All the Birds, Singing

by Evie Wyld

  The triplets had run out into the garden then, like a pack of baboons and Dad and I had pretended to pick them off one by one until Iris had leant out the window and shouted at us, ‘Stop it, you fucking derelicts!’

  I closed my fist around the cartridge.

  It was too early to call, and too close to the last time. But if it was Iris who answered, she’d hang up straight off anyway. I held the phone in one hand, the cartridge in the other, squeezing. It rang a long time and I imagined Mum getting out of bed, wrapping herself in her dressing gown and rubbing the sleep from her eyes. Phone calls at unusual hours were always bad news; I should have waited, she’d be worried. The voice when it picked up was deep and unfamiliar, a man’s. For a second I thought Dad was alive after all, it had all been a trick. He didn’t answer with Mum’s usual Hello, 635? He said, ‘Yep?’

  I opened my mouth and almost responded.

  The man sniffed. ‘You there?’ he said. When I left, the triplets were small boys. Now I supposed they were not. The voice cleared its throat, there was the muffled sound of the earpiece being smothered by something, like he held it to his shirt front. Maybe it was early enough to be cool in the house, maybe he wore a jumper, or a sweatshirt with a hood.

  ‘Mum?’ I heard him call away from the speaker, not over-loudly, but like he was testing, seeing who was near him. ‘Iris?’ There was no response that I could hear. His voice came back to me. ‘Listen, I’ll get the money, okay? Message understood, loud and clear, I’ll have it by the end of the week. Please don’t call here, it’s got nothing to do with me mum – she’s not well. End of the week, I promise, man—’

  ‘Who in hell are you—?’ I heard Iris close in the background and the phone slammed down in its cradle fast and loud enough that the line crackled before it went dead. I looked at the receiver in my hand and lowered it gently back into its cradle. Behind me, the door opened and Lloyd stuck his head in.

  ‘I think it’s started,’ he said, his face white. The phone rang and we both looked at it. I’d forgotten to withhold the number. It rang and filled the house. I’d never heard it do that before.

  ‘Are you going to answer that?’ asked Lloyd after six rings. I shook my head. Inside that mouthpiece, everything from before. The hot smoked air, the birds. The salted ends of my hair when it flew in my mouth. My family.

  I unplugged the phone from the wall and the silence was instant. I rested my rifle over my shoulder, nodded to Lloyd, and we headed back to the shed.

  The woolshed was a dark block against the hill. I washed my hands in the trough, while Lloyd went on ahead of me. I could feel it, the ripple going through the sheep, the new feeling for some of them, the old familiar ache for others. The hiss of leaves in the wind and from behind the shed, a single low sheep call. I felt it, the skin on my back prickling like something stared hard at me from behind the dark. It was holding its breath but it was there.

  In the doorway I breathed in the manure and warmth and blood of what was happening. I could make out three who were shifting about, unsettled, one who threw her head back, curling her upper lip. Lloyd crouched by her pen and stroked Dog. His beard made it look like a nativity scene. He glanced up at me and shrugged.

  ‘I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.’

  ‘It’s okay,’ I said, ‘she knows what to do, she’s done it before.’ Last year she’d had triplets – one girl and two boys. The girl now scraped the ground outside with her hooves, waiting for her turn. The boys had gone with the butcher.

  I walked slowly up to her and she stood and turned around, like when Dog makes a nest. Her waterbag poked out of her and as she twisted, it burst and she turned around again, surprised-looking, and licked at the wet spot on the floor.

  ‘What in god’s name was that?’

  ‘Her waters,’ I said.

  Lloyd shook his head in disbelief.

  ‘Did you think she’d lay an egg?’

  I waited until the head and forelegs were showing and then I checked another two who were shifting. I felt like I could lie down in the hay with them, a pang, just for a moment, of what it must be like to give birth to something, and then I went to get the iodine spray. Soon there would be more of us.

  By the time the first lamb slid out, the others were in full swing, the quiet stomp of mothers trying to get comfortable, the dark smell of blood and the wet warmth. I unhooked a shoulder from the umbilical cord with my gloved fingers, and out spilled a boy lamb and then soon after, his sister. The night went on; when there was a lull, when the shed went quiet, Lloyd poured coffee and mixed it with whisky.

  ‘I’m not much use,’ he said.

  ‘I feel better having you here,’ I said and blushed because I hadn’t expected to say that. He drank his drink and put honey on a slice of bread for me.

  ‘I don’t expect your hands are all that clean,’ he said and he held it up to my mouth. I took a bite even though I wasn’t hungry. In the quiet time last year I’d hurried back to the house and slept for a few hours. Now instead, I passed a torch over the sheep left outside. I counted and counted again. I went back to the shed and sat down in the hay next to Lloyd and Dog. We watched the lambs in the orange glow of the gas lamp.

  ‘You got any children?’ Lloyd asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Me neither.’

  When the first washes of light came up over the fields, I got on to docking and tagging the lambs. Lloyd held them with his hand over their eyes while I did it.

  ‘It’s not that bad,’ I told him, ‘just like having your ears pierced.’

  He looked at me. ‘How would you know?’

  The lamb wriggled as I passed the punch through the cartilage. ‘He’s just startled by the noise,’ I said and moved around Lloyd to get to the tail. I slipped on the band and motioned for the lamb to be put back in the pen. It bumped around trying to get away from the feeling of it chasing him.

  By the time we were done a morning breeze had crept into the shed and Lloyd was staring at the void that was his first dead lamb. It had come out grey and frog-like. I put a small triplet under the dead body and we watched while the mother of the dead lamb nosed the body off and started to lick at the nose and mouth of the live one. It let out muffled baas and its tail switched underneath it. I yawned loudly.

  ‘You go and rest,’ Lloyd said, his voice a croak. ‘I’ll come and get you if anything happens.’ Dog was settled watching Lloyd watch the dead lamb. My neck ached.

  ‘I’ll have a quick bath,’ I said, ‘I’ll be half an hour.’

  Crossing the field, for a moment the sky was blue, making the trees black at their trunks. I reached the doorway of my house and looked out. It was still there, whatever it was, the feeling like something had hunkered down in the valley, waiting and watching and ready to stoop.

  While the bath filled I sat on the toilet lid, listening to the sound of the sparrows that nested under my bedroom window waking up as the light began to come into the sky.

  The water was hotter than I could bear and I couldn’t get my hand in deep enough to touch the plug without feeling it start to cook, so I ran the cold. My bones ached like a creaking boat. By the time the water was manageable, I was cold and my feet prickled as I submerged them. As I lowered myself in, the water started to spill onto the floor, and scrabbling for the plug I lost my balance and fell backwards, smacking my head against the back of the bath, and the water formed into two colliding waves, which splashed out and all over the place. It ran through the gaps in the floorboards in a steady stream and would show up as a brown stain on the kitchen ceiling. My head hurt. I kept my eyes closed and breathed out through my mouth, afraid of the moment I would have to assess the damage. Poor Archimedes idiot.

  The back door opened downstairs. I opened my eyes. There was some blood. It was not too bad, considering the crack it had made, and the thump I was feeling, but then I saw that actually there was quite a lot, and it was turning the water around my shoulders luminous green. Downstairs,
it was Lloyd. It was Lloyd downstairs.

  He mounted the stairs. It was nobody else but Lloyd come to give me some news on the sheep. And then Lloyd was pelting up the stairs, faster than his feet could fly, and light, like he had more than one set of legs, and in a second he had beaten a path along the hallway and right into my bedroom, without even knocking, and he was standing right on the other side of the bathroom door, breathing, and I knew that it was not Lloyd. It was something else. Light blocked out in patches underneath the door, it stood perfectly still and panted deep in the back of its throat. I couldn’t remember if I had turned the key in the bathroom door or not. I held my breath and the panting stopped. There was a thump on the door, and I splashed more water out of the bath, and a splitting pain slammed through my head.

  ‘Lloyd?’ I called. The key in the door trembled but it did not open and whatever was on the other side started running again, pounded once more on the door as it passed it, then ran fast around the bedroom. I heard the springs creak as it flew over the bed, and then it was out of the room, slamming the door behind it, and it carried on up the stairs, up and up the stairs that were not there because there was no room above mine, and then the house was silent, apart from a soft wheezing sound that came from me. The water was cold and I was no longer sure how long I had been in the bath, it was not even seven when I first ran it, but the light outside was bright and all the birds were singing. Far away I heard my dog barking, angrily.

  There was a loud crash and a man said, ‘Good god, woman, what have you done?’

  24

  Outside Darwin, I pick rock melons and cucumbers with the spines that stick in my palms and fill with pus at night. Out in the sun, my scars are still tacky and they stick to my T-shirt and remind me they’re there. I make about $20 a day, which is enough to eat or sleep but not both, and sleeping in the YHA dormitory is miserable. There are bedbugs and worst of all there are the other sleepers who are all backpackers. They are English or Canadian or Scottish, which I thought was the same as English, but it turns out is very different. They frighten me, these people with their white dreadlocks and their ease at sleeping next to strangers. They think I’m their age because of my height, and one guy invites me out to watch them play drinking games. When I say I haven’t got the money, he says he’ll shout me one, and then I spend the night watching men have box-wine bladders poured down their throats, and then I watch them wheel off and puke up under the trees I sometimes sleep under.

  In the bunks at the YHA I wake up one night, the taste of smoke in my mouth, and my heart is pumping and flapping about inside me. I stay still and wait until my eyes get used to the dark, listening to the different styles of breathing and snoring the other people in the room have. When my eyes become used to the dark, I can see that the guy on the bunk on top of me has his head hung over the side, and he’s watching me, not moving, not making a sound, just watching me with eyes that look black and wet in the dark. I shut my eyes and don’t move until morning, until I hear the man get down off his bunk and leave.

  I put a bit aside every day and have enough to buy a second-hand sleeping bag, and I decide outside alone on the beach with a full belly is better than the YHA with all those creepy people. During the day I stash my bag behind a closed snack bar in an old bread tray. It’s hard work fruit-picking, and by the end of a day I’m starving, so it’s a good feeling to be able to get a calamari burger and chips and then sit in my bag and watch the fruit bats swoop about. I sleep well on those nights, while it’s warm and dry. In the mornings I swim in the sea.

  When the season starts to change, there are no more things to pick, and the very little I’ve saved up gets me each day a dim sum from the fish shop and an apple or an orange. Sometimes the fish-shop guy chucks in some chips, because he says at least I keep myself clean and I don’t put his customers off. Which is sort of a nice thing, but it means he thinks I’m a homeless. Which all in all is pretty accurate.

  My clothes start to go a bit rancid – I’ve got three changes which stay in the bottom of my bag, and washing them in sea water doesn’t do much of a job. I have to leave my bag sometimes when I go and try and find work. I get a cleaning job, disinfecting the public toilets around town. It makes less than fruit-picking and is longer hours and when I get back to my bag and my clothes, someone’s binned the lot and it’s all gone.

  I lie to the woman who gives me the job, and say I have my own transport, which means I spend most of the day walking around town with a stinking bucket of bleach, and the air sanitiser which is supposed to be peach smelling but which smells of crap as well as of peach. I have to return the mop and bucket by 7pm each day, so sometimes I have to miss cleaning a toilet or two. I know they make spot checks, so every morning I’m terrified of being caught out. I smell awful, it’s in my hair and my skin and I’m pretty sure that peach ’n’ crap smell comes out on my breath. The fish man stops giving me free chips, and I stop going there because it’s embarrassing. I get out in the breakers, which feels dangerous after dark and it’s cold now too, and I snort up sea water to try and get the peach out. Up here is the water the whale sharks move through at this time of year, the only sharks people get sad about if one of them gets stuck in a trawler’s net or washes up. I think of those big fish and their wide toothless mouths out there and then I think of their smaller cousins with the teeth and I imagine them brushing against my legs.

  While I’m making myself comfortable in the wide roots of a mango tree, a man offers me $30 to put his dick in my mouth. It seems like so little to ask for, such a short amount of time to have taken up. He gives me $15 and says, ‘There, half before and half after,’ and I feel like I’ve tricked him. That I have a tongue and a hole in my face means that in four or six minutes I can make more than a whole day of stooped, stinking work in the toilets. He holds the hair at the back of my head and drives his dick in hard so that it chokes me, like he is taking a swab, and his fingers in my hair tighten when he comes. It’s all over pretty quickly, the only really bad bit is when I have his stuff in my mouth and I think he might not give me the other half of the money if I look ill, and so I swallow it and give him what I hope is a winning smile. The man smiles back and wipes something from my cheek. He tucks his dick away in his trousers and reaches into his pocket. He gives me another $20 and says, ‘You get extra for that nice smile.’ And then he leaves. I buy myself a single room in a YHA, and lie awake most of the night because I feel excited about what the money means, but also because my stomach is churning.

  It’s a few nights before I get another one, and this one is not so friendly as the first, and I have to put my hand around the base of him to stop my eyes from running, to stop him smashing into my nose. When he comes he seems to take special care to put some of his stuff over my face and hair as well as some of it in the mouth. I wouldn’t mind, but this one only offers $10 and I have to wait till morning to rinse it off in the sea, because when I get down to the shore seagulls are screeching and diving and something is feeding under the surface. He lets the money drop on the floor and gives me a look like he is sorely disappointed in me. He takes no notice of my blowie smile, just zippers up and leaves.

  ‘Thank you!’ I call out after him, worried I haven’t been polite enough.

  25

  ‘At worst,’ the doctor said, ‘it’s a light concussion. Don’t drink, get plenty of rest and you’ll be fine.’

  Lloyd laughed and the doctor looked at him.

  ‘And you shouldn’t be alone,’ he said. ‘Make sure your husband takes good care of you.’ He passed a glance around the place, the empty bottles and unwashed dishes.

  The silence left after the doctor had gone was heavy. I sat up off the sofa and held my head in my hands. It throbbed but it didn’t hurt.

  ‘So what happened? Did you just lose your balance or was it a cry for help? Honestly, when I first came in I thought you’d done yourself in. Imagine how that would look! Strange man shows up and lures unsuspecting spinster to her dea
th.’

  ‘Something was in the house.’

  Lloyd looked at me, smiling.

  ‘Something?’

  ‘It was the thing that’s being doing the stuff.’

  Lloyd frowned. ‘The thing that’s been doing the stuff?’

  I pointed out the window. ‘I heard it, it came into the house, up the stairs, it jumped on my bed. I thought it was you but it wasn’t.’

  ‘Well, I had Dog with me.’

  ‘It wasn’t a dog. It wasn’t human.’

  ‘Neither is a dog.’

  ‘I think it was not from . . . around here.’ Lloyd’s eyes narrowed. He opened his mouth and closed it.

  ‘Look – you’ve got a concussion.’

  ‘Things have been happening here,’ I said, and there was a wobble in my throat.

  ‘I understand that – I imagine this is a stressful season for a farmer—’

  ‘I’m not a hysterical woman.’

  ‘No, but it doesn’t help anyone if you start deciding there are monsters in the woods. This is a wild place, there could be all sorts of animals you don’t know about—’

  ‘I know about all of the animals.’ My face was red and hot and suddenly I was very embarrassed. Lloyd had his back to me, and the room was tense.

  ‘You saw me naked,’ I said, to break the atmosphere. ‘How was that?’

  Lloyd looked at me and I waited. ‘Like all my nightmares come at once. You’re not supposed to drink,’ he said, pouring me a glass of whisky.

  ‘And I’m supposed to rest.’

  He handed me the glass. ‘You’re not leaving me alone with those sheep.’

  I stood, testing my balance and touching the bandage that was wrapped around the top of my head. ‘I feel fine.’

  ‘You look mad,’ Lloyd said and drained his drink.

  Lloyd limed the empty pens while I tubed paste into the new lambs.