The Silent Kookaburra

by Liza Perrat

  The coroner’s findings, once they’d “completed their investigation”, echoed in my head.

  Death caused by suffocation from the pillow that Shelley had in her pram by the action of persons unknown. Enquiry left open.

  ‘Now, if you’ll excuse us,’ Nanna Purvis went on, nodding at the western sky, ‘we gotta get inside before this storm hits.’

  ‘If you need anything ... that’s what neighbours are for,’ Mavis said.

  ‘As if we’d be asking anything of them two,’ Nanna Purvis said as the Sloan sisters disappeared. ‘Cunning as Queensland cane toads they are, trying to find out our private business. If you want my opinion, Eleanor, it could’ve been them.’

  ‘Them?’ Mum said with a faint frown.

  ‘Them who killed little Shelley,’ Nanna Purvis said. ‘No, don’t look at me that way. Think about it logically. Everybody knows Mad Myrtle couldn’t have any kids ... that they had to take her ovaries. Rotten they were, the both of them. That’s why the husband hoofed it with them Hare Krishnas. So wouldn’t it be logical Mad Myrtle’d be jealous of anyone with kids?’ Nanna Purvis’s eyes brightened. A Real Life Crime sleuth stumbling upon the truth. ‘She could’ve legged it over that fence, Mavis keeping watch while Mad Myrtle walked right up to Shelley’s pram and suffocated her.’

  Mum stared at Nanna Purvis. Pale-faced, lips trembling, tears clouded her eyes.

  ‘Besides,’ Nanna Purvis carried on, barely taking a breath, ‘with those frog eyes, them two don’t even look the full picnic.’

  ‘Oh stop it, stop saying stupid things,’ Mum cried. ‘Stop, stop, stop.’

  Stupid things, yes. Though I understood why. Like me, my grandmother could not accept that it might’ve been her own daughter who’d killed Shelley, so she carried on inventing suspects: impossible, improbable and downright ridiculous ones.

  Nanna Purvis and I were both drowning in that sea of suspicion. Swimmers caught in a dangerous rip, flailing about for a life raft, some alternative –– anything –– we could cling to, and thus spare my mother.

  The clouds assembled in a dark clump and the first splatters hailed the break in the heatwave. I jumped at a thunder crack, the hairs on the nape of my neck prickling as the rain pounded the parched earth. Yards and yards of fishing line connecting sky and earth.

  Dried grass and wilting plants sucked up the precious water, petals opening like welcoming arms.

  ‘Anyway, Eleanor,’ Nanna Purvis hollered over the rain as she wobbled up the verandah steps, ‘those coppers haven’t come up with a single thing so it seems we’ll have to figure it out for ourselves. And as for people saying you done it ... well I never heard such gobblerot. As if you’d hurt Shelley after all you went through to finally get another kid. Now come inside, you’re getting sodden. You too, Tanya.’

  Mum couldn’t stop shaking her head, lumps of hair whipping her face. I tried to drag her inside but her knuckles were hard white knobbles as she clung to the Hill’s Hoist, her feet stuck to the grass. ‘... must get those things off the line ...’

  ‘There are no clothes left on the line, Mum. Come inside, out of the rain.’

  She tried to shake off my hand. ‘No, no, no.’

  I was already soaked so I left her there and dashed for cover. Dripping puddles onto the verandah, the water collecting in the worn wood ruts, I watched the rain wash over my mother’s tortured body: slapping at her ankles, lashing her legs and pooling in her sandals.

  I kept pleading with her to come inside, but my words were lost in the noise of the rain hammering on the corrugated iron roof. The hooves of a hundred galloping horses, coming faster, closer; about to trample me.

  But really, I thought, it doesn’t matter if she stays outside. If the rain was cleansing her –– some softer thing, an ache more bearable than the utter misery of before –– just let her stay out in it.

  I hurried into the kitchen, grabbed a towel. As I dried myself off, the whole of Gumtree Cottage creaked and groaned. The wind pulled at the Venetian blinds –– a banshee wind that fled, screaming, up Figtree Avenue, thready rain chasing it.

  ***

  My mother eventually came inside and stared, open-mouthed, at Nanna Purvis hobbling about, gathering Shelley’s entire layette.

  ‘What are you doing with my baby’s things?’ she said.

  ‘You’ll never get back to normal, Eleanor, while Shelley’s things are still in this cursed house.’

  Despite the storm, it was still warm, but my mother was shivering, her arms bent up in front of her face, fingers working her cowlick. Rainwater ran off her, collecting in small pools on the kitchen lino as Nanna Purvis plonked everything beside the front door: nappies, plastic pants with non-chafe leg bands, cuddle rug, cotton wrap, singlets, booties, matinee jacket, terry towelling bibs. Everything except the pram, which my grandmother couldn’t shift on her own, and I was not about to help her remove that last link to my sister.

  ‘Get away, youse two,’ Nanna Purvis said, flapping her arms at the dogs that were yapping and racing in circles around the growing pile of Shelley’s belongings.

  I pushed a towel into her hands but Mum just held it, so I took it from her and wiped her face, her hair, dried her arms, her legs, her feet. She stood as still as an obedient child. I was glad she let me do it; felt better seeing her half-dry, like it did her good whether she felt it or not.

  Instead of walking next door in the rain, Nanna Purvis picked up the phone. ‘Got a load of things to take to the dump when you got a minute, Old Lenny,’ she said. ‘Thanks, you’re a mate.’

  Old Lenny lumbered over to number thirteen straight away. Thug that I believed Lenny Longbottom was he didn’t ask a single tactless question as he packed Shelley’s things into the back of his old van.

  But when he finished he came back to Gumtree Cottage and said to Nanna Purvis, ‘Instead of just dumping all this stuff at the tip, I reckon I could sell it off. Get youse a bit of money back, compensate youse a bit like? I’d only take a small commission. Whadya say, Pearl?’ He sniffed, hitched up the shorts over his belly.

  ‘Well, if ya think we could get a bit back, Old Lenny, be a shame not to try.’ She jiggled a finger at him. ‘But don’t you go ripping us off. I’ll know if ya do, I’ll see it in them conniving little koala eyes of yours.’

  ‘Koala?’

  ‘You always make me think of some sneaky koala, Old Lenny, with that round bald top and hair fluff poking out your ears.’

  Lenny’s face crumpled into a look of mock-hurt. He flicked the plait and limped back next door.

  ‘Now let’s all of us sit down with a nice cuppa and a couple of Iced VoVos, and work out what to do with you, Eleanor,’ Nanna Purvis said.

  She pushed my mother down into a chair and set the tea and biscuits in front of her. Oh boy, my grandmother must have been feeling generous, to share her Iced VoVos.

  ‘Nothing like a nice cuppa to make a person feel better, eh?’ she said. ‘But you’ll have to snap out of this mood. It’s a terrible thing what happened to Shelley. But life goes on, ya gotta stare the goanna in the guts. And quit fiddling with that cowlick, you’re as bad as Tanya. Give me the heebie jeebies, the both of youse.’

  My mother’s fingers dropped to her lap and she nodded as if she understood, and she’d give it a try. But within minutes, still staring at the steam from her tea curl up, twirl in a waltz, then die away, I knew she’d slipped away from us again. She moved from quietly leaking tears –– plink, plink, plink into the milky tea –– to heaves and judders, and back again. Practising crying for once instead of doing it.

  I wanted to make her better, but I had no idea how. All I knew was that this never-ending weeping was not helping her recover; it was just making her sicker.

  I stroked Steely, curled in my lap. I glanced up, out through the flyscreen door, as if the answer would be there, somewhere in the thunder and rain, in the soggy quagmire of our backyard.

  Nanna Purvis and I were so busy thinking how
we might help my mother that we paid no attention to her. We didn’t notice her shuffle into the bathroom and take her bottle of pills from the cupboard.

  31

  ‘Go and fetch your mother, Tanya,’ Nanna Purvis said, slapping Spam slices onto bread. ‘Time for tea.’

  The rain still a thousand possums scuttling across the roof, I padded into Mum’s bedroom. She was lying on the bed in her usual position, facing the window.

  ‘Tea-time.’ I touched her arm, jerked my hand away from the cool, moist skin. ‘Wake up, Mum.’

  I shook her harder. No answer.

  ‘She won’t wake up!’ I yelled to Nanna Purvis. ‘And her arms are all floppy, and she’s breathing funny and drooling like ... Shelley did sometimes.’

  Nanna Purvis came rushing into the bedroom. ‘Strewth!’ She shook my mother, yelled at her, waved her hanky over her face, slapped her cheeks. ‘Eleanor?’

  She snatched my mother’s jar of pills from the bedside table. Empty. As was the sherry bottle lying on the floor beside the bed. ‘Hurry, Tanya, ring the ambulance. Say there’s been an overdose.’

  Nanna Purvis scuttled into the bathroom, opened the cupboard. ‘At least she didn’t get to the second bottle.’

  I knew what an overdose was. A woman in Real Life Crime had taken one when she wanted to kill herself. Mum was not dead, though. When the ambulance men arrived and rubbed her chest and pinched her ear lobe, she twitched, and her chest still rose and fell. So she was definitely not dead. Just not awake.

  Nanna Purvis ordered me out of the bedroom but I hovered in the hallway while they worked on my mother, still wearing her orange-flowered cleaning shift that clung to her like a second skin. But watching them only sparked the still-blaring memories of those ambulance men trying to revive Shelley.

  ‘... pump out her stomach ... not sure we can save her ... all that sherry ...’ I heard them say to my grandmother.

  ‘You have to save her,’ I said. ‘She can’t die.’ I scurried out the front door behind them as they took my mother away on a stretcher. ‘My sister already died, just a few months ago, and my father ... my father ...’

  ‘We’ll do our best, sweetie,’ one of them said, dodging rainwater purling from roof to eave, and jogging down to the ambulance waiting in Figtree Avenue.

  Despite the rain, the neighbours were all standing in the middle of the street: Mavis and Mad Myrtle Sloan, Mrs Anderson, and her boys with their cricket bat and ball. Old Lenny and his son and daughter-in-law, and the rest of them, including Stacey with her father, Gordy Mornon who –– so Nanna Purvis heard at the hairdressing salon –– had moved back to the family home in Figtree Avenue with his secretary when his wife scarpered with some bloke.

  They whispered amongst themselves, heads nodding, women’s hands clamped on aproned hips. I was sure they were saying that after suffocating her baby, my mother had finally cracked up.

  Which she had.

  My hand fidgeted with my cowlick. That was it. Mum was gone. I felt like a baby animal trapped in a bushfire that had burnt its mother to death, alone, withering in the flames of a large and frightening world.

  ***

  Dusk fell, with no news from the hospital.

  ‘Why can’t we phone them to see how she is?’ I said to Nanna Purvis.

  ‘Ah, ya sound like cocky fallen off his perch, Tanya, hounding me with the same thing over and over. I told ya, they’ll call us. That’s what the ambulance drivers said.’

  I was certain Nanna Purvis was itching to phone the hospital too but, like me, was afraid of what she might hear.

  ‘No news is good news,’ she kept repeating, annoyingly.

  The storm wrung out its fury, sidled away over the Pacific Ocean. Every sound became clear and sharp: the crack of a eucalyptus branch, a dog’s bark, tyres hissing on drenched asphalt. The slam of a car door. The whack, whack of the Anderson boys’ cricket ball against the bat.

  Washed and dusted, the trees glittered. Rosellas flashed their rainbow bodies, back from wherever they’d gone while the rain fell. The pink-breasted galahs, too, fluttered into the yard.

  Birds, trees, flowers and earth all revived. Unlike my mother.

  Then the phone did ring, loud and shrill as an alarm. Nanna Purvis and I jumped, stared at the ringing phone. Neither of us made a move to answer it; just kept looking at it, listening to its echo down the hallway.

  ‘Go on then, Tanya, answer it.’

  I managed to get my legs working, raced to answer it. But the hospital wouldn’t tell me a thing.

  ‘They want to speak to an adult.’ I handed the receiver to my grandmother, hovering, trying to hear what the caller was saying.

  ‘Ya mum’s critical but stable,’ Nanna Purvis said as she hung up. ‘They’ll phone back when there’s more news.’

  “Critical” they’d said. They’d hadn’t said “dead” which was the worst word to hear because I’d learned that was something you could never reverse.

  ‘If Dad knows about the overdose, he’ll come home from Mount Isa.’

  ‘Don’t count on that,’ Nanna Purvis said, feeding Pooch Snax to Billie-Jean. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if ya father stays up there for good.’

  ‘He will come home ...’

  But even as I said the words I wasn’t so sure. He could easily stay in Mount Isa with “that woman”, whoever she was.

  And what if Mum dies? Don’t die, please don’t die.

  Then it hit me. Even if my mother did survive the overdose, once the police learned of everyone’s suspicions, they’d cart her off to gaol. Or to some mental asylum for the criminally insane.

  I sat cross-legged on my bed, scratching Steely’s head as I wrote a letter to my father, telling him about Mum’s overdose, and that he had to come home.

  I didn’t know where he was living so I addressed the envelope to Mr Dobson Randall, c/o Mount Isa Pub, Mount Isa, Queensland.

  I sealed the envelope and lay back on my bed, listening to the tick-tock of the hallway clock. I thought of my mother. Perhaps already dead, like Shelley. The world was too horrible. It would be better if I, too, were dead.

  ***

  Over the next dread-filled, limbo kind of day, when we still didn’t know if my mother would recover, I spent a lot of time peering through the Venetian blind slats, my heartbeat quickening with every car that came up Figtree Avenue. I kept lurching out onto the front verandah, but none of the cars was Dad’s Holden.

  I didn’t understand why he wouldn’t want to come home to us after such a terrible thing. Perhaps he hated my mother because of what he, and other people, believed she’d done to Shelley. Or he really had found another woman, and no longer cared a thing about my mother; no longer cared about me. He was never coming back to her or to me.

  So perhaps I was adopted, unlike Shelley who, being their own flesh and blood, my parents had truly loved.

  After school on the second day, and still no sign of my father, I couldn’t bear staying in that awful death house. Without letting Nanna Purvis know I was home, I grabbed a packet of Iced VoVos, hooked Steely’s leash onto his collar and went back outside.

  ‘Hey, wanna be wicket-keeper?’ Terry said, bowling the ball to batter-Wayne.

  ‘Not today, thanks,’ I said, spying Stacey Mornon-the-moron riding her bike down Figtree Avenue.

  Oh no. The one person I do not want to see.

  ‘So they finally carted your murdering mother off to the loony asylum,’ Stacey said, braking alongside me. She gripped the streamer-handlebars, her fingernails the same bright pink as the bicycle basket.

  Once again I wished my red bike –– newer, shinier and flashier than Stacey’s –– didn’t have to stay at Uncle Blackie’s. I was itching to show it off to her.

  ‘My mother’s no murderer. She’s just sick, in hospital. She’ll be better soon.’

  ‘Is that what they told you?’ Stacey gave a nasty little laugh. ‘You’re so dumb. Because your mum’s gone loony, they can’t put her on
trial for her crime yet ... they have to wait till she can answer the questions, face the jury. So,’ Stacey went on, ‘they’ll keep her away from the public so she doesn’t kill again. And when she’s cured of the lunacy, they’ll put her on trial and find her guilty. Then they’ll gaol her for life.’

  ‘You’re the dumb one,’ I said. ‘You know nothing about our business anyway.’

  ‘I happen to know a lot about your business.’ She flicked a blonde curl from her face. ‘I happen to know that your father’s gone up to Mount Isa with ...’

  Stacey’s voice shook as it trailed off, as if she regretted starting the sentence. Tears glittered in her blue eyes, which she swiped at with a fist. I’d never seen tough-girl Stacey weep in all the eleven years we’d known each other.

  ‘He’s ... your father’s run off to Mount Isa with my mother,’ she said. ‘It was probably his idea, and he just forced my mother to go with him.’

  ‘Run off with ...?’

  I stared at Stacey, unable to say another thing as Uncle Blackie’s words pealed through my mind.

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

  My father would never do that. No, he wouldn’t. Besides, Nanna Purvis still hadn’t heard anything about it, and since my grandmother knew every scrap of gossip, maybe they were both lying –– Uncle Blackie and Stacey. But even as I tried to convince myself, it sounded unlikely.

  A horrible image flared in my mind: Stacey’s mother patting Dad’s arm at Shelley’s funeral. And again, at the wake, in my parents’ bedroom.

  ‘I’ll be going to live up in Mount Isa too.’ Stacey’s shrill voice startled me from my thoughts. ‘With my mother. As soon as ... soon as they get a house organised.’

  Why’s bloody Stacey going to live with them? Why hasn’t Dad asked me to go and live with them?

  ‘So, see you round someday,’ Stacey said, trilling the bell as she cycled off down the hill.

  ‘How do I know you’re telling the truth?’ I shouted after her. ‘You’re such a moron, I bet you’re lying.’