better to have loved and won

The guy I adore has conversations with birds. These appear to be actual reciprocal chats, where the bird says something and he answers. After he has mimicked what the bird has to say, the bird often answers again. Again he responds, using a sound palette of his own devising: whistles, chirrups and chirps, clucks of the tongue, and little spoken fragments that remake in our alphabet what the bird’s liquidity of throat has offered out into the air. He has a dozen ways of answering and the bird has endless spurls of its own devil-may-care. To me the birds as I hear them relating to him out on our verandah of a morning often sound rather curious and questioning. They sound like they like being answered, albeit clunkily, in translation.

This is mostly magpies and butcher birds, sometimes a noisy mynah: though he is more wary of them after they chased onto the four-lane road a nestling we found, on Australia Day when we had been in the country only five weeks. He scooped up the fledgling in his long hands and carried it down to Kurilpa Hall, where John Pilger’s excoriating film was being shown.

Australia Day, Invasion Day. Utopia, Utopia.

He was so worried about his baby bird that he couldn’t concentrate on the film we’d come to see. I was mortified. What could be more important than the showing in this community of this film, why should two white people with their tiny adopted bird get to disrupt the long-awaited screening. I sent him outside with his orphan and sat alone through the shaming, ennobling, uplifting film. It was crowded, it was hot. I wasn’t the only one crying. Afterwards we all filed out in silence and I found the two of them sitting outside in a folding chair under a tarp, surrounded by elders who were sipping their cups of tea and offering advice. My long-legged monster had taken off his beanie and had filled it with tufts of grass for a little nest, and the bird was perched on his lap and he had worked out a way to feed it droplets of water by dipping a long grass stem into a paper cup. “I’m going to call him Harry,” he said.

We walked home after the barbecue, after dark, it was a long walk which took us nearly two hours of hill-climbing. The little bird rode on his outstretched finger and, unbelievably, snuggled down into its own self and grew drowsy. To see this Berliner, new to Australia, carrying home a tiny fig bird on his finger and to see the bird trust him enough to fall asleep and ride asleep, this wild creature, this orphaned unnested one, was incredible to me. I said, I think he seems more like a Clarence. I think you’re right, he said, lifting the bird very gently to peer at him as we turned down to walk home along the river.

He spent the next weeks reading up about fig birds and their habits and habitats, mixing up revolting pulps and stews which Clarence wolfed down avidly, talking to him in whistles and purrs, evading the cat. Whenever the bird really liked something he would trill his little scaly wings by instinct, as though keeping himself hovering in the air in front of a favourite fruit or flower. His eyes were big and round and his neck was moulted of its baby fluff and bare of feathers. He was the funniest little guy you could imagine. The two of them sat at the computer for hours, working, and Clarence rode about the house on his friend’s shoulder. After a while there were flying lessons in the leafy backyard, a long arm held up high and swooping suddenly downwards to give Clarence the idea that he could take off, he could fly. Unmistakeably they were two best buds. We hid our smiles. They were inseparable.

Heartache came when we called the wildlife rescue people and were told you’re not, ahem, allowed to keep a wild bird in your home. My soft-hearted Berliner shed tears. He had arrived from so many miles away, from the snow, and made himself a root to fasten down into the soil by falling helplessly in love with this little halfclad chirping cute and ugly barely airborne birdie. On the day the two of them were due to meet the wildlife carer and try to put Clarence back in the same tree he had fallen from – “They’re unusual,” she said, “they’ll actually take them back” – a pall hung over the house. And even now, 10 months on, sometimes a fig bird comes to visit our mango tree and sings its song and this Berliner always cranes his neck: “Maybe it’s Clarence!”