I Came to Say Goodbye

by Caroline Overington

  I suppose I should tell you, it was me who gave her the nickname, the one she’s been saddled with her whole life. I was the one that called her Fat. I can’t say precisely how it happened, only that we had Pat, and Karen, who became Kat, and then Donna-Faye, shortened to Faye, was Fat. Like, Pat, Kat and Fat. And she was fat. Chubby-fat. Her legs had rolls. Her arms, too. The first time she sat, flat on her bottom, her belly swelled out like Buddha.

  Around the same time, there was a show on TV called A Country Practice. It had a wombat called Fatso. I’d say, ‘Come on, little Fatso’ and Fat would crawl across the floor, or else I’d say, ‘Into the car, Fatso’ making a big show of what a hefty unit she was. So, Fat just stuck. It was never a mean thing. It was about how we loved her.

  Back to Pat, though, pretty much the second Fat arrived, she sank into the baby blues. Did I have sympathy for her? I did, but I also thought, come on. The baby’s here, and the baby years don’t last long. You’ve got to pull yourself together.

  What she did instead was pull up stumps. I mean that literally. No warning, nothing. She got up one morning and said, ‘No, to hell with this.’

  I remember it like it was yesterday: twenty months after Donna-Faye was born; Kat was 12, and Paul was 11 and Pat got out of bed as normal, calm as you please, and said, ‘Med, to hell with this.’

  At first, I had no inkling what she was on about.

  I said, ‘With what, Pat?’

  She said, ‘With this. With you. With Fat. With Kat, with Blue, with my life out here, the washing, the drying, the folding, the putting away. To hell with it.’

  She wasn’t mad or anything. She was calm. I said, ‘Come on, Pat. We’ve got it good. The washing machine. My mother never had a washing machine. The linoleum’ because I’d put down linoleum by then, over the cement sheets. It was easier to clean, and it looked good.

  She said, ‘God damn the linoleum.’

  I shook my head and went to work, thinking, ‘Baby blues.’

  I must have been worried though, because around noon, I said to the boss, ‘Mind if I use the phone?’ And he said alright, so I called home and the phone rang out.

  I knocked off a little early and, as I got close to the house, I could sense something was different. I went through the flyscreen and there was no Pat, and no Blue, and no Karen, and no Fat. I might have panicked but then Blue and Karen drifted in, saying, ‘Where’s Mum?’ I said, ‘College’ and Blue, he said, ‘College?’ because it had been a while since Pat had gone off to college, and I suppose I thought Blue had forgotten about it.

  A short time later in came Mrs Cochrane from the property one block over, with Fat in her arms. She looked at me and said, ‘Everything alright, Med?’

  I said, ‘I don’t rightly know’ and I took Fat from her, and put her down to bed, and put dinner together and then I sat up in the armchair, waiting for Pat to come up the drive, but come morning, there was still no Pat – and there never was Pat, never again, not after that.

  Now, I know I’m taking a bit for granted, but if you’re anything like me, Your Honour, the fact that Pat did that – the fact that she walked out on me, on Blue, on Kat, on a baby 20 months old – well, that floored me. I mean, a woman doesn’t do that, does she? A mother doesn’t walk out on her kids, and especially not a baby, 20 months old. It’s not natural. It kind of defies the laws of nature, doesn’t it?

  I know that’s what my own mother thought. She told everyone, ‘It’s not normal. To my mind, there’s something wrong with a woman who would do what Pat’s done.’

  I said, ‘Pat hadn’t been happy about the baby’ and Mum, who’d had eight kids, had said, ‘What’s happy got to do with it? People have responsibilities.’

  I have to admit, I agreed with that. I didn’t think Pat had the right to go. I thought, I never once came home drunk and beat her or the kids. I didn’t gamble my pay. I handed over the whole pay packet. I lived on what Pat gave me.

  I thought, ‘There’s got to be some law that prevents Pat – that prevents anybody’s missus – from picking up and leaving, no reason given.’

  I’d think, Remember our vows, Pat? For better or worse, richer or poorer, death do us part? Remember saying that?

  My old man was dying – his cancer would shrink, then grow again – but the upside of dying is you lose interest in minding your own business, and you start telling it like it is.

  He asked me, straight out, ‘Was everything alright in the bedroom department?’

  I said, ‘I’m not sure I know’ but even now, I reckon it would be wrong to conclude that the marriage broke up over sex, because if marriages broke up over sex, the divorce rate would be a damn sight higher than it is.

  I was hurting like hell, obviously, and I was embarrassed, too, to be the bloke who got walked out on. Edna had told me, ‘The whole town wants to know what happened.’

  I said, ‘Well, you can tell them I’m buggered if I know.’

  There was a bit of confusion in the beginning about how I’d manage. Mum said she’d come up and take care of Fat but I thought, I’m probably a bit old to go relying on Mum. Besides which, Trish had cancer by then, and Dad did, too.

  I said, ‘No, it’s okay.’ Maybe I was thinking Pat will come back, and she’ll go ape when she sees that Mum’s taken over, so I set it up with Mrs Cochrane that she’d take on Fat during the day. She was happy to do it, wouldn’t even take any money. I told work I couldn’t be doing night shifts or weekends. A week went by, then a month. After three months, I suppose even I could see that Pat wasn’t coming back.

  One year into it, papers for a divorce turned up in the letterbox. Just like that, papers for the divorce. No note, no by your leave, nothing. I tore them up. I thought, No, Pat, I’m not giving you a divorce. You can go to hell. I got married for life, and so did you.

  But then more papers came and these ones said I was divorced. I didn’t accept it at first. I thought surely a man has got to agree? But, actually, a man doesn’t have to agree. The courts these days, they just wave the divorces through, and they call them ‘no-fault’ and that’s how it goes down in history – this marriage has ended, and it’s nobody’s fault. So mine was over, and if you want more of an explanation as to what happened, I suppose you’ll have to ask Pat, because she’s the one who pulled the plug.

  Chapter 3

  THERE ARE PROBABLY SOME PEOPLE WHO think Fat is the way she is because her mum walked out when she was little. I don’t believe it, and part of the reason I don’t believe it is that Fat didn’t actually seem that bothered when Pat walked.

  Obviously, she wasn’t yet two years old, and the first few days after Pat had gone, she cried a lot, and she said, ‘Mum? Mum? Mum?’ and Edna and Mrs Cochrane had to rock her and rock her.

  The fact is though, Pat hadn’t had much time for Fat. She wasn’t ever the sit-and-read-to-them-, or the rock-and-cuddle-them type.

  I thought, well, at least with Mrs Cochrane somebody’s giving her the time of day. Years later, after Fat did what she did, social workers told me, oh, when a mum leaves, or there’s a divorce, it cuts deep, and it can take years for the wound to come to the surface.

  Maybe that’s true. At the time though, my big worry wasn’t Fat. Part of my worry was actually me, and how hard I was taking it. I even went to the GP in Forster to ask him, ‘Doc, is it possible to die from pain?’ He was pretty shocked at that, but honestly, that’s how I felt, like the pain in my chest might squeeze the life out of me. The GP was good. He said, ‘You’re not going to die, Med.’

  I said, ‘It feels like I’m dying. It’s bloody agony.’

  He said, ‘It might feel like it. You might even be hoping that something will kill you. But it’s not going to happen.’

  He said, ‘What you’ve got to know is a marriage breakdown, it’s like a death. That’s what they say in the medical books. The stress level, it’s like when somebody dies.’

  He said, ‘I can give you some pills’ but I didn’t want pills. N
obody I knew would have taken a pill, not in those days, and not for that. What I wanted was for Pat to come to her senses, but seeing as I didn’t know where she’d gone, and seeing as she had no people – no family, nobody to call – there was no way to even try to talk her around. For a while there I was pretty sure I was seeing her everywhere. I’d see a lady in the supermarket, dark hair, about the right length, and my heart would leap up and I’d think, ‘Pat!’ and it never was Pat.

  That went away after a while. The pain did, too. If I had to describe how that happened, I’d say it burnt through me. That’s what it felt like, like I was burning inside and it had to burn itself out, and then, believe it or not, there came a point where it didn’t hurt every time I thought of it, and I even began to feel some gratitude towards Pat. Not for leaving. I mean, I’ll never forgive her for leaving. I still don’t get what I did to deserve it. But I was grateful she didn’t take the kids. So many blokes I knew, when the marriage went south, the wife took the kids, and the blokes, they weren’t just divorced, they were ruined.

  I still had the house. I still had my job at the Shire. I still had the kids. No bloke I knew ended up with the kids. Most blokes I knew, when the wife wanted out, they lost the lot. So there was that to be grateful about.

  There were people who thought I should get married again, and in a hurry, because I wouldn’t be able to cope with the kids. But there was nobody else I wanted to marry. Not then. Not now. I said I’d rather cope on my own.

  I went to my manager at the Shire and I said, ‘Mate, I need you to organise for me a five-day week, nine to five, no weekends, permanent.’ I said, ‘I know you’ve got things that need work, but I’ve got a little one at home, and her mother can’t care for her’ and he didn’t ask any questions, he just said, ‘Med, that’s no worries.’

  Next up, I went around to Mrs Cochrane and made an arrangement where she’d take Fat in during the day, and I’d pick her up from there, and that was okay with Mrs Cochrane. She’d been doing it since Pat left. Why not carry on?

  With Fat organised, I went up to Forster to talk to the teachers there about what had happened. Kat’s teacher, she told me straight, ‘Kat will be fine.’ Well, I knew that. Kat was star of the school and if I had to say anything about how she was acting in that first week after Pat took off, I’d say she was having the time of her life. She was the centre of attention. She was the girl with Big News, and lapping it up.

  The teacher, she said to me, ‘She’s so bright’ and I said, ‘Yeah, I know that’ and the teacher, she said, ‘There’s two ways you can handle this: you can keep her here and we’ll do our best, or you can send her up to Sydney to board.’ A lot of country girls, in those days, they still did that – went to Sydney to board. I said, ‘Oh, no, I can’t afford that’ but the teacher said, ‘Oh, Kat will get a scholarship’ and I said, ‘We don’t want something to which we’re not entitled’ because, until then, I thought scholarships were for people who couldn’t afford the school. The teacher set me straight. She said, no, there were schools that wanted kids like Kat – smart kids – to lift the grades of the whole school, make them all look good.

  She told me, ‘The school can say they’ve got a straight A student in the HSC, and everybody else gets charged more fees’ and I thought, Do you really want to be part of that, Med? and also, I didn’t want people to think, Oh, he’s sending her out to board. Maybe he’s not coping but the teacher said, ‘It’s probably not fair to hold her back’ so I raised it with Kat, and she didn’t surprise me when she said, ‘Yes, Dad, please, Dad, I want to go, Dad!’ It was actually Kat that rang the school and got the forms sent out, and she was the one who figured out what day she had to go into town to sit the test, and she got Edna to drive her in and wait for her, and Edna told me she was full of beans all the way home, talking about how great it would be if she could go. And just like the teacher said, she did pass, and she passed easily, and the next thing, a creamy envelope landed in the letterbox, this time with a brochure of the school with the indoor pool and the place for lacrosse and the list of things that Kat could do – French, Latin and water polo, and so on.

  It took a whole afternoon just to fill out all the paperwork and another day to pick up everything she needed – summer uniforms, winter uniforms, striped tie, straw hat – and then, just like that, she was gone. Boarding in Sydney, and happy as a lark about it.

  Did I have doubts about the life she was living at that school? Yes and no. I mean, I’d raised Kat to understand that some people, by luck mostly, have more than others, and some have less, and neither of those things tells you anything about the person. Edna thought oh, maybe the school will set her up, give her expensive tastes, or make her jealous of what others had, but Kat was stronger than that, and anyway, when the reports came in – bound reports, mind you, not scraps of paper like at the State school – they said Kat was top of this, or head of that, or captain of the swim team, and so I figured she was coping fine.

  Things were a bit different with Blue. He wasn’t bright like Kat. He wasn’t stupid, just not exceptional and, in any case, what he lacked in brains, he made up for in his heart. Honestly, I’ve never seen a kid with such a heart. He’d make friends with anyone, and if he saw a kid being picked on, he’d be first to step up and try to put a stop to it. He was also the kind of kid who brought home stray dogs with rib bones showing through, and he’d feed them up and take them to Pet Day, proud as punch of his dusty mutts and he couldn’t understand why Pat wouldn’t have them in the house.

  When his mum took off, his marks started to go down pretty much straightaway, and by 15, well, he was ready to quit and I was fine with that. I mean, you’d be a loser if you quit school at 15 these days, but back then, it wasn’t so unusual. Lots of boys left at 15; the girls did, too, and Daryl and me, we were able to get Blue onto the apprenticeship program at Forster Shire, and he stuck at that until he was 18 and fully qualified as a fitter and turner, and then he also got a driver’s licence, and then he told me, ‘Old man, I’ve got it in my mind to hit the road.’

  I was a bit taken aback. Blue hadn’t been driving all that long and he’d only just started making the adult wage, but I thought, okay, that’s normal enough for a kid to want to get around and see things. I said, ‘Where do you plan on going, Blue?’ and he said, ‘I have in mind Lightning Ridge’ and I thought, ‘Right. You’ve still got those dreams of striking it rich, have you?’ He’d had those dreams for a while. At 12 or maybe 13, he’d come home with a note from school saying the class was going to Sovereign Hill in Ballarat and could he go? I cobbled the money together and off he went.

  He came back wide-eyed. He’d panned for gold, he told me. He’d found some flecks. Maybe I should have told him that they put gold dust in those troughs to make more of the experience, that it was fool’s gold, not real gold, but he had lights in his eyes, and I thought, ah, let him believe it, and that was the only time I remember that Blue ever got an A for anything, when he did a school project on the gold rush.

  He drew maps of the mines, he cut out pictures, he taped his gold dust down on the poster paper with sticky-tape, and he gave it all to a teacher, who was pretty impressed. Blue said, ‘I wish I’d been there to strike it rich’ and the teacher told him, ‘There’s still places where a man can stake a claim, Blue, not just for gold but for opals.’

  Well, Blue came home that day, brandishing his A, saying, ‘I’m going to go back one day and stake my claim.’ And I’d said, ‘You can’t stake a claim in Ballarat anymore, Blue. But you can stake a claim at Lightning Ridge. Go there for black opals, they’ll make you rich.’

  Blue went straight back to school the next day, into the library, and confirmed to me that I was right, it was black opals, and some were as big as a man’s hand, and that was the type he intended to find. Meantime, could we get a gold detector and have a look around our own property for whatever gems might lurk there?

  I told him to forget it, there was nothing but rocks where
we were, and he said, ‘You never know’ and I was taken with his interest, and so we got ourselves an old metal detector from the Trading Post. I asked the bloke who sold it to me, ‘You ever find anything?’ He said, ‘Three pennies, and 42 tin cans.’ I said, ‘Well, let’s see if we have better luck.’ And weekends, I’d go with Blue into the hills, with him wearing the earmuff, headphone things that came with the device, and we’d beep-beep and swing the pole, and bugger me, we did find three pennies and 43 tin cans, so one better than the other bloke.

  Over time, I lost interest in the fossicking but Blue never did. Right up until he was eighteen, he’d often be out near the dam, beeping and digging, and so I suppose I shouldn’t have been too surprised when he announced that it was time to try his luck at Lightning Ridge.

  ‘We should go, all of us’, he said, but I put that idea to bed. By this time I’d been on the property outside Forster for almost 20 years and had no desire to pull up stumps. Tell me, Your Honour, do you reckon that might have been because some part of me still thought Pat might come back? Christ, I hope not. Then, too, there was Fat, who had only that year started at the local public school, and Kat, who at least needed a place to come home to if she ever felt inclined.

  Blue made the point that Kat never wanted to come home, and he saw no reason why Fat couldn’t come with us to the Ridge, saying there must be schools there, but I said, ‘Fat’s got the same right as you, to stick to one school.’

  Blue said, ‘Well, if you’d prefer I hung around …?’

  I said, ‘What in the hell you want to hang around here for when there’s a fortune in them thar hills?’ and he laughed with me, and said, ‘Maybe I better stay to keep you company, old man’ and I said, ‘I’m not much in the way of company, Blue. Just ask your mother.’

  Well, it had been some time since Blue had spoken to his mother. A package came one Christmas, when he was about 14, and letters came from time to time, too. I never asked what they said, and Blue never told me, and I don’t recall that he ever even wrote back. Maybe that was loyalty to me, I don’t know. In any case, he tried once more to get me on board about Lightning Ridge, saying, ‘It’ll be better with two of us to go over the claim’ but I said, ‘Blue, I’m just not the moving kind.’