Australian Love Stories (16 page)

It felt strange once he'd gathered it in the jacket, light and fragile, but substantial. Meringue. Or like his balsa wood war plane. He imagined painting the swallow with the camouflage colour of his plane. His heart skipped to be holding the bird. Gathering a talisman of magic or goodness. He imagined painting all the birds like fighter planes. Geese like B-52s. Pigeons in Virgin Blue.

He walked down the corridor beside the kitchen.
Don't you dare, woman. As if you've ever lifted a fucking finger to show me… I'll do it, you know. Don't think I won't.

He carried the parcel up to his room and flicked the wicker washing-basket open. It was two-thirds full of laundry. He placed the jacket on top of the pile and slowly unravelled the bundle, expecting the bird to have vanished but there it was, a wing still fractionally out, its eyes sedate. It didn't struggle or flutter. He skipped over to his bedroom door and closed out much of the argument.

He carried the washing basket out onto his covered balcony, the wind slowing now but still banging the door against the inside wall of his room. A bang downstairs too, a shriek. Silence. The argument over, the boy looked at the bird anew.

He shut his balcony door and stood looking at his treasure.

They were both crying down there now, and the boy had half a mind to go to the garage and take to Tony's metallic paint. Take to Tony's lowered springs and low-profile tyres.

The boy put a cleaned-out soap dish of water beside the bird and a pair of his dirty boxers across its back to keep it warm. He wanted to stroke it but was afraid of breaking the spell it had cast. He smiled though, at the abating wind and the curtailed argument. His home still had a roof, the way it hadn't for a while when Dad had died. Their home had felt like only walls and struts then. The world getting in.

He shut the door again, stood inside at the window, steaming up the bird. His mum holding onto her neckline as she bent to pick up the washing from the lawn, stuffing it in a basket. Tony had taught her to hold her neckline when she bent, and she did it now even when nobody was around.

Tony was out there too, his face streaked red. Talking to her as she stooped for the clothes. Her face swollen, perhaps from crying. And the boy wondered why, once dad had died, she couldn't have just waited for a man she didn't need to pretend was big enough. And he wondered for the first time, why his mum wasn't big enough to not need a man so much that she had to pretend.

The boy looked up at the fireman's helmet mounted on his wall. They'd given him that at the ceremony. They hadn't called it a funeral. The boy had slept in his dad's fire gear, the trousers hanging off the end of his feet. That smell of smoke which would forever be the smell of his dad.

There was a knock at his door and he fled on tiptoes to his bed and sat down, took up a book. His mum coming in and the boy stared over her shoulder while she cried. A seagull rising and falling in the bluster, and calling too. His mum pulling away and wiping at her eyes, trying to hide her blemish by looking down at
a tired tissue in her hands. The boy promising himself he'd bring the swallow in at night. Keep it on his pillow. The idea that while it was in the house the roof would stay.

‘Why's your washing basket out on your balcony?'

He raced after her, trying to tell her it was fine and he'd clear it up.

‘What's that!'

‘A swallow.'

‘I know what it is, but…'

‘I'm mending it.'

He stayed in his room while she stood out on the balcony looking down at the bird, her hands up around her neckline. Her voice different with the glass in the way. ‘I don't want it on your clothes. Birds are
dirty.'

‘What about Tony,' he said.

‘Pardon?'

‘So's the laundry. If we leave it out it'll get eaten!'

She ventured closer to the bird, peering at it, and holding her neckline.

The boy banged the window and she jumped back. They shared a smile through the glass, his eyes twinkling at her.

‘Well,' she folded her arms at the cold—came in. ‘That's nature's way.'

‘You didn't say that about Dad.'

‘Firemen aren't nature's way. Besides,' but she could see his fists whitening, his eyes threatening to spill. ‘If you must have it in the house—'

‘It's not in the house.'

She sighed, ‘No, technically it's not in the house.' She touched his head. ‘Go ask Tony for an old tin from his workshop. And
you aren't to touch it, and wash your hands anyway.' She was walking out. ‘Then bring me those clothes so I can boil them!'

‘Mum?' The boy crossed his room to where she wouldn't be able to see him, stood in the hinges of the door. ‘Did he hit you?'

There was a silence, the boy digging his bitten-down fingernails into one of the hinges.

‘Tony and I are sorting it out. There's nothing to worry about.'

Once she'd gone, he snuck into Tony's garage, enjoying another type of danger. His hands thrust in his pockets, far from temptation, but venturing a finger here or there to look under papers or tools. Sifting through this forbidden space, his heart distracting him. The cold smell of dust and oil.

He heard footsteps and backed into a corner between dangling bicycles and an old tarp hanging from a bracket.

The connecting door opened and Tony came in, all harried hair and a look which was a long way from the tears on his face. He slung a suitcase into the car and went out again. The boy grabbing a nice old tea tin from the worktop, emptying out the nuts and bolts and tugging a load of kitchen roll and wiping out the rusty insides, then gathering more and putting it in the tin, making a bed.

The day the boy had gone with his dad to the practice tower they had climbed the hundred and seven steps, the boy in breathing gear. His dad stopping halfway at the boy's complaining there was no smoke.
You don't want to be here when the smoke's on, trust me,
but then he'd stopped and run his fingers along the right angle of the concrete steps, the moss and earth settled there, and wiped it across the front of the boy's face mask—smearing a semi-opaque sheen over it, the boy's hands coming instinctively out, lost inside the sleeves of the protective jacket and the dad
had laughed fully and almost cruelly at the boy's recognition of what he himself knew all too well. The dangerous blindness. And with the sound of his own breathing and the heat of the oversized suit, the boy had climbed the stairs with his dad.

They had stood at the top, looking at the town, looking at the ground, the boy still in the jacket but the helmet off, his mouth breathing greedy grateful breaths but also trembling a little, for his dad. Looking at him when he was staring off and pointing at the sights, trying to locate their house. The boy making the appropriate noises but taking equally greedy breaths of his father.

Now, up in his room, he went and took his father's helmet off the wall and looked out at the swallow, worrying if he was prolonging its suffering. Worrying whether it was wrong to save it. Just as his father had talked once in the late night to mum, the boy spying from the top step. His dad's spluttering and drunken sobs into the lapel of her dressing gown, about how he'd stood breathing oxygen in a roaring house, letting a burnt woman gasp because he'd known that he was too late to save her. That he'd only be carrying out a tormented death sentence.

His mum called up from the bottom of the stairs. ‘I want those clothes brought down.'

‘Okay,' he said.

The night his father died, the boy had stood and squinted at the silently twirling lights on the ambulance. A fireman had telephoned them from the burning house after it collapsed with the dad still in it. Telephoning so they could be there when he came out. So that they could see the precious last of him if there wasn't much left.

The boy had to be held back from going in. A fireman's hands on him that weren't his father's. He was still being held back as his dad's head wobbled when the legs folded under the ambulance trolley and slid away. A paramedic climbing in, holding the oxygen bottle. His mum climbing in, giving a glance to the assembled neighbours who were hugging themselves against an imaginary cold. Then she called her boy into the ambulance too. Their car parked at the end of the barricaded street, the part-collapsed house still smoking. The fireman letting him go but the boy shaking his head, no, he wouldn't go with them in the ambulance. His mother spilling emotion but the boy stayed near the fireman, pretending it was Dad. His mother's outraged and hurt squeals as the doors were shut and the ambulance pulled silently away.

Before bed, the boy put some breadcrumbs and fresh water beside the swallow, kept warm in the bottom of the helmet. He added some socks to those already in the helmet, covering the bird's body to keep it warm. Tony was talking downstairs with the monotone of begging. This was how it always went. And she always relented.

In the morning the boy woke to crying. He padded to the front room and looked down at Tony's car, clear of the garage now, the exhaust unravelling white smoke into the quiet street of morning. His mum's arms around herself against a real cold, Tony's mouth moving quickly, partly pleading with her, partly berating her. The boy remembering the swallow but too terrified to go and find the body.

He watched as his mother chewed her lip, Tony's mouth unravelling more and more selfish logic. Going in close to her and risking a distant hug, her body letting him, relenting a little.
Ready to give in again. Her left eye a mix of colours that were combining toward purple.

The boy returned to his room, focusing on the carpet as he went close to his window, not looking yet, then risking a look. What he saw made the emotion spill out of him, and he stared out at the other swallows chasing insects, or gossiping on the lines. The helmet was full only of socks, the uppermost one with some bird droppings and breadcrumbs on it. The water had been spilled.

He went out onto the balcony, and with a tentative finger moved the clothes aside looking for the bird. He looked underneath the helmet, in the layers of clothes in the basket. He scoured the balcony for feathers or a sign of a cat. He looked over the edge, his eyes wide, his face full of Christmas.

The helmet had done the trick. He wiped it out with some of his laundry and hung it back on the wall, then stood back admiring it. No wonder it was yellow. The perfect colour for magic.

Except his talisman had flown now, and so his hands found one another and wrangled a little. He ran back to the front room but the street contained only his mother, some parked cars, and a little patch of fresh engine oil on the driveway.

Hammer Orchid

SALLY-ANN JONES

When she was eight and he was sixteen he lifted her up to see a quandong. It looked like the shiniest, reddest Christmas decoration and even the tree was better than a pine, with its arms open for birds. He put her down and picked it for her. He peeled off the leathery skin and she took pieces from his fingers, letting the astringent taste rush onto her tongue. When she'd eaten it all, he gave her the round, pitted seed and she held it tight.

They were on the Clarks' property, in a strip of bush beside a track. They'd stopped to check a fence—Mr Clark, his two daughters (who were eight and six), Susan's six year-old brother, Susan and the boy-man Mr Clark called Biscuits. Biscuits was Mr Clark's farm hand.

Susan thought the tree with its Christmassy baubles was a gift. She liked that Biscuits had pointed it out to her. His real name was Bill Ware. Mr Clark said Bill Ware rhymed with Mills and Ware, which was the biscuit factory near the harbour at Fremantle. The Clark girls, Penny and Judy, called him Biscuits too. And so did Mrs Clark and even Susan's brother. Biscuits was a dog's name, Susan thought. So she called him Bill in her head and nothing to his face.

The day of the quandong was also the day she saw leschenaultia for the first time. It looked as if a chunk of the midday sky had fallen down and was lying amongst the sheoak trunks. A frothy bit of sky.

‘Better than the garden at Buckingham Palace, I bet,' said Bill.

Susan and her brother were Ten Pound Poms and they were in the same grades at St Patrick's as the Clark girls. So they stayed on the farm for the weekend sometimes, taking the school bus to the property on the Friday afternoon and back into Katanning and school and home on the Monday. Like the Clark girls, they were fair-skinned. Susan hadn't seen anyone as dark as Bill and she thought his eyes were the sky at night.