For the Forest of a Bird Read Online Free PDF Page B

ducks will come back, Nella thought. And the man’s efforts are somehow part of that, somehow
involved.
    She felt the coldness of the grass against her now, felt it through her and within her and mixing with her whole body. The night, the swallows, nothing could be kept at a distance. Her father, Matthew, her deep sense of disappointment, her mother.
    Yes, even her mother, because mixed in there with every­thing else, with the whole story of Nella, was her mother. She unclenched her fist so she saw the fingers of her left hand, long and pale, an echo of her mother’s. She saw her mother twisting the metal of her wedding ring around and around.
His heart
, her mother had said.
His heart’s given way.
    What did she mean?
    Nella stood and it was raining – just the slightest of rain – and it seemed that the creek had entered the sky and all of heaven had come down to be part of her. Perhaps inside her mother’s madness there was a knowledge, an understanding that, unravelled, would explain everything.
    But Nella recoiled from it.
    Just as she ran from Matthew, his confident summing up of their father:
He told me everything.
    Instead she looked again to the creek. The swallows had not yet returned but she was sure they would, of course they would. And so it was with her father, it had to be.
    It was the words, a simple twisting and turning of what had been said, of how it had been said, of the tone of his voice, of hers, the angle of the light. Of re-playing and re-hearing, rethinking. Yes, remembering and imagining and interpreting, and finally, when she looked at it again, Nella was sure – she was almost sure – of what her father had really meant.
    He would return but not in the way Nella had expected.
I’m not going back with you
. It was simple: it did not mean I’m not returning to you – it meant I am not going back to that house, to your mother’s house; I am going back to my house, to my real home, my deeper home – and you are coming too.
    Yes, now she understood it. Nella touched her hand to her hair and she felt the rain against it and she looked and saw that the elderly man and his dog had left the bridge but that the white tags of bread he had dropped had not sunk and disappeared but rested on the water’s surface, waiting.
    Unmistakable. As unmistakable as the wallabies and fairy-wrens, the emus and sugar gliders shifting in the bush around her. They had not been seen for one hundred and seventy years but they were still there, she knew it. It took a certain kind of looking, a certain kind of belief. The creek with its weeds, its water clotted with bottles and plastic bags, still held the movements of ancient jawless fish, the last journey of dying eels as they returned to their childhood home. And it held the future too.
    Of course, I will bring him here to the swallows. Of course.
    And with that, Nella stepped out of the long grass, one damp shoe and then the other. She walked along the muddy path and then towards the railway tracks. She’d take a train to the city and then she’d leave Melbourne behind.
    Before that, though, before she even arrived at the station, she had one more destination. She turned and walked to the little bridge that the old man had stood on. Its steps began on the bank, but she did not climb the steps; instead she walked beneath the bridge. No one else knew of this she was sure, but here in a secret world existed the previous nests of the swallows: patched of mud and grasses, some discovered string, tiny stones taken from the ground.
    Nella brushed her wrist against the hardened edge of one of the nests now, not to disturb it but to make just a small mark on her pale skin. A tattoo. ‘I will bring him back when the young ones fly.’ That’s what she said to herself.
    And now she was ready to leave.
    She was ready to go to the island.

    Her father had lived on Phillip Island for just over two years. He’d