by Liza Perrat
Six months ago, and it was still so unbelievable. So not real.
‘She’s gone, Tanya.’ Mum bent down beside me, squeezed my hand. ‘Nothing we can do to bring her back. We have to try and live our lives without her. Can we try, together, to be happy?’
A slimy fish slid down my back, and I shook all over. We can only be happy if Uncle Blackie is away from Gumtree Cottage, I wanted to say to her.
In the falling winter twilight, my mother blew a kiss at Shelley’s grave. ‘Goodbye, my sweet little gumnut girl ... I’ll never forget you.’ She sniffed, didn’t swipe at the tears running down her cheeks.
I folded my hand over my mother’s, squeezed it, and blew my own kiss to Shelley. I pulled Mum upright. We walked away, her arm curving around my shoulder as I glanced back to where Shelley would always be asleep. Never crying, only sleeping.
We took the next bus home. I slumped into the seat, looked out into the dusk light, not seeing anything. Staring at nothing.
‘There’s something I’ve been meaning to talk to you about,’ Mum said as the bus groaned its way up the Gallipoli Street hill. ‘About Blackie and me.’
I stiffened. From her wary tone, I guessed what she was going to say about her and Uncle Blackie and I did not want to hear it. I snapped my eyes shut.
‘Tanya?’ Mum shook my shoulder. ‘Are you asleep?’
I didn’t move, not the slightest blink. I heard her sigh; kept my eyes shut.
***
I dreamed of my father that night. He’d taken me to the beach but raced into the water without me. I was chugging along the long, empty shoreline, breathless and calling out to Dad, craning my neck over the gigantic waves to catch a glimpse of him.
‘Why didn’t you wait for me, Dad? Why did you leave me on my own with Uncle Blackie?’
My voice echoed against the harsh blue sky, went hoarse with the screaming and the frustration when I got no answer from him.
Then, from the inky water beyond the breakers, his dark head rose. He caught a ride in on the lip of a breaker, waded towards me, smiling, water beads sparkling like diamonds on his sun-bronzed chest. And that moment seemed to last forever. Fairy-tale time. Until I woke, sweating, tangled up in the sheet. And hating my father again.
‘Everything all right, Tanya?’ I stiffened as Uncle Blackie sat on the side of my bed, one hand dragging my fingers from the cowlick. ‘I heard you call out ... bad dream?’
In the moonlight slicing between the Venetian blind slats, I caught Uncle Blackie’s sympathetic smile. His finger trailed from my cowlick to my cheek, my mouth. Tracing around my lips.
‘I’ll bite your finger off,’ I hissed, pushing away his hand.
‘You’d never do that, Tanya, you like me too much. Anyway, listen, I’ve had this great idea.’
‘What idea?’
‘What about if I do go to Perth ... and you come with me? We could go together, just you and me.’ He spoke in a low, urgent whisper. ‘We’d have such a beaut time: the beach every day, visiting the city, going to fun fairs. We’ll eat meat pies and fish and chips whenever we want. We’ll go everywhere, do everything together. We’d be best friends.’ He took a breath. ‘You know deep inside how much I care for you, Tanya ... how much we truly care for each other.’
His hand was sliding up my thigh, making small circles as he reached higher and higher until the hand was at the top of my thigh, fiddling with the elastic of my undies. I shoved it away, opened my mouth to yell, no longer caring whether my mother discovered the truth, and fell ill again.
Uncle Blackie pressed a palm against my lips. He didn’t raise his voice a single notch; spoke in the same low and gentle tone. A voice I’d once loved and trusted.
‘You wouldn’t, Tanya. I know you aren’t stupid ... I know you’re a clever girl, really.’
As he got up and crept away, I fought back my tears of cold rage. Gumtree Cottage was my house. This was my bedroom. Somewhere I’d always felt safe. How dare he?
But as Uncle Blackie slid out the front door and into the beat-up Kingswood, I knew it was no longer safe. Gumtree Cottage had become a treacherous place.
39
‘Blackie’s going to cook us a barbecue for tea tonight,’ Mum said a few days later. ‘We’ll eat it out in the yard, then I’ll tell you the news ... the surprise.’
‘What surprise?’ From her shy glance at Uncle Blackie, I suspected it was what she’d wanted to say on our way home from the cemetery –– something she was hesitant to talk about –– and my gut twisted and knotted.
‘You’ll find out soon enough.’ She sounded all girly, mysterious.
After school, when Mum came home from her typing and shorthand course, she laid a blanket on the grass that Uncle Blackie kept almost shaved with Old Lenny’s bargain lawnmower.
It was warm for August; the sun’s final burst of heat had bleached the sky pale. Orange and pink cloud ruffles hovered over the last sliver of sun, the leaf shadows drunken ballerinas swaying across the back fence. From that fateful backyard, Nature’s beauty seemed to mock me.
‘Old Lenny’s son and wife’ve gone down the coast for a few days,’ Nanna Purvis said. ‘He wants me and Billie-Jean to go next door to share his tea. So I won’t be joining youse all for the barbecue.’
‘Don’t you hate Lenny Longbottom?’ I said.
‘Just showing a spot of neighbourly goodwill,’ she said, ignoring my teasing tone once again. ‘If Old Lenny’s lonely ... wants a bit of intelligent company, who am I to refuse him?’
Off she shuffled next door in her slippers, with Billie-Jean. I bet it was nothing to do with keeping Old Lenny company but rather to avoid eating tea with Uncle Blackie and hearing my mother’s “surprise”. His presence at Gumtree Cottage seemed to disturb my grandmother almost as much as it did me, and she too must have suspected the shocking news that was coming to us.
Dusk had turned the light a deep mulberry as my mother plonked the tomato sauce, slices of bread, and paper plates onto the blanket, next to a cask of wine.
‘Want to try some wine, Tanya?’ Mum asked, filling her glass.
‘Okay.’ I’d got used to the taste of Nanna Purvis’s sherry, so why not wine too? Mum poured an inch of wine into a glass and handed it to me. She took another glass over to Uncle Blackie, where he was cooking sausages on the new brick barbecue he’d built –– the barbecue that Dad should have built since he was the bricklayer.
Uncle Blackie slapped the (overcooked) sausages onto a plate and sat beside Mum on the blanket.
A twinge of fear gripped me. I edged away from Uncle Blackie, as far as possible, so that I was no longer sitting on the blanket, but on the grass. Blades of it pricked my legs like needles.
Uncle Blackie made my mother a sausage sandwich and Mum gazed up at him, eyes shining. ‘Ooh, thanks.’ She giggled as if he’d cooked some gourmet meal instead of a stingy pack of snags.
I wanted to refuse all food Uncle Blackie had cooked, but as usual I was famished, so I slapped a sausage between slices of bread, squeezed on tomato sauce and gobbled down my sarni. Steely lapped up the tomato sauce that kept oozing out the end.
We ate in silence. I started on my second sausage sarni.
‘Look at that bold thief,’ Mum said, pointing to a butcherbird stealing a stray morsel of bread.
‘But listen to his lyrical song,’ Uncle Blackie said, a finger behind one ear, head cocked.
‘Why’s it called a butcherbird?’ Mum said. ‘Seems so barbaric for such a sweet-sounding bird.’
‘Because he impales insects and lizards on thorns and tree forks,’ Uncle Blackie explained. ‘To support his prey while he eats it, or to store it for later.’
Mum smiled. ‘You know about everything.’
Uncle Blackie threw a bit of sausage to the bird and when it sang he told us it was the butcherbird’s “thank you song”.
What a load of rubbish!
From his branch, Mr Kooka started up his eerie cackle: ‘Garooagarooagar
ooga.’
‘And there’s another bold thief,’ Uncle Blackie said, nodding up at the bird. ‘Watch your sarnis, girls ... kookas have a keen scent for all kinds of meat. Quite creepy, in fact, aren’t they?’
‘Mr Kooka’s our friend,’ I said. ‘He’s not creepy.’
You’re the creepy one.
Mum rested her sandwich on her plate, swallowed a mouthful of wine, and took a deep breath. ‘Blackie’s going to be living with us from now on, Tanya. Here at Gumtree Cottage.’
Clods of sausage spurted from my mouth as I choked on it, coughing and gasping great, heaving breaths. My hands were jelly, the last bit of the sarni dropping to the grass. ‘But w-why? Wh-what about Dad?’
‘Blackie’s here most of the time anyway,’ Mum said, making no effort to soften the blow of her words. ‘Helping around the house ... why not save his Albany rent money and move in to Figtree Avenue with us?’
A witch stirred her cauldron inside me. Simmering, boiling, and witch brew spurting into my throat. About to puke, I swallowed hard.
‘No, no, no! Dad’ll come home soon, he’s your husband.’
Mum and Uncle Blackie exchanged desperate glances, as if they’d expected this outburst, but just hoped it wouldn’t happen.
They might have been desperate but I was in total despair, leaping to my feet and stamping my foot. ‘I don’t want him to move in.’
I flew through the twilight, purple as a bruise, up the verandah steps, and into the kitchen.
***
I listened through the flyscreen, looking down at them on the blanket in the middle of the yard.
‘Don’t worry, Ellie, she’ll get used to the idea,’ Uncle Blackie was saying. ‘She feels I’m taking her father’s place ... only natural.’
Ellie?!
‘I know you’d never do that.’
‘Are you happy?’ he asked Mum, ‘because that’s all I want, you to be happy. You and Tanya.’
How false were his words. Paste drying in my mouth.
‘I’m happy. Finally I’m happy,’ Mum said with a firm nod. ‘And I know Tanya will be too, as soon as she gets used to having you around.’ She rested back on the blanket, her wine glass dangling from her hand like fake jewellery. ‘Did I ever tell you about that outback trip when I was at boarding school? I must’ve been about twelve. Somehow I got separated from the group ... lost.’
Uncle Blackie stretched out, curved his body around hers. He caressed her arm, his dark gaze travelling all over her. I didn’t know which was worse: watching him fawn over my mother or trying to stop him doing it to me.
‘I walked and walked, trying to find the group,’ Mum said, rolling over to face him. ‘It seemed I walked forever ... struggling through endless ravines, up slippery granite escarpments. So thirsty, so hot, so exhausted.’
Uncle Blackie smiled down at her, flipped a dark clump of hair from his boxy face.
‘Finally I reached the top of a ridge,’ she said. ‘I stood there, crazed with thirst, staring at a pool of water in the distance, shimmering like silver. Exhausted as I was, I started running. But no matter how many slopes I scrambled up or how many ridges I stood on, I never reached that silvery pool.’ Mum took another sip of wine. ‘What I mean is ... what I’m trying to say, is that I felt just like that for so many years –– lost.’
‘My poor Ellie.’ Uncle Blackie kissed the top of her head.
‘Then Shelley arrived. Perfect, beautiful Shelley. I imagined my silvery pool would be there, stretched before me, glinting its welcome. But then she got sick and I’d stare at the baby in her cot, screaming in pain, and unable to stop it. That silvery pool receded further and further, then vanished altogether.’
‘It’s over, Ellie. You’re better now. I’ll help you reach your silvery pool.’
Like the actors in Nanna Purvis’s TV show, Number 96, they kissed passionately and suddenly my head felt too big for my neck. A sunflower dangling on its thin stalk. The pain was buried so deep I hadn’t known it was there, waiting quietly alongside my other pains. As if I had a line of them, one for every occasion –– Shelley dying, my mother’s misery, Dad leaving. Uncle Blackie taking photos of me naked, touching me. And now moving in with my mother. All those pains ached right down to my soul.
Uncle Blackie was still lying on the blanket beside my mother, almost on top of her. The fearsome Ned Kelly-lookalike –– the bushranger who had died by hanging at Melbourne Gaol in 1880.
If only Uncle Blackie could die by hanging. If only Uncle Blackie could die by any old way.
I skittered to the phone in the hallway, dialled Angela’s number and told her the revolting news.
‘How could my mother do this to me? I can’t bear to stay at Gumtree Cottage with that creep. What if he tries to do to me –– rape me –– same as that Carter girl? Or suffocates me, like Shelley ... or kidnaps me off to Perth?’ My words fell from my lips in a mangled garble. ‘Did I tell you he wants me to run away to Perth with him?’
‘To Perth? Oh boy ... oh gosh!’ Angela said. ‘I told you I’m not supposed to know about Papa’s business, but Marco did say he and Zio Ricci can make bad people go away from Wollongong.’
‘But how would your father make him go away?’
‘I don’t know exactly, but why don’t you let me tell my parents, and you can stop worrying? Hey, come over to my place now, for a sleepover ... Papa will come and get you.’
‘Oh yes, please.’ I inhaled deeply. ‘And okay, you can tell your father about Uncle Blackie. I hope he’ll make him go away.’
I replaced the receiver, relieved to be able to share the burden of those bitter Uncle Blackie-secrets with adults who seemed to know what to do about everything in life. And to care about me.
***
‘Mio Dio!’ Angela’s mother said, glancing at Mr Moretti as Angela and I finished telling them about Uncle Blackie’s photo shoots.
‘Is sicko!’ Zio Ricci said, and Zia Valentina nodded, her gold earring hoops wobbling.
I was sitting beside Angela at the polished kitchen table, the warm and sugary frittole taking away some of the sickness at my mother’s “surprise”. Melting on my tongue, sultana and apple taste lingered after I’d washed it down with Mrs Moretti’s zingy ginger beer.
‘You must be telling us everything about this uncle, Tanya,’ Mr Moretti said, looking at Zio Ricci as Angela’s mother refilled my glass.
‘Tanya’s uncle was here that night we had the swim,’ Angela said. ‘Down behind the pool, in the bushes ... he made her nervous.’ My friend turned to me. ‘I could tell he’d scared you, when I came back with the towels, you were all puffed out and acting weird.’
‘The man was here, at our home?’ Mr Moretti frowned.
‘Merda!’ Zio Ricci said, propping an elbow on the table, his thumb and index finger stroking his chin. He looked serious, as if he was in deep thought about something.
‘Why you not tell your papa then, Angelina?’ Mrs Moretti said.
‘Because Tanya didn’t want to tell anybody about her uncle, and I promised to keep my friend’s secret,’ Angela said. ‘Papa always says friends’ secrets are important, and never to betray them.’
‘Is true,’ her father said with a nod. ‘But this is different, Angelina, this ... ’
‘So this Uncle Blackie, he still frighten you, Tanya?’ Mrs Moretti said, her hand on my arm.
‘I guess so.’
So much attention –– Angela, her parents, aunt and uncle all concerned about me –– was a bit embarrassing. I wondered if I was making a fuss about nothing. But their faces and voices remained serious, so I carried on.
‘He’s always nice and caring but sometimes he looks at me with these kind of faraway eyes, and his face goes all hard, and I can tell he’s angry ... but he never shows it; never shouts or screams or anything. And he keeps touching me, every time my mother’s back is turned.’ I drank more ginger beer. ‘I can’t tell Mum about any of it, though. I’m too worried she’ll
get sick again.’
‘Poor Tanya,’ Zia Valentina said, sipping her wine. ‘You not worry, we look out for you now.’
‘And he wants to take me away to Perth,’ I went on. ‘Just the two of us.’
‘To Perth?’ Zio Ricci slammed his glass onto the table, his dark eyes widening. ‘Why this Perth?’
‘So we can start new lives together,’ I said. ‘But I’m not going. I’d never go anywhere with Uncle Blackie. Not unless he forced me.’
‘And,’ Angela said, ‘Tanya thinks it was Uncle Blackie who suffocated her baby sister.’
‘Mamma Mia!’ her mother gasped, patting a palm against her heart.
‘But I have no proof of that,’ I said. ‘Just a suspicion ... because of a few reasons.’
Mr Moretti and Zio Ricci frowned at each other again.
‘You are not frightened no more,’ Angela’s mother said, dishing me out another serving of frittole. ‘You are trusting us, everything be all right now.’
‘Will you call the police?’ I said.
‘No police,’ Angela’s father said. ‘We are having no proof of anything about your uncle.’
‘No, we don’t need the police,’ Zio Ricci said. ‘We –– the Morettis –– can take care of ourselves ... and our friends.’
40
It was almost my twelfth birthday, and Uncle Blackie had been living with us for about a week, when I saw the Mercedes for the first time. It glided past me, dark blue and shiny, as I walked up Figtree Avenue after school.
I only noticed the car because I wondered who owned it. I doubted anyone in or around our street could afford such an expensive-looking car. It wasn’t that kind of neighbourhood.
I reached Gumtree Cottage and pulled an envelope from the letterbox, hoping it was another letter from Dad. But the heavy sadness welled inside me as I saw it was addressed to Blackburn Randall, Gumtree Cottage, 13 Figtree Avenue.
Why’s Uncle Blackie getting his mail sent to our place? Oh yeah, because he lives here now!