Rainforest, Scrub Turkeys
and the Bower Bird Solution
Scrub turkeys made her think of her dad: all that cocker-doodle-doo for a start; the bright red faces and crests (too much booze in her dad’s case, his veins rubbling like cracked bricks); and their silly in-and-out necks (Say that again, mate, and I’ll knock yer block off). But mainly it was that weird fussing around the nest mounds, gobble gobble, scratch scratch, checking on the eggs that were cooking away while their frumpy little hens buggered off (just as her mum had done) leaving their chicks behind them.
For an hour at a time she could watch.
When Siddie and Charade and Em were still babies, ages two, thirteen months and two months, before the other seven had even been thought of, before she had even realised Em was not quite right, not quite all there, Bea would wake on the spike of the first cry. Blackness was so black then, night was so night, that objects had a blue edge. All the edges touched. She felt her way along the blue lines, there was no need for light. She would feed her nestlings — the sweet little scamps — and settle them back to sleep.
It was quiet — before the sun, before the bird calls, no sound but the deadly funnelweb spiders inspecting traplines. (They hung in ghostly cones, whitish, in the lantana outside her window, and Bea had that kind of hearing. She heard the placing of eyelash legs on the web threads.) Otherwise: outside the window, a thick pelt of hush, pre-dawn, even the cicadas tuckered out. And inside, nothing but the soft snuffle of babies.
Something held Bea; something about the eggshell heads and the frail bleat of their concave pulses. It made her catch her breath and place herself between the cots and the funnelwebs. She would memorise each scribble of blue veins, the nautilus-shell ears, the slow ballet of fingers and the way they moved as spiders move when stepping across damaged webs.
Bea loved the messy world of babies, the slow-turning sloppy- sweet days. She loved all viscous things: dribble, semen, milk oozing from her breasts, mucous ferns under logs, fungi, slick spittle from the scrub turkeys fussing at their mounds. And here they were. First light, first rainforest noises: the gobbledegook of those finicky fathers scratching outside her window.
She tucked mosquito nets, safety nets, around each cot.
Bare feet on the cool lino, she would pad across the kitchen, boil a bit of tankwater in the dented kettle and steep some tea in her tin mug — she drank it strong and black, but with two spoonfuls of sugar — and then she would slip outside. Ah, the bright dense world. Sometimes laughter left her mouth like a bird, astonishing her. It was all hereness, nowness. In the rainforest, nothing was then. Her back against the casuarina, ferns at her feet, she watched the turkeys peck sunrise out of the scrub.
Here was dad, cock of the walk, dad the builder: scratching at the ground, paddling, spittling, making nest-paste out of mud and leaves, out of twigs, out of garbage, out of vegetable peels, piling it up, pew! what a smell, what a compost heap, what a beaut oven for eggs. And here was mum, the little slut, shaking her arse feathers, letting whoever wants watch her while she spreads her twiggy lizard-skin thighs, plop plop plop, mails her eggs into the slot and takes off. Gobble gobble gobble, look what I did, flutter flutter, a little dance step, chook step, two-step, aren’t I — one, two, three — a clever chick?
Not that dad cared.
“Your mum was a good time girl. A bit of a ratbag.” That was what he’d say when she came looking for him outside the pub. He’d be stinking of booze. “Bea, luvvy,” he’d say. “Come here.” He’d hoist her up on his shoulders (sometimes slipping, sometimes dropping her, depending how many he’d had) and make an announcement. “Here she is, cobbers. Here’s the present what Shirl the Ratbag left behind. This is me Honey Bea, the apple of me eye.” And his mates and cobbers and Blue Moon regulars and other assorted drunks would give a wobbly cheer: hip hip hooray for little Bea.
She liked that, being up on his shoulders, men below and all around clamouring to chuck her in the ankle, blow her kisses, put a sixpence in her hand.
But if it was a Sunday afternoon and he was giving her a ride on his bike round the Ringwood lake, his comments were different. Kinder. (She learned that early: men were one way when other blokes were around; another way when they weren’t.) Bea would be curled up on the bar of his bicycle, sidesaddle, inside the cave made by his chest and his arms and the handlebars. “Yer mother was what she was, she had an itch,” he’d say tranquilly, rambling on. “I don’t hold it against her. I sez to her, Bugger off if you want to, Shirl, I’m not stopping yer. But the moppet is mine. No bloody way yer taking her.” And he’d lower his head and nuzzle Bea’s curls as he pedalled.
“Dad,” she’d giggle. “Dad, watch out, we’ll have a smash.”
In his fashion, till he couldn’t get out of bed any more, he was a good father. When he was coughing up his guts, when she had to hold the milk bottle for him so he could piss in it in bed, he’d get tears in his eyes. “Ah struth, Bea,” he’d say. “This ain’t something a nipper should ’ave to do.” He’d go on and on about the shack up the Condamine then, the one he was going to build for the two of them, get a few sheep, have Bea grow up somewhere clean. “I mean clean, bush clean, not just no-dirt-clean.” The coughing would get him. He’d spit and slobber and sob a bit. “Honey Bea, promise me something. Marry some bloke who’ll get ya out to the bush. A farm or a shack, I don’t care, just go bush. Promise me that.”
“Yeah, okay, Dad,” she’d say. “Yeah, I promise.” She was eight at the time, not yet the sister of Kay who’d gone gallivanting off to Brisbane, brainy Kay who read books but knew bugger all about nothing. She could imagine Kay’s eyes if Kay could see her now, holding a bottle round her Dad’s dick. She missed Kay, she missed having Kay listen with round eyes, she missed holding court.
He died at home, her dad. A week earlier she’d said: “Dad, I’m gonna get a doctor.” Not that she had the faintest idea how to do that, but she reckoned Grandma Llewellyn would know.
He sat up like a bolt of lightning hit him. “You do that,” he roared (cough cough, spitting in a wad of sheet) “and I’ll tan yer hide. I didn’t get away from the Japs to die in a bloody hospital. No bloody doctor’s gonna get his bloody hands on me.”
“Dad,” she said, because Father McEachern had come calling, “what about Father Bob?”
“And no bloody priest either,” he cough-coughed. Though a day later he told her: “You can get Father What’s-’is-name, but not a minute before I tell ya.”
No, he said, in ten different and colourful ways. Not today. And not tomorrow either.
On the third day, 7 a.m., she made him his toast and poured his glass of milk (health piss, he called it) and went to his room. His mouth and eyes were open and there was a lot of muck on his pillow, blood and phlegm and black stuff and the kind of smell the worst pubs gave off. The sheets stank.
What she did: she climbed on the bed and curled up the way she used to on his bike and put her face against his chest. She sobbed and sobbed at the top of her lungs. The only time ever. Not even Kay knew, not Father What’s-’is-name, she never told anyone, not a soul, there wasn’t a being alive who could …
Not true. She’d told Nicholas one night. God knew where in the world that secret was holing up. Somewhere safe, that was certain, though he’d tell it and tell it and tell it, put it into different shapes and colours till he wouldn’t know which was which himself and no one would believe a bloody word. If you had to tell a secret, tell a tale teller. What a talker, what a golden liar.
And maybe, yes perhaps she’d let something slip to Charade once, when Charade was pestering her for history again. The only way you could get that child off your back was to give her another pellet of the past, then she’d hive off up the mango tree or somewhere and play with it for hours. That child could talk black into blue, but who ever believed a word she said?
And Nicholas. How many versions had he given her about him and that pastry-pale woman, that Ashcan sheila? How many lies about him and Kay? What about the time he arrives on her doorstep, breezes in for his bit of cuddling and smoodging and the rest of it, and then when he’s leaving, abracadabra, pulls this snake out of his pocket, this pink coral thing for round her neck.
“What’s all this about?” she’d asked him. “What would I want with la-de-da stuff like this?”
“From Green Island, Bea,” he’d told her. “The Barrier Reef.” And as he waved goodbye from his car: “Kay and I both thought it would suit you.”
And then Kay tells her the Green Island story. For Kay’s bloody twenty-first, she bloody gets Nicholas. It can still make Bea spit. Yeah, but what did Kay get exactly? She still didn’t know for sure if they’d ever. Let alone the others, but she didn’t give a hoot about them. She didn’t even care that much about the Ashcan, that was different, that was weird. It was Kay she couldn’t bear to imagine … Ah struth, forget all that, let it go.
(God, she missed Kay sometimes. Sometimes she missed her so bad — the rotten sneaky book-smart Nicholas-chasing ninny — that she could smell their old bedroom, the books, the socks, the cheap perfume Bea herself had swiped from Woolworths, could smell the whole caboodle in the very middle of lawyer cane and staghorns and monsteras and rotting logs. Oh Jesus, Mary and Joseph.)
Oh Jesus, Mary and Joseph, she sobbed and sobbed against her dad’s stinking shirt until all the sobbing was used up, and then she splashed her face with water in the kitchen and climbed through the back fence and crossed the paddock and the buttercup patch and went and got Grandma Llewellyn.
And now it was scrub turkey time, and the sun was leaking into the Tamborine rainforest. Well Dad, I kept my promise. I got some bloke to give me a house out bush. Not much I can say about Sid but I can say this: he had a bit of land and a shack and he left it behind. Didn’t wait for Siddie to be born, even. Just shot through. He went shearing, I reckon, which was in his blood at least three generations deep, all among the wool, boys, all among the wool, he shore at Burrabogie and he shore at Toganmain. I lost a few of me blokes that way, they all dreamed that they shore in a shearing shed, and it was a fucking womanless dream of matey joy. What the hell. I had to work in the bar at McGillivray’s while I was as big as a blimp with Siddie, and ever since for that matter, not that I’m complaining. I’ve got by, along with a bit of cleaning and washing at Wentworth’s, that kinda thing. And McGillivray’s been good to me. He’s true blue, that bloke. (Funny thing, we went at it a few times back when, he still carries a torch, maybe — well, sometimes I think that, catching a look — but not one of the Bea-lings is his.) Anyway, Siddie’s dad was a decent bloke, leaving me the shack, but he wasn’t the scrub turkey kind. Who is? Except you, Dad.
Bea sipped her first tea of the morning and watched the turkey-time show. Here was the fusser. First he stuck his head down his own little homemade volcano — the way nobody alive can ever stop themselves gawking down a mail slot to see if their letter has made it, just in case the law of gravity got changed. Here was red-faced daddy scrub turkey, whose floozy had just feathered off (Good riddance, Shirl!) checking to see that her eggs were inside his personal oven. (And where else could they have got to?) Then up went the red crest, out went the breast feathers, cocker-doodle-doo, I got three eggs on the slow bake in here. Blowing his own gobble-gobble trumpet, the show-off, the silly galah.
He was the hatcher, the worrier. What Bea loved was the way he set his head to one side, laid his cheek on the walls of the nest mound, testing, testing. Sometimes he took fright: oh shit, oh struth, blimey, mate! temperature not quite right, too hot, too cold, walls not thick enough, the hearts of his tiny not-yet-chicks ticking in some pattern that alarmed him. At any rate, his turkey stethoscope gave Red Alert. (And over there, three trees away, not giving a damn, is his floozy. Shimmying her downy arse and scratching for worms.)
Not your ordinary dad, the scrub turkey. Fair dinkum neurotic he was, the way he’d rush about dabbing on earth and leaves and vegetable scraps, keeping oven temperatures just right on the button. Day after day, year in year out, Bea watched him, silly bugger. She turned around, and there were Siddie and Charade in school. Not Em; Em never went to school; Em’s father was that drifter, the Norwegian, the one got beat up that night at McGillivray’s. She’d taken him home, dragged him practically, McGillivray helping; put Dettol on his cuts and he’d stayed a month. Took off again. None of her men were scrub turkey fathers.
Bea finished her mug of tea and turned around and there were four, five, six more children in the shack. Seven children, eight children, nine children, ten. Not all of them hers, people said. Some of them were cuckoos in the nest. (Gossip gossip, buzz along the bush telegraph lines, very proper Brisbane girls, ssh, whisper, got themselves into trouble, hush, hush.)
Bea said: It don’t matter to me how they got here. Every last one of them’s mine.
They all went by the name of Ryan.
Charade was the one who worried her. “Mum,” she’d say. “Why’d you tell people Trev and Liz are yours? I remember how Trev came: you went to Brisbane to see a man about a dog, you said, and the next day there he was. He was one year old already, he was walking. Mum. And we just got Liz last year when those people came in their snooty car. Don’t tell me not, because I stayed awake that night and hid behind the couch and listened.”
“You got some objection to having Trev as a brother?” Bea asked.
“It’s not that —” Charade began.
“You got some objection to Liz?”
“No, but Mum —”
“Trev and Liz are my kids, same as you. Don’t you ever let me hear you say different.”
“But Mum, what about Siddie? Which way did you get him? What about me, Mum?”
“Here’s the goods about you, Charade.” But something would happen to her: frown, smiles, tightenings and untightenings chasing themselves across her face. She couldn’t say the name. She couldn’t be the one to start it. Charade had to wind her up.
“Was Nicholas my dad, Mum? Was he truly and ruly?”
“Yes he was. Quit pestering me, Charade.”
“Tell me about him, Mum.”
“Nothing to tell. He wasn’t a Tamborine bloke. He was a university man, he had books coming out of his ears just like you. You sure didn’t come in a car, if that’s what you want
to know.”
Ten were noisy, ten sometimes crowded Bea out of the shack, especially Charade who had to know everything, another golden talker, a chip off the old tale-telling Nicholas block. Bea had to get away sometimes, had to slip down past the casuarina, past the curtain fig, walking deeper, deeper, to where the rainforest swallowed you down in one green gulp. It could do precisely that if it wanted. Once she took hold of a loop of monstera vine and it moved. Aghh, she screamed, and not a sound came out of her mouth. Eye to glassy eye, she and a python took stock. She watched it swallow, watched the undulation slide along its slimy throat. Goodbye world, she thought. But it spelled something out with its neck, skywriting, and slithered off.
She took slow deep breaths. She walked on. Here the light could barely get through, it was murky as night and pew! Oh God, oh pew, a stinkhorn. She held her nose and looked behind a fallen tree that was soft as foam rubber. Just as she thought: bloody maiden veil fungus.
That’s me, she thought, watching how the flies came, how they drooled, how they couldn’t stop coming, landing on the lace, crawling up to the stinkhorn cap. Weird things, maiden veils, pretty and demure as a bride, with a smell like rotting meat. What she saw: three white pricks, as fat and long (ten inches) as even Bea could wish pricks to be, jutting out of the squishy log, pushing themselves up a crinoline skirt, a bridal skirt, a skirt of white lace that fell around them like ballerina’s tulle. Flies (dupes, go-betweens) crawled up the skirt to the helmet, the tip of the cock, the stinkhorn cap, getting spores on their sticky little feet.
That’s me, Bea thought. Always got flies up me skirt: favourite fungus of the forest, the Queen Bea of Tamborine Mountain.
Would she ever lure Nicholas back?
Yeah, one day, she sometimes reckoned. But over there, outside the edge of the rainforest, beyond Beenleigh, beyond Brisbane even, beyond both the Stradbroke islands, where the rest of the world went wheeling: who could say where he was? Or whether …
Ah struth, in other ways she could never shake him off. Some days she didn’t think he’d get rid of her too easy, either. Maybe he reached for her in his sleep, maybe she hung around him like a charm he couldn’t get undone. What she could never figure out was why. It wasn’t the Pom talk, he was the only Pom that she could ever stand; and she’d had lovers who were just as good, it couldn’t be that. What he was, was the boy with the recorder, the boy who was under a curse. Circe. That was his word.
“Bea,” he’d moan, coming to her straight from that Ashcan sheila. “She’s getting further and further away, I can’t touch her. Literally. She won’t let me. We’re both of us under a curse.” Bea would cradle him in her arms and between her legs, he’d suck her breasts. “I can never make her happy,” he’d sigh. “And I can never get away. She’s like Circe.” She’d stroke the soft skin inside his thighs. Time would stop, they’d slither in and out of the slick saucer of each other. “Ah Bea,” he’d sigh. “Bea.” He’d kitten-lick her, purring to himself. “You can shut down thought.”
She’d stiffen, she couldn’t help it. I got thoughts, she would want to say, green snakes gliding through her brain. But thought was something he got somewhere else: from the Ashcan sheila, from Kay.
“Your little sister’s quite something,” he said once. “A kingfisher mind.”
Hiss, hiss, went all the green snakes, forked tongues flicking. And Bea saw thoughts, Kay’s thoughts, darting blue as birds, sweet as bloody wild orchids, putting out branches, tendrils, spinning lawyer-cane hooks, reeling him in.
Did it work? In the world they had gallivanted off to, the world beyond Stradbroke Island, had Kay’s kingfisher thoughts swooped off with him? Was he telling her the tales of once upon a rainforest night …?
She turned around and here was Charade back from Sydney, Charade the student, the university woman, up from Sydney with a torn bit of newspaper that she waved like a flag. Sydney Morning Herald, no less.
Would anyone knowing the whereabouts of Verity Ashkenazy etcetera, etcetera, a post office box, please, in Toronto, where the hell was Toronto? In Canada, Mum.
Okay, Canada then. Bloody Kay, like a bad penny, could have counted on that, she supposed. So that’s where she buggered off to. But was it good news or bad? Mr and Mrs Nicholas-Kay of Toronto, but if he was there with her … Verity Ashkenazy, possibly married, married name unknown but possibly Truman.
So he wasn’t there with her.
Kay was fishing for Nicholas, that was what it meant. Though maybe not. Kay always had a thing about the Ashcan, she thought the Ashcan knew everything there was to know. Fat chance. That iceberg, that frigid snob, that manipulating bitch, that Circe.
Look: there was Nicholas. She always reckoned he’d come back as a bower bird, black as Old Nick himself, the stud of the rainforest, just his type, holding court in his bower. Bea stopped to watch. Bea held herself still as moss. Between the twin towers of twigs, all that peacockery, all that show-off stuff, the bower bird (male) stepped this way, that way, a mating dance. What a poseur. (That was a Nicholas word. He’d said it about some bloke who was keen on Kay, some university bloke. She had to ask Kay what it meant. And Kay said: “Nicholas is a poseur.” That was after the Glasshouse Mountains trip, Kay was mad, Kay was icy as a Melbourne swim. About what, about what? So Bea knew that something had happened.)
See what I have built, the bower bird said in his dance steps. Look at all my brocade: he liked blue and green, he pointed his left claw, his right claw, he dipped his long beak. Bea saw flowers, bits of paper, bits of glass, a piece from her own ripped blue floral dress, that bloody thief! taken from her clothesline last week. It was like a blooming modern painting, his bower-bird bower, blobs of colour all over the shop. Will you walk into my bower, little hen chick? Will you climb my twiggy towers, see my etchings, let me ruffle your feathers, kiss your downy arse, let me tell you another tall tale? Oh oh oh totus floreo, another Nicholas song, another bit of bower bird junk, what a wonderful bower bird am I. Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, will you walk into my bower? Will you, won’t you let me add your little birdy heart like a charm to the hundreds on my chain?
Bloody Nicholas.
And just look at those stupid bower bird hens lining up: into the bower, out again, a bloody production line. Stuff it.
And then off they went, all the stuffed little, lonely little hens, to build the real nest, lay the eggs, hatch them, feed them and grow them, without a skerrick of help from His Highness, the Lord of the Bower. This was the Bower Bird Solution, the answer to the Scrub Turkey Mum.
Oh stuff it. That’s the way it is: cop the sleepy smug look in that little hen’s eye. She’s not complaining.
Is Bea complaining?
No. Yes. No. As long as Kay hasn’t got her kingfisher claws …
Bea turns around and there’s a letter from Charade, two letters — one from England, one from Toronto — well whadaya know? Kay’s just as much in the dark as Bea is. Bloody Green Island again. Star-shaped mole! Pull the other one, Kay.
God, she misses Kay.
She misses nosy Charade.
And where is Nicholas building bowers, holding court, telling tales?