Nest (24 page)

‘How long since you’ve used it?’

‘A while.’

He unzipped it, spread it open like a book and stayed standing to turn the pages. He frowned at her résumé. ‘You won all these things? The Dobell Prize, the Wildlife —’

‘They were mainly just short-listings,’ she said. ‘You only need to do one page. Put your details, your prize. Your class with me, I suppose.’

‘What happened here?’

‘What?’

‘There’s all this stuff and then a big gap between 1990 and 1995, and then from 2003 until now.’

She moved their cups and plates out of the way. ‘I was teaching full-time,’ she said.

He turned the page. Examined each drawing. ‘Where can I get a folder like this?’

‘Yours wouldn’t need to be very big for now,’ she said. ‘We could even make one, if you like. I think I have the materials.’

He had stopped at the thumbnails from her first solo exhibition and bent over to examine them.

‘These are cool.’

‘Thank you.’

She had been told not to read the reviews but of course she had. The work had been a little naive, she had only been twenty-three, after all. Not long out of art school. It was expected that young artists have something to say, a little more anger, edginess. She’d had plenty of anger – she had just put her mother in yet another institution, albeit a nursing home this time – but she didn’t see that she needed to pour all that onto the page.

She had been trying to capture what, to her, was the most mysterious thing, the essence of animals and plants. It was, after all, the essence of them all – though buried deep in most cases. She was pigeonholed as a wildlife artist then, which there wasn’t
much of a market for. Unless you went for that big photographic style; people seemed to snap that up.

‘I’ll get us some materials,’ she said. ‘We should get started.’

He had stopped again, frowning at one of the pieces she had done in the States: an aspen grove in a sea of leaves.

‘You don’t like it?’

‘It’s different from everything else.’

‘It’s more abstract. I worked with someone who encouraged me to explore a little,’ she said. ‘Groves like that are all one tree, one organism.’

‘Cool.’

She took a few breaths in the studio, gathered the things together and returned. ‘You can have another look later, but we should start on this.’ She plonked down the cardboard, Stanley knife and cutting board.

‘I don’t have enough to put in mine.’

‘No?’

‘There’s the one I won the prize for, the feather, the first still life, the bunya cone, and the running man.’

‘What about your animation?’

‘Oh, yeah.’

‘What else did you do in art?’

‘Pottery.’

‘Anything worth keeping?’

‘I gave a raku vase to mum. She puts flowers in it.’

‘You could take a picture of it,’ she said. ‘If you email it to me, I can print it for next time.’

He nodded and placed the A3 sheet of paper on the cardboard.

‘Okay. So you want it a bit bigger than that. Maybe a ruler-width wider on all sides.’

He picked up her old wooden ruler, whacking it down for effect, and began marking out the border in soft pencil. ‘Did they still give the cane? When you were teaching.’

‘I’m not that old!’

‘Dad says he got the cane when he was at school.’

‘Did he?’ Queensland had been one of the last to ban it from public schools. Now you couldn’t even touch the students at all. Sometimes all a kid needed was a pat on the back. It was sad.

‘So I just cut it?’

‘Yep. Make sure you keep it on the board, though. And cut away from your fingers,’ she said. ‘That’s right.’

The king parrots had varied their song, adding in a kind of chirrup. ‘Now we just need to put a hinge at the back. Two sets of two holes.’ She marked the spots with his pencils.

He picked up the hole punch, hesitated.

‘As far in as you can, that’s the way,’ she said. ‘And just one on the front.’

‘Ha!’

‘Now, do you want ribbon or metal rings for the hinges?’

‘Metal rings at the back and ribbon to tie it at the front.’

‘Good.’

‘What about the pages?’

‘We can do plain paper and attach the pictures from behind, or clear plastic sleeves.’

He looked again at hers and frowned. ‘Sleeves?’

‘I think so, too,’ she said. ‘Easier to work with.’ She watched him line the sleeves up with the holes in the card and feed the ring through. ‘Good. Do you want to put something on the cover?’

‘Like what?’

‘Your name,’ she said. ‘And what about a single frame from your animation?’

His mother tooted the horn in the driveway.

‘I forgot. I have to go a bit early today.’

‘Okay.’

He packed up his things in a hurry, struggling with all of the folder’s parts.

‘When’s it due?’ she said.

‘Not till the end of the month.’

‘You could leave it here if you like,’ she said. ‘I’ll pack up.’

‘Thanks.’

Jen held the door open and watched him jam his feet into the front of his still-laced school shoes, squashing the backs down. Not for the first time, judging from their crackled finish. It was going to be a tight race between destroying them and growing out of them.

She smiled. ‘Don’t forget about Sunday.’

‘What?’

‘The installation,’ she said. ‘I’ll pick you up about eight?’

‘Oh, yeah,’ he said. ‘Cool.’

I
t was too hot to draw. Her hand kept sticking to the page, even with the fan on flat-out, and the paint still hadn’t dried on her portrait – she was running out of time to apply the final touches.

She refilled her glass with iced tea from the jug and sat out the back on the deck, hoping for some movement. The tops of the trees were shifting every now and then, suggesting something was coming. Usually she could rely on the cool sea breeze by early afternoon, but this weather was proving to be not only unusual but stubborn.

A tail hung down from the gutter. Jen peered up. ‘Hello?’ A young female king parrot flew down to the birdbath. The first female progeny, her green feathers lush and her red pantaloons circus-bright. She bobbed up and down to some tune of her own and peered at Jen, curious but not afraid.

Jen reached for her sketchbook and pulled a pencil from her hair, knotted up at the back. Two or three other king parrots called from nearby. They had synchronised themselves, or
dropped out of sync, perhaps, to sound three slightly different notes – a family song.

She put off going to bed until after ten but the change still hadn’t come through. The cloud cover was only keeping the heat in; the stillness was oppressive. She left all the doors and windows wide open, cut the lights and lit a mosquito coil to set up in her bedroom. It was possible something larger might wander in through the night but hopefully it would soon wander out again.

Opened up, it was no longer a house, but a shelter. A bed in the forest. Even a year ago the feeling would have bothered her, left her feeling vulnerable or worried about her things, at least. Now she lay under the sheet listening to the night’s music – frogs and toads and crickets and bats and owls – quite at peace. More so, if anything.

The change had finally come; she’d had to pull the doona up from the bottom of the bed in the early morning. She didn’t bother to close up the house after breakfast, leaving everything open to catch as much fresh cool air as possible. To breathe, while she headed out to walk and breathe herself.

She followed the ridgeline, to keep the sea breeze in her face, and then cut down to the riparian zone along the creek. It was like dipping into another world, another time. Cool, dark and quiet. She climbed up onto an old stump, wider than she was high, though now hollow inside, and coated in green moss. It was well preserved, more like stone than timber, almost petrified. Cedar, surely.

She perched, eyes closed, listening. Whipbirds cracked along the creek bed, a powerful owl
who-whooed.
Sound stayed inside the forest, like a secret.

A stillness had fallen, whether it was her mood, or the forest overhearing her thoughts. She watched the play of light dappling the trunks around her. The earth was damp, the memory of those trees that had already lived and died and fallen rich in the humus.

There was a fresh beer bottle inside the stump’s missing core, which burst her bubble.

She climbed down and lay on her back, staring up at the canopy. The rustling and chirruping and gentle shift of the leaves smoothed her, until she was breathing with the forest. She was forest.

She laboured up the steep slope back to the road, carrying the beer bottle. Fourex, of course. Red-browed finches danced from shrub to shrub all about her. They were such chirpy birds that she couldn’t help but smile.

A car roared past on the road. Jen crouched down and waited until it was quiet again to climb onto the verge and cross over. She cleared the advertising out of her mailbox and dumped it in the recycling bin with the bottle. The robins were flitting about the orchard, darting down to snap up insects.

She slid out of her boots and stepped inside the shade of the house, then stopped. It had cooled down nicely, a breeze running through, but that wasn’t it. There was someone inside. ‘Hello?’

She padded through to the lounge and stopped again. There were five wompoo fruit-doves resting in the rafters, their great white heads bobbing over violet breasts. For a moment, she felt herself in the wrong place. A stranger.

The doves were fond of the red berries on the palms just by the high windows – but there were no berries inside.

‘
Wom-poo
,’ said a dove.

‘Hello,’ she said.

They took flight, in one ringing uplift, and exited via the open bay windows as weirdly as they had come. No sign of distress, or having flown in the wrong door to the wrong place, or fled the coop. As if her home really was just a bird house, another tree.

‘I still live here, you know,’ she said, to no one. ‘I wasn’t gone that long.’

She hung her hat in the laundry, poured a glass of water and sat on the back steps to drink it. Thoreau wrote that a house should be as open as a bird’s nest, delaying caulking the walls of his own cabin in the woods as long as he could to enjoy the breeze running through. He soon sealed it up when winter came, though, and hadn’t lasted long out there on his own.

The idea of a house was interesting to think about, if you could set yourself apart from it. The cottage had been someone else’s home before it was hers. A family’s. Before that there was no house, no clearing – just trees. Home to birds, possums, koalas, wallabies, bandicoots and goodness knows what. And for so long before that, home to the first people, who did not need to own or destroy to live in a place, or belong. Everything had been clear-felled for her benefit, however she looked at it.

Jen already shared the house with the geckos and native mice, the occasional snake. The final act of the character in
My Birds
had been to bequeath his property to the birds – his will stipulating that the house be torn down and the block let run wild. It was an idea that appealed, especially with no one
to leave her ‘assets’ to. Not that her house would need tearing down in this climate – it would soon rot and fall and begin its own journey back into the forest.