Briony Reed lived in a bedsit behind my place, back when the old Hackberry trees were still standing.
We could never accept that leaf-free guttering and flat pavers were more important than a fifteen-metre s-grove of old-growth Celtis Australis, right in the middle of the city, about five minutes from the CBD…or the owls; the magnificent owls.
We spent a decade protecting the trees. They called us the ‘tree ladies’. She wrote the petitions and I got them signed. I wrote emails to Land and Housing Corporation (LHAC) and the council. I exchanged information with the Powerful Owl Society too. We did our best to stop LAHC from chopping them down. We held them to account at every turn. You needed signed approvals and council permits to even trim a tree in our vicinity. But in the end, they got them
Powerful Owls need a twenty-five-kilometre hunting radius and an old growth habitat to mate. A pair of them began using the grove as a stopover between Centennial Park and the Botanic Gardens. Our trees had matured enough to suit the owls and we had a rat plague that year.
Great rat-hunters owls. The first time I saw one I was woken at dawn by a cacophony of birds desperately mobbing the apex predator outside my bedroom window. I’d heard a woeful ‘woooo-hoo’ in the dead of night a few times but never figured out what made the sound and I was surprised to see an owl perched in the Celtis that stretched over my kitchen roof. I lived in an 1850’s two-storey terrace and the kitchen was added to the back of it some time in the sixties. I could climb onto the roof from my bedroom window.
I wanted to protect the owl under the mistaken belief it was in danger. The owl’s eyes were closed as it rocked rhythmically from side to side. With lightning speed it snatched a magpie that got too close with one talon, broke the magpie’s neck, and dangled it over the branch until dusk. They don’t eat until dusk. For the rest of the day the birds squawked and swooped from further out. I sat in awe of that stunning bird for hours, its golden eyes looked into my soul with apparent disdain. I liked being on the roof. We had a solid wooden stepladder that leaned against the back of the house. I acquired it when Land & Housing Corp (LAHC) closed a split-levelled community garden. It took two men to carry it over.
I didn’t go to paddy’s market – that could wait. I didn’t work on my series of abstracts, which I named Palimpsest, not from any sense of cleverness but because I couldn’t afford fresh canvases. I’d sanded back some failures and worked over the top of them. I took a large sketchpad, a brush, some ink, and made an attempt to catch the beauty of its lines, but every stroke failed. I’d been painting for twenty years but I couldn’t capture the essence of an owl.
At dusk, the owl devoured the magpie. It left a small pile of feathers on the roof. They fell one by one, landing with a gentle turn. I watched its eyes widen when a couple strolled past in the laneway with their small fluffy dog. I watched it extend its enormous wings and dive from the branch – gliding without a sound after sunset. It turned a full slow circle. Owls really are like cats with wings; the way their feathers are designed and arranged they make no sound at all and move like shadows. The owl looked big when perched on the branch but in flight it doubled in length. The Powerful Owl grows up to sixty-five centimetres long and its wingspan is one hundred and sixty five centimetres.
Briony asked for a detailed description of the experience. In the days that followed she asked me to tell her again and again, reacting each time as if it was the first. She knew it was rare; she knew how privileged we were to have an old-growth micro-forest next to our homes in urban Sydney. She blamed the loss of it on our nasty old neighbours, who complained endlessly about the dangers of trees at community meetings. These unfortunate souls are terrified of tripping on an uplifted paver, slipping on leaf mulch or of being hit by a falling branch.
‘Mavis nearly fell over her walker last week’
‘The roots are lifting the pavers, I tripped over one.’
‘And what with all the storms we’ve been having!’
‘If someone gets hit with a falling branch there’ll be hell to pay.’
‘Why don’t you just dig a hole now and get in?’ Briony was the master of the upward eye-roll.
It was around midnight. I say around because the fact that it was right on midnight sounds too far-fetched. I was at my computer, about to surf for articles on the mythological significance of owls when I heard an unusual sound, a cat-like screech. The Internet was dial-up then and the connection began with that wild modulated tonal sequence that let you know if you were successful or not. It was dead on midnight. The back door was open. I wasn’t sure of what I’d heard but I got up to check and heard it again.
We had a very tall cactus halfway down the courtyard, and perched on the very top of it was an owl. Not a Powerful Owl, a much smaller one, with a white heart-shaped face and eyes bright as fire. I didn’t want to frighten it. I took small slow steps and sat down less than a metre away. It was an Eastern Barn Owl. I sat there admiring the lovely creature, talking to it. They have a different gaze to the Powerful Owl, there’s none of the disdain. It had an intense warmth and curiosity to it’s stare. I was transfixed, and had the heightened feeling of presence you get when something special is happening. There was no doubt in my mind. It was a significant metaphysical event and I was not a stranger to meaningful coincidence. The appearance of another owl of a different species and this time at night, took me by surprise. What were the chances? I crept back inside to grab the camera but by the time I returned the owl had gone. I went back to my computer. An owl’s call is believed, in some cultures, to be a bad omen.
It happened quickly. I got home one afternoon and the trees were gone. I wept like a baby. I went on a rampage. I called every person I thought relevant. I wrote angry emails demanding explanations. I stomped around with a copy of the city’s tree policy and guidelines, waving them under the nose of anyone who’d listen. Briony comforted me. She was the stronger one.
We heard the workers grinding the stumps at the roots and feeding fresh cut limbs to their chippers. It was a moment of total defeat for us and the owls were foremost on my mind. I didn’t think every sighting of an owl somewhere was an omen but I knew my sightings were.
In one day our world had changed. Our sight-lines altered forever, birdsongs and the soothing rustle of wind through leaves obliterated.
The new light was harsh exposing grim neglected buildings and brickwork. The drawl of addicts arguing over deals in the laneway replaced birdsong. Domestic arguments and brutish cackling reverberated from wall to wall into our windows. The smell of sawdust angered me, and there was a terrible silence that night. Briony called it a void. We heard possums bickering over a lone Jacaranda. We sat silent and still over a pot of tea in Briony’s bedsit. Without the trees, her windows looked directly into my bedroom, ‘Fuck. We can have conversations across the lane now. Save money on phone calls.’
‘Great idea! We’ll use our Tibetan bells to get each others attention’ she murmured. I said the idea had a nice ring to it. She perked up a bit. We spent so much time together in that bedsit. It was filled with paperwork. Petitions, reports, photocopies of emails, letters of support, peer-reviewed articles on vulnerable species, articles on trees and wellbeing, on trees and the reduction of violence. They were stacked on every available surface representing years of futile effort and commitment. Our friendship had been bound in it.
I walked into an empty night and pushed my hand deep into the hole where a tree had been. I pushed my arm in to the elbow and cried bitterly. It was still hot with the spirit of the tree. It stayed warm for days. I saw less of Briony without our common goal, though I still dropped in for tea and a chat and to play with her mice from time to time. She bred fancy mice of every colour in generous cages on her patio. She’d take one out in the basket of her motorised wheelchair. She was very fond of the silky inquisitive creatures. I took a liking to a black and white spotted pair though I could never trust old Hazzy-Bear around them. He’d already eaten a few but Briony was a good sport about it.
‘It’s his natural instinct’, she’d say, ‘cats can’t help it’ and then give the remains a decent burial. She wore mice on her shoulders like brooches and let them snuggle in her long auburn hair and nestle in her pockets. She’d bring one out mid-conversation, nuzzle it lightly nose to nose and speak in a twee mouse-like voice.
Briony had lost a leg. She was a professional masseuse when a large drunken client fell and crushed her knee. It turned gangrenous. She had four surgeries over twelve months, each one took a little more of her leg until it reached the top of her thigh near the hip making it nearly impossible to be fitted comfortably with a prosthetic limb. She’d given up trying. She said her whole spine was out of whack, that her entire skeletal structure was gradually coming apart. She found it harder doing things and getting around. It was painful. Especially the missing limb, unbearable at times but her tiny friends distracted her from pain. She didn’t like taking pain medication, ‘it dulls the mind’. She said she’d rather die than end up in a nursing home.
I remember asking about the man in the dusty photo frames on her shelf. It was her former fiancé who broke their engagement and vanished when she lost her leg at the knee. They were an attractive couple that loved to jog, climb, swim, sail or go kayaking. He was in finance. They spent their holidays scaling cliffs, sailing his yacht or rafting remote forest gorges. Briony was an exceptionally beautiful woman back then; tall, lithe, graceful. I wondered if that made the situation harder to bear. At forty-five she was still beautiful, just a little overweight from being wheelchair bound as there were fewer home services then. She couldn’t afford private care and was estranged from her family. Briony could be difficult, belligerent, and her family had distanced themselves. I knew what that was like. My family was more trouble than I could handle, taking the opportunity to torture me every Christmas – My father who lives in the past in a state of perpetual disappointment. My sister with her habit of misinterpreting everything I say because she never listens. Mum, off with the fairies and my brother busy chasing his kids around the backyard. Every Christmas Dad whinges that I never visit, yet I can count the number of times they’ve visited me on one hand.
With the trees gone I helped Briony pack paperwork into boxes. We stacked them against a wall. She draped a long piece of silk over them and put a statue of Vishnu on top. Two wooden lotus bowls filled with coloured glass were placed on either side.
She gave me two of her favourite books, Musrum and The Exploits of the Incomparable Mulla Nasrudin. I still have them with her name hand-written in the cover. Briony was generous by nature but I felt something was wrong at the time. I said, ‘You’re not thinking of killing yourself are you?’ She laughed too heartily and said she didn’t have the guts to. I remember standing at her front door, old books in hand, looking at her. She was at her table leaning on her crutch wearing one of her long Indian skirts. It was black and burnt sienna and had elephants printed around the bottom.
‘Don’t be ridiculous ok? See you when you get back.’
I couldn’t wait to get away from the city – I was keen for a south coast adventure. I took Hazzy-Bear who was pretty good at travelling for a cat, though he preferred not to. I had to sneak around packing the car when he wasn’t around and never made it obvious I was packing – or I’d end up losing an hour looking for him.
The owls had forewarned the loss of the trees so I was taking The Gnostic Jung away to read. I was tired. I’d spent most of my life trying to stop bad things from happening; trying to hold the world together with varying degrees of success. It was as if the minute I let my guard down, it was taken apart piece-by-piece by an unseen force that lurked behind every mundane series of events. Exhausting.
‘Sometimes you have to let go’, Briony would say, ‘just let go.’
I was on the beach looking for smooth stones and unusual shells when Briony took a massive overdose and taped a plastic bag over her head. I’d been back for a week, meaning to drop by and say hello. Flashing lights on my bedroom wall woke me from a light sleep. I saw an ambulance, and a few police officers milling around in the garden of Briony’s building from my window. There was no siren. I knew it was her.
After she died, strangers cleared her belongings, they took anything worth taking. The rest got thrown in a skip. No one claimed her body for months. I made elaborate plans with pseudo-accomplices to steal her body from the morgue and give her the bush cremation she always wanted. Of course, this was not possible. By the end of summer, the local Baptist church claimed her.
Summer was hotter that year. The trees had sheltered my house from the midday sun. Their loss had raised the temperature by up to ten degrees. Sun cooked the roof all day, it hammered the east-facing bedroom in the mornings. In the long afternoons, brick walls on all sides absorbed heat causing a heat-bank that radiated outwards at night turning the bedroom into a sauna. I could see straight into Briony’s old bedsit. A couple of junkies moved in. I bought thick block-out curtains from Spotlight.
I found one of Briony’s small wooden lotus bowls thrown out in the street and took it home. I put a candle in it and left it burning on the day of Briony’s cremation. I came home and found the bowl burned to a perfect ash lotus, which crumbled at my touch. That same night my lover Gabriel had dreamed of a woman wearing a voluminous pale blue gown dotted with tiny silver stars. She was standing in the doorway smiling at us. I knew it was her.
Briony Reed had been dead for months but her coloured mice were everywhere. She must have opened the cages and set them free. Her pretty mice invaded the neighbourhood, and the cats were having a field day.
Rozee Cutrone ©
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