The Silent Kookaburra

by Liza Perrat

  I shuddered. A bolt of white-hot lightning shot through me. A shard of ice froze me. I leapt up and ran inside, slamming the flyscreen door behind me.

  ***

  It was Uncle Blackie who drove my mother home from the mental ward. After yesterday on the verandah I never wanted to see him again, didn’t want him to notice my embarrassment as I remembered his hand on my breast. He could never know I’d kind of enjoyed the feeling.

  I was walking home from school up Figtree Avenue when the rusty Kingswood swept into the driveway as if it were a limousine. The Driza-Bone reeling about him like Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights, a book we’d had to read at school, Uncle Blackie hurried from the driver’s side and opened the passenger door. He half-bowed as my mother stepped onto the driveway as if she was a queen and he her servant.

  He carried her bag, one hand cupped beneath her elbow, gripping my mother tighter as he ducked to avoid the Anderson boys’ wayward cricket ball. We all ignored Coralie Anderson’s gawping stare from her front yard.

  ‘Are you better, Mum ... truly better?’

  She nodded, blinked away tears, smiled, frowned –– a jumble of emotions tumbling from her all at once, like she was anxious how I’d be: pleased she was home or despising the mother who couldn’t look after her daughter when she’d needed her most.

  ‘I’m getting there. Look at you, how grown up you are,’ she said, as if she’d been gone three and a half years rather than three and a half months. And especially since I’d seen her several times during her absence when Nanna Purvis managed to sneak me past the hoity-toity desk woman.

  I linked my arm through hers, and with a gentle tug away from Uncle Blackie’s grip –– and avoiding his weirdo stare –– we walked up the verandah steps and into Gumtree Cottage.

  ‘Gosh, isn’t that snazzy,’ Mum said, nodding at my bicycle, leaning against the wall. ‘Uncle Blackie told me he’d got you a bike ... what a lucky girl you are, Tanya, having such a generous uncle.’

  Mum stood just inside the doorway, looking about her as if seeing her home for the first time. She bent down and patted the yapping dogs.

  ‘Stop that racket,’ Nanna Purvis said. ‘At least let her get inside before youse start bothering her.’

  ‘They’re okay,’ Mum said. ‘I’ve missed them ... missed everything.’

  ‘I’ll leave you to get settled in then, Eleanor,’ Uncle Blackie said. ‘I’ll get busy mowing the grass. It could do with a good going over.’

  With a pat on her forearm, Uncle Blackie strolled through the kitchen as if it was his own and down the backyard to the garage, where Dad kept the mower.

  He’d mowed about half the backyard, taking care to mow around Shelley’s pram rather than move it to one side, when Angela and her mother arrived.

  ‘Tanya is telling Angelina you coming home this day, Eleanor,’ Mrs Moretti said. ‘You looking well, I am very happy to see this.’ She thrust a heavenly-smelling basket of food at my mother. ‘I am thinking you would enjoy things to eat, just until you get back on your legs.’

  She set the basket filled with still-warm bread, strong-smelling cheese, and olives, on the kitchen table. ‘And cannelloni for your tea, and other meals.’ She began stacking Tupperware containers into the freezer, like at Shelley’s funeral.

  ‘Now, Sadie ––’ Nanna Purvis started.

  ‘Sofia,’ Mrs Moretti said.

  ‘Ah sorry, I get confused with ya funny names. As I was saying, I don’t generally condone foreign grub in this house, though I will admit the last lot was quite tasty.’

  ‘You said Italian food made you sick, that it messed with your insides?’ I said, exchanging a wink with Angela and her mother.

  Nanna Purvis cleared her throat, bellowed her fake laugh. ‘Just a manner of speaking, Tanya.’

  Mrs Moretti smiled and shut the freezer door. ‘My big pleasure, Mrs Purvis.’

  ‘Let’s all sit down and have a nice cuppa,’ Mum said.

  I went to fill the kettle but Mum placed her hand over mine. ‘It’s okay, I can do it, Tanya.’

  Moving across the lino like a normal person, no longer stuck to the chair, sofa or bed as if they were part of her, Mum made the pot of tea against the background whir of the lawnmower. Nanna Purvis was frowning at Uncle Blackie, and stroking Billie-Jean faster, harder.

  Sitting at the table she’d scrubbed at, slumped and cried on, my mother sipped tea and chatted with Mrs Moretti. I was pleased to see her doing something as simple as drinking tea with a friend in her kitchen; happy to hear her talking properly –– almost, for I knew the Tryptanol dried her mouth and made her drowsy –– in real sentences that made a kind of music instead of dull words in a straight line.

  As always when she spoke, Mrs Moretti waved her arms around. She told Mum about all the nice times I’d had with Angela, as if reassuring my mother I’d not suffered while she’d been away.

  ‘Your Tanya is loving our Italian food,’ she said. ‘I am learning her make the capsicum and eggplant with stuffing. I am sorry to say, you Australians know nothing of food.’

  ‘And her favourite,’ Angela said. ‘Meat balls in Mamma’s homemade tomato sauce.’

  ‘I’ll make some for you, Mum,’ I said. ‘Sooo yummy.’

  ‘Maybe you should give me cooking lessons too, Sofia?’ Mum said with a laugh. ‘As you say, we Aussies could do with a change from the same old food we’ve eaten for years.’

  ‘Why’s your uncle mowing your lawn?’ Angela said, as I took her out to the front verandah. I certainly wasn’t going near the backyard with Uncle Blackie in it.

  We dangled our legs over the edge, sipped the green cordial. Steely stretched himself out between us in the warm sun and a spider carved its web between the dusty old verandah rafters.

  ‘He’s taking advantage of my father being away ... for his work, to try and get my mother to be his girlfriend again. Like she was before she married Dad,’ I said. ‘I sussed that out the first time we visited Mum in the mental ward, when he came and gave her perfume. But Mum’s not that stupid. Anyway, how dare he use Dad’s lawnmower? I could mow it, or it could just wait till my father comes home.’

  ‘So since your mamma’s come home,’ Angela said, ‘that must mean nobody, including the police, believe she suffocated your sister?’

  ‘Nanna Purvis said the police went to the mental ward several times to question her but that they decided “not to take matters any further.” No evidence I guess. Anyway I don’t think Mum suffocated my sister ... I reckon it was someone else.’

  ‘Who then?’ Angela said.

  ***

  ‘That creep.’ I nodded at Uncle Blackie, who’d come around from the backyard. Casting me brief, sharp glances, he started mowing the grass in front of us.

  ‘Oh gosh!’ Angela’s chestnut eyes widened. ‘Why do you think it’s your uncle?’

  ‘A few reasons. Firstly because my mother was in no state to have a boyfriend while she had a crying baby, so he had to get rid of Shelley.’

  ‘No, that’s terrible.’

  ‘And secondly,’ I went on, stroking Steely so hard he nipped my hand, ‘he started hanging about Gumtree Cottage around the time Shelley died. And we both know he did commit some crime on a girl named Carter –– the reason they locked him up in Macquarie Pastures Asylum for the Criminally Insane. And one crime leads to another, you know.’

  I took a swig of cordial, a deep breath. ‘And thirdly, he knew Shelley had died without me or anyone else telling him. Three days after it happened he drove over here to give me some salt dough to make that cat sculpture for Shelley’s coffin.’ I drained my glass. ‘He just seems to know everything that happens with us: my father’s car accident, my mother’s cleaning frenzies. Shelley’s colic and crying. How can he know all that unless he’s here, hiding in the yard, listening to everything that’s going on?’

  ‘It sure sounds suss,’ Angela said.

  ‘And yesterday he touched me, here.’ I pointed at my br
east; didn’t mention that I’d enjoyed it, sort of.

  ‘He touched you there?’ Angela gasped, her eyes wide and chocolaty, like Maltesers.

  ‘You were right,’ I said. ‘Uncle Blackie is a bad person. And how dare he come back here after touching me like that!’

  ‘That is a totally and completely bad thing for a man to do,’ Angela said. ‘He should be locked up for that, and if he did suffocate Shelley, well ...’

  ‘But how can the police arrest him?’ My gaze narrowed on Uncle Blackie. ‘There’s obviously no evidence against him. I just wish he’d go home and leave us alone. Come on, let’s go back inside so we don’t have to look at him.’

  Angela and I chatted in my bedroom for a while, and when we returned to the kitchen for more drinks, Uncle Blackie came inside, mopping the sweat from his brow.

  ‘Oh, Sofia?’ He looked surprised to see Angela’s mother sitting at the kitchen table as he took a KB Lager from the fridge –– uninvited! –– and guzzled it down. ‘Lawnmower broke down,’ he said. ‘I half-expected it, Dobson should’ve replaced that clunky old model years ago.’

  Beside me, Angela tensed; her nostrils quivered. ‘We should go, Mamma. I’ve got loads of homework. Come over again soon, Tanya,’ she added, with a glance at Uncle Blackie.

  And as Mum closed the door after them, I wondered if she had sensed that hesitation: Angela’s unspoken words hanging in the air. A smell gone sour in the heat of a still day.

  ‘I’ll be off too, Eleanor,’ Uncle Blackie said. From the corner of my eye, I knew he was staring at me but I refused to look at him. ‘I’ll come back tomorrow and trim those bushes; it’s a bit hot now.’

  It was almost winter, not at all hot. Just a clever excuse to come back tomorrow.

  Uncle Blackie had barely shut the front door when Nanna Purvis started on about him.

  ‘It’s a bad idea him coming around here, Eleanor. I didn’t like it when you were in the hospital, but there was always some job needed doing so I could hardly send him packing what with Dobson gone.’

  ‘Oh no, don’t start on about Blackie again,’ Mum said. ‘We went through all this years ago. Things have changed now.’

  ‘Have you forgotten there’s a young girl in this house?’ Nanna Purvis nodded at me. ‘They should never’ve let him out of Macquarie Pastures. Monster should be kept away from civilisation ... from young girls.’

  ‘Stop saying those things about him,’ Mum snapped, fingernails tapping against her empty teacup. ‘He’s nice, a gentle person. All that business was an awful mistake.’

  ‘Never trust a bloke with a murky past, I say,’ Nanna Purvis said. ‘And what Blackburn was accused of was more than murky.’

  Uncle Blackie’s photos, his caresses. It was on the tip of my tongue but once again I stopped short. Apart from my guilt –– the embarrassment-tinged doubt that the photos, the touching, had been all my doing –– I did not want to worry my mother. Something like that could tip her back into the nervous-breakdown abyss.

  But I couldn’t believe she was defending Uncle Blackie, and I knew he’d tricked her too, same as he’d tricked me.

  As a kid I’d thought my mother was perfect. Well, not perfect, because sometimes she’d refuse me things and we’d argue. But I’d believed her smart. I never imagined she could be wrong or silly. But seeing Uncle Blackie deceive her so easily made me think she wasn’t so clever after all.

  36

  ‘Guess what, Tanya? I’ve got a job interview at Jim’s Jeans ’n Johns,’ Mum said, almost bouncing on the spot with excitement.

  Jim’s Jeans ’n Johns was a shop down at Eastbridge that sold jeans and underwear. ‘Only till I finish my typing and shorthand course,’ she went on, ‘then I’ll get a better, secretarial job. Anyway, Sofia and Angela are coming over to drive us down to Eastbridge ... Sofia said she’ll take you girls shopping while I’m at the interview, so let’s hurry and get ready.’

  Preparing herself for the job interview –– slipping into her bell-bottom flares, shaking them down over her slim, hairless legs –– was the first time I’d watched Mum get dressed up since before Shelley’s colic. I guessed this show of fancy clothes and make-up wasn’t only for her new job. It was also for Uncle Blackie.

  It was late July of 1973, and he was still waltzing into Gumtree Cottage all the time, a persistent blowfly around my mother. Apart from fixing everything that broke, he took my mother shopping in the Kingswood, and paid for our groceries, and whatever other bills came in, with his TAB-job money. And while he helped her unpack the shopping, he was always touching her. A pat here, a stroke there. As if he owned her. How I hated that.

  But when Nanna Purvis and my mother weren’t paying attention, that black gaze swept from her to me. He’d drink me in from my head to my toes like a person gasping for water. I began to sense that each caress he lavished on my mother was meant for me; that it was me he wanted, rather than her. I took to avoiding him, and never let him corner me on my own.

  Shower-fresh, smelling of Pears’ soap and wearing her satin dressing-gown, Mum patted her powder puff against her cheeks, her nose, her brow, the powder clinging to the fine hair above her lip and along her jaw, like flour on pastry.

  She turned to me, sitting on the edge of her bed, smiling as she reached over and patted powder over my face. The sun streaking through the Venetians lit her hair golden beige. She drew black liner around her eyes –– no longer hollow sea swells but the hazel colour of grass at a dewy daybreak. Leaning towards me, she traced eyeliner around my eyes.

  ‘I want a good job when I leave school,’ I said, as she brushed mascara over my lashes, and hers. ‘So I won’t have to depend on a husband to bring home the bacon.’

  ‘I thought you wanted to be a model,’ Mum said. ‘Like Twiggy ... the “Face of ’66”. Maybe you’ll be the “Face of ’76”?’

  I felt uncomfortable, like running from the surf with my swimmers full of sand. ‘Oh no, I’d hate to be a model.’

  Mum patted my arm. ‘Well I hope you get what you want. Now purse those lips.’ She made kissing lips and we were both smacking our pink, glossy mouths.

  She smiled at my reflection in the mirror. ‘Don’t you look the real young lady?’

  I tilted my chin, stuck my chest out. ‘Hello,’ I said to the real young lady.

  Just as quickly, my shoulders slumped. ‘But look how my ears stick out.’ I pressed my fingers against the tips of each ear, pushing them against my head. I scraped my hair over them. ‘Why can’t my ears be flat, like this?’

  ‘Those pageboy hairstyles are coming back in fashion,’ Mum said. ‘Perfect for hiding sticky-out ears.’

  ‘Okay, I’ll get a pageboy ... maybe I could go to Nanna Purvis’s hairdresser?’

  ‘Ha, your grandmother thinks Rita’s exclusively for her,’ Mum said with a laugh. ‘Probably best we try Percy’s Pin and Perm.’

  ‘And I am fat, you can’t deny it, Mum. I’m not called Ten-ton Tanya for nothing.’

  ‘Two women in my typing and shorthand course are on Weight Watchers,’ she said. ‘The pounds have just dropped right off them.’

  ‘Maybe I could go on Weight Watchers?’

  ‘Why not?’ Mum put her head next to mine in front of the mirror. ‘You look so much like me when I was your age.’

  ‘So I’m not adopted?’

  ‘Why do you keep asking that?’ Mum frowned as she slipped on a pretty flowered blouse, and Nanna Purvis hobbled into the room.

  ‘Because I didn’t inherit Dad’s dark genes ... the dominant ones, like Shelley did. And because Stacey Mornon’s mother said you weren’t in Wollongong Hospital having me when she was having Stacey.’ My chest felt caught in a vice as I imagined Stacey Mornon’s mother and my father together. ‘Her birthday’s the same day as mine so she reckons I must’ve been adopted. I always asked, don’t you remember?’

  ‘But I never thought you really believed it,’ Mum said. ‘Oh dear, I should’ve spelled it out. I’m so
sorry. You were born three weeks early. We were up at the Blythes’. Vicky’s birthday, I think. We still saw them back then. You were born in the hospital up there.’

  ‘You or Dad or Nanna Purvis have never actually said, “You are not adopted”. If you’d only said that.’

  ‘Anyway, how would that Mornon woman know anything?’ my grandmother said. ‘She was too busy having her seizure.’

  ‘Seizure?’ Mum said.

  ‘Didn’t they have to do a seizure to get that bird-brained Stacey out? Wasn’t her head too big for her mother’s fanny?’

  ‘Oh, I see.’ Mum giggled. ‘Caesar ... short for Caesarean section.’

  ‘Whatever,’ Nanna Purvis said, and Mum and I smirked behind our hands cupped over our mouths.

  ‘Anyway, it doesn’t matter,’ I said. ‘I know now that mothers can love their adopted kids just the same as natural ones.’

  ‘I wish I could’ve been a better mother.’ Mum sighed, laid a hand on my arm. The dewy eyes filled with tears, which she tried to blink away.

  She was going to cry again. Oh no, I’d seen her cry enough.

  ‘Sorry I got sick, Tanya. Sorry I couldn’t look after you properly like a mother should.’

  ‘You couldn’t help it. Too many sad things happened to you.’

  She looked away, out through the Venetian blind slats, one hand rubbing at her cowlick. ‘You make it sound so simple. If only...’ She sighed again. ‘I felt so useless; knew you needed me when Shelley ... and your dad drinking more and more. But the sadness, those pills, took all my energy. I needed them to get through the day but they made me so sleepy. I was too weak to fight.’

  ‘It’s okay, Mum.’

  ‘And I don’t blame your father for leaving us. I did try to give him what he needed, what every person needs, but I couldn’t fill that gap between us and it just got wider every day.’ She exhaled, her top lip quivering. ‘He tried so hard at first, but I kept pushing him away. As if his tenderness might melt me to some cold, liquidy ... nothing. Oh, I don’t know how to explain it.’