For the Forest of a Bird by Sue Saliba Read Free Book Online

hand and the silver metal was just as she remembered it, except something was different. Instead of being covered in dust and spiders’ threads. Nella’s hand was clean, as unmarked as if she had dipped it into vacant air.
    She got down on her knees and she pressed her face to the edge of the fridge so she could see the gap behind it and then she bent even further down and looked underneath. How strange it was. Not a single cobweb or grain of dust was there. Even the fiercest of winds could not have blown it all away so clean.
    Never mind, she thought, I have the key. And the idea of entering her father’s house, of unlocking the front door, of padding quietly from room to room, of lying wrapped in the old blue rug on the lounge-room couch; all these things filled her with excitement.
    Excitement, and a kind of comfort, if there could be such a feeling.
    Happiness, was that it?
    And she turned the key and waited.
    But it wasn’t happiness that rushed out at her; it wasn’t excitement and it wasn’t comfort. It was a feeling of uncertainty. The lounge-room couch with its mess of newspapers and cushions had been tidied and the blue rug had gone. The television lamp with its odd-fitting light shade was missing and a light pink papier-mâché one stood in its place. There was a vase of plastic petunias on the dining-room table where her father’s garden tools had always been.
    She stepped closer to the kitchen bench. Just above it in the glass cabinet stood the photo of Nella that her father had always kept down near the window. It was pushed behind the wall of a flour tin now. She didn’t need to look at it to remember its image. There she’d been on a spring day, soaked from a sudden rain. She and her father had run back from the beach and she’d had to peel her favourite swirly-patterned T-shirt off and put on the flannelette shirt her father had lent her. ‘You look like a little tomboy,’ her father had laughed and taken the photo of her. And he was right, all her girliness had disappeared but in its place she remembered something else – something warm and protective in the roughness of his shirt.
    She had planned now to go to her father’s room, to look out at the garden, to lie on his bed. Yes, even that, to lie on his bed. But suddenly, she walked instead to the shelf above the fireplace. It was a place where all kinds of mysteries were kept – tiny intact eggs, minute bones found buried in the bush, strange patterned skin from fish that had been washed ashore – and amongst it all, Nella had always secretly stored something special. It was the curl of wool – the very first gift her father had brought her from his travels to sheep stations all those years ago when she and Matthew had stood side by side and greeted him at the front door of the house they all shared together.
    Her father never knew Nella kept it on the shelf in his home and she’d go there when he was out watering the gardening or sleeping on the back porch. She’d go to the shelf and she’d gently push all the other pieces aside and she’d check that the slip of wool was exactly as she’d left it. And then she’d cover it up again – and feel that everything would be all right.
    And now she made her way to the shelf above the fireplace where the curl of wool had always rested.
    But before she arrived there, she felt herself slow and hesitate. What if the objects had been moved? What if the curl of wool was no longer there? She stopped where she was standing and her body tightened.
    And then she turned and left through the open front door.
    On she went, along the roadway of dust and stones . Down the lane into the bush and at last, along the hidden track to the coastal scrub. Nella could not stop moving and as she travelled along it she felt her breath catch inside her so she was not a thing of ease, not a moment of flight like the swallows as they glided