by Liza Perrat
‘Why don’t you try and stop Shelley crying?’ I said to Nanna Purvis. ‘You must know about babies, you’ve had one. Why don’t you pick her up for once?’
‘Me?’ Nanna Purvis said as if I’d asked her to fly to the moon.
‘No point asking her,’ my mother said as she came outside, panting and lugging her Venetian blinds down the verandah steps. Clunk, clunk, clunk. ‘Your grandmother never picked me up or cuddled me, not once that I can remember.’
‘Aw, I wasn’t one for all that mollycoddling,’ Nanna Purvis said. ‘Didn’t seem to do you any harm though.’
Oh yes, I certainly knew Nanna Purvis wasn’t one for mollycoddling, that she hated anyone touching her too. Except her hairdresser fiddling with her hair.
‘Can we do anything to help?’ The faces of Mad Myrtle and Mavis Sloan appeared over the number fifteen side fence.
‘Poor little mite’s been crying for weeks,’ Mad Myrtle said.
‘Doesn’t the clinic nurse know what’s wrong with her, Pearl?’ Mavis said.
‘It’s just colic,’ I said. ‘It’ll pass, we just have to be patient.’
‘I heard warmed-up vegetable oil works,’ Mad Myrtle said. ‘A teaspoon in her bottle three times a day.’
‘Humpf,’ Nanna Purvis muttered, as if she thought the sisters had no idea about anything,
‘Just call out if you need something,’ Mavis said.
‘Nosy old biddies should mind their own bananas,’ Nanna Purvis said as the women hobbled off, back inside their house.
‘They’re only trying to help,’ I said.
My mother lugged the blinds towards the washing line. Without a glance at Shelley crying in her pram, she grunted and struggled to fling them over the Hills Hoist. Arcs of sweat stained her underarms, dribbled down her forehead.
‘Let me help,’ I said.
My mother gave me a crazed kind of smile, as if my help would be just a piss in the ocean of household jobs swelling about her, but together we managed to heave the blinds over the washing line.
Mum turned on the tap, grabbed the hose and directed a fierce jet onto each slat. Slashing away the dust and dirt. Grime easily hosed away because there was barely any on those well-washed blinds.
***
My mother tramped back inside. I rocked the pram again. Like every summer, our gum tree had burst into flower –– an explosion of red fireworks. Back when I was a kid, Mum had told me about the eucalyptus legend.
‘If you walk under a gum tree and one of its blossoms falls onto your head your luck will change,’ she’d said. And her kiss on my cheek was soft as a gumnut flower.
I laid a palm against my cheek: no blossom, no kiss, just one tear that I swiped at in frustration.
A bold lizard darted out to sun itself on a rock beneath the jasmine, fat tongue lolling in the heat. The sun hopscotched between the blue-tinged eucalyptus leaves, the light chasing the shade across Shelley’s face, lulling her to sleep. The hot westerly had flattened the Pacific Ocean glassy green, the gusts tugging off the gum tree blossoms and dumping them in a ragged red circle around the trunk.
‘Garooagarooagarooga,’ Mr Kooka laughed from his branch above the baby’s pram, where he sat like some guard watching over her. ‘I’ll get Shelley to sleep. I’ll fix her up,’ he cackled, winking at me with a white, sharp eye.
‘That’s a good girl, now you have a nice long sleep,’ I whispered as her eyelids drooped and closed. ‘When you wake up I bet that nasty colic will be gone. And soon you’ll grow up and my mother will take us both to the beach. If there’s two of us nagging her, no way she’ll be able to refuse.’
A single scarlet blossom had somehow sneaked beneath the pram netting. It mustn’t have bothered Shelley because she slept on, so I left the flower where it had fallen onto her little chest, rising and falling with her gentle breaths.
‘Phew, bit of peace at last,’ Nanna Purvis said, as I hurried across the parched grass to the verandah shade, out of that brutal heat my grandmother claimed sent people mad; pushed them to do strange and terrible things they normally wouldn’t dream of.
I grabbed the half-eaten packet of Iced VoVos and plonked down on the wooden verandah boards as far as possible from the annoying grandmother and her smelly dog.
I swung my legs over the edge, faster and faster, stuffing biscuits into my mouth, watching the baby sleeping.
‘Oy, who said you could eat me Iced VoVos?’ Nanna Purvis said.
‘You don’t pay for the biscuits. Dad does, so that gives me more right to eat them than you.’
‘Ah, Tanya, I’ve told ya before, if you want them nasty schoolkids to stop their teasing, you’ll have to cut out the bikkies.’
‘Who cares?’ I shovelled the last biscuit into my mouth, but that full, warm feeling of a bellyful of biscuit didn’t last. The sickness was surging from my gut. I swallowed hard, blinked away my tears. I did care. Hated myself for gobbling so much food; disgusted at the blobs that quivered around my middle every time I moved.
‘Don’t know what’s got into ya,’ Nanna Purvis went on, ‘eating like there’s no tomorrow.’ She shook her blue curls, turned back to Only for Sheilas.
I snatched up my yoyo, Steely’s gaze moving around, up and down, a paw swiping at the string as I dangled the yoyo over the verandah edge for “walk the dog” and “around the world”.
‘And another thing,’ Nanna Purvis said. ‘Noticed you’ve had a bit of a growth spurt in the boobies department these last months. Ya mum needs to get you a training bra or they’ll end up hanging around ya knees like mine. Only natural, now ya got the monthly curse.’
Oh my god, how totally embarrassing. I stared at Nanna Purvis as she hobbled off into the kitchen. How dare she talk about that thing which had happened only once, and which you did not talk about with your grandmother.
I chucked the yoyo over the verandah edge faster, harder, thinking about that pamphlet –– The Birds ’n the Bees –– my mother had given me to read which told you nothing apart from the fact that you could now make babies.
Sullen puffs of smoke from the copper smelter stack of the Port Kembla Steelworks pumped into the sky, and the patch of Pacific Ocean in the distance taunted me with its woodsy-green coolness.
‘Wouldn’t I love to be in that sea right now, Steely?’ I threw the yoyo aside, started picking at rust-coloured flakes of paint from a verandah post. ‘I know Mum’s having a hard time of it with Shelley’s colic, Steely-boy, but I reckon she could still take me to the beach. It’s not fair, is it?’
No, fairness was only for happy people, which poor little Shelley and her colic had stolen from the Randall family.
8
It was almost dusk when the Holden lurched into the driveway –– Dad, back from downing schooners with his mates at the pub. At the same time, another car roared off down Figtree Avenue, but my Venetians were closed so I couldn’t see who was scarpering off in such a hurry.
I closed Real Life Crime, slid from my bed, kicked at the hateful rose-pattered bedspread from where I’d chucked it on the floor, and watched my father stagger into the hallway.
His eyes were stained red, breath filling the house with the reek of beer. Same as every afternoon now. He bent down to pat Bitta and Billie-Jean, tripped over the quivering bundles of fur and stumbled. I thought he was going to lose his balance and fall over, but he righted himself with a hand on the plastic carpet strip, and scratched the dogs’ heads.
‘Wearing the wobbly boot again, Dobson,’ Nanna Purvis said, as I pushed past him into the kitchen to feed Steely. My mother didn’t look up from where she was bent over scrubbing the oven. ‘If you didn’t spend so much time down that pub ... if you were home a bit more,’ my grandmother went on, ‘things might be easier for us with Shelley’s colic and crying.’
‘Easier for us?’ Dad said. ‘Doesn’t strike me you’re helping much with the baby, Pearl.’ He slapped his Akubra onto the table, flung his hands in the air. ‘Eleanor, can�
�t you do something? It’s not normal for a kid to scream nonstop. Can you at least look at me when I’m talking to you?’
‘The clinic nurse says if a baby is healthy and gaining weight,’ Mum said, her gaze fixed on the oven, ‘it’s only colic, which will pass. I just have to be patient and not worry too much. Leave her be and get on with things.’ She scrubbed so hard every word shook. ‘So that’s what I’m doing, getting on with things.’
Dad disappeared into the bedroom, returning with the crying Shelley slung over one shoulder, like a sack containing something tight and hard.
‘Well you still need to stop all this bloody cleaning, Eleanor,’ he went on, jigging around, patting the baby’s back. ‘Every time I come home it’s clean, wash, scrub. Clean, wash, scrub. Just look at the state you’re in.’
She gazed up at him from eyes sunk into their sockets, hollow as a green-brown sea swell, hair hanging about her shoulders like dirty rope. She’d always been thin but her bones now stuck out as if her skeleton was on the outside.
Still holding Shelley, he laid his free hand on Mum’s shoulder, gave it a gentle squeeze. ‘I’m just worried about you, love,’ he said, the snap fading from his voice. ‘This is getting too much for you ... too much for all of us.’
‘That’s what I’ve been trying to tell her,’ Nanna Purvis said. ‘Put ya feet up with a cuppa, I keep saying. But she’s always flat out like a lizard drinking.’
My mother stood up, hands black with oven grease, a slick of it slashed across her brow.
‘Put my feet up? You must be joking ... so much to do around this place.’ She couldn’t stop shaking her head and waving the greasy hands. ‘And the baby... the baby ...’
‘Lenny Longbum might have a point,’ Nanna Purvis said. ‘And it’s this cursed house what’s making Shelley sick. I’ve always known something wasn’t right about Gumtree Cottage. Never has been. Well, what can you expect from number thirteen in any street?’ She gathered Billie-Jean into her arms and took him out to the backyard.
Dad raised his eyebrows in that dark, furry line; threw me a small smile. ‘Your grandmother and her silly superstitious legends.’
He handed me the baby, lit a fag, took a bottle of KB Lager from the fridge and popped the top. Click-click, click-click went his push-button ashtray. Dad had one in every room of the house because he’d got a batch of them on special for fifty-nine cents each.
I wanted to agree with him; to say yes, Nanna Purvis was spouting her rubbish, but instead I said, ‘Haven’t you had enough beer for today?’
‘Last one, Princess.’ He winked, and as he drank it down in one long swallow, Old Lenny appeared at the flyscreen door in his usual faded blue singlet and baggy shorts.
‘Youse still can’t do a thing about that kid’s noise?’ he said.
Red-hot anger rose from my belly, caught in my throat. ‘How dare you say that when we’re trying everything –– everything –– to stop her?’ I stamped towards the door.
‘Don’t, Tanya,’ Dad said, grabbing my arm.
‘A mate of mine reckons Coca-Cola did the trick for his grandkid’s colic,’ Old Lenny said, holding up a can of Coca-Cola. ‘Mix it with water ... shake the fizz out before youse put it in her bottle. I bet me money on it, that’ll stop her noise.’
‘Stop her noise ... stop it, stop it.’ Mum’s voice came from her dark seabed –– muffled, liquidy.
Stop it. Stop it.
The words clanged back at me as if Gumtree Cottage were shuddering, its walls –– solid that they were –– straining and buckling beneath the din. I wedged two slices of bread into my mouth, chewed as if I’d been starved for days. My jangly nerves settled.
‘Quit eating, Tanya, you’ll spoil ya tea,’ Nanna Purvis said, and the bread churned in my guts, knotting it like tangled ropes.
I prepared Shelley’s bottle, Old Lenny hovering about, checking I added the right amount of Coca-Cola. I sat back at the kitchen table and everyone except my mother watched in silence as I fed Shelley.
She finished her bottle, burped loudly, let out a sigh and lay peacefully in my arms, her dark gaze shifting over us as if she was wondering why we were all staring at her.
‘Told youse it’d work,’ Old Lenny said with a victorious smirk. ‘I got a whole carton of the stuff if youse need it. Got it cheap off a mate. Give you a good price for a dozen, Dobson?’
Dad nodded and Old Lenny limped back next door to his pokey flat, converted from his son and daughter-in-law’s garage.
‘Maybe the answer’s as simple as that?’ Dad said. ‘Coca-Cola?’
My mother shrugged and shook her head as if nothing he said was even worth a reply. Or as if the answer to Shelley’s colic couldn’t possibly be that simple.
***
I straightened out the cot sheet and Shelley’s lambskin, lined up her fluffy teddy bear, dolphin and cat against the bars.
‘Gently, don’t wake her,’ I said, as Dad eased her down onto the lambskin. He patted a fingertip to his lips as we crept out of the bedroom.
Shelley slept right through tea. Nobody spoke, not even Nanna Purvis. All of us so slain with fatigue we didn’t have the energy to eat and speak at the same time. Either that or we had nothing to say to each other.
‘Tanya and I’ll clear up the tea things,’ Dad said to Mum as he lurched over to the sink with the dirty plates. A knife clattered onto the floor. My mother jumped at the noise. Nanna Purvis scowled. We held our breath, waiting for Shelley to start crying. But she didn’t, and our relieved exhalations filled the hot kitchen air.
‘Off you go to bed, love,’ Dad said to Mum. ‘Have an early night. Can I get you anything? Nice hot cuppa?’
‘I’ll just heat up some milk,’ Mum said, as Nanna Purvis went into the living-room and settled herself on the sofa to watch her evening television shows with Billie-Jean and a nip of sherry.
Mum took a Valium with her milk, the pills the doc had prescribed for anxiety and sleeplessness in those sad times after the unborn babies. She crushed part of another tablet into the bottle she made up for Shelley’s night feed, along with a dose of Old Lenny’s Coca-Cola.
I took Steely into my bedroom, shut the door, slumped on my bed and opened Real Life Crime to the story I’d been reading earlier. A pair of moths swirled around the ceiling light in that hot, thick air. Inside, though, I was frozen –– iced up with Shelley’s pain and crying, my mother’s rising misery and her crazy cleaning. And my father’s guzzling more and more beer.
I’d lived all my life in Gumtree Cottage, always slept in the same bedroom, so it had come as a shock a few years ago when Mum said: ‘You’ll have to give your bedroom to Nanna Purvis, Tanya. She’s old and will be cooler in your east-facing room.’
Nanna Purvis used to live with Pop Purvis –– my mother’s father –– in a standard red-brick house in Gallipoli Street, but when Pop Purvis died of a dicky ticker while sitting on the toilet, she and Billie-Jean moved into Figtree Avenue with us.
My mother had made me shift all my stuff into one of the hot, west-facing bedrooms that gave onto the front verandah, and the street.
The eaves dropping low across the front verandah, and the ugly cream wallpaper patterned with posies of violets, made the bedroom dark, stuffy and dingy-looking. I’d never forgiven Mum or Nanna Purvis for stealing my light and airy bedroom on Gumtree Cottage’s sea-facing side.
From my bedside table drawer, I took the bag of Jelly Babies I’d bought on the way home from school. I started on the red ones, dragged down the box of Barbies from the top shelf of the wardrobe and sat cross-legged on the floor.
I hadn’t done the Barbies’ hair and makeup since I was a kid, so I don’t know what made me tip them out onto the carpet and line them up in a row: Twiggy, Ken, Skipper, black Christie, Miss America and Sunset Malibu Barbie.
No more red Jelly Babies. I started munching through the green ones. ‘That’s how skinny you have to be, Steely,’ I said, holding Twiggy Barbie before my cat’s
face. ‘If you want to become a famous fashion model on telly and the cover of magazines all over the world, Vogue, The Tatler and stuff. Can you imagine that?’
I finished off the Jelly Babies –– the black ones last –– and kicked the packet under the bed where I couldn’t see it. I pinched my belly blubber until it hurt.
You’re stupid and hopeless and fat and I hate you.
Steely sat up straight, ears pointed, as a light tap-tap-tap came on my window. Someone knocking? I stayed very still, on the floor, too afraid to open the Venetians; terrified it might be that nightmares’ burglar with his stabbing knife. There it was again: tap-tap-tap.
I was just about to yell out to Dad when he appeared in my doorway. He’d had more beer. I could smell it on his breath, see it from the way he leaned against the frame as if it was holding him up.
The knocking stopped and I figured I must have imagined it. I didn’t say anything to my father, wouldn’t want him to think I was a stupid kid scared over nothing.
‘Before tea, you said that was the last beer, Dad?’
As usual he changed the subject. ‘School tomorrow, Princess, time for lights out.’
‘What’re we going to do about Shelley’s colic, Dad? She must be hurting so bad, to scream all the time. And the Coca-Cola won’t work forever, you know it won’t! And what about Mum cleaning all the time? I’m helping her as much as I can, with the baby and everything, but it’s never enough.’
Dad ruffled my hair. ‘I know you’re helping your mum, I know. Let’s just hope this colic thing passes soon.’
Shelley’s colic did not pass. On and on it lingered, right through those blazing December days and nights, the hottest –– and maddest –– month of 1972.
Oh, there were times when it wasn’t too bad. She’d often sleep after her morning feed through till lunchtime. As if making up for the wakeful afternoons, evenings and most nights –– the nights my mother forgot to crush Valium into her bottle, or the next remedy on the list failed.
But this particular night Shelley slept right through. There was no more mysterious knocking on my window, and the night was silent. Someone had turned off a machine that had been running for so long we’d become used to the noise. And it was not the noise, but the silence, that was strange.