My phone alarm woke me at 5.30 am and I was glad that squad provided a legitimate excuse to avoid my father. Bolstered by the lack of pain and swelling in my nether regions, I rode my bike to school and suffered no chafing. I wasn’t so worried about anybody spotting the nub – until I learnt that the swimming sets would be separated by three sessions of dry drill. Lucky I’d brought shorts, which I whipped on every time I got out of the pool.
First was straight-arm raises with hand weights, Gelber using her megaphone to blast anybody who faltered. Second was linked-arm sit-ups, which felt like military training, Nads and Starkey muttering threats of violence to anybody dragging the chain. The final session involved jogging with knees to waist in a figure-eight formation like prancing ponies in team dressage, Mullows a thoroughbred with his ginger ponytail swishing from side to side.
Alternating between wet and dry drills pushed me to the brink of my fitness level. I’d given it everything, hoping the exertion might somehow weaken the severity of anger I felt towards my father. But it only increased when I realised that I wouldn’t have been stuck there doing squad if he hadn’t cheated on Mum – and used my paralytic episode at the Nugents’ place as a pretext for dragging me into the city to share his luxury doghouse.
In Maths, Monaro introduced the probability unit by stating that the likelihood of any particular event occurring at a given time and place could be predicted using a formula. And the more potentially havoc-wreaking the event – like a nuclear-reactor meltdown or terrorist attack – the more important for its probability to be calculated. He turned to write on the board and Tibor Mintz suddenly yelled ‘FUCK!’, which was probably a first. Monaro demanded an explanation, and Tibor said that he’d been stabbed in the left buttock. Starkey confessed by raising his arm, holding a pair of compasses. Monaro winced and sent Tibor to Student Welfare for a tetanus shot. Then, after rebuking Starkey for the assault, Monaro devised a formula for calculating the probability of his causing disruption in any class. Whatever variables were entered, the result was more than seventy per cent. Instead of expressing remorse, Starkey looked stoked that the chance of his acting like an arsehole could be so accurately predicted.
At lunchtime I found a spot behind Old Block that catches the cool nor’-easter blowing across the harbour, beneath a Port Jackson fig that had been roped off. The tree’s trunk looked solid, its branches strong, but it was blighted by a pathogenic fungal infection that had weakened its structural integrity and could kill it. Pop Locke had been fighting fit when he’d been felled by the Pajero, but the tree reminded me of him. Probably because Venn had told me that if Pop was reincarnated as a tree, he would definitely be a Port Jackson fig. She would’ve hugged the diseased tree if she’d been here now. So I climbed under the rope, wrapped my arms around him and said, ‘I hope you get well soon.’
With nobody else around, I took out My One Redeeming Affliction. I’d left off with Walter Hunnicutt possibly manipulating the planchette to communicate his dead wife’s wish for him to remarry. Funny how people manufacture or interpret ‘signs’ to support their dubious intentions or beliefs. I wondered for a moment how Dad would justify frenching the French house guest, who was the same age as my sister, if I confronted him. Then I opened the book to get the troubling mental picture out of my head.
The following Monday, my grandfather, in a show of spontaneous benevolence, announced his decision to enrich the museum’s ornithology collection with five of his prized bowerbirds. The director responded to his generosity by allowing him to employ a studio assistant. Without deliberation, Walter chose his most promising student, Enoch Fernsby.
On hearing the news, Esther was both indignant and aggrieved. Though opportunities of education and employment were usually withheld from women, there were some notable exceptions. Walter’s predecessor had been Jane Tost, the first woman employed at the museum and one of their finest taxidermists. How, then, could Esther’s father now spurn the only child who shared his passion for the natural world, and understood the agonisingly slow thrill of resurrecting the natural form of a creature, making it almost immortal? She knew more than all of his students combined.
One week later, Walter attempted to console her by giving the museum her bowerbird illustrations to be displayed alongside the mounts – a dire miscalculation. Instead of being delighted with the surprise, Esther wrote that she had ‘gawped in utter disbelief’ at being robbed by her own father. Her devastation was made complete on discovering that he’d also given away the mounting of a cockatiel called Percy, who was once the family’s most treasured pet.
The old dude from the junkyard had a stuffed cockatiel called Percy. What were the odds of two stuffed cockatiels having the same name? A million to one? Or maybe the old hermit’s Percy is the one from the book? Not even Monaro could come up with an algorithm to calculate the possibility of that.
My curiosity about the cockatiel, combined with the recent revelations of Dad’s behaviour, dissolved any hesitation I felt about breaking his rule to stay away from the junkyard. I rode my bike down there after school and, pushing apart the vines that grew on the fence, saw the old dude pegging a pair of stained, blown-out grundies to a line strung between the plane tree and the fake totem pole.
‘Hello,’ I said, but he turned to go back inside so I yelled out and gave him a fright.
‘No need to shout,’ he said, approaching the fence. ‘What do you want, you little punk?’
‘I really like that bird of yours – the cockatiel. I was wondering where you got him?’
‘Percy? Can’t have him.’
‘Don’t worry, I don’t actually want him. I just wanted to know where you found him?’
‘You stole my bike and now you want the bird.’
‘My dad left you two hundred dollars.’
‘Poppycock!’ He peered through the fence and saw my bike on its stand. ‘You’ve stripped off the fancy parts. Ungrateful little bugger!’
‘Sorry. No disrespect, but I thought all that stuff was more suitable for a girl.’
‘Well, you’re hardly the finest specimen of manhood.’
‘Look who’s talking.’
‘Piss off, you little turd!’
That didn’t go well.
I pushed my bike back up to T H E E Y R I E and got stuck into homework. When Dad arrived, I didn’t come out.
Later he called me to join him for dinner. Spag bol is one of the few dishes he’s competent at, but my simmering resentment towards him had stolen my appetite. Holed up in my room, I decided to act like Dad was a stranger who I had to be polite to. Completely consumed with his work, he didn’t even seem to notice my absence.