Life Without The Boring Bits

by Colleen McCullough

  The war involved a lot of bedroom juggling in which I was the perpetual pawn, as mine was the only feminine room in a masculine house. After Laurie broke me and Carl up, Nanna occupied the other bed in my room — until Jim came home for good. At once Nanna received her own room on the glassed-in back verandah and was moved out of my room. Laurie moved out of Jim’s bed and in with me. Jim imported a niece from Belfast, moved Laurie back to his bed, and put the niece in with me. Laurie evicted the poor girl, moved out of Jim’s bed and back in with me. Every so often Jim would literally order Laurie back into his bed; she would go for a couple of weeks, then she’d be back in with me. Over and over. If I could have laughed, I would have called it a game of musical beds, but I couldn’t laugh. Sharing my room with Laurie was unspeakable; whatever tiny bit of privacy I had was shaken and worried like a terrier with a rat, but to understand it properly, my readers will have to plough through “Laurie” — here is not the place to talk about Laurie at length. Apart from the terrible permanent exposure of every aspect of my home life to my mother, she had a habit of waking in the middle of the night to sit bolt upright in her bed and scream, scream, scream. A nightmare, she would explain. From the quality of those awful screams, a vision of Hell, more like.

  What kind of man was Jim?

  Very intelligent but not a scrap intellectual, he detested all persons of true learning; possession of a university degree turned anyone into an enemy. Politics obsessed him, he could talk about little else, though his poor education made him an ignoramus. His politics were of that peculiar kind that profess ardent Communism, yet simultaneously he managed to reconcile them with his private, voracious appetite for wealth. Everything in the world should be equally divided among working men — except, that is, for his own secret pile. It was as if the two hemispheres of his brain were a Communist one and a capitalist one, and some neurosurgeon’s knife had separated all connection between them, thus allowing both of them to exist in a happy state of absolute non-communication. That what results is sheer hypocrisy seems never to occur to people like Jim. He would vote a socialist government into power, then “fiddle” his income tax returns to cheat it; after which he would walk the floor in a frenzy of fear in case he was caught. I suspect a great deal of the fear over being caught was because, were he, the hypocrite would stand forth revealed for all his Marxist-Leninist friends to see.

  Jim was very shrewd in business matters. Though it was a side of him I never saw, he could charm the birds down out of the trees, his personality was so beguiling, so fetching. He could sweet-talk his elderly women clients into spending far more than they had intended: this was after he went into business as a master plasterer-cum-renovator of old houses. His little firm — he was too stingy to expand — specialized in the houses of the wealthy. How he spoke to us of his clients I am too embarrassed to recount. Suffice it to say that I didn’t like being this unashamed and dreadful hypocrite’s blood daughter. The saving grace is that a bad example, if appalling enough, can be a good example. I’d sooner die than behave like Jim.

  Jim danced superbly well, no matter what kind of dancing was stipulated: Irish tap, Scots reels and flings, the Russian where they dance on their haunches, Fred Astaire ballroom, and more. In Jim, it was easy to see that the Belfast of his time was a mighty port city that saw all nationalities. He played the poor man’s musical instruments: ukelele, accordion, spoons, a saw, any kind of drum you can name. His singing voice was baritone and beautiful, whether he was tackling old laments or a flapper song of the 1920s. So he must have loved music and been very musical. The trouble is that Laurie hated his “performances” as she termed them, so I don’t know enough to make a judgement.

  Jim the miser. Money ruled him absolutely, I can say that with complete assurance. He loved it. Unfortunately once it came into his possession he was never willing to part with it, and he loved no human being the way he loved money. Laurie’s housekeeping allowance was a sum calculated down to the last quarter-pound of margarine; we should not be eating butter, or expensive cuts of meat. Let the brothers pay for it. I suspect that they did, too much and too often. I remember those hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of evening meals, the apparently amicable conversations between Jim and whichever brothers were there, and wonder now, looking back, how the brothers ever managed to be so pleasant to the free-loading master of the house, between his ravings about capitalist empires and the oppressed masses. Jim looked down a long, narrow tunnel all his life.

  The school leaving age was fourteen years and ten months, and from the day I attained it, Jim nagged me mercilessly to leave school and find a job. I was a big person, but muscular rather than jelly-obese, so his recommendations were always that I should do hard labor for a living. It didn’t impress him at all that I was head of my class; I think he felt that space occupied by brain matter was wasted. Besides, I used to cut him down to size occasionally during those hundreds of mealtime conversations, and I could do it wittily. Jim didn’t like me.

  The Nobel Prize laureate Linus Pauling published a textbook of general chemistry for high school students. It appeared in Sydney at the beginning of 1953, and I thirsted for a copy. On glossy paper, it was profusely illustrated, and so much easier to understand than the dismal textbooks available in Sydney back then. It cost a huge amount — £5 — and for that you could buy a Bluebird portable typewriter. I girded my loins and asked Jim to lend me £5 until the next school vacation rolled around and I could work and pay him back. His answer was no.

  “I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again — get out and get a job as a mangle hand in a laundry. That’s all you’re good for — you’ll never get a husband, you’re too big and fat and ugly.”

  I was fifteen years old, and I was staying at school if it killed me. Education, I knew, was my only passport out of Jim’s and Laurie’s horrible world. My uncle Walter lent me the £5 — I paid him back — and when my mother gave me £5 to buy my last ever family-funded winter overcoat, I used the money to buy a Bluebird portable typewriter. I wasn’t very popular in that quarter either, and had to wear my school blazer until I could afford to pay for my own overcoat. But the Linus Pauling chemistry book and the Bluebird portable typewriter were, in their way, open sesames to careers. Nor did I ever subscribe to the palest pink of all socialist creeds: listening to Jim rant convinced me that no one helps save those who help themselves. I prefer to earn my own way than be grateful to some government for doling out what other people earned. Jim wouldn’t even pay his taxes gladly.

  By the time the second request for a loan happened, I was living in London, and Carl was away on a long journey of discovery and exploration to Greece, Crete, eventually Israel. Cut cruelly short in Crete, where Carl died rescuing some women from a Mediterranean rip-tide.

  We had twenty-four hours to find $8,000 to bring Carl’s body home for burial. There were too few uncles left to scrape up so much so quickly, I had nothing, and certainly Laurie didn’t have it. Jim did. His business was thriving and he was diddling the tax man with a clear conscience, as the government was a Tory one. His fear of banks had led him to a huge wooden box Laurie called The Thing; it lived under his bed and contained every penny he owned. Many, many thousands.

  He refused to pay to have his son shipped home.

  “Sentimental rot!” said the admirer of Joe Stalin. “The boy’s dead, what the hell does it matter where the body is?”

  Carl stayed in Crete, and we lost his body for eight years.

  I saw Jim later on, in between England and my taking up residence in Connecticut. Though I don’t remember the incident at all, it appears that I physically attacked him, so fiercely that I drove him out of the house into the backyard, yelling abuse at him. He managed to break free of me and ran for his life. Knowing Jim, it’s likely that he didn’t understand why I went for him.

  He continued to live with Laurie, each occupying a bedroom, and they continued to have their screaming matches. His greatest delight, I heard later,
was to inform Laurie that she and I would never see his money. He had an innate mistrust of banks, as I have said above; every note of what he had seems to have resided in The Thing. In about 1971 he sold his half share of his renovation business for a lot of money — around half a million, he announced, but that may have been a boast. I don’t know.

  Literally never having had a day’s illness in his life, Jim died in his sleep on the cusp of his seventy-first year, 1973.

  Six weeks earlier he had gone to a local doctor — not the family one, who was a Hungarian Jew and therefore anathema to the Jew-hating Jim. Apropos of which, why don’t people like Jim seem to comprehend that Marx and Engels were both Jews? To the best of my knowledge, in all his life Jim’s exposure to Jews of any kind was minimal, limited perhaps to some of his elderly lady renovation clients; they paid him what he asked without a murmur if Laurie reported his talk aright. No, anti-semitism seems to be a part of the Communist package, certainly as far as Jim was concerned. But I digress.

  He had had a pain in his chest, he told the doctor, but upon examination the G.P. could find nothing except an hypertrophy of the heart in keeping with Jim’s athleticism. Things like blood cholesterol weren’t in a doctor’s repertoire in 1973; Jim was given a clean bill of health.

  “Hah!” snorted Jim. “I’m positive my bitch of a wife is putting poison in my dinner.”

  When Laurie found him dead in his bed, she called the doctor Jim had seen. This medical gentleman rushed to the house, viewed the corpse in bewilderment, announced that he wasn’t going to sign a death certificate, and phoned the police. When several arrived, he explained that Jim had told him he suspected his wife was poisoning him, and that Jim’s death was inexplicable. The next thing, there were police everywhere, Laurie was being questioned, and last night’s dinner was going into an evidence container for analysis, along with various edibles from fridge and cupboards.

  I had just received a $2,000 advance for my first novel, Tim; now I had to fly from Connecticut to Sydney in order to sort out Jim’s death. I spent the lot, plus several hundred more, and sighed wistfully for the things I had originally planned to buy with that advance.

  There were fascinating mysteries. First and foremost, The Thing had disappeared from under Jim’s bed. It had absolutely vanished into the blue, never to be seen again. He had no will, and was presumed to have died intestate. His bank denied having the deeds to the house; his account held a princely $457.

  I commissioned a lawyer to find the house deeds, which magically turned up at the mere mention of a lawyer. Jim’s name had been rather clumsily altered on them, which prompted the legal gentleman to tell me that this kind of thing happened when intestacy reared its head: the deeds would disappear for months, sometimes years, before the person whose name had been forged on them arrived to claim his property. One of the odd penalties for very inexperienced persons like uneducated widows inheriting the house they lived in. Widows who never thought of commissioning a lawyer. I add that the house had skyrocketed in value since it had been bought in 1949.

  My lawyer tidied everything up, Laurie got the deeds to the house, and Jim’s $457 went toward his obsequies.

  The doorbell kept ringing. When Laurie answered these tintinnabulations, it was to find a stranger or strangers asking to see Mrs. McCullough, as they wished to pay their condolences.

  “I’m Mrs. McCullough,” Laurie would say.

  “No, you’re not,” the stranger or strangers would say.

  Eventually it became

  “Am so!”

  and

  “Are not!” until it resembled a Monty Python sketch after four arguments with four different strangers as to the identity of Mrs. McCullough.

  One condoling stranger grew quite hot under the collar, vehemently denying Laurie’s right to the title, and describing a much younger, prettier woman.

  So by the time I reached Sydney, Laurie was a suspect in all sorts of ways. Jim’s body was still in the custody of the New South Wales Coroner; now here were Sydney’s eastern suburbs stuffed with Mrs. McCulloughs! After forty-one years of marriage, perhaps the only crime Laurie never accused Jim of was bigamy.

  Collaborating with my uncle Tom, a man with a great sense of humor, and in between rolling on the floor with laughter, we worked out that Jim had a different girlfriend for every social club he patronized, and always introduced the lady on his arm as his wife. Who knows how many Mrs. McCulloughs there are, or how many of them he may actually have kept as a wife out of the largesse reposing inside The Thing? For that matter, which Mrs. McCullough inherited custody of The Thing, and what instinct or presentiment prompted Jim to hand custody of The Thing over?

  By the time Jim was released for burial, I was back at Yale. All suspicions of Laurie’s conspiring to cause Jim’s death had been quashed, and I was, to tell the truth, underfoot.

  Laurie had Jim cremated, I am convinced so that she would have his last remains firmly in her hands. What did she do with the ashes? I never asked, but knowing Laurie, she flushed them down the toilet, quietly cheering as she did so. The reality of Jim’s going would not have impacted until later.

  Jim died in 1973. Laurie died in 2005. She won the war by the comfortable margin of thirty-two years.

  Her verdict on Jim’s enviably peaceful death: “He should have died of cancer of the tongue!”

  But for that statement’s full effect, you’d have to hear her say it. On paper, so anaemic; it lacks the hiss, the ineffable shock of being articulated through clenched teeth …

  If I put all that in a book, no one would believe it.

  LAURIE

  A dear friend of mine says that I am the most rational person he has ever known. If I can approach this subject with equanimity, it is solely because of that rationalism. One has to be able to sit back and see others for what they really are. I believe that the study of others is the only route to knowledge of oneself, and detachment allied with analysis are the proper tools. But can one stay aloof from core emotions? Let us find out.

  Laurie was my mother. I know very little about her background or personal circumstances, and have had to piece the jigsaw together more from the bits that are missing than any that I found. Complicated by the fact that I don’t know what is true, and what a tissue of lies. So my rule of thumb has been that if I heard an item from all the members of the family, it was the truth, and if from Laurie alone, there was a good chance a part at least was lies.

  Her name, Laurie, is a Scottish one, and rarely bestowed in 1908, when she was born in Ashburton, a village in the south island of New Zealand. As best I know, in her met the English of her mother’s stock and the Irish-Scots of her father’s.

  Many Highland Scots are Catholic, natural in supporters of the Young Pretender, Bonnie Prince Charlie; like Welsh Catholics, they tended to emigrate to the Antipodes rather than to North America. And Laurie’s father’s Catholicism was of the Scots kind, less dominated by the priests. Laurie’s mother was staunch Church of England, and remained so. From which I gather that religion was not an important part of family life.

  Laurie had a large number of brothers, some older than her and some younger, but no sisters. Her mother, whom I will call Nanna, had nine living children from twelve pregnancies — a somewhat better average than was common.

  The children’s coloring veered wildly between black hair and black eyes (Nanna) and golden-red hair and blue eyes (father). From the few photographs I’ve seen, they were not handsome: big and bumpy noses, small, thin, bitter mouths, round heads and faces on what appear shortish, stocky bodies; all staring at the camera with the huge and frightened eyes of trapped animals.

  They were poor. Laurie told me that her eldest brother, Spence, was a bastard Nanna had brought into the union with her; Laurie had discovered Spence’s birth certificate while snooping through Nanna’s things: father not stated, date two years before her marriage. I remember the terror Uncle Spence inspired in me when I was a small child — he exuded an
air of violence, drank heavily, and beat up his many women, upon whom he battered shamelessly. He was a professional boxer, and a good one.

  I told a lot of the early years, thinly disguised, in The Thorn Birds: how my grandfather’s enormously rich sister had brought him and his family to Australia to work for her and inherit her possessions. But the charming Catholic priest paid court to her, and when she died, she left everything to the Catholic Church. In real life, the family was thrown off the property without a penny’s compensation, and that was the end of it. What happened to the priest, I do not know.

  Therefore I’m finished with the subject. It wasn’t one of Laurie’s confabulations because the whole family spoke of it and fulminated; there were too many “Auntie Mary” stories to allow fiction, yarns around the dinner table when the men got going on old Auntie Mary and the priest. And one fact is very certain: I got a great book out of family reminiscences!

  The dispossessed family continued their lives of impoverished station hands, moving from property to property around the west of New South Wales. They must have been as good at their jobs as they were hardworking, could sow and harvest crops as expertly as deal with the grazing of livestock. Their pride was colossal; through the years of the Great Depression, they never took the government dole, at times subsisting on pumpkin.

  As a child Laurie was atrociously spoiled, the apple of her father’s eye. No matter what the family went short of, Laurie was the last to suffer. Her only claim to beauty was a dense mane of red-gold hair that her father insisted she wear flowing loose, carefully brushed into a series of sausage-like curls pulled back from her face by a big bow of taffeta ribbon. Her Sunday-best dress, from those photographs, was finished with expensive lace.