Life Without The Boring Bits

by Colleen McCullough

  But when Jim brought The Thing home, he defeated her. The Thing was a huge wooden box with many padlocks in which he kept his money and his documents; try though she did, Laurie could not open it. Once she took an axe to it, but it remained quite impervious; she was so angry that she left it sitting in the middle of Jim’s bedroom floor with the axe still embedded in it.

  To hear her talk, she hated her life, and was perpetually threatening to end it. A threat nobody believed for a second. We knew Laurie wouldn’t be done with living until she’d battered and minced it into a blood-soaked lump comprising the people she loathed — a long, long list.

  Now comes the one facet of Laurie’s character that I find hardest to understand, given her volcanic nature and the sheer power of her emotions. In all our lives as children and as young man and young woman, Laurie never once kissed, hugged or cuddled either of us. The only hand she laid on us was an angry one. Why is that? How can that be? I walked and talked at nine months of age, Carl about the same — whole, properly constructed sentences that I mention only to indicate that memory for both Carl and me was an early business. Yet neither of us could find one single memory of our mother giving us overt physical affection. I was an adult before I thought to question the lack: children assume every other child lives in exactly the same way, so it never occurred to us that children might be kissed or cuddled. And Nanna? A pat on the shoulder.

  Did Laurie’s omission scar us? Damage us? I really don’t know. The only conclusion I can arrive at is that judgement in this matter has to come from the people we have known intimately since “home” became something we made for ourselves. And in Carl’s case, that might be no one at all. Despite our closeness, we didn’t spend our adult time together raking up childhood.

  Carl finally escaped by following me to England, giving as his reason the fact that he had exhausted the Australian avenues of instruction in teaching the mentally retarded. I should qualify that by explaining that until he left for England, Carl’s teaching duties had been in underprivileged rather than special schools. Australia was very late into special schools.

  Laurie had no choice other than to accept Carl’s reasons for going; she let him go, not without retreating into one of her “saintly” phases — sighs, woebegone face, hastily mopped up tears, more sighs, her fire extinguished. Ten thousand miles were just too many, she would never have the money to visit him.

  Whether it was his delicate health as a child, or whether Laurie had gotten to him in ways I hadn’t plumbed, or whether some innate tendency naturally inclined him that way, Carl was deeply depressed. At the time I didn’t put a name to it, just knew he was terribly down. Our consciousness of emotional mental disorders today is so highly developed that we forget how recently this has happened. In 1963, we were ignorant. So in that ignorance perhaps I went about a cure in the wrong way by deciding that what Carl really needed was time spent apart from all the members of his family. Including me. Thus in London we didn’t do what we had once done in Sydney, rent a place and share it. What fun we had then!

  My own work was very demanding, his was in a different London area; we lived separate lives. Twice a week we met for dinner, our only contact; he shared digs with his best friend, I shared a room with a girl I hardly knew. It was all wrong, though I didn’t realize it then. Besides, there may have been no right way. I am not foolish enough needlessly to blame myself for what will always be a mystery.

  I saw him off on a journey down the eastern Mediterranean Sea, hoping that the experience would cheer him up; he wasn’t alone, his best friend was with him.

  On the surface his death was an heroic rescue rather than a suicide, but why didn’t he drown? The U.S. Air Force found him forty hours later floating face up, fifteen miles out to sea. If the water was too cold and the effort was too huge, with his history of rheumatic fever he might have died of a heart attack; but we lost his body for eight years, and I will never know. He was a few days short of his twenty-seventh birthday, unmarried and uncommitted.

  I had to telephone Laurie and tell her that Carl was dead. What I didn’t tell her — or anyone else — was about the letter he had written to me. It turned up in London six weeks after he died, and it’s that letter convinces me that somehow he managed to commit suicide. So alone. I couldn’t tell her, ever.

  Laurie took the news of his death nobly, didn’t cry or refuse to talk about him. However, it marked the kind of shift in her that a major earthquake does the continental plates. She never forgave Carl for dying, or me for living. This most shattering crisis of her life left Laurie with the wrong child.

  It genuinely doesn’t hurt to say that. It is a fait accompli and it could only have hurt if I had existed in ignorance of how Laurie felt about her children. I saw it as inevitable.

  Her way of mourning Carl was extraordinary. She burned all of him that she still had. His car she gave to his best friend, his clothes to the Salvation Army, and his books, his papers, his every flammable memento, she burned. Every photograph that contained him, even as background, she burned. Imperishable and useless mementos were sent to the garbage dump. So that by the time she was finished, it was as if her son had never been.

  After Carl’s death Laurie wasn’t as much different, as more. The family kept dwindling. I was gone, never to come home again, and the brothers died one by one until only Tom, the youngest, was left. Then Jim died. The spice went out of life for Laurie. The story of his bizarre death is told elsewhere, but once the fuss quietened down and everyday living resumed, it became clear that, in losing Jim, Laurie had no grand target left at whom to loose her barbs. I would have done nicely, but I wasn’t there.

  Did she cry for Jim? Did she mourn him? I don’t know, and I never will know. Out of a forty-one-year married life, they had spent relatively little time living together. I rarely saw them interact in any other way than shouting matches. All I do know is that the war between them was a vital necessity. Divorce was freely available to the working classes, so either one could have sought a legal sundering. Carl and I used to beg Laurie to divorce Jim; after we were working, we offered to pay the court costs. She wouldn’t hear of it. They were welded together as firmly as steel plates: war to the bitter end, war to the death.

  I had a telephone in my Connecticut apartment, through the medium of which Laurie and I talked every month. Once I had used a telephone to give her the news of Carl’s death, but when Jim died she didn’t phone me. She sent me a telegram. It said: DADDY PASSED AWAY PEACEFULLY THIS MORNING. ALL MY LOVE.

  Was it a way of informing me that she would have preferred to have had the news about Carl in a telegram? A tangible thing she could display rather than repeat vanished conversation? The wording was sheer hypocrisy, but for whose benefit? How long did it take her to draft it?

  Carl died in 1965, Jim in 1973.

  Save for one visit to sort out Jim’s death, I hadn’t been back in Australia since 1963. After Jim’s death Laurie’s company went down to Tom, a happy-go-lucky sort of man fully ten years her junior. Of all her brothers, Tom was the most emancipated, but after severe injuries in a car crash in 1975 he returned home to live; Laurie sank her claws in, and Tom never managed again to get away. They were to live together for twenty-three years. There was a certain amount of tension between them because Tom adamantly refused to stop visiting his club — an ex-soldiers’ football association — or seeing his friends. As he owned a very comfortable car (Laurie couldn’t drive), he was essential; constantly complaining about his friends, Laurie put up with Tom for the sake of riding in a nice car and having a man in the house at night. Her dread of an intruder was so profound that every window and every door belonging to her house was kept locked top, bottom, and middle. Not unsurprisingly, no intruder ever did break in, though from time to time she would be full of tales of the prowler (her favorite word for a potential intruder) who had gone along every window and door trying to get in. This was never something I discussed with her, so I have no idea whether she wa
s afraid of murder or rape: just that it was one of the two. Or both.

  Few things Laurie did ever had the power to hurt me, but her reception of my first novel, Tim, was one of them. There I was, a neuroscientist, writing a first novel good enough to be accepted by Harper & Row, a most prestigious New York firm — and it received wonderful reviews in all the important literary channels, including the New York Times. I was chuffed, I admit it.

  But Laurie? Laurie was utterly disgusted. Now the whole world knew that her thirty-plus spinster daughter was a loose woman — Tim contained love scenes! She could find nothing good to say about the book, and apparently burned the copy I sent her. Jim died scant weeks later, and Laurie found out that he had a copy on order from a bookstore (her copy was an advance); she cancelled it. I wonder what Jim might have thought had he lived to read it?

  But maybe there was a little bit of payback in The Thorn Birds, with its large wodges of family history in the opening chapters, and a thinly disguised rape-style honeymoon for the heroine. Maybe the world would assume that Laurie had had an affair with a priest? Not bloody likely, but still …

  In attempting payback, I hit paydirt. The Thorn Birds was a gargantuan bestseller the whole world over, crossing racial as well as ethnic barriers; at one stage I was mobbed by Hindu teenaged girls, to name one result. Naturally it was viciously panned by the same critics who had hailed Tim as brilliant — it earned far too much money to have any literary merit, and nowhere was this enmity more pronounced and long-lasting than in my own country, Australia, where the literati still put me down.

  Laurie loved it! A dissipated daughter? Never! At last she had fame and money, and she was greedy for both.

  At first I found her behavior inexplicable. Our house was in ghastly condition, but she absolutely refused to let me get the builders in. I bought her masses of gorgeous clothes, shoes, bags, even commissioned her a sable car coat with a snappy sable hat. Yet she never wore any of the clothes, shoes, bags, furs. I’d ask her to go to a reception in my honor, and she’d decline. Then I’d see her at the reception, huddled into a corner, wearing her oldest rags, carrying a tatty plastic bag, looking pathetic.

  It was only when a journalist came to the house and gaped around at the cracked and peeling, badly furnished interior that the penny dropped. I caught the look on Laurie’s face: smugly satisfied, gleeful. You awful old cow! I thought. You want the world to think that your rich and famous daughter neglects you, even abuses you.

  The builders went in the next day against her protests and I threw out all her old clothes. Though, alas, I couldn’t stop her shopping at Kmart for replacements, and she never did wear any of the lovely things I bought her.

  I took her on a holiday to New Zealand, since she hadn’t been back after leaving at ten years of age. It was hell. Laurie whined, complained, criticized, roared with rage, demanded, was annoyed by trifles, and whined all over again. I tried so hard to please her! The trouble was that she’d made up her mind before she left that she wasn’t going to have a good time.

  A holiday to England proved even worse. Because I had many unavoidable commitments, I gave her into the charge of two sweet elderly ladies who took her to the most wonderful places, but she wouldn’t even be nice to this pair of relative strangers. If I drove out of London to find her, I just aimed for the blackest cloud in the sky; there she’d be, standing under it. You think I joke, or exaggerate? Well, I don’t. I had known by then for many years that Laurie could control the weather. I tried to join her and her two companions as often as I could — a nightmare. It seems that Laurie had decided her companions were confidence tricksters out to separate me from my money — manifestly ridiculous. I was so grateful for their kindness and patience in the face of Laurie’s rudeness and incivility that I gave them a bonus, and that was far from extortion.

  During this six-month holiday Laurie spent in the British Isles an underlying, lifelong paranoia began to show in more overt ways; when she started calling me Joyce, I should have realized that she was beginning a dementia, but I didn’t. Joyce, if you remember, was the name of brother Jack’s slattern bride, and Laurie’s snooping had failed to detach Jack from her. In the years to come, I became Joyce more and more.

  When I married, she was furious. I hadn’t expected her to like Ric, and she didn’t. For one thing, he deeply offended the snob in her, as he worked with his hands for a living, thus detracting from her (and my) social status. So she summoned up the kind of hatred for him that she had cherished for Jim, but it didn’t work one place removed. Ric’s detestation of her was cold, and she was smart enough to recognize it as partisan. In Ric, I had a champion, whereas she had none. Though she had never owned a single particle of common sense, she divined that Ric was exactly the sort of man Carl would have liked immensely, and that capped her hatred. Ric was a man, which made him so alien that she couldn’t even begin to find his weaknesses.

  Suddenly living in Sydney didn’t suit her. She demanded to sell the house and move up to the Blue Mountains, yet one more good turn Ric did me. The easier driving in less traffic enabled Tom to survive; had they remained in Sydney, the driving would have killed an old man with a wobbly heart.

  One day when Ric and I were visiting them in Laurie’s new home, we both noticed that Laurie was (as Ric elegantly phrased it) “slipping a cog”. Once we did notice, her dementia became obvious; my being Joyce made sense of a kind.

  We sat Tom down and made him tell us what was happening. Tom confessed that she was terrorizing him. The poor man got no sleep; Laurie would wake him several times during one night yelling at him to evict his drunken friends from her house this very moment. Then she would drag him around pointing out pools of urine and heaps of faeces that weren’t there. She screamed abuse at him in the middle of supermarkets. Nothing he did had the power to please her.

  By this time she was into her eighties, and had lost all central vision in both eyes. Her hearing went too. But she refused to help herself, just withdrew more and more into some world of her own. All the tricks that now I myself am using, she rejected — talking books, page magnifiers, developing better peripheral vision, having first-class hearing aids, using headphones. Whatever the device or the trick, Laurie rejected it. But she wouldn’t reject the visceral act of living. That she clung to grimly. If there be an art to negativism, Laurie not only found it, she refined it.

  All that was left was the tyrant. The personality, when it broke, fractured along the lines the pattern of a lifetime had drawn. Laurie demented was sweet as syrup to those not of her family, and filthy-mean to Tom, Ric, and me.

  She went into a kind of Hilton Hotel for the aged, there to continue her downhill slide. At first she had her own apartment, then a full-time carer moved into the apartment with her, and finally she was hospitalized, unable to care for herself in any way. Being free of her gave my uncle Tom a new lease on life; he moved to Norfolk Island and lived with his dog in a little house a stone’s throw from ours. Known to everyone as Uncle Tom, he was much loved, and lived another nine years, dying at ninety-two.

  While Laurie still spoke to me, I became Joyce more frequently. Her choice of this name is fascinating; it must have been etched in letters of fire far deeper in her brain than her speech areas, even the emotional ones for curse words, yes and no. Perhaps her clash with Joyce had been the first of Laurie’s life that didn’t go the way she wanted, and she never got over the huge insult to her ego? Setting that aside, I became the hated Joyce, a woman she had discussed with Nanna over thousands and thousands of cups of tea as the years passed. I could have no illusions about Joyce and what she meant to Laurie.

  The brain may have been dissolving to a pulp infested by tiny haemorrhages, but Laurie’s body was immensely strong. While she lived in her apartment, she took marathon walks. One saw her cross most of the vast city of Sydney from its far northern beaches to the corner of the street in which her old Sydney home was situated — a distance of fifty kilometres. The police discovered
her with not a penny in her battered old plastic handbag, and brought her back. After that she wore a SAT-NAV receptor on an eighteen-carat gold bracelet studded with diamonds — she wouldn’t wear “rubbish” at any inducement. The walks continued, never with any money in her purse, and $30,000 around her wrist. No one molested her; the word would go out to the police, and back to her apartment went Laurie. No matter how vigilant the watch put on her, she evaded her keepers as if she were a ghost.

  When she was first admitted to the hospital segment of her aged complex, Laurie bit, scratched, kicked and punched all who came near her. Then a new Laurie appeared: sweetly pleasant, unfailingly cooperative. Somewhere among the frightful jumble of her thought processes an instinct for self-preservation must have surfaced and told her that she must strive mightily to make these new carers as devoted to her as the apartment ones had been. Having switched personalities, she became liked again, even loved.

  After she went into the hospital segment, the moment I hove in her vicinity to visit her, Laurie’s mouth would set into a straight, hard line as her eyes took me in; she wasn’t totally blind by any means. She would emit a noise of angry exasperation, and turn her head away. No matter how long I stayed, she would sit with head turned away, ignoring me. Never once did she acknowledge me, even as Joyce.

  One does weird things after being resolutely ignored by one’s mother. Following a whole series of visits with the head turned obdurately away, I chanced to see a television documentary about the racket in funerals. Dismissing the racket slant, I obtained a great deal of new knowledge about funerals. So the next day I went out and bought Laurie the poshest funeral I could find. I chose a beautifully carved mahogany casket that would have held six Lauries (she loathed being crowded), with white satin and lace padded interior, and gold-plated knobs and handles. Every detail was perused more thoroughly than NASA does a moon mission: the pallbearers, the sleekest hearse — the full catastrophe, as Zorba might have said. Buying Laurie that funeral did me the world of good. I was able to face another round of visits, though I never stayed long. It wasn’t a scrap of use, beseech and beg though I did to see her face, have her say something to me. She wouldn’t.