The Silent Kookaburra

by Liza Perrat

  ‘What other thing?’ the constable prodded.

  ‘Lenny Longbottom, the old codger, is a convicted murderer, did youse know that? In gaol for years ... bashed some bloke to death.’ A quick breath and on she prattled. ‘Claimed he never meant to kill the bloke, but murder is murder, ain’t it? Once done you can never take it back. Once a gaol bird always a gaol bird, I say. Once a killer always a killer. And he was always whingeing about Shelley’s crying, said he couldn’t stand the noise ... couldn’t hear his telly.’

  ‘We are aware of Leonard Longbottom’s past,’ Constable Adams said, ‘and we’ll be questioning the family.’

  ‘And the Andersons over the road at number ten are Catholics,’ Nanna Purvis said. ‘So youse won’t get much sense out of them either.’

  ‘That’s enough, Pearl,’ Dad said, with a glance at the frowning policemen. ‘They don’t want to hear about every resident of Figtree Avenue.’

  ‘Could’ve even been them mad Sloan women what suffocated her,’ Nanna Purvis said, jerking a thumb at number fifteen. From her screechy voice it was obvious my grandmother’s thoughts had run away from her and she was jibbering any old rubbish.

  Dad glared at her. ‘Sock in it, Pearl.’

  ‘Mrs Purvis,’ Constable Lloyd said, ‘we are still not a hundred percent certain someone suffocated the baby.’

  ‘Shelley ... her name is Shelley,’ Mum said, her voice thick as mud.

  ‘They know what her name is, Eleanor!’ Dad said.

  The living-room fell silent, save for my mother’s muted sobs.

  ‘Well, if that’s all,’ Nanna Purvis said, ‘youse’ll have to excuse me, the dog’ll be wanting to go outside to do his business.’

  ‘We’ll be in touch,’ Constable Adams said as the policemen let themselves out.

  ‘Who would do such a thing?’ I said, looking at my parents, my grandmother. ‘Whoever would suffocate my sister?’

  But none of them could give me an answer.

  ***

  Nanna Purvis and I dawdled into the kitchen, as if changing rooms might make us feel better. We brewed tea, one cup after the other, but it didn’t soften the blow. The shock was still an axe chopping into my skull, over and over.

  I hunted through the pantry, ripped open a packet of TimTams –– my favourite chocolate biscuits –– and crammed five or six into my mouth. Nanna Purvis didn’t make a single comment.

  But the biscuits did not make me feel better. My guts were sick, puffier than a full-blown balloon.

  Mum was still sitting on the sofa, droopy as a wet cloth someone’d forgotten to dry out. Her hands clasped in her lap, she never moved; just stared at the windows, bare without their Venetian blinds, which still lay on the verandah where she’d heaped them.

  Dad wandered from room to room, a beer in one hand, a fag in the other. Nobody said anything.

  ‘Shelley won’t ever come back to life, will she, Dad?’ My father coughed, shook his head like an open-mouthed fair clown waiting for the ball.

  ‘No ... no she won’t.’

  ‘Do you reckon that dead people can look down from Heaven and see what’s happening on earth?’ I said. ‘Could Shelley tell us who did that to her? We have to find out who did this.’

  Dad didn’t answer; just kept smoking and staring down at the lino.

  ‘If only I’d helped Mum more,’ I said. ‘If only I’d been watching over Shelley ....’

  ‘You did all ya could,’ Nanna Purvis said. ‘For a kid your age.’

  ‘This was not your fault, Tanya,’ Dad said. ‘Don’t you ever think that.’

  ‘Whose fault is it then?’

  Dad dragged on his fag, shook his head. He shuffled into the living-room, put his hand on Mum’s shoulder, shook her gently. Her gaze dropped from the windows down to her thin white hands.

  ‘What happened to Shelley?’ he said.

  Dad grabbed her shoulders, held her chin, forced her look up at him. ‘Answer me, Eleanor ... how did our baby die?’

  ‘Why are you asking Mum how Shelley died?’ I said. ‘She doesn’t know. Or she’d have told the police.’

  ‘Go and lie down, Eleanor,’ Dad said with a huge sigh. His hand slid away when she still didn’t move, not even a blink. Zapped into a trance.

  ***

  As if it was any ordinary afternoon, the Illawarra Mercury lay open on the kitchen table.

  HAPPY AUSTRALIA DAY. January 26th, 1973.

  165-year anniversary of convict ships arriving in Sydney.

  The same ships that had brought the Randall family convicts to Australia; convicts who’d built Gumtree Cottage.

  The home in which, generations later it was said, a man’s young wife had died. The tale went that he’d wandered from room to room looking for her, night after night, and never found her. He wasted away through longing for her.

  Like that man, I kept looking for Shelley; listening for her gurgles and cries, sometimes believing I could hear her but then realising I couldn’t. Maybe I was hearing the ghost of that lonely man still trapped in his misery, and I feared that one day I too would waste away through longing for my baby sister.

  ‘Is Shelley a Gumtree Cottage ghost now?’ I said to Nanna Purvis. ‘How long does it take a dead person to become a ghost?

  ‘Crikey, Tanya, what kind of a question is that?’ Nanna Purvis rolled her eyes skyward. ‘Just drink ya cuppa.’

  ‘I hate tea,’ I said, pushing aside my cup, slopping milky tea across the table.

  My tear-blurred gaze skimmed the rest of the front page of the Illawarra Mercury, not reading the words, just staring at them.

  Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam launches national anthem competition to replace “God Save the Queen”.

  ‘Who cares about the stupid national anthem?’ I stroked Steely, hard. Nanna Purvis took Billie-Jean outside and, except for the humming fridge, the kitchen was silent. A sudden, unbearable silence.

  I looked out through the flyscreen at the tangle of Venetian blinds, and beyond the verandah onto the heat-weary yard where the sun burned the leaves and flowers, purling their perfumes across the yard. And at Shelley’s pram, still parked beside the gum tree trunk.

  I craned my neck, peered inside. No Shelley. Only a single red blossom trapped in the pram netting.

  I opened a bottle of milk, scraped the cream off the top and let Steely lick it off my finger. I poured a glassful, took another pile of Anzac biscuits from the tin, sat at the kitchen table and tried to think who could have done such a thing to Shelley. But, as in loads of Real Life Crime stories, I couldn’t come up with a single suspect.

  A pair of pliers twisted into my temples, the pain searing through my head. I had to stop thinking about Shelley, stop the agony.

  I tried to concentrate on something else –– a nice thing like swimming with Angela in her pool. Then when I came around to thinking of Shelley again, she’d have come back to life, somehow. She had to. My baby sister could not be gone for good.

  I drank the milk and ate the biscuits, the voice of my fifth-grade teacher ringing through my mind, telling us about the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps troops landing at what would be named Anzac cove, at Gallipoli on 25th April 1915. I imagined them lying on the beach eating the Anzac biscuits their mothers had sent from Australia, whilst gloriously defending the Empire. Then the Turks shot them down, leaving a trail of half-chewed biscuits strewn across the sand.

  ‘Such an achievement for the Anzac troops to land on a dark coast and hold the country while reinforcements followed,’ the teacher had said.

  I supposed the mothers forgave their soldier sons for the Anzac biscuits that went to waste. Same as Mum would forgive Shelley for the stroller she’d got on special which would go to waste since Shelley hadn’t used it. Not once.

  Steely sprang onto the table. I pushed biscuit crumbs under his nose. ‘Poor Shelley ... poor little gumnut girl. Poor us!’ And when the biscuit tin was empty, I swiped it onto the floor, loathing myself even mo
re.

  ‘Aw strewth, Tanya,’ Nanna Purvis said, looking at the tin as she came back inside.

  ‘Why do you hate Catholics?’ I said. ‘Same as you hate foreigners.’

  ‘What a question to ask, the very day we’ve lost Shelley.’ She gave Billie-Jean a Pooch Snax, and spooned out his kangaroo meat. ‘They’re people we just don’t talk to ... they just don’t see things the same way as us.’

  ‘Dad told me it’s because Pop Purvis’s family were Catholics,’ I said, as Billie-Jean snuffled into his meat. ‘And because my grandfather used to hit you. That’s why you hate Catholics.’

  ‘Best not to listen to everything your father says, Tanya, especially when he’s been down The Dead Dingo. Besides, let’s not bring all that up today, of all days.’

  ‘Hem, hem.’ We both looked up to see Old Lenny standing at the back door, dressed in the blue singlet stretched tight over his paunch, and the shorts from which his thin legs poked like a bird’s. He cleared his throat again. ‘Hem, hem.’

  ‘Can’t ya see we’re in mourning, Old Lenny?’ Nanna Purvis said. ‘Not to be disturbed.’

  ‘I saw the cop car and guessed the worst had happened,’ he said. ‘Thought I’d bring youse a little something.’ He held up a yellow fold-up sun lounge. ‘Spanking new banana lounge, Pearl. Got it cheap off a mate. Noticed your old chair was getting saggy about the middle ... bit like you and me eh, Pearl?’ He let out a raspy cackle and patted his round belly –– the only part of Lenny Longbottom with the slightest wad of fat.

  ‘Speak for yourself, Old Lenny.’ Nanna Purvis opened the door and took the banana lounge from him. ‘Nothing saggy about my middle.’

  ‘Aw, I just thought a small gift might make youse all feel a bit better in light of ... of the tragedy.’

  ‘Yeah, righto, thanks and all,’ Nanna Purvis said, and when she sat back down, her gaze creeping back to the Illawarra Mercury, Old Lenny hobbled off.

  ‘You told the police you believed Old Lenny might’ve killed Shelley,’ I said. ‘How can you take presents from him? ’

  Nanna Purvis didn’t look up from the newspaper. ‘I need a new banana lounge, that’s why.’

  22

  ‘Doc Piggot’ll come and see your mum shortly,’ Dad said as he put down the phone. He took two bottles of KB Lager from the fridge and sat on the front verandah, smoking and drinking until the doctor pulled into the driveway behind the Holden.

  Doc Piggott looked at Mum, still perched on the sofa, rigid as the unbroken heat. Not speaking, not crying, simply staring at her blindless windows.

  ‘She’s been like that for hours,’ I said as the doctor sat beside her, took her limp wrist and counted her pulse rate.

  ‘Your mum’s in shock ... understandable given the circumstances,’ Doc Piggott said. ‘These pills should help.’ He scribbled something on his prescription pad. Nanna Purvis took the paper.

  Dad snatched the prescription from my grandmother. ‘I’ll get her pills, first thing Monday morning.’

  ‘Need to hose the Venetian blinds,’ Mum said.

  We all stared at her as if she was a mute person uttering words for the first time.

  ‘Jesus bloody Christ, Eleanor,’ Dad said, ‘our baby’s gone, forget the damn blinds.’

  ‘Can’t leave them outside –– ’

  ‘Shelley is dead.’ Dad couldn’t stop shaking his head.

  ‘Didn’t even get the beds changed ...’

  ‘Eleanor!’

  ‘Don’t shout, Dobson. Can’t bear you shouting.’ Mum gripped the hair at her temples, tugged so hard I thought she’d rip out clumps of it. ‘Leave me alone ... I’ll be better if you just leave me alone.’

  Doc Piggott frowned as he got up from the sofa. ‘Call me if there’s anything more I can do, anything at all.’

  Once the doctor left, Dad grabbed his hat and car keys.

  ‘Where you off to, Dobson?’ Nanna Purvis said.

  Dad strode towards the door. ‘None of your business.’

  The phone rang again. It rang a lot in those hours after Shelley died –– a shrill and persistent intruder into our private grief. Later, when the sun was ripe over Mount Kembla and the sky turned amber, the phone stopped ringing. Probably because nobody ever answered it. My mother was still slumped on the sofa staring at her windows.

  The pub was closed on public holidays so I wondered wherever Dad could be. Nanna Purvis said he was “God only knows where”.

  Finally, a fag jammed between his lips, his eyes scrunched against the curling smoke, Dad came in. His eyes were bloodshot and glittery, from crying or drinking too much beer. Or both.

  ‘Looks like we’ll have to make sandwiches for our tea, Tanya,’ Nanna Purvis said, ‘since ya poor mum can’t move from that sofa and ya dad’s in his usual state.’

  But in the end no one was hungry so Steely licked the Vegemite off the toast and left buttery crumbs scattered over the table.

  After nobody ate tea, Nanna Purvis turned on the telly and poured herself a nip of sherry. My mother was still sitting on the sofa but no one had the energy to try and convince her to move.

  ‘Jesus bloody Christ, Pearl, our baby died today,’ Dad said. ‘And you go on with your normal television routine as if nothing’s happened?’

  ‘Don’t you dare try and make me feel guilty, Dobson. We’re all coping as best we can. If this is my way of dealing with the tragedy, far be it from you to criticise.’

  Dad ignored her and turned the channel dial to the ABC News.

  Pictures were flashing onto the screen of marching people wielding banners: GET OUR DIGGERS OUT OF VIETNAM

  ‘... people demonstrating in Sydney ... police ...’ the newsreader said.

  ‘Turn that channel back, Dobson, Matlock Police will be coming on soon,’ Nanna Purvis said.

  ‘You don’t think our soldiers in Vietnam are more important than some fictional crime show?’

  ‘No I do not. I reckon most of us true blue Aussies don’t give a wombat’s willy about a war in some far-off Asian country. Mark my words we’ll all be saying: “not my bowl of rice” instead of “not my cup of tea”.’

  And for once Dad let Nanna Purvis win the television argument, because all the fight had been sucked out of him.

  I couldn’t bear to be inside the house a second longer with him and my grandmother cutting at each other like a pair of blunt scissors, snip, snip, snip. The endless bickering a drill on my nerves.

  I slipped out onto the back verandah and stared into the floral-scented dusk hanging heavy over the yard, the fateful gum tree, the pram. As if the pram was waiting for its owner to return; that Shelley was simply busy playing or having her nappy changed or being bathed. She’d be back soon.

  Nobody moved the pram; I don’t think anyone dared. While it stayed beneath her gum tree, a part of Shelley was still with us. But if the pram went, Shelley would truly be gone.

  Cicadas whirred, continuous and irritating, mosquitoes buzzed and fruit bats squealed –– soft and urgent –– mini aeroplanes swooping low across the yard. I looked down at the hard baked ground. My life was as ragged as the mounds of brittle leaves littering it.

  In the darkness, I couldn’t see the red blossom inside Shelley’s pram but I imagined it there –– thirsty now, whimpering for water, and, when there was none, wilting in the heat. The creamy white fading to dirty brown. All shrivelled up and dead.

  ***

  For our first night without Shelley, and since we couldn’t get the new tablets till Monday, Nanna Purvis gave Mum two of Doc Piggott’s old pills, and popped another into her own mouth.

  ‘Come on, you need to sleep,’ she said, pulling my mother upright from the sofa.

  Mum’s eyes were almost swollen shut and there were scratches around her mouth as if she’d been clawing at herself.

  Gaze low, shoulders hunched, her hands jammed into the cleaning-shift pockets, she shuffled from living-room to hallway to bedroom. Each step was forced and unsteady –�
� wading out to sea against a too-strong current.

  ‘And half a pill for you, Tanya,’ Nanna Purvis said, breaking one of Mum’s tablets in half. ‘I swear by these for any crisis.’

  ‘So it must be true,’ Dad said, ‘seeing as you’re the expert on everything.’

  ‘Enough of your cheek, Dobson,’ Nanna Purvis said. ‘Now we all should try and get some sleep.’

  Before I went into my bedroom, I looked in on my mother. She was facing away from the doorway, curled on the bed like the baby in a womb that our teacher had shown us in her anatomy book.

  She didn’t move or make a sound as I crept in and leaned over Shelley’s cot. I pressed my face against the sheet, trying to smell her lovely baby scent: her own smell mingled with Pears’ soap and Mum’s washing powder that was always trapped there. I mashed my nose into the sheet, my nostrils twitching mad as a beagle’s, but I couldn’t find her. There was only the sour odour of things gone wrong.

  The scream welled inside me but it couldn’t get out –– the wild and useless fluttering of a netted butterfly.

  There was no way around it. Shelley was gone, her short life wrapped up in a sheet in a metal box in the hospital mortuary. Same as a Real Life Crime story.

  My mother still didn’t stir, and as I shuffled into my own room, the ache of her lost kisses cut even deeper with Shelley gone.

  Sleep would never come. I knew it, but wanted it so badly, imagining Dad would shake me awake in a few hours.

  ‘It’s all right, it was just a dream,’ he’d say. ‘Shelley’s not dead. It’s over, Tanya ... it’s over.’

  And then I cried, really bawled for the first time. Tears for Shelley, and how frightened she must have been, fighting the pillow held over her face; for how she must have suffered. For how she’d never crawl or walk, or blurt out her first word. How I’d never push her on a swing or a seesaw, or dive under the waves with her at North Beach. I sobbed because she’d left me as an only child. Even after all my mother’s lost babies I never imagined I’d grow up without a brother or sister. But mostly I cried for myself; for how I was going to keep on living without her.