by Inga Simpson
Jen waited for a woman to reach the bank of the new pedestrian crossing, and reverse-angle-parked right out front of the store, which was a good start. She had remembered her shopping bags, too. Focused, for once, on the practicalities of the day. She had a list, her ATM card, and late morning was the least busy time.
She hurried past the headlines, locked in mesh outside the newsagent, screaming MANHUNT and STATE-WIDE SEARCH.
The store had the best parmesan for miles around; the manager of Italian origin, perhaps. She took her time choosing a piece, a thin wedge without too much rind.
‘Excuse me, love?’
The man standing next to her was balding, sweaty, an aged KingGee shirt tight over his barrel of a belly. Surely she was too old to be called love, even by this senior citizen.
‘You’re Peter’s daughter?’
She shut her eyes, just for a moment. Wished herself teleported home.
‘Jenny.’ He held out his hand. ‘Sam Pels.’
His handshake was firm, as they all were round here. There weren’t many concessions made for women. Not for her, anyway.
‘That’s me,’ she said. ‘I don’t think I remember you, though. I’m sorry.’
‘You were just a tiny thing. Riding around in that damned red truck,’ he said. ‘But I see that little girl’s face in yours.’
She smelled sawdust, the oily cool of a shed. ‘You ran the mill,’ she said. ‘Down by the creek.’ The Pels mill had been the last to shut down, when she was sitting her final exams.
‘That’s it.’
She leaned on the trolley handle, slipped one foot out of her slide. She had been at the mill the Sunday before her father left, making a pyramid of wood shavings while the men talked. Her father had come out cranky, she remembered that. Didn’t speak the whole way home. ‘I’m sorry if he let you down,’ she said.
Sam coughed. ‘Your dad was a good man,’ he said. ‘I never bought into any of the talk.’
‘Good men don’t abandon their children,’ she said. ‘Or walk off and leave their wives with all their debt.’
‘Fair enough. Must have put you and your mum through hell. I’m just saying I always figured he must have had a real good reason.’
That was exactly what she was afraid of. It would almost be better if there had been another woman. Another family. ‘Guess we’ll never know.’
Sam looked around, appraised a young mother filling a bag with Granny Smiths behind them. ‘I know he loved you. Never shut up about you being a great artist one day. Getting out of here.’
She had failed on both counts. No surprise there. ‘Well, I’m back now.’
‘The mill’s running again, too. We do a little business for the local woodworkers. Why don’t you come down, have a look around?’
She counted seven different sorts of goat’s cheese in the fridge, ranging in price from four ninety-nine to eleven dollars and twelve cents. ‘Sure,’ she said. ‘I might just do that.’
Jen unpacked her groceries and put them away. Hung the shopping bags in the laundry. After all that she had come home without any bloody goat’s cheese, which had been one of the main reasons for the trip. She examined the dairy compartment: a piece of old cheddar, the parmesan and some haloumi, which was close to its best-by date.
The sun had disappeared behind the mountain; it was cocktail hour at the birdbaths and she was missing out. Jen took a bottle of white wine from the fridge without looking at the label, opened it, and filled a glass. She carried it out to the back deck to join the birds. One rufous fantail, four Lewin’s honeyeaters and three scrubwrens. The whole forest singing. A treecreeper hopped up the pole from underneath, made blind by the base of the bath.
The robins arrived last, splashing and fluffing, sending the other birds off. Their golden yellow was luminous at dusk, as if carrying the last gleams of the sun. Only now did they sing, with their sweet, piping whistle, and first thing in the morning. Their song was best suited to dusk and dawn – the in-between.
Her wineglass was empty. She could still make an omelette with the cheddar, but she’d had her heart set on goat’s cheese and herbs. A little slice of toast.
The drinking frenzy was over, the ripples on the baths stilling, the light almost gone. Black cockatoos called overhead, late home.
Sam bloody Pels. What were the chances?
Weeds
Jen surveyed the pile of weeds she had ripped from the ground. Fishbone fern, Singapore daisy and velcro creeper – silver Desmodium – named for the way its seeds latched onto your trouser legs. Getting the weeds up to the rubbish pile was harder work than removing them – especially if she got carried away and worked until she was tired. This time she was determined to pace herself, and clean up as she went.
She piled up the barrow and pushed it uphill, stopping at the flash of a kingfisher over the vegetable patch to get her breath. She jogged up the last of the slope and upended her load.
The empty barrow dragged her downhill. She had a good look at the kingfisher this time, with his sleek yellow chest and flat-top hairdo, before he took off for somewhere less public. Full sun was blasting her solar panels, working while she worked.
She loaded the weeds straight into the barrow, making sure not to drop any of the nasty little baubles by which the ferns multiplied. Otherwise she’d be doing it all again next year. Lil, the doyenne of Landcare volunteers, said they spread downhill with water, and would take over the world if you let them.
Cobbler’s pegs had been the big problem at her parents’ place. Every year her mother had pulled them from the yard, in great angry handfuls, but always a little too late, so that the early pegs flew free or were walked about in their cuffs and socks, only extending the infestation. Aunt Sophie said that the year Jen was born, her mother had set fire to the little paddock behind their house, on purpose, to ‘get rid of the weeds’. Her father had come home early – seeing the smoke and thinking it too close for comfort – and found the breeze whipping up a line of fire heading for the hills. He’d managed to put it out with the garden hose and a watering can.
Aunt Sophie said that should have been a warning flare to them all – though Jen hadn’t understood what she meant at the time.
After seven loads, Jen stood back to admire the cleared patch. Bare, but weed-free. At Landcare, there would have been three or four volunteers working on an area that size, and tea and sandwiches afterwards. A bit of chat, too, which she was less keen on, but she was learning how to do things properly. Over the last year, they had restored the lagoon at the edge of town, removing all of the rubbish and invasive species and replanting the shoreline. It was a nice flat area to work on, unlike her own slippery slopes.
A team of kookaburras crowded around, surveying the cleared earth from low branches. Two swooped at the same time, crossing and snatching in formation, then whacking their grubs on a branch as if they were much more threatening prey.
Jen gathered up the last scraps of weed and dumped them into the barrow. She had cleared about a hundred square metres, and just about got rid of the daisy infestation. The fern would need more work.
Jen pushed the barrow up hill, taking her time. Yellow robins flitted alongside, from orchard tree to orchard tree, her constant companions. She tipped the last load of weeds atop the others, a great mound forming. Not bad for a few hours’ work. She parked the barrow in the shed and washed her hands at the tap, wiped them on her shirt.
It didn’t pay to think of how much more there was to be done. The only way to manage the enormity of it all was to focus on one small area at one time, as if working on a large canvas – while keeping a sense of the big picture at the back of your mind.
What Goes Around
Henry unpacked his pencils one at a time, lining them up above his sketchbook. ‘Mum said that a boy went missing when you were at school, too.’
Taken. Like a village sacrifice. She usually enjoyed the questions of young people, but not when she was really having a conversa
tion with their parents. ‘She did?’ Jen squeezed out her tea bag, dropped it in the compost bucket. She had thought Henry’s mum twenty years younger and from somewhere down south.
‘It’s in the papers,’ he said.
‘Ah.’ She managed two mugs and the plate in one trip, though she could have done with a quiet moment in the kitchen. ‘Well, that’s correct. His name was Michael.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
She sipped her tea. ‘I didn’t want to worry you,’ she said. ‘And I don’t really like to talk about it.’
The boy broke a chocolate biscuit in half, showering crumbs over the table. ‘Was he your friend?’
Jen put her mug down. ‘It’s a long time ago now. But yes, he was my friend.’
Henry watched her face. ‘So you know what it’s like.’
‘Yes, I do,’ she said. ‘Or what it was like for me, anyway.’
He chewed his biscuit. Washed it down with tea.
A yellow robin landed on the deck railing. Cocked its head. Its eye on biscuit crumbs, perhaps. She watched, waited.
He rubbed a tear away. Such luscious eyelashes were wasted on the boy; he was oblivious to them. Her own lashes were all but invisible and her eyes disappearing back into her head. Sometimes youth and beauty were painful to behold.
‘The teachers don’t get it. They think we should just go on as if nothing’s happened.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘They don’t talk about it. They don’t talk about Caitlin, it’s like she never existed,’ he said. ‘It’s weird.’
‘I thought you were seeing the counsellor?’
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘He’s cool.’
‘You can talk to him?’
Henry shrugged. ‘We talk more about other stuff.’ The robin flew off, gripping onto the trunk of a tallowwood, scanning the lawn for grubs and insects. ‘Mum says the cases might be connected.’
‘Michael went missing nearly forty years ago, Henry,’ she said, struggling to keep her voice even. ‘Whoever is responsible would be quite old now.’
‘And they never found him.’
‘No.’
Henry chewed the rest of his biscuit. Scratched his leg.
‘Something else bothering you?’
‘Mum says your dad went away around the same time.’
Was that in the papers, too, or just the talk around town? Again. ‘Took off’ would be the phrase they would more likely use. Even in front of Henry. ‘That’s true, too.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t really know. I was only your age,’ she said. ‘There were some money problems, the usual things.’ Jen tossed the rest of her tea over the railing, placed the empty mug on the table. ‘The police looked into it back then and found no connection.’ Except the timing, and Michael having stayed at their house, which was plenty.
A wet ring was spreading out from the base of her mug.
‘Are you going to eat that?’ He gestured to the last biscuit.
‘It’s yours. And enough chat for today – you’re here to draw.’
She gathered up sticks and leaves from the back lawn and piled them into her kindling basket. The temperature was to drop down to eleven degrees overnight, cool enough for her first fire. The lawn needed a trim, too, and the old mower, with its broken blades, did a better job if there were no obstructions between it and the grass.
One big old grey ghost stood sentinel where the ‘garden’ ended and wilderness began. Although no longer living, it still had a presence – and must have witnessed some things in its day. Every time she passed, she placed her hands on its trunk, to try and hear what it would say.
The koels were at it again, singing up a ruckus. Her father had called them ‘hysterical birds’, for their rising quow-ee quow-eel calls, coming at quicker and quicker intervals during breeding season. The koel was a summer visitor from South-East Asia, a type of cuckoo. Another species that loved to inhabit the margins of the forest.
Its carry-on was something of a false drama; it was the other birds – those of a similar size that built open-cup nests – that had cause to be hysterical. The koels were a parasitic cuckoo, knocking the host birds’ eggs out of the nest and laying their own in their place. The males were iridescent black, the females a duller speckled brown with pale fronts. Mostly they hid in leafy tree canopies, as if ashamed of giving up their young to be raised by another species. It was only during the mating season, when the males displayed themselves and chased the females, that she could get a good look.
Her father had once taken her to a site he was clearing to see a koel’s eggs in a figbird’s nest. He had helped her climb high up into one tree to peer across into another. She hadn’t really understood what parasitic meant then, but she saw that the eggs were too large for the nest and that their not-parents were distressed.
Jen stretched for a clutch of dry leaves stuck in a lilli pilli at the edge of the lawn: a perfect fire starter. Once hatched, the host birds tended to raise the cuckoo chicks, although they were bigger and uglier than their own nestlings would be, even if it meant working full-time to feed the great things. Their parenting instincts outweighed the nightmare.
Her father had loved interesting nature facts like that. And passing them on. It was years later before she had realised that those trees would have all come down the following week, the nest and koel eggs with them. It was some comfort to think that the parent birds, at least, would have been freed up to try again with their own eggs.
Colour
She was up with the birds again, though it was a much more respectable hour now that the days were growing shorter.
Her mother had not been a morning person. No matter the time of year. When Jen’s father was on a job, she had made an effort, making Jen toast and Milo to eat at the kitchen bench or, in summer, on the back steps. There would always be something placed in her lunch box: leftovers, or sandwiches, and a piece of fruit. But her mother did not speak until she was halfway through her first cup of coffee, and even then it was monosyllabic.
On her father’s days off, her mother stayed in bed. He cooked eggs and bacon and tomatoes while Jen made the toast and tea. Or sometimes they made banana fritters together, Jen pouring in the batter and her father flipping them over with the wonky spatula. Its handle was all melted where Jen had left it leaning on the side of the pan.
After her father left, it was Jen who made her mother coffee, and breakfast, though her mother didn’t often eat anything at that time of day. Jen hadn’t bothered with lunches for a while, just taken an apple, or bought a punnet of strawberries from the stall on the way to school. When the neighbours realised what was going on at home, they refused her coins, and delivered a box of fruit and vegetables from their hothouse once a week.
Her mother had been grateful, and made an appearance the next time – in reasonable order – to thank them. She had been angry at Jen, though, assuming the neighbours’ kindness was the result of some sort of complaint. ‘It’s nobody’s business but ours,’ she had said. ‘Understand?’
Jen had not said a word to anyone, but people thought everyone else’s business their own in those days – particularly around the welfare of children.
It was eluding her again: the essence of bird. The mystery of what held the tiny fairy-wren together, made it more than a spot of feathers on stick legs with a flitting tail. She could not seem to channel, even for a moment, wild bird, despite her well-trained arm.
‘A good eye is more important than the hand,’ her first drawing teacher had said, somewhat primly, in senior high school. Jen had trained her eye, and studied birds, but now it seemed the more she knew, the less effectively her hand was able to reproduce what she saw.
It had taken several years and several more teachers to help her realise that the most important thing was somewhere between the hand and the eye. Towards the end of her third year at art school, Mr Grieg had stood behind her, watching her work, which had been unnerving enoug
h. She could sense he was nodding. With approval, she hoped. When he reached over her shoulder and placed his hand on her chest, she had nearly pissed her pants. The sudden wetness there was enough for her to think that perhaps she had.
‘Good,’ he said. ‘Remember that you draw from here, Jennifer. An artist cannot afford to be afraid of her emotions.’
She had been more afraid of him, and the beautiful naked man arranged in front of the class, than her own feelings. She was not the first student Grieg had laid his elegant hands on, nor would she be the last. Still, it had led to something of a breakthrough in her work, though it was not the human form she was to excel at.
What she was most interested in was missing in people, except in brief moments of lust or rage – and these were not the faces they presented to the world, especially when posing for a portrait.
Not for the first time, she wondered if it wasn’t a mistake to try to pin the bird to the page, to confine it to paper with her meagre scratches and marks. The pleasure of living among them should be enough.
Craig always said she should get out in the world instead of copying it, insisting on walking, climbing, kayaking, running, and abseiling flat-out past all the detail. It was true that she tended to inhabit a land of her own, somewhere between the work in progress and that which had inspired it, but in those days she had been in the world far too much.
As if to emphasise the point, the family of fairy-wrens flitted and flirted their long tails at the baths, the cobalt blue and russet of the males no less astounding for the frequency with which she saw it. It made them vain, though. She preferred the plainer females with their red eye masks and more subtle touches of blue in their tail feathers. Their cheerful chatter lacked the self-consciousness of the males, the need to perform. And she knew all too well what it was to be the plainer of a pair.
