by Inga Simpson
She nodded, walked across the room to the bar. ‘Schooner of Gold, thanks,’ she said. She would have preferred a Tooheys New – or better still a Coopers ale – but in the local you had to make some concessions.
The barman placed her change on the towel runner, sat her dripping beer on a coaster, all without meeting her eye. She had a mind to perch on a bar stool, next to the old-timers, to discomfort them further, but in the end she would only discomfort herself.
She retreated to a table by the window, looking back out over the valley, and flipped through the local paper. The men of the town, or those free to drink midafternoon on a Tuesday, went back to whatever version of football was on the green screen that dominated the room.
She drank from the glass and breathed. Stilled her hands. Breathed again, from the stomach. Toughing it out was sometimes only a matter of moments and you were through to the other side.
That was not going to be the case for Caitlin’s parents, on the front page again. They were raising money in some sort of appeal, putting up posters all over the coast. Jen couldn’t help feeling sorry for the girl’s sister, wondering if she was getting the support she would need. The whole town’s attention was on the missing child rather than the one still at home dealing with it.
There hadn’t been nearly as much fuss for Michael. Not that she had been aware of, anyway. They were expected to get on with it and, to a large extent, they had. It had only been after some lobbying by the school captains that they had even been allowed to include Michael in their grade seven graduation, projecting slides onto the wall when he was awarded best and fairest for football and most improved scholar. His sister collected the awards on his behalf, shaking the principal’s hand.
When Jen’s class each went up on stage to collect their certificates, they had to stop, face the audience, thank their parents for supporting them, and mumble about what school they were going to and what they wanted to be when they grew up. Glen and Phil had gone last and second last so that together they could read out Michael’s plan to go on to the local state school and become a pro-footballer or a sports reporter.
The class had cheered Glen and Phil as much as Michael; they had volunteered to do what no one else could. Out of respect for their bravery, and in a somewhat misguided attempt at stoicism, the rest of them had managed, collectively, not to shed a tear. The same could not be said of the largely adult audience. The principal made a speech and presented a special award to the whole class, for citizenship, which had sent parents reaching for a tissue. Jen hadn’t looked at her own mother. She didn’t need to – she knew she would be blubbering.
That night, their class had been united – ‘together forever’ – before breaking for the holidays, scattering to six different high schools, and setting out on much more lonely paths through adolescence.
Jen sipped the beer. Ran her finger through the frost on the glass. Cars pulled in and out in front of the supermarket across the road, most shoppers leaving with a single plastic bag. She counted five young mothers pushing strollers up or down the street. Motherhood hadn’t been part of many life plans in grade seven, but by grade ten it was a reality for some. More so these days, it seemed. But then who was she to judge. Perhaps they were happy, and just as likely to sneer at a barren old spinster.
Jen drained her glass. Noisy miners sang in the cotoneasters outside. Fellow interlopers, the pair of them.
Hinterland
The gallery was not yet open, though the lights were on and a radio playing. Jen crossed the courtyard to the lookout and leaned on the railing. It was too early for any midweek tourists; she had it all to herself. The air was clear, without the summer haze. She could make out the froth of foam at the water’s edge, the white towers of the coastal centre, the river mouth spewing out to sea. Empty shipping containers churned back up the coast, sitting high on the blue.
The various textures of mangrove, rainforest and pasture flowed out from the river, handkerchiefs of mist lingering in the low-lying areas. She picked out the curve of Tallowwood Drive, school-hour traffic creeping along, as if Caitlin might reappear at any moment.
Jen’s own plot was directly below, giving her a bird’s-eye view. A rough rectangle on the outskirts of town, and on the high point of the ridge, between covered growing sheds and the main road, her house hidden beneath trees.
From above, it was easier to imagine it all as it had once been. Before the best of it had been picked out and the rest mown down. The great trees, gone. The first people, gone.
The cedars, all but childless for several generations now, were a race persisting only in the forgotten damp, dark gullies. Forest kings who would soon pass into legend – too majestic for this world. Not that they would be alone.
She had sat through an artist dinner once, seated next to a shiny faced young scientist, the wife of a promising ceramicist. On the subject of the declining population of pandas, and the impact of the loss of their habitat, the scientist had declared herself a ‘fan’ of Darwin’s theory of the survival of the fittest: a believer. ‘They would have died out anyway,’ she said. ‘They have no sex drive, you know – you can’t get them to mate. And on a diet of bamboo …’ She had shrugged, as if to illustrate the hopelessness of it all.
Jen had felt hopeless, too, though for different reasons. Craig had too much marking to come along, leaving her to the mercies of such conversations. The ceramicist had tried to fire his wife a warning look over the table, but Ms Science was on a roll, spouting about the supreme human capacity for adaptation.
‘Really?’ Jen had said. ‘We’re the only species destroying our own habitat. That doesn’t seem so clever to me.’ She could have gone on, about being neither fit nor likely to survive, but had held her tongue. She had been distracted by a glimpse of what she suspected was a tawny frogmouth in the tree above the car park outside. Nonetheless, the woman had appeared startled, perhaps more by Jen’s tone than the words that slipped from her lips. The ceramic couple left shortly after that, citing tiredness, and Jen had the end of the table to herself, and the rest of a bottle of very nice red from Margaret River.
She heard the bell of the gallery door behind her. ‘Jen, darling. Is that you? Sorry. I’m running a bit late this morning.’
Each time she passed the asparagus fern by the front deck, she reminded herself that it needed watering. The hanging basket was half-embedded in the front garden, coming to rest on its side, like an amphora pot. She could see the fern’s new growth shrivelling.
It had hung in the bathroom from the day she moved in, just about the only thing she had brought with her from her old place. All of the furniture she had placed out on the kerb had disappeared over the week; the books and clothes she had packed up and dropped at Vinnies. There didn’t seem much point trying to make a new start with all of her old things. Her desk and drawing table, canvases, art books, camping gear and one suitcase of clothes had fit easily in the ute, the plant in the front seat. It was like the first rule of camping: only take what you can carry in.
At first the fern had luxuriated in the green, but in the longer and hotter dry period leading up to last summer, it had started to choke. The sun swung around to bake through the glass skylight in the afternoons and whatever steam she produced in the shower soon disappeared.
As soon as the rains set in, she had carried it outside and hung it over a palm branch, only to see the basket dip down, its pointy base resting on the ground among the gristle ferns. Her sleeve was already soaked, and water running down her arm onto her ribs, so she had left it. Over the summer, she had become used to the bathroom without the basket. The bath needed less cleaning without the plant’s brown dripping, and the fern had done much better outside.
She stepped in and ripped the plant free from the grasp of the grabbing ferns. One tendril clung on to the basket’s chain, circling in the breeze as if reluctant to let go of a cousin. She hooked the basket, upright, under the eaves.
Teacher
Jen
topped up the birdbaths while she waited. She kept pouring until only surface tension held the water in: infinity pools, with dramatic forest views, for the birds.
The bottlebrush was in flower. She kept one eye out for the scarlet honeyeater she had spotted dining there yesterday, its head and throat the exact same flame red; nature had its own logic.
Henry’s mother pulled out of the driveway, spraying gravel, and Henry clumped down to the front, dumped his bag. Jen put the water jug back in the laundry and lit the gas under the kettle.
‘Hey.’
‘How are you, Henry?’
He shrugged, dragged his chair out. Set himself up. She made tea, placed pieces of lemon slice on a plate. The first time she’d baked using her own lemons.
‘How’s school going?’
‘Okay.’
She set his tea and the plate above his sketchpad. ‘Did I hear right that Mr Barr is leaving?’
‘Yeah. Moving back to the city.’
He’d been offered a job in the department, which was not necessarily a positive reflection on his teaching abilities. ‘No word on a replacement?’
He swallowed his mouthful. ‘You could do it.’
She smiled. ‘I don’t think they’d let me do primary, actually.’
‘What grades did you teach?’
‘Art right across all years, though just seniors in the end. And history for seven to ten,’ she said. ‘Grade sevens are in high school in New South Wales.’
‘History?’
‘There’s no art without history,’ she said. ‘And we wouldn’t know much about history without art.’
He almost gave his whatever face but stuffed another piece of slice into his mouth instead, his frown suggesting some attempt to digest her words.
‘Why’d you stop teaching?’
‘I’d been doing it a long time,’ she said. ‘Then I sold my mother’s house when she died. I was able to retire early and buy this place.’
‘Why didn’t you just live in her house?’
There was enough backwards movement without returning to her actual childhood home.
‘I wanted something further out of town, a little higher up,’ she said. ‘With more trees.’ Not just their carcasses lying around on boggy paddocks.
‘You’re lucky,’ he said. ‘Not to have to work, I mean.’
That sounded like his mother talking again. Kay worked three jobs, including one as a teacher’s aide at a high school twenty-five minutes away.
‘I’d trade it all to still have my mother around,’ she said.
He dropped his head.
‘It’s part of life,’ she said. ‘Though it doesn’t make it any easier when it comes.’
‘But you don’t really need to teach anymore?’
The desire had left long before the need. ‘I’m done with the classroom,’ she said. ‘My drawing is my work now, with a little teaching on the side. Instead of the other way around. But I enjoy teaching. You learn a lot that way.’
Henry did not look convinced.
‘C’mon, let’s get started.’
Henry flicked open his sketchbook, sending loose pages skidding across the table. She lifted the outer corner of one with her thumb and index finger. ‘Is this Caitlin?’
A blush lit his cheekbones.
‘It’s very good,’ she said. He had probably drawn it from the photograph they were using in the papers – it was from the same angle. It was better, though, because he brought his knowledge of the person to it. His feelings for her.
He held out his hand for the drawing.
‘Have you thought of using this, for a poster? Or to give the police?’
He shook his head.
She placed it on the table between them. ‘It’s really good, Henry.’ Perhaps portraits would be his thing.
He slipped it into the back of his book without looking at it.
‘So, I want you to work on a still life,’ she said, ignoring the slump of his shoulders. ‘But I also want you to put it together. Do your own composition. From anything you can find out there.’ She gestured to the bush surrounding them.
‘Now?’
‘Yep,’ she said.
He came back with a lantana branch, heavy with pink and orange flowers, a piece of wood with a knot like the mouth from Munch’s The Scream, and a large tawny feather so perfect it could have just fallen from the bird. She snatched it up.
‘Hey!’ Henry said.
‘Ninox strenua.’
‘Whatever.’
‘It’s from a powerful owl,’ she said. ‘I’ve never seen a feather before. And you find one in sixty seconds.’
He grinned.
‘You would have heard them, they go whoo whoo in the evening, like a person impersonating an owl.’ She got up to fetch her bird books.
‘Like someone talking into a piece of poly pipe.’
‘Exactly like that,’ she said. ‘They live in the hollows of big old trees.’ She had always suspected the grey ghost at the foot of her garden as the likely nesting site for her pair.
Henry had already begun arranging the items in the centre of the table but looked over her arm at the pictures.
‘It’s our largest owl. They catch possums, and even koalas,’ she said. ‘And fly with them back to their roost.’
‘I wish I could draw that,’ he said, pointing to a male looking right into the camera, with lanterns for eyes, a possum swinging from alarming yellow claws.
‘Maybe you can do a series,’ she said. ‘Starting with this feather.’ She left the book open on the table.
He adjusted the arrangement and began sketching it all out.
‘That’s it, leave yourself plenty of space around them, too.’ The corner of the Caitlin portrait was sticking out of his book. She was tempted to sneak it out for another look.
Lantana
She dragged lantana up the hill to the rubbish pile, leaning her head away from its prickly leaves and stems. It had a lemony smell, pleasant if you didn’t know the damage it could do. More than any other plant, lantana had adapted to the subtropical environment. Far better than any of the human inhabitants. Nothing thrived in wet summers better than weeds, and no weeds thrived quite like lantana. She pulled it out by the roots when the soil was loose after rain, but it soon popped up again, swirling into thickets, and creeping closer and closer to the house.
It wasn’t all bad, providing cover on the steep slopes and in the gullies that the shy wallabies loved. Butterflies and birds, too.
Her mother had cut lantana back with secateurs and then poisoned its stems. There had been a scrambling wall of it on their place, where the block backed onto forest. Every few years, her father would take to it all with the chainsaw. Both approaches had been more successful than her own. Her mother had said, more than once, that she remembered a time when there was no lantana, blaming the council for dumping rubbish on the roadsides and in easements, allowing it to spread throughout the district. Her father liked to say that he had arrived the same way, dropped at the side of the road by a truck driver, after hitching back from Darwin. He had met her mother when some sixties band played at the pub, and stayed. Marrying into the area, as it were.
Jen dragged another two lantana bushes up to the rubbish pile, taking care not to dislodge any seeds. Lil, at Landcare, said birds were the main culprits, eating the plant’s fruit and spreading the seeds about. Something about their digestive process aided the seeds’ chance of reproduction. But it wasn’t the birds’ fault. It was humans who had let it loose.
Thirty different insects had been introduced to control lantana, many of which now caused their own problems, and none of which had been particularly successful.
When clearing for Landcare, she cut back the lantana, sprayed it, and piled the canes up where they lay, like she was supposed to. But on her own place, she didn’t like to leave mess about. Or use poison.
Lil didn’t like using it either, holding the spray at arm’s length, nose uptur
ned, despite her pink gloves and long sleeves. Glyphosate was the lesser of two evils, its toxins disappearing from the soil before lantana ever would.
Sometimes Jen was tempted to let it all go. It was perverse, after all, to spend so much of her time fighting the natural world. There had to be a better way.
Lil never seemed to run out of energy, despite being twenty years older. She seemed to believe she could still make a difference. Perhaps that was her secret.
The asparagus fern was still hanging under the eaves, tips browning, neither inside nor outside, and denied any real benefit from the rain unless it were to come in sideways. There was a coating of cobwebs between the basket’s canes, giving it a nest-like appearance.
Jen stopped. There was a nest. A nest within the nest. A kind of woven thatch dome against one fluted edge of the basket, with a round opening on the side. Jen peered in. It was lined with breast feathers, one a kind of mottled brown.
There was no one home. She had probably destroyed all of their broody plans when she ripped the basket out of the garden, where it had been better sheltered among the palm and ferns. She fetched a cup of water for the plant, taking care to pour it around the nest, just in case.
She scratched the gardeners’ soap in the laundry so as to fill under her nails, scrubbed them out with the little brush, then did the back of her hands, and dried them on the handtowel. She should really shower, too, and get rid of all the lantana stink and spores, but the nest was at the front of her mind.
The gallery owner, May, had said she would be happy to have any pieces Jen had lying around, but she wanted to give her something new. To finish something new would be a start.
She blew on her hands and sat down at the drawing desk. Pencil, page, nest, breath. The weight of the pencil was just right, the texture of the page coaxed her hand to move, and her breath brought the outside in.
