The Starlings

by Vivienne Kelly

  I sat and watched, enthralled. I was glad I’d thought of the saucepan: there would have been a terrible mess without it.

  ‘Burn, bitch,’ I murmured. ‘Burn, fucking bitch.’

  When the flames were falling low and the ugly mess that had once been Rose was unrecognisable I poured water from the bottle into the saucepan. The fire died abruptly. When I was sure it was extinguished I put the saucepan inside an old paper shopping bag and shoved this under my bed. Then I opened the window and flapped my arms around to try to dispel the stinking air, and tidied up my room at least enough so that nobody could tell what had been going on. Later, when my father was cooking dinner, I buried the saucepan and its contents deep in the rubbish bin, so nobody would see it.

  He was wreathed in uncharacteristic smiles. We’d won. Ten points the difference. We were in the grand final.

  ‘Lethal was fantastic, Nicky,’ he said. ‘Jeans had him on the bench for a lot of the match but he came on again in the final quarter and kicked two goals, just like that! What a champion! And Dermie was terrific, too; and Judge. It’s all coming together!’

  My father looked in on me that night after I’d gone to bed. ‘You okay?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, thank you,’ I said.

  He came further into the room. ‘What’s that funny smell?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I think they were burning off next door and some of the smoke might have got in the window.’ I looked straight at him, trying to hold his gaze: I didn’t want him to see the blackish stain on the ceiling.

  ‘None of those nasty guys around?’

  ‘No,’ I said. It wasn’t true: they were still palely hiding behind the door and under the bed, but I didn’t want him to know that.

  ‘Snuggle up, then,’ he said.

  I snuggled up, and had a sudden access of childish wanting.

  ‘Can you sing me a song, Daddy?’

  He gazed at me in consternation. ‘Nicky, I don’t know any songs.’

  ‘Never mind,’ I said, anxious not to make him feel bad.

  Suddenly light dawned. ‘Yes, I do!’ he said. ‘Here we go!’ He started to sing softly. ‘We’re a happy team at Hawthorn.’ He looked at me, almost shyly. ‘You can join in if you like, Nicky.’

  So we sang it together.

  We’re a happy team at Hawthorn

  We’re the Mighty Fighting Hawks.

  We love our Club, and we play to win,

  Riding the bumps with a grin (at Hawthorn).

  Come what may, you’ll find us striving

  Team work is the thing that talks,

  One for all and all for one

  Is the way we play at Hawthorn.

  We are the Mighty Fighting Hawks!

  We shouted the last line, and then we sang the whole thing again for good measure.

  THE GRAND FINAL

  During the following week the grand final swamped our house. The papers were full of it; the radio and television were full of it; and my father was full of it. All his hopes and dreams, as well as his fears, had intensified, and he alternated feverishly between expectations of wild joy and black despair. I hoped he had no Essendon fans among his patients.

  Leigh Matthews was quoted in the paper as saying that he thought Hawthorn had every chance and that he wanted to play the game of his life. (‘He will, too,’ declared my father.) The most realistic commentators pointed out that Essendon had now defeated Hawthorn three times this season. (My father snorted. ‘It’s the fourth time that counts!’)

  On Thursday evening the three of us made the traditional pilgrimage to Glenferrie Oval to watch the last training session. I was surprised that Pippa came too. When my father had invited her, at breakfast, she had declined emphatically. But when we set off she wandered after us.

  ‘I might come too,’ she said.

  My father’s face split into a huge grin.

  The atmosphere at Glenferrie was odd. Thousands of fans had turned up, and applause for the team and coach was warm. But the mood was almost grim. It rained heavily and the players were drenched, a bad omen; but then the skies cleared and two bright rainbows hung over the ground. The close-packed crowd murmured in amazement and pleasure, and my father’s delight was patent.

  Pippa told me that our mother was back at the school.

  ‘Do people know?’ I asked.

  ‘That she’s left us?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, I’m not telling them,’ said my sister, tossing her head.

  ‘Have you talked to her?’

  ‘Are you kidding?’

  ‘Has she tried to talk to you?’

  ‘I’ve hardly laid eyes on her,’ said Pippa. ‘And if she does try to talk to me she won’t find it easy.’

  I wondered if my mother would try to talk to me instead, and at the end of school every day I kept a sharp lookout for her, but she didn’t materialise. I wasn’t sure if I was disappointed or not. I did want to see her, but I was beginning to realise that the throbbing ache inside me wouldn’t be assuaged by seeing her. I needed her back—fully, not in bits and pieces scattered here and there. The realisation that this wasn’t going to happen—or at any rate not yet—bit deeper every day.

  The grand final was to be televised, and I knew I would have to watch it. I didn’t mind: I was beginning to think about my father in a different way. He was making an effort for my sake; I was prepared to make an effort for his. And there could have been few footy fans who knew more about the lead-up to the grand final than I did. I knew that the Bombers were in danger of going in over-confident, but that their coach, Kevin Sheedy, was determined that his team would avoid the cardinal sin of complacency. I knew that Essendon was going for their fourteenth premiership; Hawthorn by contrast had played in eight grand finals and won five of them. (These successes had been in 1961, 1971, 1976, 1978 and 1983, in case you are interested. In 1983 Hawthorn had not only defeated Essendon but also pulverised them, nearly tripling their score.)

  I read what the coaches had to say. Neither of them was going to let any cats out of the bag. Jeans said footy was part of the fabric of our lives; Sheedy said it was the way you played that was important, not whether you won or lost. I wasn’t convinced by this. I felt that my father was as wildly deluded as ever. Essendon was a killer machine and Hawthorn had no chance of victory. Foreseeing this so clearly, my despair was probably almost equal to his.

  The intensive media coverage prompted me to wonder about how such things might have been reported in the ancient realm of Logres. There must have been parchment scrolls, or something of the kind, which publicised big jousts, or important battles, and reported their results. I wondered what Launcelot would say in interviews before heading off on another quest. He would probably discuss his fitness, and that of his horse. He would need to speculate about his forthcoming opponents—the dragons and bad knights—as well as about the various maidens in predicaments from which they needed rescuing. I imagined him looking sober and earnest and saying something like I’ll just do my very best, and hope that that’s good enough. No one can do better than their best, after all. Arthur would make similar remarks, I supposed, possibly in a more overtly pious vein. Both of them would have said they would take it one day at a time.

  On Friday night my father proclaimed fish and chips: his censorious attitude to takeaway had softened since he became responsible for the cooking. I’d assumed he would settle down to The Footy Show on Channel Two after dinner.

  ‘There’s a great movie on tonight,’ he announced instead.

  Pippa and I looked at each other in alarm.

  ‘No,’ he said, correctly interpreting our faces. ‘It really is a great movie. Let’s watch it together.’

  He often made gestures like this, now. Let’s do it together, he would say. Pippa spent most of her time in her bedroom, and didn’t seem to want to do much together. But tonight she relented, as she had done for the Thursday night training. I suppose we were all lonely and hurt in our
separate ways, and perhaps we thought it would be preferable to be lonely and hurt together. I’m not sure if it worked.

  The movie was Shane, a 1953 western starring Alan Ladd. Pippa rolled her eyes.

  ‘A western,’ she groaned.

  ‘Nothing wrong with a western,’ said my father, settling himself. Later that evening he would probably watch some of the footy marathon, which ran all night and showed previous grand finals. Fortunately, it didn’t start until midnight and I would be dutifully in bed well before then.

  I wasn’t interested at first, but the movie took hold of me. Shane was a kind of cowboy, a stranger who rode up to a homestead where a family called the Starretts was living, a mother and father and their young son. The son was called Joey and made friends with Shane, who decided to stay and work on the family’s farm for a while. I thought Joey was a complete dill, and I didn’t have much time for the mother or father either, but I was fascinated by Shane. He was like a knight on a quest, I thought. He rode in on his horse, and you never found out where he was coming from or going to, which must have been the effect knights like Launcelot and Gawain had on maidens and other people they rescued. And Shane rescued the Starretts too, because there was a family called the Ryker brothers who were killing people and bullying people and trying to stop the Starretts and others from farming their land; and Shane fought them and killed them.

  There was one scene in a bar, in which Shane fought several men at once, and beat them all. That was like Gawain and Launcelot too, smiting their enemies. It was a real melee, and very spectacular. Pippa made groaning noises during it, but I found it exciting.

  There was something going on between Shane and Marian, who was Joey’s mother. They didn’t do anything to elucidate this mysterious something for me, but meaningful looks passed between them and I kept expecting them to hold hands, or even kiss. This did not occur, although at one point they shook hands, which was an odd thing to do. However, Marian became angry with Shane when he was teaching Joey how to shoot. Marian said that she didn’t want Joey to grow up with guns (surely not a helpful attitude in a country where everybody else had guns and no inhibitions about using them). And Shane said that a gun was just another tool, and as good or as bad as the man using it. I was struck by this, and thought that it was the sort of thing Launcelot might say about a sword or a lance.

  Then, at the end, Joey’s father wanted to go and fight the Ryker brothers himself, but Shane didn’t think he could survive this encounter, so he fought Joey’s father and knocked him unconscious. (At this point I utterly lost interest in Joey, who was such a dipstick that he couldn’t see what Shane was doing or why.) Shane then went into the town and had a major shootout with the Ryker brothers and their henchmen. He won this, naturally, and made the country safe for the Starretts and the other families who were trying to farm. Unfortunately, he was badly wounded in the process, and the movie finished with him riding off alone into a distant mountainous landscape, bleeding and probably dying.

  It hadn’t occurred to me that it was possible in the modern era to live a knightly life, and in the light of Shane’s activities I now wondered whether this might be a genuine career option. The notion of riding around the country setting things to rights in people’s lives greatly appealed to me. It was true that Shane had come to a sticky end (as did most of Arthur’s knights), but it might be possible to avoid this. Launcelot after all had survived a long time. The trick was not to get too involved. You had to maintain distance. That had been how Launcelot got it wrong.

  *

  ‘We’ll watch the grand final together, won’t we, Nicky?’ said my father, at breakfast on Saturday morning.

  ‘Yes,’ I said; and then, wondering what together meant in this context, added, ‘I don’t think Pippa wants to watch it, though.’

  Pippa had not yet come downstairs. She was frequently late to Saturday breakfast, if she made it at all.

  He half-laughed.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Not Pippa. But you and me, hey, Nicky?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said again. He nodded and went back to his newspaper. ‘He’s a great loss,’ he said.

  I knew who he meant. ‘Lethal?’

  ‘Yes. Such a wonderful footballer.’

  Late in the morning the telephone rang and my father had a cryptic conversation into the handset.

  ‘Nicky,’ he said after hanging up, ‘I think Grandpa might come around this afternoon. That would be good, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘It would be very good,’ I said.

  ‘But Rose won’t be with him.’

  ‘I don’t care.’

  He looked relieved. ‘Perhaps best not to mention Rose. To Grandpa, I mean.’

  ‘I won’t.’

  Rose was dead to me. I thought of trying to explain this to my father but decided it was enough that I knew it myself.

  As my father and I settled down on the sofa in front of the television on Saturday afternoon there came a knock at the door. It was Grandpa. I let him in and he gave me a big bear hug, which I returned with energy. I’d missed him a lot. He’d brought a packet of Fantales and passed them over to me with winking and hiding and fake secrecy.

  And so the match began.

  Matthews got the first kick: my father greeted this with a whoop of delight and saw it as a good omen. And in the first few minutes Brereton got three goals and Hawthorn were playing with ferocious aggression. And then, in response to some incident I missed, players streamed from all corners of the ground and congregated on the wing, fists flailing and feet kicking and men toppling over each other.

  ‘A melee!’ I said in excitement.

  ‘Stacks on the mill!’ said Grandpa.

  My father shook his head. ‘It won’t do them any good,’ he said. ‘They’d be better off to settle into the game. Just wasting their energy.’

  By the end of the first quarter there were only nine points the difference. But Essendon’s dominance over the Mighty Hawks was emerging and the grooves down my father’s face were deepening. Merrett and Salmon were getting into stride: the ball travelled again and again into the Essendon forward line.

  In the second quarter Essendon showed that they were in killer mode. Two minutes in Salmon took a mark and kicked a goal, making it look easy. The Big Fish was on fire. It was a grinding, hostile, desperate game, but Essendon was putting it all together in a way the Hawks couldn’t manage. The Bombers were smooth, fast, deadly. Hawthorn looked awkward. My father muttered sourly. Jeans needed to take Smith off Watson. Someone (he didn’t say who) needed to stop Madden. Salmon took too long to kick a goal. Why would you want to take Matthews off? When were they going to put Judge on?

  There were moments of wild hope. Judge (finally out on the ground) snapped a goal out of nowhere; Brereton kicked goals four and five. But we were losing momentum and will. At half-time Essendon were eighteen points ahead, but their lead had less to do with points than with their conviction and strength and purpose. They were looking unassailable.

  During the third quarter it became apparent that unassailable was the right word. Essendon were annihilating us. It seemed as if there were only Essendon players out there: all the Bombers stars—Salmon, Merrett, Harvey, Madden, Thompson and Watson—flicked the ball to each other with contemptuous ease. Hawthorn seemed stunned into impotence. It wasn’t that they’d stopped trying. No matter how hard Hawthorn tried they could exert no pressure against Essendon’s calm mastery.

  Brereton continued to fight. By the end of the match he had set a grand final record by kicking eight goals. He ran and chased and tackled and fought like a man possessed. But even Herculean Dermie wasn’t enough to close the gap.

  We lost by a massive seventy-eight points. It was a massacre. As the final siren went my father sat, grey-faced, in disbelieving agony. Some of the Hawthorn players summoned the strength to chair Leigh Matthews from the ground. You could see Matthews didn’t want to be chaired; you could see his anguish. As he watched this, the tears coursed down my
father’s face. Pippa came past at this point and I could see from the look on her face that she was unimpressed. Fortunately my father was oblivious to her and she forbore from making the stinging comment I felt sure was on her lips.

  It was a sombre evening. I escaped to my room as soon as I could after dinner, leaving my father and Grandpa to mull together over the disaster. Grandpa came up to say goodnight before he left. He hugged me. ‘Sad day, hey, Nicky?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. And then, wanting to be honest, I added, ‘For Daddy.’

  I studied his face. I thought there was something tired and flat about him that I hadn’t properly noticed earlier. He did perhaps look like someone who was emerging from a difficult enchantment. I wanted to ask him about Rose, but I remembered my father telling me not to.

  ‘You don’t mind? I mean, not at all?’ he asked.

  ‘Well, not a lot. I mean, I do mind for Daddy. And I mind for Leigh Matthews, because I like him. I suppose I mind for Dermie too, because he played so well.’

  ‘But not for yourself?’

  ‘Well, no, not much,’ I said regretfully.

  ‘You’ve not caught the fever, have you?’

  I didn’t know what he meant, so I said nothing.

  ‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘Come over soon, hey? Would you like me to get another jigsaw?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t mind going back to the same jigsaw. I’d like to start it again.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘It’ll be easier the second time.’

  ‘That’s true.’

  He ruffled my hair.

  ‘See you soon.’

  *

  ‘I don’t get it,’ said Pippa to me, later that evening. I was in bed. She had come to my room to borrow a pen and had stayed to reflect on the day’s events.

  ‘What don’t you get?’

  ‘Dad.’ She rubbed her head in a gesture so like my mother’s that I felt a stab of anguish. ‘I mean, his wife leaves him and he doesn’t say a word. His team loses the grand final and he sobs like a baby. I mean, do you get that?’