16
I WAKE UP feeling like I’ve been stabbed in the ear. It takes me a good five seconds to remember that’s exactly what happened. On the train home from the city last night Jacinta and I had skimmed the aftercare pamphlet—something about not sleeping on a helix piercing for six weeks—but then the post-dragon-fruit-mocktail-sugar-crash hit, we let the train rock us into a comfortable silence, and I forgot all about that instruction.
I drag myself to the bathroom to inspect my ear, but besides some redness it doesn’t look like I’ve caused any damage. Back in my bedroom I pull open my curtains, letting in the grey light of a moody-skied day, flop back into bed then yawn so hard my jaw clicks. Jacinta’s mum dropped me home at about 2 am. It’s now 10 am. I message her straight away so we can compare ear-pain levels.
Forced-team-sports level of pain People-singing-happy-birthday-to-you-in-public level of pain
Now that I’ve told Jacinta about Charlie it’s like a wall has been knocked down between us but also like nothing has changed at all, which is such a relief it feels a bit like a dream. I was sure hanging out with her was easy only because she didn’t know about what happened, but now I know that wasn’t true.
My phone buzzes with a group message from Rach about a beach day with everyone next week. I stare at the screen and chew my cheek. I miss her so much. I wonder if it’s possible for things to ever be normal with Rach again. Then I wonder, for the first time, if she even knows what’s wrong. If she knows why I’ve drifted from her so much. I groan with the new awareness that she probably doesn’t, because I never told her, because this stuff is too hard to talk about and right now I’d rather eat and watch Netflix than deal with it.
In the bathroom I spray my ear with the saline stuff from the piercer, then I make some toast and lie on the couch under the aircon, watching nature documentaries and trying not to check my phone for messages from Lockie or Ben or overthinking the confusing mess of how I feel about either of them right now.
Mum and Dad mope around the house nursing hangovers from last night’s neighbourhood street party. I make sure my hair is covering my earring whenever they walk past to get an orange juice or some corn chips from the kitchen. I try not to wonder if they kissed at midnight last night, or if they avoided each other with extra-loud cheers and hugs with neighbours.
At the end of the third documentary, with my eyes stinging from the screen, I try to fight off a swirling sense of hopelessness, of being lost in my own life somehow. After the high of last night I’m coming back down to reality and I can’t imagine a single thing I could do right now that wouldn’t feel completely pointless.
I think about getting Charlie’s phone out again to try more security codes, but that will probably make me feel worse. There’s an almost limitless number of options; it could literally take me forever. This thought reminds me again of Charlie’s fascination with infinity. The symbol, the concept.
‘How does it not mess with your mind?’ he asked me while we were lying on the grass one afternoon two years ago, lazily chucking a tennis ball to each other. Mum was redoing the living-room feature wall the new Pantone Colour of the Year (burnished lilac) and the house reeked of paint.
‘I dunno,’ I said, brushing a fly from my arm and trying very hard not to succumb to the prickles of unease his question stirred in me. ‘I mean, it’s just a really big number.’
Charlie stopped throwing the ball and rolled towards me. ‘But it’s not, though. It’s not a number. It’s infinity. It’s forever .’ His voice had a strangled excitement to it, as if he was in a fighter jet feeling some kind of intensified g-force. ‘Like, we live for eighty years or whatever. But when we’re dead, we’re dead for all of the rest of time . You know?’
‘Well, yeah. Obviously ,’ I said, because I didn’t want to seem stupid. Even though, somehow, the reality of not existing hadn’t been so obvious a minute ago. Even though the thought of eternal, infinite oblivion and the fact that my life is a nanosecond in comparison to my not- life had never actually occurred to me. My brother really had a knack for saying things you knew it was best not to think too hard about. Still, a part of me wanted to ignore my anxiety and keep talking. To ask what the hell he thought I was supposed to do with thoughts like that and the feelings they dug up. What he did with them. But I didn’t know where to start.
Charlie threw the ball one more time, nearly to the height of the house’s roof, before catching it. Then he pulled out his phone, and the conversation was over. He was gone again down some rabbit hole that made him distant and pensive and angsty until dinner.
Back in the living room on New Year’s Day the black hole pulls hard at my clothes, hair, skin, and I feel sick with fear, but I also don’t know if I have the energy to resist it this time. I almost want to sink into the darkness, finally find out how bad it really is and then just stay down there forever. It’s coming for me eventually anyway so why not give in? Why not? Ugh, I hate this feeling! But then my phone rings. My phone actually rings. And when I see who it is my chest expands as if it’s filled with that foam stuff from Bunnings Mum used to fix the hole Charlie accidentally put in the wall when he thought karate was his one transcendent thing. I jump up to close the living-room door and then I stare at the screen so long I almost forget to answer. Finally, I swipe.
‘Hey,’ I say, all my nerves seemingly magnified in my tone.
‘Lucy! Hi!’
Ben’s voice is exactly how I remember it—like an affectionate but intense puppy. Sunshine on my skin after a very long winter. ‘Ninja’s still alive! And I’m so sorry I haven’t messaged you back! My dad is such a massive dick !’
‘It’s okay,’ I say, sinking back down on the couch. Days of distress seep out of my body, leaving behind a warm, sleepy feeling like a hug. ‘Ninja’s alive?’ It’s so hard to believe I need to hear him say it again.
‘Yeah. It’s kind of a miracle. She’s started eating and drinking again. They’re still worried about her but, yeah, she’s a little better.’
I melt further into the cushions, but then I remember what Ben said about his dad. ‘Are you okay? What happened with your dad?’
It turns out Ben went on a New Year’s camping and hiking trip with his dad, his sister and her girlfriend to some bush near the Grampians. They left early the morning after he came to my house, and he didn’t realise they wouldn’t have any reception. He got a few bars at one point but they disappeared, which explains the three dots I saw when he was typing. For a second I hate myself for not considering something obvious like this, but then I admit this scenario would never have occurred to me. I don’t think I’ve ever been deep enough in the bush to lose reception.
‘My dad actually locked his car keys in a key safe so I couldn’t even drive out to the road,’ Ben says, sounding a little breathless. ‘He reckoned he should teach me a lesson about being addicted to screens. He was loving it, I swear, his mini-authoritarian regime.’
‘Wow,’ I say, still absorbing the fact Ben wants to speak to me. ‘Sounds like fun. Nothing says fond family memories like forced compliance.’ I’m trying to lighten his mood, but I actually feel really sorry for him. Imagine only having one parent left and being on totally different planets.
‘Ugh. Yeah. I mean, it wasn’t all bad. I really like my sister and her girlfriend. And we all got pretty drunk on whisky and saw some epic shooting stars. I just didn’t want you to think I was ignoring you after…’
After I freaked out and ran off leaving you in the street alone?
‘Oh, I didn’t,’ I outright lie. ‘I thought a platypus had eaten your phone or something.’
This makes him laugh. I press the screen against my ear and soak in the sound of him.
‘Okay, so I was overthinking it and stressing over nothing for days,’ he says. ‘Good to know. That makes a lot of sense. On-brand for me.’ He sighs. ‘Anyway, what did you do for New Year’s?’
I tell him about dinner and the fireworks with Jacinta, but I’m too self-conscious to tell him about the earring Ninja tribute. It feels a little dramatic now. ‘But I mean, fireworks aren’t shooting stars. And I honestly watched most of it through my phone camera lens. Your dad would have hated me more than he already does.’
He snorts. ‘My dad’s opinion is not something anyone should care about.’
‘Right.’
‘So, sorry,’ he says, ‘but I have to get to work.’
‘Naturally,’ I say.
‘Naturally. But, ah…’ he sounds a little nervous. ‘How do you feel about a personal sanctuary tour?’
My heart floats towards the ceiling, but then sinks just as rapidly. ‘Are you forgetting I’m banned for life?’
‘So.’ Ben’s voice has turned all conspiratorial. ‘I can’t delete the photo of you from our admissions system. But it turns out that’s an admissions system problem. And if admissions isn’t open, I figure the problem doesn’t exist.’
I squish into a little ball on the couch and start grinning. ‘Go on.’
‘Night tour,’ he says. ‘Dad’s going to Dubbo Zoo for a work trip from tomorrow and he’s the only one who ever looks at the night security footage. And that I do know how to delete. Tomorrow night?’
Um, did Ben just ask me on a more-than-friends thing? Calm down, Lucy. That’s not what this is. It’s just a romantic twilight sanctuary tour with a hot, outdoorsy guy who thinks it’s badass you thought you could talk to a dingo and may or may not know that you flashed his dad. I try not to squeal. ‘Can we see Ninja?’ I ask.
‘Yeah!’ he says. ‘I can take you to her area for sure.’
‘Okay! I’m in!’
‘Nice. Okay. So, Dinesh is coming too. I’ve promised him I’d try this forever and he’d kill me if I took you first.’
‘Yeah, cool,’ I say, wondering if that might be a little awkward. But only if this is a more-than-friends thing. Is this not a more-than-friends thing?
‘Maybe you could bring Jacinta,’ Ben says. ‘Reckon she’d be keen?’
Okay, so maybe this is a double more-than-friends thing? ‘If you can promise a graphic spiel about koala-mating rituals, I guarantee it.’
Ben laughs and we organise a time to meet, then hang up.
After texting Jacinta I lie down on the couch, dazed from emotional whiplash. Ben wants to see me. Ninja is alive. My sense of hopelessness has eased very slightly, but it’s now mixed with a restless humming energy that needs some kind of purpose so that I don’t lie here and obsess over tomorrow night until my brain explodes.
I think about Ninja. I was meant to save her after all. And now I feel kind of responsible for making sure she keeps living. Because what if the vets at the sanctuary miss something important? Once Dad had a mole on his neck that his doctor assured him was fine, but Mum got a weird feeling about it and made him get a second opinion. It turns out it was very not fine and he got it cut out just in time. After that, Mum always told me and Charlie to trust our instincts, to never assume the people in charge have things one hundred per cent under control. Maybe when I see Ninja tomorrow night, my instincts will tell me something about her that I could pass on to the vets. Something that could help her. Except what do I actually know about plains-wanderers besides they’re exceptionally cute and extremely endangered?
I go into my room, grab my laptop, flop onto my unmade bed and start googling. I read a bunch of facts about their height and weight, what they eat, the differences between males and females, the fact that they don’t really fly much (expect for Ninja, apparently), that they make a ooooom sound when calling, kind of like a cow but backwards, and that the females mate with several males in a season, and the males incubate eggs and raise the young (a fact Jacinta will love).
I sigh and drum my fingers on the laptop. It’s not that I know what I’m looking for, but none of this information feels helpful or relevant for some reason. This isn’t a year-six science project. I need something…more. Then I scroll down the search results and click on an Australian Geographic article from last year. There’s a photo of a female plains-wanderer like Ninja, with the black and white spotted collar of feathers around her neck, a chest of dusty red-brown and delicate twig legs, and there’s a map of Australia showing the few places the remaining birds are found in the wild. I start reading the article and a tingling sensation begins blooming in my stomach.
On the dwindling native arid grasslands of north central Victoria, the plains-wanderer is clinging tenuously to survival. This unique species is the sole member of not only its own genus, Pedionomus, but its own family, Pedionomidae. Its closest surviving relatives are the seedsnipes from South America, meaning its evolution can be traced back at least 60 million years to when the land masses of Australia and South America were last directly linked as part of the supercontinent Gondwana. The plains-wanderer is ranked number one in Australia and fourth in the world on a list of Earth’s 9993 recognised bird species we could least afford to lose.
I blink at the screen then reread the words, feeling their weight and also something else like déjà vu. Like I’ve stumbled across a sign. But it’s the next two sentences that really get me: Put simply, there is nothing else in the world like the plains-wanderer. In terms of conservation of the world’s bird biodiversity, it doesn’t get more important than this.
Unique. Distinctive. Important. Ninja is special. Ninja is…transcendent?
I try to keep my breathing steady as the screen blurs in front of me and a few things Ben said come tumbling into place. They think she hit her head pretty hard. She’s only young. Less than a year old. I think about Ninja being obsessed with flying. My hands are sweaty and I rub them on my doona cover as I recall the sight of my brother soaring out of the gum tree in the backyard when we were kids, trying to prove something to the world. The thwack of a bird’s beak on glass, my brother’s head on tiles. Something cold trickles down my spine as a thought occurs to me that’s both really stupid and instinctively right and true.
Is Ninja…is Ninja Charlie?
I swallow hard. Maybe, for once, my brother was wrong. Maybe once you’re dead you’re not dead for infinity. Maybe you never really leave, or you can come back. I mean, it’s exactly like something Charlie would do—haunt me from beyond the grave.
‘Come on, Lucky,’ I can almost hear him say. ‘You didn’t think you’d get rid of me that easily, did you?’
The restless humming energy has intensified and I have to jump up and pace my room to stop from chewing my lip so hard I draw blood. And as I kick clothes out of my path, my cascade of thoughts crystallise further. Maybe Ninja is a sign and maybe this is my one transcendent thing. Not talking to animals exactly, not all of them and not in words, anyway, but maybe communicating with… my brother? My whole body thrums. I know it sounds ridiculous, but I honestly don’t care. Dad’s been talking about the importance of faith. And if he has heaven and placebos, and Mum has plants as friends and colour as therapy, then surely I can have this. I need a miracle, I need a sign to follow, I need a story that makes what happened make sense. I need to believe in something .
I stop walking and fold down to hug my knees, and finally the conclusion I’m desperate to draw hits me. If I can help save Ninja, if I can help to keep her alive, in a way it’s like I’m saving Charlie.
And if I can save Charlie, then maybe the darkness trying to swallow me whole will finally disappear.