Nest (5 page)

The koels were at it again, singing up a ruckus. Her father had called them ‘hysterical birds’, for their rising
quow-ee quow-eel
calls, coming at quicker and quicker intervals during breeding season. The koel was a summer visitor from South-East Asia, a type of cuckoo. Another species that loved to inhabit the margins of the forest.

Its carry-on was something of a false drama; it was the other birds – those of a similar size that built open-cup nests – that had cause to be hysterical. The koels were a parasitic cuckoo, knocking the host birds’ eggs out of the nest and laying their own in their place. The males were iridescent black, the females a duller speckled brown with pale fronts. Mostly they hid in leafy tree canopies, as if ashamed of giving up their young to be raised by another species. It was only during the mating season, when the males displayed themselves and chased the females, that she could get a good look.

Her father had once taken her to a site he was clearing to see a koel’s eggs in a figbird’s nest. He had helped her climb high up into one tree to peer across into another. She hadn’t really understood what parasitic meant then, but she saw that the eggs were too large for the nest and that their not-parents were distressed.

Jen stretched for a clutch of dry leaves stuck in a lilli pilli at the edge of the lawn: a perfect fire starter. Once hatched, the host birds tended to raise the cuckoo chicks, although they were bigger and uglier than their own nestlings would be, even if it meant working full-time to feed the great things. Their parenting instincts outweighed the nightmare.

Her father had loved interesting nature facts like that. And passing them on. It was years later before she had realised that those trees would have all come down the following week, the nest and koel eggs with them. It was some comfort to think that the parent birds, at least, would have been freed up to try again with their own eggs.

S
he was up with the birds again, though it was a much more respectable hour now that the days were growing shorter.

Her mother had not been a morning person. No matter the time of year. When Jen’s father was on a job, she had made an effort, making Jen toast and Milo to eat at the kitchen bench or, in summer, on the back steps. There would always be something placed in her lunch box: leftovers, or sandwiches, and a piece of fruit. But her mother did not speak until she was halfway through her first cup of coffee, and even then it was monosyllabic.

On her father’s days off, her mother stayed in bed. He cooked eggs and bacon and tomatoes while Jen made the toast and tea. Or sometimes they made banana fritters together, Jen pouring in the batter and her father flipping them over with the wonky spatula. Its handle was all melted where Jen had left it leaning on the side of the pan.

After her father left, it was Jen who made her mother coffee, and breakfast, though her mother didn’t often eat anything at that time of day. Jen hadn’t bothered with lunches for a while,
just taken an apple, or bought a punnet of strawberries from the stall on the way to school. When the neighbours realised what was going on at home, they refused her coins, and delivered a box of fruit and vegetables from their hothouse once a week.

Her mother had been grateful, and made an appearance the next time – in reasonable order – to thank them. She had been angry at Jen, though, assuming the neighbours’ kindness was the result of some sort of complaint. ‘It’s nobody’s business but ours,’ she had said. ‘Understand?’

Jen had not said a word to anyone, but people thought everyone else’s business their own in those days – particularly around the welfare of children.

It was eluding her again: the essence of bird. The mystery of what held the tiny fairy-wren together, made it more than a spot of feathers on stick legs with a flitting tail. She could not seem to channel, even for a moment, wild bird, despite her well-trained arm.

‘A good eye is more important than the hand,’ her first drawing teacher had said, somewhat primly, in senior high school. Jen had trained her eye, and studied birds, but now it seemed the more she knew, the less effectively her hand was able to reproduce what she saw.

It had taken several years and several more teachers to help her realise that the most important thing was somewhere between the hand and the eye. Towards the end of her third year at art school, Mr Grieg had stood behind her, watching her work, which had been unnerving enough. She could sense he was nodding. With approval, she hoped. When he reached over her shoulder and placed his hand on her chest, she had
nearly pissed her pants. The sudden wetness there was enough for her to think that perhaps she had.

‘Good,’ he said. ‘Remember that you draw from here, Jennifer. An artist cannot afford to be afraid of her emotions.’

She had been more afraid of him, and the beautiful naked man arranged in front of the class, than her own feelings. She was not the first student Grieg had laid his elegant hands on, nor would she be the last. Still, it had led to something of a breakthrough in her work, though it was not the human form she was to excel at.

What she was most interested in was missing in people, except in brief moments of lust or rage – and these were not the faces they presented to the world, especially when posing for a portrait.

Not for the first time, she wondered if it wasn’t a mistake to try to pin the bird to the page, to confine it to paper with her meagre scratches and marks. The pleasure of living among them should be enough.

Craig always said she should get out in the world instead of copying it, insisting on walking, climbing, kayaking, running, and abseiling flat-out past all the detail. It was true that she tended to inhabit a land of her own, somewhere between the work in progress and that which had inspired it, but in those days she had been in the world far too much.

As if to emphasise the point, the family of fairy-wrens flitted and flirted their long tails at the baths, the cobalt blue and russet of the males no less astounding for the frequency with which she saw it. It made them vain, though. She preferred the plainer females with their red eye masks and more subtle touches of blue in their tail feathers. Their cheerful chatter lacked the
self-consciousness of the males, the need to perform. And she knew all too well what it was to be the plainer of a pair.

They landed on the railing so lightly, or on the edge of the birdbath, floating in and out of the water. How could she hope to draw such weightlessness, such grace, such joy.

A breeze shifted the palm fronds, scraping the roof. She got up from the table and stepped into the relative dark of the room. It was too early for lunch, just eleven, but she was hungry. She cut two pieces of bread, a couple of slices of cheese, and made a sandwich with a smear of mango chutney and the handful of fresh greens she had picked while watering after breakfast. She put the kettle on for tea.

She was too set in her ways, no doubt, but routine was what produced the headspace she needed. She sat on the back steps, to eat, in dappled sun.

A
slip in her post office box said she had a parcel to collect. The new birding book she had ordered, perhaps. It was peak hour – after-school pick-up – and there were seven people ahead of her; she hadn’t timed it well at all.

It was dead quiet inside. Caitlin Jones’s parents were at the counter with a great stack of letters; some sort of mail-out. They no longer bore much resemblance to the newspaper pictures, their features gaunt and somehow exaggerated; caricatures of their former selves. They stood close together, him with his hand on her lower back, but his eyes suggested he was far away. They would each deal with it in their own way, any cracks in their relationship magnified. They were aware, too, of standing centre stage, of having become the public property of the community.

Everyone in line stared, but averted their eyes the minute the couple turned, suddenly very interested in the Hallmark cards or true crime books. Jen stood her ground, determined to acknowledge them, and her sympathy for their grief, though she had never met them.

The father was Brenden Jones’s son, and according to the paper, Caitlin’s mother had lived here all her life. Without her maiden name it was hard to pick the family. She looked a bit like a Shorten, but Jen wasn’t sure. She could find out easily enough, but the family had already lost enough of their privacy.

When Jen had first moved back, she had imagined getting a post office box at the unmanned office in the hamlet closer to her. She would walk down the hill every day, leaving the forest for the gentler slopes of the dairy farms, with their falling-down timber fences and iron sheds, cross the creek, admire the old stationmaster’s house on its green banks, overhung with the great jacaranda dropping a purple carpet in spring, to check her deep square box in anonymity. But there were no boxes available, and a long waiting list, so she had been forced to take one in town.

She wasn’t sure she would take the box if offered it now, having grown used to the exchange with the post office ladies when collecting her parcels and sending things off. It was how she kept up with the town and no doubt how the town kept up with her.

She still took envious note when driving through the hamlet of the characters who had come out of the hills, in from their farms and studios and sheds, parking outside and ducking in to collect their mail in dreadlocks and boots, without having to worry if they were properly dressed, or having to clear their throats to speak.

Their business done, the Joneses turned and faced the audience. The young woman directly behind them sloped to the counter, possibly the only person oblivious to who they were. Jen looked them each in the face, though what she saw there had her feeling bilious, and nodded as they walked past her and out the glass doors.

Normal conversation resumed, perhaps even a little more vigorous than usual, as soon as the parents were down the steps and into their white Pajero.

Jen took her parcel without looking at it and signed her name in the ledger. The Joneses’ mail-out was still on the counter, in neat piles. Jen turned to hurry out into the fresh air.

Michael’s parents had left town in the end. Separately. They divorced eighteen months after Michael went missing, and sold their house, with its pool and sunken garden full of adventures and memories. A childhood. Jen had liked Michael’s mother, and staying over. Especially when she baked lasagne. His father had been a bit strict, and right into his football, yelling at the screen when his team – the maroon one – let him down. Jen hadn’t minded him, except when he was mean to Michael.

The fact that he had a temper was enough for people to suspect him, to talk. Jen had thought that all rubbish, even at the time, but the police had him in more than once. In the end all that broke was their family. Michael’s poor sister, Hannah, ended up living with a relative in the city.

S
ometimes, especially when she first woke, she had trouble distinguishing between her dreams, her drawings, and reality. As if she had been set loose from her moorings to sail in other worlds. It happened more often as the weather grew cooler, the nights longer and her sleep deeper.

When working, she tried to inhabit that place as long as she could. To stay in a dreamy bubble. She had breakfast in her dressing-gown, left the phone unplugged. Tried to keep her toes deep down in her subconscious mud. Every now and then there was a touch of mystery, and it flowed into her work.

She kept a sketchbook on the deck table in summer, the kitchen bench in winter, in case of bird visitations, but also of inspiration. The book somehow gave her freedoms she didn’t have sitting up at the drawing desk in her studio. Opening the door and stepping down into her place of work sometimes had the effect of driving ideas and dreams away. Like entering the classroom.

It took her weeks to recover from her first day on the job. She remembered only standing in front of their flesh-coloured
faces, smoothing her navy skirt, and writing her name on the blackboard, her mind just as blank. All her clever ideas and plans had slipped out the window and across the oval into the blue gums. While the students seemed to manage to daydream just fine, she turned stern and plain. It became easier with time, but she finished each year a little more depleted.

Jen scratched at her scalp, her hair probably overdue for a wash. Her pyjamas, too. There was a tea-coloured splodge over one of the robin redbreasts on her front, and a bit of dried porridge stuck to her sleeve. She had ordered her robin pyjamas online, underwhelmed by the stripes and spots she found in stores. She should have ordered two pairs, or perhaps a set of the magpie ones, too, because she was always reluctant to give them up to the laundry basket.

The whipbirds were chuffing about in the lilli pillis. For the first few years, she had only ever heard a pair calling to each other, never catching sight of them. They were the opposite of what parents called for: heard but not seen. Now there was an extended family, and they had become braver – or her eye more accustomed, perhaps – and she sighted them regularly close by the house.