The summer Aunty Grace died, all the birds in Boondall lost their minds.
At the wake, I told my cousin-brother Richie about them, and the way their sticky little bodies were strewn all over the nature strips. Day after day, me and Cobber would go for a walk, and I’d look down at the ground to see crushed eggs and limp corpses. Lines of ants marched along the footpath to them and I had to yank hard on Cobber’s leash to drag him away from sniffing at the rotting carcasses.
Richie said the birds had nothing to do with Aunty Grace. ‘Cause if any animal was gonna lose its mind over her dying, it’d be the frogs.’
I hadn’t seen a real frog in ages.
‘Besides,’ he said,‘birds are your thing.’
Aunty Grace’s house was full of frogs. Not live ones—though I bet she would have liked that—but every other type you could imagine.
She lived in one of them little fibro houses in the back of Zillmere, and inside it was dark and cool, with creaking floorboards and thinning brown-patterned carpet. Before Aunty Dot lost her marbles, dementia taking hold, she’d told me Grace’s frogs took over slowly at first. It started with a couple of tiny plastic figurines of grinning frogs gifted by Aunty Retty. Then came the soft toys and the plaster lawn frogs. In the kitchen cupboards she had hundreds of frog mugs, plates and glasses. Statues and ornaments lined every surface, and if you shifted them, they’d leave silhouettes in the blue-grey dust.
But it’s not the frogs that I want to talk about, it’s the birds. Kookaburras, crows, magpies—all of ’em. I want to talk about how some of them have got melody and they sing and call, while others have voices that grate and scream. I want to talk about why there are always birds that fly down and sit in front of me, close enough to touch, and look me dead in the eye as though they’re waiting for something. I want to know why they all tilt their heads when I talk to them, as though they can understand.
When I first moved back to look after Nan, I went out in the yard and told a grazing pair of yellow-beaked plovers that me and the dog were no threat. ‘We’ll watch out for you,’ I promised, hoping that they wouldn’t swoop us when we walked down in the park where they nested.
Days later, I was hanging out the washing when the female flew into the yard, two peewees on her tail. The little birds were relentless, pinning her to the ground next to Nan’s sagging fence and pecking at her eyes.
I never heard a plover scared until that day.
‘Eyeh,’ I yelled, dropping Nan’s knickers on the grass and running over to the fight to shoo them away. ‘Get off, ya gammin’ little shits.’
Anyways, now all different birds—plovers, peewees, mynahs—have started fighting, or flinging all their eggs from their nests, killing their babies before they are even hatched, and I want to ask someone why. The only problem is, now Aunty Grace is gone there’s no one left to ask.
*
It’s not the storm that wakes me, even though the thunder is so ferocious that I can feel the house shaking right down into the foundations. It’s Cobber. He presses his wet nose against my cheek, and when I open my eyes, I see him standing by the door. He flicks his gaze up the hallway towards Nan’s room and then back at me. He doesn’t need words for me to understand, and I fling the sheet back and follow him to Nan.
Nan and all her sisters are little women: short and round, bodies melting into softness as they age. But small and soft didn’t mean they weren’t strong and brave. I never saw my Nan shy from a fight, and when she needed to she could stretch her five-foot-two frame to six-foot tall and stronger than any man’s. But when I get to the bedroom, she is huddled on the ground, pressed between the bed and the wall with her knees drawn up to her chin, hugging herself small.
‘Nanna, you all right?’ I ask, racing over and putting my hand on her shoulder. Cobber emerges from under the bed and presses his face into her arm. I see her body relax a little.
‘The house, it’s gonna fall down,’ she says, her voice so quiet that I have to lean forwards to hear her.
I don’t think it will, but of course I grew up hearing stories about how the wind flung the roofs off houses, or where trees have crashed through windows, or worse.
‘Hope not,’ I say. ‘But me and Cobber’ll look after you no matter what, okay?’
And then, truegod, there’s a flash of lightning and Nan shifts. She drops her knees down and straightens up. She looks at me, and there’s something in her eyes that tells me she’s back.
‘Did I ever tell you ’bout the storms in Goondi?’ she asks, and I want to cry. She sounds so normal.
‘Nah, Nan. Tell me.’
‘Our house on the station was high up on stilts, right in the middle of a paddock, miles away from the big house. The storms would always roll through in the afternoon, always afore Mum and Dad had come back from workin’, and us girls would be all by ourselves.’
I lean forwards. I am starving for this story.
‘Me and Dot, we usually looked after the little ones.’ She holds her fingers up and numbers them off in order. ‘Mary, Retty, Grace and Bonnie. But when the storms rolled through, it were me that needed lookin’ after.’
Nan chuckles and I can see her thoughts turning inwards as another crack of thunder rocks the house.
‘The house would shake, and you could feel the wind sticking his fingers underneath the tin roof. There weren’t nothing much between that roof an’ us there in that house. Anyway, I was scared of them storms, and I’d make the little kids huddle in the corner with me ’til it went away. This one time, in a big bad storm, Grace got out. I didn’t realise until it was all over, and the air was just going back to humid again—you know the way it does after a big summer storm? She was about four, I think.’
I try to imagine the six of them, Dot and Nan shielding the little ones from a storm and trying to be brave themselves. I can feel the tension creeping back into Nan’s body as she talks about running down the steep wooden stairs of the house and into the yard.
‘That yard was full of bindis and I didn’t have no shoes on,’ she says. ‘But all I could think about was all the horrible things that could have happened. And then I see her. She was over near the water tank, and she was covered in green tree frogs. Had to be about fifty of them, up and down her arms. And she was giggling her little face off like it were the best thing she ever seen.’
‘Oh,’ I breathe. ‘The frogs.’
‘They always came to her just like the birds come to you,’ Nan says. ‘Even here at her place in Zillmere. After storms, they’d crawl up her windows and stick there, lookin’ in at her and croaking and chirping.’
‘Nan, what did your mum say about the frogs and Aunty Grace? Did she know why they came to her like that?’ I am so hungry for this answer, I can taste that bit of culture coming towards my tongue and I feel my mouth fill with saliva in anticipation.
But then I see the light go out of Nan’s eyes and I know what’s coming next.
‘You on about that stuff again, Brydie? I told ya, my grandfather was Lebanese.’
‘Nan, it’s okay you know, they won’t take you away now, you don’t have to tell the story anymore.’ I feel tears prickling in my eyes. ‘Why can’t you just tell me before it’s too late?’ I cry.
The storm crashes above us again and Nan starts to cry too. We sit there like that until it’s gone, and then I manage to lift her back up into the bed, tuck her in, and leave her with the air conditioning whirring. Blowing that cool, fresh air around the room, it stops the post-storm humidity creeping in.
Once I’m sure Nan has settled, I clip Cobber’s leash on and venture out into the dark, hot night. We walk to Zillmere quickly, Cobber seeming to sense that I don’t have the patience for him to stop and sniff every tree and power pole. At Aunty Grace’s house, I scour the windows for traces of green tree frogs clinging to the windows, but all I find is a broken branch from the flame tree in the backyard. Next to it is a bird’s nest and the corpses of three baby birds lying in the grass.
On the way back home, the sun is rising. I walk slower this time, letting Cobber do his inspection. Every time we stop, I look up at the powerlines and see a plover looking down at us. Just like you with the birds, I hear Nan’s voice in my head and wonder if Aunty Grace would choose birds or frogs if she was trying to reach me.
On Monday, when the community nurse comes to see Nan, I leave Cobber with them and drive over to Ipswich to see Richie on his lunchbreak.
He comes out of Kambu clinic wearing pressed slacks and a Deadly Choices polo shirt. He grins when sees me, his teeth bright and white.
‘Woah, cuz, you get them chompers bleached or what?’ I tease as he hops in the car next to me.
‘Nah, sis, it was the dentist week last week. She just cleaned ’em up real good. You been for your health check yet? The shirts are good this year, ay.’
I glance over at him. ‘Yeah, they’re all right. I actually never been for a health check. Too worried they gonna tell me I’m a diabetes risk and I’m also gonna lose my marbles.’
‘Sis, you’re a bloody Armstrong. You definitely gonna get diabetes, and you probably already gone and lost your marbles,’ he laughs.
I drive us through town and down to the river. I find a parking space under the big Moreton Bay figs and reach into the back seat for the bag I brought with me. We wander along the footpath until we find a shady spot and then kick off our shoes, sit on the grass. We make hot chook rolls with our hands, pulling off hunks of Woolies’ barbecue chicken and sticking it in fresh white bread.
‘So, how’s it goin’, then?’ he asks.
‘Ah…it’s all right, I s’pose.’
‘Nah, come on. You gotta remember—I know what it’s like.’
I think about him looking after his own mum, Aunty Bonnie. She was the baby of the family and the first to go. All the other sisters’ marbles had gone one by one, so slowly that no one really saw the big things coming. But Aunty Bonnie had gone quickly. One day her main problem was a dodgy ticker, the next she didn’t know who she was or where she was. Richie had moved into the house and taken over her care until she slipped away in her sleep.
‘Sometimes Nan’s there,’ I say. ‘And she starts to get to what I need, and then she’s…gone. I just fuck it up every time before I can even start to talk about what I want to talk about.’
‘You’re not fucking up, believe me,’ Richie replies. ‘I know it was a bit different with Mum, but the windows of comprehension are small and they just get smaller.’
I put my roll down on the bread bag and lean back, wincing as something crunches under my fingers. When I lift my hand, there’s a tiny speckled egg crushed against it.
‘I miss Aunty Grace,’ I say, grimacing and wiping my hands on the grass. He nods.
‘She probably would have gone the same way as the others—you know, we always thought it would be Mum who’d go from the bum ticker,’ he says.
‘I thought she’d be there to help with Nan,’ I admit. I think about an episode Nan had a few months ago where she screamed at me to take off my bright red, black and yellow flag shirt. ‘You’re not an Aborigine!’ she yelled, over and over until I had to call the nurse to come and help me calm her down.
Aunty Grace explained a few days later, while Nan was with the nurse and we were sipping tea out of frog mugs. ‘Bub, when I was real little, when we lived out on the station, Mum and Dad told the big girls that if anyone asked where our skin colour came from to tell them our granddad was Lebanese.’
‘Yeah, but that was so they wouldn’t take you girls away?’
‘Right. But remember I told ya? The way her mind’s gone, she can’t remember the difference between a story and the truth,’ she said. ‘She was always extra careful with you, Brydie, ’cause they could have easily come and taken you away too. Even though the government says they stopped takin’ the jarjums in ’69. But if you ask me, foster care is just another name for stealin’ Black babies.’
‘So, here’s the thing,’ Richie says, chewing on the last bit of his roll and bringing me back to the present. ‘You all sad about not having done woman business, or all that. But we got what we got, ay? And Grace always said that Country is speaking all the time, you just gotta listen.’
He nods towards the grass in front of us. I expect to see a hopeful magpie waiting for the crumbs of our lunch, but instead there’s a plover tilting its head and watching closely.
‘There’s ya mate. Do you remember that time, out in Goondi, when you were about ten?’
I look at the plover, right into its eyes and call up the memory of me, Nan, Aunty Bonnie and Richie going to Goondiwindi to see the house the girls had grown up in. The trip felt like it took forever, along roads that wound their way through dry dusty fields and the bush being swallowed by prickly pears. We stopped in town for lunch and then drove for another hour, down a rutted dirt track before Nan pulled up to a stop.
At first, I thought there was nothing there, and I hung back at the car, whining. But then, as I watched Nan and Bonnie traipse across the field, I realised there was a rusted old water tank off in the distance, and a cracked concrete slab. As they got close to the tank, a plover screeched a warning and then attacked, swooping and screaming as Nan and Bonnie abandoned their mission and ran back to the car.
We were about to leave when Nan realised that Pop’s gold watch had fallen from her wrist somewhere between the water tank and the car, and she started crying.
While Aunty Bonnie tried to calm her down, I slipped out the backseat door. I’d taken my thongs off in the car, and didn’t bother putting them back on as I tiptoed across the dry, prickly grass towards the tank. The male plover walked forwards, eyeing me, and I looked him back, daring him to swoop. Back in the nest, the female screeched a warning, and he repeated it back.
‘Listen here,’ I said to the plover, ignoring Nan who had started hollering at me. ‘Stop your screaming, I don’t want your babies, just my pop’s watch. I need it, otherwise Nan will cry all the way back to Brisbane and probably for another week after that.’ I took another step forwards and he stepped forwards, close enough now that I could see his spurs.
‘My pop, he died at the start of the year, and that watch is special ’cause Nan bought it for him with money she saved from her first proper job.’ I nodded my head to a few metres in front, where I could see the gold watch glinting in the grass. The plover followed my gaze.
‘I’ll just get that and leave you to your bubs, okay?’ And then I just walked over, picked up the watch, and walked back to Nan. He didn’t swoop me once.
I remember looking back at the plover and whispering ‘thank you’ as Nan and Bonnie hugged and kissed me. Brydie the plover-tamer they called me after that.
Now I look at the plover sitting in front of us and smile. ‘G’day,’ I say quietly, and Richie digs an elbow into my ribs.
‘Aunty Grace didn’t know why the frogs chose her, they just did,’ he says. ‘Just like we don’t know why these birds picked you.’
Early the next morning, me and Cobber sneak out of the house while Nan is still sleeping. We walk down to the park and I let him off his leash. We walk through the scrub, Cobber just a few metres in front.
When I emerge out into a clearing under a stand of eucalyptus trees, Cobber stops in front of a plover nest sitting right in the middle of the grass. It’s surrounded by a ring of five broken eggs.
‘Gotta come back now, Cob,’ I call, and he trots back over to me, tucking his tail in as the adult plover swoops down from the trees. There’s something in the way the bird stands, one leg tucked up, nodding its head at the nest that makes me look back at it just in time to see a small baby plover pop out.
Five broken eggs, one baby. One chick to carry on the family line. One strong enough to live.
‘Country is always speaking, you just gotta listen bub,’ Aunty Grace said over and over. She had the frogs to bring her stories and knowledge. And me, I’ve got the birds.
I look at the plover and her baby and smile. Okay, I’m listening.
