In My Mother's Hands

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In My Mother's Hands Page 18

by Biff Ward


  Wanting Dad to be proud of my latest achievement—with absolutely no awareness of how far out I was in the vanguard—I showed the manuscript to him during one of those beach visits. He read less than a quarter and brought it back to me in barely concealed rage. People will think you’re mad, he panted, if this gets published.

  I demurred and we scrapped over some of my claims, but I failed to see how truly incensed he was. Shortly after, he wrote to tell me that he could no longer speak to me. I reasoned with him by letter for two years, back and forth we went. Barb had left him and moved a block up the road; every other week he was parenting young children alone, in his sixties. Eventually, I let the reasoning and arguing go; I wrote a letter of news of my family only. He responded in kind and gradually the old love prevailed.

  So each of us was affected by the other’s book. We are not vanilla people, Dad and I, we are some nuggetty dark chocolate with rich peppermint swirl.

  Just after that I moved again, a really long way this time. I moved to Alice Springs because I fell in love with the desert. Hannah came with me, Ben stayed with Richard, and Genna had already decamped to faraway Perth to do her degree. The breakup of my family was proceeding apace. I ached for us to be close, yet kept up my speeding rush through life Out There.

  I lasted two years in Alice Springs, six months of which I devoted to promoting the Women’s Peace Camp at Pine Gap in November 1983. About six months later, I realised I was getting thinner and thinner. Something wasn’t right. Much as I loved it, the frontier feeling and the sublime desert country, Alice Springs for me was the savage living crucible of Australian history in which there was more racism and sexism on the streets, in your face, over my back fence than I seemed able to live with. I had to leave. I couldn’t contemplate the conglomerates of Sydney or Melbourne and I knew I’d end up back in Canberra, my blood’s country of the Monaro tableland, but not just yet. Which left Adelaide, where some close friends were living.

  When people asked, Why Adelaide? I’d embroider several reasons and then add, Oh, and my mother lives there too.

  My running had brought me back to where I began, my mother. If I was living in Adelaide, I was going to have to deal with her somehow. In the end, I did much better than that.

  THIRTEEN

  Longhand

  I rented a house in North Adelaide. Mum came to lunch and we ate under the peppercorn tree in the backyard. When it was time for her to leave, I stood in the drive as she was pulling her woollen beige gloves on over the cotton interlock, talking to me with her no-teeth about how she would like to work in the garden next time. I wished I never had to see her again.

  About a month later, driven by a mixture of manners and, ridiculously, hope, I invited her again. She must have adored having somewhere to go that wasn’t a shopping mall. She could not sit still. Well, at her place she sat still a lot, digging at her hands. She didn’t do it at my place and maybe that’s why she had to keep moving. Her love of gardening was the answer.

  I’ll chop it back a bit, she would say, gesturing at a riot by the back fence and I’d come out and find every flower of the plumbago gone or a jasmine reduced to sticks. So I had to keep an eye on her. Although she wasn’t as beady-eyed and irrational as in my teens, I was snappy those first few years. I found being with her exhausting: when would she leave?

  The various flats she’d inhabited were gone, and she lived in a women’s boarding house at beachside Glenelg. It had been a double semidetached and now had a door thrown through the wall in the middle to make it a dwelling of seven or eight bedsit rooms plus a small kitchen where residents prepared their lone meals. There was no living room, no TV area.

  Mum’s room was the smallest, a converted porch, a narrow shoe-box of a room with a wall of sliding windows along the path where everyone walked in and out, a corridor of cement where no sun ever shone. The glass in the windows was patterned and opaque for privacy, so she usually had one of the sliders open for light and air. Her single bed ran longways against the inside wall, with less than a metre of space between bed and window. There was a chair, but she used the bed as her sitting place. Over the following years, whenever a larger room became vacant, I urged her to take it, to have more light, more space. She refused to consider it for a moment.

  I’m fine, she said. I don’t need anything bigger than this.

  I’ll pay the extra, I said. You could get a room with some sun.

  No. Really. There’s no need.

  Implacable. And truly content, it seemed, to live in a cubicle.

  When I visited, I would have to steel myself for the walk along the path beside her window. As I slowed down to look in, I would be taut that I might see her gouging at her hands. If she was, I would look away at once, call, Hello, it’s me, and keep walking with my stomach somersaulting and my hands breaking into a sweat.

  She bought her white gloves in bulk, a gross at a time, from David Jones’ snooty ground-floor precinct. She’d been gouging for twenty-eight years. Based on my inadvertent sightings, it seemed that the thicker the scar tissue became, the more there was to remove. Often there was blood on the gloves. In her later years, in the glimpses I had of her bare hands, the fingers were shiny scarlet and had almost no fingernails, spectral and strange like special effects from a movie. Monstrous.

  If she was not gouging in some way, the less usual circumstance, I would stop and say, Hi, and she’d jump up and smile. We would meet at the back door and make a cup of tea in the communal kitchen and take it to her room. Our talk was a little stilted but we managed: the news, television, the family. Sometimes she’d go into a delusion: Mark drove like Peter Brock and people were wanting to talk to him about professional racing; her sister-in-law had died two months ago but they’d kept it quiet; or that she had lived in a boarding house with Don Lane and what fun they’d had. She told me earnestly that someone had died, when I knew they hadn’t, at least ten times. There’s a letter of Dad’s from 1952 where I learned that she was doing this way back then: her brother and sister had died and he was refusing to tell her. One time she rang me to check that Mark was still alive—she’d read something in the paper . . .

  Once I received a letter in the mail a couple of days after she’d been at my house. It was a small envelope and I recognised the handwriting instantly.

  It said:

  Dear Biff,

  When I was working in the front yard yesterday, a woman came past and told me I mustn’t visit you again. So I will not come again and I hope you understand.

  Love, Mum

  I went straight to the phone and said to her: No, that’s not right. Whatever happened, it’s not true. You can still come here.

  Oh, she said. All right. That’s nice, then.

  She was a much freer spirit through those Adelaide years. Free of doctors, free of husband or anyone too close, free of expectations from others, her world shrank to herself and her hands, the day to day of her inner life in her small room, and there she was calmer.

  My rushing had caught up with me and I had a touch of the black dog. I was in a job that fitted like a hair shirt, the house I’d bought was full of mission-brown shag-pile carpet and rank with nicotine, and my out-there focus was deserting me, leaving no new thrill to fill the void. Even my habitual drugs—sex or alcohol—became empty of their promise.

  My daughter Genna came to visit and told me I would never get beyond this dross until I ‘dealt with’ my mother. In all my searching, I had never thought of it like that: my mother. Courtesy of Genna’s contacts, I jumped the queue into a co-counselling community where I finally found a system that worked for me. It was based on allowing the old pain to surface and then letting it leave the body through the natural expression of crying, shaking, gibbering. To begin with, I did session after session of raging and crying and shivering about Mum staring out the window, being so absent and mad throughout my childhood. I let the memories come up and I cried or sweated or shook as long as I needed.

  After a
year of this, an image appeared before me—a densely concreted wall, flat and grey, in which hairline cracks were appearing. They spread slowly as I watched. The wall would appear even when I was talking to people, making dinner, driving. It was only when I identified the feeling that accompanied it—a calm, releasing sensation—that I understood I was breaking my past open, the walls were crumbling. I was finding words, ways to talk about what had happened. And suddenly I stopped biting most of my nails, needing only three or four, the visible evidence of the anxiety still buried within.

  Gradually, I noticed that when I saw her, I was less irritable. As I cried the years of my childhood away, I could see her as the quaint half-bag lady she was, just trying to get by with what she had. As I softened, she relaxed too. There was no breakthrough into healing conversations, we were just easier together.

  During the third or fourth year of therapy, I reached the layer of terror about the night she tried to strangle me. She tried to murder you, my counsellor said.

  I gasped. Such a shocking word. I spent weeks trying it out, the m-word, with much sweating, crying, edgy laughter in my sessions. What a word to conjure with! I tried to write about it and it transpired that three others out of the seven in my writing group had had murder come very close in their lives. The four of us tossed it about, this tabooed six-letter word.

  In my search for words, my journey from our family shorthand to a longhand that others would understand, I wrote a lot of poetry. Some was published; some created fat folders for my filing cabinet. But all skittered around the edges of what I was trying to say.

  Then right on cue, Alison came back into our lives. Or, to put it more accurately, she came alive to us, to Mark and me, in a way she had never been before.

  I had been talking in my counselling sessions about what had happened to Alison, who she might have been, how our family might have been if she had lived. I talked of her presence and absence and the long penumbra that had been cast by her existence. I mentioned it to Mark, told him what I was doing, in one of our monthly catch-up phone calls. I was anxious he would think I was off on what he would see as one of my eccentric confabulations. But he didn’t.

  I’ve been doing the same, he said.

  What?

  Well, not the same exactly. I’ve been writing all my memories of Mum. And I keep thinking about Alison.

  Oh, my God.

  I went to her grave, Mark said, years and years ago. When I worked at Channel Ten. It was across the road, up there at Ryde.

  Wow, I said. It had not entered my head before, to find her physical presence.

  I’ve been thinking I’ll go again, he said.

  Oh, would you?

  Yes, I really want to.

  He made a book of his key memories of Mum, in fact made two books, one for him and one for me. The cover of mine is fashioned from a piece of recycled canvas which has had a wash of russet apricot through it. The result is a blending of colours and shapes, a merging of the messes of the past with the tenderness of the present. On this cover, close to the edge where it opens, are rasps of concrete on my fingertips, some grains, perhaps of Sydney sandstone.

  I read it once, twice, three times when I first received it. Some of his memories don’t spark anything in me; they are incidents where I was not present or even ones where I was, but recall quite differently. Others are identical to mine. All of them are seamless with the tone of how I recall our childhood.

  Meanwhile, other people were finding words for what had happened in our family. Going to bed one night, I hunkered down with a recent copy of the Australian literary journal, Meanjin. I’d read Meanjin all through my teens because it came through the letter-box, one every three months, a regular accretion to Dad’s academic life.

  I noticed Gwen Kelly had written a short story, so I turned straight to that. Gwen was one of the Armidale university women. Her husband had been a classics academic and while they were not among Dad’s closest circle of friends, they’d often been to our house.

  The story was called Friends in Perspective. By the second paragraph, I realised it was based on my family. Russel had become Gordon. One sentence read: I wanted to keep alive the fantasy that Gordon loved his wife, Helen, even though I remembered dinner parties where she had served her husband and his guests in total silence while he ignored her. The next paragraph was a description of our front room, including the glossy portrait of Mum.

  I was expostulating to myself, My God . . .

  In response to my squawking sounds, twenty-year-old Hannah called out from her bedroom across the hall, What is it?

  This story—it’s about my family. About Mum and Dad.

  Really?

  I’ll finish it, I called, and then tell you.

  It had the lot, including the Helen character, my mother, having killed the baby. He had protected her through the courts and the pain inflicted by others, but it was rumoured that his marriage virtually ended that day. And the climax is the explanation of what happened when I was sixteen: Mum buying a gun, and Dad having to have her certified. I realised that news of the gun must have shot around the university in a flash. They probably didn’t know about the hammer and the tomahawk.

  The lovely, haunted face of Helen looked at me through the curtains of a home with bars on the window while Gordon sat, head in hands, alone.

  And she then has another character say: He is committed to her care for life. Till death do us part. He takes it literally. He is deeply religious, of course.

  Dad would have recoiled at the ‘deeply religious’ comment but it’s true he was profoundly moral and that he provided for her until he died.

  I didn’t pick up on ‘the courts’, reading it as fictional hyperbole. Even though she got it mostly right, I felt invaded by Gwen’s story, begrimed by her using our life as art, as entertainment.

  Hannah came in and I tried to explain. She hadn’t spent much time with Dad in her young life and Mum was, in those Adelaide years, the peculiar grandma whom she called Margaret, who gardened like a spring-cleaner, didn’t talk much, had no teeth and wore the gloves. She was interested, but from a distance.

  Next day, I rang Dad to express my dismay. I say that easily, as though it was a straightforward thing to do. In fact, I hesitated and had to whip myself up to it because we did not do this, Dad and I, did not have conversations about Mum, about Alison, about our family history. So I took a risk.

  He implied he hadn’t read it. I didn’t quite believe him. He encouraged me to calm down. It doesn’t matter, he said.

  Mark was similar: said he’d go and get a copy but, really, what was the big deal? I wish I’d had the words to express the shock of that first reading, the fact that someone else had so many words, while I still had only a few.

  Now when I re-read it, I am struck by Gwen’s compassion and, more startlingly, by the fact that if she knew that much, then dozens of other people did too.

  After Mark had been to the grave, he rang and said, You’ll never guess what I found.

  What?

  Her name. That’s all. There’s nothing there except grass—the headstone’s all disappeared—and this one piece of marble. It’s broken at the corner but the name is there, just the first name. Alison.

  I breathed in. Audibly.

  That’s all, he said. That’s all.

  I want to see it.

  We are speaking slowly, voices weighted with the past coming to claim us.

  Yes, of course. I left it there. I felt as though it belongs there.

  We can go when I come over next month.

  Yeah. Good.

  When Mark and I talk about our past, about Mum and Dad, it’s as though we’re catching the same wave. Talking about Alison was a new beach altogether, with waves in shapes we’d never surfed before. We couldn’t prove Mum had killed Alison—we just knew. Our childhood memories of shouting in the night and the unutterable depth of Dad’s despair were explained by this, and this alone.

  When we went to
her grave, a cool autumn afternoon in Sydney, we took oranges from his fruit bowl and put them in my bag. I picked some camellias from the red-dotted tree in front of his house. We drove across the Gladesville Bridge and turned left to trace that curly road up to North Ryde. Mark took only a couple of minutes to find the spot among the sporadic headstones. We found mown buffalo grass, smooth and continuous with several other graves, also without headstones. But on ours there was the piece of marble, the size of an A4 sheet folded in half lengthways with the upper right-hand corner snapped off. It had that one word on it, her name.

  Mark picked it up and I smoothed one finger along the bottom of it. We sank to the grass above where her four-month-old bones lie deep down. The marble lay between us, a cryptogram saying, I was here.

  We sat on the grass for an hour. Two hours.

  We talked about Mum and Dad. We cried a little. We spread the flowers. We ate the fruit and we kept talking.

  I thought we might build a new headstone, said Mark.

  What a great idea.

  We’ll use this, he said, holding the marble ‘Alison’ out in front of him. We’ll set it in a block of sandstone.

  Oh, yes.

  Mmmm. Simple, he finished.

  We found that the grave belonged to Dad and we had to get his permission to place a new headstone. He would not be drawn into conversation about what we were doing but he wrote us a letter under University letterhead, willing the gravesite to us, her brother and sister. Mark negotiated with the stonemason. When we visited again a year later, oxidation had leached black tears down the yellow-pink sides of the stone.

  The morning after that first visit, we fell to reminiscing about Mosman over our toast and marmalade.

  Let’s go there, I said. Let’s go and look around.

 

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