailed too. And there’s one from right up north in the islands, where there was a woman whose baby died because she was off having an affair, and then her husband found out and took the baby’s body and killed himself, and then the woman turned into a curlew and wailed every night in remorse. But then there’s another story, more from the desert I think, where the curlews are the guardians of people who have died, and the curlew makes the noise to reassure everyone that they are around to accompany the dead person’s soul. It’s meant to be a real sort of consolation, a comforting thing. I reckon it’s great that there are so many stories about the one bird. Poor birds, though, always associated with death somehow. Although I guess they’ve only got themselves to blame for having a call that scares the bejesus out of you.’

  I realised I’d been running off at the mouth. But I hadn’t talked that much out loud in weeks. I realised it suddenly, because Delia had gone quiet. I must have totally freaked her out.

  We’d arrived at the parklands, so I got out my binoculars. Delia asked for a look at them, and she turned them over in
her hands, held them like she was weighing them, nodded, and then gave them back to me. I held them to my eyes and scanned the bit down by the creek where we had seen the bird last time. The bird, and that fine-looking scary guy.

  ‘Let’s go down there.’

  We got down to the creek. It had a good amount of water in it and it was moving pretty quickly, although the plastic bags trailing in the water and the tin cans caught in the rocks were not very appealing.

  ‘They’re really hard to find in the daytime, they camouflage really well. But it’s getting late, so maybe it’ll move around a bit. I reckon our best bet is to just sit still and wait and not speak. If it sees or hears us before we see it, it’ll freeze, and we’ll never see it.’

  We sat on a rock. It was a good rock for sitting, but there was a decent collection of dirty cigarette butts in a tidy pile next to it – so it was clearly someone else’s favourite spot too. Maybe my dark-eyed, staring, smoking guy. And it wasn’t just the little pile by the rock: there were plastic bits and cigarette butts everywhere. Didn’t people know about the way cigarette butts got washed through the stormwater system and out to sea, where mother albatrosses thought they looked like tasty little marine morsels and fed them to their chicks? Hadn’t they seen the same pictures I had: dead little albatross chicks, their stomachs split open, stuffed full of bits of plastic and cigarettes? Maybe they just didn’t care. Looking at all the rubbish made me feel hopeless. It was pointless to try to clean it up. I just hoped our curlew hadn’t eaten any.