The Marsh Birds (22 page)

‘Kids! Kids!' Janine laughed. ‘Settle down!'

Carrie kicked Dhurgham under the table and they grinned at each other.

Carrie bought Dhurgham a watch as a present. She spent all her saved pocket money that was not in her term account. She showed Janine in the car as they arrived home from shopping. Her mother raised an eyebrow at her and Carrie blushed.

‘He hasn't got a watch,' she said softly.

‘It's really nice Carrie—help to make up for how rude you were to him when you first met.'

Carrie blushed again and slammed the car door. She stormed into the house and threw it at him, scowling. It hit him in the chest.

Dhurgham was stunned. He held the small blue-wrapped box in both hands. Carrie leant in close with a little impatient dance. ‘Open it!'

He could smell her hair.

It was a most beautiful watch—solid and silver, exactly the kind of watch, he thought, that he might have chosen for himself. Carrie grabbed it from him and put it around his wrist, where its segments settled, smooth and cool. He fingered the shining glass, admiring the fine filigree of the hands and their stately movement over the reflective blue base beneath.

He was smiling broadly. ‘Thank you!' he murmured, raising his eyes to hers. She glowed back for a moment and then shrugged away, buoyant.

‘It's a Sentinel,' she said, and he guessed from her nonchalance that this meant a lot.

Janine watched them from the kitchen, troubled. How could she blame Carrie? Tom was such a lovely boy. She hoped John was right that Tom would win his case. She hoped they were all right that Tom was what he seemed to be.

Dhurgham looked at Carrie uncomfortably. She was right. He could go to school next year, if—if. Then he could go to university. But it all seemed unreal. Carrie was his age. Carrie had just finished school and was taking a year off, a notion that had at first struck him as comical, then blissfully bizarre. Carrie was in her
year off
. She was
choosing
to have some time out of the flow of life. Then she was going to university. He sat up, staring away over the creek and into the wild lush mountainside. A tui called, grating and liquid notes hidden in the shadowed green. Panic crept out of the wilds and gripped him. His education! Life had slid on, slipped away, leaving him stranded. He had his twelve year old precocity,
Oh Master Dhurgham, you can be anything, anything in the world you want to be, with that mind. You only have to do your homework.
He had had ten months with Abu Rafik with which to become an adult, but the world hadn't waited for him. Carrie, next to him, Carrie in her frilly yellow tank top, with long brown legs and jandals. Carrie slouching and petulant and elegant with it. She had kept up. Carrie had his story.

‘I think I'll be a pilot, though,' Carrie said suddenly, and the hair on Dhurgham's neck stood on end.

Carrie was delighted at first by everything that was different about Dhurgham. He noticed birds. She had never seen so many birds as she did in his company. She told him the antics of keas and the way they would tease a dog, and he laughed and laughed. She said she had to show him one of these quirky green parrots, hopping along the kerb, ‘looking for cars to trash,' she said. But there were none around Wellington. She promised to take him when she got her licence.

‘Look, birds!' she would scream, poking him, and he would look, stop, and regard them, face serious. She loved it. She loved him when he did it.

He didn't tell her that he didn't remember having been interested in birds before—that his interest in birds increased with her amusement. His interest was real nonetheless; and he felt perhaps it was proper that such an interest should surface here. For a while he thought that knowing birds and plants, naming them, knowing all there was to know about them, would bond him into place. He would find his place among them.‘I'll be a New Zealander when I know all this,' he said, ‘serious.' Carrie laughed witheringly. She didn't have to say it. Carrie knew neither the names nor habits nor calls of any birds. She could recognise a tui and knew that magpies had come over from Australia, but her answers were vague on everything else—‘Oh those—yeah, you hear them all the time.'

Nonetheless, birds charmed him.

They were lying together on the grass at the bottom of the garden, staring up into the fern fronds and the spreading canopy of the late-flowering pohutakawa. It was one of those rare days when the aromatic grass was dry enough to lie on. ‘It's a completely different world up there,' he said. Silver-eyes and sparrows flitted back and forth. ‘We live like this.' He made a flat palm and pushed it horizontally, then in a mechanical line left, a line right.‘Birds live like this.' He reached his arms up and made a sphere, then a radiating ball, an explosion of possibility. Then he said softly, ‘In the war I remember all the birds died. Even the flies. Stunned out of the sky by the blasts. There were dead birds all over the garden every morning.'

Carrie frowned. She propped herself up on her elbow to look at him. A war could be out there, impending somewhere far away, or talked about by someone from a war coming to class, but she didn't want to be trapped with someone with a war in their memories, someone who saw all the birds fall from the sky. Then she felt scared.

‘My father was in a war, too, in Vietnam, but
he
never talks about it,' she said.

Skipper Joe was behind him, guiding his hand now and then at the helm.

‘Firm, but gentle, gentle, young fella. Feel it out. The wind and the current aren't made to work for you, they're out there, wild and changeable as all getout. You got to feel out the pathway that makes music on them.'

The
Morning Star
cut in and hissed into smooth sea. The sails snapped and trilled.

‘Nope … yes, nearly nearly! Just a little more, and then keep feeling for it. It's like pleasuring a woman. It's all there already. Know what I mean?'

‘No,' Dhurgham said shyly, smiling, glancing at Joe's grizzled face and bare dome of a head.

Joe smiled. ‘You're off again, back, back, yep … That's it. See the sails, no little creases and ripples in the wrong spots. Feel it?'

‘Yes,' murmured Dhurgham without shifting his concentration from the wheel, the boat and the sea. Joe was silent.

Dhurgham could feel the warmth of Joe's sunny body just behind him, and hear his breath moving back and forth through a smile. He held his concentration, but it suddenly was no effort. It was a dreamy balanced dance.

‘It's like finding your future. It's fate, and all there, but shit ya can fuck it up.' Joe was silent for a moment, then his voice settled lower, softer, near Dhurgham's ear.‘I was in a war once. With him.' He waved at Stan's feet hanging over the coach-housing. ‘We went to Vietnam as young fellas. I was so young and stupid I kinda … thrived. Can't bear to think about it now. Those other two were protesting against us for all they were worth. Jim even got put in prison. I think they tapped his phone up until the 80s. Keep feeling for it, know what I mean?'

Dhurgham wasn't sure whether Joe meant fate or the course of the
Morning Star
. He didn't know what to say. The boat then dug and slowed, and the sails snapped as he handed the wheel back.

Carrie got her full driver's licence in a flurry of excitement and celebration in the Johns' household.

The Tararua mountains were cloud-wet. They set up camp in a soggy clearing surrounded by the black trunks and filigree fronds of tree ferns. They were perched above a hundred metre drop to a river that rushed and roared through boulders and stilled into clear green pools. They could see them way below but couldn't even reach them with farflung stones.

As night fell, the pines and ferns raised a dim blue-black canopy over their heads and the sentinel trunks flickered orange in the light of their campfire.

Carrie had reassured him that, no, there were no snakes, no tigers, no dogs. Not even foxes—only birds and small insects. No large insects, except wetas, and she said that so dismissively that he assumed they were some hidden away, unobtrusive burrower.

It had taken a good two hours for his nerves to settle, with Carrie laughing at what a city boy he was, and teasing him about kiwis and their long beaks. He had never slept outside in the wilds like this. Carrie didn't let up, but he could tell that her deft expertise and joyous authority were enhanced by his inexperience. When he asked her how often she camped out, her answer was airy with superiority and he smiled to himself. He trusted her utterly, entrusted himself to her. It didn't matter that she hadn't done this much. He was guessing that she had camped with her parents. It mattered only that she knew about the
idea
of camping, that she knew what things were for, what one did at night, that the idea of camping formed part of her imagination, part of who she was and would be in her lifetime. That was more wonderful and more essential than any real experience.

Carrie set him to work gathering wood, preparing toasting sticks, opening the corn, holding tent poles, and helping zip the two sleeping bags together.