Not much had changed in 50 years. Clea lay on the bed and watched the ceiling fan wobble, moving hot, humid air around the bedroom. The broken air conditioner lay on the floor next to the fly screen. From her balcony, the Malabar Coast stretched north and south with the tropical Kerala jungle running down to the beach. Morning and night, the tinny auto rickshaws over-revved on the street below. At 74, this would be her last trip to India. John would have liked the dilapidated bedroom. ‘Character building’, he would have said. They’d lived together for years. He had taught English Literature at the university where she had been a Professor in Anthropology. Their house in seaside Melbourne was full of books and primitive art she’d bought back from New Guinea and Africa.

A cool breeze sprung off the Arabian sea and she moved to the verandah, wiping the sweat from her face and arms with a wet cloth. The hotel was the same, the room was the same, gravity and age had weathered her lynx-like face and greyed her black hair but not her clear, green intelligent eyes. John and her had never travelled to India and she was glad of it. A place memory couldn’t find.

Clea had first come to Kerala as a PhD post graduate student, armed with a tape recorder, an old video camera and a backpack full of batteries, to hear the Brahmins make the sacred recitation of the Rig Veda. The ten books were more than 2000 years old, passed orally from father to son down the generations. It took a boy seven years to memorise and recite all 10,522 mantras. Every tone and phrase had to be perfect. A mystery puzzled anthropologists and ethnologists. One line of 10 seconds was unintelligible. It didn’t follow any human analogue. If she could crack the code, it would solve the mystery. It wouldn’t do her career any harm either.

She flew back to Melbourne and went over the mystery section. It sounded more like chirps and clicks than language. She studied the facial expressions of the boys reciting the prayer during the error – if that’s what it was – as their heads bobbed and weaved, getting the correct intonation and phrasing. In the distance, the microphone picked up the birds chattering and waves falling on the foreshore.

Clea thought sometime in the distant past an error was made teaching the prayer and it was not picked up by the elders. The Brahmins would never admit it. She tracked down the earliest translations in Sanskrit from 1000 years ago and the error was also there. A small space in the elaborate text which signified nothing. It was a conundrum, like a line missing from the King James Bible or the Koran.

After 18 months Clea admitted defeat and that hurt. Every research path was a dead end. The truth – a dangerous academic term – was buried in the sands of antiquity, lost somewhere on the beaches and forests of Kerala. She drove the anger inwards and lost sleep. The depression came in waves and she took to bed for a week. The sleeping pills and Valium tamped the anger down.

A month later she met John at the Peony Gardens, a small Chinese takeaway by the State Library. He was an English literature lecturer and looked like one, with a passing resemblance to DH Lawrence, complete with leather elbow patches on his green corduroy jacket. They sat on the lawn and ate their duck and rice together. He shared the chilli. She shared the soy sauce. Six months later they shared an apartment in Carlton. Five years later they bought a house in Albert Park, one street back from the beach.

When John looked back many years later, sitting in the waiting room of the Cairn’s doctor’s surgery, even with the hefty mortgage and the psychic prison the English Department had become, living in Albert Park with Clea was the happiest time of his life. Like when coral grows by slow accretion producing something original, unique and beautiful.

He worried about Clea after her parents died. She fell silent as if walking around the bottom of a dark well. But then she’d emerge from the funk with a song and plans for the day. All Mary Poppins with a ‘spit spot’ and ‘lets get on with things’. They’d be plans to stay at Wye River on the Great Ocean Road and a trip to the Scottish Highlands next year and she’d hug him and tell him how much she loved him.

They sold the house on the eve of their 30^th anniversary. John retired and was volunteering at the Zoo. Clea wasn’t sure moving to the Daintree in North Queensland was a good idea. While she’d spent half her life trekking through jungle and over mountains for work, Melbourne’s city lights held strong appeal. It seemed too soon. Although retired, she still gave guest lectures and supervised a couple of PhD students. She kept her doubts to herself.

Something else bothered her. Since her parents death, the seeds of a latent anger germinated and grew burrs. She’d knocked it back with wine and yoga but this time, it hit her like a tsunami. As a child, her parents had travelled the world and she was put in the care of a governess. She felt dumb and inadequate; taken for granted. Were they leaving because of something she’d done? Some heinous act which drove them out of the house and on to a P&O cruise ship? She adored her father but for most of her childhood, he worked long hours as a TV producer or else travelled by train across Europe, Russia and China with her adventurous mother. Now, as she packed up the house, as she said goodbye to her friends and university colleagues, the anger turned to rage which she kept to herself because as a girl, she’d been taught never to complain. To go with the flow and do good deeds and endure.

The Daintree house was cut in to the forest and perched high over a valley. The nearest neighbour was ten kilometres down a bush track. A spectacular view greeted them in the morning with the eastern sun playing on the mist lying low in the valley. The scrub fowls, the herons and kingfishers, were so different from the magpies, willy wag tails and seagulls of Melbourne. Clea went to work creating a garden. It will be alright she told herself. She’d make it work. It was her job to make it work. John built floor to ceiling bookshelves in the lounge for their books. There were so many. It only took three months during the wet season for black mould to stain the paper. He placed the bronze statue of Shiva she bought on the Rig Vida trip on the verandah and back-lit it with a solar light. It glowed in the dark and put Clea on edge. That bloody Rig Veda, she thought. Another failure.

She complained there was no culture, music or art. John mounted a large satellite dish on the roof and added a booster. At night they watched SBS and Netflix, although drops out made viewing frustrating. One night they watched ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf’ with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. Clea sympathised with Taylor’s character. She knew what she was going through. But in her case, she’d married a man who’d dragged her 2000 kilometres north of Melbourne and dropped her in the middle of a rain forest, surrounded by screeching birds and things that skittered in the night.

They’d slept in separate beds for years. The pragmatism of a good night’s sleep took precedence over romance. Whoever got up first made the tea and they’d read for an hour in their bedrooms before getting up. Clea felt the jungle closing in. The birds sounded demonic and she missed her friends. John had joined a local wildlife group and had taken an interest in Cassowaries. Clea stayed in the house, did yoga and had long static-filled conversations with her girlfriends about how she loved the wildness of the jungle, the solitude, the abundant bird life. She hated the place and she hated John for bringing her there. The shame and guilt grew. She knocked off a bottle of wine at night and often opened a second.

In the 30 years they’d been together, they’d rarely fought. Late one afternoon as they sat down to dinner on the balcony, Clea dropped a bombshell.

“I hate it here and I’m not in love with you”

John put his knife and fork down and took a large drink of Pilsner.

“Where did all this come from?”

“Buying this place and dragging me up here was stupid and it’s all your fault. I’m trapped here. Trapped with you.”

She spat that ‘you’ out like phlegm.

“But we looked at 20 other places and we agreed on this one”

“I don’t give a fuck on what we agreed on. You potter around with your bloody birds and wildlife groups, what the hell am I meant to do?”

John felt a heaviness in his gut. She’d never spoken to him like this. Their love had matured in to companionship, not the gold coin of true love but still a bond forged by shared experience. He could be a dour and moody prick but since he’d cut down on the drinking, he was more up, more sanguine. He thought they’d live their lives out together.

“I’ve been thinking about us going our separate ways”, she said.

“Because we moved to the Daintree?”

“That’s part of it. We’ve drifted apart. If you’re not recording bloody birds in the forest, you’re in your study reading. Do you know how boring you’ve become. I need freedom. I don’t want any responsibilities”

Something harsh and alien had taken hold of her and he was afraid. He was 64 and had sunk most of his money buying and renovating the house. What would he do if she left? She was his morning laughter and evening star. His head spun. Freedom? They had 20 acres of it. He rose slowly, got the keys to the jeep and drove 40 kilometres to the Daintree Village Hotel, where he sat at the end of the bar and got shit-faced. The last thing he remembered was yelling at Daryl the barman, who gave him a pillow and pushed him in the back of the jeep at closing time, “Where’s the quid pro quo, Daryl? The quid-fucking-pro quo?!”

xxxxxxxx

They sold the house and moved into a top floor two bedroom apartment in Cairns with a view of the ocean. John grumbled about broken dreams but Clea was happier. There were shops and people. They sold half of their mouldy books. Time to downsize. The statue of Shiva stood on the front balcony and wasn’t so foreboding. Clea put small palms around it. She joined the local gym and swam a kilometre at the local pool every second day. She forgave John, although she knew the fault – if that was the right word – lay with her. She made an appointment to see a psychologist, cancelled it, made another one and cancelled that too. Time and the tropical sun cauterised the anger.

They created new routines with John leading tours of bird watchers through the Daintree every two weeks and she read, learnt how to cook Southern Indian food, and flew back to Melbourne to see friends. She talked to a publisher in Carlton about writing a book about her search for the lost ten seconds of the Rig Veda. She pitched it as an anthropological detective story. The publisher said it had possibilities but she didn’t solve the mystery. It was like Sir Edmund Hillary getting within 100 metres of the top of Mount Everest and then turning back. It would leave the reader unsatisfied. Clea knew the feeling.

John sat in the doctor’s waiting room in Cairns. Clea had seen a dark raised mole on his back. Cancerous but not deep. The doctor was young and friendly. She gave him a local anaesthetic which stung and ten minutes later the mole was gone, replaced by six stitches. John was amazed that someone who looked 12 years of age was allowed to wield a scalpel. He smiled, thanked her and walked down Shield Street to the camping store.

On the second day the wound became itchy. Clea took the bandage off and the incision was hot, angry and puss-filled.

“I don’t like the look of that,” she said. “Make an appointment in the morning. Looks infected”

John let it go. It would heal itself. On the third night he awoke with a fever and chills. The ambulance rushed him in to casualty where the Registrar took Clea aside.

“It’s Sepsis. We’re pumping him full of antibiotics now. I’ll know more in the morning”

“Can I stay with him?”

“Of course”

The infection coursed through John’s blood stream and he died the following afternoon. Their friends flew up from Melbourne. A simple ceremony. Not much talk of God. Plenty of talk about his love of literature, nature, birds and Clea. A week later she took his ashes up to the Daintree, walked in to the forest, and threw them high in to the air. She stood and listened to the bird calls. This was John’s music. She turned and was about to head back to the car when a large cassowary blocked her path. A male with bright red and blue plumage around its neck. She was frightened. They could be fierce with razor-sharp claws. The bird stood still and stared at her. She walked slowly past it.

“Look after him,” she said and reached in to her bag for the car keys.

xxxxxxx

Clea caught a bus to the beach. It was only a few kilometres from where a million years ago, she’d sat and watched the Brahmins perform the Rig Veda. It didn’t matter now. A dhow was tacking far out to sea. She slowly walked in to the water. It was warm and not very salty. Far to the west lay the coast of Africa. Here, 10,000 years ago, nomadic tribesmen moved down the west coast of India and settled. She dove under the water and tiny green fish darted in front of her. The hot morning sun beat down as she collected her towel and bag, walked along the beach and cut in to the forest. The memory came flooding back of her traipsing through the same forest with her recording gear. The palm fronds at the top of the trees interlocked, creating dark, cool shade. Her skin goose-bumped as she made her way deep in to the forest. It was a 20-minute walk to the road and bus stop. She was alone when high in the trees she heard birds chirping: Blyth’s Reed Warbler and the Common Whitethroat. Natives. A shaft of light broke through the canopy and she stood underneath it, laughing. The Finger of God, she thought, breaking through the darkness. Let there be light!

The bird’s phrases soared through the forest as other birds joined in. The tone and pitch were perfect. How beautiful. John would have had the binoculars out by now. Then it hit her. The bird song wasn’t a meaningless trill of pips and squeaks. They were singing the mantras of the Rig Veda, line for line. She switched her old iPhone to ‘record’ and pointed it at the canopy. It had been so long ago she never wanted to hear the bloody Rig Vida or Sanskrit again. But here was an avian choir, who like perfect mimics, had remembered the original version and passed it down over the generations. Her hand trembled as in less than a minute they would sing the forgotten line; the missing ten seconds.

Don’t move, she thought. Don’t scare them. She closed her eyes and there it was, the full line. The birds were singing louder and prouder as they were the true keepers of the prayer. She started laughing and crying as she made her way to the bus stop and walked slowly up the five flights of stairs to her room with the broken air conditioner and sat on the bed, her feet covered in sand.

She opened her travel journal to a blank page and started transcribing. It was difficult. The bird’s version was very old, like an original manuscript. Her mind was old too. She’d shunted her knowledge of Sanskrit to the dark corners of memory. But it was still there. The great prayer. Her heart beat hard in her chest. She transcribed the chirps with their long and short rising notes. She looked at the arcane squiggles of a language almost dead and there was the missing line:

“The laughter of children in the morning
Is God laughing in your heart”

She splashed water on her face and lay on the bed and watched as the rickety old ceiling fan pushed hot, humid air around the room. Tonight she’d send the concierge off to buy a bottle of gin and tonic water and leave it in an ice bucket by her door. After a long cool shower, she’d put on her white dress and sit on the verandah and toast John, the Brahmins and the birds of the Rig Veda.