The Lucky Galah Read online

  Kev was good. He said to the kids, ‘Leave her alone, Mum’s having a cry.’

  My sister said Linda was mad with grief, she’d be friendly again later. She also said maybe Evan jumped off the cliff on purpose, maybe he wasn’t the father of their little girl, maybe the father was that enterologist that went out on Kev’s boat and she said in her opinion, Linda Johnson was a snobby hussy and she hadn’t wanted to say anything earlier because we were such good friends.

  I said nothing.

  ‘It was always “Linda this, Linda that”,’ my sister said, in her mimicky voice. She can be a real B-I-T-C-H.

  I never saw that pressure cooker again.

  Dish: Over.

  Galah: Roger. Over and out.

  When we get home, Lizzie lifts the thin plastic bag onto the table. Her worn thongs slap on the linoleum floor. The house is silent. Not even the refrigerator is humming. I’m out of line of sight of the Dish; I can take a rest from its endless data dumps.

  I hop-flap from Lizzie’s shoulder to my high T-shaped perch. Lizzie flicks the radio on. It starts chatting immediately, all about Steve.

  ‘Cyclone coming, Lucky,’ says Lizzie.

  ‘I know,’ I say, but it comes out as a half-baked croon.

  She opens her eyes wide, dramatically. ‘Cyclone! It’s pretty windy, hold on tight!’

  ‘Pretty windy, hold on tight!’ I say in English. In English, my voice is a quavering thing. We repeat this back and forth, enjoying ourselves, until I grow impatient and excited, accidentally letting out an ear-splitting screech.

  ‘Shoosh, Lucky,’ says Lizzie.

  ‘Shoosh, Lucky,’ I agree.

  I watch as Lizzie puts the kettle on. She sets out a mug for herself and a dainty teacup for me. While the kettle is boiling, she removes the two books and loose coins and the five-dollar note from the plastic bag. She folds the bag and puts it away in a drawer. She puts her money in an old biscuit tin. I gaze out the window at the purple bougainvillea in the neighbour’s yard. Without looking, I can tell that Lizzie is putting Lyrebird in the same drawer as the bag and closing the drawer firmly. It’s the drawer that contains a couple of back issues of the Australasian Bird Fancier, phone and electricity bills, and correspondence from the government relating to the pension. It is the Important Drawer. It is a drawer that I can’t get my beak into.

  The Lucky Country lies on the table. Later, Lizzie will nail it securely to my perch so that I can shred it with my beak without the book falling to the floor before I have finished. Lizzie shovels three heaped spoons of Bushells tea-leaves into a red anodised aluminium teapot and pours the steaming water in. She folds a tea towel over it to keep it warm, and carefully turns the pot three times. Lizzie holds out her arm, inviting me down onto the old wooden table.

  She pours just a tiny bit of tea into my teacup and fills it up with cold water from the tap.

  ‘This teacup went all the way out to the island and back,’ says Lizzie.

  She says this nearly every time. It’s the story about how her mother went out to the end of the One Mile Jetty in chains, carrying a teacup, and took a boat to the island, where she lived surrounded by sharks, listening to the water crash and the wind moan.

  When she came back, she thought she’d lost the teacup, but it found her again.

  ‘Skippety-hop to the grocery shop,’ I say. ‘To buy a box . . .’

  Lizzie joins in: ‘To buy a box of candy. One for you, one for me, and one for sister Mandy.’

  Three times, she dips a teaspoon into the pink paper sugar packet. The white crystals fall like a waterfall into her mug. Then she stirs vigorously, and takes a sip.

  ‘Ah,’ she says. ‘I needed that.’

  She feeds me pieces of Milk Arrowroot biscuit. I don’t mind nibbling from her fingers, but I prefer to hold a piece of biscuit in my claw and eat it like that. I wash it down with tea. Lizzie smiles as I dip my beak into my cup and then point it at the ceiling so the liquid can flow down my gullet. I feel it swirling into my crop, seeping down into my gizzard.

  I beg for another bit of biscuit.

  ‘One for sister Mandy?’ I say, with all the sweetness I can muster.

  But afternoon tea is over. As Lizzie washes the cups and saucers in the sink, I make a start on The Lucky Country.

  The galah is an intelligent animal, despite its reputation as a clown and lightweight. A captive galah needs constant activity if it is not to decline into depression. Tearing up books, page by page, is a mental, physical and spiritual workout for me; as good as any gym, yoga class or university.

  Lizzie naps on the couch as I work. The Australasian Bird Fancier has slipped from her hands. Her mouth is slightly open. She snores.

  The Lucky Country is a slim volume, paperback; faster to get through than an old Reader’s Digest. I tear it up quickly, not expecting much.

  Afterwards, I begin to doze off myself. As my nictitating membranes slide upwards over my pupils, the words of The Lucky Country come back to me, suggesting pathways for dreams. The wooden salad bowl. The bead curtain. Innocent happiness.

  When I open my eyes, I see the remains of my book on the floor. Strips and straggles of paper. Part of the cover still readable, but the L is missing: ucky Country. A dustpan and brush come into view, and Lizzie’s knobbly hand. She sweeps everything up – parts of sentences, torn words – in neat little strokes. She carries the pan out through the back door and I hear the smack of the wheelie bin lid before she reappears again.

  I can still copy, perfectly, the flushing of the Kelly toilet. This makes Lizzie laugh her raspy little laugh.

  She walks across the room and gives me a nice long scratch. When she stops, I continue to hold my neck out, inviting more.

  ‘What are we going to do with you, eh?’ she croons. ‘My beautiful girl.’

  I don’t answer. My receptive vocabulary is excellent, but my productive vocabulary remains frustratingly limited. My spoken English progressed from Hello, cocky and Dance, cocky, dance to Skippety-hop when I came to live with Lizzie. Later I learned Stupid dickhead and Ba-a-ad cough!

  Stupid dickhead came from evenings watching the television news with Lizzie. If she caught sight of Crowbar in his crocodile-skin shoes and akubra talking to reporters on the steps of Parliament House, she’d say, ‘Stupid dickhead,’ and I began to say it too. We’d look at each other and laugh. I’d repeat myself, trying for a second, third or fourth laugh, but there were diminishing returns.

  Lizzie says, ‘Bad cough!’ in the mornings before she has her first cup of tea and cigarette. She wakes, she coughs, she looks at me and she gasps, ‘Bad cough!’ I cough along with her; enjoyable raucous coughs. She looks at me and says, ‘Don’t make me laugh.’

  She lets me gently preen her hair. She lets me stand on the edge of the table and delicately lick up the biscuit crumbs stuck to the front of her dress. She likes to look at my tongue, the hard bulb on the end of it made for crushing grass seeds. Sometimes I lean in to her face and preen her eyelashes, one by one. Lizzie doesn’t flinch.

  I’m still thinking about those words. Wooden salad bowl. The practical Australian. It’s as if they’re rising up from the depths of the wheelie bin, slipping out through the crack under the lid, floating back to me on my perch.

  I have worked from the beginning to the end of The Lucky Country, but I am still puzzled by its central idea. For me, country is everything that is here. It’s the red earth meeting the dazzling blue of the Indian Ocean; the curling wattle pod at the end of a spindly grey twig; ribbons of seaweed in great rolls on the beach; the dark holes in old eucalypts where parrots are born. Country is alert and generous, but still. It has been here for a long time. It throws up tiny green shoots after rain, but it’s too old, now, to feel either lucky or unlucky. It just continues.

  People and animals, on the other hand, are mostly young, or feel yo
ung. They still want things. I may have lived for decades but I still feel young; I still feel lucky. My life today – with its tea and biscuits, its frequent tours of the town – is bristling with enjoyments and advantages. It stands in direct contrast to my life Before, which was spent in a small cage in which I could not fully stretch my wings.

  The trajectory of my life – from misfortune to fortune – is precisely the opposite of Evan Johnson’s. His life began in fortune only to fall, fall into the maw of misfortune. This fall is fascinating, mesmerising. I study it in my mind’s eye. I see a falling man, a rising bird.

  Falling man, rising bird.

  I am agitated, leaning this way and that on my perch, overwhelmed by the new story that is swelling in my throat. This happens sometimes, after I shred a book and become excited – desperate – to join in with the storytelling. I begin to screech, helplessly, telling, telling, telling.

  My stories are made of found objects: shreds of text, parts or wholes of spoken phrases (‘Did ya get drunk?’), data dumps from the Dish that come thick and fast as we enter its line of sight and stop abruptly if we turn a corner or retreat indoors; the popping of wattle pods showering story-seeds; the conversations of wild galahs flying overhead or gossiping on Lizzie’s back fence; the secret messages sent by pet galahs, prisoners in their cages, garbled through unreliable intermediaries. My stories are outsider art, self-taught, mostly stolen, highly embellished. They –

  Lizzie groans.

  ‘Shoosh, Lucky,’ she says. She is rolling up her Australasian Bird Fancier, threatening to whack me with it. I’d better stop.

  Anyway, this is the story so far, translated from screech to English:

  TWO

  The Practical Australian

  It is 1964. Evan Johnson is young and alive from head to toe. His wispy blond hair is already thinning on top. He’s at the wheel of his brand-new mid-blue EH Holden station wagon, a plume of pink dust fanning out from the back like a small willy-willy. As far as the eye can see in any direction there is low sage-coloured scrub dotted over red earth. Overhead, a cloudless blue sky.

  Evan Johnson has just been given an extraordinary technical assignment and the promise of excellent pay. On the strength of this, he has bought the car and packed it with all the things most important and useful to him: wife, daughter, slide rule. He has filled the tank with petrol, checked the oil and water, settled into the driver’s seat and started driving. He drives and drives and drives. He drives all the way from Melbourne, at the bottom of the continent, to his destination on the north-west coast of Australia. The gently waving stalk of his brand-new aerial catches voices speaking of Reds to the north and Blue Hills in the distance. They tell of the price of wool and a lottery in which numbered marbles representing the birthdays of twenty-year-old men are to be drawn from a barrel and the winners sent to war.

  In Melbourne, Evan Johnson had worked for an expanding national company that made televisions and radio transmitters and the electronic equipment found in ships and aeroplanes. Tomorrow morning he will start a new job with the federal Department of Supply to help establish a tracking station at Port Badminton. It takes days to drive there. At night he turns his gaze upwards to the jewelled night sky, studying the constellations.

  There he is in his horn-rimmed glasses, shorts and long socks. One hand is pointing up at the heavens, the other is closed loosely around the slide rule. There is a sharpened pencil in his pocket.

  For Evan, used to cold Melbourne winters, it is uncomfortably hot in this part of the country. He lifts each thigh in turn to unstick it from new blue vinyl. The vinyl clings to skin like a bandaid. The radio, struggling to keep hold of Jimmy Little’s ‘Royal Telephone’, gives up and surrenders to static. No twiddling of the knob can help it now. Evan switches it off with a tiny click, felt in the fingers but not heard over the sound of the Holden juddering over corrugations in the road.

  Evan is thinking about Time. As he drives, eyes on the road, always careful, his mind feels its way in the dark towards a thought about Time that is both simple and large, something very close, but eluding him all the same. After some minutes of struggle, he gives up. He lets go of the large idea of Time and relaxes into thoughts about smaller, more manageable pieces of it. In his mind’s eye, he sees a spacecraft appear on the horizon at precisely the right time. He traces its arc over him, mentally moving it across the hollow sphere of the sky, taking it down again below the opposite horizon. The golden hairs on his forearms vibrate with the shaking of the car. A trill of excitement burbles briefly in his upper abdomen. He emits the energy of it in the dry fragment of a whistle. He wets his lips and tries again, thinly whistling the melody: Oh, what joy divine!

  When Evan Johnson lifts each thigh in turn to unstick it from the vinyl seat he does so without making any remark, because for him such a thing is not worthy of comment.

  His wife, in a similar situation, would vocalise without hesitation: ‘I’m sticking to the seat!’

  But in this case Linda Johnson is not sticking to the seat, because she is wearing a white gaberdine dress with large red roses on it, cinched at the waist with a belt made of the same fabric. There’s a long hidden zip down the back. All of this fabric, which goes down below the knee, ensures she does not stick to the vinyl seat of the Holden station wagon.

  The car smells of processed cheese and celery and a warm pale green Tupperware container and a toddler’s urine.

  Lolling freely on the back seat is three-year-old Johanna. She is a little astronaut in a suit, carrying out her human functions in a moving capsule, patiently ministered to by the experts in the front seat. Her life is an endless car trip, like a rocket voyage to a faraway star, seemingly without beginning or end. Telegraph poles go past. Their wires swoop up and down, up and down and criss-cross. She tastes a bit of cheese and Sao biscuit passed back from the pale green Tupperware container and lets the rest fall through her fingers. She notices sheep and says, ‘Sheep!’ Her parents say: ‘Yes, Jo! Sheep!’

  Her mother twists around to look at her lovingly, her face framed by her black hair, a long neck like a swan’s. She says: ‘Baa! Baa!’ As she says this, her dark eyebrows lift twice, very expressively. She smiles with her red lips and long white teeth, and then turns around again.

  Jo looks at her mother’s long black hair. She tries to open the ashtray which for this entire journey has been sitting tantalisingly in front of her, attached to the back of her mother’s seat, but it will not open. She nibbles the ear of her squeaky plastic lamb, tasting the plastic. She throws her lamb into the front of the car. It ricochets off the windscreen with a faint squeak and lands in Evan’s lap. Linda cries: ‘Jo! Don’t be naughty!’ Evan brakes and stops the car on the side of the road. He pauses and then turns around, coldly and deliberately, to face his daughter. His horn-rimmed glasses and light flyaway hair presaging baldness fill Jo’s field of vision. She starts to whimper. Evan waggles his finger sternly. ‘Jo, you mustn’t throw things around the car. You’re making Daddy very angry.’ Jo finishes her current whimper, takes a breath, and howls. Linda and Evan glance at each other in solidarity, a quick look that excludes Jo; this does not escape her attention. She lies on her back, kicking her feet, punching the seat with her fists.

  The beige ceiling of the car has side-to-side stitch lines. The clouds are wispy. The telegraph wires criss-cross, criss-cross.

  Evan sees a small white object materialise in the distance on the left-hand side of the road. It is the next milepost. He is getting closer. His Expected Time of Arrival is 6 pm. Evan presses his black leather lace-up shoe just a tiny bit harder on the new accelerator pedal. The motor laps up the extra fuel and goes a little bit faster, but not, in Evan’s opinion, dangerously fast.

  Linda stares at the milepost too, at first wondering if her eyes are playing tricks. It is, indeed, a milepost. The numbers are close enough to read now. It is still a long way to Port Badminto
n but she is excited, impatient to begin her new life. She can smell the rich scent of her own body odour mixed with talcum powder. She feels an overwhelming urge to leave the car immediately. Excitement tends to play itself out in her bowels. Her left hand twitches slightly in the direction of the door handle.

  ‘Honey,’ says Linda to Evan in the little-girl voice she often uses with him, ‘I think I do need to have another wee.’

  A tiny stream of the molecules of irritation and impatience spurt into Evan’s bloodstream. He takes his shoe off the accelerator pedal and steadily depresses the brake, bringing the car to a gentle stop beside nothing in particular. He is losing time, whole units of time.

  Linda Johnson’s pale long legs appear out of the side of the car like the front antennae of an albino lobster. It is 1964, and she is twenty-three years old. She walks away from her husband and child. She is alone in an expanse of red dirt and scrub. Carrying the toilet roll, her ears begin to tune in to the small sounds of the scrub, its dry crackles and rustlings. She hears the bell-like call of a bird she’s never heard before, with its deliciously clear falling notes. There is little to hide behind in this low scrub, so she keeps walking out in a line perpendicular to the road, looking for a screen, even though there are no other cars on the road and it seems unlikely there ever will be.

  Evan is calling to her from the other side of the car, standing up, calling across the roof: ‘Don’t go too far!’ But she ignores him.

  She crouches behind a waist-high wattle. Crouched there, with its sharp dry twigs in her face, she discovers that the four-note bird call goes in time with the phrase: Have a good shit! Have a good shit! This is her own thought, one that she need not share with her husband, whose own bowels, bound up by processed cheese, cannot be released. This is a moment of triumph, of enjoyment of one’s own company, one’s own body. It is relief, it is divestment, it is a small holiday. She listens to the bird and secretly names it the shit bird: Birdus shittus.