Nest (27 page)

Perhaps it was for the best that she hadn’t passed on any of her defective genes: a father who left, a mother who broke down, and a child who perpetuated their patterns.

G
len found her planting out another tray of seedlings. Davidson plums, tamarinds, and a quandong. Food trees – as much for the birds as for herself. Aunt Sophie had made a Davidson plum tart one year, picking up a bucket of fruit at some market. Jen would have to wait seven years for the tree to mature, the label said. It was going to be a long time between pies.

‘I didn’t hear the ute,’ she said.

‘Parked up the top,’ Glen said. ‘Perfect day, isn’t it.’

‘It is.’

He looked about him, at the new plantings and freshly mowed lawn. ‘You’ve got things looking good,’ he said.

She tried to see it with his eyes, without all the flaws hers tended to focus on. All the things that needed doing. ‘Thanks.’

‘I’m going to a meeting in town. About that A-hole developer’s plans,’ he said. ‘I wondered if you might like to come along.’

She had seen something about it in the paper, a shopping centre and units. There was a petition she should have signed. ‘I don’t know,’ she said.

‘We need to stop this guy,’ he said. ‘The original proposal wasn’t too bad, a little shopping centre with parking underneath, a few units. But he’s managed to buy up half the town on the sly, and now he’s changed the development proposal. A new bank and a big supermarket. Forty-two units.’

Jen frowned, trying to picture it. ‘Where?’

‘The park goes, and all the original houses on Dale Street. The nice old shops opposite.’

‘That would completely change the nature of the town.’

‘Exactly.’

Jen looked herself over, gardening clothes, dirty hands. ‘I’m not really dressed for it.’

Glen smiled. ‘We could use your support, Jen. And you’ll meet some good people.’

The quandong was out of its punnet but not yet in the ground, and they all needed watering in.

‘I’ll finish this,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you clean up.’

It seemed she was out of excuses. ‘Won’t be long,’ she said.

She brushed herself off and scraped out of her boots at the back door, then peeled off her jeans and shirt and dropped them in the laundry basket.

She found a clean pair of fisherman’s pants in the wardrobe and pulled a fresh T-shirt from the drying rack. Tied her hair back into a ponytail. In answer to her stomach’s grumble, she took two Granny Smiths from the bowl on the dining table. Her slides were at the front door; she’d have to go round.

Glen was washing his hands under the tap. He had finished the planting, watered in the seedlings and stacked the empty punnets next to the watering can.

‘Ready?’ he said.

‘Ready.’ She threw him an apple.

He caught it in his left hand, smiled. ‘Thanks.’

They walked up to the ute, crunching. Sun on their faces. Glen wiped his mouth on his sleeve. Opened the door for her and cleared off the seat. Bills and soft drink bottles spilled out. He couldn’t have counted on her coming along, which was good to know.

He held the apple in his mouth while he reversed out of the drive and then drove one-handed towards town.

‘How’s Karen?’

‘Good, good,’ he said. ‘Having a few problems with Sarah, at the moment. She wants her freedom and independence. And we want to know where she is – At All Times.’

‘It’s hard not to worry. Especially now.’

‘I know the Jones girl and Michael were probably one-offs, but —’

Jen looked at her apple.

‘Sorry,’ he said.

They had stopped eating. ‘We don’t know that,’ she said. ‘There’s plenty to worry about.’

He crunched his apple.

They passed the lagoon, empty of birds today.

‘Didn’t some of the land you’re talking about belong to the council?’

Glen nodded. ‘They sold it to him.’

‘Can they do that? Without putting it on the market?’

‘Apparently.’ He took one last bite of the apple and threw the core out the open window. ‘The guy’s a real sneak. He came along to a community meeting years ago. We were trying to come up with ways to bring the town together, give it a heart. He already owned a lot of property then but pretended he was
on the same page. That’s where we came up with the idea for the market space and the walkway.’

‘He was planning a development all along?’

‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘He got all the information he needed at the meetings, all of the property owners’ details. And approached them, one by one. Somehow, he stopped them talking to each other. A year or so later – boom – he owns the centre of town.’

Jen picked a piece of apple skin from between her teeth. ‘What a bastard.’

‘You got that right.’

A semitrailer laden with mangoes pulled in to the fruit strap factory. ‘Has Sam ever mentioned that development that went bust here when we were kids?’

‘Only that it was a rotten business,’ Glen said.

Jen turned. ‘Was he involved?’

‘I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘Why do you ask?’

‘I only remembered it the other day,’ she said. ‘I guess there was so much else going on.’

Glen pulled a face. ‘Over our heads then, that sort of stuff.’

‘I guess it’s our turn, now,’ Jen said. ‘To do something. So – where’s this meeting?’

T
he irises, for once, hadn’t seen it coming. By the time their flowers began to open, it was already raining. Cyclone Haydos must have been heading somewhere else, changed course at the last minute and fooled nature herself. It was encouraging, especially for the Bureau of Meteorology, that even irises could be wrong.

Above the rain and the wind, the roaring in the treetops, she heard the piping call of a lone treecreeper, optimistic as ever.

The trees were lathering themselves, soapy suds running down their trunks and foaming at the base. Their tannins doubled as a washing agent; the trees were taking the opportunity to bathe.

She watched as the wind picked up, bending the treetops over. Water rushed over the gutter outside the kitchen window. The rain was about as heavy as she had ever seen but the downpipe must have blocked, or the strainer the plumber had talked her into installing, not realising the volume of leaves and rain it would have to deal with. She had meant to clean the gutters properly again by now – but had put it off one day too long.

Jen pulled her singlet over her head and stepped out of her fisherman’s pants, leaving them in a pile on the floor, like a slipped skin. She shut the back door behind her and ran out into the rain. It was coming down in slap-like drops. Slops. The roar was disorienting and her hair was soon plastered to her head. She had to stand on the edge of the deck to reach the box downpipe. Water washed over her, forcing her to work blind, unclipping the cover, removing the filter and plunging her arm in to the elbow. She removed a plug of leaves and muck from the bend and threw it over her shoulder, then another.

The waterfall ceased, rushing down the gutter again instead, beneath the house and into her underground tank. She tapped out the sieve and put it back in place, then the mesh cover, before stepping back down to the ground. The force of the water had washed a great hole in her garden bed, sending her plants sailing out onto the lawn, each its own island.

She ran back to the cover of the deck and stood dripping on the boards, the rain deafening on the iron. No sign of the birds today.

She slipped and slid to the bathroom for a towel.

Still it came down. Seven hundred millimetres in twenty-four hours alone and eighteen hundred for the week. The underground tank had been overflowing for days. The rain was so loud on the roof overnight she had not been able to sleep. That and worrying about the water getting in around the fireplace and the corner of her studio.

All she could smell was damp wood. She had lit the fire to try to dry things out, turned on all of the fans. Burned incense to cover it over.

She had been cut off since the morning before. No phone, no internet, no mobile reception, and the road out flooded in both directions. Her own driveway was a stream, and the steps down to the house a cascade.

The power had been out for eighteen hours, and then returned after breakfast. On one side of the house, anyway. The other was still dead, probably just a circuit shorted out. She had hooked up an extension cord, running yellow across the dining room, to keep the fridge going.

Jen watched the clock. The second hand, she was sure, had just moved backwards: stealing time. There, it did it again. One back, three forward. How long had it been doing that? She marched into her studio and turned on her laptop, waiting for it to wake up and tell her it was ten past twelve. The clock said twenty-five past nine. No wonder she had felt out of whack. How long had she been operating in her own private time zone? There was a new battery, at the back of the kitchen drawer, still in its packet. She pulled the clock down and changed the battery over, reset the time, and hung the clock back on the screw in the wall, adjusting it until it was straight. It didn’t move. It had stopped altogether. Swiss it might be, but her clock could not keep time in the tropics. It probably dreamt of snow and dry air, the alps of home.

There was a line of condensation spreading outwards on the freezer door. Its seals were on the way out, although only a few years old. Fridges were apparently not designed for high humidity. The complaints representative had explained that the problem was that she was failing to moderate the indoor temperature with air-conditioning – a larger fridge – so that the smaller fridge could work in comfort.

Only the television worked fine, beaming in calamitous images that had become addictive. The coast had been declared a disaster area, whole towns cut off, roads caved in and washed away. Every river, stream and seasonal creek had broken its banks, and still the rain came down and water rushed off the land; there were flood warnings across most of the state. The worst in a hundred years, they said.

A whole town had been washed away west of Brisbane, and now, water had to be released from the dam housing the city’s water supply, worsening the flooding downstream.

As the floodwaters began their advance on the city – river levels rising by the hour, residents sandbagging their homes and moving their valuables to higher ground, and authorities evacuating the central business district – the media spotlight finally shifted away from the disaster-declared coast.

Only then did all that water finally flush out the very thing everyone had been looking for, but no one had wanted to find.

Jen heard the helicopters throughout the afternoon and had to stop working, she felt so unsettled. Now it was all over the news.

A woman walking her dog for the first time in ten days, after the rain had eased overnight, had found a muddy pink schoolbag snagged among paperbarks, in the national park. By nightfall, the area had been taped off, declared a crime scene. The police had found human remains.

Long held beneath root and soil, gestating in decomposing plant matter, the hinterland delivered up its lost children, and the lost child in them all.

J
en turned off the television. She was wrung out for all those who had lost their homes and business and family members. Thankful for her own life untouched, unchanged. Almost.

For Caitlin’s parents, it was finally over. A loss of hope in exchange for knowing. The beginning of getting on with their lives.

She no longer knew how many days had gone by. It had stopped raining, though humidity was still at a hundred per cent. She had all the fans on but everything was damp. The book covers on the coffee table had curled back like leaves. Above the mosquito coil, and the bergamot, lavender and cedar combination in her oil burner, she could not escape the nose-tickling smell of mould.

She had put it off as long as she could. The fridge was empty but for condiments and there was nothing in the cupboard but dry pasta and lentils. The Hilux smelt damp. It was damp, the seat sticking to the back of her arms. She urged it up the drive, slipping on loose gravel. There was still detritus all over the road, and potholes deep enough to swim in.