The Blooming Of Alison Brennan

by Kath Engebretson

  At least this is a start, I thought, wondering if she’d ask about Harry. We’d been told not to bring up anything that would upset her, so I was prepared to lie and say that we knew nothing about him, but she didn’t ask. The Judge had attended court to hear Harry plead guilty to the manslaughter of his father, and from him and what had been reported in the papers, we knew the basic facts. I had a clipping in my wallet, but this was certainly not the time to reveal it to Bernie.

  Yesterday in the Supreme Court of Victoria, Henryk Stanley pleaded guilty to the manslaughter of homeless man Borys Staskiewicz, who was killed in Enterprise Park, Melbourne, early on the morning of Monday, 11 April. Acting on behalf of Stanley, Legal Aid barrister Patricia Coulihan proffered that Staskiewicz was Stanley’s father, and that the two had had a troubled relationship since Stanley’s childhood.

  Stanley did not intend to kill Stasiewicz, Coulihan argued, but had gone to the park to check on his safety. An argument ensued, in the course of which Stanley flew into a rage, grabbed the mallet that Staskiewicz kept by his side and bashed him on the side of the head causing his death.

  Stanley wore a dark hoodie and track pants and stood impassively in the dock. He did not seek bail and will return to court in May for sentencing.

  The report was accompanied by a drawing of Harry, the familiar long, lank hair parted to either side of his face, his large features expressionless.

  I didn’t know why I had cut out that clipping. Perhaps I hoped that one day Bernie would be well and we could talk about the events as the close brother and sister we once were.

  Alison and I sat for about twenty minutes, each of us searching for a topic that might distract or amuse her, each of us blabbing against her disinterest.

  And then finally, it was time to go. We were not to tire her, the stern head nurse had said.

  I kissed Bernie, saying, ‘Get well, darling,’ and turned to the door.

  Then Alison bent to kiss her mother.

  ‘I’ll come often, Mum, whenever I can,’ she promised. She moved away from Bernie’s chair, despondent. Then she turned back. ‘I love you, Mum, please get better.’ She touched her mother’s face gently, and then she joined me at the door.

  Chapter 39

  Alison Brennan

  Saturday, 7 May

  Yesterday, our Science class went on an excursion — Melbourne Aquarium in the morning and Scienceworks in the afternoon. Even I was excited to get away from the classroom. Rosa climbed into the bus right after me and sat in the seat beside me. I smiled at her, and then turned my head to look out the window. I was embarrassed that I’d been distant with her.

  ‘You can’t stop me sitting here,’ she said.

  Then, after a few seconds, she tried again, saying, ‘Talk to me Allie, please.’ She held up a plastic container, opening the lid a little. A delicious smell leaked out. ‘Look, Dad made Thai fish cakes with satay sauce last night. I’ve brought enough for the two of us for lunch. I’m happy to bribe you with food if nothing else works.’

  Trent had put a packet of cheese sandwiches into my bag as I left that morning, but I so wanted to share those fish cakes with Rosa. I wanted to tell her some of what was going on, but I couldn’t. If she knew everything, she’d never want to speak to me again. She might even tell other kids at school and the look of normality that I’d built up would be blown. I’d have to leave the school.

  ‘I’m sorry, Rosa,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to hurt you.’ I could feel the hot tears coming and my face contorted as I tried to control them. ‘It’s just that stuff’s happening in my family, horrible stuff that I can’t tell anyone. My mum’s sick in hospital, but that’s just the beginning. If you knew everything that’s going on, you’d hate me.’

  ‘Why would I hate you?’

  ‘Because your family’s perfect.’

  Rosa stared at me, her eyes wide. Then she said, ‘Is that what you think? My family is definitely not perfect. Why do you think we moved from Sydney? Family stuff! Dad’s business failed and Mum had an affair. For months I hated them both. There was fighting all the time. Mum was never home, and I had to look after Gio. I had to be a mother to him. I hated her most of all for that. The move down here was to try to make a new start.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. I didn’t know any of that. ‘But you live in that gorgeous house.’

  ‘That gorgeous rented house. Dad went bankrupt. I still don’t know if they’ll stay together, and Gio’s had to leave his school and his friends. No, my family’s far from perfect. Anyway, this stuff in your family. Is it your fault? What? Are you dealing drugs? Do you have a secret bikie boyfriend who cooks ice?’

  ‘Noooo.’ I laughed.

  ‘Well, if it’s not your fault, why does it have to stop you being friends with me? Heaps of kids have shit in their families. I could tell you some stuff you wouldn’t believe about kids at my old school.’

  ‘You wouldn’t believe my stuff either.’ I stared out of the window, trying to will the tears not to come.

  ‘I don’t know why you think I care about that. I’m not planning to adopt your family. It was cool when we hung out that Saturday. Didn’t we have fun?’

  ‘Yes, we did.’ I remembered that day, how I’d forgotten to worry for a few hours.

  ‘So what’s the problem?’

  ‘There’s a lot of stuff I can’t talk about,’ I said again.

  ‘I totally get that. I’m okay with it. Look, do you want to share my fish cakes or shall I offer them to Princess Selma?’

  ‘Don’t you dare.’ The cheese sandwiches could wait.

  She leant across and hugged me, and then I fanned my face to cool down the redness from my tears. By the time we reached the Aquarium, no one would have known that I’d been crying.

  I’m letting myself have a friend.

  Mrs Goodall’s voice had been in my head, reminding me how I needed to be a parent to myself. So Rosa and I spent today together again at her house. It was fun. We painted each other’s toenails, and experimented with makeup again while we watched YouTube ‘how to’ tutorials. We danced to Taylor Swift and Christina Aguilera videos, and Rosa made me try on some of her clothes.

  We have different tastes. I’m the jeans and shirt type, but she likes to glam her clothes up. She has glitzy tops and skirts that her mum makes for her. On her they look fabulous, but on me they just look weird.

  It was heavy football season. Today Carlton and Collingwood played each other at the MCG. Rosa was a Collingwood barracker, so we watched the game, in between making cupcakes in the kitchen and Rosa plaiting my hair. After his soccer game, Gio came home with Rosa’s mum, and we iced the cupcakes and ate some of them as Carlton beat Collingwood.

  Just before the end of the game, Rosa’s older brother, Dario, came home. Last year we studied the Tennessee Williams play A Streetcar Named Desire, and then we watched the 1951 movie with Vivien Leigh and Marlon Brando. In that movie, Marlon Brando was beautiful. People didn’t usually use that word about men, but ‘handsome’ didn’t fit. Brando’s face was beautiful. Later, I watched The Wild One and my crush was complete, at least until it moved on to Justin Bieber and Jaden Smith.

  Dario looked exactly like Marlon Brando in those films, sort of dark and brooding, rough and sexy. He had perfect features, dark eyes and thick eyebrows, with wavy, black hair and full lips. His face was perfectly symmetrical, and like Brando, he looked as if he couldn’t be trusted. He wore a tight T-shirt that showed his chest and arm muscles. He went into the kitchen to get food and then stood watching the game, eating his sandwich. I was suddenly shy and tongue-tied, although he didn’t take any notice of us.

  When the game was over, when Carlton had won by three goals, and when Rosa had put her head in her hands in pretend despair, I stood to leave.

  ‘I’ll come with you to the tram stop,’ Rosa volunteered.

  Suddenly, Dario said, ‘Do you want a lift?’

  Rosa cut in, ‘No, she’s cool, Dario.’

 
‘Thanks anyway,’ I said.

  He shrugged his shoulders. ‘See you then.’

  Tomorrow was Mother’s Day. I was going to ask Grandpa to give me a photo of my grandmother, and I was going to frame it and put in on her desk in my room at Leo’s house. I didn’t know if or when I’d ever have a room of my own again, but that was what I had for now. I was going to take flowers to Mum and sit with her for an hour, even if she wouldn’t talk to me.

  Next Saturday, Rosa was coming to Leo’s house and we were going to watch all four episodes of A Year in the Life on Netflix.

  Chapter 40

  Colin Brennan

  Monday, 9 May

  Nadia Godlewski. There was a stillness about her, a quality of restfulness. She seemed like a thinker. When she sang the three Hail Marys in Polish at Stasiewicz’s funeral, I was awed by the rightness of the gift, and by her reverence.

  Three Hail Marys. That’s what you got for Penance as a child after you confessed your paltry misdeeds. The Hail Mary was the older Catholic’s prayer. Kids didn’t know those traditional prayers nowadays, didn’t know anything about religion, even if they had been baptised. But really, the church hadn’t covered itself in glory recently. Priests were in jail for sexually abusing children, another lot were leaving to marry, then some of the younger ones were running around in cassocks as if it was still the 1950s, and Vatican II never happened. I was tired of it all, but I wasn’t going to give it up. I was not a quitter. I’d stay to the end on the off-chance that there was a heaven and that the church might know something about it.

  Nadia Godlewski. A solid woman, not young, she occupied her space confidently but quietly — very Polish in the features, wide-open face and thick, dark curly hair to her shoulders.

  Old fool that I am, I’m attracted to her. There you are, I’ve said it. I haven’t been interested in any woman since Mary died almost twenty years ago. I don’t know anything about her. She’s probably married. A woman like that would be.

  After that interview with Bernadette’s doctor, I felt like a whipped dog. I looked for a hole where I could lick my wounds. I wanted to hide, from myself as much as from other people. The loneliness and self-doubt were too common now. I hadn’t given way to them before. I wanted to go home to Golden Beach and my solitary existence, but we had to sort something out for Alison first. I was not leaving her with Bernadette again.

  I rang Nadia Godlewski, feeling like a teenager, afraid of rejection.

  What an act of courage it is, I thought, to put yourself forward, to offer yourself like this.

  I called her at the university, almost hoping she wouldn’t be there and I could put the ordeal off for another day. But she answered, in that clear, slightly accented, deeply layered voice.

  ‘Professor Godlewski. It’s Colin Brennan. We met at Borys Stasiewicz’s funeral.’

  ‘Oh!’

  Was there surprise? Curiosity?

  ‘How are you, Judge Brennan?’

  ‘Well, thank you. Please call me Colin, and may I call you Nadia?’

  ‘Of course.’

  Thank God, I breathed out. The immediate formalities were over. ‘I wonder how busy you are. I have some questions about Borys Stasiewicz, and Harry, Alison’s father. You know of course that he’s confessed to manslaughter.’

  ‘Yes, I know that.’

  I was stumbling now. Don’t blather, I warned myself. ‘I know very little about Poland and the war. Alison’s distraught about her father, and I thought if I understood Stasiewicz’s background better, I could talk with her about it.’

  ‘You’re close to Alison?’

  ‘Because of her family situation, we were estranged for a time, but I’m trying to make up for that.’

  ‘Yes, I understand. I’m happy to help.’

  ‘I wondered if we could have lunch one day this week.’ I waited as if on a knife edge. I’d know immediately if she thought I was a nuisance.

  She hesitated slightly, and then she said, ‘That would be pleasant. Just checking my diary. Yes, tomorrow would be good, but somewhere close, I have students in the afternoon.’

  So we settled on one of those ubiquitous Italian restaurants on Lygon Street, one to which she could walk from the university.

  I wanted to run in circles with excitement.

  Our conversation felt natural immediately. I had no idea what I ate or drank, but I knew that I listened. She wore a long black cape for the cold day, draping it casually across the back of her chair, and I was captivated. I took everything in hungrily — her scholarship, her humanity and her intuition.

  She spoke of the brutality of the German occupation of Poland. ‘More wicked than we can ever imagine or describe,’ she said. ‘There were no rules. Whole families were shot on sight and their land taken. It was quite systematic. The Germans wanted to rid Poland of its people, because the land was paramount to Germany’s plans for expansion. As they murdered the Poles or dragged them off to camps, they moved Germans into the homes and farms.’

  ‘Where was Stasiewicz in this?’

  Nadia sipped the one glass of wine she had allowed herself. ‘There are two things to know about Borys Stasiewicz,’ she said. ‘First, he was a young intellectual and a prominent poet. He taught at the university of Warsaw until the Germans closed it, but then he continued his writing and teaching in secret. The apartment he shared with his wife, Maria, in Warsaw, was a meeting place for young activists, all of whom were writing patriotic material and taking on the Germans in whatever ways they could.’

  ‘Oh, he was married then?’

  ‘Yes, it was Maria who collected and printed the writings of the Generation of Columbus, as they called themselves. She printed Borys’s poems, distributing about thirty copies among the group. One of those was found in his possession. It’s an extremely important find and it must be preserved. I wonder where it is now.’

  ‘Still in evidence until Harry’s sentenced, I suppose. What happed to Maria?’

  ‘Gunned down in the 1944 uprising. She was pregnant with their first child.’ Nadia ate silently, picking at her pasta.

  What sadists we humans are, I thought, and so greedy for power. ‘What was the second factor about Stasiewicz?’

  ‘At a certain point he became a guerrilla fighter. There were a number of different groups that formed the Home Army, basically a loose militia that was loyal to the Polish government, which was in exile in London. They took on the Germans, in the forests mainly, and they were very involved in the sabotage of German transport and weapons. Then in 1944, they staged the uprising in Warsaw and most were mowed down.’ Nadia’s voice was full of grief, and I realised that, as a Pole, this terrible history was also hers.

  ‘I wonder how Stasiewicz escaped.’

  ‘That’s a mystery. Almost no Home Army soldiers survived the uprising. Somehow he must have mingled in with the thousands being sent to camps, and when the camps were liberated by the Allies, they joined the mass of refugees to Australia. Until now no Polish historian knew he was here.’

  “What about Harry? Why would he attack his father like that?’

  Nadia finished her pasta and sipped the last of her wine, considering the question.

  ‘This is an educated guess. Borys would have been psychologically damaged from all that he’d endured. Put yourself in his shoes. Displaced from his country, his wife murdered before his eyes, lost without a history or a name in this huge, puzzling country, and assigned rough work in harsh conditions. He was an intellectual, a poet. Then there was the sense of grievance against the West, a belief that the Allies had let Poland down. And there was resentfulness that the Russian army hadn’t intervened when Germany took Poland, even though it was just outside Poland’s borders. All that anger, combined with dispossession. It seems that he was an alcoholic, and possibly a violent and neglectful father.’

  ‘But for Harry to bash him like that in an uncontrollable fury.’

  ‘Colin,’ Nadia said, putting down her glass. ‘We’ll nev
er know what that boy suffered. But whatever his faults as a father, for his contribution to Polish literature, Borys Stasiewicz deserves respect and for his memory to be preserved.’

  It was such a pleasure to be with this intelligent woman. We spoke for longer, of happier things, of her work and her family.

  ‘I came to Australia in 1952, with my parents. I was three years old. They were part of the massive exodus from Europe after the war. First we lived with relatives and then my parents found a house in Carnegie, which they rented for the rest of their lives. My father was a doctor in Poland, but his qualifications weren’t recognised here, so he worked all of his life as a hospital orderly.’ She smiled grimly, and I recalled other stories I had heard of gifted, educated refugees being forced to work in menial jobs.

  ‘What about your mother?’ I asked.

  ‘She was a celebrated concert pianist in Poland, but in Australia she spent her days giving children piano lessons. She never performed again.’

  We were silent for a moment, and then Nadia said, ‘They were marvellous people. They died within days of each other ten years ago.’

  ‘Were you their only child?’

  ‘Yes, my parents valued education so I was expected to work hard and achieve at school. In primary school I was educated by an order of Polish nuns at a small school here in Melbourne, and the same nuns ran the Polish language school that I attended every week until I was sixteen. So, you see, I’m fluent in Polish, my first language.’

  I was conscious of Nadia’s commitments in the afternoon, but I was enjoying the conversation and didn’t want it to end. I still had many questions.

  ‘Have you been back to Poland?’

  ‘Oh yes. My research focuses on twentieth century Polish literature, so from the time I began my doctorate, I went there once a year. Despite the destruction, a great deal has been preserved, thanks to dedicated patriots who risked their lives to conceal treasured resources. So Colin, while I’m a proud Australian, I am also a citizen of Poland. I love my homeland with a passion.’