by Rod Jones
Privately, Molly said to David, ‘You must never talk to that man. You must be very careful never to go anywhere with him. Sometimes there are men who try to steal little boys.’ Molly felt guilty when she said that, seeing the fear enter the boy’s face. But she couldn’t help herself.
The alien hotel, the incipient dread she could not shake, all made Molly realise again how much these feelings were connected with memories from her own childhood. During the first few days at the orphanage, when everything in that institution still seemed strange and threatening to her, she had felt that her mother had abandoned her. Despite everything else, the feeling of betrayal had never really left Molly.
Back home, Percy now complained more often that she overprotected the boy. They had been an outgoing and adventurous couple, he reminded her, adding that he missed their weekends with the motorcycle club. But now, for Molly, the world ended at the front gates. Molly kept those double iron gates closed all day until Percy came home in the car. She needed to guard her daytime domestic world, to protect David from whoever might be sent to try to take him.
Having David at home with her became an established part of Molly’s routine. As he grew older, David liked to bring his mother cups of tea and help her with the housework. She taught him how to cook, supervised his baking of cakes. Molly gave him two shillings a week pocket money, which he put in his cashbox; she taught him how to divide his money and save for presents, the holidays, books.
Percy was busy with his new job. He often had to travel. BP sent him to Europe for three months on a study and research tour. Then he had to drive every week to the Riverina to test a new anti-bloating oil for cows. But Molly was proud that Percy was still a practical man who preferred to fix a problem or do a job himself. When the kitchen and living room needed painting, he spent his Christmas holidays on the ladder in his shorts and singlet with a paintbrush and roller. He painted the eaves and spouting, cleared blocked drains, built himself a workshop in the garage. When the car needed new paint, he did not think of paying a panel beater, he bought a compressor and sprayed the car himself.
He got up early. Molly woke to the sound of his electric razor in the bathroom. He dressed in his suit and tie, an overcoat and hat in the winter, picked up his briefcase and, at 8.15, no breakfast, no tea or coffee, he kissed Molly and David and left for work.
On Saturday mornings, Molly made sure that he took David in the car to Boon Spa in Footscray to pick up the weekly crate of soft drinks, before they drove to the nearby factory where they bought chocolates. Percy was a methodical man who approached everything in a logical manner. Once, Molly looked out the window to see her husband teaching David to mow the lawn ‘in ever-decreasing circles’.
It was a mathematical world, to Percy. He wound the kitchen clock on Sunday nights. On Monday nights he dressed in his ‘penguin suit’ and went to the local Masonic lodge in Ascot Vale; most other nights he worked at the dining table with his slide rule and papers. He invested in blue-chip shares so that the family might improve itself financially. Percy was a solid, reliable husband. Molly trusted his judgment in all matters except one: she felt that he didn’t understand how sensitive David was.
Percy was a perfectionist: every detail of his life had to be exactly right, every measurement precise. Molly stayed out of the way when he sat with the boy at the kitchen table to help him with arithmetic. Percy’s frustration sometimes boiled over. There was a kind of mutual incomprehension between father and son. He couldn’t understand how David could be so slow to understand even basic mathematical concepts.
Once, in a rage, Molly overheard him threaten to send David ‘back to the orphanage’.
David sought out his mother. ‘Why did Dad say that about the orphanage?’ he asked, baffled.
Molly tried to smile reassuringly, but it turned into a grimace. ‘Dad didn’t mean it. Sometimes when we’re angry we all say things we don’t mean.’
‘But he did mean it. He said he was going to send me back to the orphanage. What orphanage?’
‘He got mixed up. He was thinking about another little boy.’
Later, Molly chided her husband. ‘Please promise me you will never say anything like that again. You’ve really upset him. Besides, you know about me and the orphanage.’
Sheepishly, Percy agreed. But another evening, he threatened to sell the house and move the family to ‘the slums of North Melbourne’. Molly knew Percy expected the boy to be grateful for what they had done for him, even though David had no idea what had happened. And Percy didn’t mean to be nasty, she was sure. He probably wasn’t even aware of it. Maybe he was resentful because of the problems they had had. He began to use the nickname ‘Joe’ for David, short for Joseph Puff—Joe Blow, a person without a real name. It was Percy’s sense of humour, but it had an aggressive edge. ‘Can you hand me that hammer, Joe?’
Molly felt tortured by the fact that David never could understand why his father called him Joe.
On Friday mornings, Molly drove Percy to the tram stop in Maribyrnong Road, so that she could have the car. Molly and Olive picked up their mother from Eldridge Street on the way to do their shopping. They went to Forges to look for bargains. They called in to see Bill in his butcher’s shop.
There were some weeks when Percy had a company car, so she was able to take David to see Olive in the afternoons, or earlier if he was home from school. Olive and Hoppy lived in Maidstone, in a street running off Gordon Street, near the ammunition factory. Their white-painted weatherboard house smelled of tobacco and the meat Olive boiled for the dogs. Inside the back door, David said hello to Cocky. The cockatoo said, ‘Cocky wants a cup of tea’ and drank from the spout of the teapot.
Olive was still an early riser, energetic, the way Molly remembered her as a child. She ran their sand and screenings business from the end of the kitchen bench, where the telephone was. There were piles of accounts and receipts in alligator clips. Molly was worried about Olive’s hiatus hernia, and she sat for hours while Olive recounted her visits to various specialists. Hoppy was still the same. He walked with a slow gait. His smile was gentle and defeated. He drove a white FJ ute. There was only the two of them; they were a ghostly shadow of how Molly and Percy might have ended up.
At four o’clock, Hoppy swung his legs down from the cabin of his truck. He walked as if with every step those quarry boots were heavier. He wore old suit pants from the Depression years, a shapeless hat pushed back on his head, indoors and out. He sat on the back porch, rolling his Champion cigarettes, waiting for the sports edition of the Herald to arrive at the corner shop.
Every time she went to Eldridge Street, during these years, Molly remembered the day she was taken there from the orphanage when she was ten. Everything was the same: the same kitchen table, the dark wooden dresser. In the room leading off the kitchen, the copper for washing. In the parlour there was a wooden telephone on the wall. The toilet was still outside, with cut squares of newspaper, just as it was when she was a little girl. The same skies, the smoking factory chimneys, the farmyard smells of her childhood Footscray, chooks in backyards and tethered sheep grazing in laneways. Molly remembered that, during the Depression, sometimes a mob of sheep would be driven along their lane on the way to the abattoirs, and that Bill would wait inside their back gate until the man and the dog had passed, then steal the last sheep in the mob.
When Alma fell ill with cancer, the family gathered. Her moth
er lay dying in the big bed in the front room, the blinds drawn. The house was quiet and dark. Molly and her sister went over every day to look after her. Alma was sixty-seven.
It affected Molly badly, losing her mother. Everything they had gone through together during Molly’s childhood had kept them close. For a long time, it was difficult to accept that her mother, who had fought so hard to keep Molly safe, was no longer there.
Molly couldn’t bring herself to tell David that his grandmother was dead. She didn’t let him go to the funeral. She did not want to admit the brute presence of death into his sheltered childhood world.
She told David that his grandmother had gone for a holiday, gone on the boat to England.
When David had to have his tonsils out, it was his first night away from her. There were other beds in the hospital ward, other children. Molly sat at his bedside, talking to him quietly. In the morning he would have his operation under general anaesthetic. David didn’t want her to leave, of course. Now came the crying, the pleas for her to stay, his fear that she wouldn’t come back. Molly was seven again, in the dormitory at the orphanage.
For Molly, walking away, there were traces of another feeling that distressed her, too: leaving him in the hospital room felt like taking him back to the place in Fitzroy.
Every few months David had another of his mysterious nervous episodes. For two or three weeks at a time he stayed home in his pyjamas. He could not leave the house, even to go to the letterbox. He told Molly that he could not stand for anyone to see him and that there was something frightening in the daylight. And of course Molly did not want her son to belong to the world out there, of football and Boy Scouts, the school of hard knocks, as Percy put it when he badgered her about toughening up David.
Home from school, David read and wrote stories at the dining room table. On their trips to the city, Molly bought him new books from Robertson and Mullens in Elizabeth Street. She went to the school every few days to collect homework from the teachers.
Day after day, together they sank deeper into a comforting interior world that existed outside time. Molly knew he was not really sick. But why did they both need to pretend he was sick, to keep it up week after week? In the routines of their days, David mimicking the life of a sick person, there was something reassuring for them both. Molly felt ashamed of her complicity. But she was still afraid that one day David might be taken away from her. She often found herself at the window in her bedroom, peeking out from the edge of the venetian blinds. If there was a car she didn’t recognise parked in the street, her heart started to race.
It was only by being at home, play-acting the patient in his dressing-gown, that David seemed to thrive. He was a boy who needed to be kept apart from ordinary life, a boy who lived through his imagination, Molly convinced herself.
As David grew older, Molly noticed that he was always falling in love with his female teachers. She was shocked to think that there might have been some neediness in his nature that attached itself to Miss Blackwood, who was forever rubbing lotion into her beautiful pale hands. It was the same even with the female teachers at high school. Where had Molly gone wrong?
At fourteen he began complaining of stomach pains. The doctor at the Margaret Street Clinic sent him for X-rays. David had to take barium meal and lie flat inside the big X-ray machine. When the results came back, the doctor clipped the X-rays to the screen and showed them where the barium was ballooning out. He said the boy had a duodenal ulcer. Molly was devastated. She felt that in the perfect world of motherhood she had constructed for herself from books and women’s magazines, something else had gone wrong. She had missed doing something essential in his emotional life. She had failed.
One day in 1967 there was a knock at the front door. Molly opened it to find a short old man in a suit and hat standing there. She quickly pulled the door closed behind her and stepped out onto the porch. David was in the living room, watching television.
It was Alfred. Somehow he had traced her. He wanted to re-establish contact. His wife had died the year before. Molly remembered her terror as a ten-year-old, outside Alfred and Gert’s house. Now he lived alone in his weatherboard cottage in Richmond. He had a lawn-mowing business, a Morris Minor van. He mowed the lawns of rich people in Toorak, Hawthorn, mansions across the river.
The first time Molly and David visited Alfred, they went to a Chinese restaurant in Bridge Road. Afterwards, they sat in Alfred’s tiny lounge room and watched Dean Martin on television.
Molly and Alfred resumed their relationship as father and daughter. David was curious about this little old man who wore a suit and hat and smoked Henri Wintermans small cigars. Molly said that David could call him ‘Pop’. David accepted this, but Molly could tell that he thought it rather strange. She was surprised he did not ask more questions about Alfred. She thought that perhaps David sensed there were secrets better not delved into.
It wasn’t until the following year, when David happened to read a card Alfred sent for her birthday inscribed ‘to my darling daughter’ that Molly finally had to tell David who Alfred was.
When Percy got sick in 1969, at first the doctors thought it was a nervous breakdown. It turned out to be the flu. He was in hospital, home, back in hospital again. Molly never imagined that her husband could be seriously ill. He was always so healthy and energetic. But the flu turned into pneumonia and they found a granuloma on his lung. Then it was spinal meningitis.
When he was in the Royal Melbourne, Molly spent all day at his bedside. After school, David took the tram along Mount Alexander Road to the hospital. It was a shared ward with metal beds, each with a pale green curtain that was drawn around the patient when the doctors came. Molly stayed until the end of visiting hours, until the very last minute. David studied for his fifth-form exams in the corridor. Finally, they drove home and had something to eat.
When Percy came home, the months passed and he still spent most days in bed. He couldn’t eat his meals. The doctor prescribed a drink of orange juice, egg and milk mixed together in the Vitamizer. The bones sharpened in his face and his gums shrank; he couldn’t wear his false teeth. His skin looked yellow. There were nights when he screamed with headaches.
Molly was always in the bedroom, nursing him. She was drained, frightened of the future. Her husband had become a creature of pyjamas, like her son. Only when there were visitors did Molly help him pull on a pair of trousers and button a shirt. He seemed confused, bewildered. He perched on the edge of the chair in the living room with his newly thin face and pretended to follow the conversation.
The next month, he needed a sheepskin rug for bedsores. Then he needed an inflatable rubber ring under his hips. His lungs were clogged and at night Molly pummelled his back to try to move the congestion.
One afternoon when she went into the bedroom, Percy was lying on his back, not moving. His eyes were open and his lips had a bluish tinge. Molly knelt by the bedside, clutching his hand. Her mind registered the information but she could not take it in. She called to David to come quickly. David had his Senior swimming certificate. He knew mouth-to-mouth. She watched him pinch Percy’s nose between his thumb and forefinger, the way he had been taught. He placed his mouth over his father’s cold lips to blow. Molly knew it was useless, but they had to try.
After her husband’s death, Molly was exhausted. She couldn’t get out of bed in the mornings without taking V
incent’s Powders, with their kick of caffeine and phenacetin. There were occasional visitors, but most of the time the house had taken on a sinister silence.
There was still a mortgage. She had to buy all the books for David’s final year at high school. She sat with the chequebook and a pile of bills. She lined up at the State Savings Bank in Puckle Street. Percy’s pension from BP wasn’t enough.
David had found a part-time job as a waiter in the banqueting department of the Hotel Australia in Collins Street. He usually worked on Friday and Saturday nights, starting at five o’clock and often getting home after midnight. Molly was relieved that, if he worked late like that, they paid for his taxi fare home.
Molly went to work at a factory, calibrating speedometers. Then she found a job making costumes in the wardrobe department of the ballet company in Flemington.
Molly and David began the new year at Cowes, on Phillip Island, where Teddy and Rosie and their kids had a holiday shack. David slept in a one-man tent in the back garden. He spent his mornings alone, reading the texts for English that year. One of the books on the course was Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers.
Teddy came to Molly one morning after breakfast. ‘You shouldn’t let the boy read that kind of filth.’ Now sixty, he worked as a cleaner at Footscray Technical College. ‘I’ve seen these teachers and the obscene books they get the kids to read.’
‘But he’s doing his Matric,’ Molly tried to explain. ‘That book is on his course. He has to read it for the exams.’ Now Percy was gone, everyone was trying to give her advice.
She did understand Teddy’s concern. Another of Lawrence’s books, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, had been banned in Australia for many years. The Literature Censorship Board had finally allowed it to be published only a few years earlier, in 1965, and there had been much controversy about it in the newspapers. Molly would never have dreamed of reading a book like that—she preferred magazines like the Women’s Weekly and New Idea—but she hoped the teachers knew what they were doing.
