The Silent Kookaburra

by Liza Perrat

  No doubt that Dad, too, yearned to know if my mother had killed Shelley. But he was shying away from it, avoiding the terrible truth that could make everything even worse than it already was. Because however could you explain or accept your wife killing your baby?

  I took the Lolly Gobble Bliss Bombs and while Dad drank beers out on the back verandah, I munched through the whole packet, until it was time for bed.

  I kicked off the nightmare bedspread and lay on the sheet. In that hot, quiet dark I heard their hushed voices. The sound of soft crying. Mum and Dad. Were they crying together, holding onto each other, bound in their grief?

  I closed my eyes, saw them loving each other again; no longer guerrillas stalking each other in dark forests like the Vietnam War. Happy, like when the sun still filtered through the Venetian blind slits before Shelley’s death snapped out all the light and left only darkness.

  But things between my parents were not all right; things only got worse. They barely spoke to me or to each other or Nanna Purvis, and never about Shelley. Nor did they mention the police enquiry, of which we heard nothing more anyway. Still no suspects, no arrests.

  In fact things got so bad that my father ended up fleeing a lot further than The Dead Dingo pub. Several days later, when I woke up, he was gone from Gumtree Cottage. His Akubra hat, most of his clothes, the Holden. Almost everything except the push-button ash trays.

  It was Nanna Purvis who told me he’d left for Mount Isa. ‘Don’t look so surprised, Tanya, he did warn you he was hoofing it.’

  She said Dad had driven away from Gumtree Cottage by dawn light. He mustn’t have wanted to wake me, but I was certain he’d have left me a goodbye message. I searched the house for his note but there was nothing. Just an unbearably silent and smokeless house.

  ‘I thought after Shelley d-d ... went,’ I said to my grandmother, ‘Dad wouldn’t really leave.’

  But even as I spoke I knew I should have seen it coming; should have read it in my father’s bloodshot eyes, which had become sort of transparent too, unable to hide his sadness, or his useless yearning to help Mum; to bring her back from that crazy, mournful seabed. Unable to snap her out of it, he’d been clinging onto their happy past, but now he’d given up on her. He’d given up on his family, and dared to leave me on my own!

  29

  ‘This is Zio Ricci and Zia Valentina,’ Angela said, introducing me to the aunt and uncle she often spoke of –– the relatives who’d come with them from Naples to start new lives in Australia.

  Angela had told me that Zio Ricci started working at the Port Kembla Steelworks with her father, but now he and Zia Valentina owned a popular Italian restaurant in downtown Wollongong, The Greasy Fork.

  Zio Ricci was an exact copy of Angela’s father, Lorenzo Moretti, and I wondered if they were twins. There was also her groovy brother, Marco, shoulders and chest muscles bulging against his T-shirt. I met Angela’s cousins too: Tony, the same age as Marco, and Bella, who was thirteen and so plump she made Angela and me look almost thin.

  It was a few days after Dad left for Mount Isa, and when Angela invited me over to Bottlebrush Crescent for tea I’d leapt at the chance to escape the misery of ghost-ridden Gumtree Cottage. The angry gods who stalked the place and sent poison clouds raining down on it.

  When it was clear my father wasn’t just out on a job or down the pub, that he’d really gone, my mother cried all day. So much that it seemed she’d always cried. Occasionally there was a pause in her sobs and Gumtree Cottage fell quiet. Then she’d break the silence with a moaning sob or a soft whimper and slip on her orange-flowered cleaning shift.

  She’d jiggle her feather duster back and forth over the sofa, simply moving the dust around. She hoovered the same spot on the carpet over and over. She shook the plastic strips outside, and stuffed the furniture sheets into her washing machine so often that the wringers seized up. From that gloomy face, the haze of sleep that clung to her, she no longer saw me –– The Invisible Girl –– as she moved silently through her day, from bedroom to cleaning every room, plodding down to the laundry shed for the washing, and back to her bedroom.

  Oh yes, I’d have moved into Angela’s home on Bottlebrush Crescent in a heartbeat if I’d had the chance.

  Tea at the Morettis’ began with antipasto: bread, olives, artichokes, cheese and salami. Three lemonade bottles stood on the table –– one filled with red wine, one with white and the other with Mrs Moretti’s zingy ginger beer.

  After the ravioli starter, with its delicious mushroom sauce, she brought out crispy roasted chicken and the salad she said Zia Valentina had made. I should have been full, but after the pasty stuff that now passed for meals at Gumtree Cottage, no way was I going to pass up such tasty tucker.

  ‘This is so yummy,’ I said. ‘How do you say that in Italian?’

  ‘Molto buono,’ Mrs Moretti said.

  ‘Italian food is molto buono then,’ I said, which made them all laugh.

  ‘Grazie,’ Mrs Moretti said.

  ‘What’s in the salad dressing?’ I asked Zia Valentina.

  ‘Olive oil, lemon juice, garlic and oregano,’ she said with a smile that showed off very white teeth. She patted her hair that was teased into a puffy twirl on top of her head, fastened with a gold clasp in the shape of a glittery feather.

  ‘You just mix all together and shake up,’ she said, waving her hands about, her gold rings with huge diamonds like flashes of sunset.

  After the chicken and salad, Angela asked her mother if we could go for a night swim before dessert. ‘I know it’s already March, Mamma, but it’s still so hot.’

  ‘Of course,’ Mrs Moretti said with a smile. ‘You are enjoying this lovely night. we are eating dessert later.’

  Tony and Marco said goodbye to everyone and left to go driving around in Marco’s purple car that I’d seen several times in the driveway –– the one with a strip of matching purple carpet in the back window and a dog that bobbed from the rear-vision mirror. I wished they’d asked Angela and me to go driving around with them.

  Bella lumbered upstairs behind Angela and me.

  ‘I can’t go swimming,’ Bella said with a pout. ‘Got my rags.’

  ‘Oh bummer,’ Angela said. ‘So glad I haven’t got mine right now.’

  We changed into our swimmers, and I wished I was wearing a bra under my singlet, like Angela was.

  ‘Yeah, real bummer,’ Bella said. ‘But at least that means Angela and I are grown-up women now. Are you a woman yet, Tanya?’

  I felt the flush heat my cheeks. ‘It’s only happened once.’

  ‘Ha, it’ll soon come every month,’ Bella said with a laugh. ‘But Mamma told me I can use tampons soon so I’ll be able to go swimming the whole month.’

  ‘Mamma says I can try them soon too,’ Angela said.

  We left the adults drinking wine and chatting, and Bella and her rags in the bedroom, listening to the cassette of David Cassidy and the Partridge Family’s, I Think I Love You.

  The flower-perfumed night air wrapping around me, there wasn’t a hint of wind but the darkness seemed to move with the sounds of birds, bandicoots and possums as we hurried by the hen-house and the vegetable garden.

  We dived into the pool and as I felt the water, soft and silky cool against my skin, I forgot Shelley’s murder, my mother’s misery, my father abandoning us. My fat vanished and I was a beautiful mermaid gliding along the seabed surrounded by bright fish, exotically-coloured coral and clear blue water. A flash of gleaming bosom, a twisting glitter of tail, lazily twirling fronds of hair. And a seductive smile for the sailor that looked like Marco Moretti.

  ‘Oh, we forgot to bring towels,’ Angela said, as Mermaid-Tanya surfaced. ‘I’ll go back up and get some.’ She scrambled from the pool and padded off into the balmy darkness.

  I floated on my back, gazing up at the starry sky. Bats dived and swooped through a cloud of gnats and I drifted my fingertips through the water, swirling it around in tiny whirlpools.
>
  A rustle in the bushes startled me. Too loud for a night creature. My feet grappled for the pool bottom and I stilled my hands, my body.

  ‘Hello, Tanya.’

  The voice that had always sounded so warm, wavy and exciting, froze me.

  ***

  ‘Uncle Blackie?’ I called his name, my head whipping from left to right, searching the shadows; wondering why I couldn’t see him, and what he was doing at Angela’s.

  From the bushland onto which the Morettis’ house backed, his tall silhouette emerged. In the ankle-length, oil-skin Driza-Bone, Uncle Blackie reminded me of the bushranger, Ned Kelly in his armour at the final showdown at Glenrowan Inn.

  ‘What’re you doing here, Uncle Blackie?’

  ‘I was just worried about you, Tanya. Wondered why you hadn’t been back to Albany to see me. To ride your bike ... or for more photos?’

  I didn’t know what to say. Angela’s words, the Macquarie Pastures asylum thing, had made me suspicious of Uncle Blackie.

  I glided away from the pool edge, started treading water in the deeper, middle part, floundering in my self-doubt.

  ‘Is something wrong, Tanya? You know you can tell me everything.’

  ‘It’s just that Angela reckons you shouldn’t have taken photos of me without my clothes on. She says that’s what filthy pervs do.’

  Beyond Uncle Blackie’s reach I was powerful, untouchable, confident. ‘And I know you did do something to that Carter girl. That’s why you got locked up in a mental asylum for the criminally insane.’

  ‘Ah, Tanya, I thought you were too smart to believe such lies.’ His voice grew softer, sad, as if my accusations had hurt him. ‘Besides, you know we’re great friends. And a girl needs a friend even more when she’s lost her baby sister ... if her father’s taken off to Queensland.’

  ‘How did you know about my fath ...?’

  Oh what was the point in asking? Uncle Blackie seemed to discover everything about us.

  ‘I don’t want you to take any more photos of me,’ I said.

  ‘I promise then, no more photos. Come back to Albany, Tanya. It’s a bit lonely there on my own. And I know you’re lonely too. If we’re together, neither of us would be lonely. Don’t you see that?’

  ‘I guess so, maybe. But you said you were moving to Perth. That’s what I heard you tell Dad.’

  ‘I was going to, but then I wondered what kind of uncle would leave you and your mum on your own. Now your father’s run off to Mount Isa with that woman –– ’

  My hands moved faster, batting at the water as if I were caught in a dangerous ocean rip.

  ‘That woman? What woman?’

  ‘Don’t worry, it’s nothing,’ Uncle Blackie said, walking around the pool edge, steps long, slow and steady. ‘I shouldn’t have mentioned anything. Anyway, it’s not right a man leaving his sick wife and his child to fend for themselves after such a tragedy. That’s the real reason I’m not going to Perth ... to stay here and take care of you and your mother.’

  ‘Mum and Nanna Purvis and I are fine on our own. Anyway, Dad’ll be back soon.’

  Uncle Blackie shook his head, his tongue making tsk, tsk sounds. ‘It’s hard to accept, but I’m sorry to say your dad isn’t coming back. I’m here for you now. For you and your mum.’

  Against the mosquitoes’ incessant buzzing, Uncle Blackie kept strolling up and down the pool edge, with that kind of smile you could believe in. I trod water, glanced up at the house.

  Should I believe him? Am I just being silly, and Angela is wrong about him? I wish I knew.

  ‘You’re jumpy as a kangaroo,’ Uncle Blackie said. ‘Don’t be nervous. You know I’d never hurt you, I only want to take care of you.’

  ‘I ... I know. I’m not nervous, just a bit cold.’

  The water had turned icy. My teeth clack-clacked. My arms ached, my legs weakened, but something made me stay in the pool. Then Angela was skipping back down the yard with the towels and, as quickly as he’d appeared, Uncle Blackie vanished into the thick bush.

  I swam to the side, grabbed the edge. Breathless and panting, I rested my head on my forearms, thinking about what Uncle Blackie had said.

  ... your father’s run off to Mount Isa with that woman.

  ‘Why’re you puffed out?’ Angela wrapped a towel around her middle and offered the other to me. ‘What’s up, Tanya?’

  ‘He was here ... Uncle Blackie.’ A shaky finger pointed at the bushes.

  ‘Your uncle was here?’ Angela squinted into the darkness, twisted back around. ‘I’m going straight to tell Papa. He and Zio Ricci will get rid of him.’

  ‘No, don’t tell your father, please. Anyway, he’s gone now.’ The last thing I wanted was Angela’s father and uncle to rush out and look for Uncle Blackie. And not find him. I’d look a right idiot then.

  ‘I really should tell Papa.’

  ‘Please don’t ... you did promise we’d keep each other’s secrets, didn’t you?’

  ‘Okay, but if he ever comes back I’m going straight to Papa.’

  ‘Uncle Blackie said my father’s run off to Mount Isa with some woman,’ I said. ‘That can’t be true, can it?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Angela’s gaze was still searching the bushland darkness. ‘But for now don’t worry about your papa. Or your uncle. Come and taste my mother’s frittole. You’ll just flip, and Zia Valentina’s chocolate-covered pannetone too!’

  I nodded, already feeling better as we hurried up the backyard.

  Once inside the Morettis’ fancy house, with her friendly and happy family, I was safe from anything. And anyone.

  30

  ‘Shelley’s gone ... gone, Eleanor. Bless her soul.’ From the backyard, Nanna Purvis’s voice boomed over the rising wind and the growl of approaching storm clouds. ‘You don’t need to wash her stuff anymore. You gotta stop washing her clothes, carrying on as if she’s still alive, or Doc Piggott’ll lock you up with the crazies.’

  I dumped my schoolbag, patted Steely and Bitta and stuffed three lamingtons into my mouth one after the other, almost groaning with pleasure at the mixture of chocolate, coconut and sponge cake.

  Dad had been gone about three weeks, and still no letter. No phone call. Nothing. I’d not seen Uncle Blackie again, still not sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing. And when I’d asked Nanna Purvis about Dad running off to Mount Isa with some woman, she’d said, ‘Wherever did ya hear that gossip, Tanya?’

  ‘Just around ... at school. Is it true?’

  ‘Not that I know of,’ Nanna Purvis had said.

  I went out onto the back verandah and ate two more lamingtons. My guts heaved and I threw aside the packet. From the Hill’s Hoist, Nanna Purvis was unpegging Shelley’s cot sheets that were swaying like dancers to a wind orchestra, and her clothes: singlets barely bigger than a Barbie doll’s, tiny, curled socks and rows of white nappies that Mum washed twice to make sure.

  ‘Nappies less than perfectly white are the sign of a bad housewife,’ she’d say.

  Each time my grandmother reached for a peg, her thin legs quivered, the varicose veins bulged and her furry slippers made her feet look like a duck’s webbed ones, only blue.

  The wind juddered Shelley’s pram too, littered with the fallen eucalyptus blossoms, and I remembered, as a kid, walking back and forth beneath those petals, hoping one would land on my head and my luck would change. Back when I believed the falling petal legend meant good luck, before I came to realise it meant very rotten luck.

  My mother stood beside the clothes line, arms folded, glancing up at the iron-grey clouds scudding in from beyond the mountain range. She did not appear concerned that my grandmother was removing what were now unnecessary clothes; she was only worried the coming storm would wet her washing.

  Nanna Purvis shoved the bundle of Shelley’s damp clothes at my mother, who clutched the garments to her chest, gaping at them.

  I couldn’t stand it, could no longer bear to see her like this, and I wanted to sc
ream the hurt away.

  The first thunder grumbled, deep and threatening. A gust raked the yard, the temperature dropped and goosebumps spiked along my arms. My mother still didn’t move, didn’t say a word.

  ‘Give them here then.’ Nanna Purvis snatched the clothes from her, hobbled over to the bin and shoved everything inside. ‘That’s it now,’ she said, slamming down the lid. ‘The end, bless Shelley’s soul.’

  Mum’s arms stayed wide open as if she was still holding Shelley’s clothes. They dropped, limp and useless, to her sides.

  ‘Storm’s coming ... get washing in,’ she said. ‘Change the beds, dust furniture ...’

  She grappled with the hem of her cleaning shift, began picking at the flowered fabric.

  I covered my ears.

  Can’t hear you. Not listening. Shut up. Shut up. Shut up.

  I so wished she’d snap out of it, so wanted things to go back to like before. If only she’d stop all this housework and take me to North Beach. But I feared my mother would never take me to the beach again. Ever. Well, she wouldn’t be able to, would she, from gaol?

  The faces of Mavis and Mad Myrtle Sloan appeared at the fence.

  ‘Storm’s coming,’ Myrtle said.

  ‘You feeling better, Eleanor?’ Mavis asked.

  Huh, the answer to that was so obvious it almost seemed they were mocking us by simply asking. Besides, I knew they only wanted to know if my mother really was a murderess.

  Mum didn’t answer and I could tell she wanted Mavis and Mad Myrtle to go away. She didn’t want to talk to them, or anybody else.

  ‘I reckon youse two could mind your own bananas,’ Nanna Purvis said, waggling a crooked finger at the sisters. ‘If this country wasn’t so full of nosey parkers we’d be a lot better off. Besides, we can take care of our own.’

  ‘Just trying to be neighbourly, Pearl. We know it must be hard for you, losing Shelley and all. Have the police found out who did it yet?’

  ‘Those hillbilly fuzz couldn’t find a dick in a men’s dunny,’ Nanna Purvis said.