The Silent Kookaburra Page 2

  ‘But you want a boy, don’t you?’

  ‘What makes you think that?’

  ‘Because I heard you say that to Dad ... the last time. “You know I need a boy to make up for ...” is what you said. Make up for what?’

  A crimson flush crept up Mum’s neck. ‘You must’ve heard wrong, Tanya. Now come on, let’s have a nice cool lemonade together and you can tell me your favourite boy and girl names. We’ll have to choose soon.’

  Three weeks later the birth pains came. Dad flapped around like a crazy galah, jamming the last things into Mum’s suitcase; a frantic search for his car keys which were lying on the kitchen table in plain sight; phoning the work boss to say he wouldn’t be in today.

  I heated towels in hot water, pressed them against Mum’s lower back where the pain was worse as she paced, breathing deeply. Nanna Purvis made a dozen cups of tea.

  ‘Can I watch it being born?’ I bounced about on the spot. ‘Please, Mum?’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Nanna Purvis said. ‘They don’t even let husbands in and it sure ain’t a place for a ten-year-old.’

  I rolled my eyes at Nanna Purvis. ‘I’m eleven now, did you forget?’

  ‘You stay here with your grandmother,’ Dad said. ‘I’ll call you the minute the baby’s born and you can come and visit.’

  The dogs barked and charged through Gumtree Cottage as if sensing this was an exciting moment. Exciting, but at the same time terrifying, because anything could go wrong. Or the baby could be born dead.

  But I wouldn’t think about that. Everything had to be all right.

  4

  ‘Drive like the blazes, mate,’ Nanna Purvis hollered at the driver as we jumped into the taxi. ‘Me daughter’s just given birth, but they’ve had to rush her to the operating theatre.’

  Without a word, the driver put his foot down and zoomed his taxi all the way to the Wollongong Hospital. I held my breath, the entire trip it seemed, clenching my hands to stop them shaking. Dad had sounded panicked –– hysterical –– when he’d phoned from the maternity ward and told us there’d been a problem after the birth. My mother was bleeding too much.

  ‘Is the baby alive?’ I’d said, tugging on Nanna Purvis’s elbow. But my grandmother had hung up and was dialling the taxi number.

  ‘We’ll find out everything when we get there, Tanya,’ she’d said, grabbing her crocheted handbag.

  As the taxi raced towards Crown Street, Wollongong’s main street where the hospital was, I thought of that story in Real Life Crime about a mum who bled to death after giving birth, so the husband went and murdered the doctor. ‘Mum can’t die,’ I said. ‘And what about the baby, is it all right?’

  ‘I told you I know nothing,’ Nanna Purvis said. ‘But don’t you worry, ya father said the doctors are doing all they can to save Eleanor.’

  In the maternity ward, Dad was pacing, stiff-legged, arms straight down by his sides. Robot-like.

  ‘What went wrong, Dobson?’ Nanna Purvis barked.

  Dad glanced up. His face was grey, his brow creased in dried mud-track ruts. He mumbled something about retained placenta, oxygen mask, blood transfusion, but couldn’t explain anything properly.

  ‘Is the baby okay?’ I said.

  Dad nodded. ‘Yes, thank Christ for that at least. It’s a girl.’

  A nurse gave us cups of tea while we waited, Nanna Purvis and me sitting on the plastic chairs. Dad went back to pacing the corridor, head bent, one hand swiping at his tangle of dark curls.

  ‘Please tell me Mum will be okay,’ I kept saying to him. ‘Please.’

  But he still couldn’t tell me exactly what had gone wrong, or if my mother would survive. I rubbed at my cowlick, kicked my heels against the chair.

  ‘Quit ya fidgeting, Tanya,’ Nanna Purvis said. ‘Making me all nervy.’

  ‘Why’re they taking so long?’ I said. ‘Why can’t we know now?’

  Finally, a doctor wearing operating theatre gear appeared. From the way he looked at us I couldn’t suss out if it was good news or bad.

  ‘We’ve managed to stop Mrs Randall’s bleeding,’ he said.

  ‘Thank bloody Christ for that.’ Dad let out a long breath. ‘Thank you. Thanks so much.’

  ‘And stabilised her, for now,’ the doctor went on. ‘But the next hours will be critical. We’ll keep you informed of her progress.’

  ‘Can we see Mum?’ I asked. ‘And where’s our baby, can we see her?’

  ‘The baby’s fine, but I suggest you all go home and have a good rest. Leave Mrs Randall to rest too, and visit them both tomorrow.’

  ‘But I want to see my baby sister.’

  ‘The baby’s in an incubator for the moment,’ the doctor said, already walking away from us, obviously in a hurry. ‘As I said, rest and come back tomorrow.’

  ‘How are we supposed to rest?’ I clamped my arms across my chest as Nanna Purvis steered me and Dad outside to the carpark. ‘Until we’re sure Mum and the baby are okay. Anyway, why’s the baby in an incubator? There must be something wrong with her.’

  ***

  ‘Well, she’s got all her bits at least,’ Nanna Purvis said the following day, looking the baby over from her head to her toes. Of course my grandmother wouldn’t hold her; didn’t touch a single downy curl.

  ‘She’s beautiful and Shelley’s a pretty name ... a beach name,’ I said, looking down at that little rose-cheeked girl lying in my mother’s arms; her almost see-through skin, raspberry lips and the thickest dark hair I’d ever seen on a baby.

  ‘Look at my three girls,’ Dad said, standing beside the hospital bed, the silliest smile showing off his yellow-stained teeth. He stretched an arm along the bedrail above my pale, weakly smiling mother and my sleeping sister, and gathered me into the curve of his other arm.

  A flurry of pink cards, balloons, flowers and stuffed animals encircled the four of us –– a happy-family photograph. The baby had all her bits; nothing wrong with her at all. My mother was weak but the doctor said she would recover. I couldn’t think of a single reason why the happiness wouldn’t last, this time.

  On account of the bleeding, my mother had to stay longer in hospital, but at last, in October of 1972, she and Shelley came home to Gumtree Cottage. Dad carried Mum’s bag in one hand. With the other, he opened the door and ushered her and the baby inside like important guests.

  My mother couldn’t stop smiling, as if making up for all the unsmiling times. Bitta and Billie-Jean yelped and dashed around Mum and Shelley.

  ‘Enough noise, youse two,’ Nanna Purvis said, but the dogs kept barking, sensing a lot of excitement was worth a lot of noise.

  ‘Can I hold Shelley, Mum?’ I held out my arms.

  ‘Be careful you don’t drop her,’ Nanna Purvis said. ‘You know how precious this one is.’

  I scowled at my grandmother. ‘As if I’d drop my own sister. Anyway, every baby is precious, even if it doesn’t ...’

  ‘Why don’t you all go into the living-room,’ Dad said, obviously not wanting us to dwell on the sorrow of those never-born babies. ‘I’ll get us some drinks. And food, maybe.’ He patted my mother’s arm. ‘Fancy a bite to eat, love? Doc said you need to eat properly, build up your strength.’

  ‘Just a cuppa and a biscuit would be nice, thanks,’ Mum said, sitting beside me on the sofa.

  Nanna Purvis groaned, the plastic slats of her fold-up chair squeaking as she eased herself onto her banana lounge and started flipping through her Only for Sheilas magazine.

  I wanted to ask my grandmother how she could act as if this was any normal day, and not the amazing thing that it was, but there was never any point questioning Nanna Purvis’s stony routines.

  The baby started mewling and my mother took her from me, settled back into the sofa and lifted her top. Shelley suckled, Mum grinning down at her, one elbow supporting the baby’s head, the other hand brushing dark swirls of hair from her forehead.

  I grabbed a little foot that had come loose from her cot
ton wrap. ‘Look, her toes all work perfectly, just like mine.’ And my mother’s smile washed over me –– a cool swim on a blistering day.

  On the coffee table, Dad placed the tray loaded with a bottle of KB Lager for him, two cups of tea, green cordial for me and a plate of Anzac biscuits. There was also a packet of Nanna Purvis’s Iced VoVos, but they were only for her. My grandmother never shared her biscuits with anyone.

  ‘Here you go,’ Dad said, holding the teacup to my mother’s lips. ‘Your hands are full.’

  ‘Such a chivalrous gentleman, Dobson,’ Mum said in a mock-posh voice.

  Nanna Purvis rolled her eyes, kept flipping the magazine pages with one hand and feeding biscuit morsels to Billie-Jean with the other.

  Mum swapped Shelley to the other breast and as the baby suckled we all fell silent; still couldn’t believe our good luck at having this beautiful –– alive! –– baby. And my mother too, back from the almost-dead.

  My father’s grin spread across his cheeks to his dark sideburns and I could see the relief in his unhunched shoulders as he lifted the beer bottle to his lips, and the easy way he spread his long legs out in front of him.

  Shelley gave a loud burp. ‘Come on, Tanya, I’ll show you how to change her nappy,’ Mum said.

  In my parents’ bedroom, Mum lay Shelley on the bed, removed her plastic pants and slid the wet nappy into a bucket that smelled like a swimming pool. ‘This is how it’s done.’ She folded a clean nappy into a triangle and showed me how to poke in the pins without jabbing the baby’s skin.

  ‘She’s so warm and cuddly, isn’t she?’ I kissed Shelley’s soft head, pushed my nose into her liquorice-twist curls. ‘Smells yummy too –– like lamington cakes hot from the oven.’

  ‘A cake baked to perfection,’ Mum said with a laugh as she put Shelley to sleep on the lambskin rug in her cot which sat next to my mother’s side of the bed.

  She sat on the stool in front of her dressing table. ‘Brush my hair for me, Tanya?’

  I stood behind her and brushed her hair until it shone so silky it slipped off the bristles.

  As she applied eyeshadow, mascara and lipstick, lots of blush over her pale cheeks –– things she’d never done through those gloomy seabed days –– I raked the brush through my own hair. I clamped it down over my ears with bobby pins, but that just looked ridiculous. Besides, the pins slid straight out and back went my hair behind the bat-wing ears.

  Mum sprayed her Cologne 4711 perfume onto her slender neck and wrists, and misted my chubby arms.

  ‘Remember when I was a kid and drew an elephant with your Tropical Coral lipstick right there?’ I nodded at the wall behind Shelley’s cot. ‘And you said, “Oh what a nice rhinoceros,” and I said you were silly ... that it was an elephant.’

  Mum let out a giggle, the same as when I’d made the elephant sketch then clomped about in her cork-heeled platforms still clutching the Tropical Coral lipstick.

  ‘I think we deserve something nice for tea to celebrate the new baby,’ Mum said, as Steely jumped onto the dressing table. His bum in our faces, the cat stalked between the bottles, tubes and jars: all my mother’s things that made her look beautiful once again. ‘What do you want, meat pies or sausage rolls?’

  ‘Both!’ I said, trying on her coloured bracelets, jangling them right up to my elbow.

  ‘Okay, we’ll have both. Your dad will go to the shop.’ And we both smiled at the side-by-side happy faces in the mirror.

  ***

  Over the next few weeks, in the afternoons and evenings after school, I played with my little sister, shaking her rattle at her, showing her how to stroke the cat and dogs. ‘Gently, Shelley, like this, so you don’t scare them.’

  I held her close to the sweet-smelling pink and white flowers that climbed the back-yard fence. ‘This is jasmine, my favourite. It might be yours too, Shelley, when you’re old enough to smell flowers.’

  I imitated the squawky sound of a sulphur-crested cockatoo, the shrieky ‘Eep, eep’ of a galah. ‘Then you’ll know what each bird is,’ I told her.

  I pointed up into the red-flowering gum. ‘Look, there’s our kookaburra. Mr Kooka, he’s called.

  ‘Garooagarooagarooga,’ I said, imitating the kookaburra’s laugh.

  ‘Garooagarooagarooga,’ he cackled back, which made me laugh more than the bird.

  Sometimes I went with my mother when she took Shelley to the Baby Health Clinic for weighs and check-ups, and each time the clinic nurse assured Mum that our baby girl was perfectly healthy.

  ‘There’s no need to bring her every day, Mrs Randall,’ the nurse said. ‘Once a week will do fine.’

  After her feeds, Mum took Shelley into the backyard and laid her in her pram, permanently parked in shade of the eucalyptus which –– as well as being Mr Kooka’s gum tree –– I’d named “Shelley’s gum tree”.

  Still tired and weak from the bleeding, my mother would rest beside the pram, staring at Shelley, so cute in her pink matinee jacket, her arms thrown above her head, scarlet lips puckered like she was kissing the air, chubby legs splayed outwards as if she didn’t have a care in the world. Which she didn’t!

  Mum never took her eyes off Shelley’s chest, rising and falling as she slept beneath the pram netting. As if she was afraid our baby wasn’t real, but a doll from some kid’s fairy-tale; a happily-ever-after story that was too good to be true.

  ‘How’s my little gumnut girl today?’ Dad would say when he came in from work each afternoon. He loped down to the gum tree, pulled funny faces at her, and I swore Shelley laughed at his grimaces along with Mum and me.

  ‘You sure it’s a good idea to park Shelley’s pram under the gum tree, Eleanor?’ Nanna Purvis said one afternoon. ‘What of them widow-maker stories? Just the other day it was on the news again: wind ripped off a branch ... fell on some campers and killed one of them.’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ Mum said. ‘The chances of a branch falling on Shelley are so slim it’s not worth worrying about. Besides, there’s not a breath of wind and the gum tree shade is the coolest spot for her to sleep.’

  Dad raised his eyebrows, making them join in the middle, and winked at me. ‘Your grandmother and her ridiculous superstitions.’ He turned to Nanna Purvis. ‘If you had your way, we’d all spend our days watching television in the safety of our own living-room. What kind of a life is that, Pearl?’

  ‘Go ahead, make fun of me, Dobson ... take no notice of what I say,’ Nanna Purvis said. ‘You never do, but if something happens to this baby don’t say I didn’t warn you.’

  Mavis and Mad Myrtle Sloan, the sisters from next door at number fifteen, came to admire Shelley.

  ‘What a sweetie, am I allowed a cuddle?’ Mavis said.

  ‘Of course.’ Mum sat Mavis down and placed the baby in the old woman’s arms. ‘She’s such a good little girl. Never cries or even wakes up even when we pass her around to people.’

  It was true, even visitors’ chatter, or the Longbottoms’ television bleating out from next door at number eleven, or the breeze moving her feathery hair across her face, never woke Shelley.

  ‘I’m so lucky,’ Mum said, a fingertip caressing Shelley’s cheek, ‘to have such an easy baby.’

  ‘Maybe you’re just a good mother?’ I said, and Mum smiled and kissed my cheek.

  ‘Yeah, thank our lucky dilly bag she’s not like you were, Tanya,’ Nanna Purvis said.

  ‘Not like me? Why, what was I like?’

  ‘You? You really gave us the run-around, barely sleeping and whingeing nonstop.’ Nanna Purvis poked a Pooch Snax into her dog’s mouth and scratched his head. ‘Eh, Billie-Jean? Thought she’d drive us all crackers, didn’t we?’

  ‘Your dog wasn’t even here when I was born.’ I turned to my mother. ‘Was I a terrible baby?’

  ‘Oh Tanya, I don’t remember,’ Mum said as Mavis handed Shelley back to her. ‘It was so long ago and so much has happened ...’

  Yes, so much had happened. So many failed babies
. So much sadness. But that was over now. Beautiful and well-behaved Shelley had magicked the happiness back to us.

  Perhaps Shelley had even broken the bad spell –– the curse that drooped over Gumtree Cottage as heavy as the boughs of the dead fig tree Dad had got cut down.

  And on it went like that: Shelley being the best baby in the whole of Australia and Mum, Dad, Nanna Purvis and I drifting about Gumtree Cottage as if we were floating on those powdery puffs of spring cloud.

  Until the day at the beach.

  5

  The thermometer rose to thirty degrees that Sunday in November and North Beach was thick with noise and people, colourful beach umbrellas and laid-out towels. It was Shelley’s first outing from Gumtree Cottage, besides the daily Baby Health Clinic trips.

  As usual Nanna Purvis hadn’t wanted to come. ‘I’ll mind the ranch,’ she’d said. ‘Got me telly and Billie-Jean to keep me company.’

  I spread out the towels amongst mothers chasing toddlers, slapping on the hats they’d thrown off, and older children, brows furrowed in concentration, modelling towers for sandcastles. Beyond the crowded sand, beneath the sun, the sea glistened like gold-shot turquoise silk.

  Barely noticeable amidst the flock of ordinary seagulls, kelp gulls –– with black upperparts and wings and yellow bills –– called their strident ‘ki-och’. I wished I could be a kelp gull and blend in so easily. Though people immediately saw I wasn’t the same as other girls, especially at the beach. Until I could rush into the surf and hide under the water, that is. Then I was just another normal-sized girl splashing about in the waves.

  Once Dad got the umbrella up, Mum handed Shelley to him and rummaged through the beach bag. She passed me the tube of zinc. ‘Don’t want that pretty face to burn.’

  ‘Pretty?’ I mumbled, slapping a T-shape of thick, greasy zinc across my cheeks, down my nose. ‘Pretty plain more like it.’

  It was nice of Mum to say that, but I was fully aware not only of my bat-wing ears, but also of why the kids at school called me Ten-ton Tanya.