Bird in the front garden calling so long without reply from any quarter. It kept on. If Darwin was recalled right, like feathers & colouring, bird call was all to do with attracting a mate. Neither the window by the bed, nor the pair of roof windows showed any sign of light. All the street birds here were little more than fist-sized, which couldn’t be guessed with a valiant suitor like that. The old lemon stood within reach of the window, the kaffir lime adjacent. Bab’s old almond & apple had always drawn birds and the native plantings gave subtle fragrances of their own. Third week of September, blustery & cool; the heavy quilt was needed again, pulled up close over the ears, as Arthur had described his practice through winter. Temperatures always dropped at dawn, Arthur had memorably revealed, which seemed counter-intuitive. While the bird continued, the freeway surf ground on. It reminded of the Japanese story of the disturbed girl in her apartment, only able to settle herself once she had brought a goldfish into her room. It took years to notice Arthur's accommodations of the possums & neighbourhood cats. You never saw him close to any of them, but even from a distance the regard was apparent. Arthur didn't need an indoor pet; all the neighbours had warmed to him now, his breakdown forty years before well in the past. With some luck, like bird-calling, a partner might be drawn by a writer’s words on the page—that could be considered a hidden part of the contract. The Jap girl with the goldfish introduced you imagined slept in a swoon like Picasso’s Dreamer. A couple years ago the sculptor Dave, who lived in a shack by Kororoit Creek, had followed his TCM’s suggestion to get a dog. Whenever Dave visited Col accompanied him and we sat out back on the paving beneath the trees. Bab of course had a masterly way with animals, though in the suburban setting there had been no opportunity to witness that hidden side of her. At the refurbished shishi pub in Footscray a kids’ animal petting zoo came Sundays. In African Village up the road there was a regular South Sudanese named Elephant—Akoon in Dinka. Brilliant Dinka whistlers let loose from the pavement tables at d’Afrique, imitating the birds from the lakes of their region. One afternoon a Sudanese under the weather had stumbled up & down the street with his jeans slipped halfway down his bottom, hooting like a baboon, happily it may have been.
