Rain Birds Read online

  Usually they came past at night, their headlights blinking off into the bush like fireflies or some sort of sprite. In the last week or so, Sol Petroleum’s diggers had begun work and, despite the site being around forty kilometres from their house, she could hear the machinery noise from her yard, soft like a mosquito’s hum but menacing. The air seemed a little heavier with smoke and dust. The birds called their alarm.

  She stood up from the kitchen table and tried to roll the day’s newspaper out flat before going to wake Alan. Reading the paper on weekend mornings had been a treasured time for him. He used to rise at the same time every day, regardless of whether he had to go to work or not. It was the quiet, early hours he’d liked the best. He had been a thorough reader; he’d often buy several different papers and compare their stories on the same events.

  ‘If you think news reporting is unbiased, you’re kidding yourself,’ he’d say whenever she questioned whether he really needed that many newspapers. ‘We have to learn to read around the opinions to get to the facts.’

  She had wanted to maintain some of Alan’s rituals after everything fell apart and, on warmer Saturday mornings, like today, she would try to get him to sit in the old armchair on the back verandah. They already had a couple of garden chairs there, but she’d dragged out one of their old recliners so he could sit comfortably while she read the more interesting news stories aloud to him. Lately, there seemed to be little point in her efforts: while she told him about the deluge of slaughter and distress in places such as Aleppo and Nauru and beyond, Alan displayed little reaction or attention. One of the things she’d loved about him was how he used to get so passionate about current affairs. But these days he could never sit still for long either; instead he trembled and flitted off like a bird. Turning leaves over in his fingers, watching the insects. He wasn’t looking to the wider world anymore.

  It was in the local paper, The Boney Point Leader, that she’d first seen reports of Sol Petroleum developing the dig site at the base of Black Mountain. The Leader had also been where she’d found out about the oil company’s intention to run an information session that morning in the Orbost Community Centre.

  ‘You can say you don’t want to work on a Saturday,’ Pina had told Tracey when she’d offered her an extra shift that week. ‘I know it’s a big ask.’

  But Tracey had encouraged her to go, said that she needed to get out every now and then, to stay connected. ‘What do you think I’m here for?’ she’d scolded. ‘Plus I’m not planning to go myself so you have to find out what they say and report back.’

  Once Tracey arrived, Pina picked up Lil from Toongabbie, and they made the hour-long drive together in the ute Alan had used for a decade before he became sick.

  The Orbost Community Centre was cold when they entered; even though it was the tail end of winter someone had neglected the heating switch. The room was kitted out with rows of identical blue plastic chairs. Most of them were already taken. Pina and Lil had to push past crowded knees to get to a couple of free seats.

  ‘Good turnout,’ Lil said.

  ‘Yeah, but are they for it or against it?’

  ‘Everyone can have their opinion, that’s how democracy works. Unless it’s a really stupid opinion. Then they can’t.’

  Pina spotted Earl Howard making his way down the front. He noticed them and raised a hand. She lifted hers in return.

  ‘Are you sure there was never anything between the two of you?’ she asked her friend.

  Lil looked exaggeratedly over both shoulders. ‘Who are you talking to? Because it’s surely not me.’

  ‘Why?’ Pina laughed. ‘You could have done worse.’

  ‘Good god, no. I see enough of him managing Harley. We’re already basically raising that bloody kid together.’

  She knew Lil loved Harley like nothing else in the world. There had been a couple of times, quiet moments in the shop, when Lil had admitted that she had probably set herself up for heartache – he was still someone else’s child, he wasn’t really hers.

  ‘But I can’t help it. I love the little bugger.’

  Pina could see why; Harley was a beautiful boy. Lil always said he’d turn into a real heartbreaker with those big eyes and those broad shoulders. He was smart, too, and talented. Around the time Lil started working with him, a coach from a Melbourne VFL team had come up to watch him play, said he could have got somewhere with it, said it was a shame about his home environment.

  She was fond of Harley as well, but she had never had the compulsion or urge for motherhood that same way Lil had. She wondered whether Alan had any regrets. Maybe she’d been so concerned with controlling her body that she’d not really listened to him, to what he was saying between the lines. There were so many things she would never know about him now.

  The seats had all filled up, and some people were even standing along the back wall of the centre. A Sol Petroleum representative sat at a table at the front of the room. He was young, maybe thirties, with a face that had the impossibly pale colour of a man who has spent a tiny percentage of his life outside.

  When it was time to start, he clapped his hands together to bring the room to silence.

  ‘My name’s Matt,’ he said, ‘and I’m here to talk to you about the opportunities Sol Petroleum can bring to your communities, to your families.’ He walked around the front of the table and stood facing the crowd, legs apart and hands resting on his hips.

  ‘I’m sure you all have questions and concerns,’ he continued. ‘We’re here to listen to them and put your minds at ease. We believe this is a good move for East Gippsland. More jobs, an injection into the local economy. We like to think of ourselves as a local family operation. I myself will be residing in the area along with our staff, and we’re here to be part of your community for a long time. As such, we want to protect the land in the same manner you do. We made sure we obtained the highest-level environmental planning permissions before we even set foot on site.’

  ‘What does that mean?’ Lil whispered.

  ‘And’ – Matt raised a hand, one finger lifted towards the roof – ‘we are committing six positions of employment to the Indigenous people of the area as a gesture of thanks for our work on their land. This is on top of the funding we’ve put into an environmental regeneration project in the region.’

  Pina imagined he was being met with a sea of unimpressed faces.

  ‘This is the first we’ve heard of those jobs.’ Earl wasn’t standing, but she recognised his voice immediately.

  ‘Ah. Well, we are announcing that today.’

  ‘When can our people put their hands up?’ Earl got to his feet. ‘You’ve already started work out there, so when do we get to talk about our jobs?’

  Matt’s face flushed, and his smooth jaw twitched.

  ‘This one here is looking for a job,’ Earl said, pointing down beside him. ‘And that one and that one. We got plenty of people ready to work.’

  Matt went to clasp his hands in front of him but then put them in his pockets. The room was quiet and unnaturally still.

  ‘I got a question, too,’ came a voice from the audience. It was Maureen, the owner of Boney Point Fuel Supplies. ‘We’re already seeing around six trucks a day coming through town. I’m worried about the weight of those trucks on the roads. Especially during rainy weather.’

  A titter spread through the room. Even Matt gave a wry smile.

  ‘Well,’ said Maureen, gazing around at the crowd, ‘just because it hasn’t rained yet doesn’t mean it won’t.’

  There was a fifteen-minute break in the middle of the meeting. The community centre had laid out tea and biscuits at the back of the room. Lil and Pina lingered over the Scotch Fingers and tried to warm their hands on their mugs. Maureen approached them.

  ‘How’s that husband of yours?’ Maureen asked Pina.

  ‘He’s fine,’ she replied.

  ‘Have you tried sudoku? That stuff’s supposed to be real good for your brain.’

&
nbsp; Behind Maureen’s shoulder, Lil raised her eyebrows.

  ‘I haven’t seen you for a while,’ Maureen continued. ‘You getting your fuel somewhere else these days?’

  ‘Maureen,’ Pina said, ‘there is nowhere else to go even if I wanted to.’

  Maureen laughed. The truth was that Pina didn’t need as much fuel as she used to because she didn’t go out as often. It was easier to stay at home where Alan was familiar with his surroundings. There were other reasons, too, if she cared to think about it.

  People were beginning to drift back to their seats. She and Lil wandered back to where they’d been sitting and sat once again on the hard blue plastic.

  ‘You’ll be pleased to know that I won’t be doing much of the talking from now on,’ Matt said.

  ‘Mate, I can’t tell you how pleased I am,’ Lil whispered to Pina.

  ‘Shhh,’ she said, laughing.

  ‘It’s my great pleasure to ask our environmental partner to come up and tell you about her wonderful project.’

  A slight woman walked to the front of the room from the sidelines. She had something of an undercurrent to her, Pina thought. Her movements were compact, but there was a deliberateness to them that hinted at something needing to be kept down, to be controlled.

  ‘My name is Arianna Brandt,’ the woman said to the crowd. ‘I am a conservation biologist at the University of Canberra. We’re fortunate to have partnered with Sol Petroleum to undertake an important species reintroduction program in the area.’

  She was early thirties. Maybe slightly taller than average, with angular cheekbones and thin lips. Her clothes were all greys and browns, and she wore no jewellery that Pina could see. Unadorned. Her skin was lightly freckled, and her dark hair was pulled back into a ponytail save for the tendrils that fanned out about her face as though she’d been standing in strong winds just moments before.

  ‘Glossy black cockatoos are a threatened subspecies of black cockatoo. However, their numbers in the wild are rapidly declining, which means it’s likely that in the next little while they will slip from being threatened to endangered.’

  ‘Sol Petroleum is very proud to be supporting such a project,’ Matt interjected.

  Pina saw the look the woman – Arianna Brandt – shot him, just for a second. Undercurrent.

  ‘Glossy blacks mate for life, and the pairs stay together all year round,’ she continued. ‘They are communal birds, often nesting in groups, and sometimes several birds are found using the same tree. They are monophagous, which means they use casuarina trees as their sole food source, but they require sturdy gum forests for their nests. This makes their habitat requirements very specific. They’re locally nomadic outside of their breeding season and produce only one chick at a time. Land clearing has removed their food sources and their nesting sites. More frequent and more intense wildfires have exterminated a lot of their existing habitat. Grazing and forestry practices have eliminated the casuarina groves. Chicks and eggs are taken from nests for the aviculture industry. For all these reasons, in the last decades their populations have declined, including local extinctions and range contractions. That’s what we’re hoping to rectify in Murrungowar National Park with our program and with the assistance of Sol Petroleum.’

  Pina could feel the room was getting restless.

  ‘What does this have to do with anything?’ someone muttered behind her.

  ‘The oil blokes are paying for it,’ someone else replied.

  ‘We have ten nesting pairs scheduled for release in Murrungowar National Park this Wednesday,’ the university woman said. ‘These are adolescent birds that we’ve raised in a facility in Canberra. Over the next six months, we will be getting our birds settled in their new habitat so they are established before the next breeding season, which falls between January and June. We invite any of you who might like to watch the release to come out to the site at ten on Wednesday morning.’

  Lil leant over to Pina and whispered, ‘Have you heard enough?’

  She nodded, and they stood to leave, pushing past knees and trying not to stand on people’s toes. Sorry, sorry, sorry.

  She glanced at the front of the room and met the eyes of the university woman. There was a sternness in her gaze; Pina felt the reprimand in it as if she were a naughty child.

  Once outside, they both started laughing.

  ‘Do you think anyone noticed?’ Lil asked.

  ‘I reckon we got away with it.’

  ‘I couldn’t bear the idea of getting stuck talking to anyone once it all wraps up.’

  Pina knew what she meant. That was the problem with small towns: you couldn’t even go to the supermarket without seeing people you knew. Any time you left your house in Boney Point, you’d run into someone, ready to relay the slightest gossip upon the town grapevine. It was hard to hide.

  ‘Do you want to drive?’ she asked Lil and tossed her the ute’s keys. It had been months since she had ridden in the passenger seat of a car. She just wanted to watch the trees fly past and switch off. Lil chatted absentmindedly as they travelled back.

  Pina let the rhythm rock her until they slowed as they reached the Boney Point turn-off. She realised her friend had fallen silent.

  ‘Are you sure you’re alright?’ Lil asked, glancing at her. ‘Is there something wrong with Alan? Has he got worse?’

  The trees started to whip past them again as they gathered speed. She kept her eyes on the road ahead. ‘I don’t know, maybe. Sometimes it’s hard to remember how he was before, you know?’

  ‘That’s probably normal,’ Lil said. ‘You’re just losing perspective.’

  She nodded and changed the subject so that Lil would go back to aimless chatter, so that she could have the few moments left before they reached town lost in her own thoughts.

  She supposed it was a matter of perspective. Looking back, it was difficult to find the beginning of it. Alan had always been forgetful, keys not found, shoes misplaced. He would stand in the doorway of their bedroom, huffing and puffing, until she uncovered the lost item herself.

  ‘Why do I have to find everything for you?’ she’d say. ‘I’m not your bloody mother.’

  ‘I don’t have to remember,’ he’d reply, ‘because I have you to care for me.’

  That was the normal, regular forgetfulness. The first edges of illness had seemed inconsequential.

  One afternoon, they had stood on the verandah steps, ready to leave for a dusk walk.

  ‘I just need to grab my … my …’ He’d closed his eyes, clicked his fingers together. ‘Errrgh …’ he’d said, trying to force it out. ‘Errrgh.’

  ‘Jacket?’ she suggested.

  Alan’s eyes rolled up in his head. ‘Fuck me, yes. Jacket.’

  In the beginning, she had teased him. I guess this is what happens when you shack up with an older fella. He never quite laughed, though, despite being quick to appreciate a joke at his expense. Now she supposed he had sensed it happening before she’d ever cottoned on; the foundations of his mind turning shaky and moth-eaten. To her, in the beginning, it had seemed like nothing at all.

  6

  IT WAS STILL early in Murrungowar but already the sun was shining sharply through the trees. Sunday. The day before, Arianna had been in Orbost in front of a crowd of locals and their sceptical gazes. She groaned at the memory. Public speaking never got any easier, no matter how many times she was forced to do it.

  Once dressed, she hauled herself out of her tent, dragged her runners towards her from across the small awning and put them on. She set off for a run along the service road that led past their camp and deeper into the wilderness towards Black Mountain. The unevenness of the dirt road was tough on her ankles, the air cool and heavy in her throat. They had two days to prepare. The birds were scheduled to arrive on Tuesday, with the release on Wednesday. So many things to do before then. Running, she went over the details in her mind. It all had to go perfectly.

  When she returned, breathless, to camp, Tim wa
s sitting on a log outside his tent, naked from the waist up. The pale skin around his shoulders was dusted with light freckles. He had a slightly sagging stomach, which Arianna found surprising given how much pride he seemed to take in his appearance. She was always a little shocked to be reminded that men were free of some of the concerns that women had about their bodies. That kind of existence was almost unimaginable; it felt like an affront of some sort. She tugged the hem of her polyester running shirt down further over the waistband of her shorts.

  Tim had already been a member of the biology faculty when she’d been appointed to the university five years ago. He was good at his job, good with data; he had published several popular papers. But she’d heard troubling things about him, too.

  ‘He’s just a friendly guy,’ some people had tried to justify. ‘He’s passionate about his work; he forgets where the line is with students sometimes – you can’t hold that against him.’

  Arianna knew she’d been given the lead on this project because she was talented, high-achieving. She’d graduated in the top percentile of her Honours year and was recognised as an emerging talent at the end of her PhD candidature. But Tim had the experience. She tried not to feel like he was there to keep an eye on her.

  She bathed quickly, standing in her underwear in front of a bucket in the middle of her camp, wiping a washcloth across her skin. She kept glancing over her shoulder to check he wasn’t watching. There was nothing but shivering branches and leaves. When she was done, she tipped the water into the leaf litter and watched it vanish into the dusty soil beneath.

  Their first task was to unload the birds’ tent bags from the back of the Land Cruiser. They had sourced eleven family-sized tents from Kmart: ten to act as acclimatisation areas for each nesting pair of birds; and one as a station for them to take data pre-release. They only needed the meshed inside dome without the fly but it still took them a good hour to figure out how the poles worked.