by Liza Perrat
I wondered if he had drugs hidden in his rolled-up carpets. Mr Moretti didn’t seem to have any carpets with him at all. And he didn’t resemble a criminal in the least. Angela’s father looked groovy (for a dad that is) in his smart, knife-edge creased black pants and black shirt. Nothing like my father’s brickie gear.
When the sun slid behind Mount Kembla I told Angela I should get home. ‘Nanna Purvis’ll be hollering up and down Figtree Avenue if I’m not back for tea time.’
‘You are come again soon, Tanya.’ Mrs Moretti kissed my cheeks and Mr Moretti glanced up from his newspaper and gave me a friendly smile.
‘Oh yes, I’d love to,’ I said, and set off down the driveway, waving goodbye to Angela. I already missed her lovely pool, the luscious vegetable garden, the smell of baked bread hot from the oven, olive oil in metal tins, nutty biscuits and happy, smiling people. All that was different from Gumtree Cottage.
Half an hour later though, as I neared Figtree Avenue, images of the photo shoot fuzzed out every trace in my mind of the Bottlebrush Crescent palace. But even if it was wrong and Uncle Blackie did end up being a perv, I hoped Angela wouldn’t let on to her father about him. I did not want my secret friend to be sent away from Wollongong.
***
‘Didn’t I forbid you to hang around those Eyeties?’ Nanna Purvis called as I came inside, the dogs barking and racing around my feet.
‘You’re such a racist. Angela’s my friend and her parents are nice, real friendly. Unlike you.’
My mother stood at the kitchen bench, staring at what looked and smelled like a burnt apple pie. I wrinkled my nose. ‘Oh, what happened?’
‘Ya mum wasn’t paying attention and scorched the pie to blazes, that’s what happened,’ Nanna Purvis said, opening up Only for Sheilas. Then, to the yelping dogs: ‘Oy, quit that racket ... youse’re giving me a headache.’
‘Headache ... headache. I’ve got a headache too,’ my mother said to no one. She opened the flyscreen door and hurled the burnt pie –– dish and all –– down into the backyard.
‘What the ...?’ Nanna Purvis shook the blue curls. ‘Strewth, Eleanor, what’s got into you? And not even a care your own daughter’s hanging about with a drug-dealing mob ––’
‘Stop talking rubbish,’ I shouted, which made the dogs bark louder. Steely meowed and rubbed his head against my knees. ‘Don’t you know that after World War II those Europeans were so poor they had to leave everything behind –– everything –– and make a new life in a strange country?’
‘This ain’t got nothing to do with making a new life,’ Nanna Purvis said, flipping her magazine pages faster. ‘But everything to do with destroying life ... with drugs. Look, I’m just worried about ya, Tanya.’
‘I already said, you have no proof of any drugs.’ I grabbed a packet of stale-looking cream buns from the pantry. ‘Mr Moretti made it rich in Australia by working hard, nothing else.’ I stuffed a bun into my mouth, barely chewed it before swallowing.
‘What’s so good about us Australians, anyway?’ I went on, cream oozing from the corners of my lips. ‘We all started as convicts. The Randalls did, at least.’
‘Them New Australians’re bludgers what paid bugger all to get over here,’ Nanna Purvis said, gathering the whimpering Billie-Jean onto her lap.
‘After the war, our country –– your country –– needed those migrants,’ I said, echoing my old fifth-grade teacher’s words. ‘We had to find workers for all our new industries, and those migrants –– Angela’s dad –– were really hard workers.’ I sneaked Bitta a Pooch Snax.
‘Seems I can’t give you advice on anything these days, Tanya. And what’ve I said about wasting good Pooch Snax on that mongrel?’
‘Why should Billie-Jean get them and not Bitta? That’s prejudice.’ Another often-used teacher’s word. I stuffed two more cream buns into my mouth. I’d never be a skinny Twiggy model but I couldn’t stop shovelling them in. My belly gurgled and I wished I could heave back all that bun and cream, but down it stayed, sitting heavy and sickly in my stomach.
Fat pig girl.
Later, when my father came home from the pub, drunk and red-eyed, he didn’t say a word to anyone. He lurched down into the backyard, scraped out the pie into the rubbish bin and scrubbed the blackened dish until his hands were red and flaky.
‘Am I adopted?’ I asked, as he grabbed a tea towel to dry the dish. I knew it wasn’t the right time to ask that question –– it never was –– but I just wanted him to talk to me. About any old thing. Anything was better than talking at all.
Dad’s eyes widened, sort of crossed and his voice came out hoarse, hushed, as he put the pie dish back in the cupboard. ‘Whatever keeps giving you that idea, Tanya?’
‘Because Stacey Mornon reckons I am.’
‘Don’t listen to the rubbish people tell you,’ he said, walking away from me.
I wanted to yell at him to come back, to tell me the truth. But if I was adopted I didn’t want it to be true. And since, yet again, Dad did not directly say “you are not adopted”, I still didn’t know.
20
‘Why the bleedin’ banjo’s Shelley’s pillow in her pram? Over her face?’ From the kitchen, Nanna Purvis hobbled out to the verandah and limped down the steps as fast as she could with arthritic knees, and varicose veins the same colour blue as her slippers.
It was the morning of Australia Day. Friday, January twenty-sixth, 1973, the sun a lemon sliver over the Pacific horizon glimmering like steel. Mr Kooka was perched on his usual branch. But he was silent this morning, as if the heat had dried up his tongue. He was simply staring, with one sharp, white eye, down at Shelley’s pram.
Dad had just driven off somewhere. Steely and the dogs were dozing in the morning sunshine on the verandah beside me, as I dangled my yoyo for “around the world”.
‘Shelley!’ Nanna Purvis ripped off the netting and shook my baby sister. ‘Wake up, Shelley. She’s not breathing. God, oh god, oh god!’ Each “oh god” was louder than the previous one.
Mum, dragging her Venetians outside for hosing, dropped the blinds in a heap. We both rushed to Nanna Purvis, beside the pram.
‘Why? Why isn’t she breathing?’ Mum’s voice was shrill. No trace of sluggishness. A hand clapped over her mouth, her scream came out stifled, damp. The dogs got nervy, barking and running around the pram, nipping at Shelley’s pillow Nanna Purvis had chucked aside.
‘Give her the kiss of life ... bang on her chest.’ Nanna Purvis was yelling and Mum was lifting Shelley from the pram and laying her on the dead brown grass and running her hands over her body, stroking, rubbing. She lifted Shelley’s singlet and slapped my sister’s chest.
‘Call the ambulance, Tanya,’ Nanna Purvis said. She turned to my mother. ‘Go on, kiss of life, Eleanor!’
‘Oh gosh, is the number triple 0? What if they don’t answer?’
‘Yes! Go now, course they’ll answer.’ My grandmother flapped her arms at me.
Legs marshmallow-squishy, heart bursting from my chest, I rushed inside as Mum’s quivering lips covered Shelley’s baby ones.
‘My sister’s stopped breathing,’ I barked into the phone, and told them our address. ‘Hurry, she’s only a baby. Please hurry.’
Hopping from foot to foot, a hand pushing on my cowlick, I waited out the front for the ambulance. It took forever to arrive, though later the neighbours would say it was only ten minutes.
‘She’s out in the backyard,’ I said, hustling the two ambulance men down the hallway, through the kitchen. Almost pushing them across the verandah.
‘Is she breathing again yet, Mum?’
My mother was still kneeling beside Shelley. ‘Not breathing, no ... please ... please help my baby.’ She looked up at the men, wrung her hands through her cleaning shift. The dogs kept up their barking.
‘Enough, youse two,’ Nanna Purvis screeched, and overhead, a cockatoo screeched back, its crest a yellow fan opening against the hard blue sky.
‘Nothing happened,’ Nanna Purvis said. ‘She’d been sleeping –– whimpering –– in her pram for the last half hour, then I saw her pillow was over her face.’
‘Mum never leaves the pillow in the pram when Shelley’s sleeping,’ I said. ‘Says it’s dangerous. She always stores it on that shelf.’ I pointed to the lower part of the pram.
‘... only use the pillow to prop her up in the pram,’ Mum said, ‘when she’s awake.’
‘Never when she’s sleeping,’ Nanna Purvis said.
‘Perhaps you forgot just this once?’ the ambulance man said.
‘No, never forgot.’ Mum hugged her arms around her trembling body. I wanted her to hug me too.
Lenny Longbottom’s crinkled face appeared over the fence. ‘What’s going on, Pearl?’
‘None of ya business, Old Lenny,’ Nanna Purvis snapped.
‘Crikey, Pearl, only trying to help.’
Mad Myrtle and Mavis Sloan poked their heads over the other side fence. ‘Anything we can help with?’ Mavis asked.
‘Youse mind your own bananas too,’ Nanna Purvis said. ‘And where’s ya father when he’s needed, eh?’ she said to me, as if it was my fault Dad was always at the pub. ‘Typical man, never home when there’s a crisis. That’s what me hairdresser, Rita, reckons.’
Nanna Purvis and I helped my mother clamber into the back of the ambulance with Shelley, the whole of Figtree Avenue came and stood out in the street, whispering behind cupped hands.
As the ambulance drove off, the blue tips of Mr Kooka’s wings flashed as he came swooping from the backyard, over the roof, dipping and soaring. Dipping and soaring, and starting up his ghostly ‘Garooagarooagarooga.’
***
Eventually Dad’s Holden pulled into the driveway and I rushed out to meet him.
‘Shelley stopped breathing,’ I said, ‘but the ambulance took her to hospital to bring her back to life.’
‘Stopped breathing? What ambulance?’ Dad removed his Akubra, ran his forearm across his sweaty brow and swiped away a fly. ‘Where’s your mother?’
‘I don’t know why Shelley stopped breathing, but don’t worry, they’ll revive her ... they can do that. I know all about the kiss of life.’
They must ... they have to!
I followed Dad’s work boots thud, thud, thud up the verandah steps, and inside.
‘Pearl? What the bloody hell’s happened to Shelley?’
Nanna Purvis told him about finding Shelley with her pillow over her face. ‘Eleanor’s gone with the ambulance, drivers said for us to wait here. They’ll ring ... let us know.’
Dad paced the kitchen. ‘Bugger waiting here, I’m going up the hospital.’ He slapped his Akubra back on.
‘They said to wait here, they’ll ring,’ Nanna Purvis repeated. ‘No use the whole lot of us going up there. We’ll only get in their way.’
Dad hurled his hat back onto the table and lit a fag. ‘Jesus bloody Christ, Shelley was fine this morning ... well, fine apart from the usual colic fiasco.’
He kept walking right through Gumtree Cottage, from one airless room to the next, smoking and flicking ash, the thump of his work boots breaking the silence between his sighs.
‘I always knew it was a bad move, me coming to live in this unlucky house,’ Nanna Purvis said. ‘What with all that’s happened here. And now this. Our own little gumnut girl.’
‘Just stupid legend and rumour,’ Dad said. ‘We don’t know if any of those stories are true.’
‘All the neighbours reckon they are,’ Nanna Purvis said. ‘Them Sloan sisters and Lenny Longbum ... and others in Figtree Avenue.’
‘And you’re dim enough to listen to them?’ Dad said. ‘One you call “Mad Myrtle” and the other “that gaol bird”? Besides, where else would you have gone after Pop Purvis died? A nursing home? Jesus bloody Christ, Pearl, I can just see you loving that life.’
My head was aching, dizzy from my father and Nanna Purvis’s arguing. My legs wobbled, and I slumped down into a chair.
And why are they taking so long to bring our baby back to life?
21
Several hours later –– and still no phone call from the hospital –– a police car pulled up in front of number thirteen. Two policemen got out of the front seat, one tall and thin, the other short and stout.
They opened the back door, helped out my mother, and walked towards the house. The policemen each gripped one of my mother’s arms because her legs kept crumpling beneath her.
‘Constable Lloyd,’ the tall one said as my father came hurrying out onto the verandah. He nodded to his partner. ‘And this is Constable Adams.’
‘Is my baby sister okay now?’ I said.
Dad took my mother’s arm; she fell against him. ‘What’s happened to Shelley?’ he said, herding Mum, Nanna Purvis and the constables into the living-room. ‘Go into the kitchen and get yourself some Anzac biscuits and a glass of milk, Tanya,’ he said in a stuttery voice, closing the sliding doors behind him.
How dare my father shut me out of this important conversation about my sister?Munching on an Anzac biscuit, I slid the doors open a crack.
My mother, Nanna Purvis and Dad were slumped on the white sofa sheets. The policemen stood together on the other side of the living-room, arms stretched down their fronts, wrists crossed, hats in hand.
I listened, in mounting horror, to the thin line of talk that trickled out, each word a drop of poison seeping through the door crack.
‘Very sorry,’ Constable Lloyd was saying. ‘The child is gone. The Casualty doctor pronounced life extinct on arrival at the hospital.’
‘Sorry ... nothing they could do,’ Constable Adams said.
Nothing they could do, gone where? Course they could’ve done something! They revived that boy in Real Life Crime.
A cold fist of fear tightened around my guts, squeezed until I was on the brink of vomiting up the Anzac biscuits. Bitter liquid spurted into my throat. I swallowed hard, hurtled into the living-room and hammered my fists against Constable Adams’s arm.
‘Liar, they could’ve got Shelley back to life ... they could’ve.’ He did nothing to try and stop me, just stood there and let me carry on hitting him. ‘You go and get them to bring her back to life ... try harder!’ The sob grew inside me, swelling and exploding in a boom like Guy Fawkes Night fireworks.
‘Tanya, quit that,’ Nanna Purvis said, and Dad was kneeling beside me, gripping my fists.
‘She’s not gone, is she, Dad? They can bring Shelley back to life ... can’t they?’
Dad squeezed my clenched hands and Constable Adams patted my head as if I was some little kid. ‘I’m so sorry for your baby sister.’
My father slumped back onto the sofa and lit another fag. ‘Jesus bloody Christ, what happened? I don’t understand.’
Nanna Purvis shook her head, hair rollers bobbing like moths around a light. ‘Whoever could suffocate a baby with her own pillow?’
‘We’re not a hundred percent certain the baby was suffocated,’ Constable Lloyd said.
‘Shelley ... her name is Shelley,’ Mum said barely above a whisper, her first words since she’d returned home in the police car.
‘Though we’re obliged to suspect as much,’ Constable Adams went on, ‘because from a forensic point of view it’s almost impossible for a baby to suffocate itself.’
‘Her,’ my mother said. ‘Herself.’
‘And,’ Constable Lloyd said, ‘because the doctor noted bruising around the child’s mouth.’
‘Shelley ... her name is Shell –– ’
‘If the doctor hadn’t detected the bruising,’ Constable Lloyd said, ‘we’d have thought it might be a case of this new cot death thing. There’ll need to be a post mortem, investig ––’
‘Cot death?’ Nanna Purvis said. ‘What the bleedin’ banjo is that?’
>
The constables looked at each other. ‘A recent ... theory,’ Constable Adams said, ‘why babies die for no apparent reason in their cot, or pram.’
‘You going to take everyone’s fingerprints?’ I asked.
Nanna Purvis rolled her eyes at Mum. ‘I told you she’s too young to be reading that damn crime magazine, didn’t I?’
‘Yes, fingerprinting,’ Constable Lloyd said. ‘And the pillow will be taken away for forensic examination.’
‘But all our fingerprints will be on that pillow,’ Dad said. ‘We’ve all handled it at one time or another.’
‘Yeah, don’t see the point of that,’ Nanna Purvis said.
‘That might be true,’ Constable Lloyd went on, ‘but we’ll still take the pillow. If fibres from it are found on the baby’s lips ... in her mouth or lungs that would support the suffocation theory.’
‘Had the baby been ill?’ Constable Adams asked.
‘Shelley ... her name is Shelley,’ my mother mumbled.
‘Nope. Fit as a mallee bull,’ Nanna Purvis said. ‘Except for a touch of the colic.’
‘A touch of colic?’ I curled my lip at Nanna Purvis. ‘She’s been screaming with colic pain for over three months.’
The constables glanced at each other again and asked us if we’d seen anybody lurking around the backyard.
‘We saw nobody,’ Nanna Purvis said.
‘Shelley was asleep in her pram under the gum tree ... I was about to-to ...’
My mother was crying now; couldn’t stop the hiccupping sobs. I sat beside her, circled my arms around her. Dad stayed upright, smoking and staring down at Mum.
‘... clean the Venetian blinds,’ she went on. ‘Once a w-week, hang them over the Hill’s Hoist to h-hose them down ... Shelley’s pillow over her face ... not breathing.’
‘We’ll be asking the neighbours if they saw anything,’ Constable Lloyd said.
Nanna Purvis huffed. ‘Won’t get anything sensible out of them.’
‘Why’s that, Mrs ...?’
‘Pearl Purvis is me name. Them Longbottoms next door,’ she said, flinging a gnarly hand in the direction of number eleven, ‘are boozers who watch the footy and cricket on telly all afternoon. Right racket it makes. And another thing,’ she began, as if the thought had just jumped into her head.