For the Forest of a Bird (8 page)

And she took Nella's wrist so effortlessly that despite everything screaming against it, Nella found that she did not resist.

And together they walked through the opened side gate and across the backyard to the shed right at the end of the property.

‘What do you need my help for?' Nella said as they stood at the front of the shed.

‘To carry something,' Isobel answered.

Nella looked at Isobel then and she wondered with a sudden intensity what this gift could be. She remembered Isobel by the roadside, her T-shirt wet with blood, Isobel in the coastal scrub heavy with the weight of the wallaby in her arms, Isobel at the graveside and her sudden words. ‘Nothing ever dies,' she'd said. ‘It just becomes something else.'

‘What is this gift?' Nella wanted to ask but before she could, Isobel had walked around the back of the shed.

‘Does she really want my mum to have this as a birthday present?' Nella heard.

‘Just take it to your mum. It will make your aunt happy,' Nella's father said. And then he added as a kind of afterthought, ‘And maybe your mum too.'

Nella followed a little way until she stopped at a distance in the shadow of a giant eucalypt. There she watched as Isobel stood in front of something, bent towards it, then spoke, clear and calm and strong.

‘You poor little beautiful thing,' Isobel said.

And Nella took a step out of the shade and from where she stood she could see that Isobel was looking at a young plant, a young bonsai tree tied and potted and staked. It rested in the shiniest, heaviest golden pot.

‘You're a prisoner there, aren't you?' Isobel said.

‘It's a very big pot,' Nella's father spoke quietly.

‘A prisoner in a very big pot,' Isobel said.

And in the silence that followed, Isobel reached out and held one of the tree's tiny branches as if it were a little hand. Nella's father shifted in the spotted light, and Nella, looking down at the place where Isobel had touched her on the wrist, was sure that she could see the mark of the swallow's nest, bright and clear and strong.

Bold
. The mark was bold as Nella lifted the wrist to her chest and held it there as she rode along in the car beside Isobel. They had left her father's dusty road and were travelling in to one of the side streets that must have been here the whole time Nella had visited the island but she had never noticed before.

‘It's strange how we don't see things sometimes,' she said to Isobel.

Isobel looked across at her.

‘I mean . . .' Nella began and then she stopped herself. She suddenly remembered Isobel's words in the coastal scrub. What had she said? If you look, if you look in the right way . . .

‘Do you think there can be things all around us,' Nella said, ‘that we don't see?'

‘Of course,' Isobel answered.

‘I mean stories, lives, histories . . .'

‘Oh yes,' Isobel said. ‘And inside us too.'

Nella pressed her wrist to her chest even harder then, although she wasn't sure why.

‘This is it,' Isobel said, as they turned into a driveway. There were trees and birds and shrubs, a pond.

‘Is there a house here?' Nella asked.

‘Yes, there are lots . . .' Isobel laughed. ‘And my mum and I have one too. Come on,' she said, getting out of the car. ‘We need to carry my dear aunt's gift to the verandah.'

Nella followed Isobel to the back of the car where they worked together to lift the heavy pot with its tree inside and then carried it between the two of them along an overgrown path that wound and circled and eventually took them to an old weatherboard house.

‘Here we are,' Isobel said. ‘Well, this is my mum's house really. I live out the back. Let's put this down and I'll show you.'

Nella hesitated.

‘What is it?' Isobel said.

‘I thought I just saw a flash of white in the trees. And wings.'

‘Oh, they're angels,' Isobel answered. And then she watched Nella's face. ‘No, not really,' she went on. ‘It's just what I call the corellas. They come here every day, right about now. Come on, I'll show you something.'

And they put the pot down and walked beside the house and out the back to a room that stood alone within the garden. It was painted blue and had two wooden steps up to its front door like a cottage in a fairytale.

Nella followed Isobel.

‘This is where I live,' Isobel said.

They walked into a room filled with books and pictures, fragments of writing, which were stuck to the walls. There were curtains of red silk that were held above the windows with pegs, a table covered in paints and pencils and pieces of coloured paper, an unmade bed in the corner and a flipper that hung from the ceiling by a piece of what must have been the strongest thread.

Nella reached out and touched one of the drawings on the wall.

‘The corellas,' she said.

‘Yes, it's what I wanted to show you.'

‘This is the picture I saw on the card beside my dad in hospital,' Nella spoke as if only to herself.

‘I made it for my aunt to give to your dad,' Isobel explained. ‘She said he liked those strange white birds that screeched a lot.'

‘The angels?'

‘Yeah, the angels.'

Isobel looked directly at Nella.

‘You're close to your dad, aren't you?'

Nella felt the blood run to her face. She looked at the drawing of the corellas caught in flight.

‘Are you embarrassed? There's nothing wrong with being close to your dad.'

‘It's not that.'

‘What is it, then?'

Nella bit her bottom lip.

‘You were surprised when he introduced us,' she said at last. ‘He hadn't even mentioned me.'

‘That wasn't why I was surprised.'

‘No?'

‘No. I was surprised because . . .'

‘Yeah?'

‘. . . because my aunt had described you differently. I imagined you to be very different.'

‘But she hasn't even met me. How could she describe me? What did she say?'

‘It doesn't matter.'

‘It does, Isobel. I want to know.'

‘It doesn't matter, really. Look, she's not a bad person. It's just that she's a bit insecure, a bit threatened sometimes.'

Nella waited.

‘And she thinks if there's something to be said, then she has to say it straight away. She can't seem to let things float or remain unsaid, she has to speak out without waiting. It's like she has to nail everything down, to make it neat and controlled, I don't know. Sometimes she's so abrupt and blunt, but she doesn't mean to be hurtful. It's just the way she is. She's different from my mum and from me and from you too, Nella, I think.'

‘Then I don't understand why my dad would want her as his . . . girlfriend.'

‘Well, like I said, she's not a bad person. She can be really nice. And maybe there are parts of your dad you don't know.'

‘No, that isn't true,' Nella said quickly.

Isobel breathed deeply.

‘She's not going to take your place, if that's what you're thinking. No girlfriend can do that, take the place of someone's child.'

Nella felt her breathing slow.

Isobel glanced at the dressing table beside her bed.

‘Why don't you talk to him, Nella? Tell your dad how you feel?'

Nella looked at the corellas.

‘Maybe,' she said. ‘Maybe I will.'

Nella couldn't, not exactly.
She couldn't use words to tell her dad all that she felt and all that she wanted, all that she feared. But she would find another way. She would tell him about the swallows.

The time had not been right until now because she hadn't felt everything she needed to feel, everything that the swallows would allow her to say, everything that the swallows had come into her life to let her express.

Uncomplicated, glimpsed in its barest, sudden form: love.

A love for her father and a love even for herself.

She would tell her father how she felt.

Nella thanked Isobel as she dropped her off at her father's house.

‘I'll tell him,' she said.

And Isobel smiled back, as if a piece of her own life might be falling into place, and drove the car away.

Yes, Nella would tell her father how she loved him. She would tell him about the swallows, how they returned each year, how their young ones flew into skies impossible to be sure of but with the strongest wing beats because their parents had flown in those skies a hundred times before. She would tell him how much she trusted and loved him, knowing nothing could stand between a parent and its child. A father and his child. Her father and her.

She would tell him.

But first she would tell someone else.

She would tell Matthew. She would write back to him and she would say that he was wrong, he had always been wrong. She
did
understand. She had gone to the island just as he had thought, and no, she wouldn't go back home. She didn't need to go back home as he'd said she did. She needed to be here with her dad. Here where there was love.

Nella walked along the driveway and across the verandah, through the front door and into the lounge room where her father sat reading a book.

‘We took the tree to Isobel's place,' she said.

‘Thanks Nella.'

‘Dad, can I use the computer in your bedroom?'

A voice came from the kitchen.

‘David, we'll be having dinner soon.'

And then a woman stepped out.

‘Nella,' she said. ‘I'm Linda.'

Linda wasn't what Nella had expected but then she was.
She was bits and pieces of Nella's imagination and fears and anticipations and strangely even ambitions. She had little ways of behaving and looking that Nella had sometimes wished she might have had.

They sat together at the dinner table and Linda's painted red fingernails, her groomed blonde hair reminded Nella of everything her mother was not. The perfectly chopped salad she'd prepared was something Nella's mother would never have attempted, and the printed paper napkins beside each plate was a nicety her father didn't get when he lived with his family. There was also Linda's voice: confident, sure, not like the often low, small voice of Nella's mother.

He won't find her asleep beside a dressing table of empty pill bottles, Nella thought. And she remembered her mother's repeated attempts to die when her depression overtook her.

‘Nella, do you like the risotto?'

It was Linda.

‘Yes. Yes, thanks,' Nella answered.

Linda smiled.

‘I made it especially. No meat.'

She looked at Nella as if expecting a response.

Nella said nothing.

She went on. ‘I know you like animals but . . . maybe a little meat would be good for you, don't you think?'

‘This is great, thanks, Linda,' Nella's dad said, reaching his hand out and touching her arm.

Linda looked down at her plate then, before raising her head.

‘Nella, I hear you're friends with my niece.'

‘Yeah, I guess so.'

‘I'm not surprised. I mean, I can see why the two of you would get along, why she would be drawn to you.'

‘Really?'

‘Yes, I mean, people are usually attracted to other people who share . . . common interests.'

Common interests
. What a strange phrase. Nella looked at Linda, a little puzzled.

‘. . . you know, you're both interested in similar . . . I guess . . . issues.'

Nella glanced at her father.

‘Linda, you said you still had some mail of mine you took around to your place when I was in hospital. I probably should have a look at it,' he said.

‘What, right now?'

‘Well, after dinner. You're only around the corner. I thought you could just run around and get it.'

‘Okay, hopefully I can find it,' Linda said. ‘I spend nearly all my time here now so I don't even remember where half the stuff is in my house anymore, but I'll go and have a look. I think I put it in the drawer of the dresser.'