Nest (9 page)

Probably, in the circumstances, and with her grades and acceptance into the arts program, she could have applied for
some sort of scholarship, but it wasn’t done then, to ask for help, no matter how much you needed it. And at the time, her mother had not been able to give much thought to the future.

Her mother had barely emerged from the bedroom for months, until Aunt Sophie came and took her to the doctor. She improved a little for a while after that – taking some sort of medication, perhaps – and was able to go through the motions of buying groceries and preparing meals most days.

People had called it a nervous breakdown. They had used that term to cover a lot of things then, especially of women. She couldn’t recall a man ever having a nervous breakdown. Jen’s shrink used the term ‘breakdown’, on its own, without the nervous part, more like an old car. He also talked about depression.

It had shamed her mother, being left like that, though it should only have reflected on her father. But perhaps it was always the woman shamed. When she and Craig had split, she had seen judgement on more than one of her own close friends’ faces. That unspoken question: what did you do?

Glen and Phil ended up at the same high school; that had kept her going. For a while. When the principal suspended her, for the second time, in grade nine, and her mother declined to attend an interview at the school, Aunt Sophie finally intervened. She drove up and tried to talk to her mother. That night, or early the next morning, her mother tried to kill herself. With sleeping tablets – hardly original. Aunt Sophie called the ambulance, and signed the forms for her to be admitted.

By the end of the year Jen was living with her aunt and attending All Saints. At the time, she was relieved to get out
of the house, the town, and the state, though she was ill with guilt at leaving her mother. ‘You’ve got your own life to think about, Jenny,’ Aunt Sophie would say. ‘She’s responsible for hers. Not you.’

As it turned out, it was the wake-up call her mother needed. Aunt Sophie had known her better than Jen could ever hope to. She had to turn to the Brethren to do it – they prayed for, and preyed on, people just like her – but it helped her out of the place she had been stuck in.

The Brethren were still hidden throughout the hills, their women barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen, just like the good old days. The biggest grossing cafe at the annual music festival – a replica prairie house – was Brethren-run. The women did all the work, while the men sat about watching the money being made; it was against their religion for men to handle food.

You could pick the women in town, occasionally, from their conservative dress code, but the men tended to blend in. As with hippies, hooch and politics, it didn’t pay to mouth off in front of someone you didn’t know well; you never could tell.

S
he found a shady spot for the Hilux in the car park out the back of the national park.

For her first walk of the season, Jen wasn’t doing the mountain summit, which was tough going, but a circuit out through the heathland. It was flattish, with some steady elevation: good exercise and good training. Fewer walkers, too.

She pulled her pack from the back, slipped into the straps and put on a hat and sunscreen. It was still cool, and there were only a handful of other vehicles in the car park. Midweek during the school term was the best time to walk. The best time for everything, really.

It was one of the many advantages of not teaching anymore: no longer being locked into school holidays, setting up camp with hundreds of families. As if she hadn’t seen and heard enough children during term. She and Craig had tried to go to more and more remote places, to avoid the crowds, but the days when you could just camp anywhere were gone. They had kitted out his four-wheel drive so they could sleep in the back, which gave them more freedom. She had only to say, ‘What about here?’
when Craig pulled up somewhere nice, and he would nod and switch off the engine. That had been half the reason she had bought the Hilux, intending to set it up the same way.

She set out with the sun at her back, the path wide and well-worn at the start. She- and he-oaks whispered around her. She bent down to pick up a seed pod; its prickle, and the fissure of the tree’s slim trunk against her hand, gave her the texture she had craved.

There was no sign of the inhabitants of the other cars, further ahead perhaps or doing the summit. It was her goal to climb the mountain again by the end of winter, and take some fresh photographs from the top. If her knees were up to it. There were always plants on top of volcanic peaks, and animals, too, that were unique to that environment.

The Castle, part of the Budawang Range down south, was the best example she had seen. Its flat, mesa-like top, when you finally scaled its walls, was a world all of its own, with Castle-specific pines and gums and banksias, glorious mosses and wildflowers, and a collection of wrens and robins. Camping there – in the holidays during her second year at art school – had been like inhabiting a fantasy story. So much so that she had had to force herself to return to earth, several days after she had run out of food.

The path dropped downhill and curved around, through a carpet of grass trees boasting tall spears from their green umbrella fronds. It was only forty minutes from her own forest, but a world apart. Drier and more open, despite getting a similar rainfall in summer. Another in-between place.

She began the climb up to the next lookout. Jen ran her hand through the cascading straps of a grass tree and watched her feet on the stone steps. She noted the geebungs thickening,
and stepped over a cascade of pine cones. The last ten metres had her heart pumping, but she wasn’t in such bad shape after all. She could thank the weeds, and her driveway, for that.

She leaned on the railing, looking out. To the west, she was surrounded by a moat of plantation pines, their dark green uniformity at odds with the native bushland. A mob of wallabies grazed on the slope below. She had a perfect shot, if she were inclined to eat meat, which she was not. She liked to think of herself as self-sufficient, but she did not think she could bear to kill an animal, even if she were starving. A fish maybe, or a crayfish. There were several hundred edible plants in this area; they would have to do. She wouldn’t measure up against the woodsmen and women of the northern hemisphere she liked to read about, hunting elk and grouse. Living off the land was all very well, but she had to be able to live with herself.

Harming another person, let alone a child, was an even greater horror, and yet it festered in all of them: the capacity to hurt, and the fear of that capacity in themselves and in others.

Caitlin’s parents were stuck. They all were. Waiting. No one could even say ‘dead’, although they all hoped she was, because the alternative was worse. Jen surveyed the land spreading out beneath her, running down to the creek, as if it could offer up the answers. For a moment, she thought she heard a whisper – the land speaking to her – but it was probably just the wind in the she-oaks.

She walked on, and down, quadriceps straining on the giant stone steps. At the bottom, a red-faced man leaned against the timber sign in singlet and shorts.

‘Hi,’ he said.

‘Hello.’

‘Worth it?’ He pointed to the path she had just come down.

‘Definitely,’ she said.

‘Righto,’ he said. ‘Thanks.’

He set off up the steps with a great deal of huffing and puffing. She should have offered him some water; he didn’t seem to be carrying any. Hopefully he wouldn’t give himself a heart attack.

Up and around the next bend, on a drier and narrower path, she dropped into a shallow mallee heath valley. The grass trees were bigger, and the geebung. The banksias, dwarfed and gnarly, were a sea of yellow candles, lighting the understorey. Fire came through here more often, seeding not only the banksias but the grass trees and wattles.

She had taken her mother on this walk, when she was still mobile. As a Mother’s Day or birthday present. Packed a picnic lunch and carried it in. Chicken, potato salad, a French stick. Things Jen never usually ate. Her mother had eaten it all up, and gazed about. ‘This is just lovely, Jenny.’ She had even asked a Japanese tourist to take a photo in front of a stand of paperbarks, which was a turnabout. Jen still had it somewhere. She had been struck, when she saw it, by how much she looked like her mother, and how much her mother looked like someone else.

Jen took a drink from her water bottle. Fantails and honeyeaters flitted about as if she wasn’t there, well accustomed to walkers and photographers.

There were pictures everywhere. The spiky zigzag leaf of the wattles she had seen only here –
Acacia hubbardiana
– as if they had been cut with pinking shears, or the flaking trunks of paperbarks, shedding stories. She had drawn from this scene many times and would draw it again. She lay back on a cushion of grass trees and held up her hands to reduce the frame.

It was impossible, though, to capture what it was like to be in the clearing, immersed in birdsong and soft floral scents, warm air. Not the work of one picture, but of many.

Jen scanned the undergrowth through binoculars. It was Gore Vidal who had suggested that ornithologists were tall, thin and bearded so as to imitate trees as they watched for birds. Not that she was a ornithologist. Or had a beard. Though a few unwelcome bristles had begun to appear – so who knew, given enough time. She couldn’t imagine Vidal leaving his desk and seeing any ornithologists in action out in the wilds. Perhaps he had met one at a cocktail party. Vidal had probably never seen a banksia, either; they were rarely tall and thin.

Ha. There it was: the red-backed fairy-wren. This one’s shawl was more orangey than usual but still striking against the black body, the intensity of colour impossible over such tiny bent sticks for legs. She watched him hop about on a limb, enjoying his time in the sun. He was the sun.

Jen imagined ornithologists becoming more and more birdlike, nesting in their hides in the trees. Beginning, over the years, to imitate the behaviours they observed.

Ornithology would have been her first choice when deciding to do further study, but it wasn’t offered in Canberra and teaching had seemed the more sensible option. She had already gambled on her art, and failed. Teaching meant she wouldn’t have to give up drawing altogether – or so she had thought.

The return journey looped through paperbarks and scribbly gums, the occasional blackbutt. For a time the path ran parallel
to an access road. A gum had come down, now a great bench seat looking back to the mountain. Jen made her way around grass trees to sit on its trunk, and run her hands over the undeciphered messages on its skin: a full body tattoo.

She returned to the path, eyes skyward, to follow the progress of a goshawk watching for small mammals she might flush from the undergrowth. Jen crossed over a brackish creek on stone steps, listening to its trickle and tell. The banks were lined with bent she-oaks, their fallen needles forming an inviting brown carpet. It was always tempting to lie down in this whispering, burbling world, but it gave her the feeling she might never wake up.