Innocence Revisited

by Cathy Kezelman

  Towards the end of the second week of my search, I tackled the last section of my mother’s basement. Inside the numerous cartons stuffed with plastic bags were piles of yellowing papers. There was no order to them; items were stored on a first stashed/ longest forgotten principle. The most critical items were most often buried the deepest.

  Squatting in the midst of generations of plastic bags, I explored an innocuous looking carton and removed a bag, compacted over time. I brushed it off and extracted an envelope stamped: ‘Coroner’s Office.’ The corners of the envelope looked grubby and the paper was stained. I tried to pull the document inside, out but it was stuck. I pulled harder and doing so threw me backwards into the dirt, smashing my light in the process. I lay dazed for several minutes before I could pick myself up and go upstairs to get another bulb.

  Cyril I.

  Institute of Forensic Pathology 2/10/68 at 10:30 am

  Gunshot wound to abdomen

  Jindal at 1/10/68 approximately 10:00 am

  It was the very report I’d stumbled across as a child, decades earlier, yet reading it now gutted me all over again. I was in no state to look at anything else after that or for the several weeks that followed. I gathered a few things together - a few musical scores, the music syllabus and some short stories and took them home with me. Over the ensuing weeks I studied them obsessively. I even played some of his pieces on the piano, and read the stories he’d written so often that I learnt them off by heart.

  On my mother’s return from overseas I surprised myself by owning up to the search up front. I was surprised that she didn’t blow her stack. Maybe she was too relaxed after her holiday to lose her temper right away. Though she wasn’t too relaxed to censor her customary comments.

  ‘But Baba, you’ve never shown any interest in your father’s things and quite frankly I could never understand why.’

  I told my mother that I’d been playing my father’s music.

  ‘Oh there was a lot more music than that, Baba. When your father died I wanted to get rid of everything as quickly as possible. I threw a lot of his music out because I didn’t want you and your brother to be upset. Did you know that some of your father’s music was published? I sold a lot of it to the university. You know the one at St Lucia.’

  I couldn’t believe my ears. To think that the pick of my father’s work had gone! That I would never get to see it or enjoy it! He was gone and my connections to him were gone. Such realisations upset me greatly and at times, the pain was too much to bear. I felt bereft and alone and suicidal thoughts once again came to the fore.

  I had to remember that I wasn’t alone. The family I had created was there for me, as were a few close friends. I also had a special person, a person with whom I could share my pain, who listened and empathised. Kate was amazing and her support was readily available. Yet sometimes I felt ambivalent about the support she offered and on occasions I’d push her away. I didn’t trust her completely just yet. At other times I felt clingy and expected Kate to be instantly accessible, to materialise with a click of a finger, ready to meet my demands. During those times, no matter how much support Kate gave me, she still couldn’t satisfy my insatiable need for time and attention. I was extremely needy, a child who was desperate to be cared for but who pushed that care away as soon as her immediate needs had been met, without knowing why.

  Kate worked hard to contain my angst but it wasn’t an easy task. She was fighting a bevy of ghosts that were surfacing from my past and those ghosts were wreaking havoc with my peace of mind. My search and its findings seemed to have intensified the severity and frequency of my flashbacks. Each one delivered new fragments of reality and freshly confounded emotions and left me agitated and irrational.

  Even though I had remembered quite a lot, I still had more gaps that I was anxious to fill. I didn’t want to go back to my mother’s place - I was too shaken up by what I’d found there already - but I did want to learn more, and looked for other ways to do just that.

  chapter 8

  Since my brother and I had grown up in the same house, logic supposed that he might be able to fill in some of the gaps in my recall. I decided to meet with him and see what he knew. The difficulty would be that Simon and I weren’t used to reminiscing or sharing anything personal. To further complicate what I was hoping to extract from him, he’d had his fair share of personal struggles and they had seriously clouded his perception of the past.

  After our father died, Simon rejected his studious persona and hit the party scene running. In sharp contrast to his school career, his years at university were erratic. He skipped classes regularly, preferring to spend time at the races or the pokies to doing his work. Through most of those years he drank heavily and was often sozzled, high, or both. He wrote his car off more times than I’d like to remember and brushed with the law, telegraph poles and his own mortality far too frequently for comfort.

  Instead of trying to understand the reasons behind Simon’s rebellion, my mother simply punished him. He acted out mercilessly. Feeling personally affronted by his behaviour she would scream, even more than usual, and he screamed back twice as loud. At one point she even threatened to disown him. Simon moved out, back in and back out again, until the last time when he all but disappeared for several years. During those years Simon not only kept his distance from my mother, but ostracised me by association.

  During that time my mother remarried and her new husband copped a lot of the anger that she had previously directed at my brother. Left with little option other than being good, I kept a low profile. I was a teenager who had never displayed any adolescent behavior or rebellion. Compelled to remain compliant, I allied myself to my mother whenever she was in conflict with either my stepfather or my brother.

  When Simon announced that he was getting married I was shocked. I’d barely heard mention of his fiance, let alone had any chance to get to know her. We both lived in Sydney, so there was no geographical distance to validate or excuse the communication gap between us. Our alienation was very plainly a natural consequence of our family’s dysfunction. After Simon married he and his wife moved away and we rarely saw them. I married soon after Simon, with my marriage providing an acceptable reason to leave home.

  Simon was introduced to the philosophy of ‘Rajneesh’ when his daughter was about three. It was a doctrine which he and his wife enthusiastically embraced. I couldn’t relate to its dictates and Simon’s blind devotion to its values drove us further apart. Years later, after Simon separated from his wife and was fighting for custody of Angie, he sought me out. His divorce was as acrimonious as they come and the accusations and counter-accusations were putrid. The protracted disputes played out detrimentally with Angie as she grappled to glean the truth about why her family had fallen apart. She struggled to decide which version of events to believe and which parent to trust, so conflicting were their stories and accusations.

  During those difficult years, aspects of Simon’s treatment of Angie disturbed me greatly. He failed to recognise the trauma she was experiencing in much the same way as our mother did with him, and often punished her rebellion at times when I felt that compassion and understanding were warranted instead.

  Simon’s ex-wife also struggled with an addiction to alcohol and the rages it caused. She loved Angie in her own way, but often couldn’t care for her properly. Simon eventually won custody of Angie and she stayed on with him in the country while her mother moved to Sydney.

  Angie chose not to see her mother much for several years after that. On the rare occasions on which Angie did visit her mother, we’d often receive a distressed call from her. We’d rush over to find Angie, squatting alone with her bags, on the footpath outside the house. We’d always hear the same story; there’d been some disagreement and her mother had lost her temper and lashed out. Eventually she stopped visiting. It was only after her mother was diagnosed with cancer that Angie started seeing her again. Their visits became more regular after a second diagnosis of
cancer was made. During her mother’s last months, Angie sat vigil. Bridges were mended as a daughter cared for a mother more lovingly and devotedly than her mother had ever cared for her.

  Throughout my childhood it had been my role to bolster my brother’s ego. Speaking out against his ways had been outside my brief and for a long time even as an adult, I wouldn’t challenge him. Despite doing what I could for Angie, I didn’t step in as much as I could have when things spiralled out of control.

  For years I feared that my brother was ‘unstable’ and I was at pains not to destabilise him further. I was terrified that some disaster would befall him and I had good reason. After years of addiction, Simon developed a hunger for adrenaline. He traded in Porches and copped endless speeding fines on local country roads; he bought a light plane and learned to fly; he scuba dived to the depths, tempting fate by pulling on the tails of sharks and other creatures of the deep; he embarked on treks to Everest and in the Hindu Kush in minus 30 degrees, technical climbs on which members of his party plunged to their deaths. As Simon played Russian roulette, my mother and I sat and watched nervously from the sidelines.

  And then came Rajneesh.

  Sporting the curious uniform of ‘sunset coloured’ clothes and a pendant featuring the leader, the Bhagwan, around his neck, Simon became a devotee. The espoused philosophy enticed my brother with a pain-free ‘out’ from his ruminating thoughts. It also brought countless extended trips away from Angie. Some were weekend workshops in Sydney, but many meant weeks and even months in Oregon in the Bhagwan’s American retreat.

  To me, the philosophy of Rajneesh seemed unapologetically hedonistic, urging its followers to look after number one above all else. It fed off the needy by offering the promise of a neatly packaged, stress-free way to live. For Simon, the trite tools Rajneesh provided undoubtedly helped relieve his intellectual intensity and the damages of a troubled childhood. He learnt to practise cathartic meditation, screaming daily in his garage for at least ten years. While it took the edge off his angst, it didn’t provide him with any insight into its source.

  Using Rajneesh practices Simon could still his agitation and ward off the depression which had plagued him for years. I believe it did so at the cost of his ability to think independently. Rajneesh transformed my brother into a cloned mouth-piece that sprouted a packaged philosophy. I saw it as brainwashing and it hit a raw nerve that would take me years to pinpoint.

  In worshipping Rajneesh my brother abandoned his daughter time and again. My mother looked after her a few times but usually Angie was left in the care of a Fijian neighbour. Angie’s Fijian mama loved and cared for Angie like one of her own, in a manner Angie had rarely experienced at any other time. She was one of several ‘mothers’ at Angie’s funeral who had collectively taken the place of one mother who was scarcely there.

  I grew close to Angie when she lived with us, and closer still after her mother died. After her mother’s death Angie was distraught. Sadly my brother, whose childhood losses had not been adequately processed, failed to comprehend the degree of his daughter’s distress. He reacted punitively to her angst, casting her out when she needed him most. How sad it was that traumas of prior generations played out in the present causing the next generation to flail just as the one before it! Thankfully the rift between Simon and Angie was in the process of mending when she died. There was a lot of love between them, but it had been repeatedly sabotaged by the extremes of emotional tumult - another pattern which spanned the generations.

  My mother was, in my opinion, incapable of real emotional connection and her narcissism kept my brother and me emotionally separated; it caused a lot of damage. The wedge that stood between me and my brother allowed her to control us. She would invariably play favourites and continued to do so with her grandchildren. Simon and I took turns on the pedestal my mother erected - he was the golden boy up until adolescence and I stepped up to take his place after that. Now, once again, the tables were turned.

  Despite the competitive undercurrents of our childhood, and our separation, Simon and I shared periods of closeness. I’m sad that there couldn’t have been more.

  Although my journey of discovery naturally led me to Simon, I approached him with some trepidation. While I was keen to discover what he recalled, I was wary of the impact of asking him too many questions. I knew Simon had gaps in his memory because he’d intimated as much. My concern was that my questions might reactivate memories which would destabilise him, as mine had done to me.

  I proceeded with caution, kicking off with a conversation about cane toads.

  Toad escapades had been pivotal in our childhood.

  ‘Sure Catherine, sure I remember.’ Simon has always called me Catherine. No-one else does.

  ‘You would have been about six, Catherine and so desperate to have a go.’

  Simon was right; I was desperate. I wanted to be chosen but then every member of the gang wanted to be in. That’s because when you were ‘in’ you got to be the one to light the cracker, smack bang under the toad’s belly.

  ‘Me! Choose me! Ah come on, that’s not fair! Neil got to do it last time and the time before that and the time…’

  For years Simon would tell me that I was too young and I resented it. As for chucking a rock at a toad, I don’t think I ever got to do that. Only the older boys like Simon ever got a go. That’s why they scored so many direct hits - mid-centre between the toad’s eyes, sending the poor creature into a death spiral.

  ‘I never did get a turn, did I?’

  ‘Nah, you were too young and you were really pissed off about it too.’

  ‘Yes I was. I really was!’

  ‘Oh come off it, Catherine. It wasn’t all-bad! You had your day of fame, you know.’

  ‘I did?’

  ‘Yes, when you started that bushfire.’ I shook my head; it didn’t ring any bells at first, but as Simon continued, ‘Oh come on, you remember, with your little mate… what was his name? Hugh, yeah that was it, the weedy little kid with the Doctor Spock ears’, I swear that I could smell that smoke. There’d been plenty of it.

  ‘Sure, Hugh and Neil. The brothers from next door. How could I forget?

  ‘And what about their mother? She was an old…’ Simon had hit the nail on the head. ‘Witch’, I added.

  I’m about seven and Hugh, my best friend is around eight, nine at the most. We’ve shaken off the rest of the gang and are playing with a box of matches I’ve nicked from the kitchen. Down the back behind the woodpile, I don’t know who strikes the offending match…

  ‘Yeah, Neil and I were under our house making some sort of contraption or another. We heard the sirens. Couldn’t not! And came racing out. The gum trees behind Mrs William’s place had gone up. Wish I’d had a camera!’

  I smirked, picturing the fire trucks howling up our street. ‘What about those hoses, then?’

  ‘Yeah, the water was pouring out. I’d never seen anything like it.’

  ‘And I couldn’t believe how pretty it looked; streams with rainbows in them. Better than anything on the Telly!’

  Simon gave me a friendly shove. ‘Sure Catherine. And you missed the best bit. After Mum dragged you and Hugh screaming inside. Neil and I got to watch right down to the last billow of smoke from Mrs William’s shed. Just as well they saved that old biddy’s house otherwise you and your mate, you would have been mince meat! Although as I recall it, you were!’

  I could feel my bottom smart as Simon spoke. Mum had beaten me black and blue with the wooden spoon from the top of the fridge.

  ‘Hey Catherine, what about that boat? The one we made from the scrap metal from the tip? Fixed it with an old soldering iron. What a job! And we painted the name on it: HMAS UNSINKABLE. Great name!’

  ‘I remember carting it all the way over the road and up to the pond. The bloody thing weighed a ton. It only floated for thirty seconds. You blamed me of course.’

  ‘Did not.’

  ‘Sure you did. You blamed me for eve
rything. Even the sinking of the HMAS Unsinkable!’

  ‘Forget boats, now bikes, they were the go, don’t you remember? We rode them everywhere!’

  I pictured my beaten-up old Malvern Star. It carried me all over the Redcliffe Peninsula. I even rode it to school. I loved the wind rushing through my hair, although it didn’t actually rush. My hair was cropped way too short for that.

  ‘And what about all those weekends at the beach, eh? Weren’t they amazing?’

  Simon was right; our times at the beach were some of our best. We’d spend hours at the beach. Dad would balance on his haunches and beaver away, designing high-walled, moated fortresses and castles with turrets and drawbridges. He crafted strange creatures that even God hadn’t got around to designing.

  When I visited our beach as an adult I was shocked to see a desolate, windswept expanse of coarse sand littered with seaweed and rubbish. I took my shoes off but the grit got under my toes and the shells cut my feet. My beach didn’t hurt when I was little.

  Daddy used to turn simple strolls into magical mystery tours. We’d poke about in salty pools, steaming from the heat, taunting anemones until their tentacles closed around our fingers, or provoking cunjevoi into squirting out their load. We would trace periwinkles to the tiny mounds at the end of their tracks before digging them up, replacing them and tracking them to a new mound. Sometimes I’d hold a conch shell against my ear, like Daddy showed, or collect cuttlefish for our budgies back home.

  I was a water baby. When I was small I would hang onto Daddy’s hand, squealing with delight. A little older and we would wade out. I’d dive right under the dumpers, fingers pinching my nostrils together. Sometimes the waves would wash my feet out from under me, sucking me back under and spitting me out. Daddy would always be there to scoop me back up in time. And when we swam out past the breakers, I would feel all grown-up, but only for as long as Daddy stayed by my side.