For the Forest of a Bird (10 page)

‘But . . .'

There was stillness. Nella felt her throat tighten.

‘Just leave it down,' he spoke again.

And Nella stared at a tiny black spot on the carpet.

‘Linda's tired,' he said. ‘She needs to rest.'

The television went blank, the light was turned off.
Nella's father went to bed and Nella sat in her room on the mattress hugging her knees to her chest.

Linda needed her rest; Linda who was marrying her father needed her rest.

Nella tightened her arms.

Well, why doesn't she just go back to her own house then?

Nella looked at the top of the chest of drawers where she kept her pile of
Australian Geographic
s
with their pictures of rock wallabies and deep-sea creatures, echidnas and rare platypuses. Somehow their stories of survival and rescue and million-year histories always restored her, but now as she looked at the pine cabinet she saw that the slim volumes were gone. Instead, in their place, rested a thick magazine. She loosened her arms and felt herself lengthen. She moved over to the chest. She reached out and pulled the magazine towards herself so that she could read the title on its front cover. ‘Special Wedding Days,' it said.

She stayed still for what felt like a very long time and then she moved towards the door that led onto the lounge room. She walked across to the television and there in the darkness she switched on the set. Light, sound. She turned the volume up.

And soon enough, in the doorway from the kitchen her father appeared.

‘Nella, what are you doing?'

She ignored him.

‘Nella, I told you, Linda needs to rest. She isn't feeling well.'

Nella turned to her father.

‘She isn't feeling well!' Nella felt her voice rise above the sound of the television. ‘She isn't feeling well! Well, maybe she needs to go and stay at a hospital!'

Nella stepped towards him and her father stayed standing in the doorway.

‘Nella,' he said quietly. ‘Nella, Linda's having a baby.'

Nella paced Isobel's room, back and forth, back and forth
. It was dark, it was the middle of the night. Where was Isobel? Nella needed her, Nella needed to talk to her, she needed to tell her what her father had said. Linda was having a baby. Nella's father and Linda were having a baby. Nella was going to have a new brother or sister. Her father was going to have a new child.

She turned on the small lamp in the corner and sat down on the bed. It was a mattress really, simply a mattress on the floor. It was covered in blankets and cushions and rugs and it occurred to Nella that it was more like a nest than a bed. She put her hand beneath its top layers. It was soft inside.

She looked around the room. The eyes of an endangered pygmy possum stared down at her from a poster above Isobel's desk. A book of Mary Oliver poems lay open on the floor. A photo of a man on the beach surrounded by sandcastles rested on the dressing table next to the bed.

Where was Isobel? Surely she couldn't be still in the yard, beneath the tree?

Nella waited. She couldn't sleep. Morning came. Rain fell on the metal roof. Tiny skinks woke to scurry beneath the room's floorboards. Still, Isobel did not appear.

Nella stood and she walked around the room. She picked up a beach scene encased in plastic but put it down gently so as not to disturb its glittery sand. She bent to a tiny opened bottle on the cupboard and smelt sea salt. She ran one of her fingers across a sponge, strange-shaped and curious from the ocean.

And then Isobel was there. The door opened and Isobel came into the room.

She wore the same jeans and shirt Nella had last seen her in.

‘Hi,' Nella said, a little awkward amongst the detail of Isobel's room.

‘Hi. I thought you were staying at your dad's.'

‘I was. I mean I did . . . for a little while. And then . . .'

‘And then?'

Now was Nella's chance to tell Isobel about the baby, about the child Linda was having and her father was having and how for all Nella knew, for everything Nella sensed, it was going to be a girl.

She looked at Isobel's face. She saw that Isobel's lips were almost blue with cold.

‘Isobel, why did you plant the tree?' she said.

Isobel's skin on her neck grew suddenly red, she shifted her feet.

‘Because I lost someone,' she answered.

Nella waited.

‘Because I lost someone. And I wanted him back.'

So Isobel knew; Isobel knew what it was to lose someone, to want them back, to want things to be what they once were.

‘Did he return?' Nella asked.

‘Yes . . . and no. I guess it's like that, isn't it?'

‘Like what?'

‘Like yes and no, light and dark, daytime and night.'

‘Is it?'

‘You saw the photo of him on the dressing table.'

Nella looked to the floor, guilty.

‘It's okay. I don't mind. It's a photo of my dad. He was my dad. That's what I mean, everything's mixed up, isn't it? Back then and now, what's gone and what's still here.'

‘I'm sorry,' Nella said.

Isobel bent down and sat on the mattress. She looked at her hands.

‘It was four years ago now,' she said. ‘I was fourteen.'

Nella felt herself drawn to Isobel. She felt the urgency of her own anguish begin to fade.

‘What happened . . . to your dad?'

‘He was in an accident on the way to Melbourne. It was wet and his car skidded and rolled over. He'd taken a back road and it was late at night when a truck driver found him. He was dead.'

Nella didn't know what to say.

Isobel smoothed the creases in her jeans. She bit her lip.

‘It was like everything was useless then,' she said. ‘Especially school.'

She looked up at Nella.

‘I didn't want to be around anyone,' she said. ‘It was like no one understood.'

Nella felt herself nodding.

‘I know my mum felt the same,' Isobel went on. ‘She didn't go anywhere except to get food or pay the bills. The only thing she started doing was just sitting on the lawn in the front yard. She'd just go out there and sit. It was just grass and a fringe of roses then.'

Nella tried to picture it.

‘I'd watch my mum through the front window just sitting there and picking at blades of grass. And then one day I saw her go up to the leaf on a rose bush and look really closely at it. And then she started noticing tiny flowers and little plants trying to come up through the lawn. She'd pull away little bits of grass as if she were clearing a way for them.

‘I watched her for so many hours out there. After a while, I noticed she started leaving the yard and going up and down the street, collecting a bit of plant here, a bit there. She'd bring home all these little bits and put them in jars around the house. She'd watch their roots grow and then she'd plant them out in the garden. She'd make sure they had enough water and all the right food and that they were positioned to get the exact sun they needed.

‘She spent so long out there. It was the one thing that made her happy, to be there with the plants.'

Nella smiled.

‘I guess it made sense then that when some money came through – from my dad's accident and everything – she bought the native nursery.'

‘And what about you?' Nella asked. ‘What made sense to you?'

‘Nothing. Nothing made sense for a long, long time. I went to school because I had to. And then, when I could, I left. I started helping my mum in the nursery. I liked it; it wasn't gardening like some people think of it. It wasn't about hedges and pots and twisting trees to fit some kind of shape that you want them to. It wasn't that at all. It was about things continuing, beginning and it got me thinking about my dad, where he was, how he couldn't have just disappeared.'

There was silence for a long time.

‘But that's not why you came here, is it?' Isobel said at last. ‘To hear my story?'

Nella thought of her father and his new child, his unborn child and she wanted to say, yes, Isobel's story was exactly why she'd come here but instead she put her hand to Isobel's sleeve to comfort her and when she looked again she was sure she saw the mark of the swallow's nest on her wrist.

Perhaps it was no coincidence, after all, Nella's glimpsing of Isobel by the roadside as she'd arrived on the island that first morning.
There was Isobel crouched beside the asphalt with blood against the chest of her T-shirt and the crumpled young wallaby at her feet.

Nella thought of it now and something struck her about that very moment. In that instant, in that exact time just before the bus had turned the corner and Nella had noticed Isobel, she realised that Isobel had seen her too. It may not have been in a conscious way but something in Isobel had known that Nella was there. Somehow, like the swallows aware of each other at two distant points on their common pathway.

‘Were you close to your dad?' Nella asked and she instantly wished she hadn't because spoken aloud it seemed such an insensitive question, and even more, she was sure she knew the answer.

‘Sometimes,' Isobel said.

‘Sometimes?'

Nella was surprised.

‘I thought . . .' Nella said tentatively.

‘You thought what?'

‘I thought you must have been close, I mean, really close all the time.'

‘I loved my dad,' Isobel said.

‘Yeah . . . I know, but . . .'

‘But what? Things aren't perfect, people aren't perfect all the time, you know.'

Nella fiddled with a button on her cardigan.

‘That's right,' she said. ‘You're right.' And something began to unfold inside her. A knot began to loosen.

‘My dad promised to bring me a blue-eyed sheep from Nathalia once,' she said.

Nella had never told the whole story aloud, even to herself.

‘She was the only sheep he'd ever seen with two blue eyes and he promised me he'd bring her back to me as a pet, as a special companion. I read everything about sheep; what they needed to eat, what medicines they had to have, how they should be bathed, what they liked to sleep on. And then, when I knew he was coming back, I waited.

‘I sat out on the front fence of our house. It was a Saturday afternoon. I waited from just after lunch until late in the day. Then I started to walk to the end of the street and back. I looked for him around the corner and as far as I could see, checking for him. Maybe he'd got caught in traffic, I thought. Or maybe he'd stopped along the way to let the sheep eat some grass. Or perhaps he was buying some of the special medical supplies I needed to take care of her.

‘I waited until it got so cold I had to go inside.'

Nella stopped and then she said finally, ‘I never said anything to my dad. I never asked him why he didn't come, why he never brought me the sheep.'

‘Why not?' Isobel asked.

‘I don't know. I guess I just always thought he should be perfect. That is . . .' Nella paused. ‘Maybe I just couldn't let myself think of him any other way.'

Perfection.
Nella looked around the room. The sea sponge that sat on the cupboard was misshapen. The little Buddha statue beneath the window tilted ever so slightly to the left, even the photo of Isobel's father was creased and almost curled at the edges. And yet, strangely, in each object's imperfection, in its aspect of incompleteness there was a whisper of possibility, of life. It was as if each had a story to be told, a question to be asked, a journey to be taken that something perfect and complete and closed could never offer.

She turned to the corner of the room and there she saw, resting in the near-darkness, a sheet of white paper. It had tiny objects on it. She moved closer. On the paper were the smallest of seeds. She bent down and picked one up between her fingers, then placed it in her other hand. She reached out and picked up another. Each seed, she noticed, had its own slightly distorted feature: a darkened patch, an enlarged end, a seam that did not run straight.

‘What are you going to do with these?' she asked Isobel.

‘Plant them in a place I know on the island.'

‘Yeah?'

‘Yeah. I'm putting them on the other side of town where there once used to be an entire forest.'

‘But you can't go back to the way things were, that's what you said.'

‘That's right. You can't go back to the exact same things but you can honour what was there, you can connect with the past and make a new beginning.'

‘Like the tree with the satin bowerbird.'

‘Exactly.'

Nella looked at the seeds' varied and imperfect forms and they struck her as entirely beautiful. Can I come with you? she wanted to ask but instead she lifted her eyes to Isobel and she said, ‘When do we go?'