Nest

by Inga Simpson

  They landed on the railing so lightly, or on the edge of the birdbath, floating in and out of the water. How could she hope to draw such weightlessness, such grace, such joy.

  A breeze shifted the palm fronds, scraping the roof. She got up from the table and stepped into the relative dark of the room. It was too early for lunch, just eleven, but she was hungry. She cut two pieces of bread, a couple of slices of cheese, and made a sandwich with a smear of mango chutney and the handful of fresh greens she had picked while watering after breakfast. She put the kettle on for tea.

  She was too set in her ways, no doubt, but routine was what produced the headspace she needed. She sat on the back steps, to eat, in dappled sun.

  Post Office

  A slip in her post office box said she had a parcel to collect. The new birding book she had ordered, perhaps. It was peak hour – after-school pick-up – and there were seven people ahead of her; she hadn’t timed it well at all.

  It was dead quiet inside. Caitlin Jones’s parents were at the counter with a great stack of letters; some sort of mail-out. They no longer bore much resemblance to the newspaper pictures, their features gaunt and somehow exaggerated; caricatures of their former selves. They stood close together, him with his hand on her lower back, but his eyes suggested he was far away. They would each deal with it in their own way, any cracks in their relationship magnified. They were aware, too, of standing centre stage, of having become the public property of the community.

  Everyone in line stared, but averted their eyes the minute the couple turned, suddenly very interested in the Hallmark cards or true crime books. Jen stood her ground, determined to acknowledge them, and her sympathy for their grief, though she had never met them.

  The father was Brenden Jones’s son, and according to the paper, Caitlin’s mother had lived here all her life. Without her maiden name it was hard to pick the family. She looked a bit like a Shorten, but Jen wasn’t sure. She could find out easily enough, but the family had already lost enough of their privacy.

  When Jen had first moved back, she had imagined getting a post office box at the unmanned office in the hamlet closer to her. She would walk down the hill every day, leaving the forest for the gentler slopes of the dairy farms, with their falling-down timber fences and iron sheds, cross the creek, admire the old stationmaster’s house on its green banks, overhung with the great jacaranda dropping a purple carpet in spring, to check her deep square box in anonymity. But there were no boxes available, and a long waiting list, so she had been forced to take one in town.

  She wasn’t sure she would take the box if offered it now, having grown used to the exchange with the post office ladies when collecting her parcels and sending things off. It was how she kept up with the town and no doubt how the town kept up with her.

  She still took envious note when driving through the hamlet of the characters who had come out of the hills, in from their farms and studios and sheds, parking outside and ducking in to collect their mail in dreadlocks and boots, without having to worry if they were properly dressed, or having to clear their throats to speak.

  Their business done, the Joneses turned and faced the audience. The young woman directly behind them sloped to the counter, possibly the only person oblivious to who they were. Jen looked them each in the face, though what she saw there had her feeling bilious, and nodded as they walked past her and out the glass doors.

  Normal conversation resumed, perhaps even a little more vigorous than usual, as soon as the parents were down the steps and into their white Pajero.

  Jen took her parcel without looking at it and signed her name in the ledger. The Joneses’ mail-out was still on the counter, in neat piles. Jen turned to hurry out into the fresh air.

  Michael’s parents had left town in the end. Separately. They divorced eighteen months after Michael went missing, and sold their house, with its pool and sunken garden full of adventures and memories. A childhood. Jen had liked Michael’s mother, and staying over. Especially when she baked lasagne. His father had been a bit strict, and right into his football, yelling at the screen when his team – the maroon one – let him down. Jen hadn’t minded him, except when he was mean to Michael.

  The fact that he had a temper was enough for people to suspect him, to talk. Jen had thought that all rubbish, even at the time, but the police had him in more than once. In the end all that broke was their family. Michael’s poor sister, Hannah, ended up living with a relative in the city.

  Dreamland

  Sometimes, especially when she first woke, she had trouble distinguishing between her dreams, her drawings, and reality. As if she had been set loose from her moorings to sail in other worlds. It happened more often as the weather grew cooler, the nights longer and her sleep deeper.

  When working, she tried to inhabit that place as long as she could. To stay in a dreamy bubble. She had breakfast in her dressing-gown, left the phone unplugged. Tried to keep her toes deep down in her subconscious mud. Every now and then there was a touch of mystery, and it flowed into her work.

  She kept a sketchbook on the deck table in summer, the kitchen bench in winter, in case of bird visitations, but also of inspiration. The book somehow gave her freedoms she didn’t have sitting up at the drawing desk in her studio. Opening the door and stepping down into her place of work sometimes had the effect of driving ideas and dreams away. Like entering the classroom.

  It took her weeks to recover from her first day on the job. She remembered only standing in front of their flesh-coloured faces, smoothing her navy skirt, and writing her name on the blackboard, her mind just as blank. All her clever ideas and plans had slipped out the window and across the oval into the blue gums. While the students seemed to manage to daydream just fine, she turned stern and plain. It became easier with time, but she finished each year a little more depleted.

  Jen scratched at her scalp, her hair probably overdue for a wash. Her pyjamas, too. There was a tea-coloured splodge over one of the robin redbreasts on her front, and a bit of dried porridge stuck to her sleeve. She had ordered her robin pyjamas online, underwhelmed by the stripes and spots she found in stores. She should have ordered two pairs, or perhaps a set of the magpie ones, too, because she was always reluctant to give them up to the laundry basket.

  The whipbirds were chuffing about in the lilli pillis. For the first few years, she had only ever heard a pair calling to each other, never catching sight of them. They were the opposite of what parents called for: heard but not seen. Now there was an extended family, and they had become braver – or her eye more accustomed, perhaps – and she sighted them regularly close by the house.

  Where once she had thought the whip crack and the answering call the extent of their repertoire, she now appreciated the full range of their chat and fuss. They were highly strung birds, with their flat-crested heads and so much furtive, darting movement from one bit of cover to the next. It was a shame they couldn’t relax a bit, feel safe; she was no predator.

  At first it had been distracting to hear so many birds while drawing another, like trying to recall the tune of a song when something else was playing. Now, though, they all chattered away as one community, from the same songbook. From her forest. One would come to the centre of her attention for a while and the others flit back into the background.

  The robin was always there, as if at the edge of her internal clearing, peering down from the side of a tree, defying gravity, in her consciousness just as they were in the real world, popping up wherever she looked. They were rarely still, however, which was why they were so damn hard to draw.

  Sometimes pencil on paper was a magical thing – and birds flew out. Other times they were just marks, her hand an inadequate tool. Today was a good morning, she could tell by the sound of the lead across the page. Everything had aligned at last. A robin’s eye looked back at her. Dark and inquisitive.

  Station

  ‘Thanks for coming in, Ms Vogel.’

  ‘It’s Anderson.�
� She swallowed a mouthful of water, which was, thankfully, refrigerated. The station house was not. It was only manned once a week, and most of that time they were out in the car, so she supposed proper air-conditioning was not considered a worthwhile investment. Or perhaps times had changed less than she liked to think in the state, and police still felt the need to make people sweat.

  He frowned. ‘You’re unmarried. Is that correct?’

  ‘Yes.’ A crime of sorts, no doubt. A woman who could not hold a man.

  ‘But you’ve changed your name.’

  ‘I draw birds. Vögel means bird, in German,’ she said. ‘It seemed a bit much, you know?’ Someone at art school had been generous enough to say something before the exhibition had opened. She’d had to run around to change it in time for the program printing and had chosen Anderson without much thought.

  ‘Right,’ he said. ‘As you’ve probably heard, we’re investigating the disappearance of Caitlin Jones.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We’re pursuing any possible connections to the disappearance of Michael Wade,’ he said. ‘It’s all a long time ago now, but we wanted to ask you a few questions.’

  It had happened before either of the policemen were born, which was going to make things tedious. Surely they could have wheeled out an old-timer who had some memory of the case and the times. Or at least a local cop. These two were from down on the coast, and one of them not long out of police college.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Michael was in your class at school?’

  ‘Yes. Grade seven.’

  ‘And it was June fourteen he went missing.’

  ‘He went missing June twelve. June fourteen was when he was officially declared missing.’

  ‘Right.’

  She finished the water in her glass and waited while the younger fellow refilled it from the misted jug on the table between them.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘And your father went missing on that same day?’

  Jen looked out the window. Shook her head. ‘The fourteenth, yes.’ At the time, Aunt Sophie had tried to reassure her, insisting there was no connection. But people thought it and said it, and that was more than enough for most of the kids at school. Most of the town. Half a lifetime later and here she was again, in the same damn place. What had made her think she could ever feel at home here?

  ‘Where did he go, do you think?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I was twelve.’

  ‘What about your mother?’

  ‘I don’t think she knew anything.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘There were a lot of bills. Loose ends,’ she said. ‘If she could have referred people to him, I think she would have.’ In truth, her mother had been too heartbroken to do much about the bills, but she would have gone after him if there had been any sort of hope.

  Jen kept her hands in her lap, channelling a stillness she didn’t feel. There was blood around the cuticle of her right index finger. She placed her left hand over the right; it was never good to have blood on your hands in a police station. It was her own, but they didn’t need to see it.

  He cleared his throat. ‘And he never tried to contact you.’

  ‘No.’ Outside, lorikeets fussed in the palms, dropping sticky seeds onto the roof of the police vehicle in the driveway with a satisfying thunk.

  The officer took a long time to write three words: no contact since. ‘Have you tried to find him at all, over the years?’

  ‘The electoral roll, phone directory, Google, you name it.’

  ‘No luck?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘Started in the nineties,’ she said. ‘On and off till a few years ago.’ More recently, she had been checking each state’s death records, though without much enthusiasm.

  He glanced at the other officer, still taking notes. ‘Any reason why you stopped?’

  ‘I figured that if he was alive, he didn’t want to be found,’ she said.

  The officer chewed his pencil. From its mangled shape, the habit was not a new one. He picked a flake of paint from his lip.

  ‘The police looked for him at the time,’ she said. ‘They didn’t find him either.’

  ‘Are you aware of any other names he might go by?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Everyone called him Peter?’

  ‘Yes.’ They knew the answers to the questions; where was this going?

  ‘But that was his middle name?’

  ‘His first name was Mallory. He was teased as a child – people said it was a girl’s name.’ Perhaps if he had kept it, he might have had the courage to climb a few more mountains.

  ‘And his mother’s maiden name?’

  ‘Dent.’ She had searched using that name, too.

  ‘And you’ve never received any gifts or money over the years?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Not even a birthday present? When you were a child, perhaps?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘How did your mother support the two of you?’

  ‘A second mortgage on the house. Benefits. And my aunt helped out with my expenses.’

  ‘No one else?’

  ‘Not to my knowledge,’ she said. Not until her mother had hooked up with the Brethren.

  He tapped his pencil on his notebook. ‘Do you think your father is still alive?’

  ‘He’d be in his seventies,’ she said. ‘And it was a hard life – all the physical work, I mean.’

  ‘Is that a no?’

  She shrugged.

  ‘So you last saw your father on the morning he left?’

  Jen spilled a little water on her pants, leaving a dark spot. ‘I said goodbye before I went to school.’

  ‘Nothing out of the ordinary?’

  ‘No.’ His hands had been shaking and, looking back, his hug might have been a little longer than usual, but that could just be her turning a childhood memory into a sentimental film.

  ‘And when you got home from school, how would you describe your mother’s behaviour?’

  ‘From what I remember,’ Jen said, ‘she was a mess.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘She was distressed, upset. Not coping. Her husband had left her, the phone had been cut off, and there were bills to pay.’

  ‘She was clear that your father had left?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Was there a note? Something for you?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Had they had a fight? How had things been between them?’

  ‘I was not aware of anything out of the ordinary.’ She swung her feet as if she were still twelve. Through the smeary window, Jen watched cloud sneaking in from the west; a thunderstorm tonight perhaps. It was a mild form of torture, shut in a small hot room in the middle of the afternoon, having all her deficiencies pointed out by a couple of men young enough to be her sons – and given enough water to push a middle-aged woman’s bladder to its limits. It was worse than sitting in the shrink’s office. Though he at least had air-con.

  The water cooler gurgled as the sergeant refilled the jug. ‘Do you need a break?’ he asked. ‘I know this isn’t easy. We’re just trying to get a sense of what happened back then.’

  She crossed her legs. ‘I’m fine,’ she said.

  ‘Were you aware your parents used drugs?’

  Jen sat up straighter in her chair. There was an agenda here, despite what they said, and she needed to pay more attention. ‘Not as a child. I learned later that they smoked marijuana recreationally,’ she said. ‘Like most of their generation around here.’

  The corner of his mouth twitched. ‘How did you become aware of that?’

  ‘My Aunt Sophie,’ she said.

  ‘You went to live with her after your mother was … hospitalised …’ He looked down at his notes.

  ‘At the end of grade nine.’

  ‘And you completed school down there?’

  ‘Yes.’

 
; ‘And your mother died three and a half years ago?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘There was a funeral?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Was that here in town?’

  She had to work harder now; too long in a hot, stuffy room answering questions designed to irritate. ‘No,’ she said. ‘A service near the nursing home, in Canberra.’

  ‘Anyone from your father’s family there?’

  Jen blinked. ‘No.’

  ‘We’re nearly there,’ he said. ‘Would you like me to open a window?’

  ‘That’d be good.’

  The younger officer clicked his pen. ‘This boy you tutor, Henry Green. You know his family?’

  ‘His mother, Kay, answered an ad I put up on the notice-board in town.’

  ‘In the co-op?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘So you hadn’t met his parents previously.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You don’t have any other students?’

  ‘I wouldn’t have minded a few more.’ By the time Kay had called, Jen had almost given up on the idea. It wasn’t as if she had thought the phone would ring nonstop – but still.

  ‘Okay, Ms Anderson,’ he said. ‘I think that’s it. Thank you for coming in.’

  The other one cleared his throat. ‘If we do … track down your father, either way, would you like us to let you know?’

  She tried to catch the feather of childish hope that had taken flight. Chances were the same as they had been this morning: slim to nothing.

  ‘Sure. That would be good.’

  Pub

  She had walked into the wrong part of the pub; every head was turned. It was still that sort of town. She should have gone to the coffee shop, with all the other middle-aged women, but it was a beer she wanted. She could have tried harder, though, to find the entrance to the ladies’ lounge or the beer garden or whatever they were calling the less pubby part of the establishment these days. For a moment, while she stood absorbing the collective stare, she considered backing up, going home. But she had been apologising for her own existence long enough.