The Elusive Language of Ducks Read Online Free PDF Page B

individual feathers on test flights, checking out the lie of the land, the sigh of the wind, the lift under the wing, and finally all returning to assemble on the duck for the first grand take-off.

DIFFICULT DAYS
    Sometimes unpredictable events or expectations settled on a day before it had even started. They arrived by email, or phone. This day they’d arrived in a couriered box. The house shook with the early morning hammering on the door. Simon was in Sydney at a conference, and Hannah was still dozing in bed. When she opened the front door, there was the box on the doorstep, delivered by a guy in a uniform and a cap.
    There wouldn’t be time for the duck today. She cleaned his bathroom box and let him scurry behind her to his daytime cage on the back lawn. When she dropped him in, he chirruped in disbelief, demanding that she come with him to probe the catchments of dew in the bromeliads. He wanted her to peel back the long leaves of the agapanthus, so he could snaffle the cockroaches and wood lice leaping like people from a burning building.
    He was too little to be released to forage alone — there were too many predators waiting for him. And he wanted to be with her.
    She picked him out again and plonked herself down on the grass. He sat on her stomach.
    That’s better, he said.
    I can’t be with you today, Ducko, said the woman. I just can’t.
    What do you mean? You
are
with me. Everything is good.
    But not for long. I have work. I have to go inside and work.
    That’s OK, I can come, too.
    Ducko, she said. Listen. A box arrived today from the outside world. From the world outside
our
world. And when I opened the box, the whole house was filled with birds, dark flapping crows batting their wings against my face, their claws pulling at my hair. Squawking at me for attention. I screamed at them. Get out! Leave me in peace! I opened the window, releasing some of them, but they sat on the railing around the deck, or on the roof, or hid in leafy branches. Waiting for me.
    That’s terrible. I didn’t see them. What did you do?
    I flapped. Inside, one was drinking water from the kitchen sink, lifting its head as if about to gargle a song. Another paced on the kitchen table, its claws clattering like pins on the wood.
    And then what?
    Duckie, each crow is a task on a list. And I don’t have energy for them today. I’m tired, Ducko. I have to catch the crows and tie coloured bands around their stiff-worm legs before they’ll go away, labelled as done.
    That’s all very well, said the duck, but what’s that got to do with me?
    What it’s got to do with you, Ducko, she said as she stood up and opened the lid to his cage, is that we’re not going foraging today.
    As she walked away she could hear the vibration of the wire netting as he threw himself against it. She wondered whether the feeling she had was anything like a mother might have, walking away from a crying baby.
    And on top of that, this morning, when she’d been searching for a pencil sharpener, she’d opened the top drawer in her mother’s bedroom cabinet, and there she was presented with all the non-descript knick-knacks left behind when her mother had gone to Primrose Hill. Spare glasses, magnifying glass, comb, birthday book, a writing pad with half-written letters, abandoned because her disease made it so difficult for her to write. Hannah picked up the pad and flicked through it.
I ask myself whether I will ever be happy again,
she read. And there it was again. The pain, swelling in her chest, in breech position, kicking its heel against her heart.
    During the course of this day, the weather shifted. It seemed that the wind was filtered through ice. She went to the window. The sky had sucked up the shadows from the earth. The garden was misshapen, its edges gnawed into by its shivering self. Animals slunk by and tentatively sniffed at the wire netting. The duck had pulled himself under the