by Liza Perrat
‘Yeah, give over,’ I said. ‘You talk such rubbish.’
‘What has got into ya, Tanya?’ Nanna Purvis shook her newly-blued curls. ‘Never this cheeky before.’
Mr and Mrs Moretti and Angela slid from the Valiant. Everyone else’s clothes were already sweat-clingy, but Angela’s parents looked elegant in their black clothes, except for Mr Moretti’s crisp white shirt. No sign of Marco. I guess he thought he didn’t know us well enough to come. Angela hugged me, pressing against my chest the bouquet of red blossoms I’d plucked from Shelley’s gum tree.
‘I’m ... we’re all sorry, Tanya,’ she said, the chestnut eyes shiny with tears. ‘So sorry.’
On account of Shelley’s death, I hadn’t started sixth grade at the beginning of the week with the other kids, and Angela had been allowed today off to come to the funeral.
‘I’m really glad you’re here,’ I said to her, as she took my hand and squeezed it.
Without speaking –– I guess there just weren’t any right words to say –– Mrs Moretti kissed my mother on each cheek. Then, heads bent, my Italian friends walked into the church.
The Andersons from number ten arrived. Old Lenny Longbottom too, mopping his brow, hair pulled back in the thin grey plait. He’d swapped the singlet and baggy shorts for a pair of beaten-up Levi’s slung low over the protruding belly, and a T-shirt with the words “Deep Purple” sprayed across the front.
Mavis and Mad Myrtle Sloan came, the sisters’ red and puffy eyes bulging like a frog’s behind their thick glasses. Despite the heat, they both wore lilac-coloured cardigans, and kept fidgeting with the pearly buttons.
The recently-divorced Mr and Mrs Mornon from up at number twenty-five arrived separately. Stacey came with her mother, silent and refusing to look at me, which was better than her taunts.
Mrs Mornon stood beside my father, splayed her pink fingernails on his arm, and patted it, whispering something in his ear. She kept her hand on his arm until Nanna Purvis gave her a withering look. My mother didn’t glance up at Mrs Mornon or at any of the other people. She just teetered –– a feeble sparrow in the rising wind.
I caught Mrs Anderson’s whisper to Mavis Sloan, as she nodded at Stacey’s father. ‘Did you hear Gordy Mornon’s moved in with his secretary? Right tart she is, apparently.’
Mavis Sloan raised her eyebrows and turned to whisper something into Mad Myrtle’s ear.
‘I’ll eat me slippers, if it isn’t the rellos,’ Nanna Purvis said, nodding at Dad’s twin sister, Uncle Bernie and my hateful cousins, Sharon and Vicky, arriving from Ballina, on the northern New South Wales coast.
Nanna Purvis nudged my mother in the ribs but Mum was scratching at an imaginary stain on her frock. ‘Look at That Bitch Beryl, would you, Eleanor? Like some King’s Cross brothel madam, prancing about in her red lipstick and her mini skirt, as if she’s the star of the show. And Bernie in his long socks and sandals. Whatever was Beryl thinking, marrying a Pommie bast –– ’
‘Beryl’s my sister in case you’d forgotten,’ Dad said. ‘Of course she’d come to her niece’s funeral.’
That Bitch Beryl kissed Dad, leaving a red lip mark on his cheek, and fake-smiled at Mum and Nanna Purvis. I slunk behind Dad.
Don’t kiss me. Just don’t.
‘Still a fatso then,’ Vicky hissed at me, exchanging an ugly glance with her sister.
I curled my lip, felt my insides boiling up. I wanted to punch my cousin and shut her stupid mouth for good.
‘Manners, Vicky,’ her mother said, the lips a red drawstring purse.
Dad’s brickie mates arrived and some others from The Dead Dingo. The pub mates smelled as if they’d already downed a few schooners and the brickie mates looked awkward dressed in funeral clothes instead of shorts, singlet and dusty boots. They all removed their Akubras and gazed towards the sea as if it might tell them why a little girl could die before she could even walk.
Sharon pointed to the two constables who’d come to Gumtree Cottage twice. ‘Why’re the cops here?’
‘Don’t you know anything?’ Vicky sneered at her sister. ‘Everybody knows the murderer always goes to the funeral, so the cops come too, so they can check out all the suspects ... work out who might be hiding something.’
Nanna Purvis wobbled over to the constables in her “funeral shoes” –– the ones she’d bought for Pop Purvis’s funeral. Her only outside shoes. ‘Suppose youse still got no leads or suspects? Anyway, didn’t youse say it was a CIB job now?’
‘Nothing yet, Mrs Purvis,’ Constable Lloyd said. ‘And yes, it’s a CIB job. We’ve just come to give our condolences.’
‘Righto, well I guess we can’t hope for too much,’ Nanna Purvis said, ‘given Australia’s first police force was made up of twelve bleedin’ convicts.’
‘Maybe our convict ancestors?’ I said.
‘Ya father’s ancestors,’ Nanna Purvis said, with a sharp glance at Dad and That Bitch Beryl. ‘Not ours.’
‘I’m sure the police are doing everything they can, Pearl,’ Dad said. ‘They’ve questioned all of us and every resident of Figtree Avenue but nothing’s come of it. Remember they told us nobody had seen anything and, at present, there are no suspects.’
‘Humpf,’ Nanna Purvis said.
Shelley had been murdered a whole week ago and I’d learned from Real Life Crime that the longer a murder is unsolved the less likely the police are to find the culprit. I would not be able to bear it if they never found out who suffocated Shelley, if no one was punished for this terrible crime.
A black hearse pulled up and two sombre-looking men wearing equally sombre suits carried Shelley’s white coffin into the church, and the organist began playing slow and sad music. I knew there were normally four pallbearers, but this coffin was so small that the funeral home hadn’t likely seen the need to put four men on the job.
‘Come on, girls, it’s about to start.’ That Bitch Beryl beckoned Sharon and Vicky into the church. Her fingernails were the same fierce shade of red as her lips. Tiny blood clots flicking through the air.
My mother clung to Dad’s arm. The hand of grief had swiped every trace of loveliness from her and she looked tiny, her sea-swell eyes sunken holes, face deadly pale as if dusted in powder, framed in wilted-flower hair. Her legs quivering –– sandpipers’ legs on a swamp edge –– could barely hold her up.
Dad shuffled along, a worn-out old hunchback, his suit coat ridden up behind him, the misery almost bending his body in two. I looked into his dark sad eyes, mirrors of the pain inside me.
He hung onto Mum too, as if they had to hold each other up. I couldn’t recall seeing them like that –– touching, holding each other –– since before Shelley’s colic. And in that moment I felt a brief, guilty gladness at the tragedy that had united them, fusing them into the same grieving body. As if someone had shot them both with a single bullet, injuring them as one.
Just as quickly that thought curled me inwards with hatred and shame, and I despised myself. But maybe my father wouldn’t go to work in Mount Isa after all. He’d never leave us now, not after this. He couldn’t!
I turned from my parents, unable to witness their agony. I rubbed at my tears and tried to think angry thoughts to stop them spilling.
‘... pray together for Shelley,’ Reverend James was saying. Everyone closed their eyes and I shivered in the hollowed-out quietness.
Then, as if I’d missed the whole service –– because I couldn’t remember a single minute of it –– that silent arc of mourners was perched on the thin brown lip of Shelley’s grave, beneath the flimsy shade of a few old gums.
Bossy Nanna Purvis had won the cemetery argument, which I put down to my parents being too shocked, too shattered with grief, to put up much of a fight. So we were about to bury the loveliest baby sister in what must be Australia’s ugliest graveyard: a wide space of flat sun-burned earth littered with weeds, dried bush and the bleached skeletons of dead trees.
And, amidst the patchy w
isps of grass tussocks, old and abandoned headstones leaned towards the ground as if they too longed to lie down like the dead.
***
‘Council put the bunnies here to eat the grass,’ Nanna Purvis said, nodding at the clusters of rabbits hopping around the graveyard, white powder puffs flashing. ‘So nobody has to mow it and make noise and disturb the dead.’
Vicky and Sharon’s sniggers were the only sounds apart from the dry wind blasts that whipped up dust veils, and the distant noise of breakers crashing onto the shoreline.
The pallbearers looped straps under the coffin, lifted it a little. The undertaker slid out the four-by-twos. Beneath the windy sunlight the mourners wavered. Insects hummed around me, blowflies darting like arrows into my eyes, gathering in the corners, up my nose, in my ears.
I stared into the deep hole; too deep surely, for one undersized white box. Sweat broke out on my forehead. Dark spots jiggled before my eyes. The wind kept up its eerie whistle as if the far-off Australian deserts were all dumping their fine dust on me at once, moaning as if they hurt as much as I did.
A voice all around me cried out. It came from one side, the other, the front, the back, overhead. ‘Help me, help me!’ becoming louder until it was a hammer pounding at my brain. I reached out to it but the voice had no body, no face, no mouth.
I looked down. My arms were stretched at the coffin being lowered into the ground, one hand still clutching the posy of gum tree blossoms. And when I couldn’t reach my baby sister I wanted to fall into the hole with her so the earth would swallow me and I’d never have to think about Shelley being gone forever.
Dad gripped my arm, his voice shaky. ‘You okay?’
I managed to nod, and lifted my gaze to my mother. Her face was so stretched I hardly recognised her. Her head dangled from the little white triangle of her neck, her eyes bulged and her body drooped.
Like a flower someone had forgotten to water, her face crumpled, each petal collapsing into the centre. Her mouth opened and out came a low moan that built to a wail. On and on it went, like the wind that couldn’t blow itself out. I was sure if Dad let go she’d belly flop into that hole. And everyone just stood there as she cried and tore at her hair and fought my father’s consoling arms.
Dad started coughing the fag cough. His rasp, mixed with Mum’s wailing, burrowed into my mind and soon became the only noise. The sound of my parents’ grief churned my guts, squeezed its way up through my body, spilled into my throat and filled it up until I couldn’t breathe. And Dad was holding up me as well as my mother.
A few people cast in single roses. I threw in my bunch of red blossoms, and the salt-dough cat that Nanna Purvis had helped me make.
The cat sculpture hit the wood with a thud. Everyone jumped, stared at me.
‘Heavens, Tanya, you could’ve cracked the coffin,’ That Bitch Beryl said.
‘I made it especially for my sister ... she would’ve loved to play with a cat. A cat the same as Steely...’ My voice trailed off as I caught Vicky and Sharon’s lips hitched in sneers. The salt-dough cat suddenly seemed childish and uncool.
‘It’s a beaut cat, Tanya,’ Nanna Purvis said, glaring at That Bitch Beryl. ‘Shelley would’ve loved it.’
The first shovelfuls of earth on the coffin clattered dry, echoing across the beachside graveyard. Nobody looked at anybody, except the two constables who were looking at everyone and whispering to each other. No one tossed soil onto the coffin like on television or in Real Life Crime. We all just turned and walked away.
25
Billie-Jean and Bitta danced around the mourners traipsing into Gumtree Cottage. Nanna Purvis took off her funeral shoes and slid her feet into the blue slippers. After standing graveside all that time, her varicose veins bulged so much it looked like someone had squeezed up bruises into bumpy ridges along her legs.
‘Do you have to wear your slippers?’ Dad said. ‘We’ve got guests.’
‘If you had to contend with very cow’s veins, Dobson, you’d wear slippers too, guests or not.’
‘Varicose veins,’ I said. ‘And can you two stop arguing for once!’
Dad shook his head. ‘Do what you want, Pearl, you always do anyway.’
‘Why’re these people in my house?’ Mum looked around at the crowd as if they were intruders. ‘All staring at me ... all talking so much I can’t work out what any one person is saying.’
‘They’ve come to help, love,’ Dad said. ‘Offer sympathy and support.’
‘Don’t want help ... better on my own ... tell them to go away.’
But they didn’t go away. They buzzed around her. Flies to a roadside corpse.
‘Can I help put out the food, Eleanor?’ Mrs Mornon asked.
‘Where do you keep your knives and forks?’ someone else said.
‘Sit down, Eleanor ... make you a nice cuppa.’
‘Don’t want to sit down ... no tea,’ Mum said. ‘Can’t breathe ...’
Elbows jutted out, she fought her way through the congested house. I followed her into the bedroom, shut the door.
‘Where’s my baby?’ she said, gripping the cot bars as if her legs were too weak to hold her up. ‘Why aren’t you sleeping in your cot, Shelley? Oh that’s right ... asleep in the pram in the shade of the gum tree ... you’ll be cool and safe there. Yes, safe.’
The agony of it –– of not knowing who had made the gum tree unsafe –– pressed hard. A boulder crushing my lungs. The pain wouldn’t shift, the blood wouldn’t stop tunnelling through my head. I leaned against the door, staring at my mother sobbing and shaking Shelley’s cot bars. Her legs collapsed and she folded, floppy doll-like, onto the carpet.
‘Get up, Mum.’ I tried to pull her upright. She looked right through me, up at the ceiling, a shaky finger pointing.
‘Cobweb ... in the corner.’ Her eyes flickered across the ceiling. ‘Another in that corner ... the Venetians rail, dusty ... grime spots on the window. How could I’ve missed ...?’
‘No, no, Mum, not this again!’
She shook off my arm and snagged her cleaning shift from the door hook. From under her pillow, she grabbed her nightdress, climbed on a chair and reached for the ceiling. Up she stretched, towards the dust and cobwebs, breath held in. Straining, flicking the nightdress at the cobwebs, but not quite reaching them.
‘Nearly there ... wipe away cobwebs. No dust, can’t have dust.’ She shook her head. ‘Filth everywhere. Terrible housewife ... useless mother.’
Dad came into the bedroom.
‘She’s acting like a lunatic, Dad,’ I said. ‘Cleaning cobwebs with her nightdress. Do something!’ I clutched the dressing table side to stop myself trembling.
‘Get down, Eleanor,’ Dad said in a stern hiss. ‘Take off that bloody shift and come into the living-room. We’ve got people.’
‘No, no. Got to stay here ... clean everything.’
‘Jesus bloody Christ, Eleanor, these people care about you ... we all want to help you.’
My father dragged her along the hallway, my mother scratching at his hands, his face. But he managed to get her into the living-room, where she crumpled onto the sofa like a used tissue. He took off her shoes, lifted her legs up on the sofa. A few people gathered around though most stayed well clear.
‘Thanks, yes, cuppa might help,’ Dad said. ‘Strong, lots of sugar. And a few of Doc Piggott’s pills ... do the trick.’
My mother lay there, helpless, as everyone mingled about trying to touch her, pet her. I didn’t know how to help her so I went into the kitchen to make her cuppa. Someone closed the sliding doors behind me but I caught smatters of their whispers.
‘... lost it ...’
‘... can’t cope.’
‘... what Eleanor’s done.’
What Eleanor’s done? My mother hadn’t done anything except lose the one, perfect baby after years of flushing away failed ones.
I took the tea in but Mum had disappeared again. I hurried to the bedroom, tried to urge her to drink
her cuppa and take the pills. Dad leaned against the bedroom doorway, shaking his head. Stacey’s mother stood beside him, her palm patting Dad’s forearm.
‘Leave the tea there, Tanya.’ Mrs Mornon pointed to the dressing table. ‘Your father and I’ll try and coax her to drink it.’
I wandered back to the kitchen where Nanna Purvis and the women mourners were laying out the food.
‘Go and play with your cousins, Tanya,’ Nanna Purvis said, ‘and quit mucking with that cowlick. Gives me the heebie jeebies the way ya do that.’
I picked up Steely, stroked him. ‘I hate the cousins, they’re nasty little bitches.’
‘True,’ Nanna Purvis said, ‘but as I know only too well, you can’t choose ya rellies. Besides, you have to be extra tolerant in situations such as funerals.’
‘You, tolerant?’ I’d have howled with laughter if I hadn’t been so wretchedly sad.
‘Stay here and help me then,’ she said. ‘Put them mini meat pies and sausage rolls on plates. No, paper plates, we’d best save on washing up what with all these geezers, eh? That’s it, Tanya, bonzer job ... and the coleslaw in a bowl.’
Dad was handing out beers to the men and they all lit fags, lumbered out onto the back verandah and lowered their Akubras against the fiery sun.
‘No sign of a break in this heatwave,’ someone remarked.
‘... rent a TV for two bucks a week down at Lavis’s,’ one of them said, ‘no deposit even.’ Another man said Norman Ross was having a sale on Victa lawnmowers. ‘Only seventy-nine bucks.’
They spoke of everything and anything. Except Shelley.
***
‘Youse lookin’ for a good lawnmower?’ Old Lenny’s voice crackled from outside. ‘I got a garage full of lawnmowers. Got ’em cheap off a mate. Willing to let them go for a better price than any shop.’
The men muttered between themselves, several shuffling off with Old Lenny. I often wondered where he got all those items that filled his garage-flat. A different thing each month: lawnmowers, Wringer washing machines, fridges, chairs and tables. Anything you wanted, it seemed.