Nest (10 page)

Instead of crossing the access road, she continued along it, drawn by a smell. At the edge of the pine forest, she stopped and listened, gauged the slope and light. One of her earliest memories that she could be sure was her own, not born of Aunt Sophie’s stories or augmented by photographs, was of entering a forest clearing, its sharp smell, the needles crunching beneath her feet. Her parents had set her down on a bright, chequered rug and returned to the truck for something – the rest of the picnic gear, perhaps. For a few moments she had been alone in that old grove, the breeze murmuring in its needles, the outside light shafting in soft lines, and she had not been afraid.

She had always wanted to know where that forest had been and why they had been inside it, when the sun shone so brightly outside. To be sure that it was really a memory, and not some dream harking back to old Europe. But that’s what she got for not asking enough questions while her mother was still alive.

She had explored all of the pine forests for miles around, – even the plantations with their torn skylines so at odds with the soft curves of eucalypt forest – driving and on foot, and had
not found the spot. Although it had felt extensive, she did not have the sense it had been a plantation; the trees had not been uniform or in rows. And yet she had walked miles of these forests, on forestry roads and trails, just in case. Of course, if it had been a plantation, it would have been cut down and consumed long ago.

This wasn’t it: too low-set, too young. She walked inside all the same. The shushing above was somehow calming, like being by the ocean. Sometimes she thought there was no pine forest, no memory. Just a dream she had latched onto, a fairytale gone wrong. She envied people with firmer childhoods, their parents pulling down album after album of pictorial evidence of time shared, of happiness and solidity.

S
he plated up her attempt at melting moments, which were all somewhat lopsided. The kettle squealed. She turned off the gas and flipped the lid, filled their mugs almost to the brim.

The deck was wet from the rain overnight, so she had set them up inside.

‘What happened to your husband?’

Her tea scalded her tongue. His mother again. ‘Who says I had a husband?’

‘Partner, then.’

She smiled. He’d been pulled up on that one before. ‘There was someone once. A man. We’re not together now.’

‘But Mum says your name is different.’

‘I use my mother’s maiden name. Not his.’

He gathered crumbs on a damp finger. ‘But you like men, right?’

Was that the talk? ‘I like men fine, Henry,’ she said. ‘I’m just happy on my own right now.’

He chewed on that, along with another biscuit.

People seemed to think she was missing out, and maybe she was. There were not the highs, it was true, but she was better off without the train wrecks. There had been enough of those. Great blanks of life.

Outside, a treecreeper perched on the edge of the birdbath threw its head back to let loose a string of loud notes in a rippling trill, exposing its clean white throat without self-consciousness or doubt.

‘Jen?’

‘Sorry?’

‘What should I work on today? You said something about shading?’

She opened her folder. ‘You can keep going on your still life, but I want you to experiment with some different shading techniques. You seem okay with crosshatching and tonal, but there are other options: accent, lines, smudging and so on.’ She put the sheet down in front of him. ‘Is that copy clear enough?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Would you like me to go through it? Or just have a play around?’

‘I’m okay,’ he said. ‘I think I’ve done some of the lines before.’

‘Great,’ she said, watching his pencil movements. ‘Been in the water lately?’ Henry had been learning to surf – a rite of passage. She had been thinking of giving him her old board, but then there was always the idea of getting back out there herself.

‘Dad’s been too busy.’

‘What’s he do? For work?’

‘Paints houses and stuff,’ Henry said. ‘But he’s been doing more with the church. On weekends.’

A young male king parrot sat on the edge of the birdbath. She nudged Henry. He looked up, pencil paused. They watched
the bird dip and swallow, one eye on them. A female called from a branch of the maple at the edge of the clearing, more cautious. When she flew off, he followed.

‘They only ever drink,’ Henry said. ‘Not wash.’

‘That’s true,’ she said. ‘I hadn’t thought of that. Perhaps if I had a deeper bath?’

Henry shrugged and returned to his drawing.

The cuckoo doves didn’t bathe either. Except when it was raining. She had burned her toast the other morning, watching a female raise one wing and then the other as if washing her armpits in the shower.

‘Do you go to church, too?’

He shook his head. ‘Neither does Mum – it’s Dad’s thing.’ He snapped a pencil lead, pushing too hard, and reached for another. ‘Mum says when he did the painting job for them, they did a job on him.’

Jen covered her mouth and composed herself. ‘Was that the pretty little church on the other side of town? Near the oval?’

‘Yeah. And the hall. Took weeks.’

‘It looks nice,’ she said. It couldn’t have been more than a few months since it was finished. Eggshell blue. Around the time Caitlin went missing, so perhaps Henry’s dad’s religion was just another passing phase. There was nothing like a tragedy close to home to focus your own fears.

Some of the boy’s lines were a bit dark today. ‘Keep your hand relaxed there, don’t forget to breathe,’ she said.

He shook out his wrist. Sighed.

‘Sometimes it’s not your drawing that’s the problem, but your connection with the subject,’ she said. ‘There’s a story there, you just have to find it.’

He blinked.

‘I think of those objects as artefacts of the forest, but you might like to think of them as something else.’

‘What’s an artefact?’

‘There’s a dictionary on the shelf behind you.’

‘You could just tell me.’

‘I could,’ she said. ‘Or you could look it up for yourself.’

He sighed but fetched the dictionary, flipping the pages over more roughly than was required. He found the word, read through the meanings. ‘But these things aren’t man-made.’

‘One definition is an object made or shaped by some agent or intelligence,’ she said. ‘Do you think we are the only creatures with intelligence?’

Henry looked at her for a moment, then stood to move the pieces.

‘Good,’ she said.

He stepped back, assessing the new arrangement through the frame of his hands, and sat once more, turning a fresh page.

She tossed another log on the fire and flicked stick ends from its edges to the centre. The lights dimmed and spluttered, but rather than switch over to the generator, she put down her book and lit some extra candles. The shorter days – and today had been a cloudy one – often meant shorter nights for reading as well.

Jen stretched out in front of the fire and watched the flames, the wood she had cut warming her once again. A train passed through the next valley, the familiar screech of metal on metal as it rounded the bends, the great shifting of air somehow comforting. Familiar. A gecko scuttled off into the rafters.

She had probably not been in a very good state of mind to
make decisions then, after Craig, after her mother’s death. Aunt Sophie had suggested as much, in her gentle way.

Jen had come back looking for somewhere to call home, somewhere safe to recover. It was only now, here in her little house, that she sometimes felt something like contentment.

S
he hurried her oats along with the wooden spoon, cut the flow of coffee into her mug, and set a bowl out on the counter next to the brown sugar and milk. A fantail flitted between birdbaths, only to be dislodged by a troop of white-naped honeyeaters. No robins.

Birds marked the seasons with greater accuracy than the shifting of the sun and the shortening and lengthening of days, or even the appearance of flowers, which were sensitive to the influences of rain and fluctuations in temperature. Every year, without fail, the robins disappeared for several weeks at the end of autumn, though she still didn’t know where to, or why. The first year, she had been worried they had fallen prey to the owls she heard about her every night, or worse, had eaten the termites she’d had a man out to poison, and died. Without those flashes of yellow, she had become very glum indeed.

Then, in the first few weeks of winter, they had returned. Perhaps they had been off building nests or searching for mates. Now that she knew they always came back, she could get through those colourless times.

Jen sprinkled sugar over the oats and added milk, then put the saucepan in the sink, filled it with water and left it to soak. She wiped her hands on her pyjamas, took a sip of her coffee and carried her breakfast into the studio.

She turned a new page and sat for a while before picking up her pencil. Sometimes, when you looked at a thing too long, you stopped seeing it. Today she needed to focus on what had drawn her to the nest in the first place – its shape, and relationship to the larger nest, the promise of what might have been inside.

Jen knocked on the water tank at the top of the hill. Almost empty. She crouched to shut the valve down to the house, opened the other, and walked around the vegetable patch, down to the underground tank. Something slithered away into the gristle ferns.

She uncovered the pump and switched it on, sending water chugging back uphill. More epiphytes had made their home on the shady side of the tank, which was nice, although suggesting its leaks were getting worse. Pumping up was a pain, but the extra height gave her more water pressure.

While the top tank filled, she swept the path with the old broom she kept for outside jobs. Once left out in the rain, its millet head had swelled and mildewed, turning out on one side like an asymmetrical haircut. She paused mid-swish. In some magic of the light, her forest was aglow, like Mondriaan’s
Wood with Beech Trees.

Her trees were third or fourth generation survivors. There was some comfort in that – that the earth gave second chances. Brush box, with their rough, flaking trunks, flourished where others had once been, growing anywhere from open woodland to rainforest, and specialising in the transition areas between
the two. Out in the open, they would spread out into a massive, broad tree. In the rich damp of the rainforest they grew fat and gnarly. Here, set close together, they were tall, thin and collegial, the heart of her wet sclerophyll forest.

Jen leaned on her broom. There was a picture everywhere she looked. She had given up trying to capture the place with the camera – it only broke things into parts. And the light was being tricksy.

The limbs of the brush box tended to horizontal, like a reaching arm, and their leaves were large and flattish. New shoots began as a pale green bud, emerging in early summer, vertically, like a flower, before opening up into a hand of leaves, giving the trees the look of a sculpted bonsai. Their real flowers were white stars, sticky with honey. For a time, the new shoots and flowers were all on display at once. As summer progressed, the leaves relaxed into a darker green, and their abundance enclosed her within the canopy. Coming into winter, the leaves dropped and thinned, allowing more sunlight in – and giving her a view out.

She resumed her sweeping, the job at hand, letting the green fall away into the background, and opening her peripheral vision – such that she was sweeping on a forest stage.

At the front deck, she changed directions with the broom, sending leaves flying over the edge into the garden bed. She stopped in front of the hanging basket. The fern was doing much better. But there was something else, someone in the nest: a scrubwren, her yellow eyes scowling beneath white eyebrow markings.

Jen backed away, and left the broom leaning on the wall. The top tank was overflowing, and she hurried down to switch off the pump.

While drawing her empty nest, she had imagined its lost inhabitants, trying to bring life and loss to the page. Somehow, she had drawn life to the nest instead.