Mateship With Birds Read online

  The kookaburra sits,

  watching the ground,

  waiting for something to move across its eye.

  Then it drops through all that air;

  silent, lead-beaked,

  like an anchor through seawater.

  Dad isn’t large, but he’s pretty;

  the mask of dark feathers across his eyes,

  the flash of blue on his rump.

  A bandit-dandy.

  He flies the boundaries in the mornings,

  keeps the airy fences in place.

  Then it’s preening and snacking

  until the evening concert,

  when he sounds the first note.

  I get the sense that if he wasn’t there,

  they wouldn’t sing at all.

  Watching Tiny in the peppercorn

  during the day.

  She sits for hours,

  motionless,

  her beak splayed open,

  waiting for something to pass across her eye.

  She’s a vacant lot, that bird;

  gormless,

  I worry for her future.

  Wing boxing,

  sparring,

  beak locking,

  beak twisting and grasping

  until one bird flies away,

  or is knocked from the perch,

  is constant throughout the year.

  There’s a small family

  across the road at Mues’s;

  three birds only.

  And to the west

  a large noisy mob;

  six at least.

  When the air is dry and thin

  (early February),

  you can hear the river birds to the north.

  I thought at first

  they were an echo,

  but when you get your ear in

  it’s clear

  that each family sings its own song.

  Betty keeps a notebook in her handbag with a record of the children’s illnesses and accidents. When she arrives home in the evening after work and hears their voices, bored and ordinary in the kitchen, she feels a rush of relief. The children are safe. Another day has passed and she has not failed to keep them safe.

  1945/46

  Michael: Burns hair at stove, pecked by gander, warts, skewered with fork, constipation, infected splinters, ball-bearing lodged in ear, sticky eye, fevers, boils.

  Little Hazel: Colic, croup, nappy rash, fever, runny stools, earache.

  1947/48

  Michael: Stood on by sheep, wasp stings, chickenpox, swallowed petrol, nits, carbuncles, trampled by cow, pecked on eyelid by bird, tonsillitis, constipation, warts, chilblains, swallowed coin.

  Little Hazel: Croup, chickenpox, tummy upset, scalds hand on teapot, hives.

  At five Michael steals a penny from Betty’s purse. Not to spend – he likes the feel of the coin in his pocket, likes to run his fingers over the big buck kangaroo. Betty doesn’t have the heart to pull his pants down so she smacks him with the wooden spoon through his shorts and shirt-tails and underpants so she isn’t really hitting him at all, just whacking at the layers of clothing and the air trapped between them. He’s never been smacked before. As soon as she releases him he turns on her. He looks about the kitchen in fury and waves his small fist at her. ‘How dare you? You pan, you rug, you – you – you … spoon.’

  She gasps. She covers her face with her hands. He’s right, she isn’t a bitch or a slut; she is a pan, a rug, a spoon. She is a woman without a man – a utensil inside a house.

  1949/50

  Michael: Bitten by bull ants, fish hook stuck in thumb, infected scratch from goanna, constipation, fever, bronchitis, warts, boils, chilblains, corns.

  Little Hazel: German measles, carbuncles, sticky eyes, chilblains, wandering off.

  At three and a half Little Hazel gets a lift into town on the milk truck not wearing her underpants. Betty is in the co-op buying bacon when Mervyn Plimeroll brings her in. Mervyn tells Betty he found her sitting on the road sniffing and asking to be taken to the lolly shops. Mervyn looks embarrassed. He’s holding the little girl’s hand, but standing as far away from her as possible. He transfers the small hot hand to Betty. Betty apologises and thanks him. She shakes her head at Little Hazel and lines up for the cash register. Little Hazel is tired. She picks up the hem of her cotton smock and puts it in her mouth to suck. There are her legs, the strong thighs swagged with baby fat. And there, between her legs, is her plump white purse. The slit is a mere smudge and wouldn’t draw the eye, but for the lips which are the same pink – the same pure, baby’s pink – as the lips of her rosy mouth.

  1951/52

  Michael: Concussion from bicycle accident, infected toe from spider bite (?), kicked by cow, v. bad cough, pecked by gander, eye infection, warts on feet, skewered with fork, burnt foot, constipation, infected splinters, nits.

  Little Hazel: Tummy upset, headaches, chilblains, pecked by gander, warts, cough, scratched by cat, diarrhoea, nits.

  Michael asks Betty about his father just as he is starting school. He has been plaguing her with questions – what is our last name, do we have a nice house, will my shorts be the same as the other boys’ shorts? Betty gets him a kitten. Within a year the cat has her own kittens and is immediately sick of the sight of them. She takes off into the paddocks for days, returning to slump down exhausted on one of the kittens, crushing its eye into the socket. Betty and Michael keep the injured kitten in a biscuit tin and watch as its recessed eye turns chalky and dies. Michael doesn’t want to look at the kitten then, he tries to close the lid on it, but Betty holds his hand and makes him stroke its back. When Michael is asleep Betty takes the kitten and wraps it in a tea towel with its tiny head exposed. She grips the bundle between her knees and sews the kitten’s eyelid closed with thread. She sews at the kitchen table, under the electric light, with the sound of the wind rattling the back door in its frame. In the morning Michael slips into his mother’s bed with the one-eyed kitten in the pocket of his dressing gown. This is the one they keep. Louie. Black and white Louie with cobwebs in her whiskers. Louie the mouser. Just like her mother Louie goes off into the paddocks for days and they love her even more when she comes home.

  1953

  Michael: Constipation, cough, infected hand, wasp sting, skin troubles, cut foot with axe, concussion in fall from railway bridge, boys’ troubles.

  Little Hazel: Bitten by Foot Foot, school cough, rashes, bruises from Foot Foot, tonsillitis, boils, nits, warts on hands.

  Driving in to work at Acacia Court, Betty often sees two little boys playing on a billycart in front of their house – the newsagent’s twins. She waves and looks back at them in her rear-vision mirror as they drag bits of wood and tin across the gutter to make ramps and bridges. Their padded faces are flushed with effort and concentration. The boys are so busy they barely notice the passing car. And they are too young to recognise the routine – that Betty passes at this same time every day of the working week.

  She can see the car park from all of the windows in Lilac ward and from the kitchen and the office. There are three crows on the edge of the incinerator and another on the rail of the mortuary ramp. The night girl has written ‘all quite’ in the record book. It is not easy to hold the cheeks of Bert’s arse apart – the muscles have slackened like spent tyre tubes. She looks out of the window. A crow hops onto the bonnet of her car with a piece of rubbish in its beak. Bert has a faecal impaction; a hard mass of faeces in the rectum is obstructing the neck of his bladder. Lately, small amounts of liquid faeces have leaked around the bolus, giving the false impression of diarrhoea. Remove the bolus, restore continence. Bert’s shit has the consistency of tar. She edges her finger between the mass and the bowel wall. It’s the same technique as getting a burnt cake out of a tin. She extracts her finger and keeping her gloved hands well up in the air takes two steps to the window and hits it with her elbow to shoo the crow away. ‘Hang on, sweetie,’ she says to Bert. ‘I’ll be back with some
Vaseline.’

  Stan Ebersole, Reg Healy, Ern Lillee, Dennis Popp, Harold Carton, Mervyn Whipp, Bert Plimeroll, Magnus, Pinky Giddings, Bill Sickle, Jack McGordon, Donald Arbuthnot, Cliff Heaslip, Arthur Springgay. They have the new linoleum, easy-clean and as cool as glass. They have the Brumly geriatric chair, non-tippable and posturally appropriate. They have a round table to play cards at and plastic spout cups to drink from. Betty has her favourites in the same way a mother has a favourite child. Cliff with his poet’s face, Jack’s hands – she imagines them on her sometimes as she cleans his nails. Ern has something, in his confusion. Bill who came in with blue marks all over his body – his wife never gave up sleeping next to him, despite his incontinence. For three years she wore her blue plastic raincoat to bed each night and then she died.

  Mervyn says, ‘At night I hear the train coming. It says, home, home, home. But it isn’t stopping anywhere near here and there’s nobody on it for me.’

  Reg says, ‘I saw an ant on my cupboard and I put some biscuit there, so it makes it through the winter.’

  Stan says, ‘A proper cup. Don’t put that dick spout in my mouth.’

  Ern says, ‘Sat around bubba then but tits tea go poor mopey it boil bud shilling vanished she’s what sore brown it fence was billy pecked.’ Because he’s had three strokes and along the way his words have come uncoupled from their meaning.

  Cliff says, ‘I’m as mad as a wet bee.’

  Betty moves from station to station wiping each bedside cabinet. She removes the water glass and fills it; rinses and replaces the expectoration mug. She disposes of hidden food, straightens the racing guide, removes lumps of ear wax smeared on bed rails and closes the matchbox where Des Feely has his collection of chewed-off fingernails. She works around the precious things – a handkerchief with a pet name, a well-fingered lingerie advertisement, a German coin. Cliff has a notebook for his memoirs – most of the pages are blank but a few feature the same drawing of an erect cock and balls shooting semen straight out like bullets from a gun. A ten-year-old boy would draw this on a toilet wall. Whose fault is it that their bodies are crumbling when their feelings are still ripe?

  There are three women in the day room looking at the linoleum. It’s the new no-wax in high-sheen apple green. The purchase and installation of the linoleum was written up in the local paper and now several times a week a group of women drop by to see it. A carload of friends or neighbours from Deniliquin, Echuca, Kerang or Swan Hill make a day of it with sandwiches and a thermos. Betty hears them say, ‘You could eat your dinner off it,’ or, ‘It’s like silk, like liquid silk.’ Most of them think they see a fault over by the windows, but it is just the reflection of the oleander in the glass. Betty pushes Stan through the double doors in his wheelchair with one hand and leads Reg by the elbow with the other. Two of the women see Betty enter and move politely back against the wall. The third woman, younger with a thick waist and poodle curls, has taken off her shoes and is scooting about in her stockinged feet pretending that she’s skiing. Betty comes up soundlessly behind her and the young woman startles, her feet slide out from under her and she nearly falls into Stan’s lap. ‘Slippery, huh?’ she says with a gasp. Her curls bobble frantically around her head as she regains her balance. Her friends start to giggle and Stan laughs too. He says, ‘Slippery, huh? Slippery, huh?’ over and over again. Betty has draped a blanket across his lap so the women don’t see that his hands are deep inside his pyjama trousers doing what they’re always doing – working away at his limp old cock. Stan has nothing to say about floor coverings.

  Dressing, toileting, feeding, toileting, milky drinks, mashed vegetables, jelly, toileting. The birthday day – to make it easier they share a birthday, like horses, and a yellow cake. She thinks they might as well all be leading the same life.

  In her lunch hour Betty goes to her locker and gets her hat and bag. She puts on some lipstick and a spray of Tweed. She leaves through the back door and comes in again through the front. It started with Bill – no living relatives – but now it has grown to include all of the widowers. She draws the visitor’s chair up to Jack’s bed and reaches out for his hand on the blanket. She notices the clock on the wall ticks loudly for a few seconds and then quiets down. Jack blinks at her and she smiles proudly at him, coaxing him to respond. Why shouldn’t I get to be a wife? Betty thinks. Why shouldn’t I get to be a wife to them all?

  Jack pushes himself up on his elbows. He says, ‘You can kill me when I no longer enjoy a cup of tea.’

  Behind the last of Mues’s out sheds, in between the woodpile and the paddock where he keeps his killers, is the rusty shell of his dad’s first Ford. The tray and the back axle were cut off years ago for some other agricultural purpose, the windscreen’s shot, the doors and wheels are long gone, but the seat is still serviceable and sometimes Mues slides in behind the big dinner plate steering wheel to cogitate and smoke a pipe. This late afternoon a couple of sulphur-crested cockatoos are cleaning up around the fence line in front of him. There’s a big old male and his missus strutting and bobbing – passing bits of straw from claw to beak. Mues watches them for a while then tiptoes to the house for his shotgun. The birds are still there when he returns. He slips back into the car seat and rests the barrel of the gun on the dashboard. He waits for the male to appear from behind a fencepost, raises the gun and shoots. The air around the bird is hazed briefly with a cloud of white belly feathers. The other bird, the female, lifts quickly in panic and flies off towards the creek, her wing beats sounding strong and urgent like a tarp being shaken in the wind.

  Mues taps his pipe out on the chassis and fills it again. He pushes his thumb under the surface rust where the running board curves up into the mudguard and watches it flake off. After a few minutes the female bird returns. She lands close to the body of the male and uses her beak to lift his limp head up from the ground. She does this again and again. Then she leaves his head and climbs unsteadily up onto his body – walking to and fro down his length, holding on, gripping and squeezing him with her claws. She flies away and Mues thinks it is all over, but after a few minutes she returns. This time she has a few stems of wallaby grass in her beak. She lays the grass down next to the body of the male and goes back to scratching along the fence line. After a few bobs and scratches she stops and watches him. When she sees that he doesn’t eat, she returns to his body and tries again to lift his head from the ground and to trample on him. There’s something both comical and grotesque about her – her fanning headgear, the leering half-moon curve of her beak. Mues is reminded of a Punch and Judy show he saw at the Echuca agricultural show as a boy. Of sitting between his mother and father in this same seat for the long drive, of his hand sweating against his mother’s leg. The beaky puppets fought and jeered and hit each other with sticks, their lips a glossy, painful red. There was a string of tiny sausages made from women’s stockings. He remembers that he wanted to touch them.

  It is starting to get dark. Mues shifts his weight on the seat. He reaches down for the gun, the barrel is still pleasantly warm in his hands. He takes the gun to his shoulder and shoots the remaining bird.

  Dairy pastures are difficult to establish in gullies where there is seepage and drainage. They drift like continents; their hides are maps of uncharted countries. Keep the herd on dry ground through the winter. Sunlight shines ginger through their ears. Plant shelterbelts to reduce wind speed. Elastic ropes of snot hang from their nostrils; their hocks are stuck with shit.

  Harry checks the herd for wooden tongue and eats his lunch leaning against the fence. Corned beef and tomato sauce, a thick coating of dripping to counteract the age of the bread. ‘That was a bloody nice sandwich,’ he says out loud. Babs makes a beeline for his collar. She likes to suck the cuffs of his shirt, his trousers where they bag out at the knee, the hem of his coat, the collar of his winter flannelette. He smacks her across the nostrils. There’ll be her silage-breath wafting up at him for the rest of the day, or the week even, until he gets ar
ound to the laundry.

  In Harry’s front paddock there are sixteen black and white cows and nine black and white birds – willy wagtails. Some of the wagtails ride on the cows’ backs or haunches, one grips a clump of wiggy forelock between the ears, the rest are on the ground pecking through cow pats. If it were possible to watch for long enough sooner or later there would be one bird for every cow. But it wouldn’t mean anything. It would just be a pattern that’s pleasing to the human eye.

  The wings of a moth opening and closing over the cape weed catch the sun in a silvery flash. One grazing cow startles forwards slightly, her hind legs make clumsy haste, almost overtaking the rest of her. She settles quickly enough but the plug of fear is transferred to her sister, and then the next cow and the next, until the whole herd has felt a diluted fraction of her fear. The herd, together in the paddock, is a sponge. Feelings run like liquid in the irregular, porous spaces between each animal. Fear, alarm, anger or confusion is processed through each bovine body (added to, or diminished, depending on its nature) and flows on again, forking, branching out, to the next. In the way of a family, the herd is greater than the sum of its members. Even in a small family, three for instance, Harry has noticed this to be the case.

  Alone of an evening in front of the fire Harry reads Edna’s old issues of Woman and Home. His favourite is the romantic serial, ‘A Hard Choice for Vera’, which he reads over and over again. The main character is a redheaded typist. Should Vera accept an invitation from the son of the company director to play tennis? The rich and attractive young man has only ever spoken to Vera when she is seated at her desk. He hasn’t noticed her misshapen foot, badly burned when she rescued her sister from a tragic house fire. All of Vera’s family were killed in the fire and now she must work to support her dear little sister who shows talent as a singer and will one day be famous despite her tiny burnt hands. Nervous Vera goes off to the shops in her lunch hour to look longingly at tennis dresses. It was never going to end well; Vera dragging her monstrous foot up the office stairs day after day; Vera feeding little Eva soup in the evenings as they listen to music on the wireless. Vera with the melted foot; Eva with the melted hands. Only together do the two sisters make a whole person. What man will take them? the story asks.