The Elusive Language of Ducks (12 page)

It was just grazes and broken ribs and burns from the exhaust, and shattered trust. They could feel their thirteen-year-old daughter slipping from their control. Notoriously, she was the daughter of a school teacher. Their father. Everyone knew who the bad girl was. Hannah had been so good. Hannah had been no trouble at all. What had they done in the ensuing years for it all to go so badly wrong?

A year later, after a tip-off one Saturday night, Hannah drove with her father out of town and off a country road, through a gate across paddocks to the river. Teenagers were scattered about, or sitting around a bonfire. A ghetto-blaster was shrieking manic music at the night.

What's all this? their father had said as they climbed from the car.
A boy was vomiting against a tree. Another two boys were hauling a branch through the grass to replenish the fire.

Where's Maggie? Who are these people? They're drunk. Drunk!

Indeed they were. Bottles scattered everywhere. No one knew or was telling where Maggie was.

Other parents arrived in cars behind them. Some of the boys ran into the bushes. Somewhere by the trees a couple of cars vroomed into throaty action. A motorbike wove across the paddock. The girls who could stand up were busy helping their friends who couldn't. But once they stood they didn't know where to go, looking stupidly into the glare of the headlights. Others were asleep in sleeping bags.

Hannah's father tugged at his coat under his throat, his mouth open as if to make an announcement. Half the kids there knew him from school. What had he been about to say? They never found out. He took a step backwards, then staggered to the stony ground. At that moment the music stopped or was turned off. The fire was crackling and the river was rushing by and the light from the fire was flicking over her father's contorted face. His hand was pulling at the buttons of his coat. Some distance away, a girl was chattering obliviously. Car doors were slamming.

Not long after, Maggie appeared in a dishevelled state, hiccoughing uncontrollably.

Hannah looked up at her from where their father lay.

Look! she screamed. Look what you've bloody done now.

Chapter 9

They had visitors coming to stay, so Hannah had to unearth her mother from the cosy grave of bedclothes and once again face the issue of where to put her. She walked around the house with the carry-bag, eyeing this sunny corner, or this window sill with a pleasant view over the valley, or the old glory box, still smelling of camphor balls, that her mother had used for storing collected items such as sheets, towels and nightdresses before her marriage.

She was trying to imagine where her mother would most be comfortable. Somewhere picturesque, inspirational. Somewhere in Nature, maybe. She stood staring pensively out the window. Her father's ashes had been tossed into waves from jagged rocks in Hawke's Bay, amidst cracking thunder and driving rain, amongst swirling rose petals and beneath wheeling keening seagulls.

Seagulls.

Recently, Hannah had been taking more notice of the seagulls at the beach. Their huge wings. Unlike the scruffy old duckling, every feather was locked into place on their sleek thick necks to give the appearance of smooth porcelain.

She'd watched them strutting around in the sand, squealing for crusts, their skinny red legs with old-man knobble-knees.

The duck's legs in comparison were like fence posts, his knees barely visible under a ruffle of feathers. His legs were yellow with fishnet stockings pulled up into the suspenders under his fancy feather pants. They were serious legs designed for a big clown. How tall was he going to become, how big? His beak looked as if it were growing mouldy, a black symmetrical smudge smeared halfway up from the curve of his smile. She had experimented by scraping her fingernail across the black to see whether it would come off. It didn't. There were pink lumps now framing his beak, and these also had mottles of black. Perhaps he was rotting from all the puddling around in filth?

She wondered what would happen if she brought him to the sea, with all that sky above and the depth and spread of ocean below. He might just bob along on a soft summer's day, getting smaller and smaller as he
drifted away from her, the steady gaze from his black eye like a peep-hole into loneliness.

At that moment there was a knock at the door. Their visitors already!

Hannah shoved her mother into the very back of a pot cupboard and raced to open the door.

Night-time. The duck was still in his cage. Hannah could hardly stand it. She went out with a clean towel for him to nestle in. He emerged from his cubby hole blearily, expecting her to pick him up. She felt like a traitor. She felt lily-livered.

The reason she wasn't bringing him inside was simple: fear of censure. Their farmer friends, two burly brothers from Puketitiri in Hawke's Bay, had come to stay for a few days. She knew without doubt that they would have something to say about a duck sleeping in the bathroom. They'd think she was nothing but a foolish middle-aged woman. They would scoff: Hah! Poultry inside! You'll be sorry! It's an animal for Christ's sake!

As it was, when they'd spotted the duck outside in the cage they'd eyed him up as a meal prospect.

Yeah, great eating, Barbary duck, not as fatty as other ducks. He'll be just right for Christmas dinner. If we'd known you liked duck we coulda got a couple out of the freezer.

When she was about thirteen, Hannah's father pulled his flat-bottomed boat with an outboard motor from the garage. He was now selling it for something bigger. A couple of rugged, tanned duck shooters arrived to look at it. They were wearing shorts and khaki shirts, and every sentence was splattered with swear words. Bloody this and bloody that and I'll be buggered and we got the bastard. The day was sunny and hot and they all stood negotiating for the boat in the driveway, while Hannah as a young girl watched from the back steps. The deal was done and the men went off with the boat.

A few weeks later, one of the men arrived at the back door with a couple of ducks hanging from his hand, his big finger separating the two woeful heads. In gratitude for the boat.

When he'd gone, her parents discussed the ducks. They'd been uncertain; it was the plucking and the gutting they weren't sure about, and, really, duck meat was a bit rich. Hannah was interested in the inner workings of things — dissecting frogs and sheep's eyes at school was a real curiosity for her. So she offered to prepare the ducks for eating.

Her recollection of it all was a haze now, but she could still recall the sensation of yanking the feathers from the flesh, the naked skin ashiver with goose bumps which were actually duck bumps, and the last few insistent ones plucked individually. And then the gushing spill of intestines, a slimy visceral mass of innards and her fingers squishing through it all as she tried to identify each of the parts. The heart amongst it all, sitting in the palm of her hand. Then, it had been just a meaty heart. Now, when she thought this in relation to
her
duck, with that engine pumping to all the machinery of her living duck, she felt sick. Back then, she'd felt sick because of the stench. She remembered dry-retching violently as she worked. And by this stage, what had happened to the heads? She recalled the concrete double tub and her mother's preserving jars filled with fruit on the shelves alongside her. She remembered her parents bemused by her curiosity that gave her a detachment from it all. And after all that, the meal not such a treat. All she could remember now was her parents complaining about the gamey flavour.

But of course, she had no intention of talking to the duck about this.

The farmers told them a story of a woman from the country who collected unwanted male ducks because she knew they were destined for the roasting dish. She now had a flock of eighteen male ducks all rivering on her rural property, dipping and diving and splashing in a gang, all coming to eat the handfuls of maize she sprinkled out for them, all thinking she was their mother duck.

Hannah wondered how a person could love eighteen ducks when she barely had the capacity to love one.

Anyway, there was a shift in the intensity between her and the duck. She hadn't had the same time for him of late. They hadn't had the hours to garden together, to forage and weed. And when they did, he wasn't quite so clingy. He'd be content to sit apart from her. Just the other day, she'd climbed a steep bank to attend to plants and there hadn't been the same cheeping call.
She'd
been the one with the moment's concern. She stood up from the foliage, her eyes flitting over the garden for him and . . . there he was. Concealed from her, but he had placed himself so that his eye was upon her. That intense beacon beaming through the panic of separation. It was a posture of independence as if he were practising for the eventuality.

It felt like something akin to resignation. He was a ball being spun from a fraying rope which was stretching further and further until one day he'd be flung off and away from her, into the sky — his new wings flapping.

It was the third evening of the farmers' stay and they'd all just arrived home from a party. Hannah went to the bathroom to wash her hands. There was no chirruping welcome. The room was full of the absence of him. There was only the absolute stillness of something gone.

The farmers and Simon sat around the table drinking whiskey. Hannah sat down and listened to the things that men talked about. They were having an animated discussion about an experiment, based in Moscow, in which five men, encapsulated in a make-believe spaceship, were well on their way into a simulated journey to Mars. There were three Russians, a Frenchman, an Italian and a Chinese man. They had eighteen months in which to understand their cultural differences. The man from China taught them Chinese. Their emails and conversations to their loved ones and colleagues back home were given a twenty-minute delay to reflect the time it took for signals from Mars to reach Earth.

Simon knew all about it, had something to say about it. The journey was going to culminate in three of the cosmonauts bouncing around a sandpit in a module connected to the spaceship. This was to be regarded as a virtual landing on the planet.

Well, said Hannah, isn't that what we're all doing? Travelling on a simulated journey to the end of our lives?

The men stopped their discussion, and they all looked at her for a moment.

Crikey, Hannah, said Bruce. You've got me there.

Roy, his brother, clamped his warm, rough hand on her shoulder. You've always been a bit of a philosopher, Hann, he said kindly.

Hannah left the trio. She took the torch and crept into the night, crunching over stones, past the pond to the hutch. She was careful to keep the torchlight subtle, not to shine it in the duck's eyes as she had the night before, making him fling himself in panic at the cage wall. Tonight he rose from his towel in the corner, snaking his neck forward into the darkness, with just the tiniest hesitant gurgle of cheep. He was a white shadow in the dark. He was a ghost.

She sat in the grass and cooed at him. He was the ghost of her mother
who wanted to be a seagull but had found the body of a duck in the night and thought, That'll do. He was the ghost of her mother, blinking from that half-dead place, wandering from the back corner of her mind, to see whether the only person in the world she could trust had anything to offer her.

And then that person left, left her mother alone in the rest home, to go back over the lawn to the light and laughter in the house above.

And in her heart Hannah was aware of the disappointment she had created through her brief, unfulfilling visit.

She was in love again. They were free to be in love again, she and her duck. The farmers left without her having to divulge any behaviour that could be categorised as obsessive or eccentric by those who didn't understand. He was her secret, her bit on the side.