Nest (8 page)

The asparagus fern was still hanging under the eaves, tips browning, neither inside nor outside, and denied any real benefit from the rain unless it were to come in sideways. There was a coating of cobwebs between the basket’s canes, giving it a nest-like appearance.

Jen stopped. There
was
a nest. A nest within the nest. A kind of woven thatch dome against one fluted edge of the basket, with a round opening on the side. Jen peered in. It was lined with breast feathers, one a kind of mottled brown.

There was no one home. She had probably destroyed all of their broody plans when she ripped the basket out of the garden, where it had been better sheltered among the palm and ferns. She fetched a cup of water for the plant, taking care to pour it around the nest, just in case.

She scratched the gardeners’ soap in the laundry so as to fill under her nails, scrubbed them out with the little brush, then did the back of her hands, and dried them on the handtowel. She should really shower, too, and get rid of all the lantana stink and spores, but the nest was at the front of her mind.

The gallery owner, May, had said she would be happy to have any pieces Jen had lying around, but she wanted to give her something new. To finish something new would be a start.

She blew on her hands and sat down at the drawing desk. Pencil, page, nest, breath. The weight of the pencil was just right, the texture of the page coaxed her hand to move, and her breath brought the outside in.

She had been searching for nests when she met Craig. She’d been up a tree in the Brindabellas, locked behind binoculars, looking for olive whistler nests, when he had come thundering along the path below. He had looked up, thinking her a large bird, though he had long sent every other animal scurrying or
flying away with all his noise, and grinned a silly grin. Her bird’s-eye view had afforded a glimpse of his energy, which she had mistaken for something wild.

It had probably been his dimples that called her down, the messy thatch of blond hair, and the promise of a cup of hot tea. She had grown quite cold sitting still so long. He was halfway through a great walk across the mountains, and could only stop for fifteen minutes.

When she ran into him on campus a few weeks later, it had seemed like destiny. He was a semester ahead in the same course, a DipEd, though she was half a decade older. They had tea again, in the coffee shop this time, and he took her number.

He had called three days later, and she had put down her pencil to answer, hoping it was him.

J
en pull-started the chainsaw on the back lawn, eased off the choke, and made her way down the slope to the fallen brush box. Its centre had been dead for some time, dragging the rest down with it. She began slicing through that section, the saw protesting and sending out the occasional spark. Brush box wood was dense, and actually contained silicon, making the timber part stone, which was great for floorboards and building, but soon blunted a saw’s chain.

She adjusted her stance on the slope, trying to bend her knees to reduce the strain on her lower back. She was into the main section of the trunk now, still green, and no good for burning for a couple of years yet, but she figured she might as well carve it all up while she was at it.

Where the tree touched the ground, she had to be careful not to cut right through. It had not been her father, as it should have been, who taught her to use a chainsaw – though she had seen him wield one plenty of times. She had been too young then to do much more than pour in the fuel and chain and bar oil.

It had been Craig, of all people, who had first given her the opportunity. He had carried a small chainsaw in the back of his four-wheel drive during holiday expeditions, in case of a fallen tree. She had thought it amusing but sure enough, on only their third or fourth trip, somewhere in the Grampians, they had rounded a bend and found a downed mountain ash, the white limbs of its crown shattered over the road.

Craig had started the chainsaw and cut up the tree with some pride, not realising that chainsawing an already fallen tree was unlikely to impress her. She would have taken more notice if he had not been able to do such things. To his credit, he had paused halfway through and gestured for her to come over. He handed her the saw, gave a few simple instructions, and stood by while she cut through the remaining sections. She had remembered her father’s rules, imparted in the truck or when training new men, about relaxing your shoulders, cutting downwards and away from your body, using the tip of the blade and so on. In the end, she liked to think, it had been Craig who had been impressed.

Not long after she moved back, she had made a trip down to the large hardware store on the coast, with the intention of purchasing a saw for herself. The well-meaning fellow, both younger and shorter than her, had tried to sell her a kiddy Japanese saw, and gave dire warnings about severed limbs and the need for Kevlar pants, earmuffs, goggles, helmet and so on: a truckload of gear. She had listened politely but insisted on a McCulloch with a much longer bar and more powerful engine. She demonstrated that she could lift it and wield it, only relenting by purchasing a pair of bright green earmuffs. Most of the loggers, her father included, had been too proud to wear
them, and were half deaf as a result. She intended to hear the birds as long as she lived.

The hardware man – Ted, or Tod, his badge had said – assumed she was clearing a block, that trees were her enemy, and she hadn’t bothered to correct him. She came up against that a lot, people of a different mindset. It had frustrated her at first – assuming that because they had chosen the same place to live they must have plenty in common – but she had finally realised there was no point trying to bridge the gap.

Her art school friends would be shocked that she used a chainsaw at all, not realising that not to have one, living among trees like this, and in a subtropical climate, was to be vulnerable.

She started on the thickest section, near the base of the trunk. It would probably be the last she extracted from the saw, and herself for that matter. Her forearms were aching. Smoke chugged out of the machine; it was overheating.

She puffed, and stretched her hands. She wouldn’t be able to do this forever, or climb the slope loaded up with wood. She had seen the tree cutters when they grew old, no longer able to wield a saw. Like shearers, their backs and knees were ruined. Their hands shook, too, from absorbing all that vibration. One fellow could no longer close his hands in any sort of grip, barely managing to lift a beer glass to his mouth at the pub, her father had said.

She baulked at buying wood, though – it was always cut too green and too small for her great fireplace. And they charged way too much. She stamped on the piece she had just cut to break the last wedge free, only to see it roll down the hill away from her, turning faster and faster until it went plop into the creek.

She was breaking her father’s golden rule, ‘never chainsaw alone’, but she didn’t have much choice. She could hardly call
the neighbour over every time she needed wood or wanted to remove a tree, and it wouldn’t be right to make Henry stand by. As soon as Kay got wind of it, that would be the end of his lessons. Though it wouldn’t hurt him to learn how to do something practical, or to carry the logs up to the woodpile.

She did make sure she always had her mobile in her shirt pocket. When she was up on the roof, too. There’d be no use calling if she severed an artery, though; by the time the ambulance located the address and found her among the trees, she would have bled out.

She had been with her father, that last winter, when one of the men slipped and cut into his leg, just above the knee. She had steered the truck to the public hospital, and stood on the clutch, while her father changed the gears, holding an old towel against the man’s leg. Her father had remained calm, and taken the time to praise her second attempt at driving, but the dark blood seeping into the seat and the pallor of her father’s face left her in no doubt as to how serious it was.

Jen’s concession was never to use the chainsaw in the rain, or if she was feeling unwell, and she tried to concentrate. She hung the earmuffs around her neck. The birds had started up again, celebrating the end of all the noise. She bent to lift a log with her right arm, loaded another on top of it, and carried them and the saw back up the slope to the house.

S
he tried Aunt Sophie again, imagining the old phone echoing up her wallpapered hallway. It was not unusual for her to be out midmorning – she was always busy with bridge or shopping for quilting supplies, or meeting friends. But it was the third time she had tried this week.

‘Hello?’

‘It’s Jen,’ she said. ‘Everything all right?’

‘Fine, love,’ her aunt said. ‘I’ve been enjoying this weather, getting out in the garden.’

‘Planting?’

‘Some more gardenias. Out the front.’

Jen smiled. Her aunt already had about a hundred gardenias. ‘They’ll get good sun there, in the morning.’

‘I think so, yes,’ Aunt Sophie said. ‘Anyway. What about you?’

‘Weeding, mainly and some replanting. I’m trying a native groundcover where I cleared fishbone fern. It has white flowers and edible fruit.’

‘Midyim?’

‘That’s it.’

‘Well, it’s a good time of year for it. And the drawing?’

‘A little. A local gallery wants a few pieces,’ she said. ‘You remember May?’

‘Of course, I love her gallery. It’s hard to know whether to look at the pictures inside or out, the view’s so good.’

Jen laughed.

‘I’m glad you’re showing your work again. That’s the best news I’ve had for ages.’ Aunt Sophie hesitated, and Jen could hear the currawongs starting up out the back. ‘I heard about that missing girl,’ she said. ‘Are you okay?’

‘The police called me in. Asking about Dad.’

‘After all this time?’

‘I guess it’s routine …’

‘When was this?’

‘Last week.’

‘Oh, love,’ she said. ‘I knew I should’ve called.’

‘It’s fine.’

‘It sounds awful,’ her aunt said. ‘Is there someone you can talk to?’

‘I’m okay, Soph,’ she said. ‘They haven’t called you?’

‘No. Something to look forward to!’

Jen smiled at the humph in her voice. She could always rely on Aunt Sophie to be on her side.

Losing a parent at such a young age had not been easy. Nor had the not knowing. A lifetime of not knowing. She had always hoped – still did some of the time – that she might see him again. It was a child’s hope. Whatever happened, he would always be her father. She had known him, which was more than some people had.

For her mother, though, his leaving had been the end of their relationship. The end of her. It wasn’t until Jen’s own relationship with Craig had ended that she had really understood what a deep hole that left.

There was the money stuff, too, which Jen had not been able to fully comprehend at the time. Bills and IOUs kept coming in for months. They had sold off all the timber lying around, and the machinery. Jen had taken the cash from the men who came, while her mother slept inside. After the last transaction, she had, on impulse, slipped a twenty-dollar note in her pocket.

In the long months that followed, whenever they could not afford milk or bread, she wanted to give it back, to retrieve it from inside the book Michael had lent her, inside her shoebox of Jen things, hidden behind a loose board in the wall of her room. But to do so would be to admit taking it, and by then even she had realised that there was only so far twenty dollars would go.

The shrink had asked if she had been planning some sort of escape, like her father, and Jen had laughed, but perhaps it had been the first expression of her desire for independence. For distance from the dark mess she found herself living in.

The first thing to go had been the private school enrolment. The Lutheran College offered a well-regarded arts program. Aunt Sophie had offered to pay, but for whatever reason, her mother had refused. And so Jen had started high school at the public school in the next town. She had not been at all gracious about it, throwing a rather teenage tantrum and screaming that her father had not wanted her to go to that stupid school. Her mother hadn’t either; it was rough and ordinary. But it was free and she could catch the bus.