Chapter 5
Alison Brennan
Wednesday, 10 February
Mum was in a state when I got home from school.
She was yelling at Dad, ‘See what you’ve done. Because you won’t cut the grass, now the council’s after us.’
Dad grumbled back, ‘I can’t cut the grass because of all the stuff you’ve got out there that you won’t let me throw away.’
‘Don’t talk to me,’ she wailed. Then she cleared a patch on the couch and sat with her head in her hands. A pile of papers slid to the floor.
‘He’ll call Child Protection. They’ll take Alison.’
I gradually got the story. A council guy had come to the house and told them it was a fire hazard. Of course it was, and on this hot day it was stifling. I could hardly breathe for the heat.
‘Did you tell him I live here?’ I asked.
‘No,’ Dad said. ‘But he would have seen you. You came in as he left.’
This could go two ways, I thought. He may decide not to get involved, or he may be conscientious and decide to report it.
I didn’t want Mum and Dad more upset, but after talking to Mrs Goodall, I was beginning to rebel. Something inside me, a small hope, wanted the man to be conscientious.
They came at seven o’clock in the evening, a man and a woman, about Uncle Leo’s age, in their forties. Their names were Bruce and Marilyn. They had kind faces. At first, Mum wouldn’t let them in. She thought she could talk to them through the door as she did with the council man, but they were persistent.
‘It’s only to discuss a complaint that came to our office. We won’t keep you long, Bernadette,’ Bruce said.
So they knew our names.
‘What complaint?’ Mum demanded, still refusing to open the door.
This wasn’t going to work.
‘It will be best if you handle this,’ I said to Dad. I took Mum over to her seat on the couch and sat on its arm next to her.
At last Dad opened the door and they came through. I watched them carefully. They didn’t register any shock at the state of the house; perhaps they’d seen this before. They didn’t ask to sit down — it would have been pointless — but stood in a space that Dad cleared for them. The man spoke and the woman looked around.
Please don’t go to the kitchen, don’t ask about the hot water, don’t badger Mum, she’s fragile. The fears circled in my head.
But the woman, Marilyn, did go to the kitchen, picking her way through the rubble. The kitchen was the final horror. When she saw that she would know everything.
Dad began, apologetically, ‘Sorry about the place. Things have got a bit beyond us.’
Bruce talked then about what they did, why they were there, and that they needed to make sure I was safe.
‘She’s safe,’ Dad said.
Mum sat with her head down. Any minute she would try to disappear into her bedroom.
Finally Marilyn said, ‘We need to speak to your daughter alone for a few moments, please.’ She turned to me. ‘Is there somewhere we can talk?’
I thought of the rest of the house, just as junked as this room. ‘No. I’ll come outside with you.’
So we stood on the overgrown nature strip and they asked me questions.
‘How long has the house been like this?’
‘All of my life.’
‘The kitchen’s unsafe. Where do you cook?’
‘We don’t.’
I decided not to make it anymore difficult for them. I told them everything that I’d told Mrs Goodall — about how I had learnt to look after myself, going to the gym to shower, buying food at the gym and at school, washing my things in the laundromat at the weekend. It was a relief to tell it to someone official.
The man was nice.
‘It’s serious, Alison,’ he said. ‘It’s dangerous and unhealthy.’
‘Please,’ I answered, ‘I cope okay. Don’t make trouble for Mum. She’s not well.’
‘We’re going to come back every week for a while to check on you,’ he said. He gave me his card.
‘Now, please be honest with us, do you need help?’ Marilyn asked as she handed me her card too.
Yes, yes, yes, I need help — that little voice of hope whispered in my head.
But I took their cards, promised to call them if I needed to, and went inside to Mum and Dad.
Mum was still sitting on the couch, crying now. I was so used to making excuses for her that at first I didn’t acknowledge the feeling that swelled inside me, like a balloon gradually inflating. It was fury… at Mum and her self-pity, and at Dad and his weakness. Fury at the situation they’d put me in, having to be monitored like an abused child.
‘This isn’t about you, Mum,’ I said in a voice I’d never used with her before.
I then left the house, taking my phone. I knew what I had to do.
After four years, it was time.
Chapter 6
Colin Brennan
Thursday, 11 February
I went to the beach early, just as it was getting light.
The smudgy halo around the sun told me we were in for another scorcher. The CFA already had their board out announcing a total fire ban. A surfer was paddling, crouched over his board, and for an instant the rising sun outlined him in gold. Closer to the beach, the surf was dark and shadowy in that blue-grey shade it got before the full light. On the dunes, prickly whiskers of sea grass began to show.
I threw two lines out and secured them, then sat on my fold-up chair with my thermos of coffee. I wanted to think.
Alison had rung me last night. When I heard her voice after four years, my stomach turned over. She was a little girl when I last saw her, just about to leave primary school, and now she was sixteen. She sounded very grown up.
I was furious with Bernadette about the way they were making Alison live. It’s child abuse! Oh the stench of that place. If they weren’t my own family I’d go right to Human Services, but that would mean they’d take Alison away. Where would that leave her? With some dreadful foster family, probably.
Of course I could sue for custody, but Alison would hate that. Despite everything, she seemed to love her parents, and it was pitiful to see her trying to protect them. As it turned out, after I confronted Bernadette that day about the secondary schools, I cut ties with them. Perhaps it wasn’t the best thing to do, because it meant I lost touch with Alison too. I told her to ring me any time she wanted, but until yesterday she hadn’t. A child would always side with her parents.
I wasn’t a talker, and I couldn’t talk to my kids. During my years on the bench I saw too much cruelty and horror, stupidity and evil, too much derangement and violence. I kept it away, even from Mary, my wife, when she was alive. The parade of human misery I saw every day locked me up inside. I was afraid it gave me a magisterial air that I didn’t always leave in the courtroom.
I wasn’t a patient father. Bernadette was a mousy child, afraid of me, jumping at her own shadow. She clung to her mother, and whenever I tried to put some backbone into her, give her a push, she would crumble. Mary protected her.
Later, in her twenties, when she was incapacitated with anxiety, Mary took her to a psychiatrist, and she was diagnosed with anxiety-induced agoraphobia. At least there was a name for it. She was treated by the psychiatrist right up until Mary died, and then she fell apart completely.
With no one to be a shield between herself and the world, she made the house her prison, especially her room in which she stacked every kind of left-over she could find — books and clothes that had belonged to her mother, broken kitchen utensils, piles of paper, old toys, magazines, junk mail, things that should have been relegated to the rubbish bin. It was as if the rubbish was another wall of defence against the world. Then she found someone to take Mary’s place, someone else she could hide behind.
Harry was the outside man we hired to keep the grounds tidy. He was a little simple, and older than Bernadette. After the cancer took Mary, he and Bernadet
te would talk in the garden. He must have persuaded Bernadette to go away with him, because she disappeared suddenly.
After a week or so, a letter informed me that they were living together, renting a flat in Fitzroy. I bought a house in Clifton Hill for her. What could I do, she had to have somewhere decent to live. I paid an allowance into her bank account every month. I thought Bernadette would have run away with anyone at that stage — no self-confidence and no judgment. That was eighteen or so years ago.
After Alison was born, they seemed to cope well enough. Harry was working then, at least intermittently, and while the house was messy, it was liveable. They would take Alison to kindergarten and then to school.
As Alison got older, though, Bernadette’s agoraphobia got worse. She retreated into the house and let the filth build up. She became obese, never seemed to bathe. I would take Alison away during the school holidays and often I had to send cleaners in to scour the property and remove junk. After the last row, when I realised they hadn’t enrolled Alison in a secondary school, I gave up. I shouldn’t have done that. My stubbornness meant that I hadn’t seen Alison for four years.
As for my son, Leo, the less said about him the better. Despite the fact that I paid a fortune to the Jesuits for twelve years, he had turned out to be a bloody wedding photographer. On Sundays, he sold his strange photos to the tourists on the Esplanade. He threw in a law degree at Melbourne University, and went slumming through India. Then he came back to tell me he was following his ‘first love’, photography, and moved into a dilapidated share house in Camberwell, after informing me that he was homosexual.
I can’t abide that Trent fellow he lives with — a Homicide Detective no less. Dear God! You can’t have homosexual cops, it shouldn’t be allowed.
Leo rang me once a week, mainly to nag me about my blood pressure tablets and my alcohol intake.
As if it’s any of his business — a nip or two of Scotch in the evenings and a little wine, that’s all. I’m still strong and healthy, still walk for miles on the beach.
There’s never been anyone for me except Mary. I wished I’d told her that more often. Mary would have known what to do about Alison. After she died, I stayed on the bench for a few more years, then sold the Toorak house and came down here to Golden Beach. I had the old shack demolished, and paid an architect to design this high, boxy two-storey house across the road from the beach.
It was a quiet village, just right for someone solitary like me. There was only a general store and a fish and chip shop, and golf and bowling clubs if you were inclined that way. I wasn’t. You needed to go into Sale for supplies.
When she was small I’d bring Alison to Golden Beach for the school holidays. She loved the beach and she read or built sandcastles while I fished. Then we’d cook something together, usually fresh fish if they were biting. I never had to entertain her — she was a self-sufficient child.
I wasn’t a success with Bernadette and Leo, too much ‘the Judge’. But when Alison was small and we walked on the beach looking for unusual shells, she’d take my hand. Then I thought that maybe I could be a better grandfather than I was a father, that maybe there was a second chance.
I had no trouble occupying my time in my quiet retreat. The silence filled me like a living thing. I reached out for it, drew it in hungrily. The days went by quickly. I fished or walked on the beach. I was also writing my memoirs — wasn’t everyone now? Even the most vapid ‘celebrity’ who once appeared on some deplorable reality show seemed to think they had something portentous to tell the world.
I tried some of the most notorious cases in Australian criminal history. I had sentenced paedophiles and rapists, child killers, murderers who had hacked their victims to pieces, gangland figures, crooked cops and politicians. They came from all walks of life, from the so-called ‘leafy suburbs’, to the most grimy housing commission areas. It was all going to come out in the book.
I wrote an occasional column on legal matters for The Australian. I was experimenting with native plants, to see what grew in this sandy soil. And once a month I drove to Melbourne to lunch with other retired judges, and I stayed over at ‘the Club’. I read everything. This late in life I’d discovered the miraculous iPad, so I was no longer dependant on the limited regional library.
Anyway, now there was Alison.
When we spoke, we arranged for her to visit me for Easter and the school holidays. It was Ash Wednesday yesterday, so I went to the Cathedral in Sale to be reminded of my mortality, and I wore the ashy Cross on my forehead all day. I had given up wine for Lent, just the two shots of whisky in the evenings. Alison was to arrive on Good Friday afternoon, so I was going to miss the service this year, but we planned to go together to Easter Mass.
By nine that evening I was home, with a good-sized gummy shark, which I cleaned and filleted, steaming one fillet for breakfast with a thick slice of the bread I baked yesterday. I sat for a long time watching the ocean.
I must look for the Scrabble set today. Alison and I might play in the evenings.
Chapter 7
Alison Brennan
Saturday, 20 February
It took me more than two weeks to work up to it, but yesterday I did what Mrs Goodall said I should.
When I came home from school, they were sitting on the couch, close together, on the only space that wasn’t covered with stuff. They were watching The Bold and the Beautiful. I climbed over the rubbish and found the remote, and then I turned the TV off.
‘Come on, Allie,’ Dad said. ‘We were watching that.’
‘I need to talk to you both.’
Right away they looked worried, and I almost decided not to go ahead with it. Then I imagined myself telling Mrs Goodall that I couldn’t do it. I didn’t want to tell her that.
There was nowhere to sit, so I stayed where I was. I told them that I’d been talking to the counsellor at school, and that she said I needed a clean space of my own to do my VCE work.
I felt sick, ashamed and angry all at once. I’d never spoken to them directly like that about the house.
I know it’s strange, but we never talk about it.
Mum got anxious, pulling at her hair, unravelling bits of wool from the old cardigan she wore. Her hands were shaking.
‘I can’t live like this anymore,’ I said. I wasn’t going to cry. It would have made Mum feel worse. ‘You have to help me.’
‘What do you want, love?’ Dad asked. His voice was gentle.
I told Dad that I needed money to hire one of those big skips that they put on the nature strip. I told them that I wanted to empty out all the rubbish that had been in my room for years; that I needed a clear space for my clothes and books.
Mum wouldn’t look at me. ‘It’s not that bad,’ she muttered, almost to herself, but I didn’t answer.
I told them I was going to ask Uncle Leo to come the next day to help. It had to be Saturday because I worked at Hungry Jacks on Sundays.
Mum nodded, but I could tell she hated the idea.
That afternoon, I ordered the biggest skip you could get and I told them we’d need it for a week.
They brought it very early this morning. It was huge. Mum hid in the house, but Dad went out and spoke to the men in the truck. He showed them where to put it, and gave them the money.
Then Uncle Leo and Trent arrived.
‘Wow, big skip, Allie,’ Uncle Leo said as he hugged me. ‘How’re you doing, Harry? Where’s Bernie?’
Dad nodded towards the house.
‘Not coping?’
‘No.’
We worked all day. I’d bought rolls of those really tough rubbish bags, the ones you were supposed to use in the garden. I was embarrassed for Uncle Leo and Trent to see my room, but I had to put up with it if we were going to get anything done. They just got to work.
Trent was big and strong. He carried the heavy bags to the skip when they were full. I couldn’t believe how much stuff we packed up and threw away. There was every kind of r
ubbish that Mum and Dad had collected over eighteen years. Well, Mum collected it really; Dad just didn’t stop her.
Everything you could imagine!
Ancient newspapers in high piles, magazines, store catalogues and every other kind of junk mail going back years; old shoes, many of them Mum’s from her childhood; boxes and boxes of Christmas and birthday cards, every one she’d ever received; every item of my clothing from the time I was a baby; broken toys; all of my paintings and drawings, beginning with kinder and then right through primary school; wrapping paper years old; hundreds of letters; craft supplies she’s never used; mouldy paperbacks and every book she’d ever owned; a collapsible bird bath; a roasting pan big enough to cook two turkeys; broken dolls and prams; my baby cradle; a portable cot; a change table she must have used when I was a baby; at least twenty packets of disposable nappies; a broken sewing machine, and old sewing patterns not even opened.
That was just some of it.
We sorted out the stuff we could give to the Salvos, and packed all the rest into garbage bags. One by one they went to the skip. The neighbours had a good look. There must have been fifty bags in the skip by the time we finished clearing everything out.
Mum fluttered around for half an hour or so, making a funny noise, like a cat mewling. She couldn’t bear seeing her stuff thrown away. I was sure she thought I was betraying her, and to be honest, it did feel like a betrayal, but I had to do it.
Uncle Leo stepped in, saying, ‘Bernie, it might be better if you go do something else. There are enough of us here to help Alison. I know it’s hard for you.’
So Mum went off talking to herself in the way she did, and hid in her room for the rest of the day. Dad stayed.
Finally we could see the floor, nice dark-coloured boards, still shiny. Soon I had a cupboard where I could store my clothes, and we had cleared the rubbish off my dresser. The room looked big.
The Blooming Of Alison Brennan Page 3
