Feel the Quiet – by Zohra Aly
ISLAND | ONLINE ONLY | AUSTRALIAN NATURE WRITING
There’s a list of things I imagine doing if I lived a different life: wandering into the small reserve I drive past daily, sipping my first cup of tea every morning on the patio bench, learning to identify native flora and fauna by name, picking up my embroidery from where I left it weeks ago. I never get round to them because I live this life, in which I’m wiping down kitchen benchtops, hanging laundry and scrolling through Instagram. But somehow, today’s script ran differently. I ticked the first item off my list and disappeared into that reserve.
In my suburb in the rural edges of Sydney’s north-west, a handkerchief of bush sits tucked in the gap between the library car park, rows of houses, and the main road to the shops and school. My daughter and other school children use it as a shortcut. Perhaps the sight of the children appearing from the trees takes me back to the stories I read as a child, of exploring English woods in search of pixies, or talking trees, or finding cottages and lakes in clearings deep within forests.
Today, on my way to buy groceries, I suddenly decide to park my car in the library car park and walk to the shops through the reserve. A few stars have aligned to achieve this – I have some time on my hands today, it’s sunny but not too warm, and the exercise will add to my step count. Within seconds – though only metres away from traffic – I am fenced in by a row of gums, and I begin to feel the quiet within.
“Within seconds – though only metres away from traffic – I am fenced in by a row of gums, and I begin to feel the quiet within.”
A blackened stump catches my eye. Taller than me, it reminds me of pictures of totem poles from my school books. I can’t tell whether heat or disease felled it. The rest of the carcass sprawls on the grass. I take a few pictures from various angles with my phone; for the last few, I’m on my knees looking up at the stump and into the sky. From this position, it’s no longer a wreck. It is bark, it is wood. It blends in; its brokenness is forgiven. I notice how leaves and bushes poke out over the railing onto the path, notice how nature doesn’t have a tight grip, but a loose hand. It allows flexibility, spillage and healing. I take a few more pictures, then a video to capture the movement as a breeze ruffles the leaves. Taking photos on my phone is a reflex these days, to capture a moment and make a memory. In bed tonight, I will collate today’s photos in an album titled ‘Library Reserve’.
A corkscrew inside me uncoils as I scan the sky through a tangle of branches and leaves. You should come here again, I tell myself. Maybe sit on the patio bench more often.
“A corkscrew inside me uncoils as I scan the sky through a tangle of branches and leaves. You should come here again, I tell myself. Maybe sit on the patio bench more often.”
The patio bench was an impulsive purchase when we moved into a new house. That first spring, I watched the apple tree outside the laundry transform itself from bare twigs on spindly stems into a mass of rouge-pink buds which burst open into puffs of candyfloss. On breezy spring days, the petals blew into flurries, like snow, but I had too many baskets of washing to get through to sit on the bench.
Walking down the path I’m suddenly aware there could be snakes or lace monitors or geckos lurking here. Should I blame growing up in Dubai for my awkwardness around nature? My childhood encounters with the natural world included lizards that found their way into our two-bedroom flat under the front door or through gaps in the wall for the air-conditioning units. I’d spot them poking out from behind the light fittings, all bulging eyes in a tiny head, or wavy grey body and four limbs akimbo, clinging to the wall. In my nightmares, they traversed the ceiling above my head; in the mornings I’d scan the sheets to check they hadn’t landed on my bed.
My mother, on the other hand, had a green thumb. She kept thriving money plants, which grew in pots in the living room. The marble-green heart-shaped leaves unfurled and seemed to extend from the stems they sprouted from. Ten o’clock flowers with their little pink faces brightened our hot balcony beside lines of flapping sheets. Were they really called ten o’clocks and money plants? Or was that what my mother called them? Either way, I never encountered anything like them in the books I was reading. In the Dubai of my childhood, in the late ’70s and early ’80s, plants hardly seemed a real thing.
On a summer’s day in Dubai, sweat beads would grow on your brows and upper lip when you drew apart the thick curtains to peep outside the window. The concrete jungle was as real as the desert. Roadsides were bare and nature strips held only scratchy grass patches and withered bushes. When we drove past the affluent beachside suburbs, we’d see bougainvillea tumble over the white walls between villas – a muddle of green leaves, thorns and papery flowers in fuschia, orange and mauve. The only place I encountered roses or poppies, oak trees or farms, was in the pages of The Enchanted Wood or on BBC TV shows. I knew the only way I could look out of a treehouse or wade through fields of tall grasses was if I climbed inside the screen, or wrote myself into the pages. Nothing short of magic would get me there.
“I knew the only way I could look out of a treehouse or wade through fields of tall grasses was if I climbed inside the screen, or wrote myself into the pages. Nothing short of magic would get me there.”
In high school Biology, I soaked up lists of botanical facts. The six parts of a leaf – apex, midrib, margin, lamina, vein, petiole. The two types of leaves, simple and compound; the six main shapes of leaves – linear, oblong, elliptical, ovate, cordate, lanceolate. I memorised how they adapted to their environment and conserved water, and I drew diagrams depicting the flow of nutritional fluids and saps in the xylem and phloem. The words rolled on my tongue like a second language. I was a curious child, interested in nature and aware of my distance from it, but accepting of the way things were. I revelled in the colour diagrams and lists in my textbooks, seeing them as a way into a world I was missing out on. Where touch and smell weren't possible, I could pore over pictures and catalogue facts.
The first time I noticed trees around me – not just their absence – was on overseas trips during school holidays. In London, we walked through leafy suburban parks or drove past green fields between cities. One holiday, we travelled back to my birth country, Kenya. On the overnight train from Mombasa, we left behind the humidity, the heat and the Indian Ocean as we chugged inland and uphill to Nairobi, the capital. Through the window, we traced silhouettes of baobabs and umbrella-shaped flame trees. On a pilgrimage to Iraq during high school, I studied my organic chemistry textbook while sitting under date palm fronds on the banks of the Euphrates. These are faded snapshots pasted in holiday albums, or fragments at the edges of my childhood mind. I knew by then that these experiences were from a different compartment of my life: the holiday box.
Perhaps as a university student in London these experiences became more rounded, engaging all my senses, not just my imagination. The first oak tree on the right in an avenue at the south entrance of Kensington Gardens became my first ‘tree friend’. I would sit underneath it and read; not fiction, but the stuff of my pharmacy degree – chemical formulae, unwieldy drug names, disease pathways. In Australia, it was the jacaranda. During my first November here, I was expecting my firstborn, and my sister-in-law pointed them out to me everywhere. Many years later, we had a garden with a jacaranda. When I stood under its purple canopy I felt the present stand still, and my mind winding back to evenings spent leaning against that oak tree. In the reserve, I felt the same.
*
At end of the path, I step out onto the pavement, and suddenly in the daylight, I see it: a dead wallaby, lying at the edge of the road. I have never seen an animal – alive or dead – this close to the local shops before. I used to follow the Instagram hashtag ‘#deathinsuburbia’, but recently unfollowed it after seeing too many posts of dead animals, birds and insects. Yet now, I pull out my phone to take some pictures. The wallaby’s fur is brown and still soft; its tail rests on a clump of dried maple leaves. Three crows hover around it; they seem to be communicating something to each other with their stares. I wonder if the wallaby spent the night in the little reserve, only to hop out in the early morning and meet this brutal fate?
The wallaby’s glassy eyes seem to follow me as I walk away. A crow pecks at the wallaby’s gut, part of which spills out onto the road. Then, all shiny black feathers, the bird struts off.
Entering Woolworths, I tuck the scenes away. My shopping list is scrawled with blunt pencil on the back of a scrap of paper. I lift bread, teabags and biscuits off the shelves and arrange them in my basket.
The wallaby is gone when I return to the scene. I imagine a kind stranger relieving it of its public indignity, giving it a humane burial and a leafy grave somewhere in the bush. Or perhaps a council worker in grey overalls drove up, tipped it into a black garbage bag, and dropped it into the green skip bin on the corner.
Two years ago, our much-loved cat Charlie went missing. We searched everywhere. When we asked the neighbours, one told us that a young man had knocked on their door to say he had hit a cat with his car and asked if they knew whose it was. The young man had laid Charlie to rest under an old towel on the nature strip across the road from our house. I had noticed the towel when driving past a few times but didn’t think twice about it. This small point of care, and the tender act of covering Charlie’s corpse, had touched me at the time. Seeing the wallaby lying close to the road, unprotected and mauled by the crows, felt so much harsher.
What led me out of the car, on my feet and into the reserve on this particular day? Wood and leaves and earth muffled the grind of traffic and the white noise in my head. I allowed myself to be that child observing from a treehouse or wading through a grassy field where I always wanted to be. I set aside the world, my desires and concerns, and watched a leaf floating down a zig-zag path from its branch; I smelt the air and imagined what the crows were saying as they met over the dead wallaby's body.
Then I drove home and unpacked the groceries.▼
This work is part of our Australian Nature Writing Project suite.
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