This is My Song Page 8

  ‘Come on!’ ordered Nancy. ‘Skipping! Not stupid birds!’

  Annie watched through her bedroom window the truck heaving onto a distant part of the track, close to where she’d first seen the goshawk. It was Saturday, still cold but with a clean, bright promise in the air. Her father would be working alone all day on the outskirts of the Jefferson ranch. Old section of fence, he’d murmured. Trampled, needs fixing.

  Pancakes and hot cocoa for breakfast. Her mother had already set out her easel and watercolours. Helen liked to make copies of photographs that she found in old copies of National Geographic. She only ever used tiny amounts of paint, so as to preserve her precious stock, meaning that the paintings always looked faded. Her works, all places from other countries, were never hung, just stacked outside under a tarpaulin on the rear veranda. There was a bleached African jungle without animals, a tepid-looking English river, white flowers dotting its banks like cotton buds, and the pale pink of an Australian desert. The wide flat rock in the middle of the desert, rendered in an equally pale ochre, reminded Annie of a cushion.

  She made it to the door before her mother called the sound that was her name.

  Annie turned. ‘Mamma?’

  ‘Careful,’ her mother signed. ‘Please be careful.’

  Was it a warning? No, it was permission! Annie raced across the yard, shoved aside the gate, clambered through the crackling grass and onto the lowest brow of the hills. Out here, away from the cabin’s confines, the day offered a crisp invitation that she found exhilarating. A movement to her left stopped her momentarily; it was a lone hare nuzzling into a tussock. Normally she would have stayed to watch, but the spruce forest beckoned, the goshawk beckoned, for surely her bird would return –

  Kak-kak! Now the air trembled with excitement. Instinct spun Annie round, the width of her known life sliding away from her as if the entire prairie, its grasslands and homes, fences, crops and barns, was being sucked past the horizon. She gasped at the horror and pleasure of this sensation before looking upward to the light. At first she saw no more than a dark speck then she heard the call again. The speck swelled, a bullet, a bomb as the bird plunged onto the hare. Annie’s heart rejoiced. She hugged herself, knowing that she should have been appalled by the death moment, but remaining transfixed as the goshawk raised its beak and warbled its victory song before ripping the hare into bloodied pieces.

  They tended to each other throughout the dim glassy winter. The goshawk, it seemed, had found a new home in a tree that was even closer to the family’s cabin. Unless there was heavy sleet or snowfall Annie could see the bird from her bedroom window, which she liked; having found the bird she now needed it to be present – the goshawk was firmly in her world. She liked hearing it too, the kak-kak having been somehow transposed into a tune made up of whistles and chirps that were as patterned and inspirational as a hymn.

  At first her father had checked closely on the relationship, but as the season drew on he no longer seemed as worried by the presence of the bird. Of course, he didn’t say, proud silences being his way, but Annie guessed that one particular incident had convinced him. She’d been outside in a rare burst of sunshine, using her smaller shovel to help her father clear the edges of the driveway. Sharp flapping had announced an interloper; the goshawk perched insolently on a fence post. But rather than warning her inside or worse, hauling her to his version of safety, her father had looked at the bird in his expressionless way before continuing to lift and toss the snow.

  For Annie at that point, the now-familiar surge. Without a moment’s contemplation, she had dropped her own shovel and crunched out the gateway, straight past the goshawk.

  ‘Come on.’

  The snow was thicker up here. The goshawk, having obeyed her command, had circled overhead, completing a heady mix of steep climbs and elegant loops as it cried its pleasure in thrilling echoes. Annie had clumped towards the slope where, weeks before, the hare had been taken. When she’d stopped on a section of the slope she’d seen, in her mind’s eye, the bloodied tussock and limp carcass. She had also felt her father’s gaze and wondered if he had yet begun to follow her.

  No matter. Annie had raised her arms, hearing the goshawk’s scream as it began once again to climb. Soon the bird was hovering as if held by the rim of the sun – before streamlining its wing shape and beginning a long arcing descent. Annie, separated from the remainder of the world, had stayed as she was. Be still, she’d thought. Be still. She’d sensed the bird closing, the ferocious energy of its flight – then the goshawk had speared through the vee between her arms, passing across her glowing upturned face before it soared back to the roof of the sky.

  Annie had felt a rush of blood warmth that had nearly felled her. Finally, when calmed, she had looked to her father. His face was pale – but they’d been practising this manoeuvre for weeks, the goshawk and Annie.

  Not surprisingly, the hawk became central to all her photos. She snapped close-ups of its brooding brow and red eyes, the sharp claw-hook at the end of its beak and the zebra pattern on its breast. Sometimes she got her Instamatic so near, she could hold the developed print – near perfect every time – and trace the feathers with her fingertip.

  She took photos of the bird sitting smugly in its favoured spruce, on the fence post that it seemed to prefer above others, even on her window sill after she’d given it water in a tin. Although her camera didn’t have much lens power, she still aimed and pressed when the goshawk was arcing above or slow-scanning those patches of the forest where the snow was thinner and morsels of food such as squirrels or rats, even another hare, might thoughtlessly meander.

  Late February. Winter should have been finishing, pulling out like a ship headed for new waters, but of course, as seasons did, it decided on a final, furious flurry. The snow blew in once again, the wind twisted itself into a blizzard and the family was mostly cabin-bound. This time, Annie didn’t mind too much. She was accustomed to the isolation, and anyway she had planned a project: making a photo wall in her bedroom in honour of the goshawk. It was a task to savour, carefully gluing string to the edges of the photos and hanging the resulting loop over pins. She was contemplating the placement of her final, best shot – the goshawk nearby her sill, swivelling his handsome head as if to say, ‘Anything for me?’ – when she heard jeep noise and voices, Mr Jefferson and Nancy, who rarely visited, particularly in poor weather. Quickly she tucked the photograph and the glue, scissors and string ball in her odds-and-ends box, but Nancy was already part through the bedroom door, hammering on the wood panels as if she was checking for white ants and shouting, ‘Annie? I brought your invitation to the spring party. Look, I made it special, with stick-on stars –’

  Now she was gazing at the wall.

  ‘Jesus,’ she said. ‘What is that bird?’

  Annie told her. Nancy looked perplexed. She went to the photos and touched a couple, perhaps to see if they were real.

  ‘How’d you get so close?’ she asked.

  ‘I just did,’ said Annie.

  ‘Oh, come on! It’s a wild animal. They don’t let you in like that.’

  ‘This one did,’ she said.

  ‘Uh-huh. Uh-huh.’ Nancy gave her that look, usually reserved for brother George or Matilda, the bewildered Chinese girl who came to help poor, understaffed Mrs Jefferson with the housework.

  ‘I suspect trickery,’ said Nancy. ‘Don’t know how but these’ – she reached for another photo, wiped her fingertips down its glossy surface – ‘these are decidedly un-natural.’

  March finally arrived, meant to be the official beginning of spring, but the air was still iced enough to hurt a girl’s throat if she breathed too deep too quick, the snow still lay in banks and luxuriant spoors that might have spangled had there been a decent quantity of light, and the entire span of the prairie still looked saddened and without hope. Like the face of an old man, thought Annie, who’s been crying for too long.

  For near to three months the goshawk had been
in her vicinity, singing to her before swooping and killing to survive. Each morning she had looked through her window pane, and each morning the bird had been there, eying the slatey frozen grasslands with those unblinking cynical eyes.

  On the afternoon of the tenth, a Sunday, the family slip-slid the truck through melting snow to their one annual social outing, the Jeffersons’ spring party.

  Her parents were, as always, reluctant. Her father did not enjoy socialising. Annie knew that he would stand near a corner or against a wall, drink his soda and maybe eat a cupcake, but never really be there. Left alone for long enough, she thought, and he might well turn into a stick of furniture or an antique clock. Meanwhile Mrs Jefferson, who was usually pleasant despite her overdone manners, would ensure that Annie’s mother was seated on the couch with the other women so Helen could nod and smile at their excessive stories and then, whenever she looked up or away, be suitably overawed by the grim paintings and Asian vases and that monster piano that Nancy would pick at around four o’clock as she looked to be applauded for a slowcoach version of ‘Four Strong Winds’. Annie saw that Mrs Jefferson was keen for her mother to feel part of this springtime shenanigan. Once she had liked this – the woman reaching out, taking her mother’s side – but these days it seemed unnatural, like the seat on the couch had been contrived to promote Mrs Jefferson’s reputation rather than her mother’s good fortune.

  Most people from the district were at the spring party, milling through the drawing room, the foyer and Mr Jefferson’s prized animal-trophy corridor. For her own part Annie was swiftly apprehended by Nancy, who motioned for her to come upstairs, but only when Brenda Whitmore and Kiera Krug were not looking: no one could possibly want to waste yet another portion of their precious God-given time on earth with those two flopsies.

  Nancy’s room was pink and prim with flowery wallpaper, white polished furniture and a blossom smell that came from a spray can. Annie stood awkwardly near the window, which looked out to the snow-capped mountains. She only came up here once a year; it felt like being jammed inside a sweet biscuit and drowned in cream and goo.

  Nancy fiddled with her record player.

  ‘Listen,’ she ordered. ‘I have a new record.’

  The voice was plaintive, the love that it described too big and cumbersome to be real. Annie listened politely while Nancy reclined on her bed, sang along in her nasally way, waggled her fingers in the direction of the chorus.

  ‘It’s called “Annie’s Song”,’ she explained after the needle had lifted. ‘I thought you might like it.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Annie. ‘I – thank you.’

  ‘Welcome.’ Nancy leaned back, eyed Annie for a moment then asked in a drawling voice, ‘How’s your bird?’

  Annie didn’t want to talk about that. The goshawk was private. She knew that Nancy could never begin to understand –

  ‘Most girls have hockey players on their wall,’ Nancy opined. She gestured towards a poster on her wardrobe door and said, ‘Or maybe Mister Donny Osmond, who is so very talented and romantic. My point is that not many girls would display a wild animal that would peck your heart out, soon as look at the stupid thing.’

  Not many girls – so why you?

  Nancy’s eyes glittered but she smiled, as if to imply that her words were lightly meant. ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘I have to tell you something. As my best friend, I mean.’

  Best friend?

  ‘I am enrolled at the Honey Academy,’ said Nancy grandly.

  The story came out quickly. Nancy Jefferson was going to Junior High in Honey because the Lord knew that silly Ms Loveday couldn’t teach to a more specialised and intell-ectual level now, could she? Did Ms Loveday even pass Grade Seven? Seeing how she misled them all about that English king and his number of queens the other day, confusing herself with the two Catherines and suggesting five rather than six, it was truly doubtful!

  Nevertheless. In the spirit of springtime, forgive and forget. Besides which, it was true to say that Ms Loveday did do a fair job with the littlies, what with playing games and identifying all the countries, even those tiny coloured African ones that were always changing themselves, and she wasn’t so bad at math either, especially fractions, which could be irksome and a bother.

  ‘The thing is,’ said Nancy eventually, ‘what about you?’

  ‘Me?’ Annie started out of her reverie. Nancy had that effect: her twitterings sent Annie’s brain into fantasy-land where nothing was pink and prim and goshawks dominated.

  ‘You’ll have to come too,’ said Nancy matter-of-factly. ‘I’ll tell Daddy. He’ll arrange the enrolment.’

  ‘Oh no,’ said Annie, ‘I couldn’t.’

  ‘But you must.’ Nancy gazed at Annie, inspecting her until her face creased once more into that sly smile. She stretched into a new pose and said, ‘Did you think – did you really think that you could continue here? With Ms Loveday? Oh, Annie, that is just too dumb. I do believe that stupid bird has warped your brain. Of course you must come to the Academy. There really isn’t any choice.’

  The goshawk was gone.

  When Annie pulled her curtains early the next morning and wiped a space in the condensation on the window, the bird wasn’t there.

  She sat quietly in the front of the truck, said goodbye when she was dropped off at the barn, did her sums and her reading test and a rare science unit with tiny glass plates and a microscope that Ms Loveday had borrowed from her brother who worked at a university, was home well before sundown and the bird wasn’t there.

  She sat outside between columns of late light and stared into the blue, the gold, the vermilion, colours that should’ve gladdened any heart, no matter how beaten or soured – but the bird wasn’t there.

  As the week progressed she watched the spruce trees shake free of the past and stretch their limbs like dancers as they welcomed the new warmth. She saw the snow dunes turn to water as a slow freshness soaked the prairie, saw the insects poke up their heads and flutter their wings inquisitively, watched each stem of grass lift like air had been blown into its fractal of tiny lungs – but for all that change, all that lightening and raising and enlarging, the bird wasn’t there.

  It was too much to bear. Annie felt tetchy and ill-sorted. Uncharacteristically, she began to contrive ways of being mean to people. She told George Jefferson that he might know how to ride a horse and he might know how to shoot a tin can from eight paces with a slingshot or fifteen with his daddy’s air gun, but he was still no better behaved than a spoiled baby, even at ten years of age. She refused to help Brenda Whitmore with her art project; poor Brenda just needed someone to lie on sheets of taped-together paper so she could trace a true-to-size body outline, and Annie would’ve fitted perfectly. Eventually Nelson Krug did it, giggling like a madman when Brenda got to drawing about his hips.

  She told Keira Krug that she was too dumb to know anything, including how dumb she was. Keira said and did nothing in response – too dumb to even cry, thought Annie balefully. She was mean to her mother by pretending that she hadn’t seen or heard her and mean to her father by being mean to her mother, but all that meanness counted for nothing: the bird still wasn’t there.

  After the meanness was done she sat in her room, simmering and hurting and wanting to axe-murder the door. Eventually she found herself tying a shoelace into a fearsome batch of knots because she hated the lace almost as much as she hated the shoe, a dumb babyish thing with a permanent leather bow and red, green and yellow patches like a traffic light. Who would want to wear that? Why was everything she owned so childish and basic, so lacking in the sweet complexities that she craved?

  She heard her father opening the door then felt him block the passageway.

  ‘Annika.’

  ‘Go away.’

  ‘Annika,’ he said, ‘enough. You must listen to me. The hawk –’

  ‘Go – away.’

  Oh, she was determined, but it was hard to be – well, hard, not her way at all; she was
sunny side up, said Ms Loveday, as natural and golden as an egg.

  She jerked the lace furiously. Her father said, ‘This bird goes home. This is what the hawk will do. In spring, he goes –’

  Annie refused to look at him. Lump, she thought viciously. Lump with a limp, lump with a frown, lump who speaks that way, with craters in the roads of his sentences, over-protective lump who brought us here –

  He said, ‘Next winter, maybe it will return,’ and closed the door.

  She waited a week then she waited a bit longer, got to eleven days before she became so desperate, so wild within her own mind, she determined to go and find the goshawk no matter what. No matter what! Being in this sordid place without the bird was simply too much to contemplate. It was as if her lens had changed. She looked out from a boxy little cabin to a land that should have been bursting with promise but instead was closed in again.

  Annie walked along the main track that fed through the pale grasses. The sun was neither warm nor cool: cautious, she thought, as if recently woken. She was glad for her boots because the cold had stayed in the earth. But still there was movement, the stirrings of creatures both underfoot and in hidden caches, foxes and lizards, possibly even snakes.

  In the past she had loved spring as a pageant of colour and awakening. She had thought of it as the happy season, a time when every plant and creature, big or small, seemed to think – ‘We made it, time to live again’ – which was true, because spring was about being born back into life, just as summer was about fulfilling that life before autumn, the cool-down, and winter, departure.

  But the goshawk had changed all that.

  She wandered up the slope towards the spruce forest. There was a new hum in the air; she thought of paper being unfolded. The trees smelled sharply of pine, and their green had begun to deepen from the core. Annie found the original branch where she had spotted and photographed the bird but she was disappointed to see no trace. Wondering if she had made an error, she moved tentatively along the edge of the forest; however, there was nothing but trees and the shifting shivering undergrowth, nor, she realised, was there any reason for the presence of anything more. It was a forest in early spring, and that was all.