The older policeman stands further away up the path. The young policeman knocks on the door a third time.
‘I do have a key, you know, Constable.’
‘We need to see your parents, mate.’
Footsteps up the hallway. Seth breathes out, it’s a light step – Delia, not his dad. He hears her putting the chain on.
‘It’s alright, Del, it’s me.’
The chain rattles off again. The door opens. The policeman looks at his own eye level, and then corrects himself, dropping his eyes down to Delia. Delia in her dressing gown, looking five years younger than she is.
‘Hey there, little miss, your folks at home? I spoke to your dad on the phone.’
Delia’s eyes narrow. She does not approve of being called ‘little miss’ by anybody. She thrusts her chin out. She draws herself up to her full height, and angles her profile upwards. ‘Our father is indisposed. Perhaps I may render the assistance you desire.’
The policeman’s mouth twists a little at the side, and Seth feels a flush of anger and shame. If this man is about to laugh at his sister . . . His fists clench, and he winces as the movement reopens a blister on the palm of his hand.
But the policeman doesn’t laugh. He extends his hand to Delia in a formal, respectful manner.
‘Yes, I believe you may be able to assist me. I am Constable Neil Giannides of the Victoria Police. And you might be?’
Delia accepts the offered hand.
‘Delia Antonella.’ Seth notes the use of their mother’s maiden name.
‘Well, Miss Antonella, I am very pleased to meet you.’
They shake hands formally.
‘Miss Antonella, myself and my partner here are the ones who helped your brother out of his difficulty down in the park there.’
‘Thank you.’
Seth can’t help himself, he bursts out laughing. Their exchange is absurd. Absurd. Seth cackles. It is so funny. Delia is staring at him.
‘Seth.’ Delia is trying to get his attention but he can’t respond, he can only laugh. His head is burning. ‘Seth?’ She reaches out and touches him, and her touch is electric, and he flinches and pushes her hard. ‘Get off me!’ he yells, and the older policeman lunges forward out of the dark and grabs him and pulls him back, away from the door.
‘Oi!’ he says. ‘Why did you do that to your sister? She’s just trying to help you, mate.’
Seth gasps for breath. ‘I’m sorry . . . I just –’ He cuts himself off with the tight-faced hee-hee-heeing of uncontrollable laughter. ‘It’s just . . .’
Delia is doing her best to hold herself steady. ‘Please let him go, he’s not like that. Please, he just . . .’ Her voice is thin, fretful. ‘We just . . . We lost our mother not very long ago. Our mother died.’
Seth has never heard her say the words before, and his laughter doubles and he has to sit down where he stands as his legs grow weak beneath him. This is so stupid, he can’t seem to stop, he feels weak with laughter.
The older constable releases Seth, letting him sit in the dirt by the door, and steps back up the path into the darkness. Constable Giannides leans down a little towards Delia and says, ‘Miss Antonella, your father needs to know we’re here, whether he’s indisposed or not. Would you mind alerting him to our presence?’
Delia pauses a moment and then nods, and her shadow retreats back into the house. Seth can feel the young constable’s eyes on him where he sits in the dirt by the front step. The man crouches beside him. ‘Seth? Seth.’ He puts his hand on Seth’s shoulder. ‘You alright, mate?’ And Seth’s laughing becomes ragged, it sinks down further into his chest and begins to sound like a sob.
Seth’s dad appears at the door, blinking stupidly. Delia stands back in the hallway a few metres behind him. Constable Giannides stands up. ‘Good evening, sir. Is there somewhere inside we might have a word?’
Their father turns around wordlessly and heads back to the kitchen, and the two policemen follow him. They pass Delia in the hallway and Seth hears the young policeman say to her quietly, ‘Maybe bring your brother inside now, Miss Antonella.’
Delia draws the crawling Seth inside by his sleeve and carefully closes the door behind him. Seth slides down the wall onto his bottom on the floor. They are alone in the hallway. Seth’s shoulders are shaking and his face is stretched painfully into a fixed grin. Tears are squeezing from his eyes.
‘Seth, what’s wrong?’
The fire is in his head, he feels the heat from it. He saw it, the fire, coming over the hill, he watched it with her, the red girl. He was the bird, quiet, outside her house, and then he was inside the house, inside her head, watching. He saw the embers raining from the sky. He witnessed the fire that killed his mother. He actually stood with the girl, as the girl, and watched it. His guts heave, spasm. Laughing. Sobbing. Delia crouches down next to him.
‘Please stop. Seth, you’re scaring me.’
But Seth can’t stop. It’s like the hiccups, it’s involuntary. ‘I can’t . . . I can’t.’
It builds, like a wave coming in. The heat was on his face. He was there. And she was there. And she loved it, she loved the fire, she gloried in it. She drew him into it. It was hot. She was going to kill him with her fire, all redness and crackle and heat. She was trying to kill him the way she killed their mother, coming at him through the trees. He can feel the fire in his own eyes now. His stomach is pushing air up and down. Delia creeps over and touches his hot forehead.
‘Seth?’
He slaps her hand away. She springs back to the opposite wall. The hot air has him. Too much air, a wind, sweeping in and out of him. ‘She burned her. She killed her. I’ll burn her, I’ll kill her.’
Delia hugs her slapped hand and begins to cry.
The two policemen come back down the hall, the older stepping over Seth’s legs and letting himself out the front door. Constable Giannides follows him out the door, but stops on the doorstep, frowning and holding his hat, not yet putting it back on his head – thinking. Seth sits on the floor with his head in his hands, snorting at the back of his nose: crying silently, closed-mouthed and shoulders shaking. Constable Giannides hesitates for a moment and then, pulling a card and a pen from a pocket on his vest, he crouches again in front of Seth. ‘Seth,’ he says. But Seth can’t respond. ‘Seth, this is my number, see here?’ He writes on the card. ‘I’m putting it in your hand, and I want you to call me about anything, anytime – any trouble you’re having, let me know. My name’s Neil. Call me Neil, okay? Or call me whatever, but call me.’
Seth manages to nod, and Constable Neil stands, gives Delia a small smile. ‘And of course the same goes for you, Miss Antonella.’ Then he lets himself out the door, closing it softly behind him.
Seth and Delia both listen to the sound of the car starting up and taking off slowly up the street. They listen to the small hum die away to be replaced by the explosive shout of their father as he yells in the kitchen and throws something – a bottle, a glass – out the back door to smash on the concrete of the backyard.
Seth sits, cradling his own throbbing hand. Waiting for whatever is to come. Waiting for his father. He says, ‘Delia, you should go to bed.’ Delia tries to protest, to position herself between him and the kitchen. ‘No,’ she whispers, but he yells at her, ‘Now!’ He yells at her and she is truly frightened – for him, but also of him, he can see that – but he doesn’t care. He just doesn’t care. And as he hears his father’s stumbling tread coming towards him from the kitchen, and Delia scuttling away up the hallway to her room, he is confused by only one thing.
He doesn’t know why he laughed.
There is nothing funny here.
Robin
It was ten-thirty, and Mum still wasn’t home. (Ten-thirty! On a school night! What did she think she was – young?) I was confused, and shaken, but also feeling quite special. What an amazing thing had just happened. To be visited by a curlew, here. So unlikely, but true. It was strange enough that there was a Bush St
one-curlew in the city at all, in the parklands just nearby. And now it had come to me at my house, and, I suddenly realised, not for the first time: I really had heard it when I was on the roof; and yes, perhaps I had seen it briefly from my window on the factory roof opposite when I felt company in my sadness. And tonight, when I saw it in the backyard with its wing hanging down, and blood creeping across, I couldn’t help feeling that perhaps it kept coming to me not only because I needed it, but because it needed me.
That memory. I couldn’t believe I had forgotten it. Sitting down there in the dark in the bottom paddock, feeling upset, more upset than I had ever felt in my life – and the curlew was there. The same curlew. And it being here now: I felt comforted; I felt consoled. But I also felt worried. Why was it here, putting itself in danger like that? Birds can go into shock very easily. An attack from an animal can finish them off. And bites are terrible – it is all too easy for an infection to take hold, and then things can go downhill very fast.
Why was it here? What had happened to it that it was lost here, like me?
And then the thought arose, like it had just been waiting for the right amount of information to make the connection. Could it be that the curlew wasn’t just lost here like me, but was lost here with me? The curlew was my curlew, there with me that night, and now here with me in the city. We were both lost. Was it somehow my fault? It couldn’t simply be a coincidence. It just couldn’t. But what, then?
I hovered around the kitchen, unsure what to do next. I didn’t understand how the curlew was here, but it was. That was a fact. And it was in danger. It was already unwell and injured. And even perfectly healthy it couldn’t survive here: Dad said it would get weaker and weaker from lack of food, and I thought it might get attacked again, by another dog. It had to get home. I needed to make a plan. I needed to tell Mum. Why didn’t she come home? I needed her. I would call Dad.
And then two creepy things happened. Creepy thing number one: I went upstairs to get Dad’s number, and I noticed my photo had gone. That great photo of me and Dad. I didn’t have many photos of us together, and that was easily the best. It wasn’t on my wall. I even looked to see if it had fallen down behind something, like my desk or something, but there was just no sign of it. It was gone. I checked everywhere in the room, but it was nowhere, just plucked off my wall and magicked away. It must have been Mum. She must have seen it and taken it down. That was the only explanation. I never thought she’d go that far. I never thought she would be that mean. She’d taken away one of my memories of him, and now it was obvious: she wanted me to move on like she was. My stupid hopes had been just that. Stupid. She wanted me to forget him, to make room for someone else. For someone like the Creature.
And then I saw that she’d also taken down my photo of the pinnacle after the fire, the one I took that last day with Dad. That was just strangely vindictive. Why on earth would she do that?
Then the next creepy thing happened. I sat back down on the couch downstairs, angry at Mum, uncertain what to do about the curlew, and in the end not really ready to talk to Dad about it after remembering that night, him and that woman. The mysterious folder was on the couch still and as I sat there thinking, I absent-mindedly flicked through the pages. There were the pages about ecology and disturbance and habitat and vegetation classes, and then I saw some photocopies of handwritten pages. And the words jumped out at me. I snatched up the pages and read them. It wasn’t just talking about science stuff anymore. It was talking about Bush Stone-curlews.
Most Australians don’t even know what you’re talking about if you say ‘Bush Stone-curlew’. When we think of amazing species under threat of extinction, we tend to look elsewhere, bringing to mind tigers, elephants, orangutans, flamingos. We go over to wherever they are and film them, make documentaries about them. We forget, or perhaps ignore, the fact that Australia has the worst mammal extinction record of any country in the world: the worst. And our birds and reptiles are not far behind. Our native species are incredible – usually they can’t be found anywhere else on Earth – and they are under threat right here at home, every day, because of us. That’s the heartbreaking bit. Can we really bear to do nothing about it, knowing we are responsible? Are we just going to sit back and let them all slip away?
I wish more Australians knew about Bush Stone-curlews, because to see a Bush Stone-curlew is to fall in love. They are remarkable birds. Those eyes, those amazing eyes. Their eyes don’t look that different to our own – which is very striking on a bird – but they are. A curlew’s vision is almost 360 degrees – they can see almost everything at once. They can detect UV light. They can distinguish different colours much better than we can. They can see more movement, too: things we would see as a blur, they see clearly; and things that move so slowly that we can’t detect them, like the movement of the sun and the stars across the sky, they can see. So when I am out there studying them, and they are frozen still in their camouflage positions, stretched out to look like a piece of dead wood, I know very well that they are seeing every tiny move I make. They’re on to me. Their very consciousness is pinned on me.
And they are not cute. One of the girls in a visiting first-year class squealed when she saw them. She said, ‘Oh, aren’t they cuuute!’ I’ve never heard such an inappropriate description in my life. They are not cute. They are distant, mysterious. They can also be ferocious – if they have to fight one another they are ruthless and brutal. Their night cry can make campers in the bush pack up and leave. They are not cute and cuddly. They are beautiful, graceful, even eerie. They are as beautiful and wild as the landscape that created them. They deserve our respect and attention. They deserve our care, or at the very least, our consideration. They deserve their own documentary.
The woman writing the pages was studying Bush Stone-curlews. Her tone had changed completely. It was like suddenly she was wondering, rather than teaching. Like she was talking to herself. Like she didn’t want to explain anything anymore, she just wanted to rant about Bush Stone-curlews. It was really expressive, kind of emotional, almost poetic. I liked the way she wrote about them. I understood how she felt.
Where had this folder come from?
And then, when I read on, I felt like someone was looking right inside me, and playing a trick on me at the same time. The next pages of the folder told me that the place the woman was studying the curlews was Murramunda. I could hardly believe it. And then I read further and she was talking about leg-tags. Red, black and yellow. She had put the leg-tags on. On both the curlews, the one at home in the country and the one in the parklands. And they were the only birds that had those colours, those two curlews. The only two.
I sat and stared at the wall for a moment, trying to take it in, to figure it out. Who had given me this? I flipped to the front to see if there was anything else I’d missed from the first pages. Selina Antonella. It meant nothing to me. I flipped through. Pages of printed and handwritten words with a map and a typed page of dates and places at the end. The last page was a schedule, or itinerary. Birchip, Chiltern, Murramunda. The last schedule entry on the itinerary had dates covering three consecutive days. Three consecutive days in Murramunda.
I knew those dates. They were burned into my memory, so to speak. But there was nothing more in the folder, nothing written about the fire, or about what it was like after the fire.
I took out the map, the map of the woman’s study site. I knew it well. The site was right on that fire track in the reserve, where Dad and I used to go to get wood, where I had imagined myself walking just two days ago. You weren’t supposed to go up there now, I knew, it was too dangerous. It was all cordoned off since that woman died up there in the fire.
There was an echo in my head. That woman died up there in the fire.
I stared hard at the map, and then I flicked back to the front page in the folder and looked again at the name. And suddenly I saw it as if it was written in newsprint. Selina Antonella.
And the hair stood up on the
back of my neck.
Someone had given me this folder. Someone wanted me to know about this woman. Someone who also knew about creeks and curlews. Someone who wanted me to know about disturbance and death. I took the folder upstairs. I sat on my bed. I stared at the photos of hills and trees and rocks.
And I knew that the appearance of the curlew in the park wasn’t just about me.
Delia
The voice high and thin – mournful – plaintive – lost – frightened. Flames roar – heat stealing the air. The voice screams – chaotic distress – calling – calling – calling – for her.
In the cold blue of the night Delia rises from her bed and walks with bare feet across the floorboards to the bedroom door. In the hallway there are night-time lines – blue horizontals, blue verticals, no colour, no curves.
She walks barefoot through the hall, past the open door to Seth’s empty bedroom, across the cold lino of the kitchen and to the front door.
The voice is outside. She lifts her arms to reach up to the deadlock. Her slim cool fingers close around the cold metal. Chill air passes through the armholes of her nightie and swirls about her neck and back and stomach. Goosebumps flush from the back of her knees all the way over her back and up her neck. She walks down the front path and onto the street. The houses are still and blue. Fixed. But the trees, the shrubs, the grass, these are all fluid, flowing with the wind, rippling around the hard edges of house, fence, gate, gutter. Her nightie ripples around the hard edges of her bones. She walks. She reaches the end of the street and looks west. The houses fit together block next to block to the end of the road. At the end of the road there is a flowing wall of trees tossed about by wind. The entrance to the parklands.
The voice is in the parklands. She steps down the street and the houses on either side melt and turn liquid; there are flowing shrubs, fallen branches floating on undulating grasses, baleful eyes behind every one. She turns to look behind her. Her suburb is gone, just open woodland, trees in arabesque, grasses tall with bobbing heads, the starry sky wheeling above, the curlew singing the stars. It is beautiful. The sound is beautiful. It is calling to her.
As Stars Fall Page 16
