Different Frequencies

"Friendship isn't always about having things in common. Sometimes it's just about showing up to the same place, week after week, until the silences stop feeling empty and start feeling like something you're building together."

Kira Papathanasio's Subaru pulled into the car park at twenty past eight, later than usual for the early shift. I watched from the staff room window as both doors opened — Kira emerging from the driver's side already in motion, heading for the boot to collect her bag, while Taryn climbed out of the passenger side with the body language of someone who'd had a difficult morning.

They exchanged a few words I couldn't hear — Kira nodding once, Taryn gesturing with the kind of animation that suggested she was either explaining or complaining, possibly both. Then Kira headed for the treatment centre without looking back, and Taryn turned toward the main building, her expression shifting from animated to resigned as she crossed the gravel.

I knew the broad strokes of the arrangement. Taryn caught buses from Elizabeth to Tea Tree Plaza, and Kira picked her up on her way through from Modbury. It was the only way the placement worked — the Haven wasn't exactly accessible by public transport, and Taryn didn't have a car. The system functioned well enough when the buses ran on schedule. When they didn't, the whole thing apparently fell apart.

Taryn spotted me through the window and raised one hand in a wave that was half greeting, half apology. I lifted my mug in response — the hot chocolate had gone lukewarm, but I was still holding it for the warmth — and watched her disappear around the corner toward the staff entrance.

A minute later, the staff room door swung open and she was there, cheeks flushed from the cold, hair escaping from a ponytail that had clearly been assembled in haste.

"Don't say it," she said, pointing a finger at me before I could open my mouth.

"I wasn't going to say anything."

"You were going to say I'm late."

"You're late."

"I said don't say it." She crossed to the kettle, flicked it on, and stood with her arms wrapped around herself while she waited for it to boil. "The 6:15 from Elizabeth just didn't show. No announcement, no apology, just an empty bus stop and me standing there like an idiot in the freezing cold."

"That's rough."

"Rough doesn't begin to cover it. Had to wait for the next one, which meant I missed my connection at the interchange, which meant I didn't get to Tea Tree Plaza until almost eight. Kira'd been sitting there waiting for twenty minutes. You should've seen her face. She didn't say anything — she never says anything — but the whole drive up here was just... silence. The pointed kind." She shook her head. "You wouldn't get it — you've got a car."

I did, actually — sort of. I borrowed one of my parents' cars when I needed it, usually the Corolla, which spent roughly one week in three refusing to start for reasons no mechanic had ever satisfactorily explained. But I'd learned that Taryn's complaints weren't really invitations for commiseration. They were a kind of processing, a way of discharging the frustration so she could move on to the actual work.

The kettle clicked off. She made herself a coffee — instant, black, the kind of industrial-strength brew that I suspected was the only thing keeping her upright on mornings like this — and took a long swallow before turning to face me properly.

"Right. What's the damage?"

I handed her the clipboard with the morning task list. "Enclosure cleaning in the small mammal ward, then food prep for the macropods. Dennis is coming in at nine to help with the heavy lifting. School group at eleven, so we need everything presentable by then."

"School group." She said it the way someone might say "root canal" or "tax audit." "Primary or secondary?"

"Primary. Year fours, I think. Emily's running the programme."

"Year fours." Taryn took another swallow of coffee, grimaced, and set the mug down on the counter. "So we're talking about thirty kids hopped up on bus excitement, asking if they can hold the koalas."

"We don't have any koalas at the moment."

"They'll ask anyway. They always ask." She grabbed the clipboard from my hands and scanned the task list with the rapid eye movement of someone who'd learned to extract essential information quickly. "Enclosure cleaning. My favourite. Nothing like starting the day with possum shit and soggy newspaper."

"I can swap you for food prep if you'd rather."

"Nah, it's fine. I'm already in a mood. Might as well channel it into something productive." She looked up at me, and I saw the shift in her expression—the complaint mode dropping away, replaced by something more focused. "How are the sugar gliders? Dennis said they were looking better yesterday."

"Holding steady. They're eating well, thermoregulation's improving. Another week or two and we can start thinking about the next stage."

"Good. That's good." She nodded, tucking the clipboard under her arm. "And the ringtail? The one with the—" She made a vague gesture near her head that I understood to mean neurological damage.

The knot in my stomach tightened. "Unchanged."

Taryn's eyes stayed on my face a moment longer than necessary. She had a way of doing that—looking at you like she was reading something written in a language she was still learning, piecing together meaning from context and tone. It was disconcerting, sometimes. Like being observed by someone who hadn't yet learned that some things weren't meant to be seen.

"That's shit," she said finally. "I'm sorry."

"Yeah." I didn't have anything else to add. The ringtail's situation wasn't something that words could improve.

She seemed to understand that, because she didn't push. Just drained the last of her coffee, rinsed the mug in the sink, and headed for the door with the clipboard tucked under her arm like a weapon.

"Small mammal ward," she said over her shoulder. "If I'm not back in an hour, send a search party. Or don't. Maybe the possums will have eaten me. At least then I won't have to catch the bus home."

The door swung shut behind her, and I was alone again with the feeding schedule and the sound of the building slowly waking up around me.

The small mammal ward smelled exactly the way Taryn had predicted—the particular funk of nocturnal marsupials and their various biological outputs, overlaid with the sharp scent of eucalyptus from the browse we'd cut fresh yesterday. I found her twenty minutes later, elbow-deep in an enclosure that had housed a family of pygmy possums, her expression suggesting that the task was meeting her lowest expectations.

"They're cute," she said, not looking up as I entered. "I'll give them that. Cute enough that you almost forget they produce their own body weight in faeces every twenty-four hours."

"That's not actually true."

"It feels true. That's what matters." She extracted a wad of soiled newspaper, deposited it in the bin liner at her feet, and reached for fresh bedding material. "Pass me those gum leaves? The ones that don't look like they've already been through a digestive system?"

I handed her a bundle of fresh browse from the bucket by the door. The pygmy possums themselves had been temporarily relocated to a holding cage while Taryn worked—three tiny bodies huddled together in a furry mass, their enormous eyes tracking our movements with the wariness that came naturally to prey animals. These ones would be fine. They'd come in as orphans, but early enough that their wild instincts remained intact. Another month of conditioning, and they'd be ready for release assessment.

"So," Taryn said, arranging the browse in the enclosure with more care than her complaints might have suggested. "You were here early."

"Couldn't sleep."

"Join the club." She glanced at me sideways, that assessing look again. "Anything in particular keeping you up, or just the general existential dread of being twenty-one in a world that's actively on fire?"

I considered my response while she finished arranging the enclosure. The truth was too complicated—Nate's face in the bathroom, Ryan's shove, the fragment of conversation outside Bishop Hahn's office, all of it tangled together with thoughts about Ghost and the ringtail and the general weight of caring about things you couldn't control. But Taryn wasn't asking for the truth, not really. She was making conversation, filling silence the way she always did, and the appropriate response was something light enough to keep the exchange moving.

"Just thinking about one of the frogmouths," I said. "The one in the raptor complex. Ghost."

"Ghost?" Her eyebrows rose. "We're naming them now?"

"Unofficially. He's been here six weeks. Felt weird to keep calling him 'the tawny frogmouth in enclosure seven.'"

"Fair enough." She transferred the pygmy possums back to their cleaned enclosure, handling them with the careful confidence she'd developed over the past few months. "What's the story with Ghost, then? Why's he keeping you up at night?"

"Imprinting issues. He came in too young, spent too much time being handled before he got here. Now he's not developing appropriate wariness responses."

"Meaning?"

"Meaning he's not scared of humans. Meaning he'll probably never be releasable."

Taryn was quiet for a moment, settling the last possum into the enclosure and securing the door. When she turned to face me, her expression had lost some of its usual sardonic edge.

"That's the woman who found him, yeah? The one who kept him in her laundry?"

"She was trying to help."

"They always are." Taryn stripped off her gloves, dropping them into the bin liner with the soiled bedding. "Doesn't make it less shit for the bird, though, does it? All those good intentions, and he's still stuck here forever because someone didn't know what they were doing."

"She didn't know. Most people don't."

"Most people don't bother to find out, either. They see something cute and helpless and their first instinct is to scoop it up and take it home, and they never stop to think that maybe—" She caught herself, shook her head. "Sorry. I'm ranting. It's the buses. They put me in a mood."

"It's fine."

"It's not fine, it's annoying. I'm annoying myself." She grabbed the bin liner and hefted it over her shoulder. "Come on, let's do the next one. If I keep moving, maybe I'll stop thinking about all the ways people manage to fuck things up while trying to do the right thing."

We worked our way through the remaining enclosures in a rhythm that had become familiar over the months we'd been volunteering together. Taryn talked—about her classes, about her housemates, about the particular injustice of public transport in Adelaide's northern suburbs—and I listened, offering responses where they seemed expected, letting the flow of her words fill the space that might otherwise have been silence.

It was strange, the way we'd settled into something that felt almost like friendship. We had nothing in common, really. Different universities, different backgrounds, different ways of moving through the world. She was loud where I was quiet, impatient where I was deliberate, quick to anger and quick to laugh and quick to say whatever was on her mind without pausing to consider whether it should be said at all.

But we both showed up. Week after week, early morning after early morning, through winter cold and summer heat and all the unglamorous work that wildlife rescue actually entailed. That counted for something. Maybe it counted for everything.

"So what happens to him?" Taryn asked, as we finished the last enclosure and gathered up the cleaning supplies. "Ghost, I mean. If he can't be released?"

"Ambassador programme, probably. Educational presentations, school groups. It's not a bad life."

"But it's not the life he was supposed to have."

"No." I thought about the flight paths Ghost would never trace, the territories he'd never claim. "No, it's not."

Taryn was quiet for a moment, and I had the uncomfortable sense that she was seeing more than I wanted to show. She had that quality—a kind of emotional radar that cut through deflection and landed on whatever you were actually feeling. It was useful, sometimes, and deeply inconvenient at others.

"You really care about this stuff, don't you?" she said finally. "Like, actually care. Not just doing it for the CV or the volunteer hours or whatever."

"Don't you?"

"Yeah, but—" She waved a hand vaguely. "It's different for me. This is new. I'm still figuring out if I'm any good at it, if it's what I actually want to do with my life. You already know. You've known for ages, I can tell. This is your thing."

I didn't know how to respond to that. She was right, in a way—the Haven, the work, the animals, all of it felt less like a choice I'd made and more like something I'd discovered about myself, a piece of the puzzle that had always been missing and had finally slotted into place. But putting that into words felt dangerous somehow. Too revealing. Too close to the vulnerable core of things I usually kept protected.

"It's just what I'm good at," I said. "Everyone's good at something."

"Bullshit." Taryn grinned, the sardonic edge back in full force. "Some people are good at nothing. I've met them. I'm related to half of them." She shouldered the bin bag and headed for the door. "Come on, we've got macropod food to prep. And you can tell me more about Ghost while we work. I want to know everything."

The food preparation area was a converted shed near the main building, equipped with industrial fridges, chest freezers, and a collection of cutting boards that had seen better decades. The work was straightforward but time-consuming—chopping vegetables, weighing portions, mixing the specialised supplements that helped captive macropods maintain proper nutrition. Taryn attacked the carrots with an enthusiasm that bordered on violence, her knife making rapid thunking sounds against the cutting board.

"So the woman who found him," she said, picking up our conversation as though there'd been no interruption. "The laundry woman. Did anyone explain to her what she'd done? Or does she still think she saved him?"

"I don't know. I wasn't here when he came in."

"Someone should tell her." Thunk, thunk, thunk. Carrot pieces accumulated in a growing pile. "Not to be cruel about it, but so she doesn't do it again. So the next time she finds an orphaned bird, she calls someone who knows what they're doing instead of setting up a bloody nursery in her laundry."

"That's what the education programme is for. Teaching people the right response."

"Yeah, well, the education programme reaches, what, a few thousand people a year? There's two million people in Adelaide. The maths doesn't work out."

She had a point, though I wasn't sure what solution she was proposing. You couldn't force people to learn things they didn't want to know. You couldn't make them care about consequences they'd never have to witness. All you could do was show up, do the work, and hope that something accumulated over time—knowledge, awareness, the slow shift in public understanding that might, eventually, mean fewer animals arriving at the Haven with damage that should have been prevented.

"Emily's good at it, though," I said. "The education stuff. She makes people care."

"Emily's good at everything." There was no bitterness in Taryn's voice, just observation. "She's one of those people, you know? The ones who make it look easy. Makes the rest of us feel like we're fumbling around in the dark."

"You're not fumbling."

"I am absolutely fumbling. Have you seen me try to handle the raptors? I look like I'm fighting a losing battle with a feather duster."

"That's normal for the first few months. It takes time to develop the confidence."

"Easy for you to say. You handle them like they're house cats."

"I've been doing this for two years. And I've been interested in birds since I was a kid. You've got different strengths."

Taryn paused her assault on the carrots, knife hovering mid-air. "Yeah? Like what?"

I considered the question seriously, because she seemed to actually want an answer. "You're good with the public. The visitors, the school groups. You can talk to people in a way that makes them feel comfortable, makes them want to listen. That's not nothing."

"That's just being loud and opinionated."

"It's more than that. You make people feel like they're part of something. Like the work matters and they can contribute to it." I turned back to the sweet potato I was dicing, uncomfortable with how much I was saying. "That's a skill. Not everyone has it."

The kitchen was quiet for a moment, just the sound of knives against cutting boards and the distant calls of birds from the enclosures outside.

"That might be the nicest thing you've ever said to me," Taryn said finally. "I'm suspicious. Are you dying? Is this a deathbed confession situation?"

"I'm not dying."

"Are you sure? Because you've gone all soft and complimentary, and that's not your usual vibe. Your usual vibe is 'silent observation with occasional monosyllabic responses.'"

"Thanks for that."

"You're welcome." She grinned, the tension in the moment dissolving as quickly as it had appeared. "Seriously, though. Thank you. It's good to hear that I'm not completely useless at this."

"You're not completely useless at anything."

"Now you're just being ridiculous. I'm completely useless at loads of things. Maths, for example. Parallel parking. Maintaining healthy sleep schedules. The list goes on."

We finished the food prep in companionable rhythm, the conversation drifting to lighter topics—her upcoming exams, a documentary she'd watched about reef conservation, the ongoing saga of her housemate's boyfriend who apparently couldn't grasp the concept of washing his own dishes. By the time Dennis Faulkner's ute pulled into the car park at five past nine, we'd portioned out food for all the macropods, cleaned the preparation area, and achieved something that felt almost like equilibrium.

"Cavalry's here," Taryn said, nodding toward the window. "Time to do the heavy lifting."

I watched Dennis climb out of his vehicle—a solid man in his fifties. He spotted us through the window and raised a hand in greeting, his expression the neutral pleasantness of a person who didn't waste energy on excessive friendliness.

"You like Dennis, right?" Taryn asked, gathering up the prepared food containers. "You two seem to get along."

"He's good at his job. Reliable."

"High praise from Jerome Smith." She hefted the containers and headed for the door. "Come on, then. Let's go be useful."