The Best Australian Stories 2014 (18 page)

*

Graham left the school and wound through the backstreets of town to Haydn Street where all the front lawns were overgrown and old couches grew mouldy on verandahs. As promised, Liam's teacher had left a stack of workbooks with a handwritten note. In the pile was a thin soft book on Australian birds and, under that, a printed page from Wikipedia. Graham wondered if the teacher had assumed Liam didn't have internet at home. There'd been a couple of notes from both the kids' schools about that. If you didn't have internet access, the school would provide extra time at school. Things were tough, but he and Jenny weren't stupid. How would Sophie and Liam be able to do homework without proper internet?

He found Jenny waiting for him by their tin letterbox. She had a snarled expression on her face and a bag of oranges at her feet.

‘Mum was expecting me an hour ago, Graham.'

She picked up the pile of books from the front passenger seat and climbed awkwardly into the car. She dropped the oranges to the floor, huffing and puffing, then settled the books onto her lap. She picked up the note and smoothed her hand across the small, thin book on top.

‘Bird watching,' she said. ‘I used to love bird watching.'

Graham snorted as he pulled out of the driveway and back onto the road. ‘Since when have you been into bird watching?'

‘I used to be into bird watching, Graham.'

They were quiet for a few minutes while Jenny read Mrs Murphy's note and flicked through Liam's books.

‘I reckon she thinks we don't have internet.'

Graham indicated right and merged onto the freeway.

‘I'm gonna give you driving lessons.'

‘I don't need driving lessons. I know how to drive.'

‘I can't take a day off to drive you down to your mum's every week, Jen. I've gotta be there, at the shop. And I gotta be networking. No one knows me from a bloody bar of soap up here.'

‘She needs me,' Jenny said. ‘Imagine if I was all alone one day and our kids didn't come.'

A small part of Graham hoped they wouldn't. It didn't bother him that he and Jenny had never left Adelaide, there was nowhere particularly he wanted to go – Queensland, maybe – but he imagined his kids going places, doing things. For the past five years, since they were seven and nine, Graham had put their age in dollars into Bank SA student accounts. Every single fortnight. No matter how tough things were. He felt good whenever he thought about those accounts. He liked to see their names printed on the bank statements in that little window on the envelope. He wanted to believe that Winners might set them up.

*

Jenny's mum was sitting in her little cement porch on a fold-up chair.

‘Well, I thought you were never coming,' she said as they got out of the car. She turned and hobbled back inside the unit and Graham saw that she was wearing the compression tights Jenny had bought her last week. She moved like Jenny: from the hips, awkwardly swaying sideways in order to propel forwards. She sat down on the floral lounge chair and sighed, rested her head on the backrest and stayed there while Jenny made cups of tea and worked through her washing.

Jenny passed Graham a load of her mother's clothes and said, ‘Fold these. You're as useless as an ashtray on a motorbike, hon.'

*

On the way home, Jenny looked through Liam's homework again. Graham wondered how she managed to avoid getting carsick. She was competent, his wife, in so many ways and it bothered him that people wouldn't know it if they just saw her in the street. He thought of her TAFE studies and the high grades she was getting for the units.

‘Look, he's supposed to fill this worksheet out,' she said and she held up one of the loose papers. ‘Looks like the other kids are going bird watching, on an excursion. They're all going to the Laratinga wetlands. I never saw a form for that. Liam'll miss that.'

Graham glanced over the loose Wikipedia page Jenny was holding up. ‘What's an Australasian bittern?'

‘They say it's rare. Special. The icon bird of the Australian swamp. Might even be endangered.'

‘And what, they reckon they've got them in the wetlands? I thought that place was just for dumping the town's shit.'

Jenny slapped the page across his arm. ‘It's environmental, Graham. How's he supposed to get this worksheet done if he doesn't get to go on the excursion? They're just setting him up to fail, is what they're doing.'

‘Well, he should bloody do it.' Graham remembered the principal's uninterested smile as he'd steered them out of his office, as though he'd given up on Liam already. He pushed his palm into the steering wheel. ‘There's nothing to say he can't go to the wetlands, is there? It's a free bloody country. He can just do it, and then hand in that worksheet like everyone else. That's what he'll do.'

‘Yep. He could walk there. Get some exercise. We could all go. We never do anything together anymore. Remember when we used to do things all together?'

Graham remembered the time he drove them to Willunga and they had fish and chips on the beach. How old was Sophie then? Six? Seven? With that wispy blonde hair. He used to call her his little princess, back then. That felt like a lifetime ago. He'd had no idea kids grew up so fast.

*

Graham rolled the Blu Tack around in his fingers and stuck the card back up on the front door of the shop. He switched the line to his bluetooth and clipped it over his ear. He still hadn't heard from Troy Campbell at the Hahndorf Football Club. As he locked the door, he decided he would call again himself that afternoon. Persistence was the key. Never giving up. He had to
think
like a winner.

Liam and Jenny waited for him in the car at the petrol bowsers. Jenny had claimed she didn't mind missing TAFE if it was for bird watching. When Graham had thrown his hands in the air, she'd made her eyes big and said, ‘What?' They'd offered the morning off school to Sophie too, because bird watching was educational, but she said she didn't want to go anywhere that Liam was going. Then she'd walked off down the street with her schoolbag half-hanging off one shoulder, as if she might just drop it on the ground and leave it there.

*

Graham parked the car in the Homemaker Centre. Jenny had packed supplies: drink bottles and a collection of snacks.

‘How long you planning on being here?' Graham asked.

‘Well, you don't know. That's the thing about bird watching, Graham. You have to be patient.'

She and Liam were both puffing by the time they'd followed the asphalt walking trail to the first pond, flanked with native grasses that reached over their heads. There was no one much around on this Wednesday morning, just an older man on a bike who passed them and a couple of mums with prams. Jenny had packed the little digital camera they'd got for taking out a
National Geographic
subscription that no one ever read, but it wasn't charged so Graham put it in his jacket pocket and got out his phone for taking pictures. Liam had the worksheet in one hand and a blue biro in the other and he dragged his feet as he walked, so that Graham saw how his sneakers had become so scuffed.

‘There, mate. That's one of those ducks.' Jenny pointed an arm vigorously towards the pond. ‘The blue-billed whatsaname duck. And look, there's a honeyeater. The New Holland honeyeater. Tick'em off, Liam. Here, give me that sheet.'

Liam handed the worksheet to Jenny as if it meant nothing to him, as if he didn't even know what it was. She took the biro from him too and rested the page on the book over her thigh to tick inside the boxes.

As they walked, Jenny read from the book and Mrs Murphy's printout. She told them how the effluent treatment worked, that Laratinga was a Peramangk word for the Mount Barker Creek. She said she had no idea there were so many different birds in the wetlands. That's the thing about bird watching, she said; until you actually watch, you don't see any birds. It's like you have to know that you're watching, you have to decide, in a way, otherwise you won't see anything. You won't hear them either, she said, unless you actually listen.

Graham listened and realised that she was right. It was amazing how many different birds you could hear when you listened. He had no idea what they all were. Trills, chirps, high-pitched squeaks, whistles, low throaty variations. A white cockatoo shrieked overhead. Graham thought again about how smart Jenny was, the way she had a knack for putting things.

They walked on, Jenny leading, then Liam, then Graham following behind. Every now and then, Jenny would stop still and turn this way and that and Liam would scuff his sneakers around at the gravelled edges. They passed the second body of water and then left the asphalt path for the unsealed trail. They wound further into the middle of the wetlands, a third pond and the boardwalk.

Liam spotted a group of blue fairy-wrens and Jenny held a hand on her heart as they watched the tiny birds flit about in the leaf litter. Jenny found the bit in the book about fairy-wrens and Graham took photos using his phone. They spotted more species of duck, a starling, lots of magpies, a group of corellas, a masked lapwing. Jenny ticked them all off. She continued reading as they walked. Sometimes, she'd stop and read something aloud. There are birds, she said, that breed in Japan and Siberia and then fly all the way here, to escape the northern winter.

Graham zipped up his jacket. He had no conception of a northern winter, hadn't ever seen snow. It was early spring and you could see signs of it, especially in the wetlands, but the air still had the bite of winter. There hadn't been a stretch of sunny days or blue skies yet. He'd never carried much body fat and the cold air nipped straight to his bones.

They didn't see any more birds for a while. Occasionally, they would think they had, but then they'd realise that one was already ticked off. Jenny said she wished they owned a pair of binoculars.

‘These are all the common birds,' she said when they reached a bench and she looked over the worksheet. ‘We still haven't really seen something special, something rare.'

Graham stood at the bench while Jenny and Liam sat at either end, pulling out the drinks and packs of flavoured crackers.

‘Let's go back,' Liam said through a mouthful. ‘This is boring.' He had flecks of orange seasoning around his lips. ‘Just tick'em off, Mum. How would she know, anyway?' He kicked at the bolts holding the bench to the ground.

The kid had a point, thought Graham. It was tempting just to tick off all the boxes. But then he thought they should see it through, as a lesson in itself. When he'd closed up the shop yesterday, he'd seen that Liam had spent the whole morning looking at porn on the computer. If he wasn't at school, then he should bloody well be doing schoolwork. It was good to make him stay and do it, to finish the task.

Right at the bottom of the worksheet was a hand-drawn sketch of the Australasian bittern. Above it, Mrs Murphy had put three question marks and an exclamation mark. It had been sighted once or twice before by some serious bird watchers – it wasn't as if it was impossible to see one, but Jenny was right; it was rare. Graham turned from the bench and surveyed the vast expanse of inky water in front of them. He checked his watch. They'd been gone for almost an hour. He tried to imagine what it would be like if they saw a bittern, if he got a picture on his phone. He imagined how excited Jenny would be, ticking the box on the worksheet and, later, attaching a copy of the photo. He imagined Liam going back to school after his suspension with that. Mrs Murphy would send him to the principal's office, to show it off. No doubt they'd put Liam's worksheet up on the noticeboard at the front office and everyone would see it, all the parents and the other kids. Liam would get an A, for sure. Maybe sighting an Australasian bittern was so special that the principal would ring
The Courier,
and there'd be a story about it in the local rag.

The first drop of rain hit Graham's closed mouth. As he brought his hand up to wipe it away, another hit his wrist. He turned back to the bench and saw that Jenny was stuffing the drink bottles and empty wrappers back into Liam's schoolbag. She folded the worksheet in half and put that and the pen in there too. She passed Graham the bag and eased herself up, leaning on Liam's knee and wobbling as she stood. The raindrops became large and random and splattered generously. Liam stood up and covered his head with his hands. Another year and he'd be as tall as his mother. A breeze came up, shimmering through branches and leaves and turning them into wind chimes. A current swept across the large body of water.

Graham put both straps of the bag over his shoulders and led the way to the boardwalk.

‘Shortcut to the main path,' he said and turned back to make sure his family were following.

The downpour came quickly and hard. The singular drops of rain turned suddenly into long vertical sheets of water. There was a crack of thunder over the valley.

Graham broke into a jog. He heard Jenny and Liam yell out and turned again to see them lumbering behind him, their mouths open, hair flat and dripping against their foreheads.

‘Run!' he yelled, but even as the word left his mouth and was drowned in the wall of rain, he knew that neither of them could. Carrying so much extra weight and with that dodgy hip, Jenny was struggling to walk. All she could manage was a lopsided shuffle. Liam was slow too and his knees seemed to collapse into each other.

On every occasion that Graham had been called up to Liam's schools, he had privately wondered if his son was even capable of the injuries he'd allegedly inflicted. A twisted arm that had required an X-ray, a black eye, a chipped tooth, numerous blood noses. And now Josh someone, with concussion and six stitches across his left eyebrow. It didn't add up. He couldn't help wondering if they all just had it in for his boy, as if they wanted Liam in trouble, that they just didn't like him.