Rain Birds Read online

  There were dangers to his night-time roving. A year or so earlier, Bruce Holloway had found Alan wandering around his milk shed at five a.m. She had woken to Bruce pounding on their front door, the bed empty beside her. ‘It was more than he just didn’t know where he was,’ Bruce had told her. ‘He didn’t know who I was.’

  After that, she had installed heavy curtains that closed across the front and back doors on the theory that if Alan couldn’t see the door, he wouldn’t remember it was there. So far it had worked.

  Until recently she’d followed him sometimes when he rose, standing in the shadows, hidden. To keep an eye on things. She’d watch him drift around the house like a creature already of the next world. She’d observe him pick objects up from the mantelpiece, the dresser. Put them down again. In the total quiet of pre-dawn, she’d walk behind him, shutting cupboard doors, and then return to bed. But most of the time now, she would just lie there as his weight left the mattress, awake but with her eyes still closed. It made no difference if she was there with him or not.

  Pina dressed as Alan murmured and then she waited as he woke, sitting on the chair in the corner of the bedroom. Once he was alert, she walked him down the hallway to the bathroom. He often forgot where it was these days. She’d hear him start to shuffle anxiously back and forth around the house, trying various closets and doorways, all of which led everywhere except for the toilet. She would rush to help him. A few times recently she’d been too late, and the front of his trousers had bloomed wet with urine.

  When he was safely sitting on the commode chair, she went into the kitchen. Outside the window, the dew was still clinging to the spiders’ webs and stalky leaves of native bushes, glittering like jewels in the early light. Wafts of mist drifted up from the grass and evaporated as they met the sun’s rays.

  She noticed that the edge of the tarp covering Alan’s ride-on mower had blown away from the rope that bound it to the ground. It flapped languidly as though it were in slow motion, taunting. Everywhere she looked, there were reminders. Before.

  Alan had run his own mowing business for most of his working life. When they’d come to Boney Point as newlyweds, they’d arrived with nothing; no plans. They’d just picked themselves up and driven across the widest part of the country to the furthest point from their hometown. A clean slate.

  For her it had been especially difficult. Her mother had been ill for a long time before she died. So even though she was heading towards the end of her twenties when they left Western Australia, she hadn’t yet had to really think about what she wanted to do.

  In comparison, work had come easily to Alan. He’d chopped firewood during the lead-up to winter, helped out a couple of farms with fencing. Brush cutting, landscaping. At one point, in the late 1980s, a local had tried to set up fishing and hunting tours in the area and hired Alan as a guide. There were deer loose in the bush towards Black Mountain, thanks to a couple of blokes having previously torn down the fences of a deer farm out that way. And the fish that ran in the inlet waters were big and sweet: freshwater and saltwater mixed together – bream, estuary perch and flathead. Alan had led a couple of groups, but the company never got off the ground. He’d been forced to go back to odd jobs. That’s when he got the inspiration for Alan’s Mowing. If the guiding job had given him anything, it was the taste for entrepreneurship.

  ‘Why sit around working for someone else?’ he’d said to her. ‘Just have to identify a gap in the marketplace and fill it.’

  She hadn’t been able to say no to that. They weren’t making much extra money at that stage, never really did, but he’d put little bits away until he could buy a ride-on mower outright. Wrangled a deal that threw in the trailer, too. Other bits and pieces he’d borrowed, called in favours from mates around the area. Slowly built up his collection of tools.

  It had been hard at first – most people with good-sized lawns already had their own ride-ons. But Alan had always had that knack for talking people around to something and making them feel as though they’d thought of it all by themselves.

  After a couple of years, Alan’s Mowing had racked up a healthy list of regular customers. The cricket club had a lot to do with it: ovals were wide and green; they needed to be kept short all year round with footy in the winter. Alan had been a player back then. His teammates from the Boney Point Bogongs Over 35s spread the word as well. They looked after their own.

  But when Alan began having problems with invoicing and remembering appointments, she’d started to worry that the business might have to go. At first she’d tried to help him – knew of other women who took care of the books for their husband’s businesses – but she couldn’t keep it afloat forever. In fact, after she had gone through all the paperwork, she became aware that Alan had been making mistakes for months already. He’d been hiding it from her the whole time.

  As she tried to ignore the thump of the tarp – and the memories it brought back – she placed some bread in the toaster and heard Alan’s footsteps shuffling along the hallway towards the kitchen. Later, she’d go out and tie it down properly again. Outside, the parrots were still chattering.

  12

  AFTER THEY’D FINISHED breakfast, Pina left Alan alone so he could get dressed. He’d been in their bedroom for a long time now, almost forty minutes. She wondered if she should go and check on him, but she was in the middle of loading dirty laundry into the washing machine. Like most couples, she supposed, their arguments over the years had often circled around the same things.

  Why am I always doing your laundry? When do you ever do mine?

  I’m not interested in picking up after you. If you wanted that you should’ve married a different woman.

  There was something intrinsically unequal for Pina in housework. Alan had been – was – a quite progressive man; he understood the unfairness of tasks that were seen as ‘women’s work’ and ‘men’s work’. He never begrudged her job at Toongabbie or her need for a wage that was her own. But when he returned home in the evenings from working, he’d take off his shorts and socks as soon as he got in and just dump them. Who did he expect was going to pick them up? She would come home to a bundle of clothes in the hallway, and Alan lying on the couch, feet up – already relaxing – a posture, she noticed, that accentuated his pot belly.

  She felt that old anger bubbling up from her stomach at the memory. What the hell is wrong with you? It seemed cruel to think ill of him, now.

  As she pushed the stuffed washing machine closed, she heard Alan in the hallway and went out to meet him.

  ‘What on earth are you wearing?’ she said.

  He had a woollen jumper over his pyjama shirt, accompanied by shorts, socks and no shoes. A scarf was draped around his neck. It was only September and still morning, but already the heat was setting in.

  She could see beads of sweat on his forehead. ‘Let’s get some more appropriate clothes for you,’ she said, taking his arm.

  ‘Get off. I’m fine.’

  He shrugged off her hands and stormed away towards the lounge room.

  Do I have the energy for this today?

  In the dim light of the hallway, she closed her eyes and tried to breathe as deeply as she could. Then she opened her eyes and walked towards the lounge room.

  It took until just before lunchtime to convince Alan to change. And it took another hour to persuade him to eat something. By then, it was almost time to drive to Orbost for their three o’clock appointment with Doctor Nash, who was at the health clinic as part of the regional outreach program. It was closer than her Bairnsdale office but still a decent drive.

  ‘Do you need to go to the toilet?’ she asked Alan.

  ‘No.’

  She tried to encourage him. Once, on a long trip, he had needed to go to the bathroom, and she’d had to get out on the side of the road and assist him. Only trees and paddocks around. Trucks tooting as they sped past. He’d got urine all over his trousers despite her help anyway.

  ‘Are you sure you
don’t want to try going?’ she asked again.

  But Alan was clearly thinking about other things, adamant he needed his jacket, couldn’t remember where it was. He went through the kitchen, opening all the cupboards.

  She found it on the bedroom floor and brought it to him.

  ‘Why do you hide everything from me?’ he snapped.

  She said nothing, simply retraced his path around the kitchen, shutting all the cupboard doors and trying to ignore the screaming inside her.

  When she’d finished, Alan was sitting on the couch, rocking back and forth. ‘Why are you doing that?’ she asked.

  ‘Why are you doing that?’ he repeated, sarcastically. Rocking back and forth, whistling without tune. Backandforth, backandforth.

  ‘I’m asking you. You can’t ask me the same thing I’m asking you.’

  ‘Stop fussing. You’re always fuss, fuss, fussing around.’

  Backandforth, backandforth.

  She felt as though she couldn’t stay in the room any longer, that she was going to explode. Watching him, those long legs bunched up. Undignified. The skinniness of his wrists; the back and forth, backandforth, backandforthbackandforth. It really was unbearable.

  unbearable /ʌn'bεǝrǝbǝl/ not able to be endured or tolerated.

  She’d never understood a word so literally before.

  ‘I may have dementia,’ he said, ‘but it doesn’t have me, yet.’ He was smiling as he said that, grinning up at her from the edge of the couch, rocking, rocking. Unbearable.

  When Alan finally allowed her to steer him outside, he stood fingering the coral pea along the verandah’s railing while she closed up. She turned the key in the lock while watching over her shoulder to keep an eye on him.

  The coral pea needed a prune; it was smothering the wood beneath it. In the early days after his diagnosis, Doctor Nash had suggested she and Alan find an activity to do together – especially once he could no longer play cricket – something that engaged his gross motor skills, something to keep him connected to his body. Something like cooking dinner, hanging out the washing or gardening, she’d suggested.

  ‘This will be great, Alan,’ she’d joked on the drive home from that appointment. ‘I’ll get my dinner cooked and my washing done.’

  ‘You’re taking advantage of my situation,’ he’d replied in mock outrage.

  But both of them had known what it was they needed, especially given her job at the nursery. Within a couple of weeks of that appointment, they’d started to work on the garden together. In preparation, they’d researched appropriate plants, ones with bird-and insect-attracting flowers, and that provided shelter and nesting. All native. Ground cover banksia, slender fuchsia, and purple coral pea. They’d commenced at the bottom of the yard, near where the fence butted up against the state forest and casuarina woodlands.

  They’d worked hard, sliding plants from pots, tangling their fingers through the roots to brush out the soil. They’d pulled out a pile of old palings from beneath the sedge-grass at the back fence, and she had held the pieces of wood straight while he nailed together some bird feeders. He was always so good with his hands.

  ‘Why buy something when I can make it myself?’ he used to tell her.

  But those bird feeders were shoddy, lumpy and unformed structures. But they were functional. He’d already begun to have trouble with the numbers on the measuring tape, the distances between things. The bird feeders were the last objects Alan had managed to make.

  Slowly, they had transformed their garden together. That was two years ago now: the plants had established themselves and, as spring set in, flowers erupted – tiny, woody blooms that appeared both fragile and hardy at the same time. Birds and insects flocked to them, drawn by the pollen that misted the air.

  She’d found herself falling into the routines of the garden: watering, weeding; sometimes in the mornings she even used to place the crumbs from beneath the toaster and the ends of bread packets on the bird feeders to lure the birds. One time, only a few months after his first appointment with Doctor Nash, Alan had remarked of Pina’s actions, ‘You can take the wog outta Italy, but you can’t take the wog outta the wog.’

  That meanness was new; it hadn’t been there before the disease. It’s not really him that’s saying it, she’d told herself. It’s just a word. But she hadn’t been able to let go of the hurt.

  There were stories that she carried in her muscles, memories that were hers even though she hadn’t experienced them. Ghosts. How during World War II, her relatives were referred to as ‘enemy aliens’ and her stonemason uncle’s tools were stolen. The policeman who came to investigate had looked at his dark features and seen fascism.

  ‘Why don’t you ask Mussolini to help you find them?’ he’d said.

  That was a story that had been repeated in her family, over and over. Can you believe it? That’s what he said to him! Always in the background, the hiss of the wind. Wog, wog, wog.

  Alan had never understood the ache of always being something other. How could he? That beautiful, blond Australian man. At the time, she had been furious, but now she saw it for what it was: another example of him separating from her.

  In the end, they arrived at the clinic ten minutes after their appointment time. The receptionist glared at her, but Doctor Nash was waiting in the corridor and waved them directly into her office.

  ‘Apple, table, ring,’ Doctor Nash told Alan, once they were all sitting down. ‘I want you to remember those words while we do some other things.’

  ‘Apple, table, ring,’ Alan repeated.

  Doctor Nash asked him to draw the face of a clock with the hands pointing at ten past four. He drew a circle, then the numbers bunched up on the top of the right-hand side, cramped. All on top of each other – a scribbled mess.

  ‘Ok,’ Doctor Nash said, ‘now the hands.’

  Even Pina could already see that it wasn’t as good as the last time he’d done this test.

  ‘What time?’ Alan asked.

  ‘Ten past four.’

  He stared at the paper while the seconds on the real clock on the wall behind him ticked over. She saw him mouthing things under his breath.

  After quite a while, he glanced up at Doctor Nash and pushed the paper away. ‘I can’t do it.’

  ‘That’s fine,’ she said. ‘Can you remember those words I asked you to?’

  He blinked at her blankly.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘Is there anything worrying you’ve noted, Pina?’

  She told the doctor how she’d caught Alan trying to light the end of a cotton bud. That he’d thought it was a cigarette. How he’d brushed his teeth with Deep Heat, almost burnt his gums off. She’d had to remember to hide the cleaning products after that.

  ‘I’d recommend you start investigating your power of attorney,’ Doctor Nash said once she had finished speaking.

  ‘What for?’ Alan was staring at the doctor.

  ‘So you can make some decisions about what you want to happen to you,’ she said, ‘and then Pina doesn’t have to make them for you. Later.’

  He looked flushed, shifted in his seat.

  ‘And I think I’d like to see you again in three months. In December.’

  ‘So soon?’ Pina asked.

  ‘It’s nothing to worry about. I’d just like to start keeping a closer eye on things.’

  Alan sat in silence as the two women talked around him, but when they got back into the ute he erupted.

  ‘Why did you tell her all that stuff about me?’ he shouted.

  ‘She needs to know – she’s your doctor.’

  ‘But it’s not true, you just make things up to get rid of me. You want them to take me away and lock me up.’

  That was more common now: mood swings, paranoia.

  ‘That’s not true.’ She tried to placate.

  ‘It is. You’re a bitch, you’re a fucking bitch.’

  People in the car park were staring.

  ‘Sshh,’ sh
e hissed.

  But he kept ranting. There was nothing for her to do but drive them home.

  ‘Get the fuck away from me,’ he yelled once they’d pulled into their driveway and she was trying to help him out.

  He stormed out of the ute and round to the back garden. She went inside and watched him from the kitchen window. He removed his shirt; tore it off like it was shackles and chains.

  Later, he came inside looking wild.

  ‘You treat me like an inval … like I’m sick,’ he said. ‘I’m not sick.’

  ‘I know. I’m sorry.’

  She felt as if she was battling against a tugging current. Everything that she’d thought was unchangeable and immovable about people was a fabrication, a bundle of half-truths. The very essence of the man she’d known was dust. Apple, table, ring. In several days’ time, she was certain, she’d remember those fucking words. After only five minutes, Alan had forgotten them.

  13

  IN THE MURRUNGOWAR campsite, Arianna emerged from her tent and noticed that the daylight was too harsh and bright for spring. She was squinting, even in the shade. It had always irked her that weather extremes became trivial conversation in small towns. What a scorcher! Warm enough for you? As though they – people – weren’t all complicit in the changes and didn’t find anything wrong with it being only September and already too warm. Were people actually that stupid? Did they really have their heads so resolutely stuck in the sand?

  That morning, as a swarm of fairy wrens twittered in the nearby silver wattle, she stood blinking uncontrollably, a pain behind her eyes. Despite the fact her running path along the service road was lined with thick tree cover, she would need to wear her sunglasses. She dug them out of her pack before setting off.

  She was still wearing them when she returned to camp and saw Tim was up.