by Liza Perrat
And, besides taking up the garage and storage sheds with his Albany junk, how easily he’d slotted into our lives. His soft and caring words lifted up my mother and carried her somewhere else, so she was always swirling about Gumtree Cottage, silly and dizzy.
She would lower her eyes, lashes stiff with mascara, showing off the eyeshadow that made her eyes look like glass beads in a doll’s head, and kiss him with a tiny pecking movement of her lips. And all the time he accepted those kisses from my unguarded mother, his dark roving eye would be seeking me out.
Nanna Purvis barely spoke to him, throwing him the glare she reserved for foreigners and Catholics, but my mother trusted him. She’d come to depend on him, leaning on those strong shoulders the way she should have been leaning on my father, miles away in Mount Isa.
With or without Stacey Mornon’s mother. I still didn’t want to acknowledge the awful reality that my parents might truly be separated, that they didn’t need or want each other anymore. No longer my parents, somehow.
Dad’s smoky smell of sweat, beer and hot bricks lingered about the house as if he’d been gone only a day. I imagined him walking through the door any minute, Akubra in hand, fag dangling from his lips. But he didn’t, and I resented him more and more for leaving us to the mercy of Uncle Blackie.
I wanted to write to him again, to tell him Uncle Blackie had moved in with us, convinced that news would make him run home. But I also feared it might make him hate my mother for allowing Uncle Blackie to take over his side of the bed. I just didn’t know what to do for the best, and that uncertainty exhausted me.
On and on it whorled, a deep and swift river carrying me along, taking me somewhere I couldn’t see, could only imagine. There was nothing I could do about it. Just live in fear of him. And in terror of my mother discovering the reason for that fear. Or Nanna Purvis finding out and telling her.
I walked inside, almost chucked Uncle Blackie’s letter straight into the rubbish bin, but I was curious to know what it was. I flipped it over. No sender’s address. I left it on the kitchen table beside the Illawarra Mercury.
‘Whoever’d send Blackie a letter?’ Nanna Purvis said, looking up from the Specials page of the newspaper. ‘The man ain’t got a single mate that I know of.’
‘I’ll give it to him when he’s finished fixing the fence,’ Mum said, from where she was stirring a delicious-smelling chicken stew on the stove. ‘When he comes in for tea.’
‘Uncle Blackie’s staying for tea again?’ I said.
‘Of course he is,’ Mum said, ‘now he’s living –– ’
‘Yeah, bloke’s here so often,’ Nanna Purvis interrupted, ‘anyone’d think he lived here.’
‘He does!’ Mum stirred the stew faster. ‘I told you, Tanya ... last Friday before you ran off to Angela’s again.’ Her face creased, almost crumpled, and I feared she might break down in tears. ‘So could you two please stop being like this, ignoring the fact that he’s moved in? Blackie’s so much help, fixing, tidying things –– paying for everything –– I don’t know how we’d cope without him. Besides, I thought you’d both be pleased for me to be happy.’
‘Humpf,’ Nanna Purvis muttered. ‘You know what I think of that rotten egg, Eleanor, unless you want me to repeat myself till me hair turns pink?’
Oh yes, part of me was happy that my mother –– the bright and normal one –– was back. The mother who no longer flew into frenzies of house-cleaning. The one who kissed my brow after school, asked how my day was, made my sandwiches for school lunch and cooked teas that no longer featured baked beans, spaghetti or Spam. But another part of me couldn’t look past the single dark cloud threatening that sunny reunion at Gumtree Cottage: Uncle Blackie.
As if he knew I was thinking about him, Uncle Blackie strolled into the kitchen, Akubra in hand, pearls of sweat fringing his brow.
‘Right, that’s the fence fixed and the garage all cleaned out, Ellie,’ he said. ‘I tossed out all that junk Dobson had collected over the years. I’ll take it to the dump tomorrow.’
I despised the way Mum smiled at him, as if she owed him everything. ‘Letter for you, Blackie.’ She nodded at the envelope on the table, touched her fingertips to his elbow and slipped off into her bedroom. She’d started doing that every day before tea –– brushing on green eyeshadow, dabbing rouge on her cheeks, painting her lips with Tropical Coral lipstick.
Uncle Blackie pulled a KB Lager from the fridge, picked up the envelope and turned it over. Nanna Purvis and I raised our eyebrows at each other.
He ripped open the envelope, pulled out a single sheet of paper and unfolded it.
‘What the ––?’ A frown knotted his brow.
‘What the bleedin’ banjo does that mean?’ Nanna Purvis asked.
I peered over Nanna Purvis’s shoulder, at Uncle Blackie’s letter. A hand print. Just a single black print with words in bold black capitals beneath it:
LEAVE WOLLONGONG
NOW
***
‘You gone and upset someone again?’ Nanna Purvis said to him. ‘Besides us, that is? Done some other vile thing to a girl?’
Ignoring Nanna Purvis’s taunts, Uncle Blackie crumpled the paper into a ball and flung it at the bin, which he missed. ‘Probably just stupid kids playing jokes.’
Uncle Blackie didn’t believe it was kids joking. And me neither, because my suspicions had leapt straight to the Moretti family.
Nanna Purvis picked up Billie-Jean and the second she disappeared out into the yard, Uncle Blackie gripped my shoulders.
‘We should go now, Tanya. Leave for Perth right now, today.’ His eyes were two hard black stones. His hands squeezing, I couldn’t jerk away. ‘We don’t want to wait forever, to start our new lives, do we?’
There was that quiet rage again; the fury that came and went in flickers, lingered about him, but which Uncle Blackie never really showed. It unnerved me.
‘I don’t want to go to Perth with you, or anywhere,’ I whispered, afraid Mum would overhear us. ‘And if you don’t go away from Wollongong –– like that letter says –– and leave me alone, I’ll tell my mother all about you ... about the photos, about Perth.’ I took a deep breath. ‘And I’ll tell her you don’t like her; I’ll say you’re just tricking her, to get to me.’
He bent down, spoke close to my ear, his voice still soft, but with the edge of a hissing snake.
‘We both know you wouldn’t say anything that might upset your poor, fragile mum, don’t we, Tanya? That would be so selfish of you, after all the effort she’s made to get better, to come home to you, wouldn’t it?’
The caterpillar eyebrow rose in an inverted “v” over his eyes as if he was truly concerned for my mother’s well-being.
‘I could tell Nanna Purvis then,’ I said, heat scalding my cheeks. ‘She’d never put up with you here, if she knew the truth.’
Uncle Blackie’s face creased into a confident grin as he swaggered off to my mother in her bedroom. Of course he knew I wouldn’t say anything to Nanna Purvis either, for fear of my grandmother tattling every last thing to my mother.
41
I fed Steely and Bitta, snagged a packet of TimTams from the pantry, and sat at the kitchen table. I worked my way through the biscuits, listening through the flyscreen to Nanna Purvis next door, talking to Old Lenny as they watched his telly. I imagined them sitting on the ratty sofa together, a blanket wrapped about their hunched shoulders against the August chill.
That brought a wry smile to my lips, which dropped as soon as I glanced out into our own backyard. Uncle Blackie was standing beside the gum tree with a team of men who, by the looks of the big sawing machine, were about to cut it down. Mum stood beside him, her arms crossed over her chest.
That witch’s cauldron brew surged from my belly into my throat. I pushed open the flyscreen door and shouted from the back verandah: ‘No, stop! Don’t you cut down the eucalyptus. That’s Shelley’s gum tree ... Mr Kooka’s home. How dare you?’
&nb
sp; ‘My dear Tanya,’ Uncle Blackie said, as I rushed into the yard so fast I tripped over Bitta and sprawled onto the grass at his feet. ‘Don’t you understand, it’s the best thing? We need to remove all reminders of your sister so we can move on ... start over.’
‘Don’t you “dear Tanya” me!’ I jumped to my feet, still shrieking, and batting away my mother’s hand as she tried to brush off grass bits from my front. ‘Where would our kookaburra live if you cut down his gum tree?’
I stood against the tree, circled my arms around its trunk. ‘If you cut down this tree, you’ll have to cut down me with it.’ I glared around at the arc of men, all of them staring, wordlessly, down at their boots.
‘Come on,’ Uncle Blackie started again. ‘Don’t be a silly girl.’
‘Tanya ––’ my mother started.
‘And how could you let him do it?’ I snarled at my mother. ‘How could you? I’m not moving, you hear? I’ll stay here as long as I have to. Nobody’s cutting down this tree.’
Still gripping the trunk like a beloved teddy bear, I called out to number eleven. ‘Nanna Purvis, come quick, they’re trying to cut down Shelley’s tree!’
My grandmother appeared within a minute, Old Lenny hobbling along behind her.
‘What the bleedin’ banjo you up to now, Blackburn?’ Nanna Purvis threw Uncle Blackie, and the tree-fellers, her fiercest glare. ‘Now youse can all just piss off home,’ she said to the men, making flapping motions with her hands. ‘There’ll be no tree-cutting at Gumtree Cottage. Not today, not any other day. Youse hear me? Now skedaddle ... shoo.’
Nobody moved. The tree cutters all looked at Uncle Blackie, started muttering between themselves.
‘Go on, get off with you, before I kick youse all in the unmentionables,’ Nanna Purvis went on, shrugging off Old Lenny’s hand on her arm.
Uncle Blackie shook his head and, still mumbling to each other, the men sloped off out of the yard, lugging the cutting-machine with them.
I couldn’t look at my mother, or at Uncle Blackie. Trying to stamp down the burning anger, the hurt, and calm my trembling body, I stomped back inside and finished off the whole packet of TimTams.
Mum and Uncle Blackie stayed in the yard beside the tree, whispering to each other. But I was still shaking so much –– so fired with rage –– I didn’t want to know what they were saying; didn’t care.
I screwed up the biscuit packet, hurled it onto the floor in disgust at myself, and scribbled a note to Mum, saying I was going to Angela’s for another sleepover.
I phoned my friend, stuffed a few clothes into my Indian bag and went out onto the front verandah to wait for her and Mr Moretti.
As I kept watch for the black Valiant, the sun lengthened along the side of number thirteen, the leaves playing their last mellow shadows across Gumtree Cottage’s old-person’s face. Birds flitted through the web of shadows and the house stood mustardy yellow in the afternoon sun.
Then I saw it again, the same dark blue Mercedes cruising up Figtree Avenue. Making an arc at the top of the cul-de-sac and cruising back down. Up and down again.
I screwed up my eyes against the slice of sun across the western horizon, but still I couldn’t recognise the driver through the tinted windows. He sat low in the seat, a hat partially hiding his face. He glanced neither left nor right, and he didn’t look the type who’d wind down his window and call out ‘Cooee’ to friends or neighbours.
So intent on the Mercedes, I wasn’t aware of Uncle Blackie sidling out onto the front verandah. But I recognised his voice, behind me. My heartbeat started up a chip-chip-chip, like a woodpecker at a tree trunk.
‘Please don’t be angry with me, Tanya. I’m so sorry about the gum tree. I didn’t realise ... Can’t we still be friends?’
‘How dare you even think of cutting down Shelley’s tree? Dad said that tree was here when our ancestors built Gumtree Cottage a hundred years ago. How could you?’
My blood swarming, I tried to push past him, to dash back inside, but Uncle Blackie blocked my path; blacked out every trace of amber light from over Mount Kembla. He caught my arm.
‘Let me go,’ I snarled. He wasn’t hurting but he wouldn’t release me, and for a long and panicked moment I held my breath.
‘You know what we have is real, Tanya ... our love.’ He motioned to the bag slung over my shoulder. ‘That will do, you don’t need to pack anything else. Just hop in the Kingswood right now and we’ll drive off to Perth. I’ll buy everything we need, anything you want, on the way. We’ll change our names and start a whole new life together. You see, it’ll be so much fun.’
‘I told you already, I don’t want to go anywhere with you. I might not be able to tell my mother about your tricks, but I could tell the cops. Taking nude photos of eleven-year-olds is against the law. And sicko.’ My fingers rubbed at my cowlick.
‘Yes, you could tell the cops,’ he said, ‘but I doubt they’d believe you. Besides, what naked photos are you talking about?’ He frowned as if he truly had no idea. ‘I certainly haven’t seen any.’
A road train was barrelling towards me but my feet were cemented to the middle of the road. No way to run, no escape. Just before that huge truck slammed into me, I realised something: I, too, had never seen Uncle Blackie’s naked photos.
But they must be somewhere in Gumtree Cottage. Probably hidden away from Mum and Nanna Purvis in Uncle Blackie’s junk, which was taking up so much space in the storage shed and the garage.
‘It’s not as if you’re even that young,’ Uncle Blackie was going on in the smooth voice. ‘Look at those African girls –– ten or eleven-year-old brides. There’s even somewhere in America where girls can marry at about fourteen ... and time passes so quickly, you’ll be fourteen before you know it. Come on, we’ll have the best time together, away from here.’
I’d never been so relieved to see the Morettis’ Valiant sweep up the hill. Uncle Blackie vanished back inside as the car pulled up alongside me.
As I slid into the back seat with Angela, I realised he was right. I wouldn’t tell my mother or the cops about him, but I would tell Nanna Purvis, and I would convince her not to say anything to Mum. If anyone had enough sway to force Uncle Blackie to go away from Gumtree Cottage, to leave me, and my mother, alone, it was Nanna Purvis.
42
‘Give me a hand to change my bed, Tanya?’ Mum said when I got back from Angela’s the next evening.
‘Oh well, all right, if you really want me to.’ I never went into her bedroom any longer; hated seeing the indent of Uncle Blackie’s body on my father’s side of the bed.
We removed the bedsheets, took fresh ones from the linen cupboard and remade the bed. Mum’s face flushed pink as she smoothed a palm across the sheets that smelled of her washing powder. From her bedside table, she took one of her candles which were supposed to smell flowery but –– to me –– stank of old vomit. She placed it in the candle holder and stood back, head bent to one side, admiring it as if it were some artistic masterpiece.
‘Can I go and live at Angela’s?’ I blurted out. ‘I’m there most of the time anyway.’
‘Oh Tanya, I know you’re only trying to avoid Blackie, and he did apologise for trying to cut down the gum –– ’
‘No, no, Angela’s my friend. I just like being at her place.’
‘Your dad’s not coming back to us, and I don’t know why you can’t accept Blackie being around ... be happy for me. For us.’
I shrugged, my fingers flying to the cowlick.
‘I told you before, think about Blackie for a minute, Tanya, all those terrible things that happened to him.’
‘But none of that’s our fault.’ I could almost taste the desperation in my voice. ‘Doesn’t mean he has to live here.’
‘Blackie’s never had a chance in life. I want to give him that chance. Besides, I don’t want to grow old alone.’
‘You can grow old with Dad. What if he comes home and sees his brother here?’ I looked down at t
he freshly-made bed.
Mum shook her head. ‘He won’t come back to us. I didn’t want to tell you, but it seems I’ll have to. Your father’s gone to live in Mount Isa permanently, with Stacey Mornon’s mother.’
I’d known all along it was true, but the cold harsh shock was still hard to bear. Ice shards spiked my arms, my neck, right down my back.
‘I know,’ I said. ‘Stacey was boasting about going to live in Mount Isa with them. Her, not me ... why not me too?’
‘For a start, you and Stacey don’t get on,’ she said. ‘So why would you want to live with the girl?’
‘That’s not the point, Mum. They asked her to live with them, and not me. Why?’
‘Because I wanted you to stay here with me, Tanya. I’d be ... I’d be lost without you.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me all this before?’ I stamped a foot, glared at her.
Why I was venting my rage on her, I didn’t know. Perhaps because she was, partly, the reason for my father leaving us.
‘I didn’t want to upset you.’ She tried to take my hand but I brushed her off. ‘Look, Tanya, I’m sure you’ll get used to having Blackie around.’
All I could do was keep shaking my head; still I could not tell her the truth about that devil-man.
While Mum went off for her shower and Uncle Blackie nipped away for a whisky down The Monitor Arms, my brain raced yet again with schemes of how to get rid of him. But as I turned over each one they all sat, unlikely or impossible, in my mind.
So, clutching Steely to my chest, I went into the living-room, sat beside Nanna Purvis on her banana lounge and told her everything.
***
In unusual silence, with no interruptions, my grandmother listened to it all: Albany and the nude photos, the Perth runaway threats, my suspicions about him suffocating Shelley.
‘And he’s always trying to touch me,’ I said. ‘To catch me in the bath or while I’m taking my clothes off. Saying “nice dress”, and stroking my hair. I keep wishing you’d see him but you never do ... he’s too clever for that.’