The Silent Kookaburra

by Liza Perrat

  I wondered who Uncle Ralph was, and why Uncle Blackie was calling that girl a bitch. She must be someone as horrible as Stacey Mornon-the-moron. It sounded as if Uncle Blackie had a number one enemy too, and that made me a bit sorry for him.

  ‘You haven’t forgotten, surely, Dobson?’ Uncle Blackie went on. ‘All those outings with Uncle Ralph to console little Blackie for his mother dying ... her death birthing me?’

  My father dragged on his fag, exhaled a long stream of smoke. ‘No, I haven’t forgotten. But ... but the Carter girl was only twelve years old. Twelve, Blackie!’

  ‘No buts, I paid dearly for killing our mother; then paid again for that prick-teasing bitch. You have no idea what it was like locked away in Macquarie Pastures all those years.’

  Macquarie Pastures Asylum for the Criminally Insane –– the place Nanna Purvis had mentioned.

  Dad shook his head. ‘No, I have no idea.’

  ‘Be nice to turn the clock back, wouldn’t it, Dobson? Back to when we were kids –– me four years old, you and Beryl five –– tumbling on the hot sand on Bulli beach, thrashing about in the waves?’ He sighed, swiped messy hair from his face. ‘And we’d walk up to the kiosk, you holding one of Dad’s hands and Beryl the other ... because he held your hands. And we’d eat fish and chips straight from the newspaper, and anything else we could afford, because there was no mother to cook. Because the cook was dead!’ Uncle Blackie breathed out, long and slow.

  He looked so sad standing there facing Dad, but I couldn’t stop thinking whatever he could have done to that Carter girl to get locked up in some criminal asylum called Macquarie Pastures.

  ‘I should’ve guessed what was going on,’ Uncle Blackie went on, ‘when you brought Eleanor up to Macquarie Pastures, in the early days, that is. Before you both stopped coming altogether. Should’ve guessed you were stealing my girl away, leaving me to rot in that hellhole on my own.’

  ‘There wasn’t anything we could do, Blackie. We tried, remember? But nothing ever came of it.’ Dad rubbed his brow. ‘I’ve always been sorry for that ... always. But don’t tell me this is still about Eleanor, after all these years?’

  ‘No!’ Uncle Blackie shook his wild hair. ‘But look at her now, the state she’s in. And it doesn’t strike me you’re doing much to help her. A drunk who can’t take care of his miserable, sick wife. Bloody shame, it is.’

  My hands balled into fists. Ants crawled across my neck, down my backbone. I wanted to rush out and yell at Uncle Blackie that Dad was doing all he could to help my mother. But he wasn’t. My father’s constant absences at the pub were not helping my mother at all.

  ‘What the hell do you want me to do about Eleanor?’ Dad spread his arms wide. ‘What?’

  ‘Get her some proper treatment,’ Blackie said. ‘Go back to the doc, insist he does something. Anyway, I’ve decided I’m leaving Wollongong. I only came back because I thought we could work things out ... could be a family again. But it’s obvious that’s never going to happen.’

  Despite the heat, he dragged the Driza-Bone around himself and started walking away towards the beat-up Kingswood. I thought it odd that my uncle always wore a work coat when he never seemed to go to work at that TAB.

  ‘I’m moving over to Perth,’ he said. ‘Far away from all the Randalls and Purvises ... make a new life somewhere nobody knows about the old one.’

  ‘Wait!’ Dad called. ‘Blackie ...’

  But Uncle Blackie had jumped into the Kingswood, revved it up. He pulled away from the kerb. Going off to Perth, leaving me here on my own.

  Good. I was glad I wouldn’t have to worry about any more naked photos.

  But who would call me beautiful? Who would buy me such far-out presents?

  27

  ‘That was so boring. Whoever wants to learn about cooking and housekeeping budgets?’ Angela said, as we hurried out of our new sixth-grade classroom. Well, the girls at least. The boys were already outside, playing cricket on the back oval, while the girls learned how to be homemakers.

  ‘No way I’m going to be a boring housewife,’ I said. ‘I’ll have a career.’

  ‘Me too. What career do you want?’

  ‘Dunno.’ I shook my head. ‘Someone who helps people who get sick in the head ... maybe.’

  It was a week after Shelley’s funeral, a week I had no idea how we got through. Inch by inch, I supposed. Climbing a steep cliff, but never reaching the top.

  February had begun as hot as January, the temperature rising to thirty-eight degrees. The sky was a hard blue as if it had to be to compete with the powerful sun, and the last of Shelley’s gum tree blossoms floated to the ground and died. The word “heatwave” lingered on everybody’s lips as we sweated and swiped at the endless clouds of flies.

  My little sister had been gone from us for ten days when I started sixth grade, which I quickly concluded would be no better than fifth grade. Stacey Mornon-the-moron and her friends still sniggered about me, and Angela was still my only friend.

  But far worse than Stacey’s taunts were her whispers; the vicious blather about baby-killer mothers which she’d sparked up right after Shelley’s funeral.

  I heard the rumour everywhere: behind the cupped hands of huddled groups of schoolkids, on the lips of housewives at Eastbridge Shopping Centre, on our neighbours’ faces when I passed them in the street. It rustled through the sun-burned leaves of the trees, wound around the parched flower stems and became trapped in the thirsty, closing petals. The smoke-stained wind of the Steelworks scattered it like dust across the streets, into yards and homes. There was no escaping the air swarming with those terrible, invisible words.

  ‘So have you seen your uncle again?’ Angela said as we sat back down at the desk we shared, after recess. ‘After he turned up at Shelley’s wake?’

  ‘No, but I heard him talking to my father outside, the night after the wake. It turns out people reckon he did do something to a girl called Carter. I’m not sure what, but they locked him up in Macquarie Pastures Asylum for the Criminally Insane.’ I picked at a bit of peeling varnish, on the desk, scraping at it with my fingernail. ‘But it could’ve been a huge mistake. I’m really not sure if Uncle Blackie’s a bad person. Anyway I probably won’t ever see him again because he’s moving to Perth.’

  ‘But he must be a bad person,’ Angela said. ‘He surely got locked up for raping this Carter girl. They don’t imprison you for that many years for anything besides rape. Except murder. You know what rape is, don’t you?’

  ‘Course I do,’ I said, recalling Real Life Crime stories, though still not a hundred percent sure what it was. ‘But I know Uncle Blackie, he’s so kind and generous, he’d never do something as awful as rape. Never.’

  ‘But, apart from the asylum business, he has to be a bad person,’ Angela went on. ‘Taking photos of someone who’s only eleven. That’s wrong.’ She took a quick breath. ‘I’m glad he’s going away to Perth, even if you’re not.’

  ‘I don’t know if I am glad,’ I said. ‘Or not.’

  ‘You should be. Good riddance to that filthy perv. Anyway, are you still going to enter Miss Beach Girl 1973?’

  ‘Oh that, I’d forgotten all about that stupid beauty quest, what with Shelley ... you know.’

  ‘Quiet please!’ the teacher said, walking in with a loud clap of her hands.

  The classroom fell quiet, but my mind whirled with thoughts of my baby sister who I’d mothered and loved, and the grief snagged me once again. The space in my mind she’d occupied was still full of her. I still felt her warm weight over my shoulder, against my chest. It was terrible to know she’d never rest there again.

  ***

  That night, sleep refused to come. A mosquito buzzed in my ear, the jumble of confusion and guilt over Uncle Blackie’s photos clotted my thoughts, and the moonlit rose-patterned bedspread looked like a small and bleeding animal hunched up in the bedroom corner.

  But I must’ve fallen asleep because I drifted into a terrible dr
eam. Drop by drop the image burned before me, bright and so alive, etching the nightmare onto my mind.

  Shelley was fighting the pillow Mum held over her face. Her chubby legs thrashed about as she struggled for air, her fisted hands pummelling as if she were trying to punch her killer. So strong for a baby. But soon the breath was squeezed from her body, her short limbs stilled and limp, feet turned outwards. Then Shelley was lying in her pink frilly dress in a white box deep beneath the sun-roasted earth of Australia’s ugliest graveyard.

  The judge banged his hammer so loud it deafened me. Bang, bang, bang.

  ‘Eleanor Randall is guilty ... guilty ... guilty. Life imprisonment ... life imprisonment for Eleanor Randall.’

  The courtroom crowd screamed, ‘Not life, off with her head, off with her head!’

  ‘Okay,’ the judge said. ‘Off with her head.’

  The masses jeered and clapped as they placed my mother’s head beneath the guillotine. The blade rushing towards her thin and snowy neck, I searched her hollowed-out eyes, pleading with her to tell me if she was guilty. Or not. She tried to open her mouth to speak to me, but her lips stayed tight as if cement had set them.

  I was still panting when I woke, and clammy with sweat. And hurting so much, as if some invisible force had ripped my heart from my chest. Outside Gumtree Cottage, cicadas whirred. They smashed about in my brain, my temples throbbed so much I pressed my fingertips into them.

  I shivered, tried to shrug off the dread that squeezed my neck like strangling hands. And from that waking moment, the fear too, awoke in me; the terror that someone –– one of those mourners, That Bitch Beryl, Dad, a neighbour –– would tell the police what they all thought. And the police would march into Gumtree Cottage, handcuff my mother and lock her up. I’d never see her again.

  But if she is a murderer, she should be punished for what she did to Shelley.

  No, no! She’s not a killer. She’s my mother.

  28

  When Doc Piggott returned to Gumtree Cottage a few weeks later Dad had, once again, abandoned us for The Dead Dingo’s Donger. Nanna Purvis opened the door, Billie-Jean and Bitta barking and racing around the doctor’s ankles so he had to edge his way inside, holding his black bag up high.

  ‘Quit that racket, youse two,’ Nanna Purvis said.

  ‘Dropped by to see how Eleanor’s coming along,’ Doc Piggott said.

  Nanna Purvis motioned the doctor into the kitchen. ‘Outside with you, Tanya, we need to talk about your mother ... about adult things.’

  ‘I hate it when you treat me as if I was a kid.’ I slammed the flyscreen door behind me. ‘As if I’ve got no more sense than a six-year-old.’

  Dusk was falling over the yard like bruised sunlight as I sat on the back verandah listening to their conversation. After all, it was my mother they were talking about. Of course I wanted to know why she was so ill and if she really had committed such a horrific crime.

  ‘Are the new pills helping?’ Doc Piggott asked.

  ‘Well, the funeral was over three weeks ago,’ Nanna Purvis said. ‘And Eleanor still either cries or stares into space. She washes Shelley’s clothes and bed sheets as if the little one is still with us ... bless her soul. She scrubs this house over and over, and in between all that she lies in bed with no idea what’s going on around her. I don’t know about you, Doc, but I wouldn’t call that helping.’

  ‘Mmn,’ Doc Piggott murmured.

  ‘Me hairdresser reckons it’s that neurotic sickness what can come over a woman after having kids. Baby blues or ... postnatal depression, ain’t that what youse call it? Happened to her sister after she dropped number three. She reckons Eleanor needs treatment, you know, special pills. ’

  ‘As I said before,’ Doc Piggott said, ‘I believe Eleanor is merely suffering from a severe dose of grief. Only natural, given the tragedy. I’ll increase her sedative to make her sleep better. After a few good sleeps and time to get over the shock she’ll come around, I assure you. And you must try to encourage her to keep her chin up.’

  ‘Far be it from me to argue with the expert,’ Nanna Purvis said, ‘but I reckon Eleanor should see one of them psycho docs. Can’t even look after her daughter. And running around cleaning like a headless chook, is that part of the grief too? What with Dobson an alky and me a near cripple, who does that leave to look out for me granddaughter? Tanya’ll be turning twelve this coming August, on the verge of the difficult years.’

  ‘I keep telling you I can look after myself,’ I called through the flyscreen. ‘And Dad’s no alky.’

  ‘Sometimes you gotta face reality, Tanya,’ Nanna Purvis called back.

  ‘Mmn,’ Doc Piggott said again, and disappeared into the bedroom to see my mother.

  A few minutes later he lumbered back to the kitchen table, wrote something on his prescription pad and gave the paper to Nanna Purvis. ‘See Eleanor gets these please, Mrs Purvis. And call me if you need anything else.’

  The front door closed and Doc Piggott’s car reversed out of the driveway.

  Nanna Purvis hadn’t said a word to him about people suspecting Mum had suffocated Shelley. My grandmother might be bossy, and talk rubbish, but at least she didn’t believe my mother had killed her own baby.

  I dawdled into my parents’ bedroom. Mum was curled up on the bed, facing the window. She remained motionless as I crept over to Shelley’s cot which, like her pram under the gum tree, nobody dared move.

  Still empty. Still no Shelley. Only her pink pyjama suit Mum laid out for her every night, straight and smoothed on the sheet. Perfect, except the baby inside the pyjamas was missing.

  She’d been gone a month –– four weeks that stretched as long as forever. Looking into her cot, an image of my sister’s little face flickered before my eyes: the corners of her strawberry-coloured lips creasing up when she cooed and kicked her legs in the air, and rolled onto her tummy. Her eyes, big and dark, as she tried to ram Billie-Jean’s plastic bone into her mouth. Her laughs and gurgles when I spun that transparent ball for her.

  I had watched them lower her small white coffin into the ground but still I hadn’t taken in the terrible reality that Shelley, once here, was now gone. Her sweet face, her pained cries, everything about her just gone.

  But gone where, I had no idea. A witch or magician could have magicked her away for all I knew. It was as confusing as that.

  I glanced across at my mother.

  Did you suffocate Shelley?

  Too fearful of the cruel truth, I still couldn’t ask her, so I trudged back to the kitchen to help Nanna Purvis make tea.

  ***

  Dad staggered in from the pub, took a KB Lager from the fridge and flipped the lid. Without a word, he sat at the kitchen table and glanced at the front page of the Illawarra Mercury.

  Monday, 26th February, 1973.

  OUR DIGGERS COMING HOME

  Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam has announced the establishment of diplomatic relations with the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North) while retaining diplomatic recognition for the Republic of Vietnam (South).

  I wasn’t exactly sure what that meant but it sounded as if the fighting sides were making up and had agreed to stop killing and maiming each other.

  The last elements of the Australian Army will have left Vietnam by June this year. There have been more demonstrations ... large number of Australians believe their deaths to be pointless, scandalous.

  Yes, pointless and scandalous, like Shelley’s death.

  The pain of my baby sister’s death was not easing. It wasn’t true what Dad said: that time heals wounds and grief. Time was not healing mine. The grief pain wasn’t fading; it was getting worse, and in a colder, uglier way.

  How long is time, anyway? I wondered if different wounds and griefs took longer to heal –– a simple knee scrape from banging into a Hill’s Hoist clothesline, compared with a gunshot wound smack in the guts. And the grief of a baby sister dying, how long does that take to heal?

  Perhaps
time can never heal those most agonising wounds. They need something more, a thing that doesn’t exist. And, in that case, my life would simply become one long continual wave in this sea of agony.

  ‘S’pose your mum’s in the bedroom again?’ Dad said, snapping over another newspaper page.

  I gave him a quick nod as I topped slices of bread with ham, tomatoes and cheese, and slid them under the griller.

  Dad got up, opened the freezer and took out one of Mrs Moretti’s Tupperware containers.

  ‘Gnocchi,’ he read from the label. ‘Might be tastier than cheese on toast. Want to try some, Tanya? And what about you, Pearl?’ He laughed, but it wasn’t real laughter, rather an odd high-pitched shriek, as if Nanna Purvis might actually want to eat the Italian food.

  Ignoring my father’s jibes, Nanna Purvis took two slices of cheese melt into the living-room.

  ‘Tasty grub,’ Dad said, loudly enough for my grandmother to hear over the television. ‘Lucky Nanna Purvis doesn’t want any, eh? More for us.’ He nudged me and winked, but the flash and sparkle had gone from his eyes –– the eyes of a dead old man.

  ‘What’s a drug dealer, Dad? Is Mr Moretti one?’

  My father finished his mouthful of gnocchi before he spoke. ‘It’s someone who sells illegal drugs to people. But there’s nothing to say your friends are involved in any of that business, Tanya. Take no notice of your grandmother’s racist gossip. Narrow-minded people like her are just jealous of the Morettis’ wealth. Think they don’t deserve it because they’re not true-blue Aussies. Which is a load of bullsh ... rubbish.’

  ‘Can I watch Number 96 tonight?’

  Dad shook his head. ‘Nope. You’re still too young for those kinds of telly shows. We could play Monopoly, eat some Lolly Gobble Bliss Bombs?’

  ‘Don’t want to play Monopoly ... stupid kids’ game.’

  I didn’t want to play any game. All I wanted was the truth: did my mother suffocate my baby sister? And if not, then who did? It was terrible not knowing. It was making me sick, stuck in my belly like gobbling too much bad food.