All the Birds, Singing

by Evie Wyld

  I think of when I first arrived in Port Hedland with the pizza parlour bed-and-breakfast you could pay ten dollars to work out of, how the owner called us jobless sluts, giving her restaurant a bad name. But she still let us in for ten dollars, so long as we didn’t use the towels, which you wouldn’t anyway because they stank of smoke and sometimes they had a little trail of something wiped on them.

  I feel hopeful here; even in those moments I’m searching the sky for an airplane, I think, can’t complain, because it’s been worse, much worse and the two of us laugh that night and drink a beer and Kelly sits outside in the dust, biting at her fleas. There is one last Holiday left in a packet I find stuffed into the pocket of my jeans, along with a book of matches. I hide it and think about it often, and wait for the moment when I need it most. It makes me feel better, just knowing it’s there.

  17

  The fence around Don’s lawn was decorated with more dead moles, some flapping in the wind, a few still moist enough to draw flies.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘a visit from the hermit crab. You look better. Had a kip? Was going to drop by you later today in fact – bloody stupid woman at the fishmonger’s keeps giving me fish. I hate the stuff – sort of rubbish your lot eat. She’s gone sweet on me, silly cow, can’t stop giving me her stinking flounder.’ He smiled at me. ‘Heard you made it down the pub the other week with your new fancy man.’

  ‘Samson came to see me the other night,’ I said, and Don’s face sagged a little.

  ‘Did he do anything?’

  ‘No. Not really.’

  ‘Come in. Come in and I’ll make you a coffee.’

  Don’s kitchen was pine and chrome in a way that reminded me of hospitals. He turned on his electric kettle and made me watch as a light strip on its side turned from blue to purple to bright red.

  ‘Ever see one of those before?’ he asked.

  ‘No, never,’ I said.

  ‘Got that for nothing – came with the kitchen,’ he said and put a sachet of instant coffee in each mug. He added water and stirred. It was the kind of instant coffee that already had milk in it – it had a grey-looking head on it. ‘Seen that before?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s great, isn’t it?’

  ‘Aye,’ said Don, looking proudly at his mug. ‘Aye, it is. They call it instantchino.’

  We sipped the coffee and I nodded appreciatively. ‘It’s good,’ I said. It was not good. But Don looked pleased, and offered me one of his sweeteners from a tin that dropped them when you pressed a button. I took two to be polite and he nodded again.

  ‘Margaret would have a conniption fit.’

  I smiled. The room was thick with the smell of our instantchinos.

  Don sighed and said, ‘I’ll bet you didn’t know that Margaret was only forty-three when she died.’ His face had a look to it like he’d won a treasure hunt.

  ‘I don’t know anything about her,’ I said, though I had always thought of her as being Don’s age, I realised – a timely death, sad, but not unexpected. Don lifted himself up out of his chair and went over to a drawer in the kitchen. Out of it he pulled a colour photograph: Don, looking much the same as he did now, the oilskin coat the same, the boots. A different shade of shirt on underneath the oilskin and a thicker quality to the white hair at the side of his head, but that was all. The woman next to him could have been his daughter, her blonde hair in a ponytail, a long beaked nose and her mouth open, laughing. Her hand rested on the head of a small dark child, who held a fistful of her turquoise bomber jacket in his paw. The boy wore dungarees and had his hair parted to the side; he was maybe four years old, but I recognised the look, the deep frown and open mouth of Samson.

  ‘Jesus,’ I said. ‘When was this taken?’

  Don propped the photo up against the jug in the centre of the table. ‘About fifteen years ago.’ He drained the last of his coffee and leant back in his chair and clasped his hands behind his head.

  ‘See,’ he said, ‘I always thought I’d go long before Margaret. Otherwise I wouldn’t have said yes when she said she wanted the baby.’ Don’s eyes were closed, like he was picturing the event. I looked at my coffee and wondered if I’d be able to finish it. The silence lengthened.

  ‘I haven’t been a good father to him,’ Don said softly. ‘Didn’t know what to do in the first place. And that’s all fine if you’ve got a loving mother – don’t need the father so much then.’ He opened his eyes and looked at me. ‘Just like my old man.’ He swept one of his arms from behind his head like he was gesturing at something. ‘He was no damn good at it – he went to work and came home and we stayed out of his way.’ He let his hand find its way back behind his head. ‘I wasn’t as bad as that – I wanted to be more than that to Samson, but I wasn’t good at it. Couldn’t do the baby talk, found it embarrassing. Margaret used to say to me, He’s not a short adult, he’s a child. But I never saw the difference. And then when he got older, there was trouble with his attention span or something. Teachers were no good. I was no good. But his mother – she was good.’ He dropped his hands down and laid them on the table, carefully. They were old hands, older than the rest of him. One of his index fingers had a scar all the way down it as if it had been split open, and the nails were yellow, thick and horny. The tips of his fingers pointed in strange directions.

  ‘When she died Samson was sixteen. Where I’m from, that meant you were a man. I didn’t know what to do with him – I don’t know if he knew what to do with me either. We didn’t know what to say to each other without her.’ Don bit his bottom lip and held it there. I listened to the sound of us breathing. ‘When he started with the fires, I thought he was punishing me, but I thought I’d done nothing wrong, so what was there to punish? I never brutalised him. Not once. Never did to him the things my father would’ve.’

  My mouth was dry, but I couldn’t wet it with the instantchino which was lukewarm now and sickly.

  ‘What did he set fire to?’

  ‘Cars at first. Then a barn. Then he had a go at the cottage while I was in it, but I came down in the night and found him sitting over the table with his head in his hands. He’d made a little bonfire in the corner of the room, and I say, What are you up to? And he says he wants the place burnt. And so I called the police after that. On my own boy, on our boy.’

  Don looked far away.

  ‘What did the police do?’ I thought of the sergeant, gentle-eyed and useless.

  ‘They said did I want to press charges, and even the fella whose barn Sam set alight – he hadn’t pressed charges once I paid him back for it – even he said, the boy’s just troubled after his mother. But I pressed charges, and the boy went to borstal.’

  I picked up my mug and drank the bad coffee just to have another movement, another noise in the room.

  ‘I had it in my head the place’d do him some good, some rules, some toughening – Margaret was never big on those things. She thought we should nurture his dream to be a guitar player.’ Don laughed. ‘He was dreadful at that, purely dreadful. He’s my son, I said; he’ll be a farmer.’

  Outside the sun came out from behind a cloud, so that it was like someone had opened a curtain in the room. I could see Midge through the window, resting her head on her paws, looking out towards my sheep. ‘And after he’d gone, when it was just me alone in the house without him to worry about, I began to see what he meant.’

  ‘What did he mean?’

  ‘He meant to burn down the house, and I saw why.’

  I nodded, but all I could think of was the water in the tap over the sink, and how I’d like to pour away the coffee and take down large gulps.

  ‘Memories?’ I said.

  Don looked up like he’d forgotten I was there. He smiled. ‘Woke up in the night with Midge howling outside, looked out the window and there she was, Margaret, in her dressing gown, the only clothes I took for her to the hospice. She had her back to the house, walking towards the woods, but I could see it was her.’

>   I got up and poured away my coffee, rinsed my mug and filled it with water. I drank and listened as the water collected in my belly.

  ‘I went down and outside, and I ran out with Midge going berserk alongside me, and I chased to the spot I’d seen her, saw something go into the woods and I just stood there calling for her. But she never came back. I thought about burning the place down then. Couldn’t sleep for the fear she’d come back. Or wouldn’t come back.’

  Don exhaled, rested his old head in his hand. ‘When Samson came out the borstal he didn’t come and see me. I ran into him in town a few times, took him for a drink, said sorry. But there’s things no amount of saying sorry’ll fix. He’s a gentle soul, really.’ He looked up at me. ‘He’d not do that to your sheep, if that’s what you’re thinking. I’m sorry he gave you a scare, but if your sheep are being slaughtered, it’s an animal, it’s not my son, I promise you that.’

  I gripped onto my mug and nodded. ‘I know it’s not him,’ I said. Don’s eyes were watery. ‘I’ve heard he sometimes camps in the woods, and I wanted to ask him if he’s seen anything.’

  Don smiled. ‘He will have seen lots of things, though you have to pick your way between choosing what ones are real. I haven’t got the hang of that, and I don’t think I’ve got the time left in me to sort the real from the daydreams.’

  ‘He wants to see you – he was asking after you. That’s why he came to the cottage – he didn’t know you’d moved.’

  ‘He does know,’ Don said with a little shake of his head, ‘he just forgets things. Must be off his pills.’

  I thought about the look on Samson’s face as he turned and walked into the dark.

  ‘Yep, afraid I turned my son loopy,’ Don said and clasped his old hands around his mug.

  I stood up to leave, felt my fists clenching at my sides. Without warning one of my hands rested itself on Don’s shoulder, and I said, ‘I don’t think it’s your fault,’ and we stayed like that for an awkward moment. Don wiped an old wrist under his nose.

  ‘Come and I’ll give you this flounder this bloody woman gave me,’ he said, and got up to go to the fridge. ‘Me, I’ll be having a Lean Cuisine.’

  18

  The Aboriginal girl gets herself killed. Karen is smoking a Holiday and her hand is shaking. ‘I fucking told you, didn’t I?’ she says and she pours out a sloppy measure of Bi-Lo vodka into her mug of tea. There are rings of soot around her eyes. She gets this way sometimes. ‘Didn’t I fucking tell you they do it for anything?’

  I take the bottle from her and pour some into my can of Coke.

  ‘Just makes it dangerous for the rest of us – giving these arseholes the idea in the first place, I mean fuck. No respect, no thought about the future. They don’t try to educate themselves, they don’t care where they’re livin’.’ She sucks hard on her Holiday. ‘Fuck, they don’t even care if they wake up in the morning. Well, that’s where it gets you’ – she slaps her thigh, hard – ‘throttled and fucked and stuffed in the back of a car.’ She drains her tea and starts to unscrew the bottle again, but midway through her face loses its hardness and crumples, her mouth bowing out at the sides like a child. ‘Christ,’ she says, though no tears come; she catches her breath and holds her palm to her chest. ‘She’s just a kid.’ A high-pitched sound escapes from somewhere deep in her throat and I take the bottle out of her hand, put my hand in its place and sit there until she can breathe again. She pulls it together with a long sniff and looks in silence at the space over my shoulder. ‘We’re not like that,’ she says. ‘We’ve got options – we’re smart. Right? RIGHT?’ She shouts a little and I nod. She swallows. ‘We’re not dependent on this. It’s a life choice.’ I nod after every statement. She looks at me. ‘You get the chance and you go,’ she says. ‘Opportunity is waiting around every corner.’ So is death, I think, but I don’t say it out loud.

  I’m sitting in the Macquarie Lanes Diner as usual with one of my regulars, Otto. Otto is good because he’s twice a month, a fair price, and there’s never any fighting about it. He doesn’t want to do those games the others like to do, he doesn’t want to pretend he’s getting something from me for free, and he doesn’t offer to pay me double if he can hit me in the face while we’re doing it. Sometimes, with no reason to it, the pre-stuffed envelope of ten-dollar notes is more than the price we agreed at the start six months ago. All he wants to do is talk for a couple of hours and then he wants one bit of sex, either a blowie or a normal. He pays me enough that I don’t have to work the rest of the night, which is the real prize. Afterwards he buys me my tea in the diner and he eats too, not like the bleeding hearts who take me for food and order for me, way too much, and then sit there watching, making me feel like a disgusting pig while they sip at a beer, or a black coffee if they’re the Christian type. I’ve got thin at the Hedland. It makes me feel neater, easier to pack away.

  Otto’s wife left him, he tells me, ‘like a pig prancing out of a pen’.

  He owns a sheep station close to Marble Bar, a few hours’ drive from the Hedland. ‘It’s a beaut spot,’ he says. ‘Green in the winter, good watering hole to swim in in the summer. Course, I try and be self-sufficient, as much as possible – a bit of grow-your-own – heck, there’s enough space!’ he says, and chuckles. I imagine it, the fat woolly sheep, the rows of carrots and strawberries sprouting out of the ground. The fruit trees. I think up a tyre-swing and hang it over the watering hole, imagine ducks landing there on their way over. The sound of frogs at night. ‘Just me an’ the missus out there,’ he laughs. ‘That’s Kelly, me dog – she’s like a sister to me.’ He takes out his wallet and shows me a picture of her, she’s got beady eyes and sharp ears. ‘Not one of those sheep’d put a foot wrong while she’s in charge, wouldn’t no bastard fox take a go either. She’d rip the skin off ’em.’ Otto dips four chips in sauce and puts them all in at once. He enjoys the food at the diner because, he says, ‘Can’t cook for buggery. Carole used to do all that, eggs, snags, chops – the whole piece. I’m more of a corned beef and beans cook. Fuckin’ awful.’

  With Otto I always order the calamari with a salad. The salad is the type with grated carrot and beetroot, not the type you see in the picture on the menu with the prickly-looking green leaves and tiny tomatoes and cucumber, but it’s all the same to me. Important, I know, to have a salad, it’s what me and Karen have when we eat together on off-nights.

  When other people order for me, like they either worry I’d be too shy or too greedy, they always get me the beefburger and chips. They don’t think for a moment I might be a vegetarian, as if I’d be allowed to have those choices.

  Tonight I have the fruit for afters, which is tinned, but it’s still good for you. Good for your skin, I think to myself every time, as if the welts on my back might heal over if I only have enough vitamins.

  Because of the issue of space in Otto’s cab, and also because of the dark, he’s never seen my back. Because he never tells me Turn over, it has never been an issue. Sometimes we feel like friends. Today was blowie day, but not one of those punch-down-the-throat ones people are so fond of. I appreciate this because it can make the next one a real piece of hard work, it can bring tears to your eyes just swallowing.

  I finish my calamari and my plate is beet-stained and greasy, and I have a beer, because you want something to cut through the feeling in your throat, even if it’s from a nice bloke like Otto. And then he fixes me with a beady eye, and he says, ‘Listen, pet, I’ve got a proposition.’

  I leave a message for Karen, because she’s out when I run home to pack a bag. It’ll probably just be a week, Just a short break to see if I like the idea. I leave Karen money for the rent for the next month just in case – that’s Otto’s idea and he gives the money to me in twenties. He insists on leaving more than the rent costs, ‘So she knows I’m for real,’ he says. I tell Karen in the note that I’ll call the phone in the hall if I stay longer, and she can come and visit. I know she’ll understand, it’s what she’s af
ter herself – to be out.

  19

  When I stopped at the top field on the way back home, I was missing a sheep. I counted and recounted five times and came up short. I searched the perimeter fence and the drainage ditch and there was no sign. The fence was solid. It was like something had swooped down and lifted her off.

  I cut at a section of bramble that had got tangled around the nose and upper jaw of an old ewe. She was from my first lot, mature when she came to me. I was surprised the last time she managed a pregnancy, but this year she remained uninflated.

  I forced open her jaw and cut the bramble out. It had made deep welts around her snout and done who knows what inside her mouth. She rolled her eyes away from me and towards the rest of the flock, struggling between my thighs until I let her go. The mud had made it in through the holes in my boots, and the old ewe bustled off without a glance behind her, without even the slightest air of being grateful that I had taken the thorns out of her face.

  ‘Screw you then!’ I shouted at her, and she stopped walking but didn’t turn back to look at me. I kicked the gate closed behind me and took a short cut up through the row of blackthorn and came out at the foot of the downs with the wind at my back. It pushed behind me and I ran in my clunking boots up the slope with flint and chalk loosening under my steps and with rabbits darting in and out of the brambles to my side. At the top I sweated and caught my breath while I inspected the southern sweep of the fields. Nothing moved other than the treetops. I turned to look out at the mainland and sat down to light a cigarette. I watched the car ferry crossing the water, a small white shoebox, and beyond that, the mainland waiting like a crocodile with all those people on its back.