by Biff Ward
When I won several races in the school swimming carnival, I was told I would be in the squad if there was a meet in Sydney later in the year. A couple of days later my house captain, a senior girl whom I idolised for her calm grace, approached me in the playground with a letter my mother had written saying that I would not be allowed to go to Sydney. I read it quickly and as I folded it, looked at her and said, Oh, my mum gets things mixed up. Don’t take any notice.
In Dad’s letter to his parents that week, he tells them that when I confronted Mum, she insisted she had talked about it with Dad and he had asked her to write the letter. Completely fantastical. One incident at a time, we were developing ways to live with this nameless hobgoblin in our midst, ways we spoke to each other about it, or didn’t, a shorthand.
He wrote in a letter, very close to this time: Poor Margaret is really getting madder and madder lately I think—or at least harder to bear in some ways. She gets a fixed idea (as ever) and then talks gently, endlessly and nonsensically about it to me, regardless of my work or what I’m doing, until I could (and sometimes do) scream and shout with frustration and fury. However she’s much less violent than she used to be.
I didn’t know this was one of the words our shorthand was covering up: violent. As the summer faded and the nights grew long and cold, she did something to me that even our truncated shorthand could not encompass. I never told Dad about it.
It happened when I was lying on my back in my narrow bed with its bedspread the colour of granny-smith apples in the corner of the room farthest from the door. At twelve and a half, I was quite developed—the first girl in my class to bleed at ten and a half and then the breasts, full size before anyone else. So in some ways I was a young woman lying on my back in bed. I wonder if this had anything to do with what happened. A girl–woman, fast asleep on an ordinary night in her first year of high school.
Mum came into my room. Her shadow, flung diagonally by the light from the hall, fell across me on the bed. I didn’t hear her. I was asleep. She sat on the side of the bed, as mothers do, as she had done before. Maybe I sensed her in my sleep but I did not wake up. She leant forward and placed her hands around my neck. She started to squeeze. Perhaps I turned a little. She squeezed more, her thumbs into my windpipe. She squeezed harder.
I woke suddenly, rolling my head from side to side, trying to free myself. I found the hands and I grasped her wrists and pushed. I shoved her off me, away from me. She didn’t resist. She let me push her away and then she stood and walked out of the room. Neither of us had spoken.
I don’t recall the rest of that night.
Next morning I went to school.
Reflecting on it decades later, I learnt that psychological shock is caused by a rush of hormones and chemicals—the flight or fight syndrome—which affect the ability to think. I chose the avoidance path, the common way, all unknowing, because the next afternoon, dusk beginning to seep from the sky, the big brother of Mark’s friend Nick swung by to pick him up. This big brother was in the leaving class, fifth form to my first form. He stood astride his bike and looked at me across the courtyard; I looked back. We stayed like that while Nick got his bag and bike together and tootled away. The big brother nodded as he turned to go.
I lay awake all night thinking about him. I didn’t notice that my eyes staring into the blackness of the room were keeping watch because I could see only him. I did that for three weeks. I must have slept a little because I didn’t fall down in front of Dad or a teacher. Gradually, I started sleeping again. Lightly. I became, in fact, a light sleeper and no one knew what had happened.
The big brother and I hadn’t spoken but we watched each other across the fence in the playground that separated the boys from the girls and I discovered the honeyed buzz of a Look, a reciprocal Look, across a wide open space. When the fifth formers went into school before everyone else, he paused each day at the third window to look down at me. At the next school dance I had gravel rash from a bike spill highlighted with gentian violet down one side of my face and my early developed woman’s body was clothed in baby blue nylon but even so, he broke all the rules and danced with me five times.
We went to a Saturday afternoon picture together and held hands. We both sat immobile. Eventually the pins and needles reached to my elbow and still I didn’t move so much as a finger. Our kissing was babes in the wood: we didn’t know about tongues. My parents and other adults at the flats watched us through cracks in drawn curtains when we went outside to say goodbye. I didn’t know how to tell them truly not to worry, that there was no danger from him.
At the end of the year he worked a holiday job, building the edifice that is now the Treasury. Mum stopped him at six-thirty one morning, as he rode past hoping I’d be awake. She told him he wasn’t to see me anymore, that there had been a decision. It was lunchtime before she told me what she had done. I groaned and pushed past her, just as Dad might have done. I waited all afternoon on the tree-house platform in the pine tree a hundred yards away. When I saw him, I called and slithered down.
Ignore it, I said. Don’t take any notice of her.
We agonised about the difference in our ages—a whole four and a half years—and consoled ourselves that when we were in our eighties, it would no longer matter. We spent every moment we could together, playing word games, planning our future, until he left for university in Sydney.
Absence, as it turned out, conferred common sense and our great passion faded quickly. But having found a way to keep my mind deliciously occupied, I was obsessed with boys, dreaming perfect fusion, filling my mind with desire. I became a daredevil, I had fervent friendships, at nights I slept lightly, was often awake. I rushed forward into my days, never still.
I avoided what had happened until I was in my thirties, when weekend discover-yourself workshops proliferated. I liked the somatic therapies because starting with the body as the site of locked-up emotions made sense to me. I leapt at spending a weekend with Eva Reich, daughter of the sainted, nutty Wilhelm, in a glorious house on the shore of the ephemera that is Lake George. There were twelve people. On the second morning when it was my ‘turn’, I lay on the mattress and Eva idly put her hand on my chest as she continued talking to the group. Her hand seemed hardly connected to me. Suddenly, she stopped mid-word and turned. Did someone try to strangle you? she asked.
I gasped. I tried to think. My brain, my stomach, my blood—all were swooping and screaming like a mob of massing seagulls.
When I could, in a whisper, I said, Yes.
Who?
My mother . . .
She whipped her hand off me and she moved away a little and turned her back.
I can’t do this, she said to the group. That’s unnatural, too unnatural.
People started to murmur.
I can’t work with her. And, she continued, she took pieces from the fruit salad with her fingers last night.
At this, the murmur grew to a rumble. Biff’s all right, Eva. It’s okay. Do it.
I watched, from them to her and back again until she grudgingly complied.
A close friend became my mother. When she put her hands to my throat, I found that my body knew exactly where my mother’s fingers and thumbs had touched me, patches of my skin that were brought to life, stinging still. I corrected the placement and pressure of each one. The subsequent bout of tears and talk I don’t remember, but I can still summon each finger on my neck.
When we gathered at home, my friends and I talked about Eva, the group, Lake George and the creepy man Eva gave the bulk of her attention to—but we didn’t talk about my story, or about my friend’s hands, or about Eva saying my case was unnatural.
My secret was out but somehow it didn’t make any difference because there were still no words to encompass it. It was invisible again.
The demise of the mighty little Austin came about after the cost of repairs spiralled way beyond Dad’s scholarship pay. His new brother-in-law, his sister Claire’s second husband, a d
iplomat who was mostly overseas, sold us our second car. It was an American Plymouth, a dark green floating feather bed with upholstery in a soft wool fabric of textured greys. The duco was a smooth curve from front to back, a car for staring at in any company.
Most memorably of all, it had LEFT-HAND DRIVE printed on the back in neat yellow letters. Before the advent of any kind of blinker system, left-hand drive cars in Australia were not only rare but also a challenge because indications to turn right or to stop were given by hand signals out the window—an extended arm for turning right and the elbow at a right-angle with palm to the front, to indicate stopping. The Plymouth was equipped with a yellow metal hand encased in a protective box stuck on the right side of the car. It worked on a hydraulic system activated by a button near the steering wheel: with a whoosh of air, it was meant to make the metal hand extend to give signals. The hydraulics never worked properly but even before Dad gave up on that system, he would, most often, forget he was in this strange machine and fling his right arm out and whack the front-seat passenger in the face. We yelped and wailed and giggled hysterically, even whined occasionally, at his inability to adjust.
The floating bedstead—the Plymouth with its hydraulic hand-signalling system
He tried forward-planning and would ask the passenger to do the signalling, but often forgot and we got whacked again. At one stage, when alone in the car, he tried to manipulate a broomstick to which he had attached a cardboard hand. If he was lucky, he would remember to stick it out the window.
He was driving the Plymouth the night I ran away, a year after the big brother saved me. In this period, he went back to the university every night to avoid Mum.
She had, in the preceding year or two, several times corralled me alone and told me each time that I must, now I was becoming a woman, wash out my vagina. Once she even called me aside from playing with other kids and fixed me with her magpie eye and hissed, when I protested, His sisters do it! Even his sisters. It’s the proper thing to do.
I knew this wasn’t right. I knew because I was sure she didn’t do it, I’d never heard of it from anyone else; but most of all it was her manner and the fact that she was hiding it from Dad. While we didn’t then know the name for it (a delusion), Mark and I knew the difference between these times and when she spoke from a shared reality.
I most definitely was not going to do this. I had, those other times, ignored her or walked away or protested enough to stop her. On this night she was more insistent. Maybe I was rattled by her certainty. Mark was silent in his room.
The bathroom was a small space cramped by tiles of bruised pink and blue. I ended up squatting in the bath with a basin of warm soapy water in front of me, crying and fuming. She leant over me with her beady eyes and fervid voice telling me frantically what I must do. And then I saw red. Literally saw red. It is the only time in my life it has happened. In the flash of scarlet that filled my whole vision for a second or two, I was out of the bath, into my clothes, past her and off into the night.
I only went fifty yards. I stopped at the communal sandpit and hid behind the slippery-dip, weepy and shaking. A while later, she came out of our block of flats and headed up towards the Heisers, who had a phone.
Good, I thought, She’s going to ring Dad.
Sure enough, twenty minutes later, the dark shark of the Plymouth whispered its way down the drive. I leapt from my hidey-hole into its beam of light. Dad stopped beside me and I jumped in, sobbing raggedly. The Plymouth glided out of the courtyard, cushioning me in its muted shadows.
He drove a block or two and stopped.
What happened? he asked gently.
We had a fight, I said.
What about?
Just stuff.
I had made a decision, signalled by that flash of red and consolidated as I hunkered in the black night: I would never open myself to my mother emotionally again. I would not trust her. Inside myself, I cut off from her. I felt the concreteness of it, my decision, I sensed that it was shocking and wrong but that I had no choice.
I wished he’d asked me more questions that night, wished that he’d kept us talking. Mostly, I think, because I didn’t want to go home and face the decision I had made. It felt so good to be with him in the soft car.
We all longed to keep the Plymouth but the budget couldn’t rise to the cost of upkeep, quite apart from the danger of being slapped in the face. Before it disappeared, however, it took us across the country on our next Adelaide trip.
Getting away was an effort because Mum had her fears for months beforehand: we mustn’t go to Adelaide because the trip was too dangerous or because Dad’s mother wouldn’t want us or because we shouldn’t leave the flat unoccupied or because some mythical person had told her we mustn’t.
When we headed west again, the roads were still a six-lane freeway of red dirt, but we went further north this time, heading for Broken Hill. The Aboriginal camp on the eastern side of Wilcannia was large and public compared with others we’d seen. I wanted to stare, I wanted to understand, but I didn’t know what to ask. Or who to ask. There were only white people on the two streets of the town.
Adelaide was different because Grandpa had died, so Dad stayed with Grannie, his mother, when we went out to Paradise with Mum. She was being only a little embarrassing by our standards, but the cousins sniggered to us about how she peed behind the stable instead of going to the toilet upstairs and didn’t hear when she was spoken to. They asked me what was wrong with her.
Nothing, I spat. It’s nothing.
They stopped their questions when they saw my face.
One day, I was asked to take thermoses down to the men at the packing shed in the middle of the peach-laden hillside. Alone with my Uncle Dave for a minute, I started to try to explain, to apologise for her, his sister, my mother.
I’m sorry, I sputtered, about Mum. You know . . .
Oh! Don’t be silly . . . he laughed at me, his eyebrows raised, shaking his head, having a good old chuckle at this thirteen-year-old who would presume to talk to an adult about matters he didn’t want to recognise. What I actually wanted, of course, was for him to understand what was going on, even to look after her himself.
We stayed longer at Paradise because Dad said he had to go to a conference. I thought of the woman with brown eyes who shut us out of the house with her children. I wondered where he really was.
Heading home, we went via Melbourne and more relatives, then up the Hume Highway. Dad kept poring over the Shell roadmap of NSW because he loved back roads, was always wanting to explore. He was sure we could get to Canberra from Tumut, across the mountains and through the Brindabella Valley—except, he added, there’s a river and no bridge.
When he asked at a garage in Tumut whether we could go that way, the man shook his head slowly from side to side, saying at the same time, Maybe, mate. Maybe.
That was enough for Dad.
For two hours, maybe three, we followed a little road which became a track and eventually ended as wheel-ruts leading through long grass to a couple of huts. A man came out and stared. The elegant Plymouth sighed.
Can we get through to the Brindabella Valley? asked Dad brightly.
The man turned his lips this way and that. His eyes swung from side to side. Yairse, he said guardedly, looking away to the left, to the direction of the Brindabellas.
Will we be able to cross the river? Dad asked.
Yairse, he said again, his eyes swinging across the dusted expanse of the Plymouth and its low undercarriage.
It’s okay, then? Dad was checking.
It was mid-afternoon, the western sun slanting through the tops of the forest. The tyre tracks continued through the grass and the huts disappeared behind us. Within a short distance, the grass turned to reeds because it was growing out of a marsh. Planks and logs lay about, their usage clear. Mark and I scampered in front of the car, aligning the planks and logs for the wheels. We were making the road as we went.
Further on, we
reached a dry track again. We drove for another hour, just us in the tall trees and Mum rubbing frantically at her hands in the back seat. Then two men on horseback materialised, quietly walking towards us. When we pulled up alongside, they were open-mouthed.
G’day, said Dad.
G’day, they tipped their hats at the four of us and the diva car.
The front one looked away into the bush. The second one watched us.
How far to the river? Dad asked him.
Well . . . he looked ahead of us, at the track disappearing into the tall trees.
How far? asked Dad. How long before we get to the river?
Not far, he said slowly.
He thought some more. Yeah.
He looked at the car again.
Yeah. A mile.
A mile? said Dad. That’s wonderful news.
Up and up went the track, then down and down. Night came. Every time we were going down, we expected the river—and then the track went uphill again.
We finally came upon the river at nine o’clock. In the black night with the high beams bouncing across it, it looked deep and dark. The mighty Goodradigbee. We fell out of the car and stretched.
Okay, kids. I want you to walk across and see how deep it is.
Sandals off, we started wading in the yellow light of the headlamps and found a pebbly, rocky ford beneath our feet. The water came up over our knees. When we reached the other side with a cheer, the Plymouth eased forward and sloshed across, only a little water going under the doors.
Nowadays, when I drive that route from Canberra to Tumut, I try to explain to my companions about that first time and the notion of getting off the main road to find what you can by way of adventure. Seeing if you can ‘get through’.
Afterwards, whenever we reminisced about that night, Mum was silent. It was as though she wasn’t with us. She had no place in our stories. The vivacity and engagement that must have enabled her young talents and the fey beauty that captivated Dad disappeared utterly in the Canberra years. She had turned into a grey wraith, to someone he was looking after. Although it was different for each of us, we shared this woman in our midst whom we knew had been kind and funny and even clever but who was now so beset by her demons that these qualities existed only as faint tracings in our family memory, not as anything we could see or show to others.
