Corellas

Kate told me about how they were sitting in the café in the park – or rather sitting in that square of grass between paths that the café had taken over from it – with Geraldine asking after her son as Kate knew she was going to do, it being January and the university placements only recently come out – asking after Eric, Kate reckoned, for the sole purpose of telling Kate about just how well her own son was doing – all very carefully trying to avoid even as she was clearly wanting to and so failing not to mention how brilliantly her son had done at the Higher School Certificate and how, by taking the full year off, he was risking missing out on a university scholarship – how, during all of this, it was just as if a white and flaking branch had been swung at them: how there were some bleating cries, a sudden stink, and what had to be dozens or even hundreds of corellas passed over their heads, landing on the other side of the path from where they were sitting – and straight from this story about her old friend Geraldine from Canada Bay, Kate started to tell me about how much she hated corellas: just the way they heaved their little fat hips over the grass, not caring that their faces were ravaged by yesterday’s tippling, making out that their lives were hard – how they always left the drought-yellow grass thinner and yellower and scattered with their horrible under feathers, and how, in the evenings, the trees in every direction rang with their plaintive, falling calls.