The Flight of Birds Read online

  When we first brought Charlotte home—the first Charlotte—we’d Googled budgies and marvelled at the goofy, spectacular antics they performed, the vocal gymnastics they produced. Song lyrics, Star Trek quotes, entire bawdy limericks. Different households vied for the most brilliant budgie. ‘Meet Joey, the smartest talking bird EVER’; ‘Grayson the superbird, so eager to please’; ‘Our budgie is worth more than his weight in gold!’ A king’s ransom; a family’s delight. Another clip we watched was titled ‘Our Child’. Even in the flurry of welcoming the first Charlotte—the assembling of the cage, the careful placement of the bell and the swing and the water trough—even then, I never thought of her as part of the family. And yet, bird books talk of birds as companion animals: for old people, for lonely people, for grieving people. A girl weeps at a branch she planted for her dead mother, and the white birds perch and witness and provide solace. Or salvation. We stretch out our hand in the rain and the bird comes home to roost.

  In a Sunday-afternoon radio broadcast I heard once, a scientist from the Australian Museum was talking about the domestication of native Australian birds. (Later, I printed out a transcript and put it in my boxes under the bed.) The scientist said:

  one of the ironies is that … we watch our endangered animals declining to the point of extinction, some of them vanishing forever, thinking that we’re doing the best we can by leaving them in the wild and leaving them alone … [I]n fact by not valuing them, by not getting closer to them, by not integrating them into our lives and ours into theirs, the indifference that we have in effect to their wellbeing, leads to many of them being lost.

  The birds sing for us, and we sing for them, hoping to delay death.

  Nevertheless, the goose is eaten.

  Nevertheless, the bird’s carcass is smoked and shrunken or the feet are severed.

  Nevertheless, the birds eat the bread crumbs that lead the way home.

  Nevertheless, Charlotte flew.

  I think about her on that Sunday morning, cramped between a plastic bell and a clump of millet, scratching at the metal walls. Or maybe another vision: chirping with a wholehearted delight, eagerly anticipating a visit from the beautiful girl. A figure appears in the shadowy space outside the cage: a gaoler, a provider. Two doors open. A chance moment.

  I wonder what Charlotte imagined. What did she want to find in the space beyond the cage, the vestibule and the back fence?

  Call and Response

  Nearly one hundred percent of the air passing through a bird’s vocal cords is used to make sound. Humans use only about two percent.

  Don Stap, Birdsong

  Do you remember that day, years and years ago, catching the train to the mountains? A hazy morning, mist in the valleys. Do you remember the songs of the forest and the silences between us?

  Do you remember last night? Or, to be blunt about it, too early this morning? Do you remember what caused me to rumple my body into you, to roll back, to grunt and then to flick the covers away?

  It happens every year. The start of summer: an air-ripping cry in the night.

  You must have heard it too.

  I remember accepting your invitation. I can’t recall the actual conversation, but I can still feel the friction in the air after you asked me. We were in one of those dusty spaces outside the lecture theatres: less of a foyer, more like a holding pen. Waiting to go in or loitering afterwards, I can’t remember. I remember your question lingering, my need to answer it, my fear of answering. I remember the dust settling when I consented.

  It was a weekday, so the train was almost empty. Uni students have all the time in the world. A few figures haunted the far end of the carriage. The train chatted over the tracks. I couldn’t think of anything to say. An incomprehensible voice fuddled the names of the stations as we rattled through the outer suburbs and clambered our way up the mountain. When we arrived, the carriage doors chirred open and we stepped out into a shrieking-cold day.

  We straggled our way down the main street to the tourist lookouts, passing steamed-up cafes and lumbering beanie-clad pensioners. You were well-prepared for the weather: gloved, and snug in your pleated coat. I put on a brave face in my worn-down duffle jacket. You asked me if I was okay. I squeezed my elbows into my ribcage.

  At the cliff tops we were accosted by the grind and hiss of buses and the breakneck shouting of school kids. The children slapdashed around us, sucking in the chilled air, puffing out plumes of white. They proclaimed—to us, to the buses, to no one in particular—that there was nothing to see. They were right. The mist had settled in and there was an empty space where the Three Sisters should be. A pipsqueaking ten-year-old coo-eed into the void. There was no echo.

  We weren’t there for the view, you said. You knew the way. You led me past the ruckus and found the track to the stairs into the valley. Well, ladders, really: metal frames bolted into the sandstone. You slivered past crumbling rock and disappeared. The icy-sharp railing blanched my palm. I didn’t look down. I breathed in the shrill air and followed. The cliff was smeared with moss, sharp horizontal lines. Ashy sediments marking the millennia. I could hear your boots tinkling against the metal rungs. I looked down the precipice. There was a flicker of movement on the ladder even lower, a clang and a clatter of laughter. I saw you hesitate and then squeeze yourself into a flinty niche. A snippet of conversation wafted up: words like morning, weather, stunning. When the parka-clad figures clambered past me, I opened my mouth. I meant to say hello, but no sound came out.

  Halfway down the cliff—a stratum of silence. Above, the hackling tourists and growling buses. And below—

  You were waiting for me in the sandstone alcove. You told me to listen.

  I listened.

  You can’t have slept through it. At the end of the street, no, three houses down, no, in the tree outside our bedroom window. A discordant plea. Two notes, one sliding into the other: a long rounded tone followed by a sudden higher plosive. Rising in inflection like a question, or a passive-aggressive demand. A pause. The grey air is silent. A chance, I hope, to ruffle back under the covers and into cloudy sleep. I sigh into you. Your body huffs and settles, lost in your own dreamscape. We share a few breaths. Then the call gashes the air again. The second plea at a slightly higher pitch, not-quite desperate, but definitely plaintive, woefully hopeful. Release and whiplash stop. Then silence. A third, up another tone in pitch and intensity. The lash at the end coming quicker, more severe, more expectant.

  I try to snuggle under your humming body, to use you as soundproofing, but a puff of objection escapes from your lips. You’re fast asleep. I’m too half-conscious to apologise, too muzzy to explain. I’m trying not to listen for the next lacerating whoop.

  I listened.

  We were in another world. Or other worlds, really. Our feet had slopped onto the muddy track at the bottom of the ladders, but we weren’t at the floor of the valley yet. The path precipiced downward and we followed.

  Every layer down provided new songs.

  I didn’t know the names of the songs we heard, nor the names of the birds who sang them. It wasn’t like I hadn’t heard birds singing before, or even these particular songs. I could have bluffed my way through finches, parrots, cockatoos. I could have made a stab at something and call it sparrow or galah or lapwing. I could have scratched out some easy verbs to manage them in my mind: chirp or warble, screech or whistle. On the misty path at the bottom of the ladder, these were inadequate, thin wisps of breath.

  You told me to listen, and I was trying to listen.

  Release and stop. Silence. Release and ripping stop. I groan into the stuffy mattress. My feet get snarled in the blankets. I kick out. You grumble a few disconcerted, disconnected words. When you twist your torso away from me, you drag the blankets with you.

  My humming body is floating, anticipatorily, in the stillness of the air, in the gaps between the whoops. These rectangles of silence are irregular, unpredictable. The room expands with expectation.

&nb
sp; Many of the calls were barely audible, like a party at the end of the street, or a television left on in the other room. My mind clutched ineptly at inadequate analogies. My literary mother would be rolling in her grave. One call sounded like the release of a half-filled balloon, the spittly plastic ends flapping together as it zips around the room. One trebled like a baby giggling. Another, a polite cough: short, tentative, as if it was asking permission to join in the fun. Another was a melodious metal detector: slow metronomic beeps and then, as it neared its target, increasing in tempo and delight. It was impossible to get the descriptions right. One was R2D2; another was Monkey from the TV show, whistling for his cloud. Another, an off-kilter Mr Whippy van: half a phrase of ‘Für Elise’ and then a sudden dissonant clang.

  I couldn’t have told you where the sounds were coming from. I couldn’t tell if they were clasping the spindly branches above or huddled in the undergrowth or hidden in the petrified grottoes. There was an occasional flustering of leaves. High above us, a flash of yellow among the grey.

  The path sidestepped an ancient tree. The bark felt like fur. I smoothed its hide as I passed.

  We moved silently through the quivering conversations.

  We listened. A new melody scented the air.

  The next whoop is the shrillest of them all. I think, for a moment, that the glass of the bedroom window has shattered. Point blank. It breaks the room. But the shards bring revelation. I feel like I’ve been anointed by an archangel, like a shaft of truth has pierced my soul. Or maybe it’s more biological, like a migraine that was gripping my cheekbones has suddenly detached itself and curled away. The darkness in the room is dazzling. Everything feels jagged and clear.

  I know what I need to do.

  My body is less eager to follow my new calling. As I stumble out of bed, my knee nicks the corner of the bedside table. I blunder out of the room, bumping into the doorframe. I’m clumsily insistent, evangelical, monomaniacal. I fumble through the darkness towards the vestibule. I bang about for the broom and drag it, scrapingly, down the hallway. The screen door yelps as I shove myself outside. I totter over the tiles of the front porch. The broom clatters.

  The nasty noise is unperturbed. The whoop is a provocation.

  I peer into the arms of the tree. A cavernous blackness stares back. I grip the splintery handle and smash the broom into the trunk. My arms tighten as the broom cuts the air. I hack the trunk again, and again, and then again.

  The new melody was beautiful. A constellation of calls. A chorus of wind chimes, almost too perfect to be natural. Like sonar. Like white coral tinkling underwater. Two tones—though sometimes it felt like three. The higher note held longer. The lower tone used as a springboard. Sometimes insistent, sometimes ethereal. Sometimes two notes came together, clashing, like children landing simultaneously on a trampoline. Sometimes three high notes were held in succession. Sometimes a long gap of silence. Then the paired notes would tinkle again.

  And, then—

  The broom wheezes through the darkness. The fractured bark muffles the air, like dust.

  And then the other call. Or calls, you might have said. Harmonious with the quiet chiming rhythms, working as a counterpoint. A slow softness at first, like a lyrical cicada: increasing intensity, until unwavering and clear. It felt mobile, like it came from nowhere and everywhere, a siren whirring down a city street. It thrummed through our bodies. Then, Doppler-like, the sound changed: a sudden lash, then silence. We waited. A palpable silence. A minute, two minutes later, the siren bent the air from another angle; another slap as the sound cracked off.

  We sat on the dewy rocks. The fuzzy moss tousled the hair on my fingers.

  This is what I wanted you to hear, you said.

  Or you might have said. I can’t remember.

  I huff, exhausted, against the chiselled bark.

  In the deepest part of the forest—the hairpin in the track before it led us back up the cliff—there was a clearing. Mottled picnic tables, remnants of a gazebo from another era. We moved, stealthily, not wanting to interrupt the stillness. There were signs planted at the edges of the space, noting its historical or ecological significance. I didn’t want words, so I slinked past. But you stopped, tracing the letters with your fingers. Although there was little light down there, the scratchy metal glinted. Then, a whiff of wind created a break in the canopy. A laserbeam of sunshine illuminated the rectangle. The silver spaces around the letters hummed.

  The sign declared:

  This is Leura Forest. In the bush you may hear the call of the golden whistler, the yellow robin. You might even hear cockatoos soaring above the valley. In the valley, you’ll hear the bell and the whipbird.

  The whipbird call is a combination of male and female birds. The male calls first and the female with amazing timing answers the male. This is called an ‘antiphonal response’. See if you can hear both sides of the conversation.

  We didn’t say any more about it. We weaved through the valley, listening to the call and response.

  The space around the tree feels vacant. The night air feels solid. But it still isn’t silent. The whoop returns. More tentative, maybe, but unrelenting, inevitable. I listen. I’m too tired to do anything else but listen. The sequence has looped back to the start: the quiet, slower, dissonant plea. This time, though, now that I’m really listening, it feels listless. Its insistence is provisional. Morose. A pathetic cry. The whoop modulates. Less perfunctory, maybe, but still melancholy.

  I scrape my fingers over the whittled bark, through my dusty hair. The whoop moves up another notch: barefaced, acute, ingenuous.

  A shadow forms on the front porch. A figure approaches. I feel your warm fingers on my shoulder, the sweaty small of my back. You’re whispering to me. Ineptly, I clutch at your dressing gown, grasping at my sobs in the night. The air calms around us. You’re breathing in and out. I follow your lead.

  The whoop starts up again, a wobbly croak in the grey morning light.

  Do you remember the journey home? Outside the train, the daylight dimming; inside, the fluoro lights flickering on. Under the quiet light, you let my knee move towards yours. You turned your head and looked at me.

  Do you remember the koel last night? Crying into the void, waiting for a response.

  Flocking

  There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come; the readiness is all.

  William Shakespeare, Hamlet

  The sparrows pick at the asphalt. When they pinpoint a crumb, they give a quick muttering gulp, their beaks chattering. They look back and forth, up and down: fretful, fascinated. They hop, nimbly, their tails tipping up. They poke out their rumpy chest; they flick their speckled chestnut cape. A dollop of white amongst the fawn wings. A bronze crown, a toasty underbelly. There’s a snatched clicking of song, the head back. They tumble turn into the dust. They pluck and kiss the ground, bristling their wings.

  The boy watches the sparrows. I call him ‘the boy’; he doesn’t call himself that. He thinks of himself as being all grown up, as complete as he’ll ever be, his thoughts and ideas all settled and done with. But he’s hollow, really: paper-thin, flimsy. The chilly autumn wind sometimes knocks him over. When the roll is called, the teacher might accidentally mark him absent.

  In the expanse of the school quadrangle the birds are tiny; specks of cinnamon on a black plain. Even the dry leaves are bigger. A leaf scratches over the playground, eddying in the breeze, a scrunched-up rip of parchment. It shuffles towards the sparrows. The birds scatter.

  A Company of Parrots

  In the first year of high school, everyone gets a taste of everything. A term of geography; a module on music. They slop up gooey cakes in the home-ec kitchens; saw into dusty timber in industrial technology; tramp in the mud during agriculture; garble through grammar in French. Everyone has to do drama, no matter what the future may hold for them. Even those who’l
l vow never to speak in public again. Even those who will think the performing arts are a total and utter waste of taxpayers’ time and money. Even the future short-order cooks, the solicitors, the checkout chicks at Best and Less. Even the future accountants. Even the ornithologists.

  Everyone knows drama is a bludge. For the first few minutes of class most students muck about, chirruping and chortling. The drama teacher doesn’t seem to mind. She’s small and spritely. She wears sharp white eyeliner. She’s the butt of many students’ jokes: her pigmy frame and wobbling chest ample fodder for sniggering. They only ever call her Miss. I don’t think the boy ever learns her name. Sometimes the other students come up with titteringly funny pseudonyms for her. Miss TheMark, they quip. Miss IngLink, Miss TheClass. When she overhears, she grins. Sarcasm bounces off her. She bobs about the room, her cardigan caped over her shoulders. Her capering is infectious: despite their wilful ruckussing, she gets the class, one by one, to participate. She whisks them in. They fumble their way through stilted impros; they clamp together as human conveyor belts; they spacejump between skits set at the hairdressers, Mount Everest, a bus stop. And, for half a term, they work through a unit on flocking.

  The group—five or six students to begin with, but the whole class by the end of term—has to move around the space together, learning to work as one. They start in the centre of the room. Facing the same direction, in a staggered formation, like an arrowhead. The tip of the arrow leads and the rest follow, imperceptibly slow, inching their way forward. When the students are really concentrating the group can weave through the space, changing direction when the flock allows. It’s not easy. The trick, Miss tells them, is for there never to be a leader, really. We should never know who’s leading, who’s following. Let go of your own thoughts. Breathe as one, she says. They’re poised, waiting for the impulse to move. Carefully, elegantly, they curve to the left. The leader now follows. There is no leader. They breathe as one.