Nest (12 page)

She had walked around Sam’s envelope, still sitting on the kitchen bench, for several days, imagining what might be inside. It probably meant she was gutless or some sort of masochist. Just as when she was a teenager she had, for a time, taken pleasure in opening the fridge to assess all of the things that she could eat, only to close the door and walk away.

Aunt Sophie had managed it with her usual grace, cooking healthy meals, stocking the crisper with carrots and celery, and running on the beach with Jen most mornings. She had organised the house around Jen’s study schedule and forked out for art materials she hadn’t really been able to afford.

Jen made a pot of peppermint tea and sat down with the envelope and a letter opener at the table on the back deck. It was still cool, even in the sun.

The robins, she had to admit, were a little pushy. A bit larger than some of the other birds, and with the strength of numbers, they tended to dominate the birdbaths when they were around.

Today one sat on the deck railing, looking straight at her while she sipped her tea. They did that. She had been feeling a little low, and along comes a robin, irresistible in his grey and yellow suit, to remind her of all there was to live for. It was hard not to read intelligence into their dark eyes.

She paused, as motionless as a hunter. Or as if she were the subject of a still life.

You shouldn’t want to tame a wild thing, and you couldn’t. But sometimes she longed to have a robin as a companion, to sit on her shoulder or on her drawing desk, through the day, chirruping away. To be able to smooth its feathers, caress it. Just one. A creature that was just for her.

This one needed a little smoothing – the feathers on the back of his head were ruffled, as if he had just woken up, the line between body and wing all a jumble. She tried to concentrate, instead, on the detail of his claws, the mix of grey and yellow on his upper back, the touch of white on his wing.

She refilled her cup. Took a breath. She slit the envelope and spread the pieces out before her, one of the many puzzles of her life. The pictures had all been taken at the mill. Her father, Sam and two men she didn’t know standing atop giant logs. Their eyes in the shade of their caps. A new truck. Neat stacks of lumber.

Sam had cut out a picture from the local paper back then, all yellow now. That gave her some names for the faces: John Coggil and Colin Yeeman. They were names she knew: men who had cut trees with her father. Colin had given it away after he put a saw through his thigh a second time. She remembered the blood on the floor of her father’s truck and him getting home from the hospital as she was eating breakfast.

Her dad and Colin had some sort of falling out with John. Probably over money, or a job. He had provenance going right back to the first timber-getters, a third-generation sawyer, who probably didn’t think much of a bloke cutting his own leg. But all she had were the gleanings of a child overhearing after-dinner adult conversation, most of which hadn’t made much sense at the time, let alone years later.

She had a vague memory of an argument at the house, after she had gone to bed, brown longneck bottles strewn around the yard when she left for school. Her mother making her disapproval quite clear as she gathered them up. But that was the only time the men had visited the house while she was there.

A brown comb. A packet of Tally-Hos. An unopened pouch of Champion Ruby tobacco. Why hadn’t someone taken that and smoked it? She sniffed – stale. But it still carried the image of her father with his brown forearm hanging out the window, the burned-down cigarette between his first and second fingers. She tucked the packet into her shirt pocket.

She sipped her tea. There was one of her old school photos, like the one he had kept clipped to the visor of the truck. Faded and creased. Grade six by the look of it. The uniformed girl in the photograph still had pigtails, her best friend and a father. No wonder she was grinning so foolishly.

It was because of their class photo, taken earlier. Michael had always pulled some stunt or another; it was a tradition. In grade one he rubbed his hair with a ruler until it was standing straight up at the back, and the photographer failed to notice. In grade two, he’d put his jumper on at the last minute – inside out. In grade three, he had an accomplice. He and Jason Ambley, on opposite ends of the second row, managed peace signs above the girls’ heads. By fourth grade, the teachers were on to it. He had to content himself with one sock up and one down. He had been sick in year five. Whether on purpose or not, she didn’t know, but that year’s photo was nonetheless notable for his absence. Grade six had been the best yet, a classic. The grade sevens, due to line up first, had been milling about on the oval with them, in the care of a relief teacher while the real teachers had their group photo done. Michael had convinced the Owen brothers – only a year apart in school – to swap. Somehow, when their own teachers reappeared, they hadn’t noticed. Both classes had managed not to crack up, though their smiles had an unusually uniform brilliance when the photos came back. The Owen boys reckoned their own parents didn’t pick it until
it was pointed out, and then – much to their relief – appreciated the joke.

There hadn’t been many smiles in grade seven, and there were no jokes, because Michael wouldn’t ever be in their photographs again.

There was an old Fourex coaster from the pub. She flipped it over. Stan Overton. A six-digit phone number. It didn’t look like her father’s writing. Probably some work contact, another tree-killer looking for work.

There was a stack of faded handwritten receipts for fuel. Never claimed. Today’s were lucky to last out till tax time, especially in this climate. She often wondered what happened when people were audited and all their receipts had gone blank. If it wasn’t, somehow, deliberate.

The pay slips, such as they were, didn’t tell her a great deal. He hadn’t earned much for hard work – but she had already known that from her lunch box contents. Some of the receipts were interesting: payments for loads of wood he had organised himself, perhaps. Those sums seemed larger, but then he would have had to pay his men, and maybe give Sam a cut. The date on one of them pulled her up; it was the day he disappeared. A larger sum than usual, too.

J
en put on her boots at the front door. The scrubwren’s eyes were less fierce in their little black mask. Jen would have liked to get a photograph, but that felt too rude, too intrusive.

She took advantage of the cool morning to walk to the village. It was always a pleasant journey down, but with a killer return. The council were doing something patchy to the side of the road, and one fellow gave her a wave. She waved back.

The dairy farm off towards the mountain was lush green, and the dams full, but the cattle were bellowing. It couldn’t be for want of food or drink. Perhaps they had been separated from their calves. Jen’s thighs were burning already, straining not to tumble downhill. A kingfisher sat on the powerline, surveying the scene. In the sun, his coat was indeed as resplendent as a king’s.

It had all begun here – the ‘opening up’ of the area. The first white settler had lived just downstream, in a hut on the bank of the creek, accumulating runs until he controlled the land all around the river mouth. He had owned the abattoir on Slaughter Yard Road, too – quite a monopoly. He had grazed
cattle, though not all that successfully – run off, in the end, by Gubbi Gubbi. It gave her some pleasure to know that the first people had been particularly ‘troublesome’ in the area. As if something in the country itself encouraged resilience.

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.

S
he 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.