As Stars Fall

  About As Stars Fall

  The fire was fast and hot . . . only days after it went through, there were absolutely no birds left. I should have seen it as an omen, the birds all leaving like that.

  Robin is a self-confessed bird-nerd from the country, living in the city.

  On the first day at her new school, she meets Delia. Delia is freaky and definitely not good for Robin’s image.

  Seth, Delia’s brother, has given up school to prowl the city streets. He is angry at everything, especially the fire that killed his mother.

  When a rare and endangered bird turns up in the city parklands, the lives of Robin, Seth and Delia become fatefully and dangerously intertwined . . .

  An intricate love story about nature, grief, friendship and life.

  Contents

  Cover

  About As Stars Fall

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part One: Disturbance

  Prologue

  Part Two: Impact and Aftermath

  Monday

  Tuesday

  Wednesday

  Thursday

  Friday

  Part Three: States and Transitions

  Selina

  Saturday

  Sunday

  Monday

  Tuesday

  Part Four: Thresholds

  Selina

  Ash Wednesday

  Part Five: Resilience and Regeneration

  Wednesday Night

  Thursday

  Part Six: Restoration

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  About Christie Nieman

  Copyright page

  For John and Gill

  Three nights they heard the curlew cry.

  It is the warning known of old

  That tells them one tonight shall die.

  Brother and friend, he comes and goes

  Out of the Shadow Land to them,

  The loneliest voice that earth knows . . .

  Oodgeroo Noonuccal, from ‘The Curlew Cried’

  disturbance

  The light was strange. The darkness was a deep red, and there was a thickness between the stars. And the air was strange too. It had a bitter tang.

  The curlew was waiting for her mate. Her hunger was growing. She smelled the air. She fluffed her feathers over the delicate eggs that lay on the ground beneath her, growing life from her warmth. Shifting her position, she smelled the air again.

  The bush around the clearing had gone silent. The sounds of all the other animals had stopped soon after the bitter air came, except for one animal at the other side of the clearing. It made a slight whispering sound – movement, not voice. A day-creature. A human. Just one. It had made a nest out of sticks it carried with it, and a silk sheet-web over the top. It stayed inside its nest all the time. The curlew could hear it breathing.

  The air began to sting the curlew’s eyes. Her hunger increased. There was a new noise, a roar like a stormy sky but lower down, and there were other sounds in it: a snap, a creak, a groan. She put her head to the side to listen, and blinked her eyes over and over against the stinging air.

  The human across the clearing moved inside its nest. She heard the rustling of the nest materials as it tossed and turned inside. She heard the voice of it, low and intense.

  The roaring was getting louder. It was getting hard to see. She pushed her throat in and out to pump air over her tongue, prickly as the air was, to try to cool herself down. But the air was too hot. And her nest was too hot. Her eggs were overheating. She stood up from the nest to let the air over them, but the air could not cool them. She spread her wings, her feet still on the ground, touching the eggs.

  Something was crawling up a tree – something orange and bright. The stick-nest across the clearing moved suddenly and an opening appeared. The human stumbled out and fell backwards looking at the tree. The bright orange climbed until it reached the leaves and exploded. The human’s web-and-stick nest gathered thick air around it, and then it roared and became bright orange air, sucked into the sky.

  *

  The woman watched her tent as it blazed and lifted up. She ran to her four-wheel drive, climbed inside, started the engine. From inside the car she saw flames behind her, and turned to see a wall of fire covering the track out of the clearing, blocking her escape.

  And she knew that she would die.

  The wind roared, shaking the car. Flames rippled sideways through the trees, trickling through the air like water, running up everything they touched. The heat was too much. There was not enough air. Her mind fought – her children still needed her; her son and her daughter, they were not old enough, they shouldn’t be without her yet. But it was a senseless resistance. She was caught in a hostile atmosphere, a strange new planet: a violent elemental world, not meant for her.

  She looked away from the blazing world behind her, her futile hands still holding the wheel. She looked forward, helplessly – instinctively – looking for the bird she had been studying, the other sentient thing she knew to be there. And there it was, through all the burning light and smoke, still there, the Bush Stone-curlew, standing at the other side of the clearing on the ground over its nest, head up, eyes alert.

  The woman stared at the bird, only at the bird. She would not look away. She would not look at the treetops as they exploded, one by one, over her head. She would not look at the billowing inferno behind her. She would think only of her children, and she would look at the beautiful bird.

  The engine cut out, robbed of oxygen. The wall of fire closed in. The smoke loosened her mind from her body, and she held the bird’s gaze. And as the heat in the air drew her life irrevocably away from her, she suffered no pain. She felt nothing of her own. She sensed only the soft inward lifting of the bird as it prepared to fly; only the perfect ability of wings to reach the cool dark sky above. And then, when the curlew finally flapped its wings to escape, the woman went with it. The last spark of her gaze left her eyes. She was drawn up with the bird. Taken away. Brought forever to the stars.

  *

  The curlew rose from the clearing and circled once. She watched as the bright fire rushed in and the woman’s children lost their mother, and the curlew lost her own children, curled up helpless in their shells below. And then she turned and flew over the stripped and smoking trees, passing out of the bushland and into the open. She landed under trees at the edge of a paddock. There was smoke here too, but no fire. There were humans in the distance, and one nearby. She stood hidden from it against the rough grey of a fallen tree trunk. She called to her mate, her wailing cry growing louder and louder. And then, when there were no calls back, the curlew grew quiet and again spread her wings and flew up into the sky.

  She drew a long straight line south.

  impact

  and

  aftermath

  Monday

  Robin

  ‘Robin? Robin Roberts?’

  This is what I imagined was happening in my form room at that moment. I imagined some old-time bespectacled schoolmistress reading my name out over and over from her roll, and in the silence after each call the crickets chirping, the tumbleweed tumbling. I had to imagine it because I wasn’t there. I was lost.

  ‘Robin Roberts?’

  Yes, that really is my name. You’d think that two parents with the surname Roberts would think twice before calling their only daughter Robin, wouldn’t you? You’d reckon. And when you heard that those two parents were Rodney Roberts and Roberta Roberts, you’d think they were just mean – like, if they’d had to suffer all those Rs, then they’d make their kid suffer too. But if you actually knew my parents, you’d get that giving me a Rolls-Royce name was just their cute way of including me in their club: the R&R
club. Well, that was their thinking anyway. They were making sure I felt part of the family.

  The family. It’s not like there’s much of a family to be part of anymore.

  And as for the name itself, Robin, well I blame my dad for that, crazy bird-lover. Then again, I could blame my dad for a lot of things right now . . .

  *

  Lost, in the first minutes of the first day of my new posh school in the big ugly city. The bell had gone nearly ten minutes earlier, the noisy throng of girls that had crowded all available space had now completely disappeared; and F-block had clearly fallen off the face of the earth. There I was, alone in the echoing hallways, wearing the requisite below-the-knee-length tartan dress, an itchy blazer and – I was sure of it – the wrong shoes. If there is one thing I understand in this world, it is that you will never know the right shoes for a particular school until you’re in it.

  I went outside, sat on a step, and put my head on my knees. This school was nothing like my old school. I’d come from a tiny, two-building country high school, only about one hundred and fifty kids in the whole school. And now here I was in a school where there were that many kids in one year level, where corridors disappeared into the distance, and where I was supposed to find my place among hundreds of girls. That’s right. Girls. Enrolling me in a girls’ school was Mum’s bright idea. I don’t know what she was thinking.

  The thought of her made me long for her in a way I hadn’t since I was a little kid. She was here, somewhere. Back home in the country she’d taught at the private school in town while I went to the local secondary, but now, in the city, we’d ended up at the same school. It was a good school apparently, a state school with private-school pretensions. And great ‘outcomes’, Mum said. And good for her career.

  I could try to find her. But what could she do? She was teaching. I couldn’t waltz into her class in front of all her students and say in my best little-kid voice, ‘Help me, Mummy.’ I lifted my head from my knees, and bloody hell – there, right in front of me, was F-block, squat and smug. Sprinting up two steps at a time, I found F-10 on the third floor, and burst into the room suddenly and loudly. Twenty pairs of eyes turned towards me. The words ‘Mr Krietcher’ were printed on the whiteboard, and from underneath them two small, dark eyes looked me over.

  ‘And you might be?’

  Panting, out of breath, ‘Flame’, I wheezed.

  This ‘Mr Krietcher’ just looked at me funny, and then was silent.

  Oh God. What had I just done? Flame, short for Flame Robin, is my dad’s pet name for me. I stuttered and scrambled for more words.

  ‘Ah . . . Robin Roberts, sir.’

  He picked up a clipboard from the desk, and scanned the roll. ‘“Flame”, did you say? Is that a nickname? Do you prefer that?’

  ‘No, no. Robin, please. Robin’s fine. Robin Roberts.’ And with a cheesy flourish of my hand, ‘At your service.’ Oh God.

  There was giggling around the room. The teacher raised an eyebrow and the giggling stopped. He carefully marked the page, and placed the pen and the clipboard back onto the desk in front of him.

  ‘Robin Roberts, I don’t know what your last school was like, but at this school we value punctuality.’

  ‘I know, oh my God, I’m so sorry, but –’

  He cut me off by raising his hand, which I thought was a bit rude, turned back around to the board and continued writing. The minute his back was to us, all the girls in the room turned towards me, getting a good look.

  At my old school, where all the teachers knew all the students from the time they were little kids – knew their parents, knew the stupid things they had done when they were six (or sixteen) – there was room for a bit of conversational back and forth, some healthy sparring. The teachers even seemed to enjoy it. So I really didn’t know I was venturing into dangerous territory when I said, ‘But it’s my first day, sir, maybe you could go a bit easy.’

  Mistake. I could tell instantly from the way his writing arm froze, and the way all the heads in the room snapped back to look at him, to see what he would do. Shit, was he one of these insecure teachers, the ones that never let their guard down, not for a second? Oh, come on, dude, cut me some slack. He slowly turned around.

  ‘Robin Roberts, I view it as part of my job to prepare you girls for success in the adult world. And the adult world does not smile upon disorganised and irresponsible people. Now please take a seat.’

  So I’m usually a fairly cool and even-tempered person, but light the right fuse and I can go off a little bit. And for me, the right fuse was a sense of injustice. Here he was, on my first day, judging my actual character, based on what? On absolutely nothing.

  ‘But it wasn’t my fault!’

  Mr Krietcher remained calm. ‘The rules are simple. If you are late to my class I will give you detention. Today you are lucky: because it is your first day you only have a warning. But for the future, know that tardiness – and backchat for that matter – is simply unacceptable.’

  There’s this thing among teachers, I know about it from my mum. It’s a saying: Don’t smile until Easter. It’s about being a total hard-arse for the first weeks of the year so your students are totally cowed and under control before you get any sort of friendly vibe on. And it’s possible that this guy was doing that. It was possible that he would turn out to be a nice guy, a good teacher. Possible. But it was also possible that he was just an unreasonable jerk. Either way, it made no difference to my reaction. My face grew hot with the unfairness of it all.

  ‘Dude,’ I said – yes, I actually called him dude – ‘I think you’ve misjudged me, and I think you’re being a bit harsh.’ One girl actually slapped her hand over her mouth, as if she could shut me up by covering her own talking apparatus.

  He lifted his chin and looked down his nose at me, truly down his nose. ‘Dude?’ he repeated. ‘Harsh?’ he also repeated. ‘I don’t think I was being harsh. But now, as you have already given me the descriptor, I might as well deserve it. You have worn out my patience and good humour and I would like to see you here, this afternoon, at three-thirty.’

  Wow. Was this really happening? In a matter of moments my first day had gone from giving me a little bit of shit to becoming a very productive shit farm; it had produced a great quantity of the stuff and sent it very efficiently my way. And, in fact, this was a bit more shit than I was prepared to take. I was really pissed off. Hell, I’d had enough today. I’d tried my best, but now I was going to turn around and stomp out of there, bugger the consequences. But just as I was drawing myself up to a good stalking-off height, a fairly small and abrupt voice said, ‘Excuse me, sir.’

  It was a tiny, pale-looking girl sitting up towards the front of the class.

  ‘Excuse me, Mr Krietcher, but I do think you are being harsh. I’m not entirely sure why you can’t see it for yourself, but I believe Robin Roberts is correct in pointing it out to you, and I believe it is also my duty to speak up, so that you may see and correct the error of your ways.’

  There were embarrassed titters and whispers around the room, and also the odd gasp. Clearly this was all quite thrilling.

  Mr Krietcher slowly pushed his glasses back on his nose, fixing his gaze on the girl.

  ‘Delia Mann.’ He seemed to consider her for a long time as she sat there with her chin pointed straight at him. She looked fearless. It threw him. He seemed indecisive. Eventually he said, ‘Delia, I’m disappointed. But I suppose I’ll be seeing you at three-thirty as well. Quite the little party. Welcome to year eleven, everybody.’

  He went back to writing on the board and, amid whispers and looks, I took the only empty seat in the room, next to Delia.

  *

  Lunchtime was a trial. Not bold enough yet to try to sit with any of the groups from my classes, I had to eat my lunch quickly and then hide out in the library, pretending I had some pressing research. I found a table in a corner and through the library window I watched the girls in the yard. The tiny year sevens
, fresh from primary school, were still playing games, hiding and chasing. I envied them. It’s so much easier to be new all together, especially when you know you won’t get laughed at for suggesting a game. The year twelves were in the library with me, being given a special library induction, and looking stressed. I envied them too; they had an excuse not to be social.

  Outside the library windows, scattered about the yard, girls from the other year levels sat in their impenetrable social groups: all those relationships already bound tightly together, no gaps. I could see a largish group of girls from my form room. One girl was definitely at the centre of that group; you could tell by the way the other girls sat, slightly angled towards her – Natasha, that was her name. She had honey-streaked light brown hair that clearly did as it was told, falling obediently in an unwavering line down her back. She was obviously popular, but popularity here also seemed to follow strange lines – I couldn’t always pick it just by looking. Many different types of girls seemed popular, for different reasons. Some of the smartest girls in the classes I’d had so far, the ones who tried hard and took it seriously, seemed really popular. That just didn’t happen at my old school. Half the students at my old school didn’t even make it to year twelve. It was all quite disorienting.

  Maybe that was what drew my eyes to this particular group of girls clustered around Natasha: there was something familiar about them. They seemed more like the girls from home. They all wore their skirts as short as they possibly could without attracting disciplinary attention, and in class they seemed to be less conscientious than their peers. I knew how to be friends with girls like that.

  Maybe tomorrow I would take a breath and plunge in and talk to them, be friendly. But right then I was a big chicken.

  And by the end of the day, I was a big, exhausted chicken. It’s tiring, being the new girl. So the last thing I wanted to do was to stay after school.

  After everyone else had gone home, we sat in our form room, Delia and I. Mr Krietcher sat at the front of the room reading a newspaper. I was feeling a keen summer-afternoon lethargy, and if I had dared I would have put my head down on the table. Delia was actually doing homework. She was sitting neatly on her chair a few seats away from me, pulled in as close to the desk as she could get, with her maths books open, and she was writing a stream of tidy figures down the side of her page. She didn’t look at all like she was really in year eleven. She didn’t even look like she should be in year ten. She was small for a start. Her school dress was clearly too big – it was way beyond the below-the-knee stipulation; halfway down her calves, in fact. It was practically a frock. Her brown hair was in a primary-school ponytail, tied low at the back with a navy blue scrunchie that had been magically time-portalled onto her head from the 1980s. Her face was pointed and there was a slight rough boyishness around her mouth, but her forehead was baby-smooth, no furrows at all, despite her intense focus on the textbooks in front of her. She looked a lot like a little kid playing grown-ups.