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

through air but something stiff and unwilling, resistant.
    â€˜It should be as it always was,’ she spoke out loud. And she pushed deeper into the bush.
    It was here, to this place of tea-trees and native vine, of banksias and paperbark, that Nella often came when she visited. It was the one place on the island she did not share with her father. If he asked her where she’d been she might answer the sand dunes or the wetlands, the foreshore or the rock pools, but never the scrub. It was a kind of sister place, if she thought about it, a kind of island companion to the creek. It was a place that if she closed her eyes and imagined hard enough she might just hear the swallows.
    But she didn’t. Instead she looked down at the white of her wrist and there it rested, the mark of the nest, although now it seemed to have faded.
    It’s only the light, she told herself. There’s too much sunlight, some things cannot exist in so much light and she moved into the shade of an overhanging branch. But just as she was about to look at her skin in the new dim light she was disturbed by the sound of footsteps. They were coming from the side of the scrub that backed onto a road. No one ever came that way. There was only the track that Nella had made from the direction of her father’s house.
    She heard twigs breaking, the crushing of leaves. The sound of footsteps heavy in the undergrowth.
    Carefully, very carefully, she slipped behind the shelter of a nearby bush. Silently, through the pattern of its leaves, she watched, and into the clearing emerged a shape, a kind of composite, really, that she might recognise the bits of, but that when put together didn’t quite make sense until it separated. Down to the ground it bent and one part rested there as a damaged, bloodied wallaby and the other stood up as a girl.
    It was her, Nella knew it straight away. It was the girl she had seen at the side of the road.
    Nella watched her stand in the sunlight: the darkness of her hair, the blood on her T-shirt and on her hands did not fade. She was older than Nella had first thought – older than Nella anyway.
    Nella made to move back, but as she did she was overwhelmed by a feeling she could not name and looking down at her wrist she saw that the mark she had made beneath the bridge was stronger now, darker.

    How bold it seemed. Nella looked at the mark again as she sat in her father’s lounge room. There was an energy about it that refused to dim and somehow amongst all her feelings, Nella recognised a feeling of hope. Surely things couldn’t be entirely bad, she thought. She looked around the room now. She saw the bookcase had been freshly dusted, the curtains recently washed, and it occurred to her suddenly that perhaps a kindly neighbour had come in – perhaps after they’d heard that her father was sick. Or maybe her father himself had paid for a cleaner to tidy the place up? Yes, that was probably it. After all, he wasn’t to know that Nella would come back to look after him and much as he would have wanted her to, he would never have asked her, never wanted to take her away from school.
    Yes, one of those hospital social workers would have organised it all when her father told them that he lived alone. They would have looked up a local cleaning agency and had a casual cleaner come around.
    Well, that was simple. Nella would just tell the cleaner if she came again, that she wasn’t needed anymore. Nella was here now to look after her father. Nella would take care of him.
    She looked around the room. The fake flowers on the table had to be removed and the original light shade had to be returned to the lamp on the television. She’d start with the light shade. She knew whoever had come into the house would not have thrown it away – that would have been too intrusive – so she decided to search the long cupboard in the laundry where her father kept all kinds of odds and ends.
    She