Mateship With Birds - By Carrie Tiffany Page 0,50

distance. The truck is running hot. It struggles up the driveway from Harry’s and once they turn on to the made road again Mervyn notices the needle on the temperature gauge is in the red. He pulls over and switches off the ignition. Father and son look at each other then, as they register the sound of the motor fading and the whistle from the radiator taking its place. Mervyn gets out of the truck and starts to lift the bonnet. He tells Leslie to go into the house over there, motioning with his chin at Mues’s place, to get some water.

The house isn’t far away and Leslie trots off at somewhere between a walk and a run. He sticks to the road for as long as he can. The surface of it appears to be getting darker in front of him as the rain spots join together and blot out the dust. Leslie judges his task as important, but it isn’t the first time it has happened and it isn’t an actual emergency. The house he is walking towards is much like any other old farmhouse on the outskirts of town. A higher level of dilapidation is obvious out here. In town the houses have some evidence of paint and an attempt at a garden. If he could have chosen one of these houses, houses more likely to contain a woman with flour on her apron, he would have. He pushes the gate open and waits for a second behind it in case the sound alerts a dog. No dog appears. He picks his way up the path to the front door. There is an old cane chair on the verandah, next to it an upturned hub cap full of cigarette butts, hundreds of cigarette butts. It’s not something his mother would allow, or at least not so close to the house. He knocks on the doorframe, but he doesn’t wait long for an answer. He steps off the verandah and walks through the long grass and fruit trees along the side of the house hoping to find a bucket out the back, and a tap, hoping to carry out his task without having to speak to anyone.

It’s around the back where things have come even more undone. There are five or six corrugated-iron sheds in different stages of decay and corrosion; a couple of them have lost their internal timbers to rot so the tin is askew, like giant sheets of paper. In between the sheds there are piles of engine parts, kerosene drums, broken farm machinery, tools, pieces of harness, chaff bags. An old piano sits partially cut up, an axe across the stained keys. There are more disturbingly personal items too: rotten rags, rusty cooking pans, brooms without bristles, fishing rods, clothes, women’s shoes of an old style not even his grandmother wears, books, hairbrushes, empty food tins, family pictures still in their glass frames. All of it brown and covered with dirt and being splattered by the rain. Leslie wonders what might be left in the house, if the house itself is empty with all of its contents strewn here in between the sheds. Looking at it makes him feel tired. A raindrop hits his arm and he licks at the skin where it lands. He looks in a couple of the sheds – empty, but with a smell of mould and manure. He’s aware that’s he’s taking too long, that he hasn’t found the water yet and his father will be wondering where he’s got to. The next shed along is in better repair. It’s larger and has a door. His attention is caught by a pile of dried-out cicadas that have built up around the doorjamb. The common ones, the greengrocers, are good for fishing. The papery bodies of the cicadas have lost most of their colour in death, but Leslie kneels down and fingers through them. He’s searching for some of the rarer types, a floury baker, or a yellow Monday. His father, Mervyn, is coming up behind him, so at the moment Leslie stands up and opens the shed door he’s startled by the weight of his father’s hand on his shoulder and he looks up into his face to see if he is angry. Later Mervyn will tell himself that he arrived at exactly the right moment. And he will tell the police that his son did not see what he saw in the shed because he was standing behind