Nest (17 page)

She looked up at the sudden whack against the window above her desk: a bird trying to fly through. The trouble with so many windows and, possibly, keeping them so clean, was that the birds saw a path through the house. Or perhaps they didn’t even see it as a house. She stood and leaned out, searching the ground below. A rufous fantail lay motionless among the leaves.

She raced to the door, slid into shoes and ran around the house. It was limp and still, its pretty tail spread. All she seemed to do lately was kill birds.

But she was not without hope. She had been caught out before, beginning to bury a female rosella only to have it return to life. This fantail, too, might just be in shock. She took off her shirt and gathered the bird up, carrying it inside – lest it become lunch for a kookaburra or currawong. She popped shirt and bird in a box and sat it inside the open front door.

When she had finished setting up her watercolours and brushes and changed the water in her jar, she checked on the bird. She found it blinking – as if waking from a deep sleep. She would have liked to believe he knew her as a friend and didn’t blame her for hanging invisible glass weapons in his way. She opened the shirt up a little, resisting the urge to caress him, and backed away.

Sketching out the next robin piece was the most difficult part – committing pencil to paper.

The fantail was scrabbling against the cardboard, confusing the image in her head. Rufous over yellow. She focused on the lead trailing across the grain of the page, and the robins returned to the foreground, where they preferred to be.

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.

T
he 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.’

T
he 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.

S
he 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. Not 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.