Rain Birds Read online

  The sun was making the car cabin too warm so she opened her window. Flying ants were sucked in and began hitting against the windscreen from the inside, trying to reach the sky again.

  ‘Far out,’ Tim said from the passenger seat. He was trying to scoop ants back out into the air, but they were being tossed around in the currents made by his hands.

  Tim, like Arianna, was a conservation biologist from the University of Canberra. They had worked together in different capacities for the past four years, but she still couldn’t say that she really knew him or what motivated him. Not that she cared to find out, either. She believed in self-reliance. She’d been attracted to biology because she’d coveted the notion of being one of the few people in the world to truly understand how it worked. There was something intoxicating in the idea of discovery and that, briefly, after a breakthrough, you might be the only person on the planet to know something new. But she was far enough into her career now to understand that possessing the kind of knowledge she had was mostly just exhausting and isolating.

  ‘Curiosity killed the cat,’ Arianna’s mother had always told her when she was asking too many questions.

  She slowed down as they approached the turn-off to the main street. To the left of the car, she saw the inlet was glinting the same colour as the insects’ wings. Translucent, fragile. Boney Point sat at the head of a confluence of the Errinundra and Combienbar rivers. In the distance, the jagged peak of Black Mountain loomed above the forest.

  She turned the car sharply.

  ‘Has anyone told you that you drive very aggressively?’ Tim said.

  ‘It’s not my fault you chose to write yourself off last night.’

  ‘Blah, blah. Can we just stop at the servo? I’m going to murder an iced coffee. One of those huge Ice Breaks that have five espresso shots in them.’

  He was tapping his fingers on the door handle, but Arianna supposed that they were both contributing to the nervous, fizzing energy in the car. They were in Boney Point to conduct a captive release program with threatened glossy black cockatoos. This trip had been several years in the planning, and it was her first time as program leader. For the next few months, the Murrungowar National Park beyond Boney Point would be home, for them and the birds.

  She pulled into Boney Point Fuel Supplies and let the engine of the white Toyota Land Cruiser idle as Tim ran inside. She watched him through the glass doors, chatting with the attendant, a short woman in her mid-fifties with hair dyed the colour of claret. The woman was tossing her head around as Tim leant with one elbow on the counter. He was always fucking flirting.

  She pressed the horn, and they both glanced over. She saw him roll his eyes and grin at the woman before pushing open the door and sauntering back to the car.

  ‘What?’ he said when he got into the passenger seat. ‘I was winning hearts and minds. One of us has to.’

  She accelerated back out onto the road. They’d been given forty hectares to work within. To get to the release site, they had to go about thirty minutes out of Boney Point along the sealed Pearl Point Track, then through the rough dirt tracks of Murrungowar National Park, and finally walk about one hundred metres into the bush. As they drove, silver gums and wattle slipped past them and the salt scrub gave way to ferny undergrowth. She turned off onto a rarely used service road where the ends of fallen branches flicked against the bottom of the car.

  When they reached the site and she stepped out of the car, the smell of the bush rushed up to meet her. The flanks of the Land Cruiser were streaked with dirt from the dusty, bone-dry road. Unseasonable heat and early pollen washed around her limbs as though she were standing in the middle of a calm lake. She knew it would get much hotter before the year was out but, despite the warmth, she shuddered; her skin was unused to the breeze that came straight off the ocean.

  ‘Where are the loos?’ Tim asked, swinging his arms wildly to stretch his back. She found it frustrating that men considered all space around them to be theirs and expected the world to reshape itself to accommodate them.

  She shrugged, casting her eyes around exaggeratedly at the trees and scrub. ‘We’re in the bush. There are no loos.’

  ‘You’re right. I’ll just use nature’s bathroom.’ He walked off to a thick-trunked gum, whistling.

  She turned her back and tried not to hear the liquid hitting the leaf litter. The air was dry and dotted with golden pollen. She took in her surroundings: towering gums festooned with long strips of bark that had peeled off from the tops of their trunks and caught over their lower branches like tinsel; knobbly, rough-barked banksia that peppered the forest.

  Glossy black cockatoos needed specific conditions for successful breeding. It had made finding a release site challenging, but Murrungowar National Park presented one of the few natural areas left that fit their requirements. Although opportunities like this never really presented themselves; it was never that simple, that unconditional. A project like theirs necessitated money, and she’d learnt that she couldn’t always choose where the money came from or who it made her accountable to.

  For the Glossy Black Reintroduction Program the university had found funding through Sol Petroleum, a comparatively small oil company that was trying to expand its enterprise and was obligated to finance an environmental project as part of their lease of land in the Gippsland State Reserve.

  ‘You use us, and we’ll use you,’ Sol Petroleum’s head of PR had commented during one of the negotiation meetings that Arianna attended with her colleagues.

  ‘Make the most of this opportunity,’ Rod, the biology faculty head, had advised her after they’d signed the paperwork.

  Tim was taking his time so she began to wander into the bush away from him, scoping it out. When she was in amongst the tree trunks she heard the sound of something heavy crashing through scrub and branches. Closing in. She couldn’t prevent her heart from leaping into her throat. Wherever you hide, I’ll find you. She turned in time to spot the brown flank of a beast disappearing into the thick undergrowth. A bobbing white tail. Wild eyes.

  ‘A deer,’ she said to herself.

  ‘A what?’ said Tim, who was still adjusting his pants as he walked towards her.

  ‘I saw a deer.’

  Tim regarded her. ‘Far out, Goldilocks. If you’re already seeing things we’re in for a long couple of months.’

  She hated it when he called her that. For a start her hair was dark, almost black. Not like her sister’s. Caro had always had the beautiful hair.

  They got to work unpacking their camping equipment from the back seat. Arranged in the enclosed tray of the four-wheel drive were bags of woodchips, climbing gear, electronic equipment and nesting boxes. She knew there was so much to do before the cockatoos arrived – the ones she’d raised as chicks in the lab. Her mother had always cared for birds; she remembered her bringing baby birds into the house that had fallen out of their nests, putting them in soup pots with towels and hot water bottles to keep them warm.

  Her mother had loved all creatures but especially black cockatoos; she’d always pointed them out when they flew overhead. They had special meanings, she’d tell Arianna and Caro. They were the bringers of rain. In some places, such as Melville Island, up off the coast of Darwin, people believed the birds accompanied the souls of the dead to heaven. They had significance. Arianna and her sister had grown up knowing that those birds were more than what they appeared to be.

  Once their camping gear was unpacked, she waited until Tim had unrolled his tent and then started to walk off into the bush on the other side.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he asked. ‘We should stick close enough to the car so we can make a quick getaway if any of the spooky stories turn out to be true.’

  On the long drive down he’d told her tales of ghosts and wild animals of unimaginable sizes.

  ‘We’re not camping together,’ she said. ‘So you can stay where you like.’

  Against her thigh, she felt an insistent vibration. Her ph
one. She didn’t take it out, instead let it go to voicemail, and kept walking.

  There was a clearing just past Tim’s camp they could use as a communal eating space. She would camp on the other side.

  ‘Are you sure we shouldn’t stick together’ Tim called after her as she pushed into the bush.

  ‘Women need privacy,’ she shouted over her shoulder.

  ‘That’s funny. I never think of you as a woman.’

  She stopped. ‘What do you think of me as?’ she asked and immediately regretted it.

  Tim shrugged, grinning. He’d won. ‘I dunno.’

  Just one of the boys. Her stomach flared with heat as she continued into the scrub. The trees plaited themselves behind her like a closing jaw. She walked another few metres and stood staring into the dense bush. Imagined she was the only one for miles – it wasn’t hard. She took out her phone and listened to her sister’s voicemail just as Tim began to sing loudly, shattering her illusion of the unending wilderness.

  It’s me. I had my appointment today, got a photo and everything. You can see the fingers – all there! I thought you’d like to know that.

  She pressed delete and slid the phone back into her pocket.

  4

  BY MID AFTERNOON, Lil and Pina were in Toongabbie’s damp greenhouse re-potting the spring stock, small grass trees and burrawang bushes.

  ‘Take your time,’ Tracey had told Pina when she’d arrived at the house that morning for her shift. ‘I haven’t got anywhere else I need to be today.’

  As well as her nursing work, Tracey bred cattle dogs, raised two teenage boys and volunteered at the Country Fire Association. Pina often wondered how one woman could do so much. She felt tired just thinking about it, and she’d never been tired like this before Alan’s illness.

  The greenhouse at Toongabbie was really just a couple of walls constructed from industrial-grade polythene plastic sheets nailed to the side of the office building with a roof overhead; its entrance was open to the rest of the nursery. Customers had to pass through it to reach the office door. The nursery was only small; each space had to be multifunctional.

  Lil and Pina did their re-potting in amongst the ferns and other tropical plants for sale. The potting soil was rich and sticky on Pina’s fingers. She appreciated the ease of being at Toongabbie. She liked that she and Lil didn’t have to speak, that the radio filled the silence.

  In local news, the East Gippsland council has made moves to introduce Gunai language classes into local primary schools in a bid to preserve and boost numbers of fluent speakers. Felicity Moore has the report.

  A car horn broke the stillness, thick tyres crushing across the gravel. There was the thud of a car door. Pina watched as Lil clicked her fingers at Harley, who came clumping past the ferns in the rainforest section.

  ‘Hey, why are you so late?’

  ‘Protest,’ he said.

  Harley had been helping out in Toongabbie three afternoons a week for the last few years. He was seventeen but with the frame of a much older boy; heavy across the shoulders, lean around the middle. He had unusually light eyes and a thick ropey scar that ran from his jawline down below his shirt collar.

  ‘Protest?’ said Lil. ‘Are you bullshitting me?’

  ‘Nah. Out at Meeniyan. You know, Black Mountain.’

  ‘What the hell?’ said Lil.

  ‘True,’ Harley said. ‘They’re going to put in a mine out there.’

  ‘How come we haven’t heard of it, then?’ Lil asked.

  Harley shrugged, lifted his palms to the sky. ‘Pfft.’

  Lil didn’t have children of her own. Her marriage hadn’t lasted long enough for that, she’d told Pina. But she had worked with disadvantaged kids in the area for years – that’s how she’d first met Harley. A few of the kids were from local Indigenous families, but others came from all sorts of places. Pina never could really work out what exactly Lil did with them, but every now and then she would turn up with a cagey-looking teenager in the passenger seat of her truck, or she’d receive a phone call and rush out of Toongabbie to head to the local school, or police station. She wasn’t qualified, as far as Pina knew, but that didn’t matter this far from the city. As Lil often said, in most cases it was enough that a person gave a shit and showed up.

  The horn sounded again as the car that had brought Harley moved away. Pina knew that Harley lived with his grandmother but was often dropped off and picked up by Earl Howard, a ranger with Parks Victoria. She had known Earl for years, but he and Lil went back even further.

  ‘What they mining?’ Lil asked Harley.

  ‘Oil. Petrol for your big truck.’

  Lil drove a Mitsubishi Triton. A beautiful, hulking off-road ute that she washed every weekend. Harley winked at Pina as he walked off towards the office.

  ‘Little bugger.’

  ‘You know that mine he’s talking about has been all over the news,’ Pina said.

  ‘Whose side are you on?’ Lil said in mock outrage, picking up the misting bottle and spraying the seedlings aggressively.

  Pina grinned as the spray landed on her cheeks and she sank her fingers into the mulch. The damp grit of the soil dug under her fingernails, and she knew that later it would be impossible to get all the dirt out from the creases of her palms. It was a kind of comfort to her to carry the earth around in her skin.

  ‘They’re holding a meeting tomorrow morning out at Orbost,’ she said. ‘About the impact on the community or something.’

  When she got no response, she glanced up to see if Lil was listening and noticed her own reflection in the polished surface of the office window. The glass warped her features, made her appear watery and askew. The edges of her still-dark hair trembled in the light breeze.

  ‘You going to go?’ Lil asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘To that meeting?’

  ‘I’d have to ask Tracey to work extra hours.’

  ‘I’d come with you,’ Lil said.

  But she wasn’t really paying attention anymore. She drew closer to her dancing reflection. There were long lines in the skin on either side of her mouth. Where had they come from? Everything about her face seemed to slope downwards – she looked old. She was only mid-fifties, for fuck’s sake; she wasn’t dying. But some reflections, she understood, were not what they appeared to be.

  She remembered how a few years before, right at the beginning of things, she’d been making dinner when there had been a shout from the bedroom.

  ‘Fuck.’

  She’d run down the hall and found Alan sitting on the edge of their bed, hands on his knees, his chest heaving.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘Don’t yell,’ he’d said.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I thought someone was in the room,’ he said, gesturing to her dressing table and the large mirror that hung from it.

  She’d followed his finger and then turned back to him. ‘You thought your reflection was an intruder?’

  ‘Yep.’

  She burst out laughing, sat down beside him and threw her arm across his shoulders. ‘You mean …’ She was laughing too hard to get the words out.

  Alan grabbed her around the waist and dragged her down onto the bed, kissing her cold cheeks. His arms had been big and solid back then.

  ‘Alright, alright,’ he said. ‘You should have seen me, though. I was like an action hero.’

  ‘That is certainly the impression I got when I came in.’

  Suddenly Pina was aware of Lil watching her stare at herself in the window. She felt a blush rush up her neck.

  ‘You alright?’ Lil asked. ‘With everything?’

  ‘Oh yeah. I’m fine.’

  Both of them knew it wasn’t true. But that was the crux of it. How to explain? The cupboard doors that were constantly left open as Alan searched for something that had never been moved in all their years in that house. How she followed him around in circles, shutting drawers, finding his jacket in with the crockery,
the milk left under the sink with the cleaning stuff, directing him to the bathroom when he couldn’t find it, the tantrums, the anger, the forgetting, always the forgetting. The way it could all turn a woman slowly insane.

  5

  THE FOLLOWING DAY was a Saturday. Pina tried to keep a sort of structure in their lives – usually she got Alan up at the same time every morning. She always rose earlier than him – despite being perpetually exhausted, she slept lightly and only for a few hours. Sitting in the kitchen, nursing a cup of tea, she thought about the community meeting ahead. It had preyed on her mind a little during the night; she wasn’t completely comfortable in social settings, and the long days now spent with only Alan for company had exacerbated that. It was important for locals to learn about what Sol Petroleum were doing in the East Gippsland State Reserve, she realised that; there were some things for which you had to make a stand. Plus Lil had said she’d come with her.

  She had never thought of herself as a greenie: passionate about the natural world and how humans treated it, yes, but not an activist. The presence of Sol Petroleum had changed the way the bush around their house felt. They’d lived in this powdery-blue weatherboard house, twenty minutes drive from Boney Point, for thirty years. Theirs was the last property on Wallangamba Road before the edge of the state forest. In the last couple of months, they’d heard the sounds of excavation: thuds and mechanical whines that echoed back towards them from Black Mountain. It was worse in Boney Point; the town had begun to rattle on its foundations as the trucks rumbled through, mounds of impossible-looking machinery attached to the trailers.