For the Forest of a Bird (2 page)

And it was, wasn't it? Something wonderful was about to happen, or re-happen if that was a word. Nella skipped over it in her mind.
Re-happen
, and she smiled. It was like that – when she was happy she would hear words sing through her. New words, imagined words, bits of words and sentences that came together and played and left again, sometimes returning and usually forgotten. Whole stories sometimes. She would watch them and listen to them and she would not chase them away.

Re-happen – what had been before would be again, and just as it had been. She would make it return, she would be part of its returning. The house with its borderless walls would come back.

She bent to her bag now, zipped it up and lifted it over her shoulder. Then she looked across at the feather. It was resting on the windowsill just as it had since she'd first woken. Weightless, almost invisible. She walked over to it and lifted it up in her hand.

Weightless, invisible.
That was how the most remarkable of things, the most powerful of things, often seemed. This was what occurred to Nella as she walked towards the school gate following the familiar pattern of her weekday journey. Footsteps on concrete. Home to school and school to home. But today something unseen and overwhelming urged her forward, past the gate without turning into the school grounds, beside the outer boundary of the wire fence, along the street where the houses began and into the gardens, green and cold and waiting. Overhead she heard the stirring of sleeping possums. Around her was the breath of every tree.

On she went, along the dirt track, wet with prints from the morning dogs, out on to Queens Parade with its cars and traffic lights and noise. Somehow in the gaps of all these things, there must be a whisper from the past, there must be a moment that says I am not forgotten, I can re-happen.

This is what she believed.

At last she passed the cafes and restaurants of Smith Street, the butcher shop she turned her face from and the little store selling glass beads that she'd often enter and move from counter to counter in, staring at the minute and individual worlds on display there.

Now, finally she arrived at the op shop. A woman with white hair was unlocking the front door. So Nella would be their first customer. Someone would be sure to help her if she needed it – but she hesitated. No, she did not want anyone to help her, she did not want anyone to gain a sense of her secret. Or at least anyone who might not understand. This is what Nella had learnt, that you cannot speak aloud something special – something that really matters to you – in the presence of someone unsympathetic, without losing the power of that special thing.

No, Nella would not say anything. She would not tell the shop assistant why she was here, what it was she wanted. How her purchase was going to change everything.

Instead she slid quietly into the store and made her way down the aisle of abandoned dresses, past boxes of discarded shoes and baskets of faded wool, paper sewing patterns and children's outgrown clothes. A broken angel stared down at her.

At last she came to the back of the store.
Bedroom Furniture
, it said. She touched the strap of her schoolbag and climbed the few wooden steps up into the elevated section. Wardrobes, dressing tables, long mirrors that threw a picture of herself back into the room, Nella passed them all. She continued to the far corner where she saw a mattress leaning against the wall.

‘That's it,' she said and she pulled out the blue crocheted rug from her bag and walked closer. ‘Yes. It looks just right.' She held the rug from one edge to the other of the upturned mattress. It fitted perfectly. ‘Yes, it's exactly what I want.'

The delivery was set for three thirty.
Matthew would be at university and their mother would be at her monthly appointment with the doctor. Nella wrote the time on her left wrist as she hurried back down Smith Street. It wasn't that the delivery was unimportant and she might forget it for that reason. It was more that she feared her destination might make her forget the detail of things, the sharp edges as they existed in the streets and shops she was leaving behind.

Down cobbled laneways she went, and back behind the oval of the school. She lifted her head as she passed the red building in the distance. Inside it was the classroom where she should be. Room eleven, eastern wing, period two. Environmental Science. She had chosen the subject herself, no one had forced her to take it. She had thought it would be about rainforests and deep sea creatures, all the animals and the natural world she loved. And it was, but not in the way she understood. Her teacher spoke of ‘managing wildlife' and there was a unit on ‘Natural Resources' as if the creeks and trees, fish and earth were inanimate objects to be used only as humans decided.

Nella continued on, past the milk bar and towards the train station at the end of the street. When she reached the old ticket office, she followed an asphalt path under the railway tracks and came out on the other side where a dirt path began. It was here she felt her heart lift. She was nearly there. She was nearly at the creek.

Grass and thistles, cloud and sky.
At last she stood at the bank.

In front of her the creek looked still, although it moved on. A darkness that could have been a shadow on the water broke away to become a tiny wood duck. Nella closed her hand in the pocket of her dress, and she felt the feather against her fingers.

‘I want to tell you something,' she said and it did not matter that there was no reply. ‘I want to tell you that he's coming home. That I'm going to bring our father back and it's going to be like it was before he went away, before everything broke apart, it's going to be just like the beginning.'

There, now she'd said it. She'd spoken it out loud and in a place where it really mattered. The creek, the sky, the birds on their homeward journey had heard her.

And there was no going back. She pulled out the clock she'd packed in her bag. It was ten fifteen. She twisted the dials on its back and set the alarm for three o'clock. Then she took the blue crocheted rug and she stretched it out on a patch of soft grass and she lay down on it. She closed her eyes and she felt the sun on her skin and she slept.

How the clouds drifted above her, sometimes blocking the sun and sometimes setting it free.
When she opened her eyes the warmth was there again. Light on the water, happiness all throughout her.

She was bringing her father home. The swallows knew it, the creek knew it, the whispers that existed in the history no human eyes could see knew it. Nothing could stop her.

She pushed in the button to stop the alarm on the clock sounding just before it was about to begin. She was heading home.

The streets around her, the final bell for the school day – nothing caught her attention except the thoughts in her head. She would instruct the delivery men to put the mattress in the spare room. She'd lock the door there with the key she'd found fallen beneath the room's upturned lino. Then she'd go down the hall with her schoolbag still over her shoulder, walk into the kitchen and prepare herself something to eat. Perhaps she'd make herself a bowl of Weet-Bix or maybe a plate of toast – one of her usual after-school meals – as if everything was exactly as it should be.

Except it wasn't. Nella turned the corner and ahead of her in the street, she saw the delivery van. It was reversing to a halt in the space outside her house. Suddenly she felt herself running towards it. She'd tell the men to be careful with the mattress, to make sure it didn't get dirty rubbing against the fence or touching the ground as they brought it inside. Quickly she ran. Against her shoulder, she felt her schoolbag with its blue crocheted rug inside almost slip from her as if to drag her backwards, but she grabbed at its straps and pulled it along. The first stage of her plan was about to be complete and she could waste no time.

‘This is the house right here,' she said as she reached the men at the back of the van. ‘Number fourteen.' She was almost breathless. ‘I'll just get the key to open the door.'

‘No need,' one of the men answered.

Nella looked at him.

‘We knocked already. We've just backed up the truck.'

‘But . . .'

She turned to the house. How could it be?

It was unmistakable. There at the centre of the verandah, where the front door should have been locked and firmly shut, the doorway was open and wide, gaping.

Someone was home. How could Nella possibly explain the mattress?
How could she conceal her plan from whoever was there? Matthew, her mother – they would know of course, eventually; they would have to. But by then her father's return would be an accepted fact, even an embraced one. No one would dispute it. Now, though, before that time, before all the forces that needed to come together had somehow done so, Nella felt unnerved.

What if she were told her father could never come back?

‘Where do you want it, love?' The older man of the two was bent beside her now, holding one end of the mattress.

‘Um . . .'

‘Do you want to show us where to put it?'

Nella wanted to ask who had answered the door. Was it Matthew with his distance, his anger? Or was it her mother, alarmed, disturbed? Nella suddenly felt herself cold and small and lost.

‘We need to put this somewhere,' the man was saying. He was still holding onto the mattress.

Nella looked at him.

‘Where should we put it?'

She bit her bottom lip.

‘Which room?'

Nella felt her breath stop, she shifted her feet. And then all in a rush she said, ‘Take it back, please just take it back. I don't want it.'

‘What?'

‘Take it back to the store. Please . . . I made a mistake.'

The man looked up at her.

‘You won't get a refund, you know.'

‘I know, I don't care, please just take it away.' She was almost screaming.

He looked across at the other man who seemed to shrug and the two of them shuffled back to the rear of the van with the mattress between them. Their feet clanged on metal steps, followed by the slamming of the large back doors and the start of the engine. And then the men, the van and the mattress disappeared around the corner and Nella was left alone in the street. And all she could see was asphalt and fences and gutter.