Rain Birds Read online

  ‘Is there something that might help you personally to identify an end point?’ Doctor Nash asked.

  She was quiet for a moment. ‘I’m sleeping on our couch,’ she said, finally.

  ‘Right.’

  ‘It just doesn’t feel appropriate to be in the same bed any longer.’

  ‘You know, there is a phenomenon called carer’s dementia. Are you feeling overly tired or overwhelmed?’

  What do you fucking think?

  ‘Look, Pina, I’m afraid I have to go – I have patients waiting. Let’s discuss this further before our next appointment.’

  She heard the line go dead; the static buzzed in her ear. For better, for worse. She was aware of her heritage; she’d come from a line of canny women who’d used what was in their power to better their bad situations. Her grandmother, Maria Antoinetta, had spent two months on the Sebastiano Caboto, clutching to her breast the dream of the fiancé who would be waiting for her at the Perth docks. Emilio had written to her with long descriptions of his property out of town.

  Every fruit under the sun they have put into that soil, a kaleidoscope of fruit.

  Two months of retching against the fumes of diesel, cigarettes and beer meant she lost almost half her body weight on the trip. When she arrived, her dress no longer fit, and her fiancé was not there to meet her.

  Later in life, Maria Antoinetta would repeat the story of her journey from the dock to the farm, often and with relish. Her bloody and blistered feet; the flies in her eyes; the dogs that bayed from behind flimsy fences; the local language like crows’ caws in the mouths of dust-covered men. She walked twenty-two kilometres into the Western Australian bush but never fully left Siderno behind.

  Maria Antoinetta had three children already before Pina’s mother, Eleonora, and three more in the years following. The Great Depression brewed around them. Everything was in short supply; a child didn’t need care and affection to survive. Eleonora was thirty-one by the time Pina arrived. Her late and only child. There were some things that were to be borne but never talked about. Women had always borne things.

  As she put the phone down, Pina realised that the mower had stopped and that Alan was outside. She’d forgotten to cover the door with the curtain.

  She rushed out to where Harley was standing by the mower, with one hand on Alan’s shoulder. She felt her stomach drop: the teenager seemed almost twice the size of her husband. He used to be such a tall man.

  Alan was agitated.

  ‘I can’t open the gate for you,’ Harley was saying as she approached them. ‘You know that.’

  As she took Alan’s arm and slowly steered him back towards the house, his expression was one of resignation and defeat.

  ‘I wasn’t going to let him out,’ Harley said.

  ‘I know,’ she said.

  The cockatoos screeched.

  ‘Why would you want to run away?’ she asked Alan.

  ‘Who wouldn’t?’ he replied.

  Later in the afternoon, after Harley had gone, she allowed Alan to go back out into the garden. Immediately, he disappeared into the thick bushes down by the back fence. She spotted him there, half covered by the erupting foliage of the butterfly bush, transfixed by the black cockatoos in the casuarina, drawn there by the clack and purr of their calls. He stared up at them, his fingers tracing the wire of the back fence, his eyes glued on the trees above. Whistling.

  She busied herself, detangling morning glory vines from her hakea and pulling them up at the roots; piled the dislodged vines beside the path and walked back to the steps to sit down.

  At the end of the garden, Alan continued to shuffle around beneath the casuarina where the chewed particles of seed pods and bark were drifting down like a mist. He scrunched up his face as the debris hit, but kept it lifted towards the birds. He seemed to move his head from side to side in the same way they cocked theirs at him. His lips moved in murmurs; he whistled when they squawked. From the steps of the verandah she watched it all.

  22

  ARIANNA WAS HAUNTED by the sounds of Sol Petroleum’s destruction. It was as though she’d carried them back to camp when she’d left the protest site a few days before. The thuds and groans seemed louder through the Murrungowar wild now – forever in her ears.

  That morning, as soon as she’d risen from her tent, a jarring pulse had begun to travel through the topsoil, up her feet and into her spine. A false heartbeat. The trees seemed to tremble. Murrungowar had become a place thick with whirrs and clangs, baneful whines, and unintelligible voices echoing off the trees. Sounds bouncing from side to side – she could never be sure of the direction they were coming from.

  As she walked into their eating area to prepare her breakfast, she noticed a couple of monstrous trucks ploughing down the dirt road past their campsite, wheels the size of bicycles. Diesel thick in the air. There seemed to be more every day; the bush was closing in around her.

  She looked towards Tim’s camp and saw him through the trees. He was facing away from her, naked except for his underpants, hands clasped behind his head. She froze, as though she’d been caught doing something she wasn’t supposed to.

  He turned to his right, facing out towards the wattle and banksia, and she could see how his torso was soft and slightly drooped. His stomach swelled enough to curl the top of his waistband; his chest had little definition. It wasn’t the kind of male body people admired in films and magazines, and she hadn’t seen many naked men in the flesh; intimacy was something she avoided. And the small pointed bulge in the front of Tim’s sagging underpants – the way she could see all of him – that was too much. She tore her eyes away and set about making breakfast.

  Still, the thud, thud, thud of machinery in the background. She knew that Sol Petroleum’s equipment started early and only fell silent in the evenings, although then there were other things to disturb her. Last night, she’d woken from nightmares. In one, she’d cut the heads off all the cockatoos, and they’d run around the bush floor like slaughtered chickens, their black blood spurting. In another, something stalked her through the trees – silver gums ghostlike in the moonlight, the ground uneven, shadows growing longer.

  Now, as she ate her breakfast, she felt eyes on her; shapes behind the trees and in the leaf litter. Can you feel the change?

  She wondered if Tim had ever spied on her, maybe when she was washing herself with the bucket. Sometimes she dressed quickly outside the tent, free of nylon walls. How much had he seen?

  About an hour later, she was cleaning their climbing equipment when the frantic, squealing alarm of the radio receiver rang out. The transmitters attached to the birds were programmed to sound the alert after twenty-four hours of non-movement. Like a death knell.

  She scrambled up from her camping chair, dropped the carabiners and tripped on a tent-rope as she ran towards Tim’s tent, yelling his name. He was dressed by then, and together they headed for the four-wheel drive.

  They drove a couple of kilometres down the service road, guided by the transmitter, before getting out. She grabbed her backpack and camera from the back seat and stumbled through the bush, heading this way and that, trying to pin down the signal until they found them. Two black cockatoos lying like lovebirds, beak to beak under a flowering wattle.

  She could feel Tim’s gaze boring into her as they knelt beside the bodies.

  ‘Don’t go crazy, ok?’ he said.

  The empty eye sockets and cracked beaks; corpses half covered by pollen and leaf litter, already crawling with ants. She felt dizzy. Her head was spinning so fast she had to grip the lower trunk of a nearby blackwood.

  ‘Arianna,’ Tim said sharply, his hand on her shoulder. ‘You ok?’

  Fear laced his voice. She’d never heard him scared before. She shoved him away and stood up. Nature chirped happily around her. The wattle hummed with bees. Two black cockatoos dead underneath. Their coloured bands bright against the forest floor. Red, blue, red. Red, blue, yellow.

  Already the rib bon
es of one bird were uncovered; the open claw of the other was raking the air. Where will you go? She crouched again in the dirt beside the birds while the afternoon turned liquid and heavy, and the world heaved and shifted, indifferent.

  ‘Are you ok?’ he asked once more.

  In a release program like this, a dead animal was to be treated like a crime scene. Photos taken from all angles. Checked for markings of predators, checked for dog tracks, checked for signs of disease, checked for blood. Black blood spurting. She knew she would have to keep herself together.

  ‘Go and get the car ready,’ she said to him.

  He got up without a word and walked over to the four-wheel drive, where he needed to clear a space on the back seat, find a box, place a tarp across the fabric. She took her camera and several large zip-lock bags from her backpack, tugged on some gloves, placed the birds’ bodies into the zip-lock bags – they seemed much smaller now, shrunken – and collected as many of the maggots as she could see. Photographed the place on the ground where they had lain, the bugs underneath. Picked those up, too.

  Death shrinks living things: she could cradle both birds in her arms at the same time. She leant against a tree trunk and looked at the blue sky filtering down through the treetops.

  Once they’d driven back to camp, she laid the birds out on garbage bags on the forest floor and prepared to conduct a necropsy. Examined their stiff bodies for bite marks or other causes of death. Nothing. She dug at the glue on the base of the transmitters until they both gave way and she was left holding the small, black plastic cylinders.

  Positioning a scalpel above the female’s chest, the blade just brushing her feathers, she pressed hard and dragged it down along her entire chest. The organs sat bright and sodden inside the chasm. In the trees above was a riot of bird noise; the thud of machinery seemed a little muted, distant.

  She stuck her fingers into the gash and felt for the stomach. Lifted it up and cut through the oesophagus just above the cardiac sphincter. The stomach was small and unwieldy like a water balloon, and she placed it on the garbage bag, cut a slit down its side and tipped the contents out. There were no parasites or anything else unusual. She sat with liquid covering the fingers of her left hand, the blade still held in her right. Put the blade down and jotted notes on the data sheet, left smears of something disgusting and visceral on the page.

  She slid the bird into a new, clear zip-lock bag and moved over to crouch in front of her mate.

  Don’t think about the way they look.

  When she had finished, she sat back on her haunches on the cleared ground of the bush and stared at the two little bags. They were no bigger than loaves of bread. She remembered when they’d hatched, how they’d pushed themselves into the world, determined to be out of their shells. They’d known how to do it somehow. Instinct.

  Fighting the desire to bury them, to leave them for the bush to do with as it wished, she dragged an esky across the clearing and placed the bagged birds inside – she had to slow their autolysis.

  ‘We need to freeze them,’ she told Tim. ‘Get some ice or something.’

  ‘We could try the Boney Point Hotel – ask if they’d fit them in their cool room.’

  She nodded, lifted the esky and carried it to the Land Cruiser.

  ‘I’ll drive,’ he said.

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘Give me the keys.’

  They drove into Boney Point and stopped in front of the pub. Tim idled the engine, left the air-conditioning running. One of the bar staff was sweeping the verandah. Broken glass glittered across the steps. Destruction.

  ‘Let me talk to them,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll come, too.’

  ‘Let me go alone.’

  ‘Why?’

  His expression was inscrutable. ‘We don’t exactly have a huge fan base around here. Or you don’t, at least.’

  She let him get out and walk up the pub’s steps, carrying the birds. She could see the owner, Glenn, standing just inside the double doorway. He smiled at Tim and reached out to shake his hand. It was only when Tim gestured back towards the car that Glenn’s face hardened. He shrugged, beckoned Tim to follow him inside. The scrape of the broom across broken glass made her teeth hurt.

  ‘He’s going to keep them in the freezer for us,’ Tim said when he climbed back into the car. ‘But only for a little while. He reckons he might be taking a risk with OHS regulations.’

  ‘Ok,’ she said. ‘We can arrange for them to be collected.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  As they drove back along Pearl Point Track towards their camp, she thought about how Glenn’s face had changed when he saw her in the car. It wasn’t as though she needed people to like her – she just couldn’t work out why people warmed to Tim and never her. She didn’t know what he did right or what she did wrong.

  She was aware, as they drove, of every metre that disappeared beneath the car’s tyres, attuned to every inch of the land, every tree. All the things she could have done differently whirled through her head, actions that could have prevented the morning’s events.

  ‘You can’t work against the universe,’ her mother would always say. ‘What’s going to be will be.’

  But this wasn’t what the universe had planned. This wasn’t a part of the earth’s design at all. They had done it; people had cleared the original habitat for development, farming. Put agriculture ahead of nature. People were the reason the birds were dying off. She wasn’t fighting against the natural way of things: she was fighting for it.

  By the time they turned into camp, the afternoon light was leaving. Tim jumped out of the car and lifted the empty esky from the back seat. He carried it to their eating area while she followed.

  ‘Do you want a cuppa?’ he asked.

  Her limbs were heavy. ‘Yeah, ok.’

  While the water boiled, he fetched her radio from just outside her tent and turned it on.

  As it grew darker, it seemed to her that the Murrungowar sky doubled in height: the heavens expanded, and the universe showed its full size. Stars were as thick as dust; these late November evenings were cloudless and cool.

  A program on the radio lapped at her like ebbing water.

  At one stage, the police on the border between New South Wales and Victoria were stopping children in cars from crossing over. They didn’t want them in their state; they didn’t want them carrying the infection across.

  She found her legs, got up and began to walk the perimeter of the campsite, pacing back and forth like a big cat trapped in a zoo.

  ‘Can you sit down?’ Tim asked, softly. ‘You’re making me anxious.’

  She didn’t answer. There were low voices murmuring below the radio presenter’s story; there were messages hidden in them.

  ‘I know what you went through last time, you know … during the curlew program. I was always really sorry about what happened with your mum. We’ve never had a chance to talk about it.’

  Her shoulders bunched together; the bottom of her belly tightened. The image of Tim’s body flashed before her eyes. Too much.

  ‘Did you hear me?’ he asked.

  ‘We might not be in the office,’ she said. ‘But this should still be a professional space.’

  ‘Ok. Ok. Jesus.’

  ‘I have people to talk to, if I want to talk to them.’

  Don’t be hysterical. Voices sounded around her. You’re so dramatic.

  ‘ Well, that’s good,’ he said. He left and went back to his own tent.

  The bush became free and loose again. The borders between her and the outside world expanded, breathed out.

  That night her sleep was punctuated by the wails of koels, the rising and falling of the wind. A storm gathered in the early hours of the morning. She could hear the uppermost branches of the eucalypts whipping together; a swell of air accumulating like a tide – drawing back, gathering energy, promising the threat of release. Far off in the distance, the shot-crack of lightning, the fizzle of electricity.r />
  She knew she should get up and pull on the fly sheet, put up the tarp if she could. But she lay on her back, watching the silhouettes of the bush whirl around her, seeing the shadows and ghosts of the dark, letting herself be sucked into the frenzy.

  23

  PINA KNELT ON the bathroom floor, Alan standing above her, trying to tug the sides of a disposable incontinence pad up between his clenched knees. She had already showered him; despite the pad he wore to bed these days, he’d wet himself during the night and his pyjama pants sat in a stinking pile in the corner of the bathroom. The bed sheets would need to be changed, too. Accidents were nothing new, but they’d become much more regular in the last few weeks. Now, whenever they left the house, she carried a bag with spare pads and a change of clothes. Just in case.

  She got up off the tiled floor and felt her stiff knees twinge. She gripped the edge of the basin. A reminder. You’re not young anymore.

  ‘Does that feel ok?’ she asked after she’d straightened up and begun to adjust the pad and his trousers from behind.

  Alan was holding very still, his head cocked to one side.

  ‘What’s that?’ he whispered.

  ‘What’s what?’

  ‘There are people up there.’

  She followed his finger. ‘What? Are you pointing to the roof?’

  ‘There’s someone up there,’ he yelled.

  Not again.

  ‘There’s no one there,’ she said, but he was already out of the bathroom and halfway to the back door, which she knew was locked but not covered by its heavy curtain.

  ‘You motherfuckers,’ he was yelling. ‘You motherfuckers.’

  He was rattling the door handle, banging on the wooden frame – hard enough to damage the skinny glass panel that ran beside it. She knew that, in a moment, she would have to go and let him outside so he didn’t break the door down, then follow him to make sure he didn’t attempt to climb up onto the roof like last time. But she paused, letting the heat of the bathroom and the moisture and the sweat turn her cheeks damp.