With the second child on the way, I went up to the Newcastle Shire, and asked the bloke there to take me on. That was Pat’s idea. She wanted me to have a job that paid a wage, one that came to me in an envelope, with some union protection.
She said, ‘If you stay out on your own, you’ve got no protection in the down times. You want a job for life. If you can’t get into the bank, go to the Shire. If you work your way up, you could get a manager’s job.’
I suppose that was the first sign she wasn’t all that happy with who she’d married. I didn’t want a desk job. I’d been happy on the building sites. I liked to be outdoors.
There were other signs that we weren’t matched. First up, Pat couldn’t stop saying that we lived like bush cockies. What she meant was, we had a weatherboard house and everybody she was coming to know, from the local shops, were in brick veneer houses on the new estates outside Forster.
I said, ‘That’s all very well, Pat, but it’s mortgage hill. Those people are paying out half of what they earn to live up there.’
Pat didn’t see things like that. She saw that they had – mod cons, she called them – what we didn’t. She wanted a kitchen with lino. She wanted a carpet sweeper. She wanted town water. We were still on tanks.
She told me, ‘I run the bath for the kids, and the leaves get in the tub.’
I’d loved that as a kid. A slimy leaf in the tub, maybe with a bug on it to examine. I said, ‘I can hardly force the shire to get town water on’ but Pat, she still blamed me.
I did my best to smarten up the place, to get Pat smiling. We were first in the Shire, almost, to get the Hills Hoist. I phoned up Daryl and asked for his help, putting it up. We put it out in the back paddock where it could really spin and get the clothes dry. I thought we’d done Pat a favour, but Pat, when she saw it, she said, ‘It’s too far from the house.’
I thought, how can it be too far from the house? But then I saw her once, running out to get the sheets off the line, the rain exploding in the dust around her feet, and I thought, okay, fair enough, it probably is too far from the house, but we’d concreted it in, and it couldn’t be moved.
It wasn’t just the Hills Hoist she hated, though. She couldn’t stand the heat under the corrugated iron roof. She wanted to know why we couldn’t get a fan, but nobody had a fan. A fan was what people got if they were a bit soft. She wanted to know why we couldn’t get cladding. People were getting cladding, like fake bricks, over fibro, but I said, ‘No, let’s just paint’, and she said, ‘Why paint? It peels and it fades and in five years you have to do it over again’, the point being, I suppose, that people in town, in the brick veneers, they didn’t have to paint. I got insulation for her instead; laid the batts myself.
She hated the isolation. She told me once, I look out the window, Med, and it’s thistles, it’s paddocks, and it’s old cars that Daryl has dumped down by the fence. I said, well, plant something. Women like to garden, don’t they? There were women around who took pride in gardens. They had roses, carnations, but Pat didn’t want carnations. It wasn’t the thistles she hated. It was being in a place that had thistles, if you see what I mean.
On one of those occasions when I tried to talk to Pat about what might make her happy, she said, ‘If I hadn’t got pregnant with Kat, I would have liked to travel’ and I’ve got to tell you, that was a unique idea. Travel where? To do what?
Pat said, ‘We don’t even go into Sydney, to visit Bondi’ but Bondi was, excuse my French, a shithole full of nothing but New Zealanders and turds floating in the water. Pat said, ‘There’s a ferry. We could take it to Manly.’ I thought, what on earth would you want to go to Manly for? To go there, and then come back? Pat said, ‘It’s called sightseeing. It’s a day out.’ She said, ‘I want a grown-up life, not picking up after kids all day.’ I said, ‘Well, phone up Edna’ because Edna wasn’t far away, and over time, she’d had three kids, all boys. Kat and Blue, they loved their cousins, and wasn’t that what women liked to do, get together, talk about kids? But Pat, she said, ‘Edna makes me want to bang my head on the kitchen table.’
She said, ‘Why can’t you leave me the car, so I can at least drive somewhere?’ In those days, we had the Ford Falcon – the 500, bench seat in front – but it was too big for Pat to drive, and anyway, I had to take the Ford to work.
Pat said, ‘Well, we could get a second car’ and there were people doing that, getting second cars, one small one, a Japanese one, but Jap crap? I wouldn’t have it in the drive, and in any case, we would have had to borrow, and aside from the mortgage, that wasn’t something we believed in doing. I wasn’t going to go to the bank to ask for a loan for a second car. The manager, he would have said, ‘What makes you think you need one? Isn’t one enough?’ Beyond that, I wouldn’t have taken a loan for a second car. My old man told me, you want something, you save up for it, or it will cost you more and be worth less. Pat was as good as me about it. I put her in charge of saving. She kept money in a tin. We saved up for what we needed. For Pat, that meant a washing machine. Another time, she bought a carpet sweeper.
Now, I don’t want anyone to think that every day Pat spent with me out on the property at Forster was a day she’d rather have spent in hell. There were times when Pat seemed quite content. In ’74, or maybe ’75, she got into a cooking spell. She collected recipe cards. If you collected enough, you got a plastic box to put them in, with a lifting lid. She tried different things on the kids. She had Rice a Riso conquered, and Ham Steaks and Pine apple. She bought four tall glasses for desserts. She’d put pineapple rings and glazed cherries, and tinned apricots and jelly in there, and serve it with long spoons.
A bit later she got into sewing. She wanted a Janome and she saved, and Dad chipped in, and she got one. Once a fortnight she’d go to the haberdashery and pick up material, folded over itself. The kids were banned from going near it. She had pincushions and button jars and rows of cotton. She’d use black-handled scissors to cut paper patterns and pin them down, and then make dresses for Kat that tied at the shoulder, and pants for Blue that he refused to wear.
If there was tension in the house at those times, it was mostly over drink. Pat will tell you that I drank. I don’t say I didn’t like a beer. I did. I still do. There was a time when I was into home-brew. Most blokes were, around that time. I had no problem with women drinking. Some companies were starting to make wine. I wouldn’t have minded if Pat had had a moselle once in a while, but she didn’t like the taste of it.
I reckon her problem with my beer had more to do with her old man, and how he’d liked to get drunk.
In any case, there were times when Pat seemed pretty content. She’d been unhappy when the kids were really little – so many buckets of nappies to soak, so many loads of washing to do, all the usual complaints – but they grew like weeds and were soon on their feet, and then off at school.
She did the school-mum thing for about a year. Taking them there, picking them up, homework, dinner on the table. Then she announced that she’d had enough of being at home. She was going back to work.
She said, ‘Times have changed, Med. Plenty of married women are working. I’ll take a college course during school hours. I’ll get a qualification, then I’ll get a job.’
I said, ‘What job?’
She said, ‘I haven’t yet decided.’
I was curious. I said, ‘What do you want to study?’ Because to me, there was nothing worse than school.
She said, ‘Arts.’
I thought she meant arts, like painting. Pat had never shown an interest in painting.
She said, ‘Arts is not painting, Med. Arts is humanities. It means literature. It means history. I might even do women’s studies.’
I thought that was funny. What was women’s studies? I said, ‘They have studies in how to be a woman? Do they have them for blokes too?’ but she wasn’t in a joking mood.
I said, ‘Aren’t you going to feel a bit of a goose, 28 years old, going to a college?�
�� but she said there were a lot of women going back. There had been a story in the local paper about a 70-year-old woman getting her high school certificate. Pat said, ‘I won’t be the oldest.’
I said, ‘And what about the cost, Pat?’ but she’d done her homework on that, too. She said, ‘It’s free now, Med’ and I had heard that. It was one of the things that Whitlam had done before they booted him out. He made the universities free.
I still had my doubts about it. Pat had a home to run. But there was no stopping her. She said, ‘I’ve done my time in this house, Med. I’ve been home every day for 8 years. Now I’m doing something for me.’ That was radical.
She said, ‘I don’t care if I have to do it part-time. I don’t care if I have to do it at night. I don’t care if it takes me eight years to get a qualification and 10 years to get a job. I’m not waiting on you and the kids, hand and foot, for the rest of my life. I’ve got other plans.’
And so, for a couple of years, from about 1979 onwards, that’s what Pat was doing. Three days a week she’d get the kids up and walk them to school, and then she’d walk to the station and get the train, and go into college, and take her classes. She made an arrangement with Mrs Cochrane down the road to collect the kids on those days, and then she’d swing by on her way home, pick them up, and bring them home for tea.
When all this started, I’d said something like, ‘And who is going to make the tea?’ And Pat had said, ‘Well, Med, maybe you’ll have to make your own’ and at first I’d thought she was serious, but she still made the tea on college days. We just ate it a bit later and there was no more experimenting with the recipe cards. We had chops. We had baked beans. Some nights we just had eggs. Then she’d do the washing and ironing and folding. I had my own recliner in those days. I’d have my feet up and I’d say, ‘Come put your feet up, Pat,’ and she’d say, ‘Is the washing going to do itself?’ I learnt not to put my nose in.
At around 10 pm, when a normal person might be going to bed, Pat would sit down at the sewing table – cleared of the Janome now – and work on her assignments, sometimes until two in the morning.
A year into college, books started turning up, books that my brother Daryl had told me to keep an eye out for. There was The Women’s Room and The Feminine Mystique, and when I mentioned that one to Daryl, he said, ‘Well, let that put the fear of God into you, Med, because I know a bloke whose missus brought that book home and read it and threw it down and said, “Things are going to change around here!” and next thing, the poor husband was having to push the carpet sweeper around.’ He said, ‘You want to make sure she doesn’t turn into a Women’s Libber.’
I’d seen stories in The Mirror about Women’s Libbers. I wasn’t entirely sure what it meant. It seemed to be something that was mostly happening in the cities. But then one day Pat brought out a list of things she did around the house – the washing, folding, sweeping – and showed me how if she got paid for doing each thing, she’d be earning more than me.
I said, ‘But those aren’t paid jobs, Pat.’ Obviously, I missed the point.
There was one other thing about Pat’s college that was good. It changed for the better in the way things were done in the bedroom. Now, I don’t want you to think I’m one of those rogue blokes who never left his missus alone whether she wanted it or not. I was never like that with Pat. I did have my expectations – wasn’t that why people got married? – but pretty soon I understood that my sex drive, and Pat’s, they were out of whack. To be honest, Your Honour, I’d been surprised how little sex there was in wedlock. I’d been led to believe it would be on tap once I got married. That’s what young men think. Older men know better.
The truth is, Pat didn’t really like it. I was okay with that. Some women don’t. But sometimes I’d say, ‘Pat, would it really be that much of a big deal for you just to do it sometimes?’ What I meant was, I don’t need bells and whistles, just some relief. But Pat looked at me like I was scum of the earth when I said that. It turned me off, quick smart.
That changed when Pat went to college, though. I don’t know whether it was the women’s books or the other ladies at the college that changed her mind, or that the kids were older and not likely to come barging in, but for a while there, it seemed she was into it, and even wanting to try new things. I don’t want to overstate it. It’s not like we started swinging from the chandeliers, but there was a bit more.
Then one day, Pat actually spoke to me about sex, or at least, about contraception. She said, ‘I don’t want to have another baby, Med. I want you to get the snip.’
My first reaction was, ‘You can forget that, Pat.’
She said, ‘Alright’ and then it was back in the doghouse for a few more weeks.
I went crawling back. I said, ‘Why do I have to get the snip? That’s an operation. I don’t want anyone coming near my old fella with a pair of scissors.’ I know what you’re thinking – typical bloke.
Pat said, ‘I’ve been on the pill nearly 10 years. People say you shouldn’t go on it for that long.’
I asked her about getting her tubes tied. I’d heard that some women did that, got knots tied in their tubes. Pat said, ‘Why does it always have to be me, Med? You are the one that wants it all the time, you should get the snip.’
I talked it over with Daryl. He shocked me, said he’d already had it done. His wife had made him too. He said it was no different.
‘You still shoot,’ he said. ‘But you shoot blanks.’
Daryl’s wife gave Pat the doctor’s number. There were eight men on the ward having the same thing done. We all came up sore. I joked with them, ‘Better be worth it!’
‘I was too tender to try out the doctor’s handiwork for the first couple of days, but then I said, ‘Well, Pat, should we give it a whirl?’ I didn’t tell her that the Doc had said we’d have to wait six weeks. Six weeks! I thought, come on, if there’s a knot in it, there’s a knot in it, so we had a go.
Ten weeks later, Pat came home from college, and instead of making for the kitchen to put on the tea, she took the keys to the Falcon off the hook, got in the car and drove straight into a fence post.
I ran out onto the porch. I could see Pat behind the wheel – forehead on the wheel – the windscreen shattered, and barbed wire coming in through the glass.
I ran over to the car and pulled the driver’s door open. I said, ‘Have you lost your mind, Pat?’
She said, ‘I’m pregnant.’
I helped her out of the car, back up to the house. I put her on the lounge. She was like a doll. I had to put her knees together. I had to get a tissue to wipe her face.
For a long time, she didn’t move. I told her I thought she might have been. She’d been sick and she’d been tired, and she figured she had a virus, and I’d told her to go to the GP, thinking maybe she’s fallen in. He’d pressed on her belly and said, ‘Mrs Atley, you’re pregnant’ and she said, ‘This can’t happen. He’s had the snip’ and the GP said, ‘Did you wait? You have to wait six weeks. It doesn’t take straightaway. Med would have had live ones in the system.’
She said, ‘Did you know that, Med?’
I said, ‘Pat, I was groggy at the hospital. I didn’t take it all in.’
She said, ‘You knew that, didn’t you, Med?’
I didn’t have the kind of marriage that allowed for lies, Your Honour. My life isn’t the type that allows for lies. I told her, yeah, I knew. But I thought it would be alright.’
It was the only time she ever hit me, Your Honour. Or almost hit me. I grabbed her wrist just in time. I didn’t hit her back. I’m not that kind of man.
When I saw she’d calmed down a bit, I got on the blower and called up the old man and told him the news. He had cancer by then. It wasn’t like now, where you fight it and fight it. We knew he was on his way to the grave. He loved the grandkids. I knew the idea of another one would cheer him up. He said ‘Your swimmers must be strong bastards.’ He knew I’d had the snip, and he was proud of me fo
r getting around it. He and Mum had pushed out eight, remember? To them, two kids wasn’t a family. Four was getting close, but two?
After I’d chatted a bit, I went back to Pat on the lounge.
She said, ‘Pregnant, at my age.’
I didn’t think she had to worry. Mum had been over 40 when the last of us came along. These days, 40 is when they get started! But it wasn’t that she was really worried about.
She said, ‘I’ve done this, Med. I’ve done the nappies and the bottles and the broken sleep and the potty.’
I said, ‘Don’t worry. I’ll get the change table out of the shed and we’ll pick up a bassinet at the op shop. We don’t have to spend a fortune. And the kids will love it. Why don’t we tell them now?’
I was thinking, just give her time. She’ll come around. It’s been a bit over 10 years since she had one in the oven. She’ll get used to the idea.
Well, that obviously didn’t happen. The pregnancy wasn’t easy for Pat. The smell of anything – me and my smokes, especially, or maybe just the whiff of me – made her sick. I’d leave the house in the morning to the sound of Pat with her head down the toilet and I’d come home and find her the same way, or else she’d be at the sewing table working on a college assignment, kids not fed, no tea on the table, and she’d say, ‘Don’t ask me to get up, Med. I’m going to finish this course before the baby comes if it’s the last thing I do.’
And then, well, Donna-Faye came. And she was nothing at all like the other two, not like Kat or Blue. She wasn’t carrot-topped, for one thing. She had brown hair and was round.
Straightaway, I thought, ah, this is my girl! With her big belly, she looked just like an Atley. I know you’re not supposed to love one more than the others, but it wasn’t long before people were saying she was Daddy’s girl. I’d carry her around in the crook of my arm. Maybe it was experience. I wasn’t as nervous as I’d been with the first two. I knew they didn’t break if you dropped them. The crying and the fussing didn’t faze me. I knew it didn’t last.
I Came to Say Goodbye Page 3
