For the Forest of a Bird (6 page)

Nella stepped down from the chair. The box was empty; the computer must be somewhere. That's when she decided to go into her father's room. She hadn't wanted to, something told her she shouldn't. Something told her to stay outside. But now she pushed the door of his bedroom open very, very slightly and she looked through the tiny crack she'd made and then she pushed it further so the gap widened and she stared inside.

Darkness turned to dimness and then she could make out the shapes of furniture in his bedroom. The bulky old-fashioned wardrobe, the familiar dressing table she'd helped him choose at the local Salvation Army op shop, the large double bed. And then, near the window, beside the closed curtain, she saw what looked like a table. She moved closer. It wasn't a table exactly, it was a desk. Its surface was neatly organised with pens and a pencil in a glass holder, papers stacked into a perfect pile, a digital clock facing the chair and in the middle rested a computer.

Why hadn't he mentioned it? Perhaps he'd been a bit embarrassed – he was often teasing Nella about how strange it was that she found out so many things about nature and wildlife through a computer. He did know her email address, though – she'd written it for him once on the back of a bus ticket when she'd left the island – so perhaps he'd sent her an email. Perhaps he'd sent her a message to tell her when he was coming home.

Nella fiddled with the catch on the casing and then opened up the computer. She pressed a button, the screen lit up and she typed until her email inbox appeared. Yes, there was a message. There'd been a message received at 9.09 this morning.

Nella clicked it open without reading the sender. It could be no one else.

She hadn't expected Matthew. She pushed herself back from the computer, her hands like fists against the edge of the desk and her arms outstretched. Nella looked at the floor, then closed her eyes as if invisibility might make her brother disappear forever. But it didn't.

Even there in the stillness, in the darkness, she felt Matthew.

It seems you misunderstood.
His was the voice she fled, and had tried to push herself so far from. If she had been in Melbourne now she would have gone to the creek, she would have gone to the swallows.
Take me away with you
, she might have said because, after all, that was the other side of their return – their leaving.
Take me away, please take me away.
That's what she might have said if she could put words to it, if she could translate the forces inside her into some kind of language that made sense.

Instead she opened her eyes and she went to her father's bed. She pulled the blanket from the top of it and she held it close to her. What did Matthew mean anyway?
It seems you misunderstood.
What did he know of understanding, of her understanding?

For him, life was school, study, a career. That's probably what this was about, Nella needing to return to school. But Nella hated school. She hated the uniform she had to wear, she hated the subjects she had to study, she hated the lunchtime conversations she was never part of. She was staying here on the island with her father and when he was well, when he was completely well, she'd take him to the creek, to the swallows as she'd always wanted to, to their children born new and unowned and full of possibility.

She hugged the blanket closer to herself now. She'd sleep under the stars. Why not? She'd sleep under the sky that the swallows travelled by navigating without map or study.

Nella went to the back door and it was already turning to twilight – in-between like the journey from the city to the island or the coastal scrub with its neighbouring sea and bush, or even the creek where one thing is ending and another beginning – and she put the blanket over the couch on the back verandah, made a little bed and climbed inside.

How tired she was
. How she slept and slept. It was not even darkness but she fell asleep and dreamt and dreamt and did not wake until late morning. There was Matthew speaking to her in the night but she could not hear him, the swallows flying into the sky on their northern migration, her school with its bell ringing again and again and her mother saying those words over and over –
His heart's given
way
,
his heart's given way
.

There was no sense to any of it – it was simply a swirl of pictures and words and as Nella lay there thinking about it in the morning, the strangest of thoughts occurred to her. Maybe Matthew was right. Maybe she didn't understand the world as it really was. Maybe she really had
misunderstood
.

But no, she dismissed the thought as quickly as it had arisen. Matthew had always done that, made her doubt herself, made her feel that all she believed was simply foolish and fantasy.

She lifted her arms from beneath the blanket, stretched her whole body and she felt a shaft of sunlight slide warm across her throat. And then, she heard a sound along the driveway of the house, near the front fence.

She listened, slowly lifted herself so she was sitting upright on the couch and then began to creep over to the garage where she would be able to see towards the road. She was halfway across the yard when she heard a car door slam and then the crushing of stones beneath moving tyres, footsteps towards the front door, and the turning of a key.

Nella held herself. Could it be? Could her father be back? Could her father be home?

She stayed still in the morning backyard. She heard the front door close, she heard curtains being opened, the kitchen tap being turned on, the clicking of the kettle on the stove.

She rushed up the steps of the back verandah and reached for the handle of the door.

‘Dad,' she said.

He was still standing near the front door, leaning over his open bag. She could just see him from the back door.

‘Dad,' she said again.

He turned slowly.

‘Nella.'

‘Dad . . .'

And she was about to tell him how she understood, she understood everything and she was here to look after him and this was now her home too and she would make sure he got well again and then, when everything was settled and as it should be, she would take him to the swallows.

‘Dad . . .'

But there was a sound that came from the room beside her. It was a voice. ‘David,' it called. ‘David, come quick. Someone's been in our bedroom.'

Nella stood in the coastal scrub and she felt nothing
. She'd run and run from her father's house, down the back steps and across the yard, over the tumbledown wire of the neighbour's fence and beneath the shade of gum trees and black wattles, over sticks and fallen branches until at last she'd arrived at the scrubland, breathless and empty and numb.

There she stood amongst tea-tree and creeping vine and she felt nothing, except for a pressure inside her that was the force of Matthew's words.
It seems you misunderstood
. And then other words, words she had not remembered since Matthew had uttered them that night she had gone to the hospital.
He told me everything.
That's what Matthew had said of their father.
Last night he told me everything.

Everything
. Nella pushed further into the coastal scrub as if the very movement might let her leave behind the knowledge growing fast inside her. Further and further she went. The prickly stem of a young bush caught her ankle and her skin began to bleed, but she did not stop. A sharp twig from an overhanging branch scratched at the side of her face, but she continued on.

Somewhere, further along, somewhere there must be another place. There must be somewhere else. She had thought it was here on the island, she had thought it was here with her father. She couldn't help but think now of the swallows – the swallows arriving from their northern homes – and she wanted nothing more than to be with them. There by the creek, to be simply alone with the swallows.

What had she done? Why had she come to the island? How could it be true that her father had this . . . friend? And that he had told Matthew? Matthew knew everything.

Nella was nothing but thoughts and questions and feelings and she ran and stumbled through the scrub forgetting her legs and breath and feet until she tripped on a fallen branch and landed with her arms outstretched on a sudden rise of dirt.

‘Are you all right?'
She looked up to see the face of the girl from the side of the road, the girl she had seen here in the scrub, with the wallaby, with the dead wallaby.

Nella reared back from the mound of dirt, from the girl, from the sudden memory of her father's house.

She was caught.

‘Are you all right?' the girl said again.

Nella looked at the risen earth she'd fallen on. She saw the dirt was fresh. She saw a white cross at one end.

‘I buried her,' the girl said. ‘I buried her to make her safe from the ravens . . . and because I thought she deserved to be somewhere special.'

Nella said all in a rush then, ‘What does it matter? She's dead.'

But the girl did not answer her.

‘She's finished. Everything that meant anything about her has gone,' Nella said.

‘Nothing's ever gone.'

Nella looked at the girl.

‘Nothing disappears. It just becomes something else,' the girl said.

‘What do you mean?'

‘I mean something can't just become nothing.'

Nella waited.

‘. . . like the bits of stars we used to be,' the girl went on. ‘If you look, if you look in the right way, you'll see they haven't disappeared. They never can.'

Nella shook her head then, more confused than disagreeing.

‘I have to go,' the girl said. ‘I'm already late.' And Nella saw as the girl moved away from her that she held in her hands a little cloth purse with a leaf embroidered on it.

‘Already late . . .?' Nella echoed.

But the girl had disappeared along a track towards the beach before Nella's voice could possibly have reached her.

Nella had always thought there was only one track in and out of the scrub.
She had always thought there was only the pathway that led from her father's house and back, but now, as she stood and watched where the girl had gone, she was struck by the possibility of a different path.

How enticing, and how unnerving too.

Could there be another way? But what if she began, what if she travelled halfway and then realised she was wrong, she was lost?

For a moment, Nella thought to follow the girl. The girl was heading to the beach, that was obvious and she seemed to have such purpose about her, such a sense of intention. And there was something else too – a strange kind of gap or space – that made Nella curious and even, if she let it fully exist, hopeful.

How silly; she'd only seen this girl for a moment, only spoken a few words, barely glimpsed her really. What was Nella thinking, to follow this stranger into some unknown space?

She thought again of her father and her heart stuck. Maybe she had misheard? Maybe the female voice had not said, ‘our bedroom', but ‘your bedroom'. Maybe it was a nurse who had returned with him from the hospital. Yes, maybe the hospital had sent a nurse home with him in the taxi and she was simply there to settle him in before Nella took over. Yes, that could be it, couldn't it?

But no, Nella replayed it all over and over in her mind but this time the story – the type of story she had so readily believed before – would not stick. Something had shifted. Something unseen and not yet understood had changed.

She's not his nurse, Nella said to herself. She's not his nurse and she's not his cleaner. Matthew knew . . . and then an awful thought occurred to Nella. She remembered her mother's words:
His heart's given way
. Remembered her mother twisting her wedding ring around and around. Her mother knew. Nella's mother knew about her father's . . . 
friend.