For the Forest of a Bird (3 page)

Her mother, Matthew? Who would she find inside?
Nella stood in the doorway and she looked along the endless passage. She looked at Matthew's room and she could feel his absence. Then she walked further into the house and she stopped at the open door of her mother's room.

The light was on, the curtains were drawn. Upturned boxes, shoes, pieces of clothing trailed from the wardrobe. Her mother moved from bed to dressing table to bed again, back and forth. A pile of pills and medication scripts lay scattered on the floor.

Nella didn't have to see her mother's eyes to know.

‘No need to take the pills anymore,' her mother was saying. ‘No need to see the doctor.'

Something had pierced her mother's darkness. Some­thing had flung her to that other end of herself.

Nella stood very still.

Back and forth her mother continued. Nella saw her twist the ring she'd never taken from the finger on her left hand. She saw her pull at her dress with its half undone buttons and with the petticoat beneath it worn back to front.

‘His heart,' her mother said.

Yes, his heart. That was it. The excitement in her mother had been triggered by many things before. The death of Nella's grandmother, the incident with the police when Matthew had trapped the neighbour's cat, and now it was this – her father's illness.

What a strange thing this crazy energy was. It made Nella's mother fast and speeding and agitated. It made her wildly hopeful like the world was filled with the greatest of possibilities and she was at the centre of it all about to burst free and live out the largest of her dreams.

‘No need to take the pills anymore,' her mother said again. She was pulling the lid from a small container, preparing to empty the little white tablets into a crumpled bag for the rubbish. It was like this, it was always like this, when Nella's mother became excited – she was not sick and never had been. It had all been a big mistake, even a conspiracy. She was fine. It was the rest of the world that was not.

Especially Nella's father. He was not fine, he was anything but fine. He believed Nella's mother was sick. He encouraged her to take her medication again, he told Nella and Matthew not to worry about what she said because she was ‘not herself'. He called the doctor, he even once called the police. He told them to take her away.

‘He betrayed me.' That's what Nella's mother said of her father. ‘He made them put me in that hospital.'

And Nella felt, when her mother told her that, that she too had betrayed her mother because Nella had wanted her mother there too. She had wanted her tucked away somewhere safe to become herself again. And Nella had wanted to be somewhere safe too.

That's what she felt now, standing here with her mother before her, glassy eyed, hair unbrushed. Nella felt that she wanted to be somewhere safe.

‘His heart's given way,' her mother said.

‘No, it hasn't. It can't,' Nella heard herself say. And her mother looked at her as if – for a moment – she might suddenly be jolted from her own strange reality.

‘It won't give way, not ever,' Nella yelled and she turned and ran from the room.

No, her father would not disappear, he would not vanish, he would never fade away to a place where she could not retrieve him.

I must bring him back, no matter what.
That's what she said. She was pressed firm now against the wood of her closed bedroom door. She stared at the basket in the corner of the room where she had rummaged through skirts and jumpers that very morning. How excited she had been, how happy, how expectant. She had been sure that everything was going to turn out just as it should.

‘I'm going to bring our father back.' That's what she'd said when she'd got to the creek. ‘It's going to be just like it was before . . .' And then something had changed, something had startled that promise away. The voice of the delivery man, the open front door – such small things.

‘I must be braver,' she said. And she stepped away from the bedroom door and thought again of her father. It wasn't just a sense of safety she felt when she was with him, it wasn't just a sense of protection. He made her feel brave, that was it. He made her feel courageous. She was like a bird who could take on the stormiest of winds, could soar in the wildest of skies because she knew he was with her, because she knew he would never let her fall.

‘Yes, of course, I will bring him back. Nothing will stand in my way,' she said. And she did not wait for nightfall or for her mother's stillness or even for Matthew to be home and obviously tucked away at his study. She walked across to her bed, dragged the top mattress from the base underneath and pulled it towards the door. There she stopped only for a moment to straighten herself before she made her way with blankets, pillows and sheets trailing behind her down the passage to the little room she'd so secretly visited before.

It was dusty and filled with cobwebs and without all the bits and pieces that might make it a bedroom, but it didn't matter, not now. Nella lay the mattress with its bedding down on the floor and she closed her eyes and she waited. She still wore her school uniform that she'd dressed in that morning but now it was not a camouflage.

She put her hand into the cloth of its pocket and there, just where it had rested all day, was the feather. The perfect swallow's feather. She took it carefully in her fingers and laid it out on the palm of her other hand. And now, suddenly, she was aware of why it had come to her. ‘It's time to tell him,' she said aloud and she went to the window and opened it to the near-night sky. Nella had never told anyone about this practice – this private way of communicating with her father that she'd had throughout her childhood. From country towns to North Fitzroy, from paddocks thick with sheep and the cries of crows, and back again, Nella had spoken to a special thing – a discovered butterfly's wing, a piece of beautiful thread – and let it go in the wind. ‘Please come back,' she had said, but this time she spoke a different version. ‘I'm bringing you back,' she said. ‘Dad, I'm bringing you home.'

And she released the feather into the air.

Matthew would have said releasing the feather was a stupid thing: what a load of rubbish.
But it did not matter, not now. She heard Matthew's movements in the kitchen soon after first light. He'd been out late the night before but he'd woken at the usual time when his alarm went off. Nella had heard it through the house, the sudden blast of it, and she'd turned over on the mattress and faced the door. There she'd felt the certainty of Matthew's footsteps, the flickering of the fluorescent light in the kitchen across the hallway. She'd heard him open and close cupboards, switch on the electric jug, unsheathe the bread knife from its metal holder. His day was about to begin and Nella already knew the details of it, the morning routine of it. Every other morning, she witnessed it blindly, pulling her knees into her chest and closing her eyes, lying silently in her bed until she had heard the slam of the front door that punctuated its end.

But this morning was different. This morning she lifted herself from the mattress and she touched her hand to the pocket of her school uniform that she'd slept in all night. She walked to the door of the little room and she opened it.

There he was, Matthew, across the hall, in the kitchen. He was fully dressed, in his polo shirt and his ironed jeans and he'd positioned a pile of papers in front of himself on the kitchen table.

He turned his head and looked at her.

‘You're more like our mother every day,' he said. ‘Don't you believe in brushing your hair anymore?'

She felt her hands prickle with the movement of blood.

He pulled the papers towards himself.

‘There's an iron in the cupboard under the sink. Why don't you use it before you leave the house?'

Nella didn't move. She stayed looking at Matthew. So often she had felt herself – her whole reality – fade against the force of him, but today was different. Today she thought of the creek and the swallows, of the animals who had lived here two hundred years earlier – and the feather, the perfect swallow feather – and all of them stood out, strong and bold.

‘You wanted to know how Dad was last night,' she said.

Matthew was silent; he was staring at his papers.

‘You wanted me to talk to you,' Nella said.

She could sense that Matthew had already rewritten the map of yesterday, already erased the moment of his vulnerability.

‘Well,' she went on. ‘I have something to tell you . . .'

She was ready to tell Matthew now, ready to say that their father was coming back, that she was bringing him home.

But he turned to her again and she noticed that his eyes were strained, tired even.

She faltered a little, but then she added, ‘. . . about Dad.'

‘You have . . . nothing . . . to tell me, Nella,' he said. ‘Nothing that I don't already know.' He stared at her creased school uniform. ‘I went to the hospital last night,' he said. ‘And I saw him. There's nothing you can say, Nella. Last night he told me everything.'

Everything. What could Matthew mean?
And then Nella felt as if she had fallen and been caught from a great height.
Everything
. Her father had told Matthew he was coming home. Her father had heard Nella's message in the near-dark and he knew she was bringing him home.

Everything
, what a magical word. It left no room for hunger, for wanting. Nella's father would be here with her, back with her, and there would be no gap of aching, no moments of feeling that the world belonged to everyone else and she was near-invisible.

She said the word aloud and Matthew looked at her, but she did not disappear in his stare.

‘I must get things ready,' she said and she did not wait to witness Matthew's surprise, but turned and went to the little room. The floor had to be swept, the mattress aired, the blankets washed. She was already making a list of things in her head that she must do when she walked to the window and looked outside. Strange, it had never occurred to her before but the window of this little room faced the creek. Beyond the slate roofs and iron fences, the brick chimneys, the creek flowed.

How she longed to reach out to it, to touch it, to whisper to it – no, to speak aloud – that her father was coming home, he really was coming home.

And with that, she could no longer rest within the bounds of herself; she could no longer concentrate on cleaning or sweeping or washing. She knew that she must see her father.

How quickly Nella rode to the hospital and what a dishevelled picture she must have presented when she got there, but she did not care.
She leapt up the lino stairs two at a time, passing visitors with flowers tight in their hands and young doctors with their pressed white coats. She heard her footsteps echo on the hardened floors and felt her reflection mirrored back at her from every polished surface.