The Silent Kookaburra

by Liza Perrat

  Dad shook his head. ‘Nobody really knows. Prehistoric man likely hunted them to extinction, or their fires destroyed their habitat.’

  ‘I heard it was the progressive drying of Australia that destroyed their environment,’ Mum said.

  Dad smiled, kissed her cheek. ‘Back together ... all of us,’ he said, threading more marshmallows onto skewers, and toasting them over the flames.

  Yes, a happy family again, all of us back together. Almost.

  I glowed with the heat of the flames warming my skin, and breathed in the scent of the gums, the bewitching aroma of wildflowers. I could have almost convinced myself that everything that had happened was simply a nightmare of some distant past.

  Except that Shelley was never coming back.

  ***

  ‘Come on, Old Lenny Longbum, get ya saggy middle and ya ratty plait over here,’ Nanna Purvis called over the side fence. She and Lenny were hosting a barbecue tea in our backyard this evening, for no apparent reason.

  Old Lenny came hobbling across with a load of homebrew and a giant Tupperware full of chops and sausages. ‘Got the meat cheap off a butcher mate,’ he said, and my mother smirked and nudged my father, sitting beside her on the blanket, one arm draped across her shoulder.

  ‘Wonder if Lenny buys anything he doesn’t get cheap off a mate,’ Dad said, which made Mum and me laugh.

  People began arriving, bearing dishes of food: neighbours, friends and some dubious-looking mates of Old Lenny’s. Lenny Longbottom took up his spot at Dad’s fancy new barbecue, wearing an apron over his shorts and singlet with the slogan: Don’t like our grub? Then piss off home.

  Mr and Mrs Moretti, and Angela and Marco –– yes, he’d come! –– arrived with armfuls of lemonade bottles full of red and white wine. I patted my new pageboy haircut that disguised my bat-wing ears, sure Marco would notice it.

  With Nanna Purvis’s help, I’d made a salad with onions, pineapple and orange slices I’d seen in Mum’s Mother’s Helper magazine.

  For dessert, Mad Myrtle and Mavis Sloan bought pink and white fairy cakes, to go with Coralie Anderson’s chocolate-soaked lamingtons, and my mother’s Pavlova that dripped passionfruit and cream.

  Not that Angela or I would be eating any of those desserts. After only two months on Weight Watchers we were both thinner, and I was sure her brother would notice that Ten-ton Tanya had shrunk to Three-ton Tanya.

  Mrs Moretti wasn’t as keen on our diet us Angela and me.

  ‘Ah my Angelina,’ she’d say, throwing her arms in the air. ‘You no more eat my good pasta ... the pasta I make for you with these own hands.’

  Nanna Purvis settled herself on her banana lounge with Billie-Jean, who quivered with the excitement of a crowd. Steely had disappeared somewhere and Bitta dashed about yapping.

  Old Lenny brought Nanna Purvis over a glass of sherry. Bottle of beer in one hand, he parked his bum on the edge of her chair. ‘Pretty groovy banana lounge you got yourself, Pearl,’ he said, patting the shiny, plastic yellow slats.

  ‘Ah, some cagey old bloke got it for me,’ Nanna Purvis said with a wink. Old Lenny slapped his hand on Nanna Purvis’s leg.

  ‘Oy, watch where you’re putting them grubby mitts,’ she said, swiping away his hand.

  People laughed, lolling about on the new spring grass or slumped in one of the plastic chairs Old Lenny had got from somewhere, hands shading eyes against the glare of the west-bound November sun.

  Through the haze of barbecue smoke tinged with the smell of scorched meat, a flash of blue moved on a gum tree branch. ‘Garooagarooagarooga.’

  I looked up through the tangle of leaves at Mr Kooka.

  ‘Means we’re in for a change,’ Nanna Purvis said. ‘That’s what me old nanna always said, and she never told a fib in all her hundred and two years on this earth.’

  ‘Your nanna lived to a hundred and two?’ Coralie Anderson said. Everyone glanced at each other, eyebrows raised.

  ‘Almost a hundred and three when she keeled over onto the kitchen stove,’ Nanna Purvis said. ‘She reckoned if a kookaburra laughed we were in for a change ... a storm coming, or a heatwave brewing. Goannas’d turn pink or kangaroos’d sprout wings and fly across the Nullarbor.’

  ‘Seems like there’s some truth in that kookaburra legend then,’ Old Lenny said with a flip of the plait. He looked around at everyone. ‘We got an announcement to make, a big change for me and Pearl.’ He took a swig of beer, a deep breath. ‘We, Pearl and me, we’re movin’ in together.’

  Silence fell across the backyard, as if nobody was certain they’d heard right.

  ‘Here’s to living in sin,’ Nanna Purvis said, raising her glass. ‘Same as all them new-age women’s lippers.’

  ‘Libbers!’ Angela and I cried, in unison.

  ‘That’s what she said,’ Old Lenny croaked, and laughter tinkled in the warm evening air, the melting sun painting everything gold.

  ‘So you won’t be needing those Only for Sheilas nude centrefolds anymore, since you’ve got a real man now, Pearl,’ Mrs Anderson said.

  ‘Yeah for women’s rights,’ Mavis Sloan cried.

  ‘Burn the bra!’ Old Lenny said, for no logical reason I could see.

  ‘Language, Old Lenny.’ Nanna Purvis smacked his leg.

  ‘Any more beatings and you’ll not get your living-in-sin-present, Pearl Purvis.’ Old Lenny hobbled over to the garage, lugged out a cardboard box and plonked it beside the banana lounge.

  More giggles and glass clinking as she opened the cardboard box to reveal a portable television set. ‘Perfect size for when we get our new bedroom, Pearl,’ he said.

  ‘Crikey, you’re one for the surprises, Old Lenny.’ Nanna Purvis cupped her hands over her mouth like a kid excited over a birthday present.

  ‘Bet you got it cheap,’ I said. ‘Off a mate?’

  Everyone laughed and cheered and raised their glasses to the future living-in-sin couple.

  The excitement over Nanna Purvis and Lenny’s announcement died down, and I sat on the grass with Angela and Marco, my plate of chop and salad balanced on my lap.

  Mr Kooka was still there, the sun’s last rays whitening his chest, shining on the blue feather tips peeking from the tawny mass, reflected in his bright, white eye. Looking for Shelley, wondering where she’d gone.

  But I knew she was up there; up in the tree with our kookaburra, watching down on us.

  I wonder what you’d look like now, little gumnut girl.

  ‘Beautiful bird, isn’t it?’ Marco said, as the kookaburra flapped his wings and flew away into the softly falling darkness and the winking stars. Old friends in a velvety sky.

  I nodded, my gaze turning to the empty place where Shelley’s pram had once stood beneath the gum tree. There she was, smiling, waving her arms, stubby little legs bicycling in the air, the breeze lifting her pink frilly dress.

  There was nothing more beautiful and perfect in the world and in that dreamlike moment of sounds and sights and thoughts mingling, the memory of my little sister was so bewitching I was certain it would never be lost.

  The enquiry into her death was still open. But Uncle Blackie had vanished, so we would never find out if it was that monster who’d suffocated her. Or if it was someone else. And that need to know burned –– a smouldering bushfire in my chest.

  49

  2016

  Forty years on, I still have no idea what happened to Uncle Blackie that night the Mercedes took him away. But I do know that in those naked photos he stole my childhood. He bit into the forbidden apple, then held the juicy core in his palm, toying with it, savouring it, knowing all the time he was going to finish it off.

  Many times over the years I’ve wanted to ask my husband about Uncle Blackie’s black-hand letters, and that dark-coloured Mercedes. But right from the beginning I learned not to ask questions about Marco and his uncle and father’s “business”. I just enjoyed the wealth it afforded us: the easy lifestyle for our children, our elegant home in Bot
tlebrush Crescent near his parents’ place. Besides I learned that some things are better left unknown.

  Angela Moretti is still my closest friend, though we catch up only on special occasions. She’s so busy with her jet-setting life, originally as a Milan fashion model, and these days as a successful business woman with her own brand of clothes and lingerie.

  As my father did when he returned from Mount Isa, I forgave my mother her gullibility –– Uncle Blackie’s enchantment of her as he played the part of dashing saviour, rescuing her from loneliness; her husbandless predicament. I mean, how could she not have been so vulnerable, Uncle Blackie pruning her with the perfection of sculpted art?

  But that didn’t mean she’d stopped loving my father. I remember her asking me, years later, if I believed you could love two different men at the same time. She hadn’t thought so before, but at that moment she believed it was possible, and –– according to the tide of women’s libbers at the time –– entirely acceptable.

  And forty years on, Shelley is still with me. Certainly everyone stopped talking about her after a time, except in passing. But like the new spring flowers blooming at Gumtree Cottage: the jasmine, wattle, bottlebrush, oleander and the red gumnuts, I came to learn that the cycle of life continued, without Shelley. My very youth buried it beneath the leaps of maturing into a teenager, an adult, a wife and mother, diminishing its conscious importance.

  The pain of her death has never left me though. Oh there were times over the years –– long periods even –– when my memory slipped, as memories do, even those brimming with love; those you think will never leave you.

  I stopped thinking about Shelley every moment of the day, but she was always with me. Often I wouldn’t know it until she prodded me with a painful reminder. Then, as my mind could no longer contain it, the grief flared. And worse, when each of those agony-filled days was over, the pain would shadow me to my bed, slink into my nightmares. The fear of it became as unbearable as the pain itself.

  Then, afterwards, there would be a long period of nothing.

  Only now can I understand the depth of my shock, so profound I’d blanked out the days leading up to Shelley’s death, the actual day, and the weeks after it. As if my subconscious was trying to protect me from the indescribable horror of losing a sister, the memory magician made of it all a shadowy phantom.

  In hindsight I’d thought that maybe my mother had been neglectful leaving Shelley alone in our backyard, sleeping in her pram in the shade of the gum tree. But no one accused her of neglect at the time; it wasn’t even mentioned.

  It was Australia Day, 1973 –– the exact day, seven years beforehand, that the Beaumont children disappeared. Jane, Arnna and Grant, aged nine, seven and four, failed to return to their parents’ home after a trip to Glenelg Beach, near Adelaide.

  The public had been sympathetic, never suggesting the parents were negligent in allowing their young children to catch the bus and stay at the beach unaccompanied. Simply because at that time in Australia this was safe and acceptable.

  We now regard the Beaumont children’s disappearance as a significant event in the evolution of Australian society: parents no longer presumed their children were safe, and changed the way they supervised them.

  But, like everyone else in the neighbourhood, I still wonder if Gumtree Cottage wasn’t at the root of our problems. If you heard the stories of the tragedies that generations of my family suffered there, you too might be convinced that everything was the fault of that star-crossed house.

  Now, here I am, back in Gumtree Cottage –– solid and welcoming when my father’s convict ancestors built it, then strange and harrowing after Shelley died –– sifting through my family’s possessions. And juggling with the memory magician.

  50

  In my childhood bedroom, sorting through each box, the hot morning stretches into a stifling afternoon. Evening comes and outside the sea breeze arrives, welcome as a cool drink on a scorching day. The trees, bushes and flowers move gently. Dancers warming up for a show.

  My gaze strays again to Nanna Purvis’s box, and the newspaper headlines of Australia Day, 1973. I sit for a moment in silence, like the aftermath of something shocking. Something devastating that has no words. A great wave dumpster surprises me, jolts me from my reverie, submerges me in its obscure depth, and it seems not to be an aftermath after all. But rather a beginning.

  The powerful memory magician is clawing at the edge of my consciousness –– the magician who plays tricks on you that you can’t understand no matter how hard you try –– grasping for that all-important missing fragment of truth.

  It started so quickly I didn’t see it coming, and now it swells so fast I can’t stop it. That remnant of childhood my eleven-year-old brain had simply erased –– the truth, hard and dark as a bitter seed –– is revealing itself to me.

  I’m hot and clammy but my body freezes. I close my eyes as the force of it uncoils from inside me, stretching up, gasping for air, shrieking. Its scream is evil –– a wild, tachycardic pulse. And as those flickering jabs of memory fight their way to my brain, my head spins with the enormity of it.

  Dissociative amnesia they would likely label it: occurring when a person blocks out information usually associated with a traumatic event; a degree of memory loss beyond normal forgetfulness with long periods of memory gap. The memories are still there, though, deeply buried and stewing, only recalled when something in that person’s environment triggers it.

  How ironic –– me, a psychologist who couldn’t even see into her own psyche.

  ***

  It is the evening of Australia Day, 1973. I’m lying on my bed. Through the Venetian blind slats, in the darkness of Figtree Avenue, cicadas buzz and mozzies throw themselves against the flyscreen as if they are desperate to get in and suck my blood. The full moon throws its brightness across the tangle of the blood-spatter bedspread, and from between the Venetian blind slats, the man in the moon looks down on me.

  High on his gum tree branch in the backyard, Mr Kooka cackles: ‘Garooagarooagarooga, garooagarooagarooga.’ Laughing, mocking. Knowing something I don’t.

  I run my tongue over dry lips, taste salt. I’m too old to play with Barbie dolls but the shock of Shelley’s death has regressed me to a child-like state and I slide from the sweat-damp sheet, tip the box of dolls onto the carpet and line them up: Twiggy, Ken, Skipper, black Christie, Miss America and Sunset Malibu Barbie.

  ‘You,’ I hiss at Twiggy Barbie. I separate Twiggy from the others, reach over and take my pillow. I hold it over her face. I press, harder and harder, imagining Twiggy Barbie struggling beneath the pillow, gasping for breath, legs kicking, hands fighting mine. Bruises flowering on raspberry lips.

  My tears blind me, the raw grief hurtles towards me like the wind from the western plains lashing Wollongong, crouched between the mountains and the sea as if it were defenceless as an infant.

  I keep the pillow over Twiggy Barbie’s face until my pain and fear boil up and explode into sobs.

  Accidents can happen –– bad, terrible accidents –– though you don’t mean them to, Dad always says.

  But it’s going to be okay. My baby sister won’t stay dead. Those ambulance men will bring her back to life. Of course they will, they revived that boy in Real Life Crime.

  I stare at my Barbie doll. Shake her, squeeze her, slap her face. I give her the kiss of life, bang on her chest.

  ‘Breathe, breathe,’ I hiss. ‘Why won’t you just breathe again?’

  I want to scream at Twiggy Barbie to come back to life; to tell her she was never, ever supposed to die for real. But Twiggy Barbie stays dead.

  The kookaburra stops cackling. The night is still again.

  And there is only silence.

  If you enjoyed The Silent Kookaburra and would like to read book 2 (a standalone) in this 1970s Australian drama series, The Swooping Magpie is now available in print and E-book:

  E-book: https://www.books2read.com/u/bMQdr7 />
  The thunderclap of sexual revolution collides with the black cloud of illegitimacy.

  Sixteen-year-old Lindsay Townsend is pretty and popular at school. At home, it’s a different story. Dad belts her and Mum’s either busy or battling a migraine. So when sexy school-teacher Jon Halliwell finds her irresistible, Lindsay believes life is about to change.

  She’s not wrong.

  Lindsay and Jon pursue their affair in secret, because if the school finds out, Jon will lose his job. If Lindsay’s dad finds out, there will be hell to pay. But when a dramatic accident turns her life upside down, Lindsay is separated from the man she loves.

  Events spiral beyond her control, emotions conflicting with doubt, loneliness and fear, and Lindsay becomes enmeshed in a shocking true-life Australian scandal. The schoolyard beauty will discover the dangerous games of the adult world. Games that destroy lives.

  Lindsay is forced into the toughest choice of her young life. The resulting trauma will forever burden her heart.

  Reflecting the social changes of 1970s Australia, The Swooping Magpie is a chilling psychological tale of love, loss and grief, and, through collective memory, finding we are not alone.

  A searing tale of lost innocence – compelling writing from an author at the top of her game. Lorraine Mace, author of the D.I. Paolo Sterling crime series.

  Capturing the attitude and angst of the teen years, and all the atmosphere of the late sixties, The Swooping Magpie’s sizzling narrative and cracking pace hooked me from the start. It’s a tearjerker too... I actually cried. Dr. Carol Cooper, journalist and novelist.

  Editorial Reviews:

  Beautiful writing as always ... love the way Lindsay’s experiences change her from an arrogant and aggressive teenager into a bruised but powerful woman. Chris Curran author of Her Deadly Secret.

  Whatever the genre, Perrat skillfully weaves stories that capture us in the pages. Patricia Sands, author of the bestselling Love In Provence series.