As Stars Fall

by Christie Nieman

  ‘What about me? I could do it.’

  ‘Remember what we talked about this afternoon, Flame?’

  I did remember. I’d asked if I could move back, now that he was here, and he’d said that things were still all a bit up in the air, that he and Mum weren’t sure how things were going to pan out, and that on the phone when he’d rung her and dobbed on me, Mum had told him about how good the school was in the city, how she thought it could be good for me to stay there until I finished year twelve, and how of course it was up to me, but what if we just left things the way they were for six months and see what we all thought about it after that. I felt confused. Staying in the city wasn’t what I’d wanted, but all of a sudden it didn’t seem that crazy. I was different somehow. I suddenly knew what I could handle. And it was a lot. I could really handle stuff. And maybe I could help some other people handle stuff too. Maybe Delia. Maybe my mum. Maybe Seth.

  Dad cleared his throat and shot me a sly sideways look. ‘No, I was thinking more along the lines of a strong young man for the job. Maybe someone who needs some time away from things to get sorted out, someone who needs time to figure out what they’re going to do about school. Do you think your Seth would like to come and live here and do some awful manual labour helping me work on this for six months?’

  ‘Dad! He’s not my Seth.’

  Dad whistled and I threw a cushion at him and I couldn’t remember the last time I felt so happy. Mo shifted on my burnt and bandaged arm, and I thought about Seth’s burnt and bandaged hand. And then I thought about feeling watched when I was at my lowest and saddest, somehow held and touched and known, and how I’d seen Seth at his lowest and saddest – lower and sadder than anyone else knew. And before I could stop myself I was smiling from ear to ear.

  I looked up and Mo was staring at me. Dad was staring at me too.

  ‘What?!’ I said in my best cranky teenager voice. Mo blinked his upside-down blink and looked away.

  Dad just looked at me and said, ‘You’re a true original, kiddo. You’re one of a kind and I’ve missed you.’

  Seth

  The stillness of the ward at night is strange. The hospital gown is crisp against his chest. He smells like petrol, it is still in his hair. He knows that somewhere far away his skin is crying out in pain, but the hospital drugs are keeping everything safely veiled, working in his body to loosen the ties that bind him to his pain, but also those that bind him to his flesh.

  There are things he can’t remember; the clearing is all hazy. But he does remember his mother’s burnt-out car, its stillness, and the awful feeling: his own voice saying, There is no-one, saying, There’s only me. All alone. And he remembers the sound of a curlew in his ears, and the whoosh of the flame as it swept up from the grass.

  He drifts on a cloud of muted sensation, dulled thought, almost-sleep. The curlew’s cry echoes in an empty hospital room inside his head. He is dreaming he is inside a hospital. Another kind of hospital: a shed with dark corners, and a glinting workbench down the centre and cages up the sides. The nurses watch him through the night – his body is seen, tended – but he is in the other hospital, scratchings and scrufflings from the other cages. He watches. He feels his curlew’s eyes see everything at once, three-sixty degrees. He’s been here before, watching out of these eyes. But this time he doesn’t try to move it on, doesn’t push this way or that, but lies peacefully, listening, understanding what is not being said, what this soul is not saying out loud. And it makes perfect sense. This soul, its purpose. Millions of years of evolution pushing towards one simple, fundamental aim: to live. To be alive, to make new life, and to avoid death until it can’t be avoided, and then to die: the final act of life.

  He feels his soul settle into this one, this older one. He feels the basic truth of it. He feels the steel beneath his clawed toes – or her toes, rather; he is female. He feels a tenderness in her wing where the tooth of a dog went through it in the parklands. He sees the lips of the dog as it looms close to her, a small dog, seen huge. He sees the eye of a fox glinting in the night and he feels her stiffen into absolute stillness to avoid being seen. He feels the vulnerable wriggle of chicks under her breast. He feels heat; a forest on fire, a new clutch of eggs threatened. He feels heat; a Land Rover on fire. He gasps, but the pain of the burnt skin of his arm is now the pain in his wing.

  There is a shuffling in the dark. The curlew shifts. He hears the scratching movement of it, of himself, stark in the empty room. He moves with it, with her – like the curlew, with the curlew, as the curlew. His feeling, that there is no-one, seems impossible now. The curlew is living. It lives, no matter the context. It’s obvious. Life is obvious. Don’t fret. Just live. Dark. Quiet. Continuous.

  There is no such thing as being alone while living things live.

  Delia

  Often in science, you don’t get what you set out to find. Science is like that. It’s hard. A lot of the time you have to cope with not understanding. And my way of dealing with that has been to learn to actually love not understanding: to try to remember that not understanding is the greatest invitation this universe has for us. It’s an invitation to experience wonder and awe at the greatness and complexity of nature. But not only that. It’s an invitation to embrace one of our best and most promising human traits, one that has sometimes led us astray, but one which may also be our salvation: and that is our ability to accept the most difficult of challenges, and to never, ever, ever give up.

  Delia reads her mother’s words by the cabin light of her father’s car where it sits grave and weighty in the gravel driveway by the shed. She sits in the driver’s seat, picks up the pages one by one from where they lie spread and disordered over the passenger-side floor, rereads the familiar words, and then she slides each page back into its place in the folder.

  She leans over for the next sheet and stops: lying there on the floor is her mother’s vegetation-analysis article from the university office. ‘The link between land-clearing and reduced abundance: regenerating farmland to reverse declining Victorian Bush Stone-curlew populations.’ She picks it up and looks at it. She hadn’t included it in the folder she’d made. Seth must have found it in her room. Why had he brought it? She frowns, scans the front page of it, and then slides the article inside the folder.

  She picks up the last crinkled green page from the floor, smooths it out on her lap, and reads the words there – she’s read them before, but somehow it is like she’s seeing them for the first time.

  Farmers aren’t what a lot of people think they are. They care a lot about their land and the wild animals that live there. They really do want to know the best things to do, and how to help the natural environment in a way that doesn’t hurt their own livelihoods.

  And that’s where I come in. I think the next part of my project might be to talk to some of the land-owners out here, see if we can’t sit down together and try to work something out for the curlews. I want to help land-owners help the curlews.

  That feels like a revelation.

  I think maybe this is what my life is for.

  Delia stows the folder under her arm and crunches back down the driveway to the house. When she opens the sliding door into the kitchen and steps inside she sees Rodney and Robin sitting opposite one another at the kitchen table, all set for dinner, looking serious.

  Rodney says, ‘Delia, I’ve just called and spoken to your dad.’

  Delia stands looking at them. She feels shame creeping over her cheeks. She doesn’t want anyone speaking to her dad.

  ‘Come and sit down, sweetheart,’ Rodney says.

  She closes the sliding door behind her and sits down at the head of the table and holds the folder in her lap. Rodney rests his elbows on the table, and he says, ‘He hasn’t been very well since your mum died, has he?’

  Delia’s hands grip the folder in her lap.

  Rodney says, ‘I’d really like it if you could think about someone that I could call for you, someone you wouldn’t mind
me talking to about you and your brother and your dad. Or maybe a few people. Will you do that for me? Don’t worry about it right now, but how would you feel about giving me a list, say, maybe tomorrow?’

  Delia’s fingers touch the edge of the manila folder. She thinks about Robin, and Rodney, and Robin’s mum. She thinks about Mr Krietcher, and about the policeman, Neil, and how he gave Seth his card. And she thinks about her mum’s friend Sonya – anything I can do, anything at all.

  And finally she feels the bowstring inside slacken and the beginnings of relief prickling up from her toes.

  She sits up straight and opens the folder. She takes out her mum’s article about regenerating farmland for the Bush Stone-curlews. She looks at the picture of the curlew holding its wings above its head, trees and grass stretching away behind it. She slides it across the table to Rodney.

  ‘I think my mother might have wanted you to have this.’

  *

  After dinner, after the sun has gone and the moon has come up, the curlew in the paddock starts calling. Her mum was right. It is beautiful. When she had played Delia her collection of curlew calls, saying, ‘Listen, Del, doesn’t it give you goosebumps? Isn’t it thrilling and beautiful?’ Delia hadn’t thought it was beautiful at all: it had been almost as shrill and distressing then as later on, when she heard it coming from the parklands. But here, sitting on the porch in the soft country evening, she listens and it feels warm and right. It sounds exactly right for a song made out of dying stars. It isn’t frightening at all. It is perfect.

  And Delia breathes it in. A full, deep breath.

  Thursday

  Seth

  In the early hours of the morning Seth’s fever breaks and he sinks into dreamless sleep. His skin begins its slow crawl towards healing, drawing on the quietness of his body to create cells, to redirect blood, to draw skin together, to perform real magic. And after hours his body wakes him again, slowly bringing him towards the surface, ushering him up through layers of sleep, until finally, with the arrival of the sun, he opens what feel like new eyes.

  The room is there. It is quiet. It is golden with early sideways sunlight. There is no-one around. He lies still and images come to him, flashes from the clearing, memories igniting in his floating mind, disordered, but with an order of their own; all flaring up and burning down to one incandescent point: Flame Robin.

  Robin, stalking into the clearing, confident, with a sense of belonging, of familiarity with the place, like she and the place understood one another.

  The sunlight concentrating down onto one spot on Robin’s head, her hair sunlit-red tendrils licking out as she begins to run towards him as he falls: licks of red tearing through the heart-bursting green-grey colours of the bush.

  Robin, sitting on her roof in the city. The soft glow of her skin, the movement of her body.

  Robin, crying, her red hair flung across her pillow. The feel of her cheek under his borrowed fingertips.

  Fire streaking from his fingers towards her.

  Her arms under him, drawing him up. Leaning against her as she walked him up the track. Her strength, like a gum sapling, bendy and resilient. She is under pressure but she doesn’t give in. His confidence in her, giving her everything, all his weight, all of himself – she can handle it. Her arms around him, her red hair swinging with the effort of carrying his body. He remembers her voice, telling Delia what to do, how to help. He remembers in the clearing telling her he didn’t care, he remembers not wanting to care ever again.

  He remembers Delia. ‘I want something else for us, Seth.’

  Delia. The one true thing. The one thing that never left. The one feeling that never changed. The constant truth in his life. Delia. He’d made a deal with Delia. ‘I want something else for us, Seth.’ He wants something else too. He wants to be well. He wants to be as strong as Robin. He wants to feel pain and get through it. To be himself again, not a skin worn by a destructive chemical angel. He wants to be Delia’s brother. He wants time, work, purpose, meaning, colour. All the beautiful ordinary things.

  And he wants Robin to let him call her ‘Flame’. He wants to see the smile spread over her face when she sees him. He wants to feel the skin of her cheek under his fingertips for real, and to see again the red of her hair spread across a pillow. And that’s how he knows, without a doubt.

  He wants life.

  Robin

  I woke up in a familiar place, to a familiar smell. It took me a moment to remember what had happened and where I was. These familiar things had become unfamiliar, like when you accidentally get on the wrong train, and when you get off and go back, waiting at the same platform as before seems different the second time – it’s a different experience of exactly the same thing because you’ve seen what’s just a bit further up the line.

  One thing that was definitely unfamiliar was the bizarre, high-pitched, wobbly snores that Delia was doing from the air mattress on my floor, and which she had been doing all night.

  The familiar smell was yeast. Dad was making his famous pizza dough. Well, that’s what he always used to call it: ‘Dad’s famous pizza dough’. I’ve told him in the past that fame doesn’t count if it’s self-attributed and only has an audience of two. He’d had to bow down before the superior logic of that one. I lay back in bed and the smell wafted over me, warm and bready, and I heard Mo chattering softly to himself from the wattle tree outside, and suddenly the sky and the treetops seemed the colour of sadness and nostalgia and lost things. Tears rose in my eyes. ‘But I’m here,’ I had to remind myself. ‘I’m here. I can’t miss it while I’m here.’ I looked out the window at the oh-so-familiar treetops, framed by the grapevines along the trellised verandah of the house. The leaves were fragile, green, enclosing the treetop and mountain view in a green-gilt frame. I could see a single caterpillar on the underside of a leaf from where I lay, and thought about how this would have been the first year that Amber and I hadn’t done our annual summer pest-control regime, which consisted of us locating the caterpillars and flicking each one of them expertly into the line of sight of the waiting chooks. Mum loved us for it – it was remarkably effective. She was so proud of her vines, not just how well they’d grown, but the whole climate-control function they performed on the house: blocking overhead sun in summer, shedding their leaves and letting in horizontal sun in winter. She’d been so proud of how clever she was to think of it.

  And it occurred to me for the first time – can you believe it? the first time – to wonder if Mum missed it the same way I did: the grapevines she nurtured through the drought, the orchard she laboriously bucketed water onto that first summer, the chook shed she went ahead and built herself while Dad sat inside sketching elaborate chook-shed designs. Why wouldn’t she miss it? How hard must it have been for her to leave it too?

  As if I’d conjured her with my thoughts, I heard the approach of a car down the gravel drive. Another familiar/unfamiliar sound. The car door slammed. The sliding door opened and shut. A soft exchange between the two most familiar voices in my life, but which in conversation with each other had become unfamiliar. I heard them laughing together. I hoicked myself up onto my elbows, feeling excited and apprehensive, and was about to swing my legs out of bed when Delia, without even moving or opening her eyes, said, ‘You probably want to give them a chance to talk about you for a while before you go bouncing out there all loveable puppy-like.’

  She opened one eye, leaving the other all scrunched up and winky, and then flashed a cheeky snarl-smile at me.

  I flopped back down and looked out the nostalgia-coloured window for a second. I thought about the new things, rather than the old things: about Seth maybe coming to live here, about having time to get to know him no matter where I lived; and about his dark eyes – about seeing what they looked like when he smiled, or told a joke, or played a trick as Delia said he liked to do. And I thought about the way I was getting to know Delia, little by little, liking her more and more. And then I sat up and threw my pill
ow at her. ‘Yeah, well, you snore weird.’

  Delia yawned and stretched. ‘I know.’ And the yawning and stretching continued, turning into an elaborate routine of strange stretch poses and waking-up growls and squeaks, until I laughed at her and she laughed at me laughing, and we were giggling like we were little kids at a sleepover: smiling at each other, smiling at everything, smiling at nothing at all.

  restoration

  There is still pain in her wing. It is no longer a bad pain. She stretches it out. It stretches all the way. She isn’t thirsty anymore. She holds her head up straight.

  And the other thing that had been lodged in her has gone. The compulsion to be in the wrong place. Last night she ruffled her feathers and it fell away.

  She is in a small place. It is hard and dark on all sides except for one side that is bright and airy. She looks at it closely. It is outside. She has tried to get there but she can’t pass into it. There are crossed sticks in the way.

  It is hard to get a grip with her feet. It’s too smooth and the place she is in keeps moving, and the square of outside keeps changing. And there are noises all around – those humans that caught her and made her world small, they make noises to one another. They call back and forth.

  The world has stopped moving. She looks at the outside square. She smells the air. She looks. She sees a fallen log, grass and trees. She tries to get to it but runs into the crossed sticks. She tries again and again, frantic to get to it.

  One of the humans begins calling and coming closer. She moves back from the square as much as she can, but it is hard and dark and she can’t go further back. The human’s paw is at the bright square and she claws her way back but can’t go any further. She hears a snap and the crossed sticks fall away. The bright square is open. She could fit through.