Evie Wyld - All the Birds, Singing

‘That kid ever wakes up,’ he says, ‘he’s in for a helluva shock.’ I look up at him, his fists on his hips and his hat low over his eyes. ‘Steve Warren says they’ve put round-the-clock security at his bedside — reckon people might get ideas.’ He turns around and looks at us, swigs his beer. ‘Reckon they might have the right idea.’ Mum looks up sharply.

‘John! Don’t say things like that.’

‘If that was my daughter, dead in the ground, it’d take more than a couple of cops to stop me getting to the little hoon.’ When he says the word ‘daughter’ my father rests his hands on my shoulders.

‘Don’t swear in front of the children.’

‘Hoon?’

‘They don’t know he did it,’ I say quietly. Mum and Dad stop arguing and both look at me.

‘Jake. Don’t you get all lefty here — they found him over where the fire started, reckon he was after Flora all along. Who knows what he did to her before he started the fire. Covering his tracks more than likely.’

‘He wouldn’t do that.’

‘You don’t know anything,’ Mum snaps in a way that seems to surprise her, and she stands up, leaving her wine, to get on with the laundry.

From what I have heard about comas, they reckon you can still hear, even if you can’t move. I wonder if Denver lies there listening to all these people talking about what will happen to him if he wakes up and if it will make him decide to die instead.

I follow the burnt trail down to the beach, but I go the long way round so I don’t pass the spot I last saw Denver. I stop when I come across a wombat, swollen and on its back. He looks like someone has taken a blowtorch to him, all his hair is missing, and his skin is flaky charcoal. He looks like he would pop if I nudged him with my foot. I nudge him with my foot and he doesn’t. There’s still a smell to the bush, like it’s thinking it might go up again, and I know I’m not supposed to be there. The trees don’t want me there, they are black stakes and behind lots of them are small piles of ashes that could be the remains of animals sheltering. There is not a single bird to make sound, not a cicada or a cricket, not even a mosquito to whine at my ear. Down by the sea, there’s a blackness to the water and to the beach, ash rolls in the waves and dead birds have washed up out of it. Flies are the only things that have made any headway out of this, and they rise in flocks when I walk by the bodies that must have dropped out of the air. Some of them are perfect, a kookaburra, a honeyeater, a bowerbird.

You’re not supposed to swim this time of year because the whalers come in close to feed on the mackerel. I drag the boat out to the water and it makes grooves in the sand, and I think that might be the last they’ll know of me, deep large footprints in the sand and the surprising strength of a fifteen-year-old girl. I row until I’m just past the reef, and I drop the small anchor, feel it catch and the boat turns in a circle. No one can see me out here, so I take my T-shirt off. I fix myself up with the goggles, which make my eyes bulge because they’re too small, and I fix the snorkel to the side of my face, bite down on it. I sit lightly on the side of the boat like scuba divers do, thinking I’ll go in backwards, but the boat nearly capsizes, so in the end I just jump out like a mad kid. The water is warm and clear. Butterfish scoot in and out between each other. I dive down to the sea floor. It is not deep, not deep deep black blue which would be frightening. The seabed is soft and sandy, and when I feel it with the flat of my palm, white sand billows up, sparkling gold and silver and floating like dust motes in the small swell. Prawns with long moustaches walk the water around me and I look up and see a flock of birds so clearly my goggles fog. The sharks fly with the urgency of ice melting. There is no thrash, no gums bared and raw-meat teeth, no rolling eyes and fat green blood-cloud. I only have a few moments before I have to go up for air, have to rise up between them, but I don’t move for what feels like the longest time, not until my eyes feel like they might start to bleed from the pressure. One bubble at a time I let my breath out. They feed in this quiet way, occasionally darting forward a few feet to swallow a small fish, barely opening their wide mouths, sucking soup from a spoon. They sing to each other — it is just the pressure in my ears, the sound of needing to breathe, of course it is, but I can hear a high-pitched ticking, a noise like air let slowly out of a balloon, and I imagine it’s their song. When the last air bubble has left my mouth, I let myself float to the surface, coming face to face with a dozen of them, and they do not care, they don’t want me, and only turn in a tight circle when I put out my hand to touch them, turn in a tight circle and fly away. When I break the surface, I breathe in and in and out again, and there’s a sharp pain at my temple, and black spots appear and then disappear from my eyes. It’s now, looking down, that I feel uneasy, and I see how far I have gone from the boat in coming up, not keeping my eye on its shadow, and I lap across the top, with those great birds underneath me, watching me like I have watched them, hearing the beat of my heart, the mess I make of the top of the water. One of them brushes gently against my foot, but it doesn’t bite, there is just, when I pull myself into the boat, the smallest of grazes, and I lie in the bottom of the boat, jumping with sea lice, feeling them moving underneath me, and I get the feeling that nothing matters all that much any more. When I close my eyes, I see smoke-blackened people with hard eyes and red-licked lips and I know I will visit Denver and talk him out of his sleep.

The buses are running, out-of-town buses mainly, because the depot went up. There are people on board who don’t belong, who fumble with change and can’t understand where the stops are. The cars were part of the problem, I’ve heard it said in so many different ways, the explosions, the reignition. The bus is crowded, and the grapes I found at Four Square are pressed against my shirt. I hope they are seedless. I watch over his shoulder as an old man blows his nose into a white handkerchief, and what comes out is black. The man stares at it a moment before folding the handkerchief and putting it back in his pocket. It’s inside of us all.

As we leave town, the ash becomes less thick, but it still draws my eye, it still creeps in. A lot of people get off with me at the hospital. There is not much talking. I hang around in the lobby trying to work out where to find him. The place feels like a maze. I don’t want to ask at reception, so in the end I follow signs to ‘Burns Centre’. It’s visiting time, and there are people in there with no hair, in bed with flowers around them. A lady has a bandage over one eye, and a doctor stands by her bed while her husband locks his hands in front of him with nerves. Incredibly lucky , is what the doctor is saying, and from behind her bandage the woman smiles. Denver is not there, and I walk the squeaky aisles feeling lost.

A policeman is sat outside a room, and this is how I know I have found him. The policeman is one of Dad’s friends, I’ve seen them at the pub together, but I don’t know his name. He nods at me with a look of confusion when I say hello.

‘I’ve come to see Denver,’ I say and he blinks.

‘No visitors, I’m afraid. Just family — as if they’d come.’ I shift legs. The man’s eyes fall on the grapes. ‘He can’t swallow, love,’ he says. ‘He won’t be swallowing down anything any more — the throat is gone.’

How can a person’s throat be gone? I think — it must be a figure of speech. How would the head connect?

‘Reckon he’s got his own punishment being left in a state like that — no eyelids, no lips. Not enough skin to see him through the grafts.’