Diving into Glass

by Caro Llewellyn

  One night when she was visiting I wrote her a note in my best handwriting, explaining that I wanted her to be my big sister. I folded the paper over until it was a tiny square and then wrapped sticky tape around and around it to seal it tight. When Amanda left that night, I waited for her at the door and handed her the note and whispered that she shouldn’t open it until she was in the car or at home.

  To my delight Amanda agreed, and was true to her word from that day on. She took me to buy my first bras and in my teenage years, and far beyond, let me stay with her whenever I needed.

  She dressed me for my primary school social like a character from a Bob Fosse dance show: a pair of fishnet stockings, a black leotard and my grandfather’s beautiful top hat. She taught me how to cook with care, how to handwash delicate clothing and underwear. Most importantly, she taught me to care for myself in a way I had never known before.

  What I understand about all this now is that I had my father’s survival instinct. Children are incredibly adaptable and those lucky enough to have some smarts about them can invent all kinds of mechanisms and opportunities to cope where there are none. Where children in trouble are thwarted, though, is if there aren’t good enough backups. Without a reprieve, without someone telling you, ‘It’s going to be okay,’ it’s hard to keep from going under.

  Experts say you just need one person. One person to give you a break, to give you perspective, to tell and show you that what you are living through is not normal, nor something you brought upon yourself or are responsible for.

  I was lucky to have more than one. My backups were Uncle George and Aunty Babs, Amanda, Marisa and Phil Wilkins, Annie McCutcheon, others – who took me in. Their houses were calm and easy. I could regain my footing.

  My father saw his lifeline out of the iron lung when my mother showed up in her starched white uniform and sass. He decided charming his way into her heart was his best route to escape. I saw my own route just as clearly – when these opportunities presented themselves in the guise of kind family friends, I grabbed them just as ruthlessly as my father had.

  Of course it wasn’t as thought-out as that – I was still a kid acting more on intuition than reason – but somehow I must have considered my options and acted. It was already my nature, but I made myself into the best-behaved little girl, because then I knew people would want me and I could get out of the chaos at home. Even if only temporarily.

  At home I crawled into the darkness, hid myself and maintained a quiet heartbeat until I could escape. Most of all, I tried to forget.

  Decades later, walking through the Guggenheim Museum one afternoon with a friend, I was struck by a piece by the artist Louise Bourgeois. It was a small bedroom with walls made of mirrored doors. On the neatly made little bed was an embroidered pillow. In tiny red stitches Bourgeois had written:

  I need

  my memories:

  they are

  my documents.

  Standing there on the curve of the gently ascending walkway in the Guggenheim, I realised I had spent my life running from my memories of childhood. If I was ever to stop running, I had to remember.

  Twenty-two

  In 1975 Becky and my father took me and my brother to America to stay with Becky’s family. We were ten and thirteen. My brother noticed that Mr Donothorn, his art teacher from school, was on the flight and spent the entire trip with his head under a blanket so he wouldn’t be seen with the man in the wheelchair.

  We never spoke about how these things made our father feel, but Becky vowed that when she and my father had children of their own, she would never let them carry the shame we had. It was seven years before they started a family, but Becky was true to her word. I was jealous when, a decade or so later, I heard that my father was coaching my little brother Morgan’s school cricket team.

  The humiliations to my father came from many quarters. I recently discovered a letter written by Becky’s father addressed to the US embassy in Adelaide regarding our trip to visit her family. The letter reads:

  Dear Sir:

  Richard Llewellyn is planning to come to the United States on December 9, 1974 and will stay until January 29, 1975. This is a pleasure trip during which he expects to visit friends. He has adequate resources to handle his own expenses. If there would be any problem we would be happy to assume responsibility for him.

  Sincerely,

  William L. Roberts

  Assuming that my father, a grown man, wouldn’t be able to take care of his family on their vacation was patronising and must have come as a blow, although he never shared how it made him feel with me. I’m sure Becky would have known the extent of it, though.

  Becky’s parents had a pool. Becky encouraged my father to go in. She made him some shorts on her mother’s sewing machine. Shorts were not something he’d worn since he was struck by polio, on account of his self-consciousness about his strange-looking, stick-like legs. But Becky was convincing and her three brothers agreed to help. They lifted him out of his chair, carried him down the steps of the shallow end and lowered him into the water. In my mind, I’d outgrown my father by the time I was ten, but in truth he was six-foot-two and it took all three of Becky’s brothers to carry him.

  It was an act of love, like a baptism or saving a beached whale. It was beautiful for him to float, to feel weightless after the constriction of the chair. And I got to go swimming with my father. I never knew how it was that he could float as perfectly as a blow-up mattress, but his body always stayed flat on the water’s surface. My brother and I dive-bombed around him, trying to flip him over or make him sink. He never sank, but occasionally one of us bombed hard enough and close enough to make the waves roll him over facedown.

  Being underwater didn’t scare him after his training as a naval diver and he always came up laughing when we turned him onto his back. I pedalled my legs hard underneath the blue surface to get high enough out of the water to wipe the puddles out of his blinking eyes. Then I’d swim off to do more handstands in the shallow end while he floated on the surface.

  One particularly hot day, they carried my father into the pool and I swam down to sit on the bottom to look up at his funny weightless body floating above me against the blue sky. He looked like Humpty Dumpty in a blue floatation tank: not quite as round as Humpty Dumpty, but his legs just as long and thin.

  When I came up for air, Becky’s mum announced a fresh batch of homemade ice cream. I clambered out of the pool and ran inside. It was the best ice cream I’d ever tasted. My swimsuit was dripping puddles on the kitchen floor so I was sent back outside, sucking the last of the strawberry cream from the bottom of the frosted cone, ready to dive-bomb my father again and tell him how delicious the homemade stuff was.

  I pushed open the back door, dropped the remains of the cone on the hot concrete and started running. My father was facedown in the water. My uncles were sitting at a picnic table with their backs to the pool and in my enthusiasm for the ice cream I had failed to tell them to turn around and watch him.

  When they heaved him out of the water he was very shaken, gasping for breath. He kept telling me that he was okay and tried to ease my guilt by saying his diving training helped him stay calm. He never blamed me, but I blamed myself.

  The punishment for my stupidity was that I never got to go swimming with him again.

  Later we drove to Puerto Peñasco in northern Mexico, about 100 kilometres south-west of the US border. We drove there in a large white Plymouth that one of Becky’s brothers had bought for us in San Francisco. Using drawings Dad and Becky had sent him ahead of time, he’d jimmied together a lifting machine and welded it to the roof of the car. Dad and Becky wanted to be able to travel independently. Becky’s brother sold that car back to the same dealer (minus the lifting machine, of course) after we left.

  We arrived in Mexico like a carload of visiting aliens. I remember being scared by the local kids begging for money, squashing their faces to the windows and leaving behind dirty finger, snot a
nd sweat smudges. Each time we stopped at a traffic light they tried to prise open the doors. I was sure we were going to be mobbed. I wanted Becky to turn the car around and drive us back to Tucson, to the pool and the homemade ice cream.

  One night we went to a restaurant where a very beautiful waitress paid us extremely good attention. My father flirted with her, which made me cringe. Then, at the end of the meal, he made an exhibition of how much he was tipping her. She laughed and played the flirting game back, but when my father handed over the money her face fell and the mood of the evening changed. She said nothing more. It was only after we were back at the hotel that my father realised he’d miscalculated the exchange rate and only offered her a paltry amount. It was an honest mistake, but the show he’d put on trying to impress her, and knowing in the end we’d simply insulted her, was embarrassing.

  My brother found a store that sold gigantic firecrackers – six of which, he told me, equalled a stick of dynamite. He convinced me to help him smuggle some back over the border to the US. He bought as many as he had money for and hid them in his luggage.

  The morning we were leaving to drive back to Tucson, we did something we hadn’t done the whole trip: we offered to help pack the car. My brother instructed me to shove some of the firecrackers into the cavities of the portable lifting machine they used when they travelled. This collapsible one folded down to fit inside a large denim bag that Becky had made.

  As we approached the border we feigned sleep in the back seat. Our father knew something was up and quietly tipped off the border police to search the car. They found some of our stash, but not the ones I’d put into the lifting machine. Had Becky crashed on that drive back, we would have gone up like a mine blast.

  Back in Tucson, when we let the firecrackers off, my brother and I were suddenly cool – not the freak children of the cripple. Our crackers lit up the sky in huge cascades of billowing glitter high up above the rooftops. The air smelled like gun smoke. The locals only had tiny little bangers that went off with a fizz; ours were magnificent. I went to bed that night with the smell of gunpowder in my hair and nostrils, dreaming of exploding stars.

  Suddenly we were accepted. And, because we’d told them how we stuffed the crackers in our father’s lifting machine to smuggle them across the border, he was seen as an accomplice. Suddenly he was cool too.

  My brother was on a roll. A week or so later, he convinced Dad and Becky to let us go to the Grand Canyon. He argued that he and I should go alone and they could come pick us up after we’d made the trek. I have no idea why they agreed, but they seemed happy enough to put us on a Greyhound bus with enough money for food, one night’s accommodation and the donkey ride down the canyon. We stayed in a small hotel on the South Rim so we’d be near the early morning muster of mules that we’d ride down into the mile-deep chasm.

  I thought it sounded like fun, but when I met my beast and saw the narrow rocky track – not much more than a few feet wide – leading down into the abyss, I felt sick. I’d once before embarrassed my brother with my fear of heights and danger, when the Mad Mouse rollercoaster at the local fair had to be stopped to let me off because I was hysterical. He was so mad at me after that incident, he didn’t speak to me for a week. So I knew I had to ride this mule no matter how sick I felt.

  Hugh’s mule and mine seemed to be the only ones to walk to the very edge of the steep track, reaching out over the cliff face to eat shrubs along the way. I looked down over my mule’s withers to see its front hoofs right on the edge. There were hundreds of hairpin corners on our treacherous descent. The mules took each of them not safely hugging the rock face but right out at the unsealed path’s edge. Peering down hundreds of feet of vertical cliff face to the canyon floor, atop a stubborn mule, I felt sure I was about to plunge to my death.

  I’m not exactly sure what Dad and Becky were thinking, letting us go off like that. It was long before mobile phones or the internet. I suspect it was my father’s conviction not to quell our thirst for adventure, or step in the way of our dreams.

  Since contracting polio, he had listened to so many people tell him, ‘No, you can’t do that.’ Damned if he’d ever say anything like that to us.

  When my brother and I got home to Adelaide, my mother was furious. She called my father. ‘You’ve made her fat!’ she yelled down the phone.

  Twenty-three

  Dad and Becky built a wooden deck at the front of their house at Henley Beach, so my father could look at the ocean, smell the salt, feel the wind whip up from the south and remind himself of his beloved days in the navy.

  Sometimes, if he lifted his head to a certain angle, all he could see was ocean and the dome of the sky; he could fool himself that he was far out at sea.

  My father’s mind could take him anywhere. Just like he’d read Moby-Dick and imagined himself out at sea, he could do the same simply looking out at the wide expanse of flat water that stretched as far as you could see left and right, straight to the edge of the world.

  His great lesson was to teach me that we’re as free as we allow our minds to make us. Imagination can save your life if you need it to. It saved my father. I was not sure if mine would be able to save me when my life depended on it most.

  My father loved watermelon, but never so much as when we were in the backyard during our summer holidays, engaged in watermelon seed–spitting competitions. The rules were to propel our seeds at the same time. I took pains to line up my shoulders even to his, to have him believe our game was a genuine duel. Then I’d raise my arm in the air like a starting gate and shout, ‘One, two, three, spit!’

  I’d wait just a second or two before spitting mine, though, so I could aim my pips a little short of his. When he began to suspect what I was up to, I’d narrowly defeat him in a round or two to get him off the scent.

  Out in the yard playing on my own, I could spit my pips three times as far as him. The little black seed would shoot all the way past the line of spindly beans staked up on bamboo sticks in his beloved vegetable patch. It wasn’t much of a garden. As strong as his willpower and efforts were, they were no match for the harsh sun or the salt and sand that blew in from the beach. But he would not be defeated. He brought in pea straw to trap what moisture there was in the ground and hung shade cloths to dull the sun’s rays.

  He planted an olive tree, which thrived. But when I said he should just plant a grove of those and be done with it, he scoffed. He wasn’t in the slightest bit interested in that. What he liked was beating the odds. There was no challenge in an olive tree. A tomato, though – in that soil – well, that was another thing altogether.

  ‘Come and see my tomatoes. I just built the pergola last week to protect them,’ he’d say, pointing with his chin to the four large pine posts stuck in the ground with dark mesh stretched tight between them.

  He was always ‘planting’, ‘mowing’, ‘chopping’, ‘building’ and ‘cleaning’, when in reality he could only just brush his own teeth. But we all went along with it without question. It was our father’s garden, and we all pretended he put up the pergola, and planted the tomatoes all by himself.

  Taking ownership of tasks when all he actually did was tell other people to do them on his behalf was part of his fight for independence and dignity. He didn’t physically do very much at all, but he did make arrangements and hustle to make things happen, so why shouldn’t he lay claim to having actually done them?

  He was always instructing me on the best way to make a bed, clean shoes, polish brass, wash windows, pull weeds, plant trees. When I was fed up, sweating over some task or other, and he reminded me of the benefits of his technique, I’d think, ‘It’s easy to have an opinion when all you do is sit all day and watch from the sidelines.’ I like to think that I never said such a thing out loud, but I suspect I probably did.

  In truth, the only thing he actually could do in the garden was hold the hose and aim it at the plants. Even then, someone had to put the hose in his hand and turn on the tap. But
when we picked plump ripe tomatoes, bursting with flavour, the credit was all his. None of us objected.

  Twenty-four

  Four years after the trip to America, it was my mother’s turn to take me overseas. The terms of my parents’ separation and custody agreement stipulated that if one parent wanted to take us out of the country, the other had to grant permission. My father accused my mother of skipping that part. We hadn’t been in London long when we received a stern letter from my father’s lawyers. We had been summoned back to Australia.

  My mother had rented out our house in Adelaide, planning for us to spend a few weeks in London, visiting art galleries and museums, before heading to the south of France for six months. I was looking forward to practising my French, and Amanda was coming with us, so I was especially happy.

  We did visit the galleries despite the despair that fell over my mother when we got the letter from the lawyers. She believed in art as a sanctuary and I was glad to be out in public in a quiet, calm place where she had to keep it together.

  I still remember being perplexed by the performance artists Gilbert & George, whom we watched one day at the National Gallery in a room of nineteenth-century oil paintings. I can’t remember exactly what they did, but it seemed to me remarkably like what everyone else was doing, except they were cordoned off from the rest of us by a thick rope that made a large square in the centre of the room. Gilbert & George wore smart suits. They looked like they were on their way out to tea, but as far as I could tell they were just standing around, talking to each other.

  I couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about. After we sidled off from their performance, I kept asking my mother how what we’d just seen could be art.