by Biff Ward
As dusk settled softly on the houses, Mark and I called to each other, Come on, the lights will be on in a minute!
As a girl, I received extra help from him. It may have been triggered by an incident in which a man pulled up in a car where a bunch of us were playing on the footpath and opened the door so we could see his half-erect penis. We rushed inside, but of course he was long gone by the time Dad galloped outside.
If a man grabs you, Dad said, or shows his penis, you do this. You get close and push your knee up into his balls.
We were in the tiny triangle of front lawn when Dad startled me with this news. He mimed this desperate act for me, his hands clasping imaginary lapels and jerking his knee upwards in a vicious jab. I tried to imagine accomplishing such a feat. He told me to practise but my knee looked too small even though I crunched it upwards a few times.
He won’t expect it, Dad added, watching me. You’ll surprise him.
I tried to believe.
You’ll be fine, he said, drawing me to him in a hug.
Our freedom to explore extended to Balmoral, our local swimming beach. In the rock pool at its western end, Dad refined my swimming style by cupping a hand under my chin and walking slowly backwards in the water, saying, You do the rest!
He watched my arms and legs and shouted, Make your hands into a cup, or, Keep your legs straight and let your feet do the work!
Most of all, he taught us to float and tread water.
If you can do this, then you can’t drown, he told us.
When the lesson was over and we were left to play, we created pirate adventures on the island in the middle of that bounteous beach or climbed around the rocks towards The Spit.
Once when we were there with our friend Evan and Mum was the one keeping an eye on us, someone suggested an ice-cream. Evan feared Mum would say no.
We’ll just take the money, I said.
How? he asked.
Look.
We moved towards Mum who was smoking and looking in her gone-faraway manner out towards Middle Head. Her handbag was leaning against her hip. Mark and I knelt down, I took out her purse and Mark extracted the money. We crossed the road to the Peters shop and bought three ice-creams. We finished them on the beach, licking sticky white trails from our wrists. She noticed nothing.
Sometimes all four of us were happy together. On birthdays and at Christmas we were allowed to cavort on Mum and Dad’s bed while they sat sipping cups of tea. A bowl, a basin really, full of sweets—humbugs, Fantales, raspberries, freckles, jellybeans, licorice allsorts and jubes—sat in the middle of the bed where we could all reach it. Dad believed that lollies were indispensable to any occasion involving presents and it wasn’t until I grew up that I realised it wasn’t just for us—he liked them too.
Where Mark and I sat at the foot of the bed, our seats were a shifting roller-coaster as legs moved or feet stretched beneath the blankets. Mum and Dad were inside while we were on the outside and I was dimly aware of a life they shared, in there under the bedclothes, from which we were excluded.
I was eight I think when some big boys at Sirius Cove told us that ‘fuck’ was a really rude word. Mark and I and our friends were delighted to be included in this arcane knowledge. We tried it out, this word, and gradually built up a chant so that by the time we were marching up the late Sunday afternoon street, we were yelling in unison, Fuck the fucking fucking fucker!
The others peeled off to their houses and we continued improvising, Mark and I, up the hill into Clanalpine St. Dad flew around the corner of the house to meet us at the front gate. Shush! he said, shush!
We looked up to see that he was frowning and smiling at the same time.
Come inside and I’ll explain, he said.
The three of us crowded round one end of the dining table where he proceeded to tell us, in language that certainly worked for me, that fucking was how babies were made. He was simple and graphic, using his finger and a loosely curled hand to demonstrate. What really cemented the gravity of the word, this being 1950, was when he ended by adding that most people thought this was a word so bad, so very terrible, that you couldn’t even whisper it and that Mrs Courteney, for example, whose kitchen overlooked our back fence, would think it such a shocking word that if she wanted to tell her sister Nell what we had been shouting, she wouldn’t be able to actually say it, she’d have to write it down. I pictured a small piece of paper, one that might hold a shopping list, on the corner of Mrs Courteney’s kitchen table with Nell and her bent over it as she wrote and then straightening up to look at each other with eyes widened by horror.
Mum was wafting in the background as Dad talked, giggling a little, something new she had started to do. She was responding to something that was happening on the inside of her and wasn’t meant to show on the outside.
Perhaps Dad’s confidence and quickness in making decisions meant that there was no space left for her. She did make some decisions—our clothes, for example, and shoes that fitted well. But at a moment like this, the f-word entering the house and what to tell the children, she was utterly absent.
After that day the treat of being on the end of their bed, waiting for a gift to appear from behind a pillow or under the bed-frame, was sharpened by knowing this was indeed their private place where they did this thing I couldn’t imagine, despite what I’d been told.
I don’t remember any specific presents from those years, but my body can recall how our little party felt, their legs shifting, those impossibly giant legs that adults have, so that one moment I had my nest, a circle just for me beside a leg, and the next I was being bounced over one of their shins and had to find a new patch, like a cat curling back to sleep after being disturbed. And Dad whooping as we opened a present, as he chose another lolly, bringing joy into the room.
FOUR
The Undercroft
There was a hidden world beneath our Mosman house, an elongated triangle, if viewed from a side elevation, of dark mustiness. Like most of the buildings in Mosman, the house clung to a hillside. The high side was the top of the backyard and the slope lunged downwards from there so that at the front, the house was two storeys high. It was built on sandstone, part of the gigantic bowl which forms Sydney Harbour, and the cavern created by the height at the front contained a cellar lined by great blocks of sandstone with a dirt floor and cool earth smell. The only light came from the open door, a door so small that adults had to bend to get through it.
Near that door there was a workbench where Dad had rigged up a lamp by which he could mend shoes, decant his demijohns of wine, make occasional behemoths of furniture and fashion sinkers for his rare fishing trips. I liked to visit him there to watch and marvel at how he cut the rubber sheeting so exactly that he bevelled the sides before gluing pieces to the soles of my shoes.
In this undercroft we could almost hear the microbes at work, burrowing into the soil and through clefts in the rock. To go further into that space, further up under the house where the incline rose more sharply and humans had to crawl, you definitely needed a torch. Sometimes Mark and I dared each other to see how far we could go but once we’d put our head into the deep gloom, the coolness of the silence chilled our derring-do after only a couple of knee-shuffles and we shot out backwards into the feeble light.
I don’t remember Mum ever being down there until the Easter Friday when I was in third grade and we were going, finally, to The Show, the Royal Easter Show. Each year it seemed that every other kid at school turned up after Easter with show bags, those magical large brown paper receptacles full of goodies: rulers, coloured pencils, chocolates, minties, yo-yos and maps. We had never had one.
But leading up to that day, the day of Mum in the undercroft, were some other events. There was a clumping of events around the time I was seven and eight.
One day, Dad told us Mum was going to have a baby. He was the one who was excited: he scooped us up into his arms and hugged us. Mum was smiling but her eyes didn’t reach mine.
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He examined cars parked along our route to school and wondered what kind he could buy that would fit all of us in it, including the new baby. Since we had no car at all, this problem really lassoed our attention. We fixed on a blue baby Renault we passed every day, a small rounded car with a dickie space in the back for luggage.
We’ll put the baby there!
Yes, he laughed. That’ll be wonderful.
Why do you want another baby? I asked him one day.
Because you are so beautiful, he said. Of course I want more like you.
It reminded me of when he spoke about Alison.
I don’t remember the miscarriage but I do remember the hysterectomy soon after. Mum was in a small private hospital near my school and Dad told us it meant she wouldn’t be able to have another baby. One Saturday afternoon, we were playing with the kids next door, the other side from Dorothy’s, when Dad’s head appeared above the picket fence.
Do you want to come to the hospital to see Mum?
No, said Mark, pushing a car through the track we had created in the dirt.
No, I said slowly. Then, more definitely, No.
Okay.
He called to the mother of the house, I’ll be back by five.
I kept playing but my mind followed him—into the kitchen, down the hall, out the front door, down the path, out the gate and the turn left to head up the street.
I’m going, I muttered to Mark.
I flew in my bare feet down the path beside the house that mirrored ours, out the gate and up the footpath towards his back. He was only two or three houses away but I couldn’t wait to be with him, to go with him on this visit which might show me everything was all right. I must have called, because he turned and dropped to his knees. I landed on his chest, all tears and panting.
I want to come.
Of course, darling. Of course.
He put his thumbs either side of my nose, moving them at the same pace like careful windscreen wipers and brushed away my tears. His hand enveloped mine and we walked to the top of the hill together, along Raglan St, down the lane, round a few corners and there we were: the big house that was a hospital with a date palm in each corner of the front garden. I could see the roof and top floor of this building from my second-grade classroom. I had been watching all week, thinking about her, wondering when she would come home.
We climbed the stairs. Mum was in a room with three other women. She was surprised to see me, but her attention, intense and dense, was for Dad. He sat close to the bed, holding her. Suddenly, the air around them became sharp and Dad slumped. Then he stood up tiredly and pulled the curtain around the bed and shooed me away. I had no toys or books. I wandered to the window and then out into the garden. The grass was prickly buffalo but I lay on it anyway and looked up the trunk of a palm tree and wondered if you could eat the dates hanging there.
When Dad appeared, I held his hand and we walked home, just the two of us and a lot of silence.
Among the events caused by Mum’s strangeness, I have a small jewelled bag of memories in which there are gleeful giggles and bright words between my parents during the first years in Mosman. Mark, sixteen months younger, can’t access even one of these moments.
One particular day, anticipation crackled the air. Mum unearthed an evening gown, a slinking gown. I watched her iron it: black georgette with asterisk splashes of colour in red and green and yellow. It was a marvel even on the table, where a towel covered by a sheet did the job of an ironing board. The babysitter arrived and off they went down the front steps, laughing back to us. We ran out to the verandah for a last wave. Mum’s dress had a strip falling from one shoulder and folding softly across the line of her bosom. The whole creation clung to her.
What I remember most—in fact, the reason I recall this event at all—was the next day, a Sunday. They slept in, or tried to. The babysitter gave us breakfast in whispers: Let them sleep.
When they emerged, it was a day like no other. They giggled. They told us stories of dancing and singing. They told us Dad had piggy-backed Mum up the hill from Avenue Rd as the sun rose because she was tired or because her high-heeled sandals hurt or because it was fun. Their hands wafted to each other all through that slow day of nursing their hangovers.
I never saw its like again.
And the gown? We used it for dressing up along with the extraordinary blazer in maroon and white stripes from Dad’s rowing adolescence. Both disappeared in our teens in one of Mum’s purges. She positively loved getting rid of things.
Soon after, there was a night their voices in the kitchen became growly, and when they came into the dining room Dad looked at us with a face full of horror and said, You kids have to leave the room while Mum and I talk.
He shut us into the dark hall and closed the door. We stood side by side, Mark up to my shoulder, watching the light round the edge of the door, waiting for it to open. I noticed the grain in the wood of the linen cupboard door beside us in the gloom. I don’t recall any of the words we heard through the door but I can summon in an instant the desperation and brokenness of his voice and the eerie indistinctness of hers. It went on and on, him pleading and her silence, her few implacable words. Something in him was being broken.
I brought a hand to my mouth and bit a nail off. It was the first moment I experienced the satisfaction of ripping. If he became shaky, if he slipped, then where would we all be? I chowed down into another nail.
When Dad opened the door, he looked desolate. He didn’t appear to notice how large our eyes were, how constricted our breathing. Mum was in the kitchen.
He never spoke to us of that night, of what I now understand to have been a cataclysm in his life. I learnt the substance of it from the letters after he was dead. He tells his parents that she had announced, from her increasingly unbalanced state, that she had never loved him, that in fact she hated him and always had. He tried to reason with her, he beseeched and begged. I now know that it is quite common for people with the illness she turned out to have to find, eventually, that close relationships, especially with family, are intolerable. I presume that this is what was happening for her and that she was dealing with it as best she could. As was Dad.
I’m certain that he had been really in love with her. There’s the rushed wedding (he—or they—couldn’t wait); the photograph that day which can be read as a moment of shared private lusciousness; the besotted poems he wrote to her when he was away during the war; my few memories of a fizzy happiness between them; and what Dad’s second wife told me, that my mother was the love of his life.
And then there are the letters. He agonised to his parents about the change in her and struggled to explain how what he was dealing with was coming from a place beyond the rational, that she was moving more and more into a private world of delusions and imaginings: I have come painfully to realize that words, reason and actions, simply do not enter into it . . . so for 6 to 8 months we’ve had no prolonged talks nor arguments as earlier in her illness, nor indeed has so much as a kiss been exchanged between us; though we talk fairly amicably about every-day things and get on well collectively with the children, who of course have no idea at all . . .
We may not have had ideas we could voice but we breathed it in, the irrational in her, the grief in him and the unpredictability all around. I think that night was his attempt to hold it all back, to ‘fix’ her, to regain a semblance of what he longed for, what he called in his book, The Australian Legend, ‘that close psychic companionship which men seek in a wife’. But her strangeness grew and she stared silently out the window more and more.
The day we were going to The Show, I had on a new dress with pearly buttons, the pansy-patterned fabric still stiff. At the last minute, as we moved to the front door, there was a pause. Where was Mum? Everything went still. Dad traversed the house, calling in every room. No answer. He arrived back at the point where Mark and I had not moved. Dread rose around us.
I’ll look out the back, he said. You sta
y here, Mark. You look in the cellar, he said to me, his voice tight.
I went out the door, down the four steps and turned right onto the strip of bitumen beside the grey paling fence. The bolt on the cellar door was pulled back, leaving it ajar. I pushed it open and peered in. My mother was near the back wall, bent over, vomiting on to the black earth. The gored skirt of the flowing navy dress that she had made and wore for best was trailing in the dirt. She swung her head sideways to look towards me and said, It’s all right. Don’t worry. I’ll be up in a minute.
I backed out of the door, the smell of her vomit prickling in my nose. I walked slowly up the path and into the house.
Did you find her? Dad asked.
I didn’t know how to tell him what I had seen, so I said, No, looking up at him. No.
He read my face, touched my shoulder and headed for the cellar. We waited, Mark and I, staring through the open door where the sunshine hit the red-painted steps. When he reappeared, he was helping her walk, holding her shuffling form in both his arms.
Sit on the sofa, he said to us, and took her on towards their bedroom.
After a while he reappeared and said, I have to go to the phone.
When he came back, he went past us to her. We had not budged a fraction, sitting side by side on the green sofa. I examined the bookcases on the other side of the room and I began to count the books in threes. When there were one or two left over at the end of the row, I checked by counting again back the other way. I really wanted every shelf to end neatly in a three, so each time I started on a new shelf, I was full of hope. If it did end in a neat three, I felt the zing of pleasure, the moment when all is as it should be. When it didn’t end in a three, I started again, even when I was really sure that I had counted accurately the first time. I might do it several times, exerting my will, seeing if I could wish myself into a previous mistake so that this time, this time, it would end with the happy clunk of a three.
