Snake Circle

by Roberta Sykes

  On one occasion when John was out of work, Brian had to travel out of Sydney for a week, so he agreed that John could use his house in his absence. He returned mid-morning to find John in the loungeroom, the cupboards and refrigerator bare and not even the makings of a cup of tea left in his house. Brian gave John money to go and buy tea and milk, as Brian couldn’t live without his cup of tea.

  While John was out at the corner store, Brian discovered that even the little money-boxes in which he saved coins for his nieces and nephews had been raided. He became livid and confronted John on his return. In response John pouted and said, ‘I was hungry. What did you expect me to do?’

  Brian said he realised John had not looked for work at all in his absence, and had spent his day lying around, watching television and listening to the stereo. Spending the coins from the money-boxes was the last straw. Brian ordered John to leave and retired to his bedroom to give him time to pack his few things and organise his departure. He heard John making some phone calls and rattling around.

  At last Brian heard a car pull up, and went to the window to peep out, expecting to see a taxi. Instead he saw John, suitcase in hand, stride down the path and climb majestically into the back of a big white, privately owned limousine!

  ‘Can you believe that?’ asked Brian to the group of us with whom he was sharing this story. ‘The man had friends all over the place so wealthy and keen to see him that they’d send limos to pick him up, and instead he pilfers money out of kids’ money-boxes?’ We all cracked. Strange as this may seem, tales of John’s knavish behaviour often endeared him to people and many of his antics became embedded in urban Black folklore. In some quarters his appetites were legendary and his larrikinism lionised, much like Ned Kelly, I suppose.

  Over time I tackled John about his feelings of hostility towards me, as shown in his Identity article and in the patently untrue things he had said to mutual friends. I had learned, from fragments of conversation he had dropped in my hearing, that my sister, Della, had married a boarding-school friend of John’s with whom he had been enamoured. I asked him outright if my sister’s marriage was the reason for his bitterness towards me. Della, by this time, had long ago divorced her first husband and had been living in New Zealand for almost a decade.

  Eventually, after John had reflected on my words, he conceded his hostility and acknowledged the truth of my suspicions regarding my sister’s marriage. He asked if we could put the past behind us and if I would be his friend. We were both doing work which often brought us to the Aboriginal Medical Service, and he said it would be to the advantage of the Black community if we were to ‘bury the hatchet’.

  Although I continued to run into John from time to time over the years when he would try to inform me about his latest conquests or dramas, I was unable to feel confidences shared with him were safe and consequently we never became ‘friends’. I thought too that, despite his general lack of sensitivity about such matters, he became aware that I disapproved of his frequent sexual coarseness, which he seemed to regard as titillating, and of the promiscuity about which he often boasted without any concern for the presence of children.

  Brian Syron, on the other hand, had become a friend, after some initial misunderstandings between us. At first I had thought Brian dealt with problems lightly. He had an actor’s manner of calling up quips and punch-lines from old movies in often quite inappropriate circumstances, and on one occasion I told him so. I think he thought me far too serious for my own good, and consequently not entertaining company. However, he took it upon himself to bring some cheer into my life, ringing to invite me to opening nights and performances. Over time we became very close, sharing a deep friendship and loyalty, while remaining trusted critics and supporters of each other’s work and efforts.

  My mother continued to visit me several times a year, as well as sharing fragments of her news with me by post. She was really beginning to show her age by this time, not only through her increasing forgetfulness, but also her inability to stay up with the times. If, while she was staying at our house, I had to fly to a meeting outside of Sydney, she would make a big fuss about coming to the airport to wave me goodbye.

  ‘Mum, I fly out at 6.30 in the morning—and I’ll be back this very afternoon. Taking a plane now is like taking a bus.’

  She seemed unable to comprehend the speed at which the world was changing. On one occasion, she sent Russel a few dollars cash in an envelope, telling him to take me out to dinner with it for my birthday. The small sum she sent wouldn’t have come anywhere near paying the bill at even the cheapest restaurant. Instead, Russel used the money to buy mince to cook me a meal at home. She seemed to have completely lost track of so many things, though I was assured by my friends who had elderly parents that Mum was normal for her age.

  In one of her letters Mum wrote that a nephew of hers had turned up at her home in Tweed Heads. Perhaps he had contacted Aunty Glad, who would have given him her address. With the exception of Aunty Glad, Mum had been wiped off for more than three decades by her large family for having the temerity to give birth to three illegitimate children of colour. Mum seemed delighted, therefore, that at long last she had been forgiven and she was now being, perhaps, welcomed back into the fold.

  This nephew, she informed me, was in his fifties, lived in Sydney with his wife and family, and was a senior police officer. She just knew he would love to meet me.

  I had to laugh at her naivety. If the theory I’d put together from the tiny clues that had littered her life was correct, that her family had been passing as white, then the chances of this man putting his hand up to be recognised as one of my relations was extremely remote. I was the family’s ‘black sheep’, being so politically active. I also had the capacity to cause people to ask if Mum and her relations were really white? Or were they Black, too?

  When she was next in Sydney, Mum spoke of her nephew in really glowing terms. He was such a ‘lovely young man’. He had come by her house and they had spent such a nice afternoon together. Through him, she had caught up with all her family news—who had died, who was still living and in which town. From her handbag, which always held everything but the kitchen sink, she took out a scrap of paper and carefully copied from it his name and the police station at which he was the senior officer. Would I contact him?

  After a few days of nagging, I phoned the police station, which was on the northern beaches. Mum was at my elbow, encouraging me. I thought that if I got him on the line I’d pass the phone to her. But he was on holidays, I learned from the officer who answered, and they weren’t expecting him back; he was about to be transferred to another northern suburbs station. Mum seemed quite sad.

  However, when she returned to Tweed Heads, she continued to hassle me to contact him, and in each letter she put another slip of paper with his name on it. Eventually, sitting at my desk with my little manual typewriter in front of me, Mum’s square slip staring me relentlessly in the eye, I tapped out a letter to him at his new posting and, next day, mailed it.

  Need I say more? The letter was never answered, nor was it returned. The phone never rang. Mum’s nephew disappeared back into the thin air from whence he had come. I waited until she visited again before I told her, so that I could console her if necessary.

  ‘Mum, he just didn’t answer. I gave him my phone number and address. I’m so well known that I have no doubt he knows who I am. He just doesn’t want me as a cousin.’

  Mum’s face grew rigid and she rose up from the kitchen table where we were sitting and went off to the lounge room where she was sleeping during this visit.

  I would liked to have confronted her again about my suspicion that she and her entire family were living a lie, but I restrained myself. To be honest, by that time I think I no longer cared. I was living my own lie, keeping the dark secret of my son’s conception and birth, and carrying the burden of pain and secrecy in my heart.

  How then to raise questions of my mother’s pain and secrecy? I fel
t also that I had to set some sort of example to my child, to accept what my mother wanted to tell me so that he would accept what his mother had to tell him. Mum had her reasons, and I had mine.

  Over the years, I had been placed under a lot of pressure from some Black community members to explore my family roots. At first, when my son, the product of rape, was young, I had done so, often quite enthusiastically. But as time passed and my own experiences widened and deepened, it had become unimportant to me. I had questioned Mum, often brazenly and rudely, about my father, and when that had not been successful, I had used cajolery. As a maturing adult, though, with periods of my mother’s absence from my life, combined with the struggle of raising my own children, I had had cause to reflect on just what constitutes fatherhood.

  As my children had no father present in their lives, I realised I had had no one either. No one willing to put his hand up, to take responsibility for the life he had helped to create, whoever he was. He had not been there to help my mother put food in front of me, to hold me high in the air so that I could get a lofty vision of the world. There had been no one nearby to be my protector, to defend me against the horrors of the world. Instead, like so many others in my position, I had become a victim.

  I had reflected, too, on the experiences of some of the Blacks, and a few whites, whom I had counselled, who had confided in me stories of their own searches. Many had gone out looking for fathers, sometimes mothers, and occasionally siblings, only to have their hearts broken by rejection. I was saddened by their stories, some of which no doubt influenced the way I thought about the notion of searching for a father who had abandoned me.

  Eventually, I had come to a conclusion: why would I want to know a man who didn’t want to know me? It boiled down to being that simple. I was glad for those people whose search stories seemed to have had a ‘happy ending’. But their stories were the exceptions rather than the rule. I had enough unhappiness to deal with. I wasn’t interested in going out of my way to find any more.

  My mother, pretence or not, had stood by me. As an adult, I realised I cared enough and was grateful enough for her love and loyalty, to overlook whatever may have been her shortcomings. They were not mine to judge. When I was pressured by other Blacks, and sometimes whites, about my bloodlines, I silently accepted the burden of their pressure. I just hoped that over time, they too would mature enough to realise that no one can judge another person on anything other than what they themselves had done, and that they had no right to try to judge me.

  I took heart from all the things that had been given to me in this life, and decided to waste no more energy and tears on those things that were beyond my reach. As time passed I was able to acknowledge that there are some things unknowable, unattainable, and I became happier in myself when I achieved this insight. People would undoubtedly keep nudging and hassling me, because it seems to be in the nature of some people to always cry for the moon.

  My two children were a source of tremendous joy to me; they were, quite simply, the reason why I drew breath every day. I didn’t want my son to know anything about who his father could be. And my daughter’s father, William, refused to support her. I considered his threat to tell Russel of the criminal circumstances of his conception too high a price to pay, so his support too had become unattainable.

  I had a warm coterie of friends, friends for every reason and friends for every season. Without some, like Mrs Owens, who had started as a reluctant occasional child-minder but had grown into an adopted ‘grandparent’, and Liz Milne, who cared about my children, my life would have been much harder. As we all do, I had friends for when I was up, and for when I was down. They all had their own lives, of course, but I was grateful for that bit of their lives which they spent on me.

  I had a headful of warm memories, of beaches and blue sea and sky. My snakes had always been wonderful friends to me, and a great happiness and feeling of satisfaction flows over me whenever I think of them coiled or stretched on sunny hills, somewhere just beyond my immediate vision.

  My identity was grounded in being who I was, in the work I was doing, and the mother I was being. I was who I found looking back at me from my mirror each morning: a Black woman of modest good looks, striving to live the only life we are given, as decently and honestly as I could.

  5

  When in 1997 I received, first, an invitation to fill out an application and then later an acceptance into the Master’s program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, I was filled with confusion. On the one hand, this felt like the opportunity of a lifetime (Pinch me quick, see if I’m dreaming?), and on the other, an awesome burden which I felt, at that point in my life, I could not assume. My work at the Health Commission was almost totally consuming, but it was so poorly paid that I was compelled to keep doing extra work outside whenever it was available. I wrote book reviews for newspapers, magazines and radio programs, and continued to freelance as a journalist, writing articles wherever I could place them.

  I have collected quite a store of humorous stories about some of my written work, most of which was, by then, commissioned. One week I had just finished writing a piece for a Christian newspaper when I received a surprise phone call from Mark Day, then the managing editor of Australian Penthouse magazine. Geraldine Willesee had introduced me to Mark years before when he was working at the Mirror.

  We met again now in his office and he asked if I would be interested in writing a piece for his publication. Penthouse wasn’t a magazine I read, and I had always thought of it as being tits, bums and porn, so I was shocked. Mark assured me, though, that they ran serious articles. I thought about his offer for a while because, although I didn’t read it, I knew that it had a high profile and likely reached an audience possibly hitherto untouched by Black politics. Surely, I thought, readers of Christian newspapers do not also read Penthouse.

  Health Commission policy, which I had often had to ignore, was that employees were not to make public statements without prior approval. However, if the public had to become informed before governments addressed the appalling state of Aboriginal health, then I felt I had a greater responsibility to do what I could. I would not allow myself to be stopped by red tape. My articles had appeared in a wide variety of newspapers and magazines, and I had never been reprimanded. Still, an article in Penthouse, I thought, might just draw flak.

  After considering all the factors, Mark and I struck a deal. My article would run on two pages, and not be interspersed with pictures of partly undressed or naked women. I hurried home and wrote ‘Killing Me Softly’, a piece about the removal of Black men, through death, incarceration and other means, from the Black community, and the social consequences which eventuated and the genocidal conclusions which had to be drawn from this. When it went to press, I sat back and waited.

  Surely, I thought, no one at the Health Commission reads Penthouse?

  Within two days of the magazine’s release, I received a phone call from Gary Foley. He had read it and warmly congratulated me. I said, ‘Only for the articles, eh, Gary?’

  ‘Yeah, sis. Just for the articles.’

  I had perhaps envisaged rich old white men in raincoats as being Penthouse readers. It had never occurred to me that members of the Black militant sector might also lean in that direction, so Gary’s phone call had me spluttering with surprise and laughter for years.

  As promised, my article had been printed discreetly, on two facing pages and appropriately separated from nudity or anything that might have detracted from its political and informative value. Over the next week, photocopies of it were circulating through the entire Health Commission. So many people, including senior staff, spoke appreciatively to me about it, all careful to mention that they had read only the photocopy, that their implicit denials became something of a joke to me. Someone had read it in the original, but no one ever owned up.

  My mother also phoned me, as she had previously when an article about me and my work had appeared in Australasian Post.
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  ‘Do you always have to write for rude magazines, Roberta? And why is it that everyone else has to tell me these things! Your Aunty Glad rings to say you’ve been on television, people pull me up in the street to say they’ve seen your picture or writing in magazines. How come I’m always the last to know, eh?’

  Mum chose not to understand that these things were just part of my job as a public educator. She considered this to be ‘fame’, and was peeved that I didn’t report directly to her.

  I continued, in a voluntary capacity, to write, research and edit the Black community newspaper, AIM. It was being published by the Aboriginal Dance Company, where I also taught, through an arrangement with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Skills Development. I was kept very busy and locked into work which I regarded as valuable. I remained in no position just to walk out and go off to Harvard, even if I could afford to, which I could not.

  As well, my son Russel was doing his Higher School Certificate, to become one of the few Black students to successfully reach this level at that time. I could no more abandon him at this crucial period than I could fly. I wrote back to Harvard, spelling out the reasons why I was unable to take up their offer.

  Professor Chester Pierce, who had initiated the invitation to Harvard, wrote to me supportively on a regular basis. His airmail letters in his familiar almost illegible scrawl mounted up, and I was always pleased to read his repeated reassurances that the work involved in gaining a Master’s degree was well within my ability. Still, I harboured my doubts. If, I wondered, I was considered smart enough to get a degree from Harvard, why had Australian universities not picked up on this? Although I routinely gave guest lecture presentations in university courses in fields such as medicine, politics and English literature, I had been regularly told that in order to enter the university I would have to study for and pass a Matriculation exam. Being the sole bread-winner, I couldn’t have afforded the time off to do so, and therefore the idea had never been on my agenda. Apparently it was alright for me to teach in universities which I couldn’t get into, even as an undergraduate student.