by Liza Perrat
Nearby, a group of girls in crocheted bikinis, limbs shiny with coconut oil, laughed and whispered to each other, sinking nail-polished toes deep into the sand, seeking the cool beneath the burning surface. If I were slim, I too could wear a crocheted bikini instead of this ungroovy one-piece. I wished they were my mates. At least I had Angela –– my one friend. I’d invite Angela to the beach with us this summer, that’s what I’d do. Then I’d have someone to talk to on the sand, and swim with.
The girls were giggling at a knot of surfie boys wearing board shorts and plastic shark’s tooth charms on silver necklaces. Ignoring the girls’ shrieks, the boys picked them up and carried them down to the water.
As their thin bodies scraped against the boys’ muscles, the heat rose about me, pressing against my fat rolls. And when the boys dumped them onto ridden-out waves, the girls’ squeals rose louder than the seagulls’ crowing.
Idiots. As if getting chucked in the surf on a hot afternoon is so terrible.
‘Race you, Tanya,’ Dad said. ‘Last one in’s a rotten egg.’
Mum waved us off, holding up one of Shelley’s little hands in a wave.
‘Ow, ouch,’ I squealed racing across the scalding sand, sighing with relief once we reached the cool, wet shoreline.
‘Under this one,’ I shouted, as the set of waves rolled in. I dived beneath the breaker, clutched the sandy bottom so the dumpster wouldn’t pick me up and hurl me about like some ragdoll. Down I dived, again and again, and when the break came, Dad and I surfaced, laughing, breathing fast and flipping the hair from our faces.
‘Let’s get ice-creams,’ Dad said when the skin on my hands was wrinkly soft, the bum of my swimmers sagging with sand.
We hitched a ride into shore on the back of a wave, dried off and dashed across the sand up to the kiosk.
Clutching our chocolate Paddlepops, we hurried back to Mum and Shelley, and slurped our ice-creams in the shade of the umbrella. But as fast as I licked, the quicker it melted, chocolate running down my chin, my arm, blobbing onto the sand. And Mum and Dad were laughing at me getting chocolate everywhere.
The afternoon breeze wafted away the dense heat, the air turning cooler, lighter and I just knew it. This was only the beginning of loads of happy summers of sea water cooling hot skin, of ice-creams and fish and chips wrapped in newspaper. Mum, Dad, Shelley and me all together.
‘Why don’t you go for a swim with Dad?’ I said to Mum. ‘I’ll mind the baby.’
‘Okay, why not? Shelley’s just had a feed so she should be all right for a while.’ And my parents scampered off across the hot sand, hand in hand like the young lovers in Dolly magazine.
I held my sister upright, close to my face, and stared into our father’s chocolate-coloured eyes. Unlike mine, which were small, too close together and a boring greeny-brown shade. ‘Isn’t the beach great, little one? And soon you’ll be old enough to swim in the surf with me. Then the real fun will start.’
Of course Shelley was too young to even smile, let alone answer, but I was convinced she did smirk as I touched a finger to her smooth cheek. She sensed I loved her; was old enough –– responsible enough –– to take care of her in our mother’s absence. I was no longer a kid building silly sandcastles, or turning cartwheels and falling over in a heap, my mother having to brush off my faceful of sand.
‘I’ll always stick up for you, Shelley,’ I said, swaying her gently. ‘Even if you turn into an ugly and uncool kid like me.’
***
Through the blistering sunlight, I squinted at my parents lurching from the surf, walking away from the boisterous crowd of people swimming between the flags.
Dad’s arm slung across my mother’s shoulders, their hips touched as they strolled along the shoreline, curving sideways together to avoid obstacles: cracked seashells, daggery shards of cuttlefish, sharp driftwood.
I was so busy staring at my lovey-dovey parents that at first I didn’t notice Shelley’s whimpers. Her little fists began thrashing and she struggled in my arms. I hoisted her over my shoulder as I’d seen my mother do, jiggled around, patting her back to get up her wind.
The whimpers grew louder, weakened once she burped, then rose again. I bounced on the spot. ‘Shush, shush, Shelley, you’ll be all right.’
But Shelley was not all right. The cries turned to screams. People began staring as if they suspected I might be hurting her.
I laid her on the towel, checked her nappy. Clean and dry.
‘Maybe you’re too hot?’ I stripped off her cotton top, her singlet.
‘What is wrong with you?’ I gathered my shrieking, scarlet-faced sister into my arms. ‘You can’t be hungry, and you’ve burped. What is it?’
Her body stiffened, her legs outstretched, stubby feet pummelling my chest.
‘You’re hurting somewhere. But where, and from what?’
Despite the umbrella shade, the sun beat down harder, hotter on my back. ‘What is wrong, little one?’
The heat heightened her screams, trapping them in that scalding air, her little body sweat-slick against mine. More beach-goers were gawking at us, wives muttering to husbands –– advice probably, about how they’d be able to stop a baby screaming.
‘Why won’t you tell me then?’ I wanted to snap at them. ‘I don’t know what to do.’
Finally Mum and Dad were making their way back, hurrying when they realised it was Shelley making more noise than the crashing waves.
‘She won’t stop crying ... I don’t know what’s wrong.’ I shovelled Shelley into my mother’s arms. ‘I didn’t do anything ... just held her, like you showed me.’ My fingers darted to my cowlick, pressing, rubbing.
‘It’s all right,’ Mum said. ‘Probably just a bit of stuck wind.’
‘I promise I didn’t do anything to make her cry.’
‘No one’s blaming you, Princess.’ Dad dragged my fingers from the cowlick. ‘She’ll be right soon, you’ll see.’
But the stare in Shelley’s wide dark eyes seemed to plead: ‘Do something ... stop my pain. Please!’
Hiccups. Sobs. Louder hiccups, more crying and Mum pacing around, patting her back.
‘Guess we should head off home,’ Dad said, jamming down the umbrella. I bundled our things into the beach bag and we sprinted back to the Holden, Shelley shrieking the whole way.
***
Gumtree Cottage was a fifteen-minute drive from the main Wollongong beaches, but as we passed South Beach, at the end of Crown Street, then drove along Corrimal Street, alongside the Sewage Treatment Works and finally up the Gallipoli Street hill, Shelley’s wailing made the trip seem like hours.
Later, when the sun vanished over Mount Kembla and dusk fell, Shelley was still yelling. She muffled the dogs’ yelping as they ran circles around each of us –– whoever was holding her, trying to calm her down.
‘Sounds like the colic to me,’ Nanna Purvis said as Mum sat on the sofa and tried to feed her again.
Shelley jerked her face away and beat her fists against the swollen breast as if saying: ‘No, that’s not what I want!’
‘Tanya had the colic, don’t you remember, Eleanor?’ my grandmother said, scurrying out to the kitchen, the dogs on her heels. ‘Screamed the place down for weeks. We’ll try that hot-towel trick we used on her.’
‘A hot towel in this heat?’ Dad scowled at Nanna Purvis who handed a sodden, steaming towel to Mum.
‘Well, if you’re the colic expert, Dobson,’ Nanna Purvis said, ‘what do you suggest?’
Dad shrugged, flicked fag ash into one of his push-button ashtrays. Click-click, click-click.
‘Oh yes, I’d forgotten this trick,’ Mum said laying Shelley tummy-down on the hot towel. ‘It’s been so long.’
‘Yeah, should move that nasty gas, eh, Shelley?’ Nanna Purvis threw my father a triumphant smirk as her shrieks waned to exhausted little whimpers.
‘Thank goodness for that ... poor poppet.’ My mother stroked Shelley’s head. The baby’s eyelids
fluttered closed and Mum left her on her lap. I don’t think she dared move her to the cot for fear of starting up the crying again.
‘Righto, I’ll be off down the pub,’ Dad said, slapping on his Akubra hat and jingling his car keys in his pocket.
‘Typical,’ Nanna Purvis said, ‘leaving us here on our own to cope with a sick baby.’
‘Shelley’s not sick,’ Dad said. ‘Just a touch of colic. She’s fine now.’
‘Oh just let him go to the pub for a few beers,’ Mum said. ‘He’s right, she is fine now.’
Dad kissed Mum’s brow and touched a yellow-stained forefinger to the baby’s cheek. ‘Won’t be long, love, quick schooner and I’ll be back.’
But my father had been at The Dead Dingo –– aka The Dead Dingo’s Donger –– for only half an hour when Shelley woke and started crying again.
We tried the hot towel-trick again which only made her scream louder. Mum filled the bathtub and lowered Shelley into the warm, deep water.
Her face red as a waratah bloom, sweat pearls dotting her forehead, Shelley thrashed about in the tub, fists bunched as if she wanted to punch something.
Of course Nanna Purvis wouldn’t attempt to pacify her, so after that bath I took Shelley, sat in the night-feeds chair and rocked back and forth as I sang: ‘Baa baa black sheep, have you any wool, yes, sir ...’.
But she must have sensed the tension in me, the strain seeping right through Gumtree Cottage and, hating my tight and desperate embrace, her wailing stifled my words.
‘Sorry, I give up,’ I said, handing Shelley back to my mother.
I went into my own room and pulled the latest issue of Real Life Crime from its hiding place, rolled up inside Dolly –– a magazine I was allowed to read. I flung my horrible rose-patterned bedspread onto the floor, and flopped onto the sheet.
Right from when I was a kid and Mum had bought it on special at Kmart, that ugly bedspread had given me nightmares –– frightening dreams about a burglar breaking into Gumtree Cottage and stabbing me. I was bleeding to death but Mum and Dad didn’t realise because they couldn’t see my blood among those huge red roses.
Shelley eventually settled. Mum fell asleep. Nanna Purvis’s snores rattled down the hallway but I couldn’t sleep for the heat. A thick carpet of it unravelling into my room from the hot darkness outside.
A sound just beyond my window, a muted kind of cough, made me leap from the bed. Sparrows beat their wings in my chest as a shadow slipped past the window. A shadow too long, the wrong shape, to be my cat. It was the shadow of a person. Too frightened to peek through the Venetian blind slats, I stood there trembling, sweat droplets trickling down my cheeks. I didn’t want to go running to my mother like a little kid. Besides, she was still exhausted from the birth, and the bleeding, to deal with any extra dramas.
Then the shadow was gone and there was only silence and darkness, and my short and quick breaths.
Later, footsteps coming down the hallway startled me. I bolted up in my bed, listening for that cough, watching for the shadow. It was only Dad though, back from The Dead Dingo. But his noise had woken Shelley too, who started wailing.
My poor little sister cried right through the night and as the sun peeped over the Pacific horizon we all straggled from our beds, battle-weary soldiers after an entire night of Shelley’s bombardment.
6
Home from school, I opened the front door. No crying Shelley like almost every afternoon since she’d started two weeks ago at the beach. Just an echoey quiet.
‘Mum?’
‘In the bedroom, Tanya.’
My mother was lying on her bed reading Women’s Weekly, Shelley sleeping on her lambskin in the cot, a thumb stuck in her mouth.
‘Just grabbing a quick rest,’ Mum said, patting a place beside her. ‘The clinic nurse gave me a new colic remedy. This peppermint mixture. And it’s working. Your sister’s been quiet all day.’
‘That’s great.’ I kicked off my shoes and sat on her bed.
She closed her magazine, put it aside. ‘Good day at school?’
‘Okay, same as always.’ I didn’t mention the usual fat, bat-wing ear taunts; didn’t want her to fuss. She had enough to worry about with Shelley’s colic and “building up her strength”.
‘It’s so hot, isn’t it?’ I said, then as if the idea has just leapt into my head: ‘Shelley’s sleeping, so maybe Nanna Purvis would mind her and you could take me to the beach?’
‘Oh Tanya, I’d love a swim with you, but after weeks of your sister’s crying I’m just flagged out, up all night and day with her. Don’t even know where I’ll find the energy to get off this bed to cook tea.’
‘We could just go for an hour? We’ll have the quickest swim ever. Then I’ll help you cook tea.’
‘Maybe tomorrow, or the next day. If this peppermint mixture does the trick I’ll be much better in a few days. Then we’ll go to the beach, I promise.’
For two weeks she’d been saying she’d take me to the beach soon. But soon never came. My mother’s promises meant nothing. I shoved her hand from my thigh.
‘Tanya, please ...’
‘Oh, just forget about it,’ I said in my sulkiest voice, stomping out of the room. ‘I’m taking Steely for a walk.’
I stuffed Real Life Crime into the Indian shoulder bag Dad had bought me at a beachside fair, snagged Steely’s leash from the hook and clipped it onto his collar.
I knew all the neighbours thought I was a weirdo, taking Steely for walks, and this afternoon was no different. Mad Myrtle and Mavis Sloan at number fifteen peered through their Venetian blind slats. Old Lenny Longbottom at number eleven winked and smiled –– the smile you’d give a lunatic. I ignored their stares, marching out with my cat into Figtree Avenue.
The Anderson boys were playing cricket on the footpath outside their house at number ten, opposite ours, which they did each day after school. Come six o’clock their mother, Mrs Coralie Anderson, would open her front door and call out: ‘that’s enough cricket for today, boys. Time for tea.’
‘Hey, Tanya, wanna play?’ the oldest, Terry, asked. Terry and Wayne never really wanted me to play, since my cricket skills –– like every other sport –– were terrible, but you needed three for a proper game: batter, bowler, wicket-keeper. I was usually keen, the Anderson boys being the only kids besides my friend, Angela Moretti, who didn’t call me nasty names.
‘Maybe tomorrow,’ I said, too miffed at my mother to feel like cricket.
‘Is your baby sister sick or something?’ Wayne asked. ‘What with all her hollering?’
‘Just a bit of colic,’ I said. ‘She’ll get over it soon.’
‘Our mother reckons there’s something not right with Shelley,’ Terry said. ‘And that your mum should figure out how to shut her up.’
‘Nobody in this whole street can sleep anymore,’ Wayne said.
‘The nurse gave my mother a new colic mixture,’ I said. ‘And it’s working. Shelley will be better now.’
The sun roasted my face, arms and legs as I hurried up Figtree Avenue to the bush track that led to the old abattoir.
I let out a groan as I saw Stacey Mornon playing elastics with two of her friends at the end of the cul-de-sac.
Oh no, not bloody Stacey Mornon-the-moron.
‘England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales. Inside, outside, monkey’s tails,’ the friends chanted as Stacey jumped over the taut elastic, blonde curls shiny and bouncing in the sun.
I picked up Steely, tried to hide his leash.
‘Ha ha,’ Stacey said, with a sneer. ‘We know you’re walking that cat of yours, Ten-ton Tanya. Whoever takes a cat for a walk? How uncool, even for Miss Adopted Batgirl.’
‘People walk their dogs,’ I said, ‘so why not their cat?’
Their laughter seared, hot arrows through my back, as I scurried away from them and onto the bush track.
I reached my special place in a clearing, sat on my flat rock in the flimsy bush shade and pulled Real Life
Crime from the Indian bag. Steely started sniffing around.
I was so engrossed reading the story about the Faraday School kidnappings in Victoria, when two kidnappers took a teacher and her six pupils for a one-million-dollar ransom, that I didn’t notice the man approaching me.
A shadow blackened the page. My heart somersaulted in my chest and I leapt to my feet. Real Life Crime slid to the ground.
I gripped Steely’s leash and stared up at the tall, thin man with dark curly hair and eyebrows to match.
‘Who are you?’ My voice was a trembly mouse-squeak, and I was sure he could hear my heart still doing gymnastics.
***
‘Hello, Tanya. Don’t be scared.’ The man’s voice was soft and feathery, and, hands nestled in the pockets of an ankle-length Driza-Bone coat, his shoulders looked wide and hulky.
‘I’m not scared,’ I said. And I wasn’t. The longer I stared at the man the less afraid I became. I didn’t know why but he seemed familiar, so I felt no Real Life Crime stranger fears.
‘Who are you?’ I repeated. ‘Did you follow me up here?’
‘I know you come here some afternoons with your cat, Tanya, I’ve seen you before.’
His words bobbed up and down. A ripple on a calm sea. He stepped closer, his breath hot and heavy on my cheeks.
‘You’re really like your mother up close,’ he said. ‘Her lovely hair too –– same tawny shade as a dingo.’
Lovely hair? The most boring, thin and straight hair the colour of a mouse.
My fingertips flew to my cowlick, pushed at my brow.
‘You even rub that cowlick like your mother did when she was nervous, or anxious. I told you, Tanya, don’t be scared, I won’t hurt you.’
I dragged hair clumps over my ears, which made him grin.
‘And the same ears that stick out just that bit,’ he said. ‘But you’ll work out –– as your mum did –– that you can camouflage those small flaws just by wearing your hair a certain way.’
‘Who are you? And how do you know my name ... and my mother?’
‘Call me Uncle Blackie, and I knew your mum a long time ago.’ He smiled but not at me. A faraway smile, secretive, mysterious.