Learning how to Breathe

by Neil, Linda;

  And why is that, Mum? I asked, laughing, trying to draw her back from the absent space into which she now seemed to regularly disappear.

  Because they find it harder to leave the womb than girls, she replied. Except for you. We all thought you would be a boy because you took ages to come out.

  Maybe I was scared to leave the womb, I laughed, aware of how my symbolic interpretation of things often used to make her eyes roll.

  Not like your sisters, she told me. They couldn’t wait to get out. They were just raring to go. She trailed off as she often does these days, withdrawing into her own thoughts. I am left to fill in the gaps she leaves by her silence, imagining words, inventing fragments that hang in the air between us.

  THE LONELIEST GOATHERD

  My nephew, Finn Neil, is born on 14 November, my father’s birthday. When Paul rings to announce his son’s arrival, I have never heard him so happy.

  He looks just like a Neil, Paul tells us on the phone from the hospital.

  What the hell does that mean? I ask, receiving his joy and giving it back to him. What does a Neil look like?

  I know his answer will be different to mine. To some, the Neil side of the family is a handsome lot: classically proportioned, refined, with large, well-shaped foreheads – to ‘contain all the brains’, as my grandmother used to put it. I always thought Dad’s relatives were a broody bunch; their overhanging lids and downward curving eyes seemed to indicate deep thinking, worry, and secrets held inside. According to some sources, Neil means ‘a king from Scotland’. Others say the name means ‘Irish chieftain’ or ‘champion’. In the Gaelic tradition it means ‘of dark complexion’; in a Cornish context it means ‘power’. In another – my favourite – it signifies ‘a cloud’.

  Just like Dad did, Paul replies with unrestrained delight in his voice. But then again a friend reckons all babies look like their fathers so that the fathers will fall in love with their own image and not leave.

  But you don’t look like a Neil – small, dark and handsome, I tease him. You’re fair and cute like Mum’s side of the family.

  The Cottrells, my mother’s side of the family, were humbler, more practical, less snobbish than the Neils. The Neils were dark-haired and brown-eyed, the Cottrells fair and blue-eyed. The name ‘Cottrell’ means ‘cottage’ or ‘cottager’: he or she who owns a cottage. My grandmother, Christina Augusta Cottrell, perfectly embodied this name – acquired through her marriage to my grandfather Albert – by originally owning the two cottages that our family lived in. The cottage at St Lucia was enlarged eventually into something big enough to be called a house; the fibro shack at the Gold Coast – where Grandma originally lived before selling it to Dad for us to use as a holiday house – was hardly roomy enough to qualify even as a cottage. If names signify something more than the letters that form them or a legal necessity, the type of union suggested by the names Neil – dark-complexioned champion king – and Cottrell – he or she who owns a cottage – was embodied by the marriage of my mother and father. When Dad, dark haired, olive skinned, newly departed from a position as head of the Strathfield seminary – a fallen king – co-joined with my practical, industrious, cottage-dwelling blonde-haired mother, it was more than a union of the dark and the light, it was a merging of a kingly man without a cottage with a humble young woman whose mother owned two.

  My brother shares the Cottrells’ practical streak. Now, to top it all off, he has been practical enough to beget a child to carry on the name of those Celtic champions. We rejoice in some more trivial banter, this bubbling celebration of new life.

  I can hear gurgling sounds in the background as I continue. And his eyes? What colour are his eyes?

  Well, they’re blue at the moment, Paul tells me, but that’ll change in the next few days.

  I give the phone to Mum. She is reluctant to speak even though this is a milestone for her – her first grandchild, from the son most likely to produce one for her, the only one of Mum’s five children who is married and who, he tells me later, she feels is happy with his life. I know Mum sometimes fretted about her unmarried daughters, but she never pushed the idea of marriage onto us. If she ever brought up the subject she might have understood perfectly well if I had told her that while many girls were dreaming of weddings and gold rings, I was dreaming of being a female explorer, a research scientist, a discoverer of new things. Perhaps we made you too independent, she later wondered about me and my sisters. You’re all just too used to doing your own thing.

  Mum loved her sons. Her ‘boys’.

  Joan: Boys need to let off steam much more than girls. I used to dread the days it rained because the boys couldn’t go outside then. They’d be inside all day throwing their cricket balls against the walls. I put my good china away just before my first child was born and never took it out again. Your father knew it was best to get the boys to run around as much as possible, to wear them out so they’d just come home when they were tired or hungry and not be so loud around the house. He was good like that. He thought sports would be better for the boys than music.

  According to Mum, Paul, the eldest of her two boys, was one of those lucky people who expected to be loved from the moment he was born. He has always been a man who seemed at ease with himself, who liked to get on with people, who liked being married. We all thought he would be a wonderful father. When I became interested in names and their meanings I thought that it might have had something to do with his name, which means ‘humble’. Perhaps a humble man is considered a good man, a man worthy of love. My other brother, Stephen, a name that means ‘crown’, which seems to perfectly suit his intellectual and refined demeanour, was also well loved, but more discreetly, I suspect. My two sisters also have names that would seem to bode well for the flowering of their finer natures: Cathie means ‘pure’ and Janice means ‘gracious’.

  I wave the phone in front of Mum, encouraging her to speak to this humble man whose good fortune it is to be so blessed with this expectation of always being loved. But she is distracted and worried about her state of mind and unsure if she can feel properly joyful at this milestone.

  * * *

  On the way to Westminster Hospital we stop at the Taringa Five Ways to buy fruit and flowers. Unable to even offer a smile, Mum waits in the car. It is a glorious November day in Brisbane. An unseasonable cool breeze is blowing while I pick out the most luscious bunch of flowers, but Mum is neither calmed nor cooled. She seems dislocated and anxious as we drive along the Brisbane River towards the hospital. Her face is tense and held in; I detect a clenching of the jaw and notice how distractedly she grips the armrest with her hand. I chat casually, encouraging her to breathe her way through her discomfort, trying to lighten the guilt she might feel about her lack of enthusiasm for this visit, marvelling too at the way fate works: that after years away from family duties I have returned for this day, while my mother, who has always ably fulfilled all her responsibilities, seems hardly able to enjoy it at all.

  She leans on my arm as we walk up to the maternity ward from the hospital car park.

  I’m so tired, she says wearily. How did I get this tired? I don’t know what I should do. Tell me what I should say. I should be happy, shouldn’t I? I should feel happy. I know I should.

  I put my arm around her shoulders and propel her gently up the driveway. I can’t tell you what to say, Mum. Just say what you feel.

  She begins to cry again. I don’t know what I feel. I just feel tired.

  To distract her, I take her for coffee and cake before we head up to the maternity ward. The hospital’s little café is staffed by volunteers; one is an old acquaintance of Mum’s. As I order tea and lamingtons, I notice how Mum shies away from contact, how she can hardly breathe from the fear she now feels at being out in public.

  When I first see Finn, he is wrapped in a white flannelette sheet lying under a halo of light on a baby table in the middle of a small
hospital room. Close up, Finn looks like a tiny version of a fully grown man. I love him deeply straight away. It enters me unexpectedly, this genetic bond, this wanting to linger near his breath, to smell his fresh skin, to be close to his murmurs and cries. I have to stop myself from becoming animal, from taking him to a corner of the airless private ward and holding him close to my heart, oblivious of any other claims on his little body, to hold his tiny face up to the light and offer him to the perfect blue November sky as a sign of new life and renewed possibilities.

  Instead, Paul and I joke briefly about the coincidence of his birth falling on the same day as Dad’s birthday.

  Perhaps he’s a reincarnated spirit, I tease him. Perhaps he’s Dad come back to watch over us.

  We all laugh, drawn closer by our shared love for the new child. I feel the biological pull as a kind of birth of something inside me too, a sense of something that wasn’t there before, reflected in the tiny body, the little crushed face, the sleepy eyes and curled fingers, and matted black hair brushed forward like an old man’s. Dad, I whisper out of earshot of the others who might take offence at my presumption. Finn, I sigh, nestling my cheek on his. Dad. Finn. For the first few hours, in the dislocated ecstasy of sudden love, the two names seem interchangeable.

  Mum seems a little confused by the occasion as she hangs back from the cluster of love in the centre of the room. Finn is placed into her arms by his mother, a girl from the country just like Mum, who also believes in the value of these simple family rituals.

  Joan, look what Paul and I have done. Kym smiles, exhausted yet radiant. I remember what you told me about how you forget the pain it took to get them here the minute you hold them and now I understand.

  It is easy to see the sudden arousal of love between Kym and Paul, who seems giddy with happiness. Their bubble of emotion is so private and palpable that I back away and pull up seats for Mum and me near the window. From here Mum can look at the newly flowered poinsettia trees outside if she needs a distraction from the emotional business of this birth.

  I’m sorry, Paul, she finally says. I hardly sleep anymore.

  Paul has always been a generous man and is so happy now that he is not offended by Mum’s state of mind. That’s ok, Mum, he tells her, beaming. We’re just glad you’re here, he reassures her.

  I know Mum is overjoyed at seeing her first grandchild but as I witness her behaviour in the maternity ward I understand that there could be something quite serious happening to her. It is unsettling for all of us to see. If our family had sometimes seemed like a whirlwind of music, sport and rowdy activity, Mum had always been the strong centre of the storm. She herself sometimes compared mothering five children to being a general in charge of a small army. But I hadn’t always been such a good soldier and in the family I was sometimes known by the term my Uncle Charlie first coined for me: ‘the little rebel’.

  When I was eight one of my first acts of rebellion had to do with the song ‘The Lonely Goatherd’ from The Sound of Music, which my mother had volunteered all three of her daughters to perform wearing bibbed skirts and babushkas and holding puppets dressed in lederhosen and alpine hats. Along with four other boys and girls, the three of us were supposed to represent the von Trapp family in a draughty room in one of the back streets of inner city Brisbane, the premises of Russell’s Music and Dance Academy.

  Unaccredited by any official organisation, these Academies of Song and Dance, these Schools of Voice, Strings, and Keyboard, were a kind of underground network of music teaching in Brisbane run by men and women like Russell, who may once have done a stint in the chorus of a show in Sydney or Melbourne before heading north to set up shop in Brisbane. They operated in a secret, lowbrow world, never directly referring to the Conservatorium of Music, which in those days and right up until the new millennium did not regard any academies that taught American show tunes, music hall medleys and tap dancing as either legitimate or musical.

  My mother worked at one of these academies playing the piano for Russell’s singing and dancing students. Russell was a short, boisterous man who fulfilled Mum’s dreams of being a professional musician by paying her a few dollars an hour for weeks of evening rehearsals for his regular Gala Night at the Academy shows. ‘The Lonely Goatherd’ was Russell’s idea, and it seemed logical that the three extra girls needed to complete the faux von Trapp ensemble would be provided by his eager-to-please accompanist.

  Despite how hard she worked and how little she was paid, I know Mum loved the thrill of being involved with these shows and thought her daughters should be equally as thrilled. It was also a feat of organisation for her to have all our meals cooked and frozen in separate containers – individually marked with our names according to our particular culinary tastes – so that each night of the week she was away at rehearsals we would have a different meal – with dessert accompanying each of them. But I had already begun to wage battles with Mum over the matter of violin practice and I was in no mood to cooperate over a goatherd, no matter how lonely he was. My refusal to wear the coordinated floral outfits made from the curtains in Russell’s mum’s lounge room, or to participate in Russell’s choreography, which involved making our puppets dance and do somersaults during the instrumental interlude, or, in the end, to perform at all, would become another step in my campaign of musical independence.

  It wouldn’t be the last piece of music I sat out, but it was the first major strategic withdrawal I made from the sound of my mother’s voice. In the end, looking bored and refusing to open my mouth did the trick. I was quickly sent off-stage by an exasperated Russell, in cohoots with my mortified mother. My protest was nonviolent and only partly successful; even though I was no longer expected to sing, dance or wear the pink floral babushkas and pinafores, I still had to accompany my mother and sisters to all their rehearsals, where I would sit slumped and sulking while Russell commanded his troops and my mother, his second-in-command, thumped away on the piano. I was also obliged to be in the audience for what turned out to be a charming and very melodious ensemble piece which the audience greeted with stamps and howls that Cathie and Janice absorbed with wide, exuberant grins lighting up their pretty faces.

  I was envious of their success, but not of the tortuous negotiations which rehearsals turned out to be, with Russell alternately barking and cajoling his inexperienced singers into performing professionally. Mum never said ‘I told you so’ about this triumph. Not directly. And neither of my sisters tried to rub salt into my wounded and stubborn pride. They didn’t have to. When they were asked to give a reprise performance at a bigger hall for an even larger and more boisterous crowd, I was – not unexpectedly – left out; as I was the next year when Russell decided to dress up his singing troupe as a group of Asian children to sing ‘I Whistle a Happy Tune’ from The King and I. But despite realising, even then, that my stubbornness could isolate and marginalise me, as well as exasperate my mother, there was no way, I whispered to myself when, as well as being left out of the concert I was left at home through all the rehearsals – the loneliest goatherd of all – that I could whistle anything, let alone a happy tune, with the extravagant Russell in charge of both my mother and the music.

  I still can’t whistle at all. Both my brothers are virtuosos. Paul – who uses a unique technique that involves throwing his head back and clenching his teeth in a half-smile – is a brilliant whistler. He could certainly have whistled that happy tune – if he’d been asked. I imagine he made Kym swoon and giggle with his perfect whistling of Cole Porter’s ‘Night and Day’ during their courting days, and he could make us all laugh with his whistled interpretations of any number of songs by Frank Sinatra or Fred Astaire. He was a wonderful, natural singer too, favouring supporting roles in amateur theatre productions of such musicals as South Pacific and Guys and Dolls in which he once sang the part of Nicely-Nicely Johnson for the Ignations Musical Society at Toowong. I went along, probably grumbling, to one of his per
formances with Mum, who attended every production in which her kids appeared or played in.

  I was surprised, even shocked that evening as I had no idea that my sports-mad, musically untrained brother could sing as beautifully as he did. I recall Paul’s buoyancy on stage, his ready grin, his slightly kooky charm, the obvious pleasure he took in wearing the nifty suit and rakish hat that was part of his costume. Most of all, though, I remember him hitting some high notes at the end of a song in such a pure falsetto voice that I felt I was being lifted up out of my seat. I turned to Mum in astonishment to see if she was as surprised as I was, but she was too busy beaming to return my look, perhaps overcome herself at how unexpected and joyful those fleeting sounds were.

  At the hospital now Paul isn’t singing though, he’s whistling a quite comical kind of lullaby to Finn, with sound formed through his trademark gritted teeth, as I steer Mum out of the room in search of tea and sandwiches.

  Perhaps a change of scenery will help calm her emotions, which at the moment seem to ebb and flow depending on her surroundings. We walk arm-in-arm to the cafeteria singing a little as we go and Mum is almost jovial by the time we run into Jonus Nicholson, a prominent doctor at the hospital and also one of Mum’s most dedicated singing students. Jonus is a vigorous, palpably confident man, who is also noticeably deferential to Mum.

  So do we call you Grannie now, Joan? he asks.

  She gives Jonus a comical withering look. Believe me, Jonus, no one is going to call me Grannie.

  I can see that only politeness stops Jonus from clapping Mum on the back as he would any other colleague.

  That’s the spirit, he says instead, bowing slightly. You’ll always be young at heart, Joan. We all know that.

  He prepares to move on – an important man in an important hospital has little time for chitchat. As his singing mentor, though, Mum has claims on his time. She calls him back with a theatrical whisper and asks to speak to him privately for a few moments.