Rain Birds Read online

  She didn’t know what to say. Trees whipped past the open window.

  ‘I tried to punch one of them when I saw that photo. I swung at him, and he just stepped back and then came forward again and knocked me out. He was bigger than me then. Now he’s a little pissant. But I thought it would get easier to take punches.’

  Why are you telling me this?

  ‘I think that animals are probably the superior creatures on the planet, you know,’ he said. ‘Better than people.’

  He obviously wanted something from her. But what? Camaraderie? Consolation? She still didn’t know what to say so she said nothing.

  He didn’t push it any further, and the silence between them was filled by the breeze speeding past the window.

  There was a truth in science that made the world easier to navigate. That’s why she’d been drawn to it. It made things knowable. You could learn how to cope with a world that you knew. Biology was the study of life. It meant understanding everything – including people – at a cellular level. It meant accepting that humans were also unpredictable, animal.

  Take her father: he hadn’t been all darkness; that was the problem. One day in first grade, she’d come out of the classroom crying because her favourite toy – a puzzle of wooden interlocking pieces, a brainteaser – had been broken. It had frustrated a boy in her class so much that he’d thrown it to the ground and a crucial part had shattered. She was cradling the wooden mess when she noticed her father waiting at the school gates. He never came to collect them; it was always their mother.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked.

  She readied herself. He would say: Who cares? It’s a piece of crap.

  He knelt down. ‘Kiddo, what’s the matter?’

  ‘My puzzle broke,’ she told him.

  He’d taken the pieces from her and inspected them. ‘I know you’re sad, and you got a right to be. But things we love get broken. Sometimes we break them ourselves. You got to have your cry and then pick yourself up.’

  His voice had been gentler than she had ever heard it. Caro was standing a little way off, watching them.

  ‘So have your cry,’ he said, ‘and in a minute we’ll go. Ok?’

  She’d sniffled, smelt the petrol on his clothes, the dusty smell.

  ‘You ready?’ he asked.

  When she nodded, he’d taken her hand. They’d walked out the gates, with Caro trailing a distance behind.

  As Tim drove over the rough service road back towards camp, the Land Cruiser was filled with the vibrating sound of the tyres flying across the corrugated dirt. She could feel her stomach tighten, that itch on her neck. She slid her hands between her thighs and pressed them together, so they were trapped.

  15

  THE BONEY POINT supermarket was a small shop on the main street, about the width of a couple of shipping containers side by side, with only two aisles. Pina was eternally frustrated by the lack of produce and the exorbitant prices. During the town’s popular fishing tournaments, which drew participants from as far away as Melbourne and Geelong, the shelves of the supermarket would be almost bare – the locals left to fend for themselves. But like everything in Boney Point, the supermarket was family-owned, and she was familiar with them. It made complaining difficult when you knew the owners and saw them often at the post office or the pub.

  The oldest daughter, Kelsey, usually staffed the cash register. Today, she barely turned away from the television behind the register as she and Alan walked in. The volume was very loud, a daytime show with shiny hosts that hurt Pina’s head.

  ‘Why do you watch that crap, Kelsey?’ she asked.

  The girl shrugged, eyes fixed on the screen. She’d never been all there, that’s what a lot of people in town thought. She’d always been odd. Pina remembered her in her school uniform, waiting at the bus stop out on Wallangamba Road. The way her mouth was always slack; how the other children stood apart from her. There were some kids who you could tell just didn’t have the social skills to make it through high school unscathed.

  ‘At least she didn’t get knocked up,’ her mother had once bragged drunkenly to Pina and Lil at the pub. ‘We can all be thankful for that.’

  Poor kid.

  ‘You good?’ she asked Kelsey now, one eye on Alan, who had drifted over to the dried fruits to finger the portioned bags. But Kelsey didn’t hear her over the noise of the TV. Or, if she did, she pretended otherwise. Pina walked off to do her shopping.

  She was in the rice and pasta section when she heard Alan yell out.

  ‘Pina, Pina.’

  The world was ending – that’s what his voice told her.

  ‘What’s wrong with you?’ Kelsey was saying to him. ‘She’s just over there.’

  Pina rushed back, took his arm. ‘What’s the matter, Alan?’ she said, her cheeks burning.

  ‘I need to keep my eye on you,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It reminds me where we are. I forget where we are.’

  She tried to balance the grocery basket on one arm, tucked her other arm through his and patted his bicep. It was thin and formless. One of the things she’d loved about her husband was his arms – isn’t that what all women went wild for? She remembered the way his muscles used to swell as he propped himself above her in bed. A dream.

  She led him to the register where Kelsey swiped through their items, all the while glancing sideways at Alan.

  He’s not contagious, she wanted to shout at her, all sympathy for the girl suddenly evaporated.

  ‘I’ll sit down,’ Alan said, pointing to the bench outside the automatic doors.

  She watched him shuffle outside, the bip, bip of barcodes being scanned in the place of his footfalls. In all the commotion, she realised she hadn’t got half the things she needed. She couldn’t summon the energy to go back and find them.

  When they returned home from the supermarket, it was already heading towards dusk. She liked to try to shower Alan early so their evenings weren’t a rush. He whistled as she turned on the tap and dragged the commode chair across the tiles to sit beneath the spray. She bent down to the cabinet to find a washcloth, soap. Things that had to be hidden away in boxes now. Out of reach. He was still whistling as she sat him down into the chair – he’d matched his pitch to the whine of the old pipes.

  ‘You’re going to give me a bloody headache,’ she said.

  ‘When are we going?’ he asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Mum,’ he said.

  She froze. Her arm outstretched. The sound of water hitting the tiles, the plastic commode.

  ‘I mean,’ he said. ‘Um, what’s your name?’

  She straightened up. ‘It’s not Mum.’

  She felt like collapsing to the floor. It’s me, your wife. It was all she could do to keep washing him, passing the flannel across his loosened skin, then towelling him dry and dressing him in his pyjamas. Slippers on his feet.

  As she was helping him stand, he began to whimper and clamp his knees tightly together.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she asked as he bobbed up and down. ‘Do you need to go to the toilet?’

  He nodded, and she moved him across the room until he was standing with his back to the commode chair that sat over the toilet. She tugged his pyjama pants down and helped him reach back to grab the armrests of the commode and lower himself down. The bathroom floor was a disaster of sodden towels and discarded clothes.

  ‘I’ll come back in five minutes,’ she told him.

  Gathering the dirty laundry into her arms, she walked down the hall and started stuffing it into the washing machine. Something heavy slipped from the pile, and there was a loud clunk on the tiles beside her foot: a cricket ball. She’d noticed a lump in Alan’s pocket at the supermarket but had forgotten about it till now. She picked it up and held the solid, red sphere in her palm.

  As far as she knew, all of Alan’s cricket gear had ended up packed away in the shed. Boxes pushed into the darkest corners and seal
ed with duct tape. It was unlikely that he would have discovered them. So where did he get it from?

  He’d been a cricket player since a young age. A slip fielder – that meant something, apparently.

  ‘Every position has a different personality,’ he’d often told her. ‘You can tell a man’s make by the fielding position he plays.’

  The slips were tough. A slip fielder had to do away with his fear. The cricket ball was one of the hardest of all balls, and in the slips it came towards you at very high speeds. A slip fielder needed great hand–eye coordination, reflexes like a cat’s.

  She’d boxed all his sports gear up when the memories became too much for him. All those trophies and achievements only served to remind him of how much he had changed. Then Doctor Nash had suggested they find a shared activity – and the garden became his physical outlet. It was what saved them for a long time: the work, the chores, the being needed, having their hands in the same earth. But, eventually, his disappearing took over. Tools became too hard for him to hold, and he started to watch from the deck instead, as she moved about the garden alone.

  She placed the cricket ball onto a shelf above the laundry sink, picked up a pile of clean towels and went back to the bathroom. Alan was still sitting on the commode chair.

  Please, let me get you dressed without kicking up a fuss.

  Then she noticed what he was doing. His erection. It was sticking up in the air between his awkwardly bent legs. His hands were dancing around it, brushing himself with feathery movements. Not the purposeful and confident strokes she’d seen before. Before.

  She was paralysed. Once she would have known what to do; she would have walked over, put her hands on him. Once his state would have been somehow participatory for her – it would have involved her. A man has needs.

  But now … her heart was pounding high in her throat, her legs weak and shaking, all sensation whirling around her. A man has needs. Alan was glaring at her. She backed out and closed the bathroom door, staggered to the laundry and shut herself inside. Tidal, racking sobs bent her over from the waist. She clutched the edge of the laundry sink as she wept. She hadn’t thought that he still had those kinds of urges, assumed that when the intimacy between them had dried up it was because his need had dried up. It’s me, your wife.

  She wiped her cheeks with her hands and tried to get herself together. Then she went to the linen closet and took some spare sheets and a pillow to the couch in the living room. It was no longer appropriate, she realised with dismay, for them to sleep side by side.

  This was the clearest indication she’d had so far: he was no longer her husband.

  After dinner she helped Alan climb beneath the covers of their – his – bed, adjusted the pool noodle up along the side of the mattress and hoped that it would keep him from wandering too much. She didn’t move to kiss his cheek, and he didn’t offer it to her.

  In the lounge room, she tucked a sheet over the seat cushions of the couch, positioned her pillow at one end and sat down. Even during arguments they’d never slept apart. Their marital bed.

  As the ghosts of the memories housed inside the weatherboard walls swirled around, silent, heavy tears slid down her cheeks. So many ghosts. Alan, at thirty-one, dragging a Salvos mattress up the front stairs on their first night there. Alan, older, washing the dog in the kitchen sink after she’d rolled in something and it was too cold outside for the hose. Alan digging a grave, in the middle of a hot day, for that dog when she was bitten by a snake. They were the memories she tried to hang on to – images of when he’d been a strong and healthy man.

  But the more recent memories were starting to crowd them out: Alan convinced there was someone stalking around the verandah and testing all the door handles.

  ‘There’s no one there,’ she’d told him. ‘It’s in your head.’

  But he’d insisted, becoming more and more wild. His frame was still big then, and she’d wondered if she should be scared for her safety. What is wrong with him? she’d asked herself.

  Alan had never been sick, not seriously. It had been easy to dismiss the symptoms. Forgetting more and more words, more often. Simple ones; things he should have known. Forgetting to pay the bills three months in a row; her having to call an irate energy company to negotiate their power back on. The mood shifts, the paranoia. The swings from angry to overly affectionate. All the inappropriate behaviour.

  ‘You know that Rolf Harris?’ he’d said to her one Sunday as they were sitting on the same couch where she was now. ‘That entertainer?’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘They say he’s a … you know … a kiddy fiddler.’ Alan had stared at her chest. ‘Not like me – I’m a titty fiddler.’

  She’d recoiled. ‘Alan! That’s disgusting!’ She remembered wrapping an arm protectively across her chest.

  He looked as though she’d hit him across the face; the surprise and confusion stripping years from his features. ‘What? What did I say?’

  She hadn’t been able to find the words to answer him. It wasn’t as though she was prudish or anything. Just those words: the crassness of them, the unexpected nature of them – it had made her feel violated. He’d never spoken to her like that before.

  ‘I’m so sorry, love,’ he’d said.

  His hands had been grasping hers, crushing them. Forgive me. But she’d felt uneasy for the rest of that day.

  I don’t know who you are anymore.

  After that he’d become more and more unpredictable, and the pattern of their life together – the unspoken things they’d shared – started dissolving.

  She sat there on the couch, on her bed now, and wondered what version of her husband of thirty years would remain when this was all over.

  16

  A FEW DAYS HAD passed since Tim had left her at the supermarket and driven out to the dog tree with Earl. In that time they’d seen the flock sporadically drift back to their Murrungowar site before disappearing again. Mostly, when they did spot them, the birds were sitting in the very tops of the trees. Arianna watched them for hours through her binoculars, their stainless steel leg tags catching the sun, the reflection shooting down into the bino lenses. A bad feeling.

  And today had ended without them seeing any trace of the cockatoos at all. As the sun sank low behind the trees, she and Tim ate their dinner in silence and prepared to go out into the bush. Once it was dark they intended to conduct a nest check, hoping to find that the birds were returning to roost at night even if they’d been absent all day.

  As they set off, she felt jumpy. The warm weather made the bush cloying and busy. Nocturnal. She could sense that things were hidden in the darkness. Shapes danced just outside the beam of her head torch as she and Tim went towards the first nest. She ascended to the box with movement flickering in her peripheral vision; she reached inside, hoping to brush against feathers, or even for a sharp nip.

  ‘They’re here,’ she called down to Tim as quietly as she could, trying not to frighten the birds.

  She pushed the pair apart to see their leg bands, make sure they hadn’t tried to snap them off with their beaks. The male (blue, orange, red) squawked in protest at being disturbed.

  ‘Sorry, mate,’ she whispered to him as she withdrew her hand.

  Back on the ground at the base of the tree, she and Tim smiled guardedly at each other. It was a good start. But, by the end of the night, they’d only found six pairs in their nesting boxes. Four pairs were missing. Four out of ten was significant. Dread niggled at her as they walked back to their campsite through the pitch-dark bush, but she made an effort to quell it.

  The following morning, she rose early and was out on a run when dawn arrived and the light shifted from grey to gold. Already it was warm. In the distance, through the trees, she could hear the sounds of large bodies crashing through the brush. Kangaroos or deer. She pushed herself on, long after her legs had started to ache. She liked the pain, used it as a distraction: from events that were going on around her; f
rom habits that were more destructive. It was something she could control.

  About halfway through her run, she heard a car approaching and stepped onto the verge to let it pass. A grimy, yellow station wagon drove by, taking the uneven road slowly. All the seats were filled with what looked like kids. The driver raised a hand to wave at her.

  When she returned from her run, Tim was already downloading the data collected from the motion cameras the night before onto a hard drive for storage. She stood at the edge of camp for a while, her chest heaving, her leg muscles burning. He sat on a chair with cords running over its arms.

  ‘It’s too early to jump to any conclusions,’ he muttered.

  ‘What conclusions?’

  He glanced up, surprised. He’d been speaking to himself, she realised.

  ‘Oh, nothing, really,’ he said.

  She’d never seen him look so terrible; puffy eyes with dark smudges beneath them. He was hunched forward. But she didn’t feel too sorry for him – he’d gone out late last night after they’d finished the nest checks.

  In the past fortnight, Tim had taken to driving into Boney Point a couple of nights a week, always returning in the early hours with uneven footsteps. The noise of the Land Cruiser pulling into the campsite would always wake Arianna, and then she’d lie wide-awake in her tent, her heart beating hard, long after there was nothing but stillness from his camp.

  Tim was jiggling his knee up and down, a frown on his face. As she watched him, her fingers crept across her scalp. Behind her left ear, she found a patch where her hair seemed to be a bit thinner than usual, more downy. You bald bitch.

  She could feel the tide beginning to rise inside her, the waves of panic creeping up her throat. She turned her head towards the sky. The tops of the trees were swaying back and forth in a breeze that didn’t reach below the canopy. Her arms were prickling; her hairline felt as if it were being stuck with pins. Plucked chicken, mangy dog.