Nest Read online

  Upstream, the river widened and forked around mangrove-fringed islands. She kept meaning to hire a kayak, paddle out to them. They hid a different set of birds than she had at home. Egrets and gulls and herons. Once past the bridge, from this angle, there was little sign of humanity, just a couple of tinnies out fishing. A flotilla of pelicans drifted ahead of her, the wind ruffling the back of their proud white necks.

  The session with the shrink had all her thoughts scrambled. Too many memories near the surface.

  Her first river journey had been during her second year at college. Semester break. A friend of Craig’s had driven along the old forestry roads, through spotted gums and cycads, to drop them, their kayaks and all their gear in a gorge at the back of the mountains, the source of the Deua. That river had been a world away from this one: cold, narrow and rushing over rocks. She had overturned on the second set of rapids, her kayak caught up against a log.

  They stopped on a white beach by a rock pool, and Craig lit a fire to warm her. ‘I should have warned you about logs,’ he said. ‘It’s a bit of a trap. The water rushes underneath and generates suck. Like a plughole. If the boat gets up against the stationary object, the log, the force of the water is concentrated on one side of the hull.’

  She had figured all that out while she was in an upside-down world of bubbles, her breath driven from her chest by the cold. Avoid logs. Deathtrap. She hadn’t been able to right herself, as she had learned to from a roll, and the deck tarp hadn’t held. The kayak filled with water and went under. If Craig hadn’t been there to pull her out, she would have drowned.

  ‘Don’t let the river get you broadside,’ he said. ‘If you get into trouble, face it head on.’ He rubbed her goosebumped flesh with his warm hands, dried her hair with a towel. And they made love there, while her clothes dried on the rocks, to the rush and swirl of white water.

  The shrink said she had to let go of Craig. As if she were still hanging on by her fingertips and hadn’t already plunged to the bottom of the gorge. He said it was time to let go of her grief, too. Jen had made a note in her diary, and dutifully reported on her progress each month. But she hung on all the same, nursing it like a blown egg, the fragile shell of what it had once been. It was what she had instead of him. Instead of love. It was all she had, and she had no intention of casting it out of the nest.

  She took her foot off the accelerator as she approached the spot where Caitlin had last been seen. Probably everyone slowed down and stared, even though there was nothing to see. Humans, despite all their intellect and self-awareness, were as predictable as birds.

  The spot had been turned into a shrine: plastic wreaths, flowers in jars, candles and notes. Jen had always thought such displays in poor taste: white crosses bearing bad spelling and faded plastic. The inappropriate public outpouring of emotion. The naive assumption that the person’s spirit had departed from the point of impact, rather than in the ambulance or hospital.

  Perhaps it was easier to see it for what it was – a simple expression of grief – when it was closer to home. It was the teddy bear that did it. Pink and fluffy, a little girl’s toy, nailed through its neck to a tree. Jen pulled over into a driveway and leaned her head into her forearms, still on the wheel.

  The Mill

  ‘Morning, Missus,’ Jen said.

  The scrubwren didn’t answer, but it was nice to have a neighbour. To wake up every day and know another creature was close by. Jen had been walking past as little as possible, half-expecting the wren to realise her nest was now in a public thoroughfare, but it seemed having invested in the building of the nest, she was going to stay. Perhaps she had even laid her eggs; she was on the roost more often than not.

  Jen walked downhill beside the road, straining against the slope. It was land ‘too steep for the plough’, as they used to say, saving it from the fate of the more level country all around. Jen caught a flash of something iridescent in the undergrowth and stopped to peer through the fence. She jumped at the sound of a car horn, snagging her thumb on a barb. An arm hung out the window of the retreating van in a wave.

  She sucked the wound on her thumb as she passed the old stationmaster’s cottage, neat white on the bank of the creek, and continued down the track. A whipbird cracked from the tangle of lantana and bracken fern. The wooden gate was shut, a hand-painted Pels sign the only clue.

  The Pels mill had once been right in the heart of cedar country. Down south, trees were sawn into planks with a pitsaw. Here, the pit would just fill with water, leaving the sawyer up to his thighs in mud, so the logs were rafted out. Where close to streams, the logs were rolled to the bank. If they were farther away, bullock teams had to ‘snig’ them to the water. It was these snigging tracks that had really opened up the country, giving travellers access through dense scrub and vines. The gravel track she was walking on had begun its life this way. Once the logs were in the water, the raftsmen had spiked them together with iron ‘dogs’ and floated them downstream.

  A real dog announced her arrival, one part pig and three parts mystery by the look of it. Someone called it off and turned down the radio. ‘Sam, Jenny’s here.’

  She stopped herself from wincing at that. Her schoolgirl self. By the time she shook his hand, she had recognised him. ‘Glen. Good to see you again.’ He had shot up early, in grade eight, but had more than grown into himself now.

  ‘You look well,’ he said, smiling the lopsided smile of the boy she had known. ‘Never thought you’d come back here.’

  Jen hadn’t intended to visit the mill either, but here she was.

  Sam emerged from the dark of the shed, concentrating on the three mugs in his two oversized hands. ‘We were just about to have a cuppa.’

  Glen produced an extra stool from behind a pile of logs – their ends still branded with the first letter of the owner’s surname, as if it were a hundred years ago. Apart from the box of tea bags on the shelf, and the new white ute at the edge of the clearing, she could almost imagine it was.

  Sam cleared his throat. ‘I hear you bought Mal’s old place?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Nice spot there. Tucked away.’

  ‘It is.’ She sipped her tea. Strong, milky and sweet. Just the way the timber-getters had probably liked it. Though they wouldn’t have had tea bags. ‘Sam said you’ve started up again?’

  ‘Specialty stuff. For the local cabinet-makers and woodworkers. Sam trips around buying stuff up and we store it and cut it here.’

  ‘There’s still a market for solid timber.’ Sam said. ‘For quality. And if you know what you’re doing, you can make some money. I got hold of a stack of wenge at twenty bucks a cubic metre. Bloke thought I was a total sucker. But now we’re selling it for three times that.’

  Glen watched her through the steam drifting upward from his cup. ‘Do you have any kids?’

  She shook her head. ‘You?’

  ‘Three.’ He pulled a wallet from his back pocket, the surfie canvas style of a teenager. ‘Aiden and Quinn – they’re twins. We did IVF. And then little Sarah, she came later – a complete fluke,’ he said. ‘Boys have left home now. And Sarah’s in grade twelve. Real smart, too.’

  ‘They’re all gorgeous.’

  ‘Take after their mother,’ he said. He slid out another picture, even older. ‘Do you remember Karen Reynolds? From the grade below us.’

  ‘Of course.’ She had been good-looking even then, when the rest of them were bucktoothed and freckled, and went on to be school captain in senior high school.

  White cockatoos were raucous in the pine trees up on the ridge, drunk on the fermenting kernels. There was something about sitting around with blokes out the front of a sawmill that felt completely normal, and plenty that didn’t.

  ‘Any other mills still going?’ she said.

  ‘Only Mannings, but they do large-scale mainstream stuff. Got the big machines,’ Sam said. ‘Which reminds me, I have something for you.’ He stood and placed his mug on the corner of the
bench. ‘Just hang on.’

  They waited while Sam lumbered back into the mouth of the shed. ‘Do you ever hear from Phil?’ Jen said.

  ‘He visited a few years ago, and we had a good catch-up,’ Glen said. ‘Promised to keep in touch. One of us usually calls the other around Christmas.’

  ‘He’s still in Sydney?’

  ‘Last I heard.’ He gulped at his tea and looked off into the scrub. For a horrible moment, Jen was sure he was going to say something about Michael, but instead he coughed and made a mark in the dirt with his foot. ‘Bloody awful about the Jones girl, isn’t it?’

  ‘Terrible.’

  ‘I heard the police are interviewing someone local – their vehicle matches the description.’

  ‘Oh?’ she said.

  ‘But they’re probably interviewing a lot of people.’

  ‘Probably,’ she said.

  ‘Got it.’ Sam was out of breath. ‘It’s not much. Some old photos we had up here, payment slips and the like. But I thought you might like to have them.’ He handed over a grimy, once-white envelope, like her father had used to take all his receipts to the accountant.

  ‘Thanks.’ She sat the envelope on the table beside her. ‘I love this time of year,’ she said, lifting her face to the sun.

  ‘It’s grand,’ Sam said. ‘Less tourists. No rain. Get a whole lot more work done, too.’

  ‘Tourists make everyone money, Sam.’

  A single black cockatoo passed overhead, beating its wings at such a leisurely pace it was a wonder it didn’t fall out of the sky.

  Jen put down her empty mug, stood and put her hand out. Sam pulled her in for a paternal hug. ‘You come down again whenever you like, love,’ he said. ‘And if you need any help up there, just give us a call.’

  ‘I’ll do that. Thank you.’

  Envelope

  She had been in the woods again. How many times had she been there, in her dreams, and why did she keep going back? She shut her eyes, still in half-sleep, and could smell the needles, hear them crunch. She was sitting between her father and mother on the blanket. Someone was walking towards them, or was it away?

  A shrike-thrush landed on the roof near the window, scratching with its claws. She should get up, but there was something pushing at the edge of the clearing that was her memory. There had been someone else there that day; why could she not remember? The thrush sang at full volume and then it was gone.

  She pushed back the covers and climbed out of bed. The steps downstairs were cold on her bare feet.

  She opened the front door a few inches. The scrubwren was out. Gathering breakfast, perhaps. Jen looked around, listened for any anxious chew-wieps in the undergrowth, and peered into the nest. There were eggs inside, speckled. Ha!

  She had walked around Sam’s envelope, still sitting on the kitchen bench, for several days, imagining what might be inside. It probably meant she was gutless or some sort of masochist. Just as when she was a teenager she had, for a time, taken pleasure in opening the fridge to assess all of the things that she could eat, only to close the door and walk away.

  Aunt Sophie had managed it with her usual grace, cooking healthy meals, stocking the crisper with carrots and celery, and running on the beach with Jen most mornings. She had organised the house around Jen’s study schedule and forked out for art materials she hadn’t really been able to afford.

  Jen made a pot of peppermint tea and sat down with the envelope and a letter opener at the table on the back deck. It was still cool, even in the sun.

  The robins, she had to admit, were a little pushy. A bit larger than some of the other birds, and with the strength of numbers, they tended to dominate the birdbaths when they were around.

  Today one sat on the deck railing, looking straight at her while she sipped her tea. They did that. She had been feeling a little low, and along comes a robin, irresistible in his grey and yellow suit, to remind her of all there was to live for. It was hard not to read intelligence into their dark eyes.

  She paused, as motionless as a hunter. Or as if she were the subject of a still life.

  You shouldn’t want to tame a wild thing, and you couldn’t. But sometimes she longed to have a robin as a companion, to sit on her shoulder or on her drawing desk, through the day, chirruping away. To be able to smooth its feathers, caress it. Just one. A creature that was just for her.

  This one needed a little smoothing – the feathers on the back of his head were ruffled, as if he had just woken up, the line between body and wing all a jumble. She tried to concentrate, instead, on the detail of his claws, the mix of grey and yellow on his upper back, the touch of white on his wing.

  She refilled her cup. Took a breath. She slit the envelope and spread the pieces out before her, one of the many puzzles of her life. The pictures had all been taken at the mill. Her father, Sam and two men she didn’t know standing atop giant logs. Their eyes in the shade of their caps. A new truck. Neat stacks of lumber.

  Sam had cut out a picture from the local paper back then, all yellow now. That gave her some names for the faces: John Coggil and Colin Yeeman. They were names she knew: men who had cut trees with her father. Colin had given it away after he put a saw through his thigh a second time. She remembered the blood on the floor of her father’s truck and him getting home from the hospital as she was eating breakfast.

  Her dad and Colin had some sort of falling out with John. Probably over money, or a job. He had provenance going right back to the first timber-getters, a third-generation sawyer, who probably didn’t think much of a bloke cutting his own leg. But all she had were the gleanings of a child overhearing after-dinner adult conversation, most of which hadn’t made much sense at the time, let alone years later.

  She had a vague memory of an argument at the house, after she had gone to bed, brown longneck bottles strewn around the yard when she left for school. Her mother making her disapproval quite clear as she gathered them up. But that was the only time the men had visited the house while she was there.

  A brown comb. A packet of Tally-Hos. An unopened pouch of Champion Ruby tobacco. Why hadn’t someone taken that and smoked it? She sniffed – stale. But it still carried the image of her father with his brown forearm hanging out the window, the burned-down cigarette between his first and second fingers. She tucked the packet into her shirt pocket.

  She sipped her tea. There was one of her old school photos, like the one he had kept clipped to the visor of the truck. Faded and creased. Grade six by the look of it. The uniformed girl in the photograph still had pigtails, her best friend and a father. No wonder she was grinning so foolishly.

  It was because of their class photo, taken earlier. Michael had always pulled some stunt or another; it was a tradition. In grade one he rubbed his hair with a ruler until it was standing straight up at the back, and the photographer failed to notice. In grade two, he’d put his jumper on at the last minute – inside out. In grade three, he had an accomplice. He and Jason Ambley, on opposite ends of the second row, managed peace signs above the girls’ heads. By fourth grade, the teachers were on to it. He had to content himself with one sock up and one down. He had been sick in year five. Whether on purpose or not, she didn’t know, but that year’s photo was nonetheless notable for his absence. Grade six had been the best yet, a classic. The grade sevens, due to line up first, had been milling about on the oval with them, in the care of a relief teacher while the real teachers had their group photo done. Michael had convinced the Owen brothers – only a year apart in school – to swap. Somehow, when their own teachers reappeared, they hadn’t noticed. Both classes had managed not to crack up, though their smiles had an unusually uniform brilliance when the photos came back. The Owen boys reckoned their own parents didn’t pick it until it was pointed out, and then – much to their relief – appreciated the joke.

  There hadn’t been many smiles in grade seven, and there were no jokes, because Michael wouldn’t ever be in their photographs again.

  Ther
e was an old Fourex coaster from the pub. She flipped it over. Stan Overton. A six-digit phone number. It didn’t look like her father’s writing. Probably some work contact, another tree-killer looking for work.

  There was a stack of faded handwritten receipts for fuel. Never claimed. Today’s were lucky to last out till tax time, especially in this climate. She often wondered what happened when people were audited and all their receipts had gone blank. If it wasn’t, somehow, deliberate.

  The pay slips, such as they were, didn’t tell her a great deal. He hadn’t earned much for hard work – but she had already known that from her lunch box contents. Some of the receipts were interesting: payments for loads of wood he had organised himself, perhaps. Those sums seemed larger, but then he would have had to pay his men, and maybe give Sam a cut. The date on one of them pulled her up; it was the day he disappeared. A larger sum than usual, too.

  Coaster

  Jen put on her boots at the front door. The scrubwren’s eyes were less fierce in their little black mask. Jen would have liked to get a photograph, but that felt too rude, too intrusive.

  She took advantage of the cool morning to walk to the village. It was always a pleasant journey down, but with a killer return. The council were doing something patchy to the side of the road, and one fellow gave her a wave. She waved back.

  The dairy farm off towards the mountain was lush green, and the dams full, but the cattle were bellowing. It couldn’t be for want of food or drink. Perhaps they had been separated from their calves. Jen’s thighs were burning already, straining not to tumble downhill. A kingfisher sat on the powerline, surveying the scene. In the sun, his coat was indeed as resplendent as a king’s.

  It had all begun here – the ‘opening up’ of the area. The first white settler had lived just downstream, in a hut on the bank of the creek, accumulating runs until he controlled the land all around the river mouth. He had owned the abattoir on Slaughter Yard Road, too – quite a monopoly. He had grazed cattle, though not all that successfully – run off, in the end, by Gubbi Gubbi. It gave her some pleasure to know that the first people had been particularly ‘troublesome’ in the area. As if something in the country itself encouraged resilience.