Nest (11 page)

J
en headed home along the river. She tried to get down to the coast at least once a week. It was a chance to walk on the beach and swim. Today it had been too windy. Everyone was swimming inside the river mouth instead, crowded along the narrow strip of sand by the parkland.

It was also better to see specialists out of town, to avoid any gossip. Her mother, when Jen was small, refused to purchase even head lice treatments at the local chemist, but drove to one several towns away. ‘I don’t want to give them anything more to talk about,’ she’d say. She had grown up in this town, too, so she would know.

Since coming back, Jen had heard them for herself, gossiping behind the counter, caught the raised eyebrow as someone came direct from the doctor’s surgery next door with another script for Prozac or Viagra. Her doctor had referred her to the shrink as much for his location as his reputation.

Jen pulled over in a cul-de-sac by the river, beneath a straggle of paperbarks. There were flyers stapled to all the power poles, even down here. There was Caitlin, right in the middle of the
windscreen. A heaviness trapped Jen in her seat. The girl was dead. All these pictures, all the fundraising in the world weren’t going to change that. She had a sister – Briony. What of her childhood, her grief? Sometimes, you had to focus on the living.

Jen unclipped her seatbelt and opened the door. The breeze was stiff, she set off with it at her back. It was high tide, the water lapping right up beneath the mangroves. A new path had been laid, winding through native plantings, piled high with fresh mulch.

Upstream, the river widened and forked around mangrove-fringed islands. She kept meaning to hire a kayak, paddle out to them. They hid a different set of birds than she had at home. Egrets and gulls and herons. Once past the bridge, from this angle, there was little sign of humanity, just a couple of tinnies out fishing. A flotilla of pelicans drifted ahead of her, the wind ruffling the back of their proud white necks.

The session with the shrink had all her thoughts scrambled. Too many memories near the surface.

Her first river journey had been during her second year at college. Semester break. A friend of Craig’s had driven along the old forestry roads, through spotted gums and cycads, to drop them, their kayaks and all their gear in a gorge at the back of the mountains, the source of the Deua. That river had been a world away from this one: cold, narrow and rushing over rocks. She had overturned on the second set of rapids, her kayak caught up against a log.

They stopped on a white beach by a rock pool, and Craig lit a fire to warm her. ‘I should have warned you about logs,’ he said. ‘It’s a bit of a trap. The water rushes underneath and generates suck. Like a plughole. If the boat gets up against the
stationary object, the log, the force of the water is concentrated on one side of the hull.’

She had figured all that out while she was in an upside-down world of bubbles, her breath driven from her chest by the cold. Avoid logs. Deathtrap. She hadn’t been able to right herself, as she had learned to from a roll, and the deck tarp hadn’t held. The kayak filled with water and went under. If Craig hadn’t been there to pull her out, she would have drowned.

‘Don’t let the river get you broadside,’ he said. ‘If you get into trouble, face it head on.’ He rubbed her goosebumped flesh with his warm hands, dried her hair with a towel. And they made love there, while her clothes dried on the rocks, to the rush and swirl of white water.

The shrink said she had to let go of Craig. As if she were still hanging on by her fingertips and hadn’t already plunged to the bottom of the gorge. He said it was time to let go of her grief, too. Jen had made a note in her diary, and dutifully reported on her progress each month. But she hung on all the same, nursing it like a blown egg, the fragile shell of what it had once been. It was what she had instead of him. Instead of love. It was all she had, and she had no intention of casting it out of the nest.

She took her foot off the accelerator as she approached the spot where Caitlin had last been seen. Probably everyone slowed down and stared, even though there was nothing to see. Humans, despite all their intellect and self-awareness, were as predictable as birds.

The spot had been turned into a shrine: plastic wreaths, flowers in jars, candles and notes. Jen had always thought such displays in poor taste: white crosses bearing bad spelling and
faded plastic. The inappropriate public outpouring of emotion. The naive assumption that the person’s spirit had departed from the point of impact, rather than in the ambulance or hospital.

Perhaps it was easier to see it for what it was – a simple expression of grief – when it was closer to home. It was the teddy bear that did it. Pink and fluffy, a little girl’s toy, nailed through its neck to a tree. Jen pulled over into a driveway and leaned her head into her forearms, still on the wheel.

‘M
orning, Missus,’ Jen said.

The scrubwren didn’t answer, but it was nice to have a neighbour. To wake up every day and know another creature was close by. Jen had been walking past as little as possible, half-expecting the wren to realise her nest was now in a public thoroughfare, but it seemed having invested in the building of the nest, she was going to stay. Perhaps she had even laid her eggs; she was on the roost more often than not.

Jen walked downhill beside the road, straining against the slope. It was land ‘too steep for the plough’, as they used to say, saving it from the fate of the more level country all around. Jen caught a flash of something iridescent in the undergrowth and stopped to peer through the fence. She jumped at the sound of a car horn, snagging her thumb on a barb. An arm hung out the window of the retreating van in a wave.

She sucked the wound on her thumb as she passed the old stationmaster’s cottage, neat white on the bank of the creek, and continued down the track. A whipbird cracked from the
tangle of lantana and bracken fern. The wooden gate was shut, a hand-painted Pels sign the only clue.

The Pels mill had once been right in the heart of cedar country. Down south, trees were sawn into planks with a pitsaw. Here, the pit would just fill with water, leaving the sawyer up to his thighs in mud, so the logs were rafted out. Where close to streams, the logs were rolled to the bank. If they were farther away, bullock teams had to ‘snig’ them to the water. It was these snigging tracks that had really opened up the country, giving travellers access through dense scrub and vines. The gravel track she was walking on had begun its life this way. Once the logs were in the water, the raftsmen had spiked them together with iron ‘dogs’ and floated them downstream.

A real dog announced her arrival, one part pig and three parts mystery by the look of it. Someone called it off and turned down the radio. ‘Sam, Jenny’s here.’

She stopped herself from wincing at that. Her schoolgirl self. By the time she shook his hand, she had recognised him. ‘Glen. Good to see you again.’ He had shot up early, in grade eight, but had more than grown into himself now.

‘You look well,’ he said, smiling the lopsided smile of the boy she had known. ‘Never thought you’d come back here.’

Jen hadn’t intended to visit the mill either, but here she was.

Sam emerged from the dark of the shed, concentrating on the three mugs in his two oversized hands. ‘We were just about to have a cuppa.’

Glen produced an extra stool from behind a pile of logs – their ends still branded with the first letter of the owner’s surname, as if it were a hundred years ago. Apart from the box of tea bags on the shelf, and the new white ute at the edge of the clearing, she could almost imagine it was.

Sam cleared his throat. ‘I hear you bought Mal’s old place?’

‘I did.’

‘Nice spot there. Tucked away.’

‘It is.’ She sipped her tea. Strong, milky and sweet. Just the way the timber-getters had probably liked it. Though they wouldn’t have had tea bags. ‘Sam said you’ve started up again?’

‘Specialty stuff. For the local cabinet-makers and woodworkers. Sam trips around buying stuff up and we store it and cut it here.’

‘There’s still a market for solid timber.’ Sam said. ‘For quality. And if you know what you’re doing, you can make some money. I got hold of a stack of wenge at twenty bucks a cubic metre. Bloke thought I was a total sucker. But now we’re selling it for three times that.’

Glen watched her through the steam drifting upward from his cup. ‘Do you have any kids?’

She shook her head. ‘You?’

‘Three.’ He pulled a wallet from his back pocket, the surfie canvas style of a teenager. ‘Aiden and Quinn – they’re twins. We did IVF. And then little Sarah, she came later – a complete fluke,’ he said. ‘Boys have left home now. And Sarah’s in grade twelve. Real smart, too.’

‘They’re all gorgeous.’

‘Take after their mother,’ he said. He slid out another picture, even older. ‘Do you remember Karen Reynolds? From the grade below us.’

‘Of course.’ She had been good-looking even then, when the rest of them were bucktoothed and freckled, and went on to be school captain in senior high school.

White cockatoos were raucous in the pine trees up on the ridge, drunk on the fermenting kernels. There was something
about sitting around with blokes out the front of a sawmill that felt completely normal, and plenty that didn’t.

‘Any other mills still going?’ she said.

‘Only Mannings, but they do large-scale mainstream stuff. Got the big machines,’ Sam said. ‘Which reminds me, I have something for you.’ He stood and placed his mug on the corner of the bench. ‘Just hang on.’

They waited while Sam lumbered back into the mouth of the shed. ‘Do you ever hear from Phil?’ Jen said.

‘He visited a few years ago, and we had a good catch-up,’ Glen said. ‘Promised to keep in touch. One of us usually calls the other around Christmas.’

‘He’s still in Sydney?’

‘Last I heard.’ He gulped at his tea and looked off into the scrub. For a horrible moment, Jen was sure he was going to say something about Michael, but instead he coughed and made a mark in the dirt with his foot. ‘Bloody awful about the Jones girl, isn’t it?’

‘Terrible.’

‘I heard the police are interviewing someone local – their vehicle matches the description.’

‘Oh?’ she said.

‘But they’re probably interviewing a lot of people.’

‘Probably,’ she said.

‘Got it.’ Sam was out of breath. ‘It’s not much. Some old photos we had up here, payment slips and the like. But I thought you might like to have them.’ He handed over a grimy, once-white envelope, like her father had used to take all his receipts to the accountant.

‘Thanks.’ She sat the envelope on the table beside her. ‘I love this time of year,’ she said, lifting her face to the sun.

‘It’s grand,’ Sam said. ‘Less tourists. No rain. Get a whole lot more work done, too.’

‘Tourists make everyone money, Sam.’

A single black cockatoo passed overhead, beating its wings at such a leisurely pace it was a wonder it didn’t fall out of the sky.

Jen put down her empty mug, stood and put her hand out. Sam pulled her in for a paternal hug. ‘You come down again whenever you like, love,’ he said. ‘And if you need any help up there, just give us a call.’

‘I’ll do that. Thank you.’

S
he had been in the woods again. How many times had she been there, in her dreams, and why did she keep going back? She shut her eyes, still in half-sleep, and could smell the needles, hear them crunch. She was sitting between her father and mother on the blanket. Someone was walking towards them, or was it away?

A shrike-thrush landed on the roof near the window, scratching with its claws. She should get up, but there was something pushing at the edge of the clearing that was her memory. There had been someone else there that day; why could she not remember? The thrush sang at full volume and then it was gone.

She pushed back the covers and climbed out of bed. The steps downstairs were cold on her bare feet.

She opened the front door a few inches. The scrubwren was out. Gathering breakfast, perhaps. Jen looked around, listened for any anxious
chew-wieps
in the undergrowth, and peered into the nest. There were eggs inside, speckled. Ha!