That was four years ago.
It was good in the house for a month or two, then the rubbish started to pile up again.
During my meeting with Mrs Goodall, she asked me to write a list of places I could go to, to study. And she said that she was going to arrange for me to use the school library at weekends.
Writing the list made me think of Grandpa. He told me I could phone him, but I never had. It would seem like I was taking sides with him against Mum and Dad. But I kept remembering the house at Golden Beach. It was his holiday house, although he lived there now since he retired. I used to go there a lot when I was in primary school. He’d pick me up in his big car and we’d always get hamburgers along the way.
The house was like a huge box on stilts. You climbed steep steps at the back, and when you walked in all you could see was ocean. Grandpa never drew curtains or blinds. The light or the dark just came right in. I used to love standing at the big front window watching the waves march in like soldiers in a battle, and then falling over as if it was all a big joke. Grandpa told me that if I was a bird and flew directly across that ocean I would come to Tasmania. Sometimes at home I would imagine that I was that bird, and that I could fly for days over the ocean to land in a new place, clean and green and sunny.
I hadn’t been to Grandpa’s house since he had that fight with Mum.
Mrs Goodall wanted us to meet once a week. She said we would work out some ‘strategies’ and make sure that there were ‘appropriate’ places for me to study. She used all this counsellor-type language.
She also asked me to talk to Mum and Dad about respecting my ‘private space’ in my bedroom. She said that I would have to be firm with them, but I had a right to have a tidy, neat place where I could study.
She wanted me to tell Mum and Dad that they couldn’t put any more of their stuff in my room, and to ask them for help in moving out the rubbish that was already there. She asked me if I felt comfortable talking to Mum and Dad about it, and I said not really, but I’d do it. I was going to do it before I met her next time.
At the end of our meeting, she asked me how I felt. I could feel that my eyes were puffy from crying, but what I liked about her was that she wasn’t all clammy and motherly, putting her arms around you, and getting too close. She just pushed the box of tissues towards me and listened. That was the best thing — she listened.
How did I feel about telling her?
I said that I was relieved, and that was true, but I didn’t tell her that something inside me was shrivelling up in horror, now that I had told her our family’s worst, deepest secret.
Chapter 3
Leo Brennan
Tuesday, 2 February
The old man’s a bully.
He terrorised Bernadette, made it obvious that she wasn’t the daughter he’d hoped for. She was always withdrawn; she hid behind our mum. But it was the year I was at Melbourne University, when I was nineteen and she was twenty-one, that the agoraphobia took over.
She went out less and less, and eventually refused to go anywhere unless Mum went with her. She hid in her room, in that big, cold house. She read, wrote in her diary, watched soap operas on television, shuffled around doing chores, and collected junk. She seemed to have decided that that was going to be her life, and for years she clung to Mum as a stranded sailor might cling to an upturned boat. Then Mum died and Harry rescued her, or so it must have seemed to Bernie.
By fourteen years of age, I knew that I was gay, but nothing coerced me to reveal that to ‘the Judge’ — our dad. It was strange that I couldn’t admit such a basic fact about myself, but back then it was still a stigma, and in a Catholic family like mine, it was considered a serious sin. It would have been hard for anyone who didn’t grow up in that house to understand how deeply Catholic it was. Even my name, Leo, came from the Judge’s favourite Pope, Leo XIII, champion of workers’ rights and unions, but also defender of the right to private property and free enterprise. Old Leo was the Judge’s hero.
I couldn’t talk about being gay at school either. It was a bastion of Catholic conservatism, and the priests and other boys had names for boys like me. So I played football and cricket, and I laughed at fag jokes. Sometimes at lunchtime, I escaped into the art studio and took down the heavy books of paintings from their high shelf. I pored over the colours and shapes, lost myself in the harsh landscapes, the gentle watercolours, the dreamlike impressionists. I was mesmerised by the greens, greys and blues of outback Australia, and the swirling shapes and colours of the abstracts. Recalling those magical paintings helped me to sleep at night.
Art was considered fine until the end of Year Ten, when the Judge decreed that I was to study serious subjects that would help me to get into Law. It was an article of faith that I would follow him into Melbourne University, and not go to one of those modern, ‘lefty newcomers’ that he scorned. I wanted to be a good son. Bernie had disappointed him, so he focused his authority on me. I let him; indeed I craved his approval. The smallest nod of his head in recognition of some achievement could keep me going for days.
I separated myself from Mum. I couldn’t admit how much I wanted and needed her. She brought hot chocolate to my room every night and always hesitated to leave, wanting to talk, but I brushed her off.
‘Everything alright, darling?’
‘Yes, Mum, everything’s fine.’
Then she’d kiss me. She’d tell me that she loved me, and despite the wall I’d built between us, I waited nightly for her declaration.
So I excelled academically, captained the senior football team in my final year, pretended I was interested in girls, and late at night drifted to sleep to dreams of soft-limbed boys from school.
I went to Melbourne University, intent on taking a path through the city’s best law firms, and securing a seat on the bench, replicating my father’s life. I was too caught up in it all to see that it couldn’t last.
One day, stepping into the shower, preparing to put on my armour for another day, I was hit by a tidal wave of darkness and futility. My defences crumbled in an instant. I couldn’t turn on the tap, couldn’t do anything except fall against the wall and slide to the floor.
I curled into a foetal position, reduced to helplessness. I sobbed quietly at first, and then I lost my cultivated control. The sobbing became a howl, and the howl became a scream. I banged my head on the floor, didn’t care what happened, how much noise I made. I didn’t know if I was there for hours or minutes. All I knew was that I was looking into a fathomless darkness that I couldn’t escape. In a perverse way, I wanted it to reach up its slimy tentacles and suck me in.
I was in hell.
The cleaner found me. She was a Filipina, much coveted for her skills by the matrons of Toorak, and given to expletive-laden scorn at their condescension. She covered my nakedness, cradled my head on her lap, and rocked me with lullaby words.
Summoned from one of her committees, Mum called an ambulance, and a Crisis Assessment Team took me to the Melbourne Clinic. I spent five months there, numb among other sedated shadows. I was cared for by a white-haired psychiatrist, a death camp tattoo just visible on his forearm. With infinite compassion he took my psyche apart, as one might disassemble a child’s toy, and put it back into something recognisable and authentic.
The Judge visited me periodically in the clinic, but always had to leave quickly; he was very uncomfortable while there. Mum came often. We would sit in the sun, or in the corner of the library, not always talking. Towards the end, when I was almost ready to leave, we would go to Victoria Street for a bowl of noodles.
That was when we found each other again.
One day, over a pot of tea in a tiny Vietnamese restaurant, I finally told her that I was gay. I watched her eyes. No change.
She picked up my hand from the plastic tablecloth and kissed it. That was all. She knew and she didn’t care.
The Judge offered me money to convalesce in Europe. He thought that once I was over my foolish breakdown
, I would resume my destined path — as if I could pick it up like a suitcase I had put down for an hour or so. But there was no going back. I took a quarter of the money he offered and lost myself in India, another displaced white man in cheap drawstring pants, ragged T-shirt and dirty sandals.
I merged into India’s scurrying, surging masses. I lived in hovels, or in a corner of someone’s room, and I ate rice and dhal from street stalls. When Mum sent money for my birthday, I bought my first real camera, strapping it to my body when I slept and when I pushed through the streaming crowds. The camera was my passport to a longed for life of the imagination.
From Mumbai, I travelled north by train and photographed sari-clad women emerging with radiant faces from the sacred waters of the Ganges. During the mad exuberance of the Holi festival, I filled my viewfinder with images of joyous Hindus covered in multi-coloured powders. At the Golden Temple Pond in Amritsar, my camera captured the moment that the morning sun turned the holy waters bronze, as a turbaned Sikh bathed lost in meditation. As my guru and guide, I adopted Krishna the god of youth, music, courage and love and had his child-like image tattooed on my chest.
I learnt to take photographs by watching and waiting — waiting for the exact play of light on water, for the very moment a smile broke across a child’s face, for the instant the setting sun dropped behind a mountain. In a mosque in Mumbai at the end of Ramadan, I photographed rows of Muslim men bent over in prayer. Their straight lines of reverence, their discipline, and their indifference to distractions, filled me with wonder. I had never experienced such enthrallment with the entity I had been taught to call God.
With each photograph my happiness grew, and little by little I became visible to myself again.
Eventually, I was ready to go home. I wanted to see Mum and to tell my story, my real story, to the Judge. I didn’t return to the Toorak mansion, but lived in a shabbily comfortable share house in Camberwell while I found my life. I began my photography business tentatively, doing favours for relatives of friends, taking snaps of chocolate-stained little faces at children’s birthday parties. Whenever I could, I roamed city streets with my camera, documenting graffiti before it disappeared, trying to expose the beauty of grungy lanes and the juxtaposition of skyscrapers with bluestone cobbles. I would go to the beach or into the bush to practise with my camera, mastering the art of watching and waiting.
When one of my photos — red and gold autumn leaves in the Dandenong hills — won a prize at a local gallery, I began to call myself a photographer.
Trent and I fell in love by accident. He was the bulky, bearded best man at a friend’s wedding and I was the fidgety photographer, bothering everyone for a spontaneous shot. We thought we were as different as two people could be, but long after the bridal pair had left to a round of tipsy cheers, we talked, as waiters cleared around us.
Our love was a comfortable, ordinary thing. We rode our bikes by the Yarra, hiked in the country, me lugging my camera, argued about football, and ate at small, local restaurants. We knitted out lives together like two sleeves of one of those thick, warm jumpers you threw on against the Melbourne nights.
When we knew that we wanted to be together forever, and we moved into our rented cottage in Port Melbourne, the cottage we eventually bought, I knew it was time to put some organisation into my business. My website said it all.
LB Photography: Every imaginable celebration: weddings, divorces, christenings, birthdays, bar and bat mitzvahs, anniversaries, graduations; I cover them all, anywhere, at any time. I will help you to make your occasion joyous and memorable.
At the Esplanade market on St Kilda’s foreshore, I sold my other photographs, those I took in the bush, or in the city streets, or trudging across sand dunes to the beach. I was always sending my photos to outback and travel magazines, hoping for a commission that would take me away into the Australian landscape, where my camera could record its colours and moods, and where I could again feel the freedom I felt in India.
I knew I was like the Judge. I was tall like him, and I had the thick, blond hair that he had when he was younger. I talked like him, with the same vocal timbre and inflections, and used the same kind of vocabulary. But I hoped I was kinder and less hasty to judge others, just as Mum was.
I rang the Judge every Sunday to check on him. I was going to insist on my existence. I visited Bernie, dragged myself into that stinking house and tried to make her talk to me.
It was me who told the Judge that they hadn’t enrolled Alison in a secondary school. Someone had to. Bernie wouldn’t leave the house, and poor dull Harry didn’t know what to do.
I thought about Alison all the time; I adored her. Whenever I could, I extricated her from that frightful house and brought her here for one of Trent’s pastas or roasts. We talked about everything — except her parents. She was intensely loyal.
It was probably time that we drove down to see the Judge, although he was rude to Trent last time we went. He mellowed when he saw the bottle of merlot Trent had brought. The old hypocrite! Chester dug up one of his tomato plants.
‘Get that bloody dog out of my garden,’ he bellowed.
Chester was a Jack Russell. They had to dig — it was a moral obligation.
So we planned to go there at Easter, even knowing that the Judge wouldn’t be happy to see us.
Chapter 4
Rod Wilding
Wednesday, 10 February
I thought I’d seen everything.
I had worked for local councils in Melbourne for twenty years, but I only started with the Yarra Council a few months ago, so I didn’t know the house. This summer was a scorcher — one of the hottest on record for the state — so we were doing spot checks for fire risk areas, overgrown yards, rubbish lying around. The last thing we wanted was a fire in this densely populated suburb.
The call came from a neighbour who said he’d made complaints about this particular dwelling before. He was especially worried now, he said, because he’d seen one of the inhabitants smoking and discarding butts in long, dry grass in front of the house.
So I went there with the council literature on fire prevention and safety. If necessary, we’d get machinery in to slash the long grass and trim tree branches away from the electrical cables.
But this house was one out of the box.
Overgrown trees obscured the windows of the house. A wooden picket fence had fallen in on itself, so you had to scramble over it, and the tinder dry weeds in front of the house were waist-high in places. Fire would rip through it.
I made my way to the front door through piles of rubbish. Broken bicycles, an old TV, furniture blasted by heat and rain, the body of a rusted car stripped of its parts, an upended child’s swing, piles of smelly household rubbish buzzing with flies.
I felt sick at what I might find, even though I’d been through this kind of thing before. I was a believing man, and at times like these my impulse was to send out a prayer. ‘Please God, don’t let there be kids here.’
The door wasn’t locked because the handle had come off, but something behind the door prevented me from pushing it inwards. I knocked. No response. I knocked again. Then there was a shuffling behind the door, a sliding, falling noise, like things being pushed out of the way. I then heard a female voice.
‘Who is it? We’re not interested in what you’re selling.’
‘I’m not selling anything, Ma’am. It’s Rod Wilding from the Yarra Council. I’m here to advise you on fire prevention. If you’ll open the door I can show you my ID.’
‘No, go away, we’re alright with fire prevention.’
‘Well, no Ma’am, I’m afraid you’re not. Your front yard is a fire hazard. You’ll need to clear it right away. If you’ll open the door and talk to me, I can show you what needs to be done.’
‘Go away.’
‘Is anyone else in the house with you, Ma’am?’
I heard a male voice say, ‘What’s going on?’ And then the door was dragged halfway open. He w
as tall, broad and unsmiling. Suspicious.
The woman hid behind him. I got the impression of someone short and plump, and despite the heat, she was wearing a long-sleeved cardigan. The smell from the house rushed at me. It was a mixture of rotting food, mould, all kinds of thing I couldn’t name.
I held up my ID. ‘Rod Wilding from the council.’
‘What do you want?’
‘You’re going to need to clear around your house, Sir. This is the worst fire season in years. We’re encouraging all residents to do everything they can to reduce risk. Here are some council pamphlets that will inform you about the fire safety by-laws.’
He made no move to take them, but stepped across to shield the inside of the house from view. Before he did I caught a glimpse of high piles of paper and litter, and similar jumbles of rubbish as in the front yard.
He wanted to get rid of me.
‘Yeah, mate, I know it needs doing. Been putting it off. I’ll get on to it. Thanks for the reminder. By the end of the week, it will be done.’
I didn’t believe him, but I’d done what I had to do. ‘How many people live here, Sir?’
‘Only me and the missus.’
‘Good. I’ll give you a few days then come back.’ I turned back towards the street and stumbled again over the broken fence. Just as I was about to start my car, someone else went in the way I’d come out, into that firetrap of a house.
It was a young girl in a school uniform — fifteen or sixteen years old.
As soon as I got back to the office I made a phone call to Child Protection Services. Someone had to check on that girl.
The Blooming Of Alison Brennan Page 2
