by Liza Perrat
‘You’ll see, Batgirl,’ Stacey called over her shoulder. ‘You’ll see it’s true.’
Once my insides stopped foaming, I looked around me. Heat-heavy Figtree Avenue was deserted, except for Terry and Wayne Anderson playing cricket. Steely still on his leash, I continued on up the hill and stopped outside number twenty-five, Stacey Mornon’s house. The one with all the garden gnomes.
The house looked empty. Well it would be, wouldn’t it, if her father and his secretary were at out at work –– together –– and her mother was in Mount Isa with my father.
I stole into the front yard, hooked Steely’s leash over the letterbox, and picked up a stone. I hurled it at one of the gnomes. Its head broke in two. Another stone. Smash. I was strong, brimming with energy. One more gnome down. Bits of gnome strewn across the yard. More and more stones hurled at the gnomes. Bang, smash, crash. One after the other, gnomes flying and me feeling more powerful with each newly-smashed gnome.
When I’d smashed the last ones left standing –– the dog and cat gnomes –– something hot and heavy welled inside me. I couldn’t believe what I’d done; wanted to glue them back together, those thousands, perhaps millions, of shards.
But some things you could never fix.
32
‘Children aren’t allowed to visit,’ the woman on the desk said. She had the same stuck-up and irritating voice as That Bitch Beryl.
‘Why not?’ I said, stamping my foot.
We’d got the good news this morning, a few days after her overdose: they were transferring my mother to the psych ward and she was finally allowed visitors. But only adults, apparently.
‘She’s my mother,’ I said to the snobby woman. ‘I want to see her.’
‘I don’t make the rules, dear.’ With a hoity-toity look, she pointed to an alcove-type space with four chairs around a table piled with raggedy magazines. ‘Why don’t you wait there for ... is it your grandmother? She’ll be able to tell you how your mum’s coming along.’
With a sigh, as if we were real nuisances, the woman got up from her desk. ‘I’ll have Mrs Randall brought to the lounge,’ she said to my grandmother, nodding at the sign, with an arrow: Patient-Visitor Lounge.
‘Why can’t we see her on the ward?’ Nanna Purvis said. ‘Why do youse have to take her to a lounge?’
‘No visiting allowed on the ward,’ the woman said, strutting off down the corridor. ‘The behaviour of some of our patients can be ... can be distressing to visitors.’
Still boiling with anger, I hissed to Nanna Purvis, ‘She can’t stop me visiting Mum, can she?’
‘Shut ya clapper,’ Nanna Purvis whispered, hustling me into the alcove. ‘Trust me, I’ll work something out.’ Off she tottered, following the woman and the Patient-Visitor Lounge arrow.
I sat on a chair, folded my arms and glanced over the magazines.
Boring, boring, all of them. It was so unfair. For the past days I’d been badgering Nanna Purvis nonstop to bring me in to visit my mother and now this woman wouldn’t let me see her.
‘I keep telling ya, Tanya, have a bit of patience,’ Nanna Purvis had said. ‘This’ll take ya mum ages to get over, Shelley going like that, then Dobson hoofing it to Mount Isa all in the same year.’
‘Dad will come back,’ I’d said. ‘You see, he will.’
True, he’d not yet returned from Mount Isa and he still had not written to me. I wondered if my letter hadn’t reached him, or there’d been a glitch with the post. Or maybe he was too busy mining to reply. Or too busy with bloody Stacey’s bloody mother.
I still didn’t want to believe my father had gone off with her. With the sulkiest pout, I swiped at the pile of magazines, splaying them across the floor.
Nanna Purvis had been gone about ten minutes when she appeared in the corridor and beckoned to me, a fingertip against her lips.
‘Snotty woman must’ve gone for a smoko,’ she hissed, glancing up and down the corridor. ‘Hurry now, if you want to see ya mum.’
With a stifled giggle, I scuttled into the lounge, where my mother was alone, slumped in a chair. She was not handcuffed or tied to a bed awaiting trial, but free to get up, walk around and do what she wanted.
My baby sister had been murdered almost two months ago, and still the police had not arrested her. I’d read enough Real Life Crime stories to know that –– insane or not –– they would have handcuffed and taken her away by now.
Then, like a worm breaking through dark earth into the light, my bewildered brain began to suspect that maybe my mother had not killed Shelley after all.
So who did?
***
Someone had hung paintings on the lounge walls and stuffed dried flowers in plastic vases to try and cheer up the drab-green room. But the pictures were faded and flaking, the flowers frayed and dusty.
My mother’s ropy hair was slick with grease, stick-arms poking from the hospital gown, her skin dead-fish scales. She glanced up, as if unsure what to expect from me, but as I shuffled towards her she smiled, took my hand and squeezed it like I was five years old again. Oh gosh, did that mean she was better, that she was recovered?
I leaned over, took her in the small circle of my arms and felt her heartbeat, feeble and fast.
‘How’re you two getting along?’ she asked. She let go my hand and started winding imaginary thread through her fingers.
‘Tanya and I are fine,’ Nanna Purvis said. ‘Don’t you worry about us.’
‘But we want you to come home,’ I said. ‘When can you come home?’
Nanna Purvis’s face creased into a wrinkly frown and she jabbed a finger to her lips, motioning me to shut up.
My mother’s brow furrowed as if it hurt her to think. ‘Soon ... home soon.’ She looked away, out through the window at a drooping willow tree. Her eyes came over all glittery and she was gone again, to her seabed world. Oh no, she definitely was not better.
I was so busy staring at her that I didn’t realise another person had come into the lounge. But I caught Uncle Blackie’s smell behind me –– vaguely damp and dour like Albany. I swivelled around, stiffened.
‘What’re you doing here?’ Nanna Purvis said.
‘Merely showing concern for my sister-in-law,’ Uncle Blackie said. ‘My absent brother’s wife.’
‘Dad’s not absent,’ I shouted. ‘He’ll come back after he’s made a packet of money up in the mines.’
‘Shut ya gob, Tanya,’ Nanna Purvis said, ‘or we’ll both get thrown out.’
‘Well, for now,’ Uncle Blackie said, his voice pleasant as ever, ‘your mum needs someone to help her through this difficult time.’
He took a gift-wrapped box from his pocket and pushed it into my mother’s clasped hands. ‘Thought this might cheer you up, Eleanor.’
As if he was quite at home in the Patient-Visitor Lounge, Uncle Blackie sat in the chair beside my mother as she fiddled with the paper, fingers picking uselessly at the sticky tape.
After what seemed an age, all the while Nanna Purvis and I exchanging wary looks behind Uncle Blackie’s back, she managed to get the paper off. From the box she pulled out a bottle of Cologne 4711.
‘That’s lovely, Blackie.’ Mum’s eyes closed as she sniffed the perfume, a violent pink flush spreading upward from her neck. ‘You remembered it’s my favourite.’
‘Let’s just say it’s a little memento of our summer of ’57-’58.’ He gave her a knowing wink and my feet started sweating, sticking to my Roman sandals.
‘Isn’t it nice of Blackie to visit?’ Mum drawled. ‘And with Dobson ... gone, he’s offered to take care of the jobs at Gumtree Cottage: gardening, lawn-mowing ... fix a few things.’
‘Dad’s not gone! He’s coming back.’
‘Stop shouting, Tanya,’ Nanna Purvis said, glaring at Uncle Blackie. ‘That snotty woman’ll be back any tick of the clock.’
Before I could say anything more, a man wearing a white coat and a solemn expression strode into the room. ‘You must be Mr
s Randall’s mother and daughter?’ he said. ‘I’m her doctor, and we’ve started her on a new drug which seems to be helping a great deal.’ He didn’t mention anything about no children visitors.
‘Tranquillisers don’t help my mother,’ I said. ‘She’s already taken heaps of them.’
‘This is a different medication, young lady. Tryptanol is a true antidepressant –– ’
‘So, Eleanor has got this postnatal depression thing then?’ Nanna Purvis said. ‘I said as much to Doc Piggott but he reckoned it was just the grief.’
‘I feel it’s manic depression rather than postnatal,’ the doctor said. ‘A disorder she’s likely been suffering from for many years. Of course, the tragedy –– and grief –– only made it worse. So Mrs Randall will have to take the Tryptanol for at least six months, in increasing doses, to fully recover.’ He glanced over at Uncle Blackie. ‘And having her brother-in-law here every day is also helping her. It’s marvellous to see such caring family members.’
But my mother had not been allowed visitors! I opened my mouth to ask this doctor why Uncle Blackie had been allowed to visit and not us, but Nanna Purvis shot me another warning glance.
Once the doctor left, we all sat in silence. I stared at my mother, refusing to meet Uncle Blackie’s gaze wrapped across my face like a thick, grubby scarf. From the corner of my eye, I could see Nanna Purvis scowling at him as she jiggled her crocheted bag up and down on her lap.
We gazed out the window at the droopy trees and shrubs. The jasmine, without its pretty pink and white summer flowers, climbed the wall; trying to escape over it.
When there was nothing else left to look at, and nothing more to say, Nanna Purvis stood up. ‘We’d best be going, can’t leave me little Billie-Jean on his own for too long.’
In her cool and distant manner, Nanna Purvis didn’t kiss my mother goodbye, not even a pat on the arm. She just said: ‘Keep up the good work, Eleanor. We’ll be back in a few days.’
Out in the corridor, she said, ‘Wait in the alcove, Tanya, I need the dunny before we leave. Me old bladder’ll never last the trip home.’
I sat back on the same chair, kicking my left heel against my right toes, Roman sandals making squeaking noises on the shiny lino floor still littered with the magazines. An annoying, grating noise. A shadow passed across my feet. I looked up to Uncle Blackie’s frame filling the doorway.
‘Why are you avoiding me, Tanya?’ He sat beside me. ‘I thought we were friends. And didn’t you say you’d come back to Albany?’
‘Why are you hanging around my mother all the time, and buying her presents?’ I jerked away from his hand dragging my fingers from the cowlick. ‘I told you, we can look after ourselves. And I could tell Mum about your photos, if I wanted.’
Though even as I spoke I knew my mother could never find out about the nude photographs. She was far too ill to bear such news. Besides, Angela might have convinced me it was wrong of Uncle Blackie to take them, but I also believed the photos had, somehow, been my fault; that it was me who’d really wanted him to take them. And that guilt, too, stopped me letting on to anyone besides Angela.
Nanna Purvis came out of the Ladies. She muttered something to Uncle Blackie that I didn’t catch and hustled me down the corridor faster than I’d ever seen her move.
‘Will you tell me now,’ I said as we waited at the taxi rank, ‘what Uncle Blackie did to that Carter girl?’
‘Things adults ain’t supposed to do to kids,’ Nanna Purvis said. ‘Keep away from that one, Tanya, you hear? There’s one rotten egg in every nest and they should’ve kept that bloke locked up in Macquarie Pastures Asylum, and flushed the key down the dunny.’
‘But if he committed a crime why wasn’t he sent to gaol, instead of a mental asylum?’
‘Because it was an asylum for criminals,’ she said. ‘And the judge ruled Blackburn was crazy at the time. Not only “at the time” if you ask me. That one’s always been a nutter. Even back in that summer of ’57-’58 when ya mum had the bad luck to meet him at the beach. And a black day that was.’
‘Why did Mum and Dad stop going to visit him at the asylum?’
‘Because I made them see sense,’ Nanna Purvis said as we got into the taxi. ‘Made them realise they should forget such a monster, not pay him visits like some ailing rello in hospital. Besides, by that time ya mum and dad had decided to get hitched. It would’ve seemed odd, them going to see him as a couple when it was Blackie stepping out with Eleanor in the first place.’
So my suspicions had been right. Uncle Blackie and Mum were boyfriend and girlfriend in the summer of ’57-’58. And as the taxi struggled up the Gallipoli Street hill an ugly suspicion about my uncle and my mother sneaked into my mind.
But I could not yet be certain.
33
‘I saw her ... saw Shelley.’ I couldn’t help myself, and grabbed hold of Nanna Purvis’s arm.
‘What you on about, Tanya?’ My grandmother didn’t even shake off my hold.
I nodded at a dark-haired woman waiting in the supermarket check-out queue behind us. ‘In her pram,’ I hissed. ‘I’m sure it’s Shelley.’
My grandmother sidled back behind the dark-haired woman and squinted into the pram, ignoring the mother’s bewildered frown.
She stared for a moment, and hobbled back to me. ‘It might look like Shelley but it ain’t her.’
‘But I was sure it was,’ I said, unpacking our groceries from the trolley.
‘I know what ya mean, Tanya, I’ve seen a dozen babies I thought were Shelley. In prams everywhere: the supermarket, the hairdresser’s, along the street. It’s all part of the grief.’
My mother had been in hospital for a few weeks, and that Friday after school, the month of March blowing itself out on a refreshing cool wind, Nanna Purvis and I had caught the bus down to Eastbridge to stock up the pantry.
I knew my grandmother was right, that I had just been imagining Shelley might still be alive somewhere and well. She was simply away from us; not ours any longer but living happily with another family, unaware I was searching for her the whole time.
Nanna Purvis slipped Only for Sheilas into the trolley, then, to my surprise, threw in the latest issue of Real Life Crime.
‘Oh?’
She winked and I started packing our purchases into the bags –– all the specials Nanna Purvis-the-bargain-hunter had found: a barbecued chicken for one dollar, fifty-five cents, mustard pickles for twenty-three cents a jar, the cool posters she’d let me get for my bedroom wall, and a double-pack of Iced VoVos for “cheap as mice”.
‘How much do mice cost?’ I’d asked, with a smirk.
‘Watch ya cheek, girl,’ she’d said, poking me in the ribs.
Despite missing Mum and Dad, it was easier now the strain was gone from Gumtree Cottage, which settled into a peaceful kind of place as if its ghosts too were absent. Gone away on holiday.
It was strange at first without my mother shuffling about –– a fairy lost in the woods –– her feather duster quivering like a useless wand. It was lighter too, without my father’s heavy despair, though his smoke-tinged scent of sweat, beer and baked bricks clung to the walls, his gravelly voice scratching about in my head.
Bath time, Princess. Teatime, Princess. Leave that cowlick alone, Princess.
I’d expected Nanna Purvis to become even more of a tyrant but she didn’t. Her hard shell softened, as if the sun that came blinking over the horizon every day was thawing her cold heart.
We never house-cleaned or hosed the Venetian blinds. We dumped the white sheets covering the sofa and armchairs in a pile in the corner of the living-room. To avoid washing up, we used paper plates, and I drank straight from the milk bottle.
I spent most afternoons after school at Bottlebrush Crescent with Angela, eating Mrs Moretti’s molto buono food and darting secretive glances at Marco’s rippling muscles.
Nanna Purvis didn’t even make too much fuss about me hanging around “that foreign mob”.<
br />
‘Italians are just the same as Aussies,’ I’d told her. ‘People are just people ... whatever country they come from.’
‘Humpf,’ she mumbled, and left it at that. No arguments, no more racist comments.
We’d bought far too many groceries to lug back on the bus so Nanna Purvis and I caught a taxi home.
‘Reckon we deserve a treat after that effort, eh, Tanya?’ she said, as we dumped the shopping bags on the kitchen floor.
I stored the food in the pantry and the fridge while Nanna Purvis wriggled into her slippers and made a pot of tea, the dogs hovering about her ankles.
The last thing I took from the shopping bags was the training bra –– on special, of course –– that my grandmother had picked out for me. ‘Go on then, try it on,’ she said with a wink.
My cheeks burning, I sloped off down the hallway to my bedroom. My grandmother buying me a bra was the most embarrassing thing ever, but I was secretly glad my boobies would no longer bounce more than the Andersons’ cricket ball.
‘Come and show me how it looks,’ Nanna Purvis hollered.
‘No way! As if ...’ I pulled on my T-shirt over the bra and stood in front of the mirror patting my new womanly chest, and giggling.
‘What if I make hamburgers for tea?’ I said once we’d drunk our cuppas.
‘Bonzer idea,’ Nanna Purvis said, feeding biscuit crumbs to Billie-Jean.
I dragged Mum’s mincing machine from the cupboard and Nanna Purvis said, ‘None of them gadgets around when I was a young wife: mincing machines, sandwich makers, food processors and them new frog things ... what’re they called? Fondue pot, that’s it.’
She carried on chatting as I poked raw meat hunks into the top, and turned the handle. ‘And the only recipe book we had was The Kookaburra Cookery Book from the Committee of the Lady Victoria Buxton Girls’ Club of Adelaide. Which is a hell of a mouthful but did us just fine.’
Nanna Purvis shrieked at the pink worms of meat oozing from the end of the mincer. ‘Looks like poo coming out a bum, eh, Tanya?’