Poems by Christie Nieman

Magpie Wars

by Christie Nieman

From Canary Summer 2018

Christie lives on Dja Dja Wurrung country in the box-ironbark forests of the Loddon River Catchment.

Even in summer the river is cold. When he gets home from his work in the city, they put on their wetsuits and hold hands and walk down through the weeds to the edge.

It doesn’t flow, this river. The water is still and deep. One time they stood on the bank and pushed a wooden pole into the water, pushed it down as far as it would go, over three metres, to the bottom. The river shouldn’t be like this. It should be broad and warm and shallow, but the two-hundred years of land-clearing for paddocks has caused the river to cut itself so deeply into the earth that it has turned salty and stopped moving. She stands on the edge and closes her eyes and imagines a flowing, shady, generous river moving slowly towards its wide-open mouth. And then she looks and sees a river that has died.

‘Hey, Honey,’ he says, ‘you want to see something funny?’

‘Yes,’ she says.

He squeezes his straight arms to his sides and then releases them, and they spring out away from his body, and bounce to a stop at a forty-five degree angle. ‘My wetsuit is too small,’ he says.

‘That is funny,’ she says.

It is baking hot so they leap in, icy water finding its way through zippers and seams to trickle over their skins. He duck-dives with his snorkel mask on and then puts on a weight belt so he can sink and investigate the steep edges of the river, looking for signs of life. She floats with her arms behind her head. She wonders when the two baby magpies will come down from their nest in the sugar gum.

He comes up spluttering.

‘An eel,’ he says.

‘How big?’

‘Not a baby.’

All they ever see are eels. And mosquito larvae. And mosquito-fish. Nothing else. No yabbies, no mites, no turtles, no leeches. So she has decided, and he has agreed. They are not going to add to the burden they see around them: the land-clearing, the overpopulation, the death of everything. They will do no more harm to this place or any other. They won’t have children.

He dives again. She reclines, body growing cold in the water, face burning in the sun. He surfaces silently, spookily, right next to her. She laughs.

‘We need to get you a flat rock for your belly,’ he says, ‘so that you can be like an otter and float there and crack open oysters on your tummy.’

He makes a wild guzzling-oysters noise and she throws her head back in the water and reaches for him with her arms. He comes in close, seal skin against seal skin.

‘How good is requited love,’ he says.

‘Good,’ she says. ‘Really good.’

A flat rock for her flat belly.

In the morning he leaves and she goes back to sleep. When she wakes again, she hears the baby magpies calling in the sugar gum. The tea he left for her an hour ago has developed a tan-leather skin. The alarm clock radio has been filling her sleeping mind with Gaza.

She lies for a moment and then sits up and turns off the voices and the stillness and the sound of birds reclaims the room. Outside a female magpie sits on a fence post, looking over the river. A family of magpies forages on the opposite bank. The female throws her head back, sending a blast of carolling their way, but the family ignores her.

As she cycles up the dirt road driveway, the male magpie makes contact with her helmet. She rides facing him, wobbling on the gravel, and he wipes his beak on a tree and glares at her. She reaches the bitumen road and turns and rides so fast her eyes stream. A Holden whizzes past her from behind, too close and too fast, sucking her into its tailwind. She pushes on but stops when she comes across the fresh body of an adolescent wood duck lying in the middle of the road. She drops her bike in the grass and approaches the duck where it lies. She hopes it isn’t breathing.

It is unmarked. There is no blood. She slides her fingers between the bitumen and the feathers. The bird is soft and warm: it feels alive. She lifts it and its head lolls as the long neck hangs down. A stream of blood flows from its bill to the road. She brings its delicate head close to her eyes. No breath disturbs the blood around the nostril. She carries it to the side of the road and sits next to it in the long grass, her hand firm on the still body, her fingers tucked into the soft place under its wing, waiting for the feathers to grow cool.

The train to the city passes through bare paddock after bare paddock interrupted by the occasional fluorescent yellow square of canola. Every few hundred metres a brown falcon sits high on a power pole or a dead tree, waiting for scurrying field mice to give themselves away. She spots every bird, twisting to look at their dark tear-stain markings, like rugby paint, as they recede in the distance. The outer suburbs of the city replace the open paddocks. Magpies nest here too. She sees them, high above the trees of the nature strips, dive-bombing one another. They can live anywhere, procreate under any conditions. She admires them.

Gina calls from across the food court. She waves an arm.

They always meet at the market; the coffee’s good, they can have lunch, buy their fruit and veg and then go to the agri-section and look at the ducks and chooks and retell their country childhood stories about each other.

‘I’ll get coffee before I sit down,’ she calls, and turns herself side-on, first one way and then the other, between chairs and prams and other pairs of women leaning in close over their coffees, and then back, cup in hand, through a sea of children to the table.

‘Christ almighty,’ she says. ‘Hello.’

‘Cheers,’ says Gina, and they clink cups.

They talk politics and siblings and art and exhibitions and property prices and mental health and work–life balance, and then she says, ‘I’m hungry, lunch?’

Gina says, ‘I don’t know if I will. I’m not feeling very well.’

And she notices, finally, that Gina’s cup is full of pale herbal tea, not coffee. And a secret, proud smile appears on Gina’s face, like nothing she’s ever seen before.

They hug, awkwardly, but the occasion demands it.

They go to the agri-section and look at the ducklings and the chickens falling over one another in their tiny cages, and suddenly she hates to see them like that. She hates it so much that she buys five ducklings and three chickens. She has no idea where she’ll keep them. The man puts them in a cardboard box with a bag of feed, and hands the box to her. She hugs the moving, squeaking box to her middle.

‘That was unexpected,’ Gina says.

‘I guess I’ll have to go,’ she says.

They almost hug again, but the box makes it impossible, so she waves goodbye with her little finger.

She sits in reception at his work with the whistling, scratching box on her knees, waiting for him to come down. She peers in the gap at the top. The ducklings scramble against the edges. They are afraid of her. She puts her hand in the box and lets it lie still, and after a while the little birds forget to be afraid. A duckling climbs inside the curl of her fingers, pushing its downy, padded breast into the warmth of her palm.

He arrives. He looks at the box. It scuffles and squeaks.

‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘I don’t know where we’re going to put them. I didn’t think.’

He sits down next to her. ‘It doesn’t matter. We’ll figure something out.’

They look into the box together and the birds panic.

‘They’re beautiful,’ he says. ‘I love them.’

They walk through the park to the station. She holds his hand, and with the other arm holds the box as steady as she can. Cyclists breeze past with eyes painted on the backs of their helmets and the magpies swoop anyway.

‘Gina’s pregnant,’ she says.

His grip on her hand tightens momentarily.

On the train they open the box so the conductor can have a look. Other commuters sit up in their seats to see. They smile. They can’t help it.

She closes the box and feels the movement of the baby birds against her belly. The ducks will interbreed with the wild ducks. She shouldn’t have done it.

He stares out the window, and as the train passes from suburban clutter into the openness of the barren paddocks, he looks suddenly worried. He reaches out and puts an arm around her, and she leans into him and into the motion of the train as it carries them home to the dead river.