Best Australian Yarn: Nest by Josephine Sarvaas

My name is Lavender Marigold Smythe. I’m nine years old. In my previous life I was an owl. I know this because my father told me in a dream. My father is dead, but he’s all around me. His spirit hasn’t settled into a new body, so sometimes he’s a bird and sometimes a butterfly and sometimes a tree, but he’s usually somewhere nearby. I don’t think people know you can end up as a tree, because at school we watched a video of a rainforest being torn down. It made me cry to think of all the spirits being killed, and Ethan McKenzie, who weed his pants on an excursion to Taronga Zoo, laughed at me. So I bit him. I bit him until I tasted blood, and the owl in me really liked that. She wanted a taste of the hunt. That was at my old school in the mountains. I’m at a new school now, living with Aunty Arlene. She’s my father’s sister, but she’s nothing like him. Back when my father was a human, he was long and thin and hard, and Aunty Arlene is short and round and soft. If my father got lost in the wilderness, he would construct a lean-to and spear fish and survive for years off the land. He taught me to tie strong knots and forage bush grapes. If Aunty Arlene got lost in the wilderness, within ten minutes she’d be hunted down by a bear, if we had those in Australia. The place I live now is called Five Dock. In the mountains things were so quiet it felt like I was the last person on earth. In Five Dock the streets are full of people laughing in coffee shops, and buses coming and going from the city. Aunty Arlene spends most of her time in her front garden. She snips pieces off her succulents and plants them in new pots. She has hundreds of the same plant, like she’s creating an army. Elderly Italian ladies always stop at the gate to talk to her. When they do, I clutch the bars and press my face against the iron lattice and pretend I’m a prisoner in a cell. “Oh, poverina!” they cry, and try to stroke my head like I’m a cat. And like a cat, I hiss and spit and snarl. “How’s she settling in?” “Well enough,” Aunty Arlene always says. “This must be a huge shock.” “It was very sudden, yes.” “And there’s no mother?” “She passed away long ago.” “Poverina!” When I pull faces, they laugh. “So spirited!” “She takes after her father. He was quite the free spirit.” My father once told me that means he lives his own life, and has lots of adventures. Before I was born, he travelled across Europe with all his belongings in a backpack. He slept rough in forests and got robbed on an overnight train and met my mother at a retreat where for ten days they couldn’t talk, just stared at each other across the room. Then it turned out they didn’t speak the same language, and she had to learn English and he learned Mandarin and until then they spoke in hand signs and smiles and what he called ‘a connection of spirits.’ But now my father is, literally, a free spirit. He’s the wind ruffling my hair and the trees that wave as I walk to school. Every morning he sits on the garden gate in the body of a myna bird. He never flies away when I approach, just looks at me with bright eyes as I lean in close. “Daddy,” I whisper, “I hate it here. I want to run away.” * At my new school the teacher calls me bella and lovely and when she introduces me to the class she says everyone must be very kind. All the girls are called Maria and Isabella and all the boys are variations of Alex and Alessio and Alessandro, and they stare with big eyes like little mice. I think if any of them were lost in the wilderness they’d be gobbled up immediately. At lunch I run around with my arms outstretched. I imagine swooping down and hunting small furred creatures, bloodying my beak and claws. “Hello!” A girl comes towards me. Her hair’s braided with red ribbons, her face fresh-scrubbed pink. “You’re the new girl.” “I’m Lavender Marigold Smythe,” I say. “I’m Maria Lucia di Chiara,” she says. “Cool.” I turn away, but she skips after me. “You have a really pretty name.” “My Dad’s favourite flower is lavender and my Mum’s is marigold. Having a name connected to the earth makes me very powerful.” “I’m named after Our Lady and Saint Lucy. They’re my patron saints, and since Mary’s the mother of God, I bet I’m also very powerful.” “Right.” I eye her warily. “Do you want to be friends?” Maria asks, holding out her hand. There’s a gold star stuck to it which she won for doing her times tables the fastest. I look around the playground. Everyone’s running, screaming, throwing handballs, shrieking with laughter. By my sides my fingers curl like an owl’s talons. “No,” I say, and run away. Later we do crafts, cutting trees out of green paper and pasting them to poster-boards. Around me, people are doing all sorts of cartoonish trees that don’t exist in real life. But I’m carefully recreating the wattle and lemon myrtle that lined the creek behind our house. If I make it detailed enough, when I hang it over my bed tonight I’ll enter it in my dreams, and my father will appear and tell me how to get home. Then, when I run away, I can make my way back here, to our old house and the creek and the bush track. At the next table, Maria and her friends are talking about me. “She’s so rude,” one of the Isabellas whispers. “And so weird.” “Shh! We have to be nice,” Maria says. “Why?” “My Mum said her Dad died. It’s really sad.” “How’d he die?” “We’re not allowed to ask. It was something horrible and scary. Mum said she wouldn’t tell me because it’d give me nightmares.” I’m clutching my paper so tightly it rips. I cut the shape of a girl out, and crumple it in my fist, and chew it up and swallow it. That afternoon I’m in the playground waiting to be picked up. Maria keeps looking at me, then pretending she wasn’t when I meet her eyes. I decide that I hate her. My father crawls over my knee in the form of a ladybug. I scoop him up, tilting my palm, watching him run along the creases. “I’m gonna place a curse on her,” I whisper. “On all of them. Then I’ll run away back home and live in the forest. You’ll be waiting for me, won’t you?” It’s hard sometimes, my father not being able to reply. But I can usually tell what he’s thinking. He scuttles up my wrist, along the blue line of my vein towards my heart, and I know he’s saying he loves me. “I love you too,” I say, and watch him take flight. * No one ever taught me how to curse somebody, but I know I’ll need lots of powerful components. When Aunty Arlene takes me for a walk by the bay, I’m on the lookout for sticks shaped like lightning bolts, and smooth stones, and feathers. This part of Five Dock is pretty. It’s not like the mountains, with bush so thick and tangled that you could walk into it and get lost forever. But the mangroves are full of shrill cicadas, and the sunset is all candy-coloured shades of orange and pink, and there are pelicans drifting in the water. My father’s among them. “What do you want to do for your birthday, Lav?” Aunty Arlene asks. “Go camping and look at the stars.” “There aren’t really campgrounds around here, sweetie.” “Birdwatching, then.” “I’m not sure how to… look, how about the botanical gardens?” “We could go into the wilderness and look for buried treasure.” I squat in the sand and dig with a stick. A lady jogging past stops to chat with Aunty Arlene. Everyone here knows everyone else; if the adults make eye contact, they talk and talk. I catch snatches of what they’re saying. My name. Dad’s name. Something about school. Something about meals. There’s something shiny in the sand; a shard of broken glass. I slip it into my pocket. The lady pats Aunty Arlene’s shoulder. “You’re doing a beautiful job,” she says. “It must be so hard.” Then she jogs away, huffing and puffing, and Aunty Arlene is crying but trying to hide it. I run ahead of her because I don’t want her to be embarrassed that I’ve seen, and lead the way home. * “Why does everyone bring us dinner?” I ask. As usual we’re eating something from a casserole dish left at our door. Every day a meal materialises. Pastas, stews, pies. Aunty Arlene’s eyes are all shiny. “I didn’t know what sort of things you’d like to eat. And I’m not much of a cook, it’s only ever been just me here. The neighbours all offered, when they heard.” I cut my meat into pieces and pretend a mother owl is feeding me little bloody morsels of prey. This is what happened when I was small, in my past life. And in my current life, I remember my mother picking up tender pieces of pork and popping them in my mouth. This is my only memory of her. In my mind she’s a disembodied hand wielding chopsticks. At midnight I sneak into the garden. The streetlights’ orange glow makes me feel like I’m trapped in an old photograph. In the mountains everything was pitch black and we could see every star. My father taught me all their names; the sky was full of familiar friends. Tonight, my father’s a succulent in a little pot. I set him by my knee and begin creating a nest of my treasures. Sticks and gumnuts and a funny pine cone and a big ibis feather, white with a black tip. When I take out the glass, the edge accidentally cuts my palm. Sticky blood wells up and I let it drip over the treasures. I glare at them as hard as I can and let all my anger and rage pour out through my bleeding hands. I can feel the curse surging out of me and I know it will give everyone in Five Dock nightmares tonight, especially Maria Lucia di Chiara, and all the stars and insects and birds will turn against her and everyone else I hate. Then I pick up my father. Open the gate. Step into the road. I can hear the hum of the streetlights, the distant sound of tyres on asphalt. I look left down the street. Right. A plane roars faintly overhead. “Okay,” I whisper, “time to go home.” I start to walk. The bitumen’s rough against my bare feet. My steps falter. I want to walk and walk until the suburbs collapse around me, give way to sun-bleached fields and mountains hung with fog and roiling, overcast skies. But my feet stop working. They won’t take another step. My hand hurts. A little at first, but the pain grows and grows until it fills my entire body. There isn’t enough room for it. It feels like it’s bursting out of me. Somehow, I’m back in Aunty Arlene’s garden. I drop the pot and my father hits the ground in an explosion of dirt. I’m crying now. I’m sobbing. The sound rips through the night. Not high-pitched like a baby’s crying, but a deep, shuddering, heaving sound, like an owl’s call. I’m a wounded hunter crying into a dark, empty night. And everything hurts so much. So I just curl up and cry. * “Oh, Lavender. Sweetheart.” Cool hands are touching me. I’m lying in the garden and Aunty Arlene is smoothing my hair. She scoops her succulent back into its pot. “You know, your mother gave me my first jade plant? I propagated all these from that original one. Come inside, honey. Let’s clean you up.” She washes blood and dirt from my hands and knees and wraps my palm with bandages. Her hands aren’t calloused like my father’s, they’re soft and smell like rosewater. But this morning, for some reason, I’m glad for their softness. She slices a banana into my weetbix and says, “Signora Lombardi brought these over. I’ll put one in your lunchbox. They’re perfectly ripe.” There’s a big moth on the flyscreen outside the window. My father’s back, then. I thought he might be angry that I didn’t manage to head home last night, but here he is. When Aunty Arlene isn’t listening, I whisper, “I think I need to stay here for a while, because Aunty was crying yesterday and I can’t leave her alone with all the Signoras. And if I’m not here they’ll stop bringing food.” My father beats his wings, which I know is his signal for yes. It feels good to have a plan. * At school we walk to the park. Because most of our class would not survive in an unfamiliar suburban street, let alone the wilderness, we are all given a walking partner. Mine is Maria Lucia di Chiara. She tries to hold my hand but stops when she sees the bandages. “I talked to my Mum last night,” she says. “She told me Marigold is short for Mary’s Gold and Mary is Mary the mother of God. So you and I share a patron saint, and she’s the most powerful of all.” “Can I get her to curse people?” I ask. Maria mulls this over. “I guess?” she says. “Most people do the opposite. They ask patron saints to bless people. Like giving them good luck.” This is intriguing. I decide I don’t hate Maria any more. She seems like a powerful ally. I swap sides so she can hold my uninjured hand, and say, “Let’s figure out what animal you were in your past life.” * That night, my father visits in a dream. We are owls, flying through the night. Below us something horrible and scary is happening. I can see the flicker of flames, hear screams and sobs. “Don’t look down,” my father says. So I don’t. We fly until we’re swallowed by the night sky. I can’t see my father any more, just the stars around us. But when I let out a hooting cry, I hear his voice echo back to me. I know he’s leading me to a new nest somewhere safe. And because I am a great hunter, and the whole sky is filled with the beat of his wings, I am not scared. I am never scared at all.

Best Australian Yarn: Nest by Josephine Sarvaas

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