by Liza Perrat
‘Why’s the baby sleeping on this grubby carpet, Tanya?’ she said.
‘I was playing with her and –– ’
‘Get her off the floor.’ The hair hanging in greasy clumps about Mum’s shoulders shook in time with her voice.
‘Leave Tanya be,’ Dad said. ‘The baby’s sleeping at least. And if you stopped all this bloody cleaning and paid Shelley a bit more attention, Tanya wouldn’t have to take care of her all the time.’
‘I do all I can for that baby,’ Mum said, staring down at her bony bare feet. ‘I can’t do any more ... can’t ...’
Dad shook his head. ‘Jesus bloody Christ, what’s happened to you?’
‘N-nothing,’ Mum stammered. She looked up at us, gloom clinging to her like the ugly sweat-stained cleaning shift. Her eyes filled with tears. ‘I don’t know. Nothing ... everything’s fine.’
Dad sighed. His voice grew louder, snappier. ‘Oh yeah, Eleanor. I can see everything’s fine. Just fine and bloody dandy!’
11
It was still sweltering at North Beach but I was glad I’d got my father away from yelling at my mother –– from the tautest elastic stretched between them.
Over the westward mountains, white cloud puffs hovered, their dolphin-grey underbellies hugging the escarpment but over the sea the sky was blue and cloudless.
Wet-suit-clad surfers, boards tucked under one arm, hands shading eyes, stood on the shoreline searching for the best surfing spot.
‘What’re you waiting for?’ Dad said, stripping down to his Speedos. ‘Thought you were so hot you’d be in the water the second we arrived?’
‘Coming.’ I slapped zinc cream onto my face, silently willing Dad to go on ahead of me. It was becoming totally embarrassing to be seen with my father wearing Speedos. They were only for little kids and old men, and I wished he’d wear board shorts over them, like the surfies did.
The sun searing holes through my back, Dad weaved alongside me, puffing out his beery breath as we skittered towards waves thick with foam. As if someone had squeezed whipped cream across the rim.
‘Watch out for the plovers’ eggs,’ I said, as we scattered a crowd of the tiny red-capped birds. ‘That’s what my teacher said, be careful of their scraped-out nests, and their eggs.’
‘Don’t worry, plovers lay their eggs in January,’ Dad said. ‘I think.’
But as we ran into the cool shallows, I thought how easy it would be to accidentally crush those unborn plovers. I wondered how any of them survived to hatch out. And even if they did make it beyond the egg, who’s to say they’d not be immediately squashed; murdered by some careless human?
As Dad dived beneath a wave and swam out, I sat in the shallows thinking about the poor murdered plovers, the salt on the offshore breeze whipping my cheeks, stinging my eyes, two coal tankers –– pirate ships! –– slipping across the horizon.
A couple swimming beyond the breakers had drifted outside the flags and a surf-lifesaver was blowing his whistle at them. He waved his arms, motioning at them to get back in between the flags.
‘Stay between the flags,’ everyone always says. ‘It’s only safe between the flags.’ As if an inch either side of the red and yellow flags the surf becomes suddenly dangerous.
The surf-lifesaver jogged along the shore, still waving his arms and blowing his whistle, harder, louder. But it was obvious the couple was in trouble, the rip tugging them further out to sea. The people around me had stopped squealing and jumping around in the surf, all heads turned to the swimmers getting smaller and smaller.
Three more lifesavers appeared and the four of them dragged the longboat down to the water. As they started rowing out over the breakers, I was reminded of the story of Australia’s Lost Prime Minister. Harold Holt had gone for a swim one day in 1967 and was never seen again. Vanished. Forever probably.
Some reckoned a Chinese submarine kidnapped Harold Holt. Others, Nanna Purvis, for example, said a shark got him. But the surf-lifesavers were certain a rip had carried him off –– those dangerous currents running at angles to the shore which we are powerless to control or fight.
The longboat bow bounced over the waves, tilting to an almost vertical angle.
Dad came and stood beside me, squinting at the distressed swimmers, eddies of white wash clinging to him like Pavlova meringue.
The longboat reached the swimmers, and someone cried out: ‘Got ’em.’
‘You bewdie,’ shouted another and the onlookers resumed their frolicking, no longer thinking about lives that could be lost in a minute of being caught in the wrong place.
‘Come on, Princess,’ Dad said. ‘Surf’s great.’ His voice was clear and sharp; the cool water had washed clean the beer slur.
I followed him out, struggled to get beyond the breakers, feeling the thrill as each wave pulled me up to the urgent curve of its peak.
And when I judged –– because it was all in the exact timing –– that the wave would crash on top of me, I dived deep, hunched into a ball against the drag of the sea. Scaring off schools of tiny gleaming fish, I gripped the rippled sandy bottom, listening to the murmur of its own special language as the silky arc broke above my head.
A break in the sets and Dad and I surfaced, and caught our breath.
I looked out at the deeper, dark water. If I stared for long enough I always imagined I could see the black bob of a whale or the menacing fin of a shark. But if I steadied my gaze, I realised there was nothing there at all. That it was only my brain tricking me.
‘Hope there’s no sharks,’ I said.
Dad smiled. ‘I won’t let any silly shark eat you.’
I so wanted to believe him, like when I was a kid and believed everything my parents said because I’d thought adults always told the truth, believed they understood everything.
But now I knew otherwise, and I imagined the sharks speeding in from the deep, their fins boat propellers cutting through the water. They reached me, started circling. No escape. Trapped prey. They closed in on me, bit my body in half. My head, arms and trunk sank to the dark and murky seabed.
‘I’m getting out of the water,’ I yelled. ‘Gotta get out!’
I thrashed about, breathless, riding on waves that tossed and tumbled me into the shallows.
I stumbled from the surf, giddy, sweeping hair from my eyes and hacking salty water from my throat.
Panting hard, I stood on the shoreline amidst clots of seaweed the leaving tide had thrown up. Some were like rags of lettuce, others were dark and wavy –– the stolen curls of mermaids who now glided, bald, across the seabed. Another was a delicate green fern, fragile as Shelley.
A dead crab lay upside down amidst a cigarette butt, a discarded zinc tube and a child’s sandal.
‘Why’re the crabs always upside down?’ I asked my father. ‘Do they flip over before or after they die?’
‘Oh for god’s sake, Tanya, who knows? And who cares?’
‘Can we buy meat pies for tea?’ I said. ‘Mum probably won’t have cooked anything at home.’
‘I know your mother’s a bit ... distracted, but you gotta understand the strain she’s under. The strain we’re all under.’
‘I do, Dad. But that doesn’t mean she can ignore everyone and everything except the housework.’
‘I know. But I’m betting our little gumnut girl will be right soon and things ... Mum, will get back to normal.’
Oh sure. Another lie.
***
We sat on the grassy area over at Belmore Basin to eat our pies, chucking bits of tomato-sauce-sodden pastry to squawking seagulls. The ocean breeze ruffled their feathers as if airing them out.
Dad had brought two bottles of DA in the beach bag –– the longnecks he called Dirty Annie’s –– which he swilled down with his pie.
A mother was pushing her little girl on the swing, and a stab, like the point of a fishing spear, jabbed at my heart. I remembered when my mother pushed me on swings, those times when she’d recover from the sadness of the las
t lost baby. In the state she was in now, I could never imagine her pushing Shelley on a swing. But I would. As soon as she was old enough, I’d make sure my baby sister was happy all the time.
The little girl squealed in glee, which sent the gulls off into a majestic grey and white flight and the whole beach seemed to rise into the sky with their shadows. Thud, thud went the see-saw, children’s laughter a song against that sun darkened with seagull shadows.
It was twilight by the time we got back to the Holden, the hum inside a seashell still in my ears, the tang of salt still in my throat and nostrils.
House and street lights flickered on as Dad drove along the South Beach road, Wollongong’s other main beach, mainly for surfers. From the Port Kembla Steelworks, furnace flames and smoke chugged into the dusk air.
A few moments later, on Corrimal Street, as we passed the Wollongong Golf Club, the Holden veered into the middle of the road. An oncoming car honked.
‘Dad!’
My father jumped in his seat, rubbed his eyes with one hand, the other tightening on the wheel.
‘You almost dozed off, didn’t you?’
‘Sorry, Princess.’
‘Are you okay?’
‘I’m fine, Tanya. Just a bit tired from your sister crying all night, and hard days at work.’
Of course Dad was tired from our wakeful nights. Shelley’s crying had exhausted us all. But it wasn’t only that and his hard bricklaying days making him sleepy. It was also too many schooners of beer.
A minute later I spotted the rabbit on the road in front of us, so enormous it might’ve been a hare. My father –– bleary gaze fixed on something in the distance –– didn’t seem to notice it.
‘Dad!’ I grabbed the steering wheel; the Holden swerved madly.
He slammed on the brakes. The tyres squealed as the car skidded across the road.
The rabbit didn’t budge, just stared straight into the Holden’s oncoming headlights, and the last thing my father probably saw was the rabbit rising from the bumper bar through the twilight in a beige and red explosion of fur, blood and guts.
The car careened off the road. I screamed with the thud, my ears, my mind filling with the roar of crumpling metal, exploding glass. Then silence as the Holden came to rest, bonnet buried in the roadside ditch.
I looked across at my father. His arms hung limp, straight down beside him, his head resting against the steering wheel. A trickle of blood leaked down between his closed eyes.
12
‘Ya can’t bring Shelley with us,’ Nanna Purvis said a few days later, when the hospital said we were allowed to visit Dad. ‘What if she yells the place down? Think of all them sick people.’
‘I can hardly leave the baby on her own, can I?’ Mum said. ‘I’ll stay here with her, you two go. Besides, the carpets need a good vacuum.’
‘Why don’t you want to see Dad?’ I said. ‘Anyway, the car trip will calm down Shelley.’
After the accident three days ago, when the ambulance had rushed Dad to Wollongong hospital, I couldn’t stop shaking; could barely utter a single word, so they’d taken me too, for a check-over.
‘You’ve had a shock,’ the nurse said, ‘but apart from a few bruises, no nasty injuries. You’ll be right as rain in a day or so, love.’
Nanna Purvis and Old Lenny had come in Lenny’s van to take me back to Gumtree Cottage; Mum stayed home with Shelley. I was still all trembly, couldn’t think straight or make a proper sentence.
‘Off to bed with you right now, Tanya,’ my mother had said, popping half a Valium into a steaming cup of tea.
‘Yeah, Eleanor, come and visit Dobson with us,’ Nanna Purvis said. ‘Do you good to get away from these four walls. Even if I am going to give Dobson a gobful, tell him how irresponsible he is, driving a kid around with all that grog under his belt. Downright dangerous it is.’
For once my grandmother wasn’t talking rot. My father’s beer-drinking could’ve killed me, and I was still half-angry at him for that. But half-glad he was still alive.
‘And thank me lucky dilly bag you had that beach bag on ya lap, Tanya,’ Nanna Purvis went on, ‘or you’d have hit the windscreen like ya father thunked into the steering wheel.’
Mum looked around as if uncertain she could leave the safety of the house. ‘All right, I’ll come to the hospital, since you both insist,’ she said, and dragged her cleaning shift over her head.
During the taxi ride, Shelley lay quietly on Mum’s lap in her pink frilly dress. I grabbed a finger and she gave me a gummy smile, and gurgled as if she was trying to talk to me. Then she fell asleep.
‘We ought to drive her around every night,’ Nanna Purvis said with a grim smirk.
‘Cute baby,’ the taxi driver said, as we reached the Wollongong Hospital. ‘Real well-behaved too.’
I had an urge to roll my eyes at him.
‘Which ward is Dobson Randall on, please?’ Nanna Purvis said to the hospital receptionist.
‘Robson,’ my mother cut in. ‘Robson Randall.’
Everybody forgot that Dad’s mother, Nanna Randall, had actually named my father “Robson”. But the person who’d written out his birth certificate had made the “R” stroke too short and everybody’d thought it was a “D”. And since Nanna Randall had bled to death a year later and Pop Randall couldn’t read or write, my father had ended up being called “Dobson” all his life.
Dad was in the end bed of a row of five down either side of the ward. All the patients were lying on their beds, wearing pyjamas or white hospital gowns, coughing, yawning or talking to visitors.
A wide bandage, spotted with dark blood, encircled my father’s forehead. Purple bruises ringed both his eyes.
Nanna Purvis and Mum –– holding Shelley –– sat on the green plastic chairs beside the bed. I was still annoyed at Dad but I leaned over, kissed his cheek. His skin was clammy and cool against my lips.
There were only two chairs so I slumped, cross-legged, onto the floor in the corner.
Dad opened his eyes a crack and frowned. One shaky hand reached out, trying to touch my mother’s, but Mum kept her hands around the bundle of Shelley, just beyond his grasp. Dad seemed too weak to reach any further and Mum didn’t move closer. Her blank gaze began skimming the white hospital walls, probably checking for dirty marks, or to avoid looking at her husband.
He sighed and closed his eyes. Nobody spoke, the three of us sitting there in silence, staring at Dad. Shelley slept in Mum’s arms. I picked at strips of loose paint on the wall behind me.
After a few minutes Dad opened his eyes, frowned again. ‘Blackie ... think ... saw him outside house ...’
Nanna Purvis straightened in her chair, gnarly hands gripping her crocheted handbag. ‘Blackie ... what do you mean you saw him?’ She glanced sharply at my mother, who turned her attention from the walls to Dad.
My fingers stilled on the peeling paint, my ears burning.
‘Saw ... Blackburn ...’ Dad managed to say before his voice trailed off and the eyelids drooped shut.
‘Why’s he gabbling on about seeing Blackie, Eleanor?’ Nanna Purvis glared at my mother. ‘Impossible. That bad egg’s still locked up. At least I hope he is, and the key flushed down the dunny for what he did to that Carter girl.’
The man in the next bed stared across at us.
‘Mind your own bananas, you,’ Nanna Purvis said to the man, and reefed closed the curtain separating the beds.
Mum said nothing but a strange look came over her face. A kind of odd, half-smile which vanished as quickly as it had appeared.
‘Who’s that Carter girl?’ I said.
‘Nobody.’ Nanna clamped her lips into a firm line.
My grandmother wouldn’t tell me about that Carter girl. Well, too bad, Uncle Blackie would. I bet my groovy secret uncle would tell me anything I wanted to know.
***
I dawdled over to Dad’s bedside table, flicked through his “get well” cards, mostly from his brickie and pub
mates. There was also one from Mavis and Mad Myrtle Sloan next door. Another, from the Andersons across the road, was decorated in fuzzed-out roses like a sympathy card. I hoped we wouldn’t be needing any of those “death” cards. There were two from the Mornons –– one from Mrs and the other from Mr –– because they’d divorced by now. The Longbottoms had sent nothing, which wasn’t surprising. If Old Lenny’s constant over-the-fence complaints about Shelley’s noise were anything to go by, they probably hated us.
The biggest and brightest card, along with the largest and prettiest bouquet of flowers, came from Angela’s parents. But you couldn’t see the card properly because Nanna Purvis had slid it to the back behind the others.
‘This is the nicest one,’ I said, moving the Morettis’ card to the front so it half-hid all the others.
‘Bought with drug money no doubt,’ Nanna Purvis said, ‘along with those fancy flowers. Laundering they call it. Now put it back out of sight, Tanya.’
‘What’s laundering?’ I said. ‘And how can you say that about my best friend’s family? Anyway, Angela’s invited me over to her place in the holidays to swim in her pool and you can’t stop me going.’
Nanna Purvis shook her blue curls. ‘I can’t allow that, Tanya. What if you fall into drugs or something? With your mother barely in the game these days,’ she went on, nodding at Mum who’d gone back to staring at the hospital walls, ‘and your father always down The Dead Dingo’s Donger –– when he’s not in the hospital that is –– it’s my job to protect you from people such as that Moretti mob.’
‘You can’t stop me seeing my friends,’ I said. ‘You’re not my parent.’
Nanna Purvis glared at me as a nurse came over to Dad’s bed. She looked like a tidy white parcel in her thick stockings that the heat must’ve stuck to her legs, her white uniform, and her cap that made me think of two seagulls glued together on top of her head.
She took Dad’s pulse, blood pressure and temperature, and shone a torch into his eyes.
‘Just checking your dad’s okay after the accident,’ she said, and wrote on a chart at the end of his bed.