For the Forest of a Bird (9 page)

Nella placed her spoon on her empty plate.

Her father stretched back in his chair.

And Linda continued eating in silence until finally, she sipped the last of her wine and said, ‘I guess I'd better get over there now.'

‘I'll clean up the dishes,' Nella said. She reached across the table and began collecting all the plates. Linda stood and kissed Nella's father on the cheek.

‘I'll just wash them in the sink,' Nella said as Linda made her way to the front door.

‘Don't worry about that,' Nella's father called from the table. And then he got slowly up and came over to Nella. ‘Did you want to use the computer?' he said in a half-whisper. ‘Go on, nick in there while Linda's gone. I can stack these dishes.'

He would stack the dishes, she would sneak in there while Linda was gone; it was as if they were a team again
. It was as if nothing had changed.

It was as if everything was as it had always been.

Isobel was right to encourage Nella to tell her father how she felt. It was true, no one could take the place of someone's daughter.

Nella sat herself down at the computer. Yes, she would tell her father how she felt, but first she would tell someone else. She stared at the screen and she remembered how everything she felt was good about herself, how everything she felt was good and alive about the world, faded when she was near Matthew.

‘You think our father cares about you?' he'd once said. ‘It's only because you're young and naive and he can get away with his stories around you.'

She began to type.

A sound came from the kitchen.

She stopped and then went back to her typing.

She noticed a small moth travelling towards the desk light.

She stared for a long time at the words.

And then from the front of the house, she heard the door opening and closing. Could it be Linda back already? She focused again on the screen and went on typing.

‘I found the letters. Of course, they were right in the drawer where I thought I'd put them.' Linda's voice sounded from the lounge room where Nella's father must have been. He'd be back in his chair, relaxing, reading his book.

Nella heard Linda walk to the kitchen, open a cupboard, get out a glass and then she sensed her stopping, looking, seeing the light beneath the bedroom door.

Nella kept staring at the screen. She re-read the last line.

And then she heard low voices from the lounge room.

‘David, she's in our bedroom.'

‘Yeah, I know.'

‘David, we need to say something.'

‘Not now.'

‘David, yes now. Things need to be clear from the beginning.'

Silence.

‘David, are you going to tell her or do I have to?'

‘Just leave it, Linda.'

‘No.'

‘Linda,' Nella heard her father call out and then she waited. Linda would be at the bedroom door in a moment. She would be standing in the doorway, she might walk into the centre of the room. ‘Nella,' she might say, ‘I am your father's partner and this is my bedroom, our bedroom, your father's and mine.'

Nella stayed looking at the screen. She typed more words to Matthew.

‘Nella,' she heard from the doorway. She saved her message.

‘Nella.' She turned. ‘Hi Nella.'

Linda was standing there. She wasn't smiling as she had been earlier. She was looking serious, almost stern.

‘You know it's best that . . . things are clear from the outset . . .' she said. ‘That everything's made clear.'

Nella waited.

Her father appeared from the lounge room. He stood behind Linda.

‘Nella, there's something that you need to know.'

Linda looked around the inside of the bedroom then. She cleared her throat, she straightened herself.

‘Nella, your father and I . . .' she said. ‘Your father and I are getting married.'

Married.
The room seemed too small to contain it all, to contain Nella and her new knowledge and her father and Linda and what had been before and all that was promised for the future.

Married
. Nella felt the blood run from her fingers and her feet to somewhere deep inside, somewhere secret and unseen. She looked at her hands suddenly cold and thought of her mother, her mother's hands.

Blue, cracked. How they were so often like ice.

‘Married?' Nella heard herself say.

‘Yes,' Linda answered.

Married.

Nella turned back to the computer screen. She felt the tightness in the pit of her. She felt like she was waiting.

Nothing moved.

Nella saw words of her email floating out at her. She closed her eyes, she heard Linda shift in the doorway behind her. She waited.

And then she reached her hand out to the computer, scrolled past
delete
and clicked
save as draft
.

Isobel would know what to do.
Isobel understood in a way that was not identical to Nella's but that somehow matched, somehow made sense of things without answering them.

Without packing them into boxes.

‘Are you okay?' Nella heard her father.

‘I'm going to see Isobel,' she said.

She stood and walked past her father and Linda in the doorway. Linda stepped slightly back and her father reached his hand out, but Nella kept walking.

‘I don't know when I'll be back,' she said, as much to the empty air of the house as to the two adults she left behind in the doorway.

Married, she kept hearing. With every step as she walked the three streets to Isobel's house she heard it.
Married.

Stones and fences and gateways and open gutters. She heard it again and again and again until at last she reached Isobel's house, as secret amongst its mess of bush and tangle as the swallows' nests beneath the bridge.

‘Isobel,' she said when she got to the door of Isobel's garden home. ‘You won't believe what's happened.'

Isobel eyes grew wide.

‘What is it, Nella?'

‘My dad and Linda . . .'

‘Yeah?'

‘They're getting married.'

‘What?'

‘Yes.'

‘Really?'

‘Yes, really. They are.'

Nella felt Isobel's hand on her sleeve.

‘It's true,' Nella said.

And then she felt herself folded inside Isobel's arms so her head rested against Isobel's chest and she couldn't be sure if the heart she heard was her own or Isobel's or that of someone else.

She was right, Isobel did know what to do.
Together they sat in Isobel's room and Isobel listened. Nella spoke and she looked at the pictures on the walls, the words as phrases and poems stuck against paint, and she spoke again and she fell silent and she tried to explain things and midway gave up and started again and then began something else. And all the while – for one of the first times ever – she did not feel like running.

She did not feel like being anywhere else.

She felt as she did in the coastal scrub or beside the creek but even so just a little bit different again.

Here she felt that she could be mended, that she could be put back together again. That maybe –

‘Do you believe broken things can be fixed?' she asked Isobel all of a sudden.

Isobel didn't answer at first and then she said, ‘I want to take you somewhere, Nella, tonight as it gets dark. We'll go there at dusk. It's a journey you can only make at nightfall.'

Light and dark and endings and beginnings, and the faintest hint of stars
. It was just turning to night when Nella followed Isobel down the pathway of Isobel's house. Nella hugged a borrowed cardigan tight around herself. Isobel walked with her left hand gently clutching something inside it. She had just the faintest of smiles.

‘Come on,' she said.

They walked along the road Nella had arrived on, but it was not harsh and dusty now but gentle, muted. Even the stones seemed without edge. They walked in a kind of softness, blue-black sky above and the earliest of possums emerging from their nests. A small dark shape that could have been a leaf floated down towards Nella but at the last moment flew away as a tiny bat. A cicada started and stopped and started his song again.

‘It's not far to go,' Isobel said.

They passed a fallen tree already hollowed on its inside and at last turned the corner to a little general store. Its lights were on and there were customers inside – a father with a small child, an elderly man holding a carton of eggs.

‘Good, she'll be busy. Come on, Nella.'

Isobel walked into the front yard of a house beside the shop.

‘This is where she lives, Mrs Governor, the woman who runs the shop.'

‘What are we doing here?'

‘I want to show you something. Now, stay quiet and watch.'

Isobel crouched down to the ground and Nella squatted beside her. They were sitting on the edge of the yard, looking into a small tree thick with leaves.

‘What are we watching for?'

‘Shhh,' Isobel said. ‘He'll be here in a minute.'

They waited and watched. Nella felt the sky turning from its deep blue colour to an almost black.

‘He's here,' Isobel said.

Nella looked up and saw a winged shape drifting through the air, so graceful she was sure it must be gliding home. It circled once, then twice, then gently dropped, coming to rest on a branch in the tree Isobel and Nella knelt beneath.

‘He's come home,' Nella whispered.

‘Kind of,' Isobel said.

They watched the bird shift on his perch, fluff up his feathers, turn his head into the warmth of his breast. Stillness. He was somewhere between flight and dreams.

‘How did you know he was here?' Nella said.

‘Because I invited him,' Isobel answered her.

‘What do you mean?'

Isobel opened her left hand. Inside was the little cloth purse with the leaf on one side. She unzipped its top and poured some of the contents into her palm to show Nella. There they rested: small, almost shining beads.

‘These are the seeds of the blueberry ash tree. It used to be here, all over this area before the land was cleared for farms and houses. When it went, so did the birds. My mum found a way to propagate the seeds at her nursery.'

‘You planted this tree?'

‘Yes, four years ago, and then the satin bowerbird came two years later.'

Nella put her hand out to the seeds. She felt herself suddenly excited like she had found the answer to every­thing she had ever asked.

‘You found a way to make things exactly as they were,' she said.

‘Well, not exactly.'

Nella stopped her hand mid-air between herself and Isobel.

‘They can't be exactly. I mean, you can't go back to the way things were exactly. There are other things around the tree and the bird now – traffic, houses, people, you can't change that. And, anyway, even the bird and the tree aren't exactly the ones that were here before.'

Nella closed her hand to a fist.

‘You can't return to the exact same things, Nella.'

But Nella stood and began to back away.

‘Some things can be returned to,' she said. ‘I know they can.'

She walked further from the tree and from Isobel and from the bird. Further and further.

‘I'm going back to my dad's,' she said. It was fully night now, black.

‘Nella.'

‘I'm going back,' she said. And Isobel's voice called out, but could no longer reach her.

What was Isobel talking about?
Nella had thought Isobel understood, Nella had thought she was a friend but there she was saying things couldn't be what they once were, saying things couldn't be returned to what they once had been. Of course they could. So, Nella's father was getting married. Nella didn't like it and she knew it would take some getting used to but it didn't mean things couldn't return to how they had been with her father; it didn't mean things couldn't be as they once were back before he went away, before he left the family, before he was forced to leave the family by her mother's illness. After all, Nella was her father's child, nothing could change that and even more, she was his daughter, his only daughter.

She moved along the road. The early stars had disappeared, covered over by cloud, and there were few streetlights around. She pulled the cuffs of the cardigan's sleeves down over her hands to stop the cold air from getting inside.

Back she travelled to her father's house. She knew the exact way, she didn't need the help of lights, she told herself. She'd be back there soon sitting with her dad in his lounge room. Maybe they'd watch something together on the television, simply sit in their own silence and be together since there was no need to talk, she knew that. She knew there was no need to say a thing, especially no need to talk of what had been revealed earlier that day.

So he was getting married at some time in the future – there was nothing more to be said about it.

At last she came to the front of the house with its light dim in the lounge room and the glow of the television spreading from a corner. Her father, she knew, would be there in his brown lounge chair watching a program on Channel Two. He would have asked Linda to go and stay at her own house since Nella was coming back; he would have known she was returning.

Nella would walk inside, simply sit down and be with her father.

Through the gate, up the driveway and across the verandah, she reached the front door. The television sounded. She walked in.

‘Hi Dad.'

‘Hello Nella.'

‘What are you watching?'

‘Oh, just a documentary . . . . I'm only half watching really . . . I can turn it off.'

He reached for the remote control on the table beside him.

‘No. No, don't do that. I'll watch it with you.'

Her father hesitated.

‘Maybe we should talk, you know, Nella . . . earlier today . . .'

‘We can watch it together,' Nella said and she pulled up the other brown vinyl chair that exactly matched her father's.

There on the screen was a cat with mauve-coloured whiskers. Someone was saying how there was only a one in fifty thousand chance of this happening.

‘That reminds me of the time we went to Collingwood Children's Farm,' Nella said. ‘Remember? And we saw the goat with blue eyes.'

‘Yeah,' her father answered. ‘And I told you about the sheep up in Nathalia, at the shearing shed.'

‘That's right,' said Nella.

‘Let's turn it up.' She reached for the remote control.

‘Wait . . .' Her father put his hand out to stop her.

‘But it's too low, I can't hear it and they're explaining why the cat has those strange whiskers.'

‘No,' her father said firmly. ‘Leave it down.'