All the Birds, Singing

by Evie Wyld

  ‘Was it a customer?’ he asks and I nod, letting the lie set immediately. I make it the man with the bleach-blond hair and shaved balls who wanted to put his dirty socks in my mouth. He came in my face and on his socks. Then he took the socks out of my mouth and he put them on his feet and put his feet in his sandals and trotted off home. I made it him, but instead of socks he’d undone his buckled belt – in reality he was the sort that didn’t wear a belt and preferred everyone to be able to see the top bristles of his shaved bits. I tell this story to Otto as he sits on the toilet seat with a yellow towel wrapped around him and I lean against the sink, feeling how loose it is from the wall.

  Otto wipes tears from his eyes. ‘You girls,’ he says, ‘what a time of it you have.’ And he gestures that I should come and lay my head in his lap, kneel on the toilet mat, and he sobs over me as I race through the details of my lie in my head, file it away in my memory and close the door on it. Slowly Otto moves aside his yellow towel and that’s how I end up giving him head while he’s sat on the toilet.

  Around the house is a paddock of tall strange grasses. They are strange because of the things hidden in them that poke out into the air – push-bikes without wheels, farm tools that are the colour of earth from rust. Every now and then if you pass the paddock on your way to the dunny, you spy a sheep’s skull among the tin cans and broken chainsaws. Sometimes it’s like there’s a tiger out there, like it can see me but I can’t see it. If I stand looking for too long, Kelly is liable to stand up and ask, What are you loitering for, and don’t test me to see if I’ll bark.

  Kelly doesn’t like me. She’s not like a dog really; she’s more disapproving than a dog. She sees things differently to the way most dogs do – she’s not into pats on the head, she won’t take food from my hand. I offer her the meat from my sandwich one time and she stands, looking through me until I feel embarrassed and put it back in the bread. Another time I absent-mindedly bend down to scratch behind her ear while Otto is telling me how he likes his home kept, and she snaps at my hand, breaks the skin on my little finger. Otto frowns. ‘She doesn’t like that,’ he says. She watches me in a way I recognise, but not from a dog.

  I have not seen a phone in the house, and I ask Otto about it.

  ‘Phone?’ he says. ‘Who would we call? The Ghostbusters?’ He laughs. This is a thing I’m learning about him – he likes to laugh at his jokes.

  Somewhere into the fifth week, Otto has only called for sex a dozen or so times. He’s just a kind, lonely old man. He only ever wants it in a normal way. He drives us into town to get supplies, to the store which has everything – food and hardware and furniture and animal feed and rat poison and grog. My palms sweat. Otto has given me $100 for groceries, which is more than I know what to do with. I pick up a can of cream, the same kind that Mum used to squirt onto her daiquiris. She called it a grog float. I put the can down carefully and turn away from it. I remember what Otto said about Carole’s cooking, and I find eggs and bread, some cheese. Otto does not have a deep-fat fryer, so I do not put the great sacks of frozen chips or, though I eye them, the ready-dipped calamari rings in the trolley. As a gift, he buys me a pink shampoo with a picture of a horse on it. At the checkout, I go to give him a peck on the cheek, and he stiffens. ‘You’re my niece,’ he says, ‘remember that.’ And I glance over at the checkout lady who looks quickly down at her till.

  I wonder how those sheep are still alive, how long they’ve been trapped there next to their slaughterhouse. Since Carole left? I don’t know how long that has been.

  The pen is made up of flimsy metal barriers that can be linked or separated and moved one at a time. The sections are not heavy and the sheep, if they had a mind to, could probably break out, but they don’t do a lot of anything much, just shift their weight from their hips to their shoulders and stare out at the horizon while the flies eat their backsides.

  The earth in their enclosure is coated in shit and just a few feet to the left of their pen is a dusting, at least, of grass. I start to shift the pen, panel by panel, expanding it slightly, edging the sheep over towards the grass. When they get in my way, I herd and shoo them, waving my arms. They are not bothered enough to be scared, but they more or less go where I tell them. They move with the weight of ghosts and I notice a few are resting on the front joints of their legs, like they haven’t got the strength to stand. It takes me two hours, during which time Otto and Kelly drive up to see why I’ve been gone so long.

  Otto frowns at first, but then he shrugs. ‘Might get some meat on them I suppose,’ and he drives back to the house while Kelly watches out of the back of the ute.

  The flies drink out of the corners of my eyes, and crawl all over my shoulders, and I let them crawl. I’m not sure what I was expecting, to see the sheep dance gratefully around in the puny grass I’ve found them, but they just stand there, a silent little group. I try to move them about, but they’re not scared of me. Resigned is what they are, and I tell them, ‘You can move around if you want to,’ waving my arms and jumping about, but they just sway a little in the hot fly air. I look at the woolshed and see the meat hook and I shift onto my other foot. ‘Fair enough,’ I say and cycle back to the house, and put the sheep far in the back crevice of my mind, with those other things that only come out in the dark when my guard is down and I stare at the night behind my window cage.

  There’s a black and white photograph on the wall in the telly room and Otto sees me looking at it. It’s him with dark hair and a trim waist, and he’s holding some kind of trophy.

  ‘Golden Shears, 1962,’ he says. He’s standing with a woman who wears high-waisted trousers and an old-fashioned hairdo and who is presenting him with the trophy, a pair of scissors soldered onto a plinth. ‘That’s Candy Mulligan – she was the weather girl from ABC. She had a thing for me.’

  I look at the man in the picture with the sun-crinkled face and the straight back. Dark hair feathering out from under his hat.

  He turns up the volume on the TV. ‘Ah – it’s me programme,’ he says.

  Otto gives me a lesson in driving. He takes me out where there’s nothing to smash into and lets me turn slow doughnuts in the dust. When we stall and when I make the truck rattle with going too slow, he laughs at me, but I’ve never felt so capable, and I think about when the other truck is fixed and when I can take off down the dirt road and out onto the bitumen. If you have wheels, I realise, you are free.

  After the lesson, Otto shows me what he’s doing to the other truck. The bonnet is up and inside is another language of tubes and cables.

  ‘See this?’ he says, slapping a black box with the flat of his hand. ‘Couple of loose connections in there I reckon, nothing major.’ He blushes a little and looks away. ‘I wanted to have her ready for when you arrived, but me flamin’ hands went crook.’ I put my hand on Otto’s shoulder and smile at him.

  Late in the day, I’m standing out on the veranda smoking a Holiday and Kelly is standing on all fours barking at me like she really wants to go for me. Otto comes out looking uncomfortable.

  ‘No smoking here, pet, upsets the dog. Reminds her of Carole – she and Carole didn’t get along,’ he says and I exhale and look at the tip of my cigarette. I feel awkward and embarrassed, like a kid again.

  ‘Okay,’ I say, ‘last one.’ It’s fine, I think, I’ll just have to do it when I’m on my own, but he comes and takes the cigarette out of my fingers and drops it cherry first into his mug of tea. Then he holds out his hand.

  ‘And the rest.’

  ‘That was my last,’ I say, counting up the packets I have left from the duty-free Karen gave me. I think there are two and a half-finished pack, but as long as I can find fifty cents here and there, I’ll be able to sneak a packet now and again, it’s not such a hardship.

  ‘Hm,’ says Otto, frowning. ‘Bad for a person’s health.’

  Otto has a beer early and falls asleep in front of the afternoon soaps – he can watch them again in the evening runs, so it’s
not a drama. Because the house is so hot, I leave a note and climb on my bike. Kelly lifts her head at me as I cycle off up the track to the sheep, but she doesn’t bark and wake Otto.

  I fill their trough with fresh water and scatter some pellets around the place. They aren’t that interested and who could blame them. There’s almost no shade, and the ones with the paler faces must be blistering with skin cancers. Mostly, they crowd along the wall of the shed where the roof shelters them a little from the sun. The flies are swarming again, clouds of them, they muscle in at the sheep’s eyes and arseholes. I try spraying the sheep with the hose, but I can’t tell if it helps or if they like it, they just hang there on their feet. If I could get hold of a couple of lengths of wood, I could hang over a tarpaulin and give them a little shade. The man with the black hair in the photo on Otto’s wall wouldn’t object to that. Maybe it was just his crook hands that stopped him from looking after the sheep, maybe he just needs the extra help. I get on my bike and ride back to the house, slowly, thinking.

  Inside, my last packets of Holidays are laid out on the front table.

  ‘Now, I’m not cross,’ says Otto, ‘because I know this is an addiction. But what we’re doing here today is we’re taking a stand against it.’

  I stop myself just short of raising my voice when I say, ‘You went through my things?’

  ‘Your things, young lady, are in my house.’ He says it with an edge of hardness like he thinks he’s my dad, and it makes my heart beat fast. I think I will cry.

  ‘Come and stand next to me, pet,’ he says.

  Kelly is sitting bolt upright in the dirt, waiting for something. Otto picks up the first packet and lobs it off the veranda to her. The dog pounces on it like it’s alive, snarling and growling, the flesh of the inside of her mouth showing, saliva greasing all over the cardboard.

  She wrecks them, shaking the packet, slinging cigarettes everywhere, rolling on them once they’re out. And Otto throws the next packet. Kelly does not lose focus.

  ‘Now,’ says Otto, once it is all done and I am standing in silence next to him, gripping the wood of the veranda. He hands me a dustpan and brush. ‘You go and clean all that mess up and put it in the bin and we’ll say no more about it.’

  Kelly does not growl at me while I sweep it up but she watches me and I’d like to kick her hard in the ribs.

  I go to my room and sit on the edge of the bed with a feeling I can’t be exact about spinning round in my stomach. I look at my bag, which I hadn’t thought to unpack since I arrived.

  Otto is bright and chirpy, and we have a busy day because it’s time to teach me to shear.

  ‘Bin thinking,’ he says, ‘about what you done with the pen, and giving the sheep a bit more space – p’raps it’s good for ’em – don’t seem so maggoty any more. If we could get those girls in a more acceptable state, might be a few we could mate, and we could get things going again. Arse has dropped out of wool, but maybe if we could get the meat sellable,’ he says, full of himself, chirruping away. I am tired and he looks hurt.

  In the woolshed, he hands me some shears which don’t look far different from the ones Mum used to use on the triplets’ hair. He shows me how to work them, and Kelly sniffs round the place, in particular at the black stains underneath the meat hook.

  ‘Get yerself a sheep then.’ I look at him a bit blankly. ‘G’wan,’ he says, ‘you’re not shearing me!’ which he thinks is a hilarious joke and he doubles over laughing. I go and get hold of a sheep around the hips. She doesn’t struggle, but isn’t wanting to move, and it’s difficult persuading her up the ramp to the shed. She might be wondering which bit of her is getting cut, but I get her up there, and Otto shows me how to position her to start. When he has her pinned on the boards, a strange gentleness comes over him, I can see it in his face. It’s like how he looks at me when we screw.

  ‘You don’t want her to be sitting on her tail,’ he says, ‘cause that’s not comfortable,’ and he demonstrates on half of her how to go – when he does the throat cut I can see her wild eye and I want to tell her, It’s just the wool. He hands the shears over to me. ‘Some places they have you hanging on a strap,’ he says, ‘save using your back too much. But if you don’t use it it’ll never get strong, so you’ll just have to get used to that ache.’ And I do ache when the sheep starts struggling and whipping about and I have to hold her steady; I think I’m going to die from the ache afterwards. Because it is important, because if she is not still I will cut her skin, and she is eyeballing me like I’m going to slit her throat, and I want her to end this thinking, Wasn’t so bad. I manage with a bit of help from Otto, who inspects my work afterwards.

  ‘You’ve got to go deeper, girl – you’re not close enough to the skin, leaving all that good stuff behind, stuff that binds it together. You need to peel her like an orange – pith and everythin’.’ And so on my second go the sheep gets cut, and it’s horrible. When I see the blood I let her go, I can’t believe I’ve held her down and hurt her and that she couldn’t tell me. It is awful, it is awful, I never want to try it again, I can’t, and Otto looks surprised when I cry but then he laughs good-naturedly. ‘Jesus Christ, girl, you might look like a man but you’re sure not one, ay?’ I haven’t hated him before, but I do when he passes me the shears again and says, ‘C’mon, this is what you’re here for,’ as if that were true, and he makes me catch the same one and I have to finish the job on that scared and bleeding sheep. ‘Here,’ he says, coming up behind and putting his arms around me to hold the sheep, ‘feel her wrapped around you,’ and I make the sheep fit in the hollow between my breasts and my hips, somehow, and she feels safe there, locked in. ‘Now,’ he says, holding up his hand, ‘breathe.’

  Twice more I make them bleed and then I get the angle, I get the understanding of it, and it is like taking the skin off an orange, or more accurately like peeling a mandarin, when the skin is thick and the pith attached and there is something satisfying about it, and when I do it right the sheep doesn’t struggle or cry, it just lies there and lets me get on.

  I spray the hose in my face to wash off the flies and they come back quickly to suck up the beads of water on my skin. I lean on the fence for a while, looking away from Otto’s, watching the mirage, and I let myself believe it is the sea, and that the desert ends in a gentle slope down to the water’s edge, which hides my house, with my people who are living in it. A rabbit shifts on the mirage and it’s gone. A whistler circles above it.

  I’m sweeping up, which is important with all the blue bottles. The amount of shit and maggots I’ve taken off the ewes is disgusting, and sweeping the great hunks of black wormy wool out the door is satisfying. Afterwards, I give myself another hose down. I put my thumb over the nozzle to try and get a stronger spray, and run the water over the dark stain under the meat hook. The pressure is not great and it doesn’t have much of an effect. Water starts to run over the boards and into the corner of the shed, where the feed is kept in a large plastic barrel. I’m checking that there’s nothing behind the barrel that shouldn’t get wet and I find an earring. It’s a small gold heart with a teardrop of opal hanging from it. It sits in my palm like a dead beetle. I put it back where I found it and cycle back to the house to make Otto his lunch. My hair dries before I’m back, and in the bathroom mirror I see the sun has worked me over, left me pink and brown, picked out the new bulges of muscle on my arms.

  Later, back at the woolshed I roll up the fleeces, and I find some string to bind them all up neatly. When Otto comes out with the truck and I show him, he laughs.

  ‘Pretty impressive, pet,’ he says, ‘but no one wants shit an’ maggots in their carpets. Maybe on the next shear there’ll be something better.’

  We load it up anyway and when we’ve driven back to the house, I help throw it all into the paddock. ‘All good fertiliser,’ he says, but I’m not sure I believe him. Kelly sits on her behind and when we’ve finished chucking them in, she goes to investigate, comes back with fleece sticking
to her muzzle and a hacking cough from eating hair.

  I think about the earring that night when Otto comes to me and bends me over the bed. I think about how he took my little penknife, that really couldn’t do much damage to anyone, and how he never mentioned it to me.

  While we are lying there in the aftermath and he is collecting himself, he tests one of my biceps, pinches it between his fingers.

  ‘Getting some guns on you, girl. I like a useful body. Just don’t go getting too manly.’ He laughs as if he has told a joke.

  I can hear his guts churning in him because he had a late supper. I ask, ‘How long ago did Carole leave?’

  He looks at me and there’s something nettley in his eyes. ‘How come you want to know about that?’

  I skate a hand over his windy chest and roll over, try to look cute, which is not easy for me. ‘I just wondered how long you had to cope all on your own out here. Must’ve been lonely?’ And he softens, and closes his eyes, lets his head fall back, and relaxes after his exertions.

  ‘She left probably a year before you came.’

  I want to ask more questions but I can’t figure how to get away with it. I want to know what she looked like, how tall; the kind of woman to wear earrings on a sheep farm – what kind of woman is that?

  ‘You don’t need to worry about Carole,’ he says and wheezes out of his nostrils loudly, because there is detritus up there. ‘She was a slut. Not like you. You’re a little girl in a slut’s skin. She was the other way.’

  There’s a small stereo in the telly room, and the CDs are mainly things like Slim Dusty and Tales from the Mallee, which I don’t think much of, but among them are INXS and Cole Porter, and I know both those names. I put Cole Porter on and Otto comes in the house. ‘Course Carole always liked a dance,’ he says. I think that will mean I have to turn the music off, but he does a neat little four-step and takes my hand in his fingertips, turns me twice and then finishes with a little flourish, leaning me back like he’s a gentleman. Kelly is barking at the door in fury, and out the fly-screen I catch her eye as he dips me. I win this round, mother superior.