The Starlings Read online

  Vivienne Kelly was born and educated in Melbourne, where she now lives. She has worked in university administration, and has a PhD from Monash University on myth and history in Australia. Cooee, her first novel, was shortlisted for the Age Book of the Year in 2008. ‘Passion Fruit’ was included in Best Australian Short Stories, and ‘The Third Child’ won the Australian Women’s Weekly short-story competition.

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  The Text Publishing Company

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  Copyright © 2017 Vivienne Kelly

  The moral right of Vivienne Kelly to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  First published in 2017 by The Text Publishing Company

  Cover design by Sandy Cull, gogoGingko

  Plate image courtesy Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, Sydney. Photo: Sotha Bourn.

  Page design by Jessica Horrocks

  Typeset by J&M Typesetting

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

  Creator: Kelly, Vivienne, 1949– author.

  Title: The starlings/by Vivienne Kelly.

  ISBN: 9781925498059 (paperback)

  ISBN: 9781925410419 (ebook)

  Subjects: Families—Fiction. Loss (Psychology)—Fiction. Australian fiction.

  CONTENTS

  EPIGRAPHS

  PROLOGUE

  Round 1

  Round 2

  Round 3

  Round 4

  Round 5

  Round 6

  Round 7

  Round 8

  Round 9

  Round 10

  Round 11

  Round 12

  Round 13

  Round 14

  Round 15

  Round 16

  Round 17

  Round 18

  Round 19

  Round 20

  Round 21

  Round 22

  Round 23: THE ELIMINATION FINAL AND THE QUALIFYING FINAL

  Round 24: THE SEMI-FINALS

  Round 25: THE PRELIMINARY FINAL

  Round 26: THE GRAND FINAL

  THE LAST PLAY

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  For my sister, Margie, and my brother, John

  The hero is one who kindles a great light in the world, who sets up blazing torches in the dark streets of life for men to see by.

  FELIX ADLER

  Playing footy brought out the dark part of my soul…

  LEIGH MATTHEWS

  PROLOGUE

  For more than thirty years I’ve done my best to forget 1985. I crushed it into a matchbox, and I pushed the matchbox to the far corner of a dark drawer in the distant reaches of my brain, and I slammed the drawer shut. I’ve been moderately successful in this endeavour. Every now and then something will remind me of what happened in that year, but I’m a determined person and most times I manage to evade it.

  But the other day I saw Rose.

  I didn’t recognise her at first. Well, thirty years. I was visiting a friend in hospital when a nurse bustled in and took Alex’s temperature, checked his blood pressure and other vital signs of life, and presented him with tablets. She apologised for interrupting us, but she hardly looked at me. Why would she? She was in the room for I suppose five minutes, and for the first four I didn’t look at her either. Conversation lagged, as hospital conversations do when one participant is having clinical things done to him, and so I looked out the window. Then, when she was getting out the medication, my eyes rested on the nurse’s face. And I thought, That woman’s got eyes like Rose. The exact green.

  And then I realised. The woman I was looking at was not young and beautiful, and her hair was silver and cut short, but she was Rose. The shock of recognition felt like electrocution.

  ‘What’s that woman’s name?’ I asked when she’d gone.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Alex. ‘They all look the same to me.’

  ‘I thought you were the great charmer.’ Alex is an actor—good-looking and mildly famous. ‘Don’t you chat up the nurses?’

  ‘No. I am flat on my back, Nicholas, and in desperate agony. Have you not noticed?’

  I laughed and said something bantering, and we got back to talking about my next play. There was a part in it for Alex, if he wanted it.

  When I left I looked around for her, but I couldn’t see her.

  I’d given Alex some pages of the script, and I came back a couple of days later to see what he thought. I hadn’t decided what to do if I did see Rose again, but when I arrived Alex wasn’t in his room and I went to the nurses’ station to ask where he was. She was sitting behind the counter.

  ‘I’m looking for Alex West,’ I said.

  She rustled through some papers. ‘He’s off having X-rays taken. If you like to wait in his room, he’ll be back soon.’

  I swallowed. ‘Rose,’ I said.

  She looked directly at me for the first time. Her eyes widened. ‘Nicky.’

  I didn’t know where to take it from there. We stared at each other.

  ‘So,’ she said. ‘How are you, Nicky?’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’m fine too.’

  A pause. ‘I thought you might not recognise me,’ I said, trying to sound casual.

  ‘It’s been a long time. We’ve both changed, haven’t we?’ She sighed. ‘But I’ve followed your career. I’ve seen photos of you.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Oh, yes. I saw you in the theatre, once.’

  ‘You should have said hello,’ I said, awkwardly.

  ‘You were with other people. And, besides…’ She half-smiled. ‘Well. You know.’

  We limped on, and after a few inane remarks I said goodbye. But halfway down the corridor I changed my mind and swung back, angry with myself.

  ‘Could we meet? What about a drink after work? A coffee?’

  She looked strained, but she agreed, and we made arrangements.

  When I got home, I hunted through some old boxes in the garage. It took me a while but I found them, Zarlok and Fleshbane. The others I had thrown out, but those two I had wrapped in tea towels and stowed away. And, under them, my old exercise book of plays from 1985. I brought the toys and the book into the house, poured a glass of shiraz and sat down with them. And remembered.

  Once I opened the dark drawer in my brain, the matchbox became a conjuror’s toy: scarf after scarf streamed from it, endless unstoppable lengths of vivid fabric that fluttered in the air before falling around me. Everything came back so clearly. I saw it all unfolding.

  It started with my eighth birthday.

  My eighth birthday fell on Sunday 31 March 1985. Among my presents were Karkin the Clawman and Calamitus the Battle Monster, both of whom I had coveted. That alone made the day memorable, but, as it happened, my grandmother died early that morning. For my father the weekend was notable because of the previous day, a red-letter day, as he called it; the football season began that Saturday, and Hawthorn had been defeated by Geelong.

  For each of my family, then, that weekend, all those years ago, meant something different. For me it was my birthday and my presents; for my mother it was her mother’s death; for my father it was Hawthorn’s defeat. For my older siste
r, Pippa, it was probably not a significant weekend at all. Her attention was elsewhere.

  Everyone sees things differently.

  My family habitually played a forgetting game on birthdays. In my case, my father would read the newspaper and drink his coffee in silence. My mother would dart and pounce (toasting bread, making tea, chattering), and Pippa would ignore me even more strenuously than usual. It was a perilous time: I was nearly sure it was a game, nearly sure they hadn’t in fact forgotten, nearly sure the game would cease with much laughter and teasing (come on now, fess up: you thought we’d really forgotten!) and the delicious bubbly knowledge that I was loved after all.

  On this particular Sunday morning, as I came down the stairs of our Hawthorn house, it was all very quiet. When I walked into the sunroom, the breakfast things were on the table. The only person there was my father, and he was not reading the newspaper but scribbling something on a notepad.

  ‘Nicky,’ he said, in a curiously neutral voice.

  I looked around. This was a new version of the game. Perhaps my mother and sister were hiding. My mother’s battered leather briefcase, bulging as usual with unmarked essays, sat on an armchair in the corner; of my mother herself there was no sign.

  ‘Sit down, Nicky,’ said my father. He looked grim. I judged that this was probably because Hawthorn had been beaten. The previous evening my father had slumped in front of the television, morose and monosyllabic. That was how things were when Hawthorn lost, and a loss at the beginning of the season—exploding as it did all the heady optimism that had possessed him in the preceding weeks—was hard to take. At the end of the season, one could say (so I had learned), There’s always next year. At the beginning of the season, the despair was absolute. My father had listened grimly to the post-match analysis, which praised the brilliant performance of Geelong’s forward line, made patronising noises about the Hawthorn attack, and pointed out that the Hawks’ season would be mediocre indeed if their senior players could not lift. This summary put-down was made worse by the fact that Gary Ablett, the Geelong star full-forward, had dazzled yet again, with a bag of six goals, and had left Hawthorn looking pretty ordinary. And this in itself was made worse because Ablett had once been a Hawthorn player whom the club had transferred to Geelong, whereupon he turned into a superstar. It added insult to injury. My father customarily said that Ablett was overrated, and he did not like it when this hypothesis was disproved, which happened frequently.

  My father was a dentist, and I used to think you would not want to be one of his patients on a Monday after Hawthorn had lost. Especially if you happened to be a Collingwood or an Essendon supporter.

  Still, it was my birthday. Hawthorn’s loss was important—I understood this—but surely not more important than my eighth birthday.

  I sat. ‘Where’s Mummy?’

  ‘Mummy’s gone over to be with Grandpa.’

  ‘Grandpa and Didie?’

  My grandmother’s name was Diana and everybody, even my mother, called her Didie.

  ‘Just Grandpa,’ he said. ‘Didie has died, Nicky.’

  A spasm flickered over his face, doubtless caused by the inadvertently comic edge of what he had just said. It sounded like a nonsense rhyme: I could not decode it, could not work out what was being expressed. I smiled and said nothing. I still thought I was in a game. Any moment, everyone was going to jump out whooping from under chairs, behind curtains.

  ‘She died, Nicky. Your grandmother died early this morning.’

  I looked down at my empty bowl. I picked up the box of cereal and shook some in. ‘Okay,’ I said. I could be cool. It was a new version of the game, that was clear. I allowed my smile to linger and poured some milk over the cereal.

  I suppose it must appear that I was being obtuse, but you should remember that I was primed for a version of the birthday game. Further, although I had some theoretical knowledge of death, my only actual experience of it had been when our cat was run over. I had seen poor Rossini splayed on the road outside our drive; I had seen my father scraping him up with a shovel, digging a hole in the garden, burying him. These were not concepts I could align with Didie.

  ‘Are there crumpets?’ I asked. There were usually crumpets on birthdays.

  Now I realised something was badly wrong. My father had begun to assume the disappointed expression to which I was so accustomed during our dealings together: the melancholy bloodhound grooves of his long dark face were settling. And it was clear that my mother was not about to leap from behind the door.

  ‘Are you listening to me, Nicky?’ asked my father.

  It had really happened: they had forgotten. I felt the prickling behind my eyes and in my nose presaging the unmanly tears that were my father’s pet hate, and vainly I tried to suppress them. To my surprise, he leaned across and held my hand, preventing me from eating my cereal.

  ‘Never mind, old son,’ he said. ‘It’ll be hard for you. It’s hard for us all. I think it would be a good idea if you had a quiet day today, just spent it thinking about Didie. How would that be, hey? The way you want to remember her.’

  His voice wobbled and he stood, transferring his hand to my shoulder, which he squeezed. Then he left the room.

  Thinking about Didie was not how I had planned to spend my birthday. It was hard to describe exactly how I felt about Didie. If you had asked me whether I loved her, I suppose I would have agreed that I did, but really only because she was my grandmother and you were supposed to love your grandmother. In fact I did not much like Didie: she had a sharp tongue from which her grandchildren had borne much. It had always seemed to me, moreover, that I suffered more than Pippa; why I did not know. Was it because I was younger? Or more obnoxious? Because I was male? Who could tell?

  I finished my cereal and wandered into the lounge. Perhaps my mother might be concealed somewhere there. Hope had faded, however: the room was empty. I was arrested by the colour photograph of Didie and Grandpa that stood on a bookcase. It had been taken on their silver anniversary. There she was, her puffy white hair framing her familiar round face. I have the photograph still: she is wearing what she always wore, what we called Didie colours—mushroomy, cobwebby greys and cloudy pinks, generally in lacy knits, fussy shawls, pale silky blouses, trailing scarves. Didie was like a pigeon: she had a pigeon’s plump chest, and her colours were soft and feathery. When you hugged her—if she let you hug her—you sank into her warmth and the sweet flowery smell of her.

  Of course, in recent months she had not been like this. The word cancer was not something I understood, but it had been uttered a good deal in our house over the previous year. I was confused about it, because Pippa (who consulted the astrology forecasts in the newspaper, with what degree of seriousness I was unsure) had told me that I was an Aries and she was a Cancer (another case of apparently irreconcilable concepts). But I knew that hugging Didie these days was different: what you felt was not softness and warmth but frail sharp bone, papery skin. And she gasped a little, if you hugged too hard, as if you were crushing her and she might crack.

  But nobody had ever said she might die.

  I stared at the photograph a little while, and then at the one beside it, which showed Didie and my mother together, arms about each other’s plump waists, laughably alike with their round faces and their wide eyes, except that my mother’s curls were crisp and dark. My mother’s smile was gormless and hopeful, while Didie’s by comparison was a trifle caustic. In physical terms my mother was all Didie—none of Grandpa in her at all, apparently. Grandpa was slight and dapper and urbane, and you could still see the handsome man he had been. My favourite photograph of Grandpa was in their album: it showed him in his air force uniform during the war. He was grinning cheekily up at the camera and under it Didie had written Mr Debonair! I think this photograph gave me my first intimation that old people had once lived other lives, had other bodies.

  Donizetti was stretched on the sofa, and I sat beside him and scratched his back. Rossini had belonged t
o Pippa; when he died she had mourned extravagantly, and my parents had given her Donizetti, once a black velvety kitten, to fill the gap. (My mother always named our cats.) Since Donizetti had grown into a stately scornful adult, Pippa had largely lost interest in him, and I tried to make up for this by my attentions. On this occasion Donizetti gave me a disdainful glance, rose, arched his back and stalked off. He wasn’t interested in me either.

  I wondered whether we would replace Didie, as we had replaced Rossini.

  I drifted back to my bedroom, filled with bitterness at the unfairness of life, aggrieved that Didie had stolen my birthday limelight, anxious about the new and uneasy atmosphere that had entered the house. I paused outside my sister’s bedroom: her door was shut, and from within I could hear the radio playing Madonna. Pippa and I were not precisely enemies, but this was mainly because I was seven years younger than she was, and therefore not important enough to occupy much of her attention. On the whole, she simply swatted me away. We did have occasional moments of amity, and I wondered if the unusual circumstances might provoke one of these.

  But it was never safe to knock at Pippa’s door, and I decided against it.

  Later in the morning I went to find my father, and asked without much hope if I could walk around to my grandparents’ house. They lived only a couple of blocks away, but normally I was not permitted to go their on my own.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘No, old son.’

  That was twice he had called me old son; a sure sign that things were astray.

  ‘But I want to see Mummy,’ I said, starting to cry. ‘I want to see Grandpa, and Didie.’

  ‘Didie is dead, Nicky.’

  I saw that he was on the verge of irritability, and was reminded of Hawthorn’s loss. We all stepped warily when Hawthorn had lost, but my rising panic made me reckless. ‘But I can still see her, can’t I? Why can’t I go and see Mummy?’

  ‘Mummy will be home soon.’

  ‘For lunch? Will she be home for lunch?’

  My father looked annoyed and helpless. ‘Nicky,’ he said. ‘Try to be a bit grown up about this. It’s pretty bad for everybody, and Mummy is trying to cope with it, and she’s trying to look after Grandpa too. There’s an awful lot to be done and I’m afraid she doesn’t need you over there right at the minute.’