Diving into Glass

by Caro Llewellyn

It was a wonder the house never burned down. Sometimes our backyard looked like an experimental art installation. When my mother burned something on the stove, which happened more often than seemed reasonably possible, she put the blackened pots out in the sun and doused the burnt bottom and sides in water, then tipped bicarbonate of soda onto the affected areas. There they sat until the black softened and we could scour or chisel out the inch-thick chunks of charcoal.

  We had a large lift-top freezer the size of a small cupboard. It didn’t fit in our kitchen, so it sat on the porch near the back door. Our mother filled the freezer with cartons of unfinished milk, squares of leftover cheese, meat, casseroles, fish heads and chicken bones she boiled to make soup.

  The fish soup could have been delicious, except that the scales were never scraped off properly so you had to sieve them out between your teeth as you slurped. Lifting a spoonful of broth with a large fish eye looking at you took away a lot of the enjoyment too.

  The problem with the deep freezer was that the food just kept stacking up. You could never find things or know what was underneath the last layer. There were no compartments, drawers or lift-out baskets. It all just built up and eventually froze into one solid mass. Nothing was labelled or put into containers. Leftover stews were tipped into a used plastic bag and dropped in for later. But later never really came and, if it did, I never wanted to eat it.

  I thought of the freezer as a graveyard. I dreaded opening it or watching my mother take something out and throw it in the sink to be defrosted for the evening’s meal. But one day the deep freeze was finally filled to the brim. I knew it would be down to me to make it right. I waited until my mother left, took the chair from the kitchen table and positioned it next to the freezer so I could stand on it and reach in.

  ‘You can’t throw that out,’ my mother would have said of the two-year-old slab of meat scalded with ice burns. ‘That’s top-quality steak.’

  The top layers were easily reached and I worked fast, throwing most of it into a large garbage bin. But the further down I went, my upper body folding deeper into the freezer, the harder it got. Everything was stuck together.

  I knew I had to get the job done before my mother came back – otherwise the whole exercise would be pointless – so I boiled the kettle and poured it in. Jug after jug. Slowly the packages separated. I was making good progress – I was at least halfway to the bottom when I was overwhelmed by the smell of all the different meats, which had begun to cook, and the sour stench of milk from the unsealed cartons and unwrapped cheeses.

  I had to hold back the bile rising in my throat. The chicken meat felt like still-warm dead babies, but I knew I had to keep going. Eventually my mother did come home and, after the shock had passed, she helped me with the rest. I felt sick and couldn’t eat any dinner, but the freezer – that frozen graveyard – was cleaned out. After the mess I’d made with the boiling water, not even she could argue for a single item to be salvaged.

  I wrote a poem about that experience and gave it to my mother, who thought it showed promise and stuck it on the fridge. She often said of her own writing that once it was written down, it didn’t have anything to do with real life or real people. If only it were really like that. Still, I was grateful she didn’t take offence and was proud of me for writing it.

  Nineteen

  We didn’t have much money. We lived on our mother’s student allowance from the government and rent from a boarder who had moved into the now shuttered gallery. I’m not sure if my mother knew he owned a pet eagle when she took him in. Shortly after he unpacked all his belongings he put a large chopping block outside the back entrance to the gallery, near my old swing. He swung an axe down into the surface so it sat there suspended in the wood like a threat or a violent sculpture.

  My brother and I wondered what on earth it could be for. Maybe he was going to help us chop up the mallee roots we had delivered at the start of winter for firewood. Not so. Every morning he grabbed a few of the mice he kept in a cage and carried them to the block by their tails, screaming and whipping around trying to break free. There he laid them down and cut off their heads with the axe, then fed them to his eagle, which lived in the gallery with him. I don’t remember a cage.

  My brother and I had pet mice that we kept in an empty fish tank in the outdoor toilet. My brother named his mouse Continental Small Goods as a joke. I kept my cat, Mao Zedong, locked out on the other side of the door. We stayed out of the backyard near the eagle’s feeding hour.

  My mother was studying Classics at Adelaide University. She taught me to distinguish a Doric column from a Corinthian and how to count to ten in Greek. Best of all, she told me Greek myths. I loved Zeus the most and still think of him when it thunders. Even as an adult, when the sky roars and sparks I often wonder if it’s not really an angry god stomping and throwing things around, as if there’s a fight to the death taking place above the clouds.

  It was around this time that my mother entered the university poetry competition – the Bundey Prize – and won. Suddenly she was a promising poet. From then on, I accompanied her to lots of readings. I sat on large cushions on the floor listening to readings at the regular Poet’s Union events.

  My mother had written some poems about me as a baby. I could feel my face get red as soon as she began. But I was proud of her standing up there in the spotlight reading her life out to the crowd. I enjoyed the readings, and writers seemed like nice people to me.

  But there was something unsettling, too. Often the poems she read out on stage painted a picture of life that didn’t match my own version of it. The poems described me as a flame of life, that having me around was like having a dolphin in the house. That I brought her immense joy and wonder. I know I did bring her joy at times, but mostly I felt like an encumbrance – a noose more than a dolphin.

  I once cleaned up a rat that had died in the cupboard among the saucepans underneath the stove and always checked for weevils and wriggling maggots before eating dry goods. There just wasn’t time in my mother’s new-found life for any kind of domesticity. I had become her Cinderella and quietly cleaned up the dead bodies and threw out the evidence of neglect.

  If treasuring something meant caring for it – which is what it meant to me and how I cared for the things I loved – how could you neglect it day to day and then tell the world it was your most treasured thing?

  Over time, her poetry became another fable and I was complicit. My father was gone, so the narrative changed, but there was still a story to uphold. Now, though, with her reputation growing after the Bundey Prize, it was even more public. It wasn’t just family and friends for whom we maintained a charade, my mother’s representation of our life was printed in anthologies and newspapers. Printed, it was fact.

  Sometimes, when things were good – and they really were good sometimes – I would happily fall into believing that it was all as we pretended. It was a relief, no matter how fleeting, that I had imagined the darkness and trouble. But the only time things felt real was when I walked out the front door and went to school.

  Every second year, when the city played host to Adelaide Writers’ Week, my mother took me to sit under one of the sought-after spots of shade under a tree, where we listened to the readings and lectures, eating sandwiches she’d packed for us. I’m not sure I was always a willing participant. It was often so hot I’d have preferred to be swimming or riding my bike with my friends, but she’d shoosh me if I complained I was bored.

  When we rode our bikes home together, sunburnt and tired, she’d explain what the writers had been talking about. Riding our bikes together was a good time. Sometimes we raced with heads forward over the handlebars, pedalling hard. She was as competitive as I was and for many years she’d leave me in the dust and, by the time I dropped my bike to the ground in the backyard, she already had the kettle on the stove to make tea.

  This was when home was referred to as ‘the flop house’. There was an endless stream of people staying. Sometimes tha
t was fun and they were nice people, but other times they stole from us, leaving in the middle of the night with their loot. There were constant parties and my brother and I got to stay up late playing charades with the guests as Nana Mouskouri played on the stereo in the background.

  My mother may have been good at charades in everyday life, but at the actual game she was hopeless. She always ended up laughing so much at her own inability to express the word she was looking for in actions, she often simply blurted it out in frustration and got disqualified from the rest of the game. It was funny and, even though she rarely won, no one could argue that she wasn’t the real victor.

  My mother got involved in the student newspaper and thereafter our formal dining room was regularly turned into a printing workshop with people taking turns at winding the handle of the old-fashioned Gestetner printer. The clunky machine spewed out pages in blue ink, which we folded and stapled in impromptu assembly lines. They were fun nights too. My brother and I went to bed with ink on our hands and faces while the adults drank on, until my mother suggested they all go to Hindley Street – the local strip where bikies and prostitutes hung out – to visit the Flash Café for excellent coffee and gelato. My brother and I always knew when they’d gone to the Flash because we’d each wake up in the morning to find a couple of Baci chocolates on our pillow. Chocolate kisses for breakfast was a sweet surprise.

  Meanwhile, as an antidote to the flop house, my father decided it was his duty to instil in my brother and me a strong sense of heritage and structure, so when we went to stay at their place, he and Becky often arranged trips to our ancestors’ stomping grounds and other personally significant heritage sites. We went on daytrips to Moonta to see the school where our great-grandfather had taught. I never understood the point of travelling all that way to see a school that had been turned into a museum and emptied of life.

  Once Becky parked the car in the former school grounds, my brother and I scuffed our shoes through the dry red dirt to clearly demonstrate our indifference. The dust clung to our clothes and got into my nostrils. The air was so dry it made my lungs hurt.

  Our father couldn’t get up the stairs to show us the bronze roll call of former headmasters, which hung high on the baby-blue wall of the corridor outside what used to be our great-grandfather’s office. Instead he waited in the sun in the buckled-concrete quadrangle while we went inside with Becky and reported back that we’d seen our family name up there, close to the top of the list.

  My father was still in a manual wheelchair, which meant one of us had to wheel him from one spot to the next. If we had left him out in the quadrangle, he’d have died of heat stroke or dehydration unless a stranger happened by.

  After we’d seen the plaque on the wall, and he shared stories about our great-grandfather and the school’s history, we wheeled him back to the passenger side of the little two-door white VW Beetle. There we began the elaborate process of getting him back into the car.

  The car had a manual lifting machine attached to the roof, once again concocted by Bob Todd and my father. The machine was soldered onto the roof exactly in the centre of the two doors. It consisted of an extending and retracting pipe, like a trombone slide, with a heavy hand-turned spool at the end. Around the spool was a high-density metal cord, which had a large hook attached to the end.

  On the days we were going out in the car Becky sat my father in a bucket-shaped seat made of heavy canvas that she’d sewn with triple stitching to make sure it didn’t tear. The seat had four thick loops of the same material, but even thicker and more heavily stitched, into which she threaded the lifting machine’s hooks.

  Once the hooks were in place and my father was clasped bottom and back, she hoisted him up out of his chair by turning the handle on the spool. As he was in the air, he looked like an old-fashioned picture-book illustration of a swaddled child held in the beak of a large stork.

  When he was dangling high enough in the air – above the level of the car’s seat – my brother or I pulled the wheelchair out of the way. Becky pushed my father with her hip and shoulder so the pipes retracted back into their socket and our father slid inside the car, hovering above the passenger seat.

  Then Becky turned the handle in the opposite direction and lowered him into the seat. I secured the seatbelt around him while my brother collapsed the wheelchair and hooked it to the modified bike holder at the rear of the car. Finally, my brother and I climbed in the back seat and Becky started the car.

  After visiting the old school in Moonta, we would drive to a dingy café on the town’s main street for lunch. The place was dimly lit, with dusty fake flowers on plastic tablecloths, but they sold the best pasties and my brother and I couldn’t wait to get there. This was by far the best part of the whole trip. Pasties were a hundred-year-old specialty of Moonta, having been brought there by the Cornish immigrants working in the mines. These delicacies were completely different from the dry, fatty version that we sometimes bought at our school canteen when we got money to buy lunch for a special occasion. It didn’t matter that the pasties at school had been defrosted and then slowly warmed up in their individual cellophane bags in a heated glass cabinet, they made me feel like I was one of the cool kids. Cool kids bought lunch at the canteen.

  Even my brother and I knew these pasties in Moonta were a whole different thing. These were made fresh daily. The pastry was light and flaky, and I slathered it in tomato sauce and spread it thickly across the top with my index finger. Usually I ate so fast I had to fan the large mouthfuls on my tongue with my mouth wide open so as not to burn myself. So many flakes of pastry landed down my front, when I finished I had to dust myself off like I’d been hit in the chest by a snowball.

  Although he never said it directly, I strongly suspect my father’s motivation in taking us to these old family sites was to show me and my brother that we came from a long line of adventurers. It’s the same reason he took us to see my grandfather’s long-dead monkey at the museum and constantly retold his family’s history.

  My father didn’t want us thinking that we were frail, timid people who stayed in one spot all their lives, just because that’s how his life had turned out after polio.

  He was saying, ‘This is your history. This restlessness and sense of adventure is in your blood.’ I took up the mantel of my ancestors as soon as I possibly could, determined to do all the wild living, have all the adventures my father couldn’t.

  Twenty

  Once my father finished with university, he volunteered in the state government’s Department of Aged Care. He knew they’d never employ him without proving himself, so he offered to work for free and was determined to make such an impact they’d have no choice but to hire him.

  My father was a ‘systems man’. He was always telling me not to cut corners. There was a right way and order to do things, and he never let up instructing me which was which. Clearly he told the government people too, because not long after he joined their ranks as a volunteer, a whole new administrative system was in place.

  A few months later, they offered him the job, but he wasn’t allowed any of the standard-practice benefits and entitlements that would have come with the position for an able-bodied person. Those were the days before anti-discrimination legislation, when even the government tried to get away with whatever they could to save some money. My father was denied both a pension and any superannuation benefits. Their justification was that he was likely to not be able to work for long and would end up being a heavy liability on taxpayers.

  Once again, they didn’t know my father.

  He also wasn’t given any tax breaks for the often expensive equipment that made it possible for him to work. It was law back then – as it is now – that able-bodied people can claim items on their tax return that help them in their work, or make it possible for them to turn up and be able to reasonably conduct their business. Not for him. Becky drove him the forty-five-minute drive to and from his work each day and no allowance was made for
her or the car. If he needed an electric wheelchair so he could get around the office independently, then he had to pay for it entirely out of his own pocket.

  But even so, by 1977 he had earned enough money to buy a large stone house on the waterfront at Henley Beach. The local square, about a mile from their new home, was filled with hundreds of Harley-Davidsons belonging to the local chapter of the Hells Angels. Henley Square was the gang’s regular hangout, so people tended to avoid the area when they were in residence.

  The square fronted onto a long wooden pier, a suburban road with a large pub, a billiards hall, a small fun-parlour with dodgem cars and a little shop that sold cigarettes and sundry items. Not much in that store was family friendly, but occasionally my brother and I were sent to buy bread or milk with instructions to carefully check the expiration date. On most Sunday mornings, the square was empty of Harleys and on our way to the pier with our fishing rods and crab nets my brother and I picked our way through shards of glass from smashed beer bottles.

  My brother loved fishing. He often woke me up early to go out to the end of the pier, where we’d sit for hours with the old regulars – weathered Greek and Italian men who always helped us out if we didn’t have enough bait or lost a hook in a getaway fish.

  The old men, with their big rods, caught large whiting and mullet and sometimes a shark. That never felt right to me, even though I didn’t particularly like sharks after seeing Jaws. I forever regretted watching that movie because from then on, every time I went in the water, the theme music played in my head, sending me into the shallows.

  But it was thrilling when someone caught a big fish. Suddenly we’d hear a shout or excitement in the old men’s voices, which signalled a big catch. Hugh left his rod leaning up against the railing and I abandoned my little wheel of line on the ground and we ran to watch as the fish was reeled in.