All the Birds, Singing

by Evie Wyld

  ‘I know what you’re about,’ says the eye. It disappears and the shadow moves away. My heart drums. I look through the knot in the wood and see Clare staggering off in the direction of the shearing shed. He’s been away the week, and he has found something out.

  I bolt from the shower without washing out the suds, round the side of the shed to my sleeping quarters. I pull on pants, shorts and a singlet and then I begin stuffing everything else into my backpack. If you were so sure he’d never find you, says my head, why are you so prepared to leave, why do all your belongings fit in a backpack? Everything is in there except my shears, which I left on the bench next to the wool table, to sharpen in the morning. And the carapace of a cicada that Greg gave me last month when he asked if I’d go to the Gold Coast with him once the job was done. I hold it in my palm and it vibrates with my pulse.

  ‘Just spend a month at the water. Fishing, swimming, drinking beer,’ he’d said. ‘Get the dust off us before the next job.’

  I put the skin back down on the ledge and go to find Greg in the dinner hall.

  Almost everyone has gathered for tea, and I scan the bench for Clare, but he’s not there. I sit down next to Greg, who is talking to Connor about boat engines, and I try to make it clear I want to talk to him by putting my hand on his shoulder. He squeezes my thigh under the table but doesn’t turn around, too involved with his conversation.

  ‘. . . corroded so far, it broke through and dropped down into the bilge,’ he says, and Connor is drinking from his can and he says,

  ‘Yep. That’s just the way she’ll go – people forget,’ his voice becomes high-pitched and incredulous, ‘as far as an engine is concerned – water’s your enemy.’

  ‘Yep,’ says Greg and I shift about next to him. I don’t want anyone else to know there’s a problem.

  ‘You right?’ asks Greg, distracted by my fidgeting.

  ‘I need to talk to you,’ I say quietly.

  Greg looks at me a moment, takes a swig of his drink and snakes his arm around my back.

  ‘Can we go somewhere?’

  ‘Tea’s coming out.’

  ‘Yes but . . .’

  ‘Whisper it.’

  I lean closer to him. People assume we are having some sort of moment I suppose, and no one could be less interested. A grey steak arrives in front of me and trays of boiled potatoes get passed down the line.

  My mouth goes dry. ‘Have you seen Clare yet?’

  ‘His truck’s back, he’ll be around somewhere. Why – what’s he owe you?’

  ‘Nothing. I just— Look, can we go to the Gold Coast?’

  He gives me a hopeless look, like he doesn’t know what on earth is the matter with the woman. ‘Yeah. I suggested it. What, are you having a stroke or something?’ He puts six large potatoes on his plate, passes the tray, which I pass on to Stuart on the other side of me.

  ‘I mean now. Can we just hop in the truck and go now?’

  ‘Why? What’s happened?’

  ‘Nothing’s happened. I just want to go now.’

  Greg looks confused. ‘Well, so do I, but we’ve got to finish the job.’

  ‘Why?’

  Greg is chewing on a lump of steak. ‘Why? Because these are me mates, I’m not leaving them a man down. Besides, we go early, we don’t get the bonus – it’s just a week we’ve got left. Not long.’ He swallows and reaches for one of the rolls that sit in the centre of the table. ‘Sid,’ he shouts, ‘is this bread still made with the arse flour?’ Sid doesn’t reply and Greg shrugs and mops his plate.

  ‘Can you just trust me that we need to leave now?’ I say.

  He puts his bread down. ‘Why do we need to leave now? What is the difference? You rob a bank?’

  I open my mouth to speak, but there is nothing I can tell him.

  ‘See,’ he says, picking up his fork again, ‘there’s no problem. Everything is simple. It’s just hot is all, we’ll be at the Coast in no time.’

  Another tray starts to come down, with sausages on it. When I pass this to Stuart he looks at me strangely.

  ‘No snag for you?’ he says.

  ‘What?’

  ‘On Jenny Craig or something?’

  I ignore him, but Greg notices too, and waves the sausages back. ‘Wait wait wait, if she’s not eating I’ll have hers,’ and he spears two extra.

  ‘Why do you get the extra?’ asks Stuart.

  ‘Because she’s my woman.’

  ‘What? That’s not right.’

  ‘Fair dinkum,’ Denis says from down the end. ‘She’s his woman, means the snags pass on to him.’

  I wish I had taken the sausages.

  I have until the end of tea to convince him.

  Greg has eaten my steak, and two large bowls of tinned fruit cocktail with the shining red cherries and the pale cubes of melon are distributed along the table.

  Someone barks, ‘What, no ice cream?’ and Sid tosses a couple of bricks of it, the kind you cut with a pallet knife and which are bright yellow like cheese, and Connor hacks off a two-inch slice and dumps a ladle of fruit salad on top.

  ‘Love it when the ice cream mixes with the syrup,’ he says loudly to anyone who wants to know, and then he picks out the red cherries one by one with his fingers, his pinkie held up high, and lines them up at the side of his dish, ‘but those little fuckers can get bent.’

  Clare appears in the doorway with the night behind him. The strip lighting in the shed makes him look like he glows. He holds on to the door frame and scans the long table. I wait for his eyes to settle on me, and when they do I see a look of pleasure on his face that I recognise. I am trapped. Greg’s thigh pumps blood next to mine. Connor scrapes the bottom of his dish with his spoon and Steve, next to him, flicks one of the red cherries so it darts onto Stuart’s lap. Stuart gives Steve the finger without looking up from his bowl. Alan at the top of the table is reading the paper and is not interested. He drinks his beer. And in all of it, Clare looks at me and I know I’m done, I know the end has come. He enters the room and walks slowly past me. I try not to crane to follow him, I try not to anticipate his next move. He puts a hand on Greg’s shoulder and bends down to him, and I tense myself for the end. Greg looks up and Clare hands him a Violet Crumble and Greg’s face opens out into a smile.

  ‘Good man,’ says Greg. ‘Now I don’t have to get involved with this horse shit,’ he says, nodding at the fruit salad and pinching open the purple wrapper as he does it. Clare ambles on by, saying nothing, just giving me a sidelong glance. Greg breaks the end off his bar and hands it to me. While Greg is turned away from me, I crumble it to dust under the table.

  I pick up my shears from the shed, and do not think about what will happen next. The shed smells good. Sweat and dung, lanolin and turps. I can’t imagine being away from it. A possum scratches on the tin roof. I walk slowly back to my quarters, stand for a moment in the dark where I can see the warm slice of light in the dinner shed, where I have a side view of Greg, who is laughing, who brings a beer to his lips, who drinks, who puts it down and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. I bite the tip of my tongue and I try to think of some last-minute plan that can stop this. Nothing comes and I turn away and follow my feet back to my quarters.

  Clare is lying on my bed with his boots on, smoking a roll-up. I stop in the doorway, but he’s heard me coming and he’s ready with a toothy smile for me. I stay in the doorway wondering if I can turn around, walk back to the woolshed, hide under a fleece.

  ‘Know where I was all week?’ he asks, swinging his legs off my bed. ‘Come in out of the doorway, love,’ he says, ‘you look like a prostitute.’ He grins wider, if that is possible. He blows smoke out and it fogs the air between us. ‘Planning a trip?’ he says, in the voice of someone off the TV. He kicks my backpack gently. There is so much excitement in his voice.

  ‘Ben tipped me off about the posters – pictures of you plastered all around the place down there. Did you know that? I had to go and see for myself – but the
y’re you all right.’ He pulls from his back pocket a scored and folded piece of paper. He unfolds it slowly, chuckling to himself, and holds it up to show me. There I am in black and white sitting on my pink pony doona cover, smiling for the camera. There’s a stuffed bear on my lap and my hands are digging into it, not that you can see my hands, not that you can see the bear or the doona cover or the old man taking the photograph or the dog guarding me outside. You can only see my face, the smile for the camera. In capital letters it says MISSING at the top and I catch the words ‘granddaughter . . . danger to herself’, at the bottom, but I can’t read it all because things have gone dark.

  ‘I rang the number, Jake, and you know what I found out?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. He’s not my grandfather.’

  ‘Oh, I know all that. That poor old bloke, “Otto”. We had a good long chat. I went to see him on his farm, just a pen of dead sheep, and all he can talk about is how you killed his dog and how you took his money and he was only trying to take you off the street. Said you took everything that was dear to him, took his truck even, poor old cracker couldn’t get into town, had to rely on the Salvos to come once a week with groceries until he got his old banger working. Saw what you did to that too, smashed it up pretty bad.’

  ‘I didn’t, I just—’

  ‘I saw it. The old bugger cried when he talked about his dog.’

  ‘I just—’

  ‘Shhh,’ Clare says, but loudly. He gets up off the bed in one fluid movement and walks towards me slowly, takes my forearms where they hang limply by my sides. He moves me over to stand in front of the workbench and he leans on me, crotch heavy.

  ‘You might have fooled them, but you don’t fool me.’

  My mouth waters. I look over at the doorway. What would happen if Greg appeared in there now?

  ‘What you’ve got, is you’ve got two options here. Maybe I’d be persuaded to keep my mouth shut.’ Clare’s breath is hot fudge on the side of my face. He whispers in a way that sounds like soon he’ll be shouting. ‘You can show me some of what you’ve shown everyone else at the Hedland . . .’ My heart tumbles around my body. A stupid part of me thinks, He might not say anything, and is quieted by the part of me that knows it will not end, and I cannot stay here. ‘Little bit of affection – I’m not asking for much – I wouldn’t fuck a mate’s lay – maybe just the mouth.’ And I can see exactly how it will all be, the back of the throat, the hair grasped in a ponytail, and the words he will say while he does it, and then afterwards how it will only be worse, how he will be rid of me either way, and with a flourish. ‘Or,’ he says, trailing his finger along the outer curve of my breast, ‘or I can let old Otto know where to find you, and the police.’ He starts to unbutton my shorts, and he tugs my singlet out from them, and puts a hand down, scrabbling with his fingers to get beneath my underwear. ‘I won’t even have to tell Greg, they’ll do it for me.’ He scrapes a finger over my crotch, and like a mechanical game at the fairground, something is triggered and I punch him in the jaw with my right and he goes down, out cold and bleeding on the floor.

  I cannot do up my shorts because my hand crunched badly against Clare’s face, and it has turned into a meat fist, throbbing and swollen.

  I leave the room without looking back at him, but I can hear him shifting about in the dust and a wet groan comes from him. I am fairly sure that I have broken his jaw.

  3

  I watched Don drive down into the valley in the last of the light, stayed there with the wheelbarrow in the sleet, with Dog sheltering behind my legs, until he’d disappeared over the crest of the hill to the other side where he lived. My boots made a crumping sound as I walked back down the path to the woolshed. There were times I felt how unnatural I was in the place, the way my skin still stung at the cold, the way the insides of my nostrils and the back of my throat prickled. The smell of wet wool and rain-dampened sheep shit were aliens to the dust-dry smell of the carpet sheep in their wide red spaces back home. The way the land seemed to be watching me, feeling my foreignness in it, holding its breath until I passed by. I’d asked Mum once, What kind of Aussies are we? Did we come over on the boats, or did someone take us here later on? Mum’d looked up from where she was struggling to get the triplets’ bare white arses into undies, and blew a hank of hair out of her face. ‘I’ve been here for ever, darl,’ she said and swatted one of the kids on the legs to try and get them to keep still. I’d never pushed further than that.

  I tried not to look too hard into the trees which were black even in the morning, but from the corner of my eye I saw something flicker and I started, thinking the trees were on fire but there was nothing, just some slight movement in the wind. The sheep coughed and bleated. I parked the wheelbarrow in the woolshed and closed the door. My teeth chattered and when I got inside the house, I pulled on my coat and sat on the sofa. Dog climbed up damply next to me.

  I hadn’t called in over a month. The last time no one was in and I let it ring out thinking about the phone in the front room, how the sound of it made the magpies lift off the veranda and then settle back down. How the air moved with the ringer, the air that smelled of washing left too long in the machine, of three young boys and their socks and undies, the long-gone deep-fat fryer whose smell, as I remembered it, still soaked into the walls. Mum’s back-door cigarettes that we weren’t allowed to know about, and somewhere from an open window, the smell of sugar and eucalyptus, the hot breath of the trees.

  I dialled the code to withhold my number and tapped in the long sequence that I knew by heart. It took me through the tones and silences of connection to home. It would barely be daybreak there, but Mum was an early riser – always had been. It rang out twice and I stroked the arm of the sofa to hear the sound of Mum’s voice.

  ‘Hello, 635?’ she said and waited. ‘Hello? Hello hello?’

  A sigh, from her chest which sounded shallow and wheezy. It would have been her birthday the week before. Seventy-two.

  ‘Iris!’ she called. ‘It’s doing that thing again.’ A thickness in her throat, a cold or an allergy. My sister’s voice, muffled, maybe from upstairs.

  ‘Just hang up the phone, Ma, for Christ’s sake!’

  ‘Well, what’s wrong with the phone though?’

  Iris closer now, down the stairs and entering the room. ‘How the hell should I know.’ The clunk of the phone being taken out of my mother’s deeply veined hands and into Iris’s heavily ringed fingers. ‘Hello?’ My sister’s voice, sharp like always, edged with being the eldest. She listened to my silence. ‘I dunno, Mum, maybe you’ve got a pervert after you.’

  On the receiver’s journey through the air into the cradle, I heard the beginning of a butcher bird’s song, ceecaw-ceeceecaw – and the line went dead. Back in my living room with the electric heater on and smelling of burnt dust, I finished the song, whistling. Pwee pwee pwee pwee pwee pwee pwee pwee pwee pwee pweeee. Dog raised his ears at the sound but it wasn’t that unusual to him. I started a set of push-ups, but halfway through lay down and stared at the ceiling.

  I made some coffee and drank it. After some time had passed, I laid out my paperwork on the kitchen table and worked through it. When that was done I let Dog out to pee, but stayed in the doorway in my socks. I put the paperwork away and folded myself up on the sofa with a book that I held unopened on my lap. The wind moved through the trees, down the chimney and into the front room where it waved through the top sheet of a newspaper.

  With the night outside I closed the curtains in the kitchen and put on the radio loud enough to drown out the skittering noises of leaves moving up the stone path. The only programme I could get was the soccer results. I listened to the names of places while I made sardines on toast. Wigan. What was Wigan like? I had a pretty strong sense of it just from the name, and it made me glad that I was not there. I fed a sardine to Dog and it made him sneeze.

  The sitting room was cold and so I ate under a blanket. I didn’t look out the window at
the dark, but I felt it there.

  Burnley, three; Middlesbrough, nil.

  When I could find no further reasons for not being in bed, I turned the radio off and whistled tunelessly and loudly on my way up the stairs. On the landing a feather fluttered in a draught. I brushed my teeth and must’ve scraped over a mouth ulcer, because when I spat there was an impressive amount of blood. I washed it away and blew my nose and then rolled on an old T-shirt to sleep in. Dog collected himself at the foot of the bed, and we stared at each other a moment or two before I checked the hammer under my pillow and turned off the light. I closed my eyes so that I wasn’t staring into the dark, and I tried not to take any notice of the sounds that felt unfamiliar, even though I’d heard them a million times before. A sheep’s cough had always sounded just like a person’s. A fox was being made love to somewhere in the woods and her shrieks cut straight into my room.

  I fell asleep, because I woke up from a dream where I saw myself opening the bathroom door and finding all of my sheep in there, looking silently back at me. There was no colour or light in the sky, so it wasn’t past five. There was something sick in the air, like someone had lit a scented candle to mask a bad smell. The house was still. Dog stood by the closed door, looking at the space underneath, his hackles up and his legs straight and stiff, his tail rigid, pointing down. And then one creak, on the ceiling, like someone walked there. I held my breath and listened past the blood thumping in my ears. It was quiet and I pulled the covers up under my chin. The sheets chafed loudly against themselves. Dog stayed fixed on the door. A small growl escaped him.

  My fingernails dug into my palms.

  On the wall behind me came a noise like someone drawing a nail from the ceiling to the top of my bed’s headboard and stopping there, one straight smooth and slow line. Dog slunk over to the bed and growled long and low. I lay still, felt every muscle beat in time with my heart; my back throbbed now. I had the feeling that I had bled onto the bedsheets, that if I moved my back would stick to the material and pull at my skin.