Rain Birds Page 5

  The old man behind the journalist turned his head and stared at her. The hairs along her arms stood up.

  By the time they were ready for the release, the heat had dropped off a little, but the light remained golden and watery. The bush was still. Everyone moved softly. The casuarina hissed and the gums tunnelled off into the clouds. The birdwatchers stood in pairs by every tent, one on either side of the openings.

  On Arianna’s signal, in one smooth movement, they unzipped the flimsy mesh screens and rolled them back slowly, tucking the elastic clips around them at the top. Then everyone retreated to where the crowd had gathered, walking backward with careful footsteps.

  The cockatoos sat inside the nylon domes and seemed not to notice the sudden absence of the barrier between them and the world. They ruffled their feathers, puffing them out so they looked again like the fluffed chicks she’d hand-raised.

  One bird, braver than the others, walked foot over foot down the gum branch it was perched on and stuck its rounded head out the doorway. Just far enough to catch the sunlight on his feathers. Number five (green, blue, red). He shook his wings a little, and turned his head from side to side. Arianna felt her heart catch. The other birds began to move their shoulders up and down. The clicking of beaks, grumbling. Some started to move down their own branches, that Charlie Chaplin walk. Then number five scooped the air into his wings and lifted out into the trees. The heavy whuump, whuump of wing beats bouncing off the trunks.

  Arianna’s breath was stopped in her throat. It only took a few moments before they were all out, the bush raucous with the sound of wings flapping, the tents shaking from weighty bodies pushing off. Everyone cheered and began to clap. Arianna stepped forward, away from the group. The fingers of her right hand running up and down along her left forearm, pinching, the fine hairs on end again. She watched the last of the cockatoos fly into the higher branches, disappearing out of view. This moment was supposed to be hers; it was her first release. It felt unfair to have to share it.

  ‘Well, then,’ Tim said, after the birds were all gone. ‘That’s all, folks.’

  The schoolkids filed off to their bus, the locals drifted away. Arianna walked over to one of the tents and started to pack it up. The birdwatchers followed suit and began to dismantle the others, folding the tent poles into themselves.

  ‘You don’t have to do that,’ she said to them.

  ‘It’s alright,’ said a man at the tent nearest to her. ‘We don’t mind lending a hand.’

  As she was trying to wrestle her tent into its bag, she glanced up to see Tim slouching against a tree near where the cars were parked, talking to Earl from Parks Victoria. She’d been aware of Earl throughout the morning. He was always studying the trees; even during the release, he’d been gazing upwards when everyone else was watching the birds. He’d remained at the edge of the clearing the whole time. Even now from this distance, while she couldn’t see his eyes, she somehow knew exactly where he was looking.

  8

  PINA FASTENED ALAN’S seatbelt. He was whistling softly and staring ahead through the windscreen. She’d brought him to see the release of the black cockatoos; she’d thought he might get something from it, given all the hours they’d spent together watching the birds that flitted in and out of the trees beyond their back fence. Not that either of them had been birdwatchers ; not in the way that other people were – those who sought out rarely sighted breeds or purchased all the right equipment – but, she had to admit, that moment when the tent doors had been unzipped and the black cockatoos had rushed forward into the open bush had been special. That first instant of flight in the wild, where they were supposed to be. She wondered how the biologists knew when it was time to release the birds into the bush. She supposed they had formulas to tell them when to let them go. Having a set of rules to follow would make things like that easier.

  A couple of people had tried to speak to her and Alan as they were leaving, and Alan hadn’t recalled who they were. Looked right through them as though they hadn’t all been living in the same area for almost thirty years. She’d given up apologising for him long ago.

  ‘Do they know me?’ Alan had asked as she’d steered him back towards their ute.

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know them.’

  Even Earl. She thought back to how, after she’d been working at Toongabbie for a couple of years, she and Lil started meeting up with Alan and Earl at the Boney Point Hotel late on Friday afternoons; remembered how the two men had just clicked immediately upon meeting.

  ‘We’re cut from the same cloth,’ Alan had told her. ‘I could have grown up with that bloke; it’s like we already did.’

  Just before, as they were leaving the birds’ release site, she’d seen the sting of hurt travel across Earl’s features. She wasn’t the only one losing Alan.

  She steered the car back along the service road to the Pearl Point Track T-junction. Then she drove down the main street to get to the other side of Boney Point. Along Wallangamba Road, pale-trunked mountain gums and full bushes lined the sides of the road. She knew the tickbush flowers would arrive in December; it was one of her favourite times of year.

  At their meeting with the community on Saturday morning, the newsreader was saying on the radio, Sol Petroleum promised six local Indigenous jobs. Members of the public voiced their concerns about the project at the meeting, some even clashing with supporters of the dig in the Orbost Community Centre car park. Coming up after the news, Roger Jones talks to conservation biologists in Murrungowar National Park trying to save a threatened local species.

  She turned the volume down until the voices were a hiss beneath the car’s engine.

  ‘Look,’ Alan said as they neared home. He was pointing towards a big stringybark at the end of the driveway to Bruce Holloway’s dairy, a couple of kays down the road from their house. From the heavy, splayed branches hung about fifteen corpses. Dog tree. It was something of a local custom, she knew, for the farmers in the area to string up the wild dogs they shot on their properties. The beasts decimated livestock and attacked native wildlife like echidnas and bandicoots. The dogs were all hung up by their hind legs. Some were the size of large calves. She always tried to pretend she couldn’t hear the ricochet cracks of gunfire that came across the paddocks, but she wasn’t completely naive. She understood what it meant to live in the country: that sometimes things had to be put down.

  She changed gears and heard the crunch that signalled she hadn’t made a smooth transition. ‘Sorry,’ she said, but Alan didn’t even look away from the window.

  She was confident behind the wheel, but he’d always been the driver if they went out together. That’s just the way they’d done things. He’d enjoyed driving, and she’d enjoyed the feeling that she was in her husband’s hands. The day they’d decided that Alan was no longer safe driving a car was one of the hardest for them both. In a strange way it had marked the end. He’d been a bit unsteady for a while, putting his foot on the brake rather than the accelerator, that kind of thing. But then one afternoon he’d driven straight through the only roundabout in Boney Point. Right over the top of it.

  ‘What the hell is wrong with you?’ she’d yelled, horns blaring around them.

  ‘What?’ he’d asked.

  ‘You go around roundabouts.’

  He stared at her, and she could tell he didn’t understand what she was talking about.

  ‘What?’ he said again.

  ‘You go around ’ – she moved her arm in a half-circle through the air – ‘not straight through.’

  By then they were stopped on the shoulder of the road, just outside Boney Point Fuel Supplies. She could see Maureen peering out the window at them. Alan was gripping the wheel with both hands, staring ahead, his knuckles blanching beneath his taut skin.

  ‘Alan, what’s going on?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘What do you mean you don’t know?’

  He let go of the steering whee
l. Stretched out his fingers and hovered his palms just above the vinyl. ‘I think you need to drive.’

  She had felt a pulsating mixture of frustration and fear. She’d worked a long day – why couldn’t he just drive? But there was something about the way he looked that kept her from snapping. She opened her door, got out, and they passed each other as they changed sides.

  Maureen came out of the service station. ‘Youse right?’ she called.

  ‘Fine,’ Pina shouted back.

  Alan was already sitting in the passenger seat, hands under his armpits for warmth. She started the ute and steered back onto the road. Dusk had set in: the tree trunks appeared white and were lined up against the edge of the road like teeth. Alan said nothing, just stared into the growing darkness. When they reached home, she turned off the ignition and they sat in the dark until their eyes adjusted.

  ‘What’s going on?’ she asked again.

  The only sound in the space where his answer should have been was the wind.

  Now, as she pulled into their driveway, she noticed that the weatherboards on their house were flaking, the verandah was sagging in places. The wire fence down along the side of the shed was rusty and slack. Fixing things like that used to be Alan’s job.

  After the roundabout incident, matters had moved quickly. Their local GP had referred Alan to the Cognitive Dementia and Memory Service clinic in Bairnsdale, a two-hour drive away. The neuropsychologist there was a woman named Doctor Ellen Nash. She’d been wearing a gold brooch shaped like a sparrow’s skull when they first met her.

  ‘I know, it’s a bit cliche,’ she’d said when Pina had commented on it, ‘but I really like birds and brains.’

  She’d sent Alan for an MRI, and then had conducted a series of tests.

  ‘Some of the things I’ll ask you may seem a little strange,’ she had warned Alan at the start. ‘What’s the date today?’ she said first.

  ‘The fifteenth.’

  ‘Of what month?’

  ‘July.’

  She wrote something on the pad in front of her. ‘Do you know who the prime minister was before Tony Abbott?’

  ‘I can see his face,’ Alan said, ‘but I can’t think of his name.’

  ‘It’s Kev …’ she said. ‘Kevin Rrr …’

  You know this one, Pina thought, urging Alan on. The guy had been a real disappointment, as Alan had told her often enough.

  ‘Can you take this piece of paper,’ Doctor Nash asked, ‘and draw me a clock face with the hands pointing to a quarter past eight?’

  Alan picked up the pen and drew a circle. His hand hovered above it for a beat, then he wrote down all the numbers along the right side of the clock. The left side remained blank.

  ‘Now the hands. A quarter past eight.’

  He had drawn two lines. Both pointed into the jumble of numbers with no logic.

  ‘I’m going to read you a list of words,’ the doctor said next. ‘When I’m finished, I want you to repeat as many of those words as you can. Cloud, fish, paint, dentist, ladder, chicken, banana, telephone, truck.’

  ‘Truck,’ Alan said. ‘That was the last one. Chicken.’

  ‘Any others?’

  ‘Banana … cloud, fish, pa …’

  It was as if there was nothing left in his mind except dust and vapours.

  ‘Alan,’ Doctor Nash said, ‘how are you coping at home?’

  ‘Fine,’ he whispered.

  The doctor had given them her diagnosis at the end of the session. Early onset.

  The words had resounded in Pina’s head. There was a distance to them, a mutedness.

  ‘Alzheimer’s?’ she kept saying.

  Alan’s jaw was set, and he wouldn’t meet her eyes.

  ‘But he’s not old,’ she’d said to Doctor Nash. ‘He’s sixty. This is an old person’s disease, isn’t it?’

  Sitting there together in the ute, as the engine cooled and the darkness deepened, she thought about how that was the difference now: he did seem old these days.

  Alan was still staring out the window blankly. His fingers splayed across his thighs. The car door felt unusually heavy as she pushed it open. Her legs were stiff from the long drive, and she stumbled a little as she got out and thought back to how the black cockatoos had seemed cumbersome initially, as though they’d needed a few moments to get used to the heft of their own wings.

  ‘Come on,’ she said after she’d walked around to Alan’s side. ‘Let’s get you inside.’

  9

  ARIANNA’S AND TIM’S first few weeks in Murrungowar marked the close of winter, with the occasional frost and stark skies. As the end of August approached, the weather warmed quickly, and she heard on the radio that it was projected to be the hottest spring in thirty years. She began to be woken up by the sound of insects butting against the sides of her tent, aware that the unusually high number of them was the result of the seasonal moisture in the ground and the warm weather encouraging accelerated breeding and development of larvae.

  The mornings were shimmering, all silvery air and a cacophony of life. Birds whipped through the leaves to catch the insects; sometimes their talons scratched against her tent walls alongside the bugs. She had always been a light sleeper, and the tiny, grating tapping against the nylon that woke her set her teeth on edge.

  That morning, she watched beads of dew slide down the side of the tent and thought about how it seemed a long time since she’d been in a proper bed, a bedroom. A wren or some other tiny bird struck its beak against the flywire before fleeing as she stirred behind it. She could hear Tim already moving around his own camp, whistling.

  She rose and dressed quickly, irked that he was ready before her. It was her program. Tim was there to assist her, but she’d never been comfortable with any sort of dependency on another person. It involved too much trust. Take the work ahead of them that morning: every few days, as part of their monitoring and data collection routine, they had to perform tree ascensions to inspect the nests and retrieve footage from the camera traps. Government health and safety required there to be two people present for each climb – one on the ground ready to do an aerial rescue if needed – but she considered it best to assume that you only had yourself and your own skill to fall back on, that there would be no one to save you.

  It was already midmorning – and heating up rapidly – by the time she walked across to meet Tim. They set out for the nests, each carrying the coiled metres of rope attached to their backpacks; they were heavy, and their racks of carabiners tinkled and rattled together as they walked. Behind them, on the other side of camp, she heard the growl of a car engine from the service road. For the last few days, she’d noticed vehicles heading out further into the bush but not many had returned; she recalled hearing radio reports mentioning demonstrations out at the Sol Petroleum dig site. Don’t think about it.

  Her ponytail lay heavy against the back of her neck. Beneath her feet, the leaf litter crunched, and the heat made the bush feel slightly more claustrophobic than usual. Normally she only felt that way indoors. Indoors and in crowds, like the farewell the biology faculty had thrown for her and Tim at a bar the night before they’d left for Boney Point. It was a venue frequented by academics, with low, dark wooden tables, chairs with red leather upholstery, and a close proximity to the campus.

  ‘You could stay in the town, just take day trips out to the site and back,’ Rod had said to her.

  ‘I’m really ok to camp. It’s easier if I’m there with the birds all the time.’

  Rod leant onto the table and made a pretence of lowering his voice. ‘You’re good at what you do, Arianna, no one’s saying otherwise. I just don’t know why you have to take the hardest route with everything.’

  She saw the smirks ripple around the table.

  ‘You all set to go, too?’ Rod called across to Tim, who was chewing the ear off a young female PhD candidate down the far end.

  ‘For sure,’ he replied. ‘Someone’s got to keep the genius grounded.’
He winked at Arianna.

  ‘Everyone says your work is really important,’ the PhD candidate piped up.

  ‘Hopefully every one of us here is doing important work,’ she replied. ‘If not, what’s the point?’

  Tim roared with laughter. She felt the fingers of her right hand flutter up around her brow, probing the smooth hairs for irregularity. No. She forced her hand back down to grip the side of her chair.

  ‘Yes, we’re all doing very important work,’ Rod said.

  ‘We’re like goddamn Captain Planet,’ Tim shouted.

  She’d winced. She had always hated the looseness and unpredictability of drunkenness. As soon as was polite, she excused herself. Some colleagues attempted to persuade her to stay, to have another drink. She was going to be stuck in the middle of nowhere for months, they said; she should make the most of the bar tab, of civilisation. Yet she was longing for the stillness and vastness of the bush. She’d left Tim draped across the table, talking animatedly to the PhD student.

  Now in Murrungowar, she stared ahead at Tim, who already had sweat bleeding down the back of his shirt. She adjusted her heavy pack and kept walking.

  When they reached the first nesting tree, she looked up and could see the blinking, black camera box from the base of the trunk.

  ‘What do you reckon we’ve captured?’ Tim asked. ‘Leaves and bugs are my guess.’

  She didn’t reply but prepared her climbing rope. She ran its length through her hands to feel for bumps, twists or places where it had frayed or collapsed. That was the key: repeating something until your hands did it on their own, until you knew it so well nothing could ever surprise you. She went over each knot, smoothing the messier ones, tightening the carabiner screw-lockers.

  ‘A braver man might say you have a touch of OCD,’ Tim said, watching her check each inch of the set-up.

  ‘There’s nothing compulsive about taking safety seriously. Or obsessive.’