Nest (14 page)

Jen laughed. ‘Exactly.’

S
he took her time on the road down from the mountain. It was steep and winding, and the view out to the coast spectacular. There had been a rockfall since she came through earlier, partly blocking the other lane. Jen pulled over onto what verge there was and got out. Whipbirds cracked and chided. She stood for a moment, listening for traffic. It was just her and the birds, and a tractor doing some slashing in the valley below. She crossed the road and rolled the rocks off into the gutter, one by one. The largest of them was shaped like a giant toad, and would look good in her bromeliad garden.

Again she listened for traffic and, hearing nothing, bent her legs to heft the stone. She staggered across the road, holding it against her body, and just managed to lift it over the edge of the ute’s tray.

She puffed to get her breath and leaned on the ute as a sports car sped past, throwing up what was left of the rockfall detritus.

Down the lane, a little ahead, black cockatoos started making a fuss in a big old grey gum. Dozens of them. They were squawking and carrying on – for what reason, it wasn’t clear.
Jen bunched a tarp around the rock to try to stop it rolling about and climbed back into the cab.

The lane meandered off into the foothills. She nosed along, stopping close by the tree where the cockatoos were making such a ruckus. Jen lowered the window and raised her binoculars. The birds seemed to be getting grubs from high up in the tree – borers, most likely – which was generating a great deal of excitement. A celebration of abundance.

The sun was warm on her face, all the noise somehow cheering. Having finally delivered the pieces to the gallery, she did feel a little lighter. She was pleased with the wenge, in the end, setting off the robins’ eyes. Only tourists ever went through the gallery, and they tended to buy up all of the local landscape painter’s works – brightly coloured hills topped with mad houses – but the robins would at least get some sort of showing.

It was the best time of year. The air so clear. The colours so bright. The country steepened behind the old grey gum, and the lane disappeared around a corner into a patch of pine forest. The light was so soft, it was almost like a wash over the scene.
Pine forest?

Jen stopped. Lifted her binoculars once again. The hair on her arms prickled. She started the Hilux and released the handbrake, leaving the cockatoos, who seemed to have settled down now, behind her. The road narrowed, dipped, then climbed again. The fence by the road was old and tumbling, disappearing into grassy tussocks. She held her breath as she rounded the bend.

The pines were over a ramp, on private property. Something about the row of mailboxes, battered old four-gallon drums,
felt familiar. She stopped short of the entrance. Brown needles spilled out over the driveway. Her foot slipped off the clutch and the Hilux stalled.

It was more a feeling than any definite recognition or familiar feature; this was the place she had hung on to. She struggled with the doorhandle, dropping her sunglasses on the floor. The air was pungent with pine sap, persisting beyond memory, and distinct from the wet and dry sclerophyll of her more everyday experience.

It was barely a forest, an acre or two given over to pines. Probably planted in the early twentieth century. She stepped onto the narrow strip of dirt.

Jen slid off her shoes to walk on the pine needles. A crow called. She followed the path woven around fat trunks, their eighty or so years of growth more solid than her own, to the clearing within. Her vision spun loose, a blur of russet thatch and flaking trunks, interrupted light. It could be anywhere: any forest, any country, any time. And she was nowhere, stranded between her childhood and now.

Dry needles cut into her knees. A breath of wind had the trees whispering and shushing above her. Surely the memory would come freely here. Answers.

Nothing.

The movement was all around, only she was still. Half her life had gone by – like this.

She forced herself up and back down the path to the ute, driver’s side door still open.

Jen passed a yurt and two A-frames, one of the many communal titles that gave away the area’s hippie roots. The road’s potholes
sent the Hilux lurching. She loosened her grip on the wheel and dipped her head to see better, each bend promising something familiar, until she ran out of road.

She pulled up by an old carport, an original structure by the look of it, piled high with evenly cut wood. An old man emerged from between two coffee bushes.

She opened her door and placed her foot on the ground. As if that would steady her. ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘I’m Jen. Jen Anderson.’

‘Wayne.’

‘I was Jenny Vogel,’ she said. ‘Your pine grove. I have this memory of having a picnic there when I was a child.’

‘Picnic?’

She stood and leaned on the ute door. ‘With my parents. Peter and Carol. I was only small.’

‘Well, we had some great parties in there,’ he said. ‘But I don’t think they would have brought you along.’

A brush turkey patrolled the edge of the lawn. Beyond, lantana and privet were taking hold.

‘Place has got away from me a bit,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you come inside. I was just going to have a cuppa.’

She followed him into a hexagonal room overlooking the forest.

‘Might we have been visiting you?’

He busied himself with putting the kettle on and throwing some more wood on the fire. ‘It was the seventies, yeah?’

‘Yeah.’

‘We were all hippies then, and young,’ he said. ‘Thought we were real alternative.’

Except, unlike the hippies she read about, they had cut down forests instead of saving them.

‘Course, a lot of that’s back in fashion now, just been rebadged. Slow living. Organic.’

Jen smiled.

‘We all grew our own stuff back then. Swapped and bartered.’

The kettle whistled but Wayne didn’t get up. He watched her, forehead wrinkled, waiting for something.

‘Oh!’ She laughed. ‘They were scoring pot.’

‘Sorry, love, didn’t want to just come out with it. In case you’re all evangelical or something. Coffee?’

‘Yes, please.’

‘I grew vegetables, too,’ he said. ‘But we had a little business on the side. Good stuff, and just for friends.’ He filled the plunger with boiling water.

‘And my father would drive up here to get it?’

‘Sometimes,’ he said. ‘Didn’t usually bring you or your mum, though.’

‘Maybe he left us in the pine grove, came back,’ she said. ‘I remember a picnic rug.’

‘Could be,’ he said. ‘He did take her there on a picnic when they were dating. Said there was a little magic to the place, that anything was possible. Course, a smoke or two helped.’ He waited, then pushed down the plunger and filled two old mugs.

Jen rescued hers from Wayne’s shaking hands before it spilled over the newspapers on the table. Her father had said once, a little tipsy, that he had asked her mother to marry him in a fairy grove. And her mother, after he had left, said that she had been a fool to marry a man always so far away with the fairies.

‘Thank you.’

‘Your dad and I were pretty good friends, for a time,’ he said. ‘Ever hear from him?’

Jen shook her head. ‘You?’

‘No, love.’ He swallowed a mouthful of his tea. ‘Would’ve
liked to. Never made much sense, him taking off,’ he said. ‘He really loved your mother.’

Jen slowed as she passed a schoolgirl walking home. She watched her in the rear-vision mirror until the car going the other way had disappeared over the hill. She was as bad as all the parents around town. Overcompensating. Trying to fix what could not be changed; they had let a child down.

And now they were letting them all down – to assuage their own guilt. It was one thing for the adults to be watchful, vigilant, as the papers suggested, but all their anxiety was absorbed by the children, at the very time in their lives when they should have no fears or worries. You had to prepare children for the realities of the world – she wasn’t in favour of cottonwool – but she preferred to see their characters free to form within a bubble of endless possibility rather than limited by a world of horror and restrictions.

They had gone to Fraser Island once, when she was small. Just for the day. She remembered the feeling of swimming underwater in the blue lake, with the snorkel and mask they handed out. Flippers, too. She had not known then to walk backwards up the beach, and each time she came out to tell her parents about a turtle or fish, she had split the wide front end of the flippers – probably perished from the sun – and had to get a new pair. Neither the tour guide nor her parents had said anything, just let her go.

The memory of swimming in the blue lake was one of freedom, oblivious to anxiety, worry or the future. Before Michael. It was hard to imagine today’s children knowing that feeling.

S
he paused with her cup halfway to her mouth. A pink robin had landed on the edge of the birdbath. She blinked. At least that’s what she thought it was. A dusky pink breast and fat robin shape. On its own, it seemed. No mate. She set down her cup on the table rather than clatter the saucer and reached for her bird book. The robin section was well-thumbed, and thick with notes, but this was a first. ‘Ha!’ Rose robin. Uncommon.

It was peering at her now, but didn’t take off. She opened her book and made note of the sighting, recorded the date and time, then began making some rough sketches. It was a little smaller than the yellows, more demure. She had a mind to dedicate her day to a study of the rose robin.

The scream of a chainsaw put an end to all that. The bird disappeared into the trees, and the morning was ripped apart.

Jen pulled a beanie on over crumpled hair, slid into her boots, and marched up the driveway. On the side of the road, the last threads of the trunk cracked and gave way, crashing down – in treefall – and shaking the ground. The smell of cut timber tickled her nose and throat. Bloodwood, probably; their
resin gave off a smell almost like flesh. Particles were caught in the light.

Three orange-shirted fellows encircled her mailbox, one with an axe resting on his shoulder.

Jen stopped just short. ‘Can I help you?’

‘This has to go. We’re widening the road. Sealing it.’

She sneezed. ‘I got the notice. But it said you were stopping at my boundary.’

‘There’s extra money now – we’re going further.’

Jen noted the string of trees marked with fresh pink ribbon. ‘Well, no one has talked to me about it. So perhaps you could initiate a conversation before taking to my property with an axe.’

‘It’s on council land.’

‘The mailbox is on the side of the road, like everyone else’s, so that the mail delivery person can pull over and put my mail in it,’ she said. ‘And I’m pretty sure it’s on my land. As are the majority of those trees. Perhaps you would like to confirm where the boundary lies, and get me something in writing?’ Which would give her a chance to object, on paper, rather than placing her body between them and the machines.