Riding the Black Cockatoo Read Free Page B

washed up by a wave at his feet – all three kilos of it! No one ever bothered to ask how we knew the history of this great lump of iron; my classmates – especially the boys – were too busy turning the Fraser Island Cannonball over in their hands with the silent reverence that boys bestow on implements that kill and maim.
    Dad’s collection could be divided into three broad categories. First there was the outside stuff – artefacts that were either too large to fit in the house or so grimy and dilapidated that they couldn’t get past Mum. Then there was the downstairs stuff that filled drawers and boxes in the garage and lined the walls of the pool room. Third, there was the upstairs collection, the bits deemed special enough to live with us: the lamps, the vases, the pottery pieces, the shiny brass things, and of course Mary on the shelf above the record player. Mary sat in for every record change of my childhood. From the swinging sounds of Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass in the 1960s to Nirvana’s bellowing-at-the-moon through the 1990s, four decades of middle-class white music reverberated though Mary. I sometimes wonder what his spirit would have thought of it all, especially on nights when the windows rattled to Mum and Dad’s favourite, the thunderous organ prelude to Phantom of the Opera . It’s a wonder that the combined sonic assault of Andrew Lloyd Webber and modern speaker technology hadn’t reduced Mary to dust, or at the very least vibrated his teeth from their sockets.
    I worked my way through the cupboards with a detective’s touch, sneaky fingers feeling around corners, behind picnic baskets and over little boxes tied up with string. As a child, I had an almost paranormal knack for unearthing our gifts weeks before birthdays and Christmas. I peeked behind framed family photos up on the higher shelves, making sure that everything was put back just so. I said hello to my grandmamma, 20 years gone, and she smiled back at me through the dust-speckled glass from her beloved garden. In that photo, wild grey hair that she could never be bothered with blew in an eternal breeze and a green cardigan stretched across her abundant frame. How I loved her.
    I abandoned the wall unit and wandered down the hall to my old bedroom. It’s a bit of a junkroom now, a holding pen for things my mother is trying to get out of the house, and things my father is trying to hang onto. My old bedroom, once made wall-less by imagination; I saw again the Himalayan base camp on top of my wardrobe where I would sit amid clouds with my survival rations of Vegemite sandwiches. I saw again the endless shark-filled ocean over which my creaky bed rolled; I saw again the virgin, pea-green, shag-pile Amazonian forest over which my model planes floated. I looked through the window, seeking out familiar sights; the fire station tower where the hoses still hung like spaghetti strands dripping themselves dry; across the street, the young married woman’s bathroom window on which I had trained my binoculars at 7.15 each night for one wonderful year – where was she now? The bedroom walls began to close in – too many memories for such a tiny room.
    I drifted around downstairs, eyes and fingers flitting through the pool room, the workshop, my brother’s old bedroom stacked high with things that had not yet made the skip or the local auction centre. The auction centre! In a recent effort to de-clutter the house and to appease my mother, Dad had been taking stuff there by the ute-load . . . Surely not! They wouldn’t accept a human skull, would they?
    I went back into the lounge room and flopped into my father’s lounge chair. It sat dead square in front of the wall unit; the best seat in the house for watching the telly. The cat glided between my legs, her appreciative purring the only sound as I wondered out loud, ‘Where? Where could Mary be?’
    In the distance a rubbish truck emptied wheelie bins in quick, cacophonous crashes of