All the Birds, Singing

by Evie Wyld

  I’m there with a man who calls himself Simon, though I can see he’s written his name on the inside of his work boots when he takes them off and in his boots he calls himself The Rock – written in curly letters, like he thinks he’s a super-hero or something. I reckon from the way he goes on about how great he is, he might have given himself that nickname. Me and the Rock get up on the bed and it’s all pretty usual with me on top.

  ‘Keep yer bra on.’ The Rock has a thing for tits in a bra. He grabs on them while he’s bucking away underneath me, and he keeps his eyes firmly on the cleavage he’s made himself by squashing them together. His tongue pokes out of his mouth, like a kid colouring in. His concentration gives me the chance to have a quick look at my watch – I graze it past my face and then pretend to be all about the sex and grab my hair and put my finger in my mouth. It’s getting late, Karen’ll be back in ten, and this guy’s not going to get very far with my boobs. If I concentrate I think I can hear her outside, and it’s embarrassing when that happens.

  Just then he says, ‘Tell me you want me to come on your tits.’ And just the idea of me saying this makes him do an extra big thrust, which punches me in the gut so that I want to smack him right in the face. The thrust is so large that it bangs the bedhead against the wall, and the crappy wood-chip picture bumps a little, and all of a sudden out from the crack in the wall behind it come dozens of baby huntsmen. It takes me a second to react and in that second the Rock does another super-thrust, and when it bangs the wall a spider falls right into his face and he screams, and I scream and jump off him, and he leaps for the floor, scrubbing his face with his hands, dancing about and shouting, ‘Fuck fuck fuck!’ like he’s burning. There’s a pounding on the door, and it smashes open and it’s Karen wide-eyed after hearing the commotion, she’s taken her shoe off and is holding it ready to beat the eyes out of whoever is murdering me, and she sees the spiders and yells, and I see a man behind her pelting his way down the stairs and out of the building. The Rock is standing at our sink washing his face over and over and the spiders are still spewing out and spreading all over the wall. Me and Karen yell and yell, and we start laughing, and the Rock turns around with tears in his eyes and spits, ‘Fucking whores!’ like we bred the spiders especially, and then he shakes his trousers and gets into them, jumping about like he has them all over, when the only place they are, apart from the one that fell on his face, is all over the wall. ‘You can forget about the money, you fuckin’ witch!’ he spits and pegs out of the room with his boots in his hand and I shout after him, ‘Bye, the Rock!’ and me and Karen fall on each other laughing, and screaming, because our room is covered in tiny spiders.

  The dream is nothing special. It’s just a dream of home. I can smell it. I can smell the old chip-fryer and Mum’s secret smoke behind the house. The triplets are a background noise of wants and fighting, the closeness of a full house. I’m in the bathroom, I’m lying in the bath but I can still see through to the room I share with Iris, and Iris is in there pashing with some boy. The house is trying to be normal but I know there is someone standing behind me that I can’t see. That is all it is, but I wake up with Karen sitting on my chest, gripping my arms to my sides with her thighs, and clapping in front of my face and saying my name.

  ‘Shit and Christ,’ she says, ‘what is it?’ She climbs off and puts on the ombiant lamp that lives on the floor and has a red bulb. She looks back for an answer and her face is puffy from sleep. She sighs when I don’t answer and pulls up her pillow so she can lean back and she lights two Holidays, passes me one. My heart is still fast and there’s sweat on my face.

  ‘Sorry,’ I say, and she looks at me sideways as she blows smoke out. ‘It was just a dream.’

  ‘No shit,’ says Karen, and she holds the smoke between her lips and moves a leaf of hair from my face. ‘You okay?’

  I nod and, as my heart starts to slow, it feels like the dream is the smoke I breathe out. But the feeling is still there, the smell of the fryer in my nose. I practise closing my eyes and every time I do I see Iris through the knot in the bathroom wall. I feel my shoulders against the white curve of the bath, and I open my eyes again to replace the image with the one on our wall – the unicorn with the dolphins leaping behind him. He looks silly in the head.

  ‘You want to talk?’ asks Karen.

  ‘No. Thanks.’ Karen crushes out her Holiday and then takes mine from me. She puts that out on the saucer by the ombiance lamp, and then switches the lamp off. Light eases in from behind the towels hung on the window. She shifts further up the headboard so she’s sitting up, and then she surprises me by pulling me onto her so that her arm is around my back and my head is on her chest. I’m wary of hurting her boobs with my head, but she feels relaxed under me. I try to be too.

  ‘Think of your brain,’ she tells me. ‘Visualise it.’ I can hear her breathing deeply in the dark, and it’s nice. ‘Can you see it?’ she asks.

  ‘Okay,’ I say. My brain is neon pink and bulging.

  ‘See the cleft that runs down the middle? That separates your brain into two halves?’

  ‘I do.’ I zoom in on the line in my head.

  ‘Think of it,’ says Karen; ‘that line is the corridor of your brain.’

  My imagined brain doesn’t know what to do, so it just pulsates.

  ‘Either side of the corridor,’ she goes on, and she starts to stroke my hair with the hand that’s scooped around my back, ‘are the rooms with the memories in.’ Her voice has dropped a bit, and coupled with her breathing, in and out like the feeling of lying in the bottom of a boat in a gentle swell, it’s easier to see the brain corridor. It’s lit with halogen bulbs, and the floor is shiny, like a hospital corridor. There’s no one in it, and it stretches on until it disappears out of sight. Karen starts to stroke my hair behind my ear, again and again. ‘Go in through one of those doors,’ she says. I reach out and when I look down, I’m dressed in an old-fashioned nursing outfit. My shoes are rubber-soled. I turn the door handle and step inside, where I see the bathroom back home and the little knot of wood that I can push out to watch Iris, but it is plugged with loo roll. Outside it is daytime, but also black. I can smell the world around me melting, I can smell the oil in the deep-fat fryer from downstairs, I hear a tinkle of glass breaking.

  ‘And now step out of that room, via the door you went in through,’ says Karen, and I turn around, and the hospital door is still there, hasn’t closed up while I wasn’t looking, and I step my rubber-soled foot through it and into the dim-lit corridor. ‘And now close the door behind you and lock it.’ I take a large ring of keys from my crisp white pocket, and it jangles as I lock the door.

  ‘And now walk down the corridor,’ says Karen and her fingers have started to slide deeper into my hair, stroking slowly in time with her breath, and she has slid down a little lower so that I feel her breath in my hair and it feels like hot bread, ‘and choose a new door. Open it. And go in, go into a good place. And if it turns into a bad room, leave, and find a new door.’

  I stand at the door with my keys in my hand. I can see my reflection in the safety glass. There’s one of those little paper hats with the red cross on my head. Through the window I can see the room is under water, and something noses at the glass, but the water is dark and I can’t quite make out what it is. I stand in the corridor, with my neat white shoes close together.

  ‘Are you in that room? Is it a good room?’ asks Karen quietly.

  ‘Yes,’ I lie, matching her voice. I stay standing in the corridor a moment longer, and then I carry on walking down it – it stretches as far as I can see, and I may never have to go inside another room.

  21

  I fried flounder in butter and we had it with bread. The sheep was still missing; how long would it be before she showed up as clumps of blooded wool dotted over the hillside? Lloyd was drunk, and I tried to get there too. When we’d walked up the driveway together, Lloyd sprinkling ashes from his envelope as he went so that his fingertips we
re black, something shrieked and it echoed across the valley. The hair at the back of my neck stood on end. Lloyd noticed nothing, sang his song.

  While I cooked, he beetled around making a fire. I pretended not to notice when he unbalanced and had to sit cross-legged in the hearth to build it. He folded up the envelope and pushed it into the centre of his unlit fire, and then set a match to it. It was damp and so it took a few tries, and I felt sad for him that it hadn’t all happened in a more satisfying way. He sat on the sofa once the fire had lit, singing again. ‘“Wouldn’t it be nice if we were older, then we wouldn’t have to wait so long,”’ but his song was slow like a hymn.

  Lloyd’s beard had ashes in it, and he only shrugged when I told him, and left them there. The fish was good and the bread mopped up the whisky inside me. We didn’t speak, just the scrape of forks on plates, the gullet swallow of our drinks, and of our glasses being refilled. Outside the rustle of the wind in the trees and now and again a howl that could have been the wind whistling through the valley, from off the sea through the blackthorn, down into the field of sheep feeding in the dark, and opening its mouth wide to swallow the house. We drank more and kept drinking.

  ‘God, I wish you’d get a haircut,’ he said.

  I stood up and swiped at his face, but I only clipped his ear, and he grabbed me round the wrist.

  ‘Fucking hell!’ he shouted. ‘Just a trim!’

  I went to bed.

  I woke in the morning with a dry mouth. Downstairs, the fire was just a glow and I fed it with the logs Lloyd had leant against the hearth. Dog was coiled on the other side of him in a deep sleep. I felt a long pulse of nausea from my stomach to my throat and my head, and drank three glasses of water and lit a cigarette. I smoked staring out the window at where the light was starting, pale grey. A late bat whipped around in front of the house and then disappeared under the eaves. No mist today, but a crispness, frost on the ground.

  At first I thought it was a cat, because it moved in that way, loped like a cat, but it was larger and even this far away from the woods I could see the hair on its back was thick and wiry, its shoulders dense and muscled.

  ‘Lloyd,’ I said, but not loud enough. It entered the dark bank of the woods and was gone. I blinked and wondered if I had seen anything at all.

  At the shed I filled up the water and feed troughs. The daylight had started to go already and Dog lay down and moaned because he hadn’t eaten yet. It was warm in the shed, and rain on the tin roof mingled with the bustle of the ewes finding their comfort in the straw. It smelled good. Lloyd touched the nose of a ewe I thought would have triplets. She snorted his hand away, but he didn’t flinch. These ones at least were safe for now. I shifted the feed barrel to get to a new box of gloves behind it, and on the floor was a dainty hoof. I stared at it a moment before I understood what it was.

  ‘Lloyd,’ I said and he came and stood next to me. We both looked at the foot, the bone crunched through at the ankle, the cleft toenails curled. ‘I’m going to sleep in here tonight.’

  ‘Whisky,’ was all he said.

  22

  In Darwin, a man with deep pockmarks on his chin and a smell about him like he’s been infused with some kind of pickling vinegar offers me forty-five bucks, but not just for a blowie.

  ‘The real thing,’ he says. Forty-five dollars does not seem like all that much, when that first one had given me thirty just to use my face.

  ‘Fifty-five dollars?’ I ask and he smiles at me like he is my indulgent father.

  ‘We’ll see how you go. You’d better be pretty good for fifty-five.’

  I don’t know what to do. With the blowies it is fairly straightforward – I kneel, they unzip. But we stand opposite each other a little while, me shifting from foot to foot.

  ‘Where’ll we do it?’ I ask, finding that I am blushing.

  ‘Got a tarp stretched over the back of the ute,’ he says and turns towards the road. His ute is a rusted thing with Queensland plates and a crack in the windscreen that has been reinforced with packing tape. A bright blue tarp is tented in the back tray like a kid’s clubhouse. I stand on the step and go to get in.

  ‘Not here, girl!’ he snaps. ‘If I’m paying through the nose I want to make noise.’ And he climbs into the cab. I pull myself up on the other side and get in too. As we drive out of town, I feel nervous.

  ‘What’s your name?’ I ask.

  ‘Not your business.’

  There’s a pause.

  ‘My name’s Jake.’

  ‘I don’t want to talk.’

  ‘I come from over west, near Brisket.’

  ‘Never heard of it – Jesus, do I have to pay you to shut up as well?’

  I decide his name is Ken, short for Kenneth. He probably works on a prawn trawler. He is the sort of character who is grouchy but ultimately friendly.

  The rest of the ride is silent, and we pull into a car park at the beach, and he draws up under some fir trees.

  ‘Git in the back,’ says Ken.

  As I climb in under the tarpaulin, Ken pushes his hands against my bum and squeezes. It seems a strangely affectionate thing to do after being such a ratbag in the cab. Underneath the tarp everything is light blue and glowing. Ken and his skin and me and my skin all look illuminated, and his teeth look very white against his green face. It’s warm in there with the sun making it smell of hot plastic. I smile at Ken and he holds my ankles and turns me over, not that gently, so that I can’t see his face.

  ‘Take em off,’ he says and I feel down to unbutton my shorts. It’s embarrassing, the idea of getting your bum out at some man you don’t even know. But I manage it, and he tugs them down and all of a sudden he is hot and damp and all over me, pushing and squeezing parts of him into me and swearing all the time he does it.

  ‘Up,’ he says and pulls on my hips, so that I am on all fours, and he grunts into me. ‘Make some fuckin’ noise,’ he says, and so I bang on the floor of the ute with my fists. ‘Not that sort of noise, you retard,’ he shouts, before I understand what he means. It’s a strange thing making the noises he’s after. There is an eyelet in the tarp which shows how white it is outside and I watch that and make the noises he wants, pleased that my back is turned to him so that I don’t also have to make the faces as well.

  Grunting away and saying encouraging things like ‘Yeah, like that,’ Ken strokes my midriff in a way that could almost be friendly. He reaches up and feels my boobs under my T-shirt, and then back down the sides of me to where he is working away. He is starting to gasp and between us there is a racket of moans and shouts while I look at the white circle of sky. He presses his thumbs into the dips of my haunches, and then screams and falls backwards off me.

  ‘What the fuck’ve you got!’ he shouts with the air that’s left in his throat. I turn around to look at him. He looks so angry with his trousers round his ankles and his dick cuddling up to him that I nearly laugh, and he kicks at me with his tethered legs.

  ‘What is it, girl? Fuck I didn’t even wear a rubber.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ I try to say, and he almost throws me out of the back tray into the white, with my shorts around my knees and his wetness all on me. He charges out of the truck a moment later, as I am pulling my clothes back on and I think he’s going to hit me, he comes so close to my face.

  ‘What the fuck is that on your back?’

  ‘Just scars,’ I say.

  ‘Scars? From what?’ He looks suspicious but his fists have relaxed. I shrug.

  ‘An accident.’

  ‘What kind of accident?’

  I don’t know how to answer so I stand there, scratching my arm for a bit.

  ‘An accident at sea,’ I say finally, because the words feel good to say and that is where the worst things happen.

  He presses the heels of his palms to his eyes. ‘Fuck,’ he whistles quietly, ‘thought it was some sort of AIDS.’ And he spits on the ground next to me. ‘You should tell people you got that. It’s n
ot fair to make people pay for damaged goods.’

  Kenneth turns without giving me any money and gets into his truck. He drives away without a glance in my direction and just as I realise I’ve left all my stuff in the cab, I see my bag sail out of the window to land in the road. I collect up my things and stuff them back in, check to see if maybe he’s put my thongs in too, but he hasn’t. I walk back into town barefoot with bits of melted bitumen sticking to my heels. I haven’t thought about my back like that before, that other people will see it and ask what it is. It was my first go at having lie-down sex, how was I supposed to know which bits have to be unscarred, which bits you can get away with.

  23

  The crows roosted in the treetops. Their blackness against the darkening sky made me want to get the gun and scatter them. From the house, I took a gas lamp so we wouldn’t have to keep the fluorescent on, the last of the bread, which was stale, and some butter and honey. I put the coffee pot on the stove to fill up the thermos. Out the window, the light faded in waves, the tree branches became longer, hanging on to their shadows. I found two of my thickest jumpers and wrapped a half-bottle of whisky in one before I put it into my bag. I pulled out the box of cartridges I kept at the back of the kitchen cupboard. I took one out and weighed it in my hand. Dad trying to teach me to shoot cans out the back when I was small. He’d given me a cushion to hold against my shoulder so the recoil didn’t leave a mark and Mum wouldn’t throw a drama. ‘Remember,’ he’d said close to my ear, the soft gust of beer on his breath, ‘the human eye senses movement before all else.’