‘Now, now,’ he says when we reach the narrow sitting room with its Ikea couch and ambushed by relics from other lives. He’s a gentle character, Mick. ‘Calm down. You’ll be able to get her in somewhere.’
And of course we will.
Australia isn’t a place where there aren’t any elderly and consequently no homes for them.
So!
If I wanted to take out my frustrations, I couldn’t do better than set about getting rid of the scentless carnations mouldering disgustingly in their glass vase on the mantelpiece. I will. I will do that.
‘Supposing,’ I say to Mick as he follows me into the kitchen and I ream out the slime and concertina the flowers on their stems into the compost bin, ‘that she’d actually had the good sense to go into assisted living before this? I guess there are people in that hostel who went there via the assisted living process, and what’s their reward for having chosen bloody Narrowlea? They get chucked out because the standards for hostel accreditation have been raised so high it’s impossible for anything more than thirty years old to meet them. We bloody well had to spend three solid months resurrecting her house from the rubbish heap it had become and sell it to get her into the place, now we have to go through the business of whether or not the bond rolls over for the next place, which might be a good deal more swank than Narrowlea and might cost a lot more. Or then again, it might be a dump. And it might be in Timbuktu. What’s going to happen in the future? Every Narrowlea person is going to be put through the same almighty disruption. What’ll happen to Amanda? What’ll happen to Neridda? They’ve lived there for years – it’s their home. It’s always the poor who get relocated. The bureaucracy of the time thinks they look untidy and don’t reflect well on the community and out the poor buggers go at the mercy of whosoever should deign to pick them up.’
‘Aren’t you exaggerating a bit?’
‘No, I’m not. It’s not as if they have reasonable temporary accommodation in Melbourne to tide people over while changes are made.’
‘It wouldn’t be feasible.’
‘I dare say it wouldn’t. And it would fill up and become permanent in no time. But we’re in the situation where it would be damned useful if there were a place these people could go until the job’s done, like a serviced hotel with a garden to sit in. Instead, it devolves back on those who’ve done the horrible deed already to do it all over again. I feel utterly trapped. Not to mention used. There’s no compensation for this kind of thing, no onus on the closing home to do more than put us in the hands of an agency. And there’s nothing to say that we won’t be in exactly Stella’s position ourselves when our turn comes.’
‘Not many people reach her age.’
‘Well, speak for yourself. Those members of her family who don’t die in battle are very long-lived. I might be, too. I’m not just going to sit back and let it all happen. I could opt to be knocked off, I suppose, but while I’m fit enough and well enough, I want to have my go at life. So far, I’ve barely had a look in for looking after other people.’
‘I know,’ says Mick, ‘my mother was a single parent who looked after her mother.’ We’ve talked about this many times. Mick understands and I’m very grateful for it. His mother was like me, the family member who’s been singled out one way or another to bear responsibilities that others, if they’d been here, might have shared.
No wonder people drink and take drugs – you’ll find among the drinkers and the drug takers the folk who didn’t warrant a place in a society that then turns around and says that they’re the problem – or that there is no society.
But there’s no point in saying any of this. It’s obvious. Politicians who say things such as ‘no child shall live in poverty’ are just creating an opportunity to make themselves weep on camera. The people who urge them to say it are deluded and the people who listen and let their hearts be softened by it are deluded. If you abolish poverty, you abolish the poor. Sweep them off the streets into the dustbin of history so that middle-class jackanapes won’t have to look at them.
Mick is doing four days’ worth of washing up while I stand around cursing and fretting. He shops, he cooks and looks after my house and his, which is miles away in a country town. He drives up and down to the country to teach around my timetable. He spends his weekends with me. He thinks we ought to get married but what have I got to offer Mick? An old mother who seems set to live forever; Nin, a pioneer of lesbian parenting whose father, David, is a lunatic who’d like to have my blood in a cup; and Eli, my unorthodox, danger-addicted son. Mick has sons but they are not like Eli; in Mick’s mind, there is an idea of a son that bears no resemblance to Eli.
Oh, where is my beautiful little rosy-cheeked boy, my little companion, my joy and steadfast friend? On a day like today we’d go fishing. We wouldn’t catch anything, because our version of fishing was following bubbles on the top of the brown Yarra as we rambled the bank with the dog. If a romantic disaster beset me, as it often did, there was my blue-eyed boy. Once, when a lover failed to turn up at a train to see me off on a holiday, it was ‘Don’t cry, Mum. He’s not worth it.’ He was six. Then he said, as the train clattered out of Spencer Street, ‘Come on Mum, dinner in the diner, nothing would be finer!’ For a few magic years you think you know who you’re looking at as young life unfolds so gorgeously before your eyes.
Eli’s visit home has been very worrying. He’d rented a flat somewhere and wouldn’t tell me where. Nin hardly saw him and he put in once-a-week appearances at my home where he’d either play a few games with Nin’s son, Daniel, or lounge about dispiritedly, sighing and beginning to put questions that he couldn’t adequately frame.
Was it just the way he saw it or were people in general completely without conscience? I’d try a few answers such as I didn’t think the world was conducive to having consciences, that I was a person who had once had a conscience, but that it became heavier and heavier as I grew older and somewhere in middle age I had to put it down to rest or die under the weight. In my life the world had shifted from the morality of extended care that prevailed after the war to the morality of an insistence on peace during Vietnam and on again, in an utterly bewildering way, to the radical and widespread notion that greed is good after Vietnam. The last shift seemed to happen when Eli was a teenager and he told me that I was blowing my car horn at all the wrong places during football matches and cricket games. There was I, cabling cricket jumpers on the sidelines in the old bomb and remembering ‘play up, play up and play the game – win or lose, the end’s the same!’ from high school and thinking he’d just done something brilliant and he’d say afterwards, ‘You just don’t understand. It only matters if you win.’ I certainly didn’t understand, the old philosophy felt right, it felt very right, even though – on reflection – it came from England and was an injunction to youth to obey the rules of the game and die for king and country. And after all was said and done, England had won, so it wrote the history and the songs. Those rules, I suppose, were altered when the US gained its ascendancy over old England and colluded with it to become ‘winner takes all’. Subsequently we’ve all been caught in the greed-is-never-good dilemma, gazing at our own bejewelled belly buttons for want of other places to hang the bling that everyone has and talks about incessantly because fairness is unfashionable: ‘Now, couldn’t you tell us where you’re living, dear?’
‘You wouldn’t want to know.’
And away he’d go, brows knit and full of the sort of lassitude that sends every mothering type in search of tonics. I’d want to commiserate with him, recommend some good books, suggest we take in a show or two, or teach Dan some new tricks, but there was no enthusiasm in him for anything.
Eli first went travelling when he’d finished his journalism course at university. He was going to ‘get rounded’ he told me. He was going to put the lessons of his childhood to the test. He was going to visit the third world on the money he’d made as a night stacker at Coles (i.e. I was going to fork out when he got i
nto difficulties) and see for himself why it was that other people continued to be poor while we were swimming in glut.
He saw things that most men of his age had not yet imagined: the tunnels in Vietnam where the Viet Cong hid, playing tricks on the Americans with false trapdoors covering spiked pits and circular tunnels that led nowhere and were inescapable in the pitch darkness; the torture chambers of Phnom Penh, lined with numbered photographs of the slain – there he found children playing among graves and swinging from the very scaffolds their forebears had swung from by their necks. In Calcutta, he saw women and children delving through refuse like rats, and was so dispirited he became ill with amoebic dysentery from drinking unclean water.
He went to Pakistan through India, crossing the border at Lahore and then going south through the Punjab and Sindh to Karachi. His original plan had been to go from Karachi to Cairo and then into Africa and on to England, but what happened on the way to Karachi made him change his mind. He’d taken buses and local transport because he wanted to see how ordinary people travelled and anyway, he was on a budget, a very low budget. On the last leg of the trip, the bus broke down and he got on the back of an extremely overcrowded Toyota ute that came to the rescue. As he was climbing on board, an overburdened young woman handed him up a bundle; in her other hand she had a chicken in a sack and there was no way she was going to be able to hang on carrying both loads. Eli was pushed forward and lost sight of her, but found himself with room for his backside on the side of the ute’s tray. He soon realised he had a wet lap and when he looked into the bundle, a little face was looking back at him. He’d been given a baby to mind – so he tickled it and played with its cheeks and hands. It took some hours to reach Karachi: the baby was very good but Eli’s arms were aching. Although he kept his eye out for the woman, he couldn’t see her for the crush. As the numbers thinned he imagined he must have forgotten what she looked like, and his growing fear was that the baby had been dumped on him. People started giggling at him, so he played the clown and got the baby laughing as though it was his. It was wet and he unswaddled it as far as room allowed. To his horror, he saw that its legs were malformed. It was a baby girl who would never walk. The mother, of course, had disappeared.
Eventually he was set down in the Bolton Market area in central Karachi, his arms still full. On what he thought was the way to a police station he crossed the path of a policeman and explained his predicament. The man waggled his head the way Pakistanis and Indians do. ‘She’s probably older than she looks,’ said the policeman and he took Eli to make his acquaintance with the cradles around Karachi put out to take unwanted children. It was a large, deep, solid cradle, covered by a roof on poles so that in wet weather, a child placed inside wouldn’t get wet.
‘What, we just leave her there and walk away?’
‘Yes,’ said the policeman, ‘you just leave her there and walk away. Don’t look back.’
‘The mother can’t be found?’
‘No. If she wants to find her baby, she will come here to find it, but she knows that by leaving it here, it will be taken care of. She can’t look after it.’
‘But I saw her, I can tell you where she got on and what she looked like…’
‘The woman you saw might not even be the child’s mother. This little one has had polio, who knows what’s happened to her family?’
So Eli, who had done his best to fix up the sodden nappy, placed his baby in the cradle and walked off, but couldn’t bear to go far. How was a little girl going to get by in that condition in Pakistan? The baby started to scream when she was parted from him, tearing his heart.
He took a room in a backpackers’ hostel from where he could keep watch. Half an hour or so after he’d put her down, a woman in anonymous workaday shalwar kameez came along and picked her up. Eli decided to follow and see what happened. He wrote that he felt like a stupid Westerner, full of ideas of rescue and rehabilitation, while all the time knowing that although he could visit a foreign land, feed himself and be fed and sheltered as a visitor, he was in reality a helpless bystander. He was dogged by the feeling of being alone and unable to be present in the reality around him.
He’d never heard of the abandoned child system of Pakistan. What he learned made him want to write about it and the foundation that, since the nineteen-fifties, has run the biggest private ambulance system in the world and developed clinics, adoption agencies, hospitals and shelters for people in need. For the first time in his travels, something was in line with what he had learned as a middle-class youth in a prosperous country. He had learned more than ‘winner takes all’; he’d learned to care and that caring is the beginning of belonging. He hunted down the founder of the foundation and organised to meet him. He was a very famous man in Pakistan, a Muslim of a minor sect who had no interest in pushing his religion, only in obeying the Quran by being a good person. Eli was flattered that such a person would make time to meet a naive young would-be journalist from Australia and wrote home to say he’d had his visa extended and was going to stay a while in Pakistan and find out more about it.
Eli has always loved children, although he has none himself. He loved his childhood. Notwithstanding that his father dumped us, he was a happy and imaginative child, but lackadaisical to the point where he’d turn up at his primary school in one set of clothes and come home dressed completely differently.
By the time David Silver came into our lives, he’d been smartened up a bit by a change of schools but he was still happy-go-lucky. The new environment – all male to compensate for an oversupply of women in his home life – gave him esprit de corps; there was a uniform to wear and it took a couple of years for his old habit of costume swapping to reassert itself. By the time he was fourteen and star of the school cricket team, his alarming propensity for losing expensive pieces of kit devolved into his being put in charge of the lost property box and from then on, he had an article for every occasion. He also had a side business, betting lost property fines on the football pool. I took news of the football pool in my stride, but, with hindsight, I can see that for the first time a rascal was beginning to reveal himself as being on board with my blue-eyed boy. This rascal was too laid-back to remove things like detention notes from the pockets of his borrowed trousers before they went in the washing machine: Coretti missing periods one and two. Four hours picking up papers in the school grounds and organising the rubbish, when Coretti had started out on his bicycle at crack of dawn. As for the punishment of rubbish removal, Eli wasn’t Henry Coretti’s grandson for nothing: Dadda used to haunt the dump for material. They were doing their work, that school, bringing out the inner boy.
Confronted with the evidence of tardiness at class, a look of deep pain would come over his face. He’d say things like, ‘They made a mistake.’ But it was a mistake ‘they’ often made and a couple of undercover trips on the tram showed me why he wasn’t reaching school before ten o’clock. She was a pretty little thing who played the violin at the neighbouring girls’ school and she was spending a lot of time on detention for lateness, too. They’d sit around snogging up the back of cafes in Glenferrie Road. David thought it was funny and told me to lay off him, but then, David would get stuck into him for being on the phone half the night sorting out the romantic problems of the sister school’s orchestra.
David had a double attitude towards Eli – on the one hand, he couldn’t allow him any literary or artistic success and he would say he was unintelligent; on the other, he couldn’t deny Eli’s sporting prowess, so he praised it in that backhanded way that men do when the most they can say is that a kid’s performance was okay but it could have been better. Eli was actually a sporting star and David, a wisp of a man, had no talent for it at all.
Both David and Eli loved sporting statistics and among the feminist literature of the household were cricketing, footballing, tennis and Olympic books of records that were sometimes pored over for whole afternoons while balls were biffed around television screens during finals.
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Eli was in sympathy with a companion male in a predominantly female household. The relationship would come unstuck, however, when we knew that David had lost his temper and attacked Allegra. Then Eli had a battle within his growing body, a desire to wallop David once and for all, offset by his knowledge of David’s demoralising background. David was the illegitimate son of an insecure young woman who left him with her parents after her lover died and then went in search of another man and when she found him, he decided that he didn’t want to take on David. As Eli grew, the conflict in him transformed itself into a realisation that he had power in the household. There were Nin and Allegra to protect in front of me. There was David to stand over, to tacitly threaten and cajole. There was an adult personality to formulate in a situation of intermittent family crisis. David was violent. He’d beaten up Allegra. He was sometimes aggressive towards me and he might harm Nin. This situation called up resources in Eli that hadn’t before been realised.
Eli adored Nin, who was, indeed, an adorable baby. He liked to mind her and to play with her and it made a beautiful spectacle for Allegra and me. But not for David, who was jealous. Eli and Nin happily romping around confronted David with his own sad childhood circumstances – a household in which he made fleeting appearances between terms at boarding school and grandparents who would sometimes leave him at school, the only kid in the boarding house, during the holidays. He’d been lonely, demoralised and frightened.
To offset the deficiencies of love in his young life, David became a hard and conscientious worker; he was very self-disciplined and productive and here, he had the advantage over Eli – Eli was by nature haphazard.
During the break-up of David and Allegra after David wrecked my show at Mad Meg, Eli disgusted Allegra by acting as go-between instead of showing outright contempt for a vicious, violent person. She tried to account for David with feminist rhetoric, but for Eli, that is not where David fitted: his viciousness was learned. Viciousness, according to Eli, was an emotional tangle that could be unknotted. Eli was going to spend his adult life trying to unknot it. That way, he would save the world from itself. Eli, like Allegra and me, was full of reforming zeal.
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