by Liza Perrat
How dare some evil person steal away our happiness!
I fumbled around under the bed, reaching for the Barbie dolls I’d kicked there. I dragged them out, lined the Barbies in a row, my gaze resting on Twiggy. Dark and sultry eyeliner-eyes, long lashes, pouty mouth. Thin body. I looked down at my fat ripples and spat on Twiggy Barbie’s face.
Dad came in and checked my flyscreen was closed. ‘Mozzies’re bad tonight,’ he said as if mosquitoes were our only worry. He sat on my bed, took my hand from my cowlick. ‘Will you be all right, Princess? I know we’ve had the most god-awful shock.’
‘Will the police find out who killed Shelley?’
‘We’re still not certain someone killed your sister,’ Dad said. ‘Might be this ... this cot death thing.’
‘But what about the bruises around her mouth?’
‘I dunno ... I just don’t know what to think.’ He kissed my brow and his fag smell mixed with sweat, bricks and beer hung in my nostrils.
After he’d gone I flung the nightmare bedspread behind my door and lay on the sheet thinking, once again, who could have killed my little sister. I knew my father also suspected murder, rather than this cot death thing. Those constables too, from the way they’d looked so suspiciously at us.
I must have fallen asleep because I dreamed I was standing on the edge of a cliff, the sound of the sea below like funeral music.
Teetering on the cliff edge, the sea below me rose in waves, heaving and folding in rhythm to the sickness at the bottom of my guts. Then a wave –– bigger than all of them –– rolled right up the cliff face, smashed over me.
The pain crushed my chest and when I could no longer breathe, I collapsed and tumbled off the edge. Faster and faster I fell, the world whizzing past me. I tried to grab hold of something to stop myself but there was nothing and I crash-landed, a baby again, in a pram the same as Shelley’s.
I was in a row of babies in prams and Mum and Dad were walking up and down deciding which baby to adopt. The person selling the babies said to my parents: ‘This one’s on special because she’s tubby and has bat-wing ears. “Batgirl” you could call her. Or “Ten-ton Tanya”. And if you don’t take this one it’ll be junked ... thrown out.’
‘We’ll take this one then,’ Mum said, counting out coins from her housekeeping purse.
She wrapped me in a Venetian blind to take me home to Figtree Avenue because Dad’s brickie work didn’t earn enough to buy baby clothes as well as the baby.
The slats were sharp and cut into me and I ended up all wet because my mother had hosed the Venetian blinds beforehand. I started crying and Mum said: ‘Be quiet, Tanya, let me get this house clean.’
My eyes snapped open, my heart juddering like a lizard trapped beneath a rock, my pillow soaked with tears.
23
‘The baby died from suffocation,’ Constable Lloyd said on the Monday afternoon. Constable Adams stood beside him, serious and solemn.
‘Shelley ... her name is Shelley,’ Mum said.
The policeman nodded. ‘The child, Shelley, was suffocated with her pillow. Autopsy showed pillow fibres in the airways and lungs. So, combined with the mouth bruising ...’
‘We’re so sorry,’ Constable Adams said. ‘CIB’ll take over the enquiry now, examine and photograph the crime scene.’
‘CIB?’ Mum said.
‘Criminal Investigation Branch,’ he said. ‘The coroner is bound by law to conduct an enquiry when there are criminal or suspicious circumstances.’
My sister died on a Friday public holiday, so we’d had to wait the entire weekend and most of Monday for the autopsy results. Days that passed in one long, thick fog. But not real days, rather images from one of my faded picture-books; as if someone had pressed a button and time-frozen us.
I’d spent most of that time slumped on the back verandah with Steely and Bitta, staring at the empty pram, and eating. My father spent most of Saturday at the pub. He was out all day Sunday too, though he didn’t say where he’d been. Billie-Jean curled up in her lap, Nanna Purvis had stared at the television screen –– even after God Save the Queen played, signalling the end of ABC transmission for the night. And, as if a blustery wind had raked her over, my mother teetered through the house in silence, her arms wrapped about herself. She seemed always to be searching for something but never remembering what. And she looked dead, herself.
I’d wanted to go back to Albany and see Uncle Blackie. I wanted to see Angela too. Anything to get away from Gumtree Cottage and its old-person’s face mortared in sorrow, but I didn’t dare leave my mother alone, terrified she might topple from this almost-dead state into a real-dead state.
‘Whoever’d suffocate an innocent baby?’ Nanna Purvis said to Constable Lloyd.
‘Yes, Jesus bloody Christ, who?’ Dad lit a new fag from the butt of the last one, dragged deeply and exhaled. The smoke encircled my mother like a dirty halo.
‘Anybody we could call?’ the policeman asked. ‘Friends, relatives, a priest?’
‘Priest? Won’t be no Catholics in this house,’ Nanna Purvis said.
Dad shook his head and Mum stared, motionless, at nothing, avoiding everyone’s gaze on her.
And later, when it got dark, we all sat at the table and tried to eat the baked beans she’d plonked onto slices of toast.
‘Yuck, the beans are cold,’ I said, my fork clattering onto the plate.
My mother jumped, her palm held over her heart as if the noise of a fork on a plate was the most frightening thing ever.
‘Can’t we have meat pies or sausage rolls?’ I said. ‘Why don’t we ever have nice food anymore?’
‘Just eat the beans, Tanya,’ Mum whispered as if it was too much effort to talk properly, or she couldn’t remember how.
No, my mother couldn’t talk to me, or even look at me these days. My father was forever running off to the pub to get away from me. I was no longer his “princess”. It was obvious my parents no longer loved me. Maybe they never had, only I was too young and stupid to realise it. Which all meant I probably was adopted in the first place.
‘I don’t want you to be my mother anymore,’ I blurted out.
Mum got up from the table, grabbed hold of the bench side and started to cry. I didn’t care. Let her cry, this thin, sad stranger who could only clean and scrub and wring her hands through her cleaning shift.
Clinging to the flowered fabric, she slid down the front of the cupboard onto the floor. Sprawled across the black and white lino, she reminded me of a Real Life Crime hit and run victim, mown down on the false safety of a pedestrian crossing.
That made me cry too even as I fought the tears; didn’t want her to see me upset. Then we were both sobbing. Two separate, sobbing heaps on pedestrian-crossing lino.
‘Crying is good for you,’ Dad always said. Now he didn’t utter a word, just stared at both of us. ‘It lets out the hurt. If you don’t let it out it’ll just get worse and make you sick.’
I was already sick; sick in my guts. Rats gnawing at my heart, my liver, my kidneys, and soon there would be no more insides of me.
Eventually Mum stopped crying and dragged herself up, and back to the table. ‘Sorry,’ she said.
I didn’t know why she was sorry; it wasn’t her fault Shelley was gone. And I didn’t know what to say to her so I picked up my fork and shovelled down the cold and pasty beans.
My stomach heaved and folded, the ache of it all coming freely, threatening to spill over into a vomit. I couldn’t go on gathering the pain like this.
After tea, Mum slunk off to bed. Nanna Purvis switched on the telly and Dad went out –– he didn’t say where –– and I lay on my bed because there was nothing else I could do.
In that heavy, stifling air, Steely and Bitta curled up beside me, I could hardly breathe. I opened the Venetians, slid up the window as the lights of a car shone over the Figtree Avenue hill. It came closer and I saw it was Uncle Blackie’s rusty old Kingswood. But he drove right past number thirt
een, which was strange. Surely he wanted to see me; to say something comforting about Shelley?
But he must have turned around at the cul-de-sac because there he was again, coming back down the road, slowing in front of Gumtree Cottage.
I thrust an arm out the window, waved at him. As Uncle Blackie looked about, up and down the deserted street, I crept from my bedroom, eased open the front door and skittered over to the Kingswood.
Uncle Blackie leaned over the passenger side and spoke to me out the window. ‘I heard about your baby sister, Tanya. I’m so sorry.’
‘Yeah.’ The word snagged in my throat, threatened to turn into a sob.
I wondered how he’d found out about Shelley so quickly. Old Lenny, too, had known straightaway. At least one thing Nanna Purvis said was true then: bad news travels fast.
‘You know you can always come back to Albany if thing get too tough here,’ he said. ‘Just for a break, and to ride your new bike.’
‘Okay, I might come ... soon.’
‘In the meantime, I brought you this.’ Uncle Blackie handed me a paper bag. ‘Salt dough. You could try making your own sculptures, something nice for Shelley’s funeral maybe? Keeping busy with a hobby can help take your mind off ... off things, you know. And if you need help, just come over. How does that sound?’
‘Yep, sounds all right.’
‘Good, well I’d better be off now, Tanya. See you real soon, eh?’
I waved at the Kingswood disappearing down the hill and hurried inside clutching the paper bag. An uncle who drives all the way over to say sorry about my sister, and to bring me salt dough, can’t be that bad. Can’t be a filthy perv. Maybe Angela –– and I –– were being unfair to him.
***
‘Our baby has died, Eleanor,’ Dad said as he came in from The Dead Dingo. ‘Only four days ago. And all you can do is scrub the floor?’
He took in her greasy hair, plastic gloves and cleaning shift, the rag she clenched as she scrubbed the lino Cinderella-like. ‘Look at that cloth, Eleanor ... go on, look at the bloody thing. It’s clean. Spotless. There is no dirt left to scrub.’
She stared up him as if he were a Martian wandered into her kitchen.
For the last three days I’d been hiding out in my bedroom, trying to mould Uncle Blackie’s salt dough into shapes: a dog, a fish, a bird, a horse. But they were hopeless attempts, all resembling nothing, and now the dough had become brittle, impossible to shape into anything.
I wanted to go to Albany and ask Uncle Blackie to help me, but still it seemed wrong, somehow, to leave Gumtree Cottage. As if I should stay locked up inside, mourning Shelley like my mother and my grandmother. That rule, however, obviously didn’t apply to my father.
My mother had not snapped from her trance, and only three days after Shelley died, she’d gone back to her household chores. As if against some deadline known only to her, she worked more frantically, and there was no reaching beyond an absent nod from that hunched back, those never-still feet, as she work, work, worked. As if she’d forgotten how to rest.
‘What’s happened to you, Eleanor?’ Dad said, his voice low and husky as he took a KB Lager from the fridge. ‘Where’ve you gone ... and what the hell happened to Shelley?’
‘Why do you keep nagging Eleanor about what happened to Shelley?’ Nanna Purvis said, voicing my thoughts. ‘How would she know?’
Ignoring Nanna Purvis, Dad sat at the table with us, in front of his plate of spaghetti –– a tangle of cold worms on cold toast. ‘We’re all suffering too,’ he said. ‘Don’t run away, love. Stay with us.’ He sighed, picked up his knife and fork. ‘Maybe I should get Doc Piggott to come again ... get him to change your pills or something. Anyway, come and eat tea with us at least.’
Mum kept scrubbing as if he hadn’t spoken.
‘I’d kill for a cuppa,’ Nanna Purvis said when we’d finished eating the cold worms. ‘Dry as a nun’s nasty I am.’
‘As if cups of tea can fix the world,’ Dad said rolling his eyes at me.
From the day Nanna Purvis had come to live at Gumtree Cottage, I’d been my father’s ally in his ongoing war with her, so often caught in the no-man’s land of their battlefield. But right now their arguing was worse than ever –– a hatchet chopping my nerves into tiny pieces.
Mum shuffled across the lino, put the kettle on and made Nanna Purvis’s cuppa.
‘And god only knows why you let her order us around.’ Dad jabbed his finger at my grandmother.
‘Can’t you see I’m only trying to get her to come back to us, Dobson?’ Nanna Purvis said. ‘From wherever she’s wafted off to.’
‘You do realise your mother’s insisting on putting Shelley in the Purvis family plot, Eleanor?’ Dad said. ‘In that ugly cemetery down by the Sewage Treatment Plant?’
‘Bury Shelley?’ Mum shot Dad a bewildered look as if he’d suggested burying a live person.
‘I don’t want our baby there,’ Dad said. ‘Much nicer up at the cemetery at the northern beaches where the Randalls are buried. Say something, Eleanor, back me up ... agree with me.’
Mum frowned, said nothing. Fingers kneading the scrubbing cloth, she stood there as if dazed to find herself in combat with the man she loved –– or had once loved –– baffled at being forced into an argument about where to bury her baby girl.
‘Shelley should go in with the Purvis side of the family, Dobson,’ Nanna Purvis said, sipping her tea. ‘Best she’s not associated with youse Randalls. After all, youse are the ones with the weird family ... the perv brother. Not that we ever want his name mentioned in this house.’
‘That business was just stupid bush-telegraph gossip,’ Dad said with a sharp glance at me.
‘And it wasn’t only the Carter girl,’ Nanna Purvis said. ‘There were all those others –– other young girls –– who came forward after ... who claimed they’d suffered the same thing.’
‘Again, just vicious rumour,’ Dad said. ‘Anyway, what the bloody hell’s all that got to do with burying Shelley?’
‘They don’t lock people up in Macquarie Pastures Asylum for the Criminally Insane on rumour alone, Dobson,’ Nanna Purvis carried on. ‘That’s if Blackie’s still there. When you were away with the pixies after the accident you were mumbling on about seeing him. So maybe he is out? God help us.’
‘What’s an asylum for the criminally insane?’ I said, though I had read about one, in Real Life Crime.
Despite Angela’s words swarming through my head: ... he’s a filthy perv ... a filthy perv ... a bad person, it was almost impossible to believe my nice and caring uncle had been locked up in an asylum for mental criminals.
‘And who’s that Carter girl?’ I said to my grandmother. ‘You wouldn’t tell me before, but now I want to know.’
‘Better you know nothing about all that vile business,’ Nanna Purvis said, dragging the whining Billie-Jean onto her lap.
‘Why not?’
‘When you’re older,’ Nanna Purvis said, ‘when you can understand those sorts of things.’
‘So why do you always talk about things in front of me,’ I said, ‘but never tell me the whole story?’
Neither Dad nor Nanna Purvis replied. My father dragged on his fag, coughing, his face grim. Click-click, click-click went the ashtray. Nanna Purvis fed biscuit crumbs to Billie-Jean. My mother went back to working at a stain on the lino –– a stain so small I could barely see it, but she fussed over it, grinding away, stubborn as the stain itself.
She became breathless, panting, crimson blotches flaring on her thin cheeks. Circles of sweat curled the armpits of her shift, and a trickle oozed down the side of her face, leaving a moist and glittery slug trail.
Nanna Purvis hobbled over to the phone and called her hairdresser. ‘Funeral’s in three days, Rita,’ she said. ‘Can’t turn up with these grey roots, you’ll have to fit me in for the blue rinse somehow ... you can? Aw, knew I could count on you. Thanks, yeah, bye ... cheers.’
‘What’d I
tell youse all?’ she said on a note of triumph as she hung up the phone. ‘Once ya find a good hairdresser, stick with her. Don’t go chopping and changing, you’ll only end up with some freak hairdo you wouldn’t be seen dead with. Been going to Rita over forty years so I guess that merits some privileges.’
‘Don’t you think we’ve got more to worry about than your hair?’ Smoke spurted from Dad’s mouth with each word. ‘Jesus bloody Christ, Pearl.’
‘Do you know how to make salt dough, Nanna Purvis?’ I asked.
‘Why do you want to know about salt dough?’ she said.
I want to shut up you and Dad bickering.
‘To make a sculpture to put in Shelley’s coffin with her. An animal or something ... a cat, yes, that’s what I’ll make.’
‘Come on then,’ Nanna Purvis said and started measuring out salt, flour and water. ‘We’ll make the best bonzer salt-dough cat this side of Kalgoorlie.’
Dad shook his head and stomped out with his beer.
24
‘Why’re them foreigners turning up to Shelley’s funeral?’ Nanna Purvis pointed at the Morettis’ black Valiant pulling up outside the mud-brown brick church which, in the shade of a jacaranda, looked even more drab. ‘And in that drug car. Youse surely didn’t invite them?’ She glared at Mum and Dad.
‘That drug story is spiteful neighbourhood gossip,’ Dad said, his voice lost on the hot wind stalking in from the western plains. ‘Your bush telegraph working overtime again, Pearl.’
‘I know for a fact that Lorenzo Moretti conceals the drugs in his rolled-up carpets,’ Nanna Purvis said. ‘That’s what a woman at the hairdresser’s told me when I was sat beside her at the dryers.’
‘Can’t you just give over for once?’ Dad said with a weary shake of his head. ‘If the Moretti family are good enough to come today –– people we hardly know –– we’ll accept their condolences gracefully.’