Nest

by Inga Simpson

  This time the mill gate was open, as if expecting her.

  ‘Hey, Sam,’ she said.

  ‘Hi, Jen,’ he said. ‘How are things?’

  ‘Nice to get a bit of rain.’

  ‘Reckon.’

  She stepped inside the shed. It still smelled the same. Wood, of course, but all different notes, mixed with oil and metal and time. Old number plates covered one wall, dating back to the fifties.

  ‘Coppers still haven’t found that girl,’ he said, holding up the local rag. ‘Some big investigation unit set up in the city now.’ Caitlin’s parents, or the people who used to be her parents, were on the cover, pleading for public help.

  ‘Someone must know something,’ she said.

  He looked over his glasses, which were in need of a good clean. ‘Cuppa?’

  ‘Sure,’ she said.

  She sat up at the workbench, scarred with chisel and saw marks, spills and chips, half-covered with old newspapers and scraps of paper scribbled with measurements and phone numbers.

  ‘Sam?’

  ‘Yeah, love?’ He put her cup down in front of her, to the right, and flipped out a coaster to slip under it, as if the beach were still a more polished piece of furniture.

  ‘These coasters,’ she said. ‘From the old pub. Where’d you get them?’

  ‘Fred gave me a whole box, before the place was torn down. I pinched a couple of bricks, too, from the building. Nearly got myself arrested.’

  It had divided the town, that demolition. Another of the Dean brothers’ enterprises. It was the end of more than the pub when the wrecking ball started swinging. ‘I remember that day.’

  ‘Yeah?’ he said. ‘You would have been what, ten?’

  ‘Eleven,’ she said, and picked up the coaster. Her father had carried her on his shoulders so she could see over the crowd. When the police turned up they had slipped away, and weren’t part of the fracas that followed.

  ‘I know they’re just coasters,’ he said. ‘But it reminds me of the old days. Old mates.’

  ‘The stuff you gave me, of Dad’s. There was a name. Stan Overton,’ she said.

  ‘Doesn’t ring a bell,’ he said.

  ‘Wasn’t one of your team?’

  ‘No one I dealt with,’ he said. ‘And I knew most of the other blokes, too.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. I was just curious.’

  ‘They used these coasters for a long time,’ Sam said. ‘Fred got some deal, in 1977, I think, seventy-seven boxes or something. From Castlemaine. Didn’t see what was coming.’

  Jen nodded. She had noticed some dark timber half-dressed by the saw. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘That’s the wenge we were telling you about. Catches your eye, doesn’t it?’

  She stood up to take a closer look. Felt the weight.

  ‘I’ve got some polished up somewhere,’ he said. ‘Hang on.’

  Jen took the piece Sam offered. Black-brown and glossy with a partridge grain. ‘I like that,’ she said. ‘Is it suitable for frames?’

  ‘Perfect,’ he said. ‘A little expensive, but no more than you’d pay for lesser quality veneer from a framer.’

  ‘You can do that here?’

  ‘For you,’ he said. ‘Yes.’

  ‘It would be perfect for some work I’m preparing now,’ she said. ‘Stand out a little.’

  ‘It will that,’ he said.

  ‘It’s not Australian, though?’

  ‘African,’ he said. ‘From the Congo, I believe.’

  Jen clucked her tongue. If it was a tropical timber, it probably hadn’t been harvested ethically, and was possibly endangered.

  ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘What did you say that bloke’s name was?’

  ‘Stan Overton.’

  ‘A fella did come in here looking for your dad once. Said he was staying nearby for a while. I think maybe his name was Stan. Don’t know if he gave me his surname.’

  Jen sat up on her stool.

  ‘Some artist from the city,’ he said. ‘Bit up himself, if you ask me.’

  ‘When was this?’

  Sam scratched his arm. ‘Gee,’ he said. ‘I’m thinking it was a week or so before I last saw your dad. But I can’t be sure.’

  Jen turned at the call of a catbird and tried to pick it out from among the foliage. She didn’t get those much. Only a kilometre away and a different world. ‘That last Sunday. I remember Dad seemed angry when we left here,’ she said.

  ‘It was probably about his pay. I couldn’t offer him the work I had been, things were pretty tough. It was cut everyone’s hours, or cut some blokes off altogether, and I didn’t want that. Most of them had families.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Your dad did some other work for me, on the side,’ he said. ‘He asked me for an advance, and I gave it to him – figured he must have been behind on the bills. Then I heard he’d left … felt pretty bad.’

  ‘It’s not your fault.’

  Sam up-ended his mug. ‘If you’re worried about using a more sustainable local timber for your frames, we could do ironbark, or stain something if you want to go a bit darker,’ he said. ‘But this wenge was taken years ago. However you look at it, you’d be giving it a second life.’

  ‘Let me have a think about it,’ she said. ‘Thanks for the cuppa.’

  ‘You okay?’

  ‘Fine,’ she said.

  Carcass

  She had been clambering all over its body in her boots. The grey ghost at the end of her garden had come down with a crash in the night. There had been something of a storm, though without much rain.

  It was more like a skeleton, after so many years dead, bleached hard, almost petrified. Like the remains of a great elephant. And here she was cutting off its limbs and carving it up.

  She should really leave it as it lay – there was more life in a dead tree than a live one. It was so full of hollows it must have been a high-rise apartment building of the forest. Jen had peered inside, looking for inhabitants, but everyone had left – except the ants, cockroaches and other tiny critters.

  Left alone, animals would return to the tree and everything would eventually rot back into the earth, as it should – but she had used up all the fallen timber she could easily access around the house. She sat down on the thickest part of the trunk. The timber was worn smooth, like a hide, and warm, as if somehow still living, still absorbing sunlight, still sentient. Still offering comfort. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. She gave thanks and savoured the sun on her face. Listened. If she were truly a creature of the forest, she would make her home here herself. The hollow trunk, at its thickest, was big enough for her to sleep in, and there were several entrances and exits, storage places for food. Its centre had been eaten out by termites, leaving behind a strange, damp woodmud. Weakening it so much that the tree had eventually given way. The force of a lightning strike had knocked it over, its roots no longer gripping the soil.

  A tree had fallen across the fence during her first year of high school. She and Phil had inspected the site and found the dislodged nest of a wompoo fruit-dove – with two eggs still intact – on the ground. They had transferred the nest onto a piece of wood pinched from the industrial arts workshop and set it up in the fork of a neighbouring tree. The eggs had probably long gone cold but it had seemed a noble project at the time.

  Going out of bounds and being late to class that day had earned them detention, but when the deputy reviewed their files, while they squirmed on orange plastic chairs, he said something about them having a difficult transition to high school, and meaning well, and let them off with lunchtime litter duty.

  Jen restarted the saw and carved off cross-sections. Many of the pieces fell apart, and what she had thought would be larger logs, suitable for burning overnight, split in half, or even quarters, as she cut.

  With all the dirt inside, and the density of the timber, the saw was soon blunt. She stopped to sharpen it, sweating beneath her overshirt.

  She and Phil had borne the
litter duty punishment with pride, ridding the schoolyard of every straw, ring-pull and paddle-pop stick. Over the course of that one hour, they hatched plans to become naturalists and build bird shelters all over the world. If only life was as simple as it had seemed then.

  She had abandoned her nest. The heart of the drawing had been its emptiness, and as it had turned out, it wasn’t empty at all.

  She had found a robin’s nest instead – way out in a brush box where it should be, rather than hanging in a basket under the eaves – disguised by lichen and ribbons of bark. Two green eggs inside. For her new piece, Jen had torn strips from an irritating article on climate change, and pasted them over bark and straw, to achieve a similar effect on the page.

  Now she worked on the robin mother, using watercolour and coloured pencils, which was all a bit of a hotchpotch, but she hoped it would come together somehow.

  She couldn’t help worrying about the mother scrubwren, though. Or, more correctly, her eggs. She seemed to be spending a lot of time off the roost. Such tiny eggs would surely cool, left unattended for so long. What if all of Jen’s coming and going had disrupted the wren’s mothering somehow? And where was the father?

  Bunya

  ‘What’s this?’

  She put four cupcakes on a plate. Chocolate. She only baked for the boy, but she had found her own sweet tooth returning as she grew older. Especially in winter. And most especially when she had been gardening, as she had today. ‘It’s a bunya nut,’ she said. ‘And a branch from the bunya tree. They used to grow all around here.’

  Henry separated paper from cake and stuffed it whole into his mouth.

  A captive audience; the perfect opportunity for a micro-lesson. ‘The bunya is important to the first people around here, the Gubbi Gubbi – it was a major food source. Other groups used to travel from miles away every few years for a big bunya festival,’ she said.

  Henry sucked the last of the cake from the roof of his mouth. ‘My aunt makes bunya nut pie,’ he said. ‘And bunya nut pesto.’

  Just as well Jen had held back on her usual anti-hippie commentary. ‘Any good?’

  ‘Pie’s all right. I don’t really like pesto.’

  Jen didn’t either, garlic didn’t agree with her at all. Or too many nuts. She broke a cupcake in half and took a bite.

  Henry gulped his tea and pushed a second cupcake in behind it. He was beginning to shoot up, getting the lanky-legged look of a man on the make. Always hungry. He turned to a fresh page in his sketchpad, selected his pencils.

  ‘The bunya goes right back to Jurassic times,’ she said. ‘Hasn’t changed much since then.’

  ‘They’re about the right size for dinosaurs,’ he said, mouth still half-full of cake.

  She laughed. ‘Megafruit for megafauna,’ she said. ‘Actually, it’s not a pine tree at all, but a conifer. Like the Wollemi pine.’

  ‘We learned about that in school,’ he said. ‘A guy found them growing in the Blue Mountains and kept it a secret.’

  ‘That’s it. They’re related.’

  She and Craig had climbed and walked all through what was now the Wollemi National Park. Craig had been miffed that they – perhaps more correctly he – hadn’t made the discovery.

  Finding bunyas on her own block had been the bigger discovery for Jen, eliciting a whoop for the whole district to hear. They were remnants of a distant past and, somehow, symbols of hope. None of the trees were old enough to produce nuts, though; she had picked this one up from a roadside.

  Henry reached for the cupcake papers without looking up from the page and popped them into his mouth.

  Jen raised an eyebrow. ‘There are more inside.’

  ‘It’s okay,’ he said, still chewing.

  She had sucked the papers, too, when a girl, but had not attempted to digest them. Cupcakes had appeared more often at Aunt Sophie’s than at home. She sighed, watching a pair of emerald doves on the back lawn, their iridescent wings catching the sun. Henry was doing a nice job of the texture of the nut – detail was his thing – but not so well on the branch itself. The leaf formation was challenging.

  ‘Remember all your shading techniques,’ she said. ‘And try to get the overall shape first with those leaves. They’re kind of triangular, I think.’

  Jen cradled her cup to warm her hands. Black cockatoos called from the ridge, their voices drifting down over the house. One day, she would like to see them drinking at the birdbaths.

  She smiled. Henry was taking great care with his shading, going for finer, more detailed movements. He hadn’t put anything of the patty cake papers back on the plate; he must have swallowed them, which couldn’t be good for his insides.

  It was cooler today, a breeze getting up under the deck. She buttoned her cardigan and crossed her legs under the table.

  Henry pushed his chair back. ‘Bathroom,’ he said.

  A robin flashed across the clearing, into the dense foliage of the tamarind. She heard the toilet flush, and the sink tap. Good; he had remembered to wash his hands.

  ‘Jen?’ He had stopped at the dining table, where the two robin pieces were waiting to go down to Sam for framing.

  She stood and went to him, blind for a moment in the womb of the house after staring at white pages in the sun.

  ‘I haven’t seen these ones before.’

  ‘You’re here for your work, not mine.’

  He touched the one of three robins bathing. ‘They look just like them!’

  ‘Thank you.’

  He leaned closer, examining her pencil work. ‘I never noticed they had little whiskers there, above their beaks.’

  ‘Cute, isn’t it?’

  ‘Did you do it from a photo, or real life?’

  ‘I’ve been watching them for a while now.’

  ‘Are they sold?’

  ‘A friend of mine runs the little gallery up the mountain and asked for a couple of pieces.’

  ‘Geez. I’ll never be this good.’

  ‘You don’t know that, Henry; I’ve been doing this a long time,’ she said. She placed her hands on his shoulders and turned him towards the deck. ‘Back to work.’

  Roadkill

  A kookaburra swooped low across the road. Jen slammed on the brakes, reducing the impact, but the bird whacked right into the middle of the windscreen, leaving a greasy smear. The Tupperware container carrying leftover cupcakes flew off the front seat and onto the floor.

  She pulled over and walked back, looking for the bird. Her whole life she had never seen or heard of a kookaburra doing that; they were too smart. Perhaps it had been sick, or young, or had a momentary lapse of judgement, too focused on some tasty morsel.

  She couldn’t find it. Not on the road or in the grass. The Hilux was blocking the road, cars ferrying children to school veering around, drivers frowning and beeping their horns. Perhaps the kookaburra had survived, flown off; they were tough. More likely it was lying in shock somewhere.

  She walked back to her vehicle: the killer. Though, as the driver, she would be the one charged. She continued on into town, twenty kilometres under the speed limit, ignoring the string of drivers behind her. She had only ever hit a bird once before, a parakeet, when she was learning to drive in her father’s truck, and had never forgotten the mush of bright feathers in the radiator.

  She made the usual exchanges in the post office: a little banal conversation, a slip for a package, bright notes for a few items. Coin in her pocket. A smile. All the while thinking, I killed a bird.

  In the cafe, she leaned over the newspaper. A father had abducted his own son after school, taking him interstate. With the hysteria around Caitlin’s disappearance still fresh, parents were up in arms about the lack of teacher supervision at pick up. The election wasn’t far away, either, so local politicians suddenly had a lot to say about child safety.

  She parked the Hilux on the access road and carried the coffees on top of the Tupperware container down the hill to the worksite.

  ‘Jen!’ L
il removed her gloves and made her way up the slope. ‘Coffee. You’re a darling.’

  ‘And cupcakes – though they took a tumble, I’m afraid,’ Jen said.

  Lil peeled back the lid with wrinkled hands. ‘They’re lovely. Let’s sit for a bit. I need to get the taste of lantana out of my mouth.’

  ‘Sorry I’m late,’ Jen said. ‘I hit a kookaburra.’

  Lil brushed crumbs from her shirt. Her eyes were clear blue, with the sparkle of a much younger woman. ‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘Are you okay?’

  Jen nodded.

  ‘And the kooka?’

  ‘Couldn’t find it.’

  ‘I’m sure it’s fine.’ Lil grinned. ‘They’re tough old birds!’

  ‘Like you,’ Jen said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How’s your mother?’

  ‘Bah,’ Lil said. ‘The meals-on-wheels lady went round on Wednesday, as usual, but there was no answer. She rang me, of course. So I tore over. And there Mum was doing a puzzle, curtains drawn, television on full bore. Dirty dishes in the sink.’

  Jen smiled.

  ‘I mean, I was glad she was all right …’

  ‘Is she eating properly?’

  ‘Subsisting on tea and biscuits from what I can gather,’ Lil said. ‘And refuses to drink water. Water! She’s had to be hospitalised twice already just for dehydration.’

  Jen offered another cupcake.

  ‘We’d better save some for the boys.’

  The ‘boys’, three men aged forty plus, had begun glancing up from behind the lantana. ‘And we’d better get to work.’

  ‘Yes. Wouldn’t want to be thought useless women,’ Lil said. ‘Though I’d happily leave the lantana to them – they seem to enjoy hacking and slaying at it.’