by Inga Simpson
When she got up to check again, the fantail was gone. It had flown the box. Jen smiled. She had not killed a bird today.
Gallery
The way in was a maze of roundabouts and canals, the signage unhelpful to the unfamiliar. Jen gave up on the map and followed her nose along the river. It was greener than at home, the lawns still lush. According to the map, the gallery was over the bridge on a little headland, near the library. Pelicans watched from the streetlights, and white boats celebrated the cobalt waters. Jen turned into the street she had written down, passed a brown heritage sign that probably said gallery, and parked the Hilux in the shade of a spreading fig. The road was closed for some sort of market, all white tents and rainbow clothing. A green-grassed park rolled down to the water’s edge. A couple lay in the sun on a red blanket, next to two rather incongruous World War II shells.
She followed the winding path around, beneath Moreton Bay figs and tree ferns. The gallery’s glass doors, looking out to the water, were closed. Jen peered in, past the shop counter, and noted some of David Paulson’s later works occupying the main space. Her little pieces could not compete with their size and colour, their boldness. Or the photorealism of the Christopher Page eagle in the foyer. A clock on the wall said she was ten minutes early.
She retraced her steps and browsed the tables of a second-hand bookstall at the edge of the market. A tattered first edition of Skemp’s My Birds all but flew into her hand. At only eight dollars, she took it to the counter, sure it was worth three times that.
She nursed the cloth hardcover under her arm right through the meeting and tour. The curator, Maureen, was one of those eternally bubbly and optimistic women whose enthusiasm never seemed to flag. It was exhausting, but what was needed to persist in the art world, especially in this day and age.
‘So, what do you think?’
‘It’s a lovely gallery,’ Jen said. It was smallish, a series of rooms without any great space from which to stand back and appreciate larger works. But that would work quite well for most of her pieces. And the spot was tranquil, beneath trees and by the water, like some sort of hide – albeit open to the public. ‘I’d welcome the opportunity to exhibit here.’
Maureen clapped her hands together. ‘I’m so pleased. I absolutely love your work,’ she said. ‘As soon as I saw those robins, I just knew you were back.’
Jen smiled. Flattery, as uncomfortable as it felt, was always welcome.
‘Wait just a minute.’ Maureen flurried out of the room in a swish of silk.
Jen flicked through her book, scanning a paragraph to see if the bird descriptions were as good as she remembered. Maureen returned carrying one of Jen’s early pieces, the second or third she had sold: black cockatoos feasting on a pine cone. Tearing it apart, really. Like lions at a carcass.
‘I inherited this,’ Maureen said. ‘From my mother. I just love their faces.’
‘That makes me feel a little old,’ Jen said. ‘It’s from my graduation exhibition.’ The exhibition, at the Drill Hall Gallery, had been politely received. A few sales, and some nice write-ups. But not glowing. With graduates producing shark skin ‘heavy petting gloves’ and enormous postmodern sculptures, she was all but invisible. A junior arts writer for the Canberra Times had given her the ‘bird lady’ tag that had stuck.
‘I’ve been working on a list of galleries and private owners on record as having your works,’ Maureen said. ‘Perhaps I could email that to you, and if you have any you can add …’
Jen blinked. ‘Sure.’
‘We don’t need all of them, obviously, but a good cross-section.’
Drier
The showers had freshened things up for a while, but three hot days had turned her world back to brown and crispy. Jen refilled the birdbaths, drunk dry already.
It was supposed to be hot again, thirty-three, with a late change and the chance of some rain. Despite all that technology and equipment, that was the best the bureau could come up with: ‘the chance of a shower’. Even odds. Tossing a coin or glancing at the sky would be just as effective. The heat had to break but nothing about the bush suggested there was rain coming. The trees were dropping leaves flat-out and the birds kept to the shade, beaks open. Most telling of all, black ants swarmed the kitchen sink, encircling the plughole like miniature bison.
Lil said that getting hot like this, before the rain, was not a good sign. Except for lantana eradication.
Jen turned off the kitchen tap and stood still. There was a swamp wallaby at the bottom of the garden, ears twitching. He looked towards the house from behind his dark robber’s mask. She memorised his stance, the lengths of his limbs. The ginger bases of his ears. She stepped out onto the deck, keeping behind a post. He sensed her, stood a little more alert.
She took another step, peering out from behind the post. He took off, downhill, each springy hop loud on the dry leaves. She refilled her glass with cold water from the fridge and retreated to her studio, beneath the shifting air of the fan.
She was still eating her breakfast when the phone rang. She looked up from the page, contemplated leaving it. But it was nearly seven, and a Henry Day. ‘Hello?’
‘Jen, it’s Kay.’
‘Hey.’
‘Henry’s not coming today. The counsellor, from school, he’s had an accident.’
‘What?’
‘Fishing. Off the rocks. Washed out to sea. They found his body this morning.’
‘Is Henry okay?’
‘He’s upset. They all are. He’d been seeing the counsellor every week.’
Jen swallowed.
‘It’s been good, I think. But it will make this even harder.’
‘Yes.’
‘Anyway, I’m sorry for the late notice. They only just found out.’
‘It’s fine, Kay,’ she said. ‘Take care.’
‘You, too.’
Jen put the handset back in its cradle. Sighed. That class was having a bad year.
Driest
She hosed her lettuces and cherry tomatoes. Water trucks thundered up and down the road. Her tank was low, but it was only her, and if she was careful, she shouldn’t have to buy any in. Surely it had to rain in the next few weeks.
Waiting for rain generated a certain tension, and endless opportunities for procrastination. Weeding would be easier when the ground was soft. There was no use planting – until it rained. It was better to leave the grass long. After almost two months, she had settled into a sort of malaise. She was spending more time in the studio, at least, and had an idea for a major new piece.
Of course, rain wasn’t the only thing everyone was waiting for. There was no news of Caitlin, no clue. Not a word from the police for over a month. Even the media had moved on. It was sucking the life out of the town, just as the dry was browning the green.
Jen soaked her herbs, prone to drying out in their fat terracotta pots, to protect them from the thirty-degree day forecast to follow. The garbage truck tore up the hill, too fast, then locked up, its wheels braking in the loose gravel built up on the side of the road. A cloud of dust floated down over the orchard.
Her carry-on about the road – her mailbox and trees, at least – had been all too hard for council. They finished the tarring where they had first intended, just short of her property line.
She had loved the idea of a gravel road in the beginning, remote and inaccessible. The look of it, too: soft terracotta beneath a green tree arch. There was more traffic now, though, utes speeding through pulling rattling trailers, and she couldn’t wait for it to be sealed. Council used to grade the road three times a year, taking several days to do the job. Now, it was once a year, and finished in a day. Within a few weeks it was full of potholes and corrugations, deepening to juddering pits, and she was sick of the dust.
Jen turned off the tap, picked a handful of rocket and lettuce for her lunch and returned to the cool of the house.
Her skin was dry and itchy, wanting to flake off like the bark of the spotted gums outside. N
ot that she was lucky enough to have a smooth new version of herself waiting underneath; she was stuck with the skin she had, stretching and wrinkling with each passing year.
When the rains came late, like this, it was easy to think, as Christmas and New Year approached, that this was summer. The way everyone else knew summer, with sunny days, clean surf and clear nights. The bright beach towel left on the line for next time, the outdoor furniture uncovered. Reminding her that holidays did not have to be as she remembered them as a child – stuck indoors with the mould while it rained and rained for a month. The last time the wet had come this late was 1996, Lil said, and it had held off until the very end of January. There was no escaping it, though. The annual rainfall had to come, and the later it came, the more condensed a period it would fall within – and the more damage it would do.
The rufous fantail who had hit the window – she was sure it was the same one – often fluttered about her studio now, as if remembering the encounter, flitting its tail this way and that to show off its span and fine russet tones, chirping and fussing. He was wasting his time, but it was the utmost flattery to be courted by a bird.
Why did birds sing? It was the gift of language, the birds’ way of communicating with each other. But why so pretty? Perhaps to make up for the fragility of the singer, perched on hollow bones. Did it give them pleasure to perform their songs, as it did to hear them? There was no explaining beauty in nature. And there were horrors, too.
Only yesterday morning she had seen a butcherbird – horror enough – with something in its claws. Focusing her binoculars on the scene, she had found it was a yellow robin, flopped quite still and dead. She had chased the damned butcher away, but it was all too late. It was the way of things, and she should not interfere or sook, but she had been too upset to draw, cleaning out the laundry instead. All day she had tried not to think on it, pushing the image out of her mind. Red spilling over yellow.
She had given the robins a false sense of security, thinking that they were safe in this clearing. But with the trees dropping leaves and branches to survive the dry spell, the butcherbirds snuck in to spy little birds from the high branches, swooping to strike.
Moment
A cool change around midnight brought nothing but wind. She had fallen asleep amid a rain of sticks and gumnuts on the roof and the bending of trees, and awoke from turbulent dreams.
It was blown drier than ever, and the deck, lawn and drive were covered in mess. Still, the drop in temperature was a relief. She gathered up bits of branch from the lawn, some as thick as her arm. There would be less opportunity to burn them now. She had already filled her kindling basket, and the fireplace. Now she was filling the wheelbarrow, to push up to the rubbish pile. She set aside those sticks too thick to break under her boot to chainsaw later.
The birds warbled and sang, happier for the cool. A black cockatoo called from somewhere down in the gully. Everything was brown and crunchy, like down south in late summer. For the first time since she had moved back, fire was a worry. Someone had dropped a note in her mailbox – one of the neighbours wanting to discuss a fire plan. It was probably a good idea, but she was hanging on to the hope of it raining first.
The ants had come into the bathroom, drinking from the puddles of water left by her feet and climbing her toothbrush in its tall glass for whatever nutrients they found there. And she had almost trodden on a red-bellied black snake on the cool step of the studio.
She put on her boots to water the vegetables, which were limp and sulky. Even the herbs were burned off.
‘Oh.’ She had heard the crash in the night, of something coming down. There had been a brief silence afterwards, before the owls and bats and crickets started up again. Whether the silence had been surprise or a mark of respect, she wasn’t sure. It was a brush box. Or half of one, at least. Grown top-heavy and then snapped off, leaving a splintery stump. The driveway was blocked. It was a problem; she had an appointment with the shrink in an hour.
She re-dressed: jeans and an old shirt. The shed, where she kept the saw and other tools, was cool. Her hands were clumsy pulling the cord; she had to relax her arm or the cord would jam and jar, wrenching her shoulder. The machine started without much protest and smoked until she shut off the choke.
It was the thin end of the tree, more bulk than weight. She trimmed each springy limb from the trunk before slicing it into lengths. It hurt a little, to cut a tree so fresh, although she had not brought it down herself. The leaves were still bright green, its heart sap-filled and rebellious, as if it did not yet know it was dead.
She took pleasure in the work, breaking down the tree, carving it up and hauling away the parts, the way she imagined a skilled hunter might cut up an animal out of need in the snow. She liked to think she now wielded the blade in a way her father would have been proud of, shadowing what she remembered of his own technique.
Craig had never really wanted her to be his equal in chainsawing. Or his equal in anything for that matter. It had amused him to let her play with his toys, under his guiding hand, to try the things he did, as long as she didn’t surpass him. It had taken her a long time to see that. Those belief systems were so deeply ingrained in men, and women too, that they were replicated, consciously and unconsciously, all the way down the line.
When she had won a grant to work in the States and had the opportunity to walk the Sierras, she had just thought him jealous. He had always wanted to trace John Muir’s footsteps but hadn’t been able to take the time off work to come with her. It had been more than that, though; some kind of fear of her walking independently of him.
‘What’s the workshop, anyway?’ he had asked.
‘It’s a retreat, with Kym Daniels, the wildlife artist,’ she said. ‘I didn’t think I’d get in.’ In those days she had still been trying to keep her art going on weekends and holidays, even harbouring ideas about working towards another exhibition. She had laboured over the application for weeks without telling him and sent her portfolio from work, as if it were a dream she had no right to have.
‘What’s so good about him?’
‘She is the best in the field. I’ll be working with ten other artists from all over the world. What we produce will be exhibited, and perhaps published in an artist’s book. Part of it is about describing our practice, which I suck at.’
‘But you’ll have to take time off work,’ he said. ‘And we had the Bungonia trip planned.’
‘Only a few days.’ Teaching in a private school, she had an extra non-teaching week every term break, which had been burning him up for years. ‘We can still do the trip, if we leave two days later than we planned.’
He had smiled and nodded, but she had felt him turn dark underneath.
The workshop, and the trip as a whole, had changed her life. The feedback process had been fierce – she spent more than one night in tears – but she produced some of her best work. She had been so focused on working with Kym at first that she had underestimated the value of working with the other students. A mature group of peers with such a similar focus, similar passions. Four years of art school had not even come close to that week.
Some of them had been postgraduate students from the school, and they organised a field trip. They had walked and taken photographs and sketched. She had seen her first wolf and lain beside its tracks in the snow. Somehow the new landscape had kicked off something in her. She was an artist. If not by profession, by way of life. By nature. On the flight home, several wines into the long dark haul over the Pacific, she had been determined never to let go of that feeling. To find a way to keep working, somehow.
Craig had not been at the airport to meet her. She arrived home, after a fifty-dollar taxi ride, to an empty apartment and a Post-it note on the fridge. He was walking the Bungonias – on schedule and without her.
Jen hadn’t unpacked her bags, leaving them in the narrow hallway, as if she might leave again, still riding the great wave of inspiration. She had ordered takeaway and
eaten it alone on the balcony with the bottle of Californian chenin blanc she had brought back to share with Craig. Made plans. For the first time, she had felt life to be full of possibilities.
Jen propped the end of the splintered trunk up off the cement with her boot to make the last cut. She misjudged it a little, slicing right through the timber and bringing the blade down on her boot. The log rolled down the drive. She turned off the saw. Her boot was steel-capped, stopping the blade, but there was an unsightly notch in the leather over the toe.
By the time Craig returned, she had washed her clothes, put all her gear away, and cooked his favourite – veal scaloppine – for a welcome-home dinner.
She had been a stupid woman. Weak. Still wanting to believe the best in him, that he would change. But people didn’t really change and he never saw the need. Even as she watched Craig slice up the veal and eat it a little too fast, between stories about his walk, she knew she had made a mistake. He did not ask about her trip. She had told him anyway, shown him all of her pictures. But as she turned the album’s pages, she felt all the magic slipping away.
The sun had lifted itself above the tree line, lighting up the leaves. She dragged brush box limbs off to one side of the driveway and threw the lengths of wood, with an exaggerated back swing, into a rough pile on the other. She would have to ferry it down to the shed later.
Koel birds were calling all around – drowning out any other song. There seemed to be more of them than ever, and knowing what the birds were really up to, their rising notes had her feeling anxious.
She dusted off her jeans and jogged down the driveway, put the saw in the carport and ran into the house, already peeling off clothes.
Chance of a Shower
