It wasn’t too long before Leszek was staying back after the shows, drinking late into the night with the band and its groupies. I tired of bourbon and cigarettes crawling into our bed at 3 a.m. and resented tiptoeing around the house with Jack while his father slept off another late night.
By Jack’s first birthday, I was a single mum. I was twenty-four.
We managed as well as we did in large part because Jack was such a great, easygoing baby. I never bothered with all the paraphernalia of babyhood – change tables, portable playpens – that I see so many modern-day parents hauling around with them. Much of it seems a nonsense designed to exhaust everyone. Jack had a simple collapsible stroller, but mostly I carried him in my arms. He slept in a beautiful old wooden cot, which a friend bought in a second-hand shop and painted pink and blue. When we visited my friends, he slept in their beds, cushioned by pillows to prevent him from rolling off. It was simple. We travelled light.
I was parenting how I had been raised. My brother and I – at least until we became rebellious in our very different ways – were quiet when we were told to be. We sat down, stood up or fetched this or that whenever we were asked to. Our parents didn’t have the luxury of only half committing to what they wanted us to do. So when I told Jack to be quiet or behave, that’s what he did. He knew what I said was what I meant, just as my brother and I had known it when we were toddlers. We didn’t have the option to be defiant. Jack didn’t either.
After separating from Leszek, I knew I had to make something of my life – for Jack’s sake, if not my own. I was a 24-year-old single mum with a high-school education and no particular skills to make me employable.
I got a full-time job working as a secretary for a progressive company that sent me to typing school, where ironically I got a certificate with my name printed on it in large looping cursive.
I wasn’t going to argue with Leszek about the morals of providing for his son, so I also began working in a bar two nights a week to supplement my secretary’s salary, while Jack stayed home with my flatmate. I’d get home at 2 a.m., then wake Jack early so he could attend pre-school childcare and I could be at my desk at 9 a.m. Of course I was tired, but didn’t feel I had much choice.
Jack was a little over two when I quit my job as a secretary to begin working with my good friend Frankie. We ran a small music booking, publicity and management company. Most of our clients were jazz musicians. We eventually got established enough to rent a sunlit office on Druitt Street, with an enormous balcony looking over the Sydney Town Hall. Many friends told me it was irresponsible to have quit the security of my stable job, but I contended I was no good to Jack if I was unhappy.
Once again, what seemed like a foolish and reckless move worked out. Working with Frankie was fun and a whole lot more interesting than answering phones all day.
In 1992, on a trip to Adelaide to visit Dad and Becky, Jack gave my father his favourite nickname. It was a hot afternoon and there were guests over at their beachside house to celebrate Becky’s birthday. By now my father had an electric wheelchair that he could control himself and as always he was in his element as host.
Jack wandered into the sunroom, looking for a lost carriage from his train set.
‘Chair,’ he said, looking up at my father, trying to make himself heard over the babble of guests. ‘Chair,’ he said more loudly, since nobody was acknowledging him. Still there was no response, so he pulled on my father’s trouser leg and yelled in his baby voice, ‘Chaaa-iirr!’ My father answered, ‘Yes, Jack?’ and the tiny human at his feet asked if he knew the whereabouts of his lost caboose.
My father pointed to the Thomas the Tank Engine carriage lying on its side under the window in the corner and Jack said sweetly, ‘Thank you, Chair.’ Political correctness had arrived with a vengeance and a strained silence came across the room. The guests either turned their heads out towards the horizon or peered into their drinks. Jack waddled off, his drooping nappy making him swagger like a cowboy, completely ignorant of the bomb he’d just dropped.
People who met my father generally fell into two categories. There were those – the majority – who did their best not to stare at the ugly chrome wheelchair, though you could often see the effort in their faces. There were also those who assumed his mind was as sedentary as his body and spoke very slowly and loudly at him.
Yet here, in the pink and orange glow of the sunset, a toddler had named the obvious truth. It didn’t take long for my father to begin laughing. Slowly everyone joined in, watching him and me to make sure they really did have permission.
It was a name my father loved, in no small part because he enjoyed the horrified look that came over people’s faces when one of us called the guy in the wheelchair, ‘Chair’. It was a name I loved because it was honest. My father was his wheelchair. The name stuck and Jack called my father Chair from then on.
During the same visit home, I visited Muttee in hospital to introduce her to Jack. She was eighty-nine and had never approved of me having boyfriends; she wanted her little girl to have a wedding ring. After Jack’s birth, a distance had opened between us. But I was hoping that with death in sight she might soften to the living.
She didn’t. She was steely in her demeanour and disapproval hung in the air as I sat on the edge of her hospital bed. I rubbed hand cream into the frail, arthritic hands that I had known so well when they were thick-fingered and strong. I tried not to let my anger come through in my touch. Jack played on the floor with his toys; my grandmother ignored him.
‘You know,’ she said, ‘I still feel exactly the same. It feels no different today as when I was sixteen. Nothing has changed except this body. Inside I still feel like a teenager.’
I wasn’t sure if that was the best or the worst thing I’d ever heard about old age. At that moment, sitting next to my grandmother, I decided to take the positive interpretation.
Even though she couldn’t shake her disapproval, I felt short of breath when Jack and I walked out of her room, knowing I’d probably never see her again. We walked hand in hand down the corridors. Trolleys and wheelchairs squeaked along the linoleum floors. Children skipped with ‘get well soon’ helium balloons, oblivious of their environment, parents trailing behind holding sad flower arrangements wrapped in bright pink tissue paper.
I don’t like hospitals at the best of times. I often faint in them even if I’m not the patient – particularly if I’m not the patient. Watching other people’s agony drains all the light out of me. I’m sure it’s some residual trauma from having spent half my childhood in a bed with a chart hanging at my feet.
And so, as we approached the enormous glass doors leading out into the street, I felt myself exhaling. I blinked in the bright light and, as we stepped out onto the path, a raucous noise broke out above our heads. I looked up to see two large black birds fighting in the blue sky above the exit. There was a loud guttural sound before one of the enormous crows plummeted through the air, landing with a thud at our feet. Jack screamed and I picked him up, held him as tightly as I could so he couldn’t see the tears streaming down my face. I walked quickly away across the trimmed lawn of the hospital grounds.
Shortly after, my Muttee was in a black box.
A year or so later, I booked myself in to see a medical doctor who also acted as a counsellor. Dr David Isaacs saved my life. There is no way to get it all right in rearing a child, and I knew I would make mistakes all of my own with Jack, but I would not use my parents’ example of parenting as my guide. I would not be the neglected who neglects, or the abandoned who abandons. I would do better.
Not surprisingly, I had internalised some of the tricks I’d witnessed, and in the early days of my relationship with Lezsek, I could flip into a jealous fit that had me chasing him across town in my little orange Datsun 120Y.
Dr Isaacs worked with me to help me see that I had not made up or imagined my difficult childhood. Talking to him in his snug office overlooking a park in North Sydney, I began to unde
rstand that I had lived in a house of distorted truths. I began to see the great divide between the stories I’d been told and my memories. Slowly, slowly, I learned to trust my own version. I also began to see the damage I carried with me and grew determined to cleave it off.
For many sessions we simply talked, but after a while, Dr Isaacs suggested hypnosis. He believed I had been so conflicted about the version of childhood events I’d been told and my own memory of them, that the only way to make me see and truly believe my memories was to have me relive them. I was sceptical of his methods – hypnosis sounded to me like something from an old movie, performed by a charlatan swinging a fob watch – but, as he counted back from seven and told me my arm would rise off the pillow he’d placed under it, I felt my arm lifting.
On the first day, I went back to a memory of playing at the foot of my father’s chair in the gallery. I had one of my brother’s rubber toy snakes, which I trailed around like old rope. The ghoulish reptile had long red fangs and blood on its bottom jaw.
I looked up when I heard my mother enter and saw her clasp her long red nails to her face and tear into her flesh. She opened her face in the same way I dug into wet sand on the beach to make a road around a sandcastle for a toy car to travel along. Her skin flayed in ribbons and blood streamed down her face onto her blouse. I pressed myself up against the spokes of my father’s wheel.
My father called his parents on the phone in the gallery, which he always had within reach, on his tray.
I wanted to climb inside Grandfather when he arrived. He scooped me up in his long arms and took me straight outside and put me in the back of his old station wagon. I waited in the car while he went back inside and called the doctor and a friend of my mother. When the doctor arrived, Grandfather came back to the car and we drove away.
Gran was waiting for us when he carried me into the house. She had set one place on the table and right away brought me soup in a green scalloped-edge bowl. She gave me that same set of bowls years later, after Grandfather died and she moved to a nursing home.
I woke from that ‘spell’ in Dr Isaacs’ office with near cuts in my palms from clenching my fists so tight. My mother had always played that incident down when I asked her about it. She told me I exaggerated it. But the grooves in my palms and uncontrollable shaking rippling through my entire body made me see just how bad it had been.
I was so disoriented, Dr Isaacs worried for my safety. So did I. When I got home, I went to bed and stayed there, sobbing for most of the following week. When I was finally able to leave the house, I remember standing on a train station platform, hoping I’d be able to stay where I was.
Twenty-eight
When Jack was seven, I became involved with a well-respected, kind and clever music journalist. I was no longer working in the booking and promotion business with Frankie, but that job had taken me to a role overseeing the ABC’s jazz label.
I met my husband to be when I was in Wangaratta for the annual International Jazz Festival. He was having dinner with a large group of other critics and presenters when I walked into the bar. One of his colleagues waved me over and introduced us. He had dark eyes, olive skin and thick black hair and when I sat down next to him, I was the only woman at the table.
‘Usually I only meet men with beards at these weekends,’ he said, promisingly.
Later that night we were wrapped around each other. When I drove off a few days later, I felt as if I had been skinned. I knew I wanted to be with him.
All this came on the heels of my first book, Jobs for the Girls: Women talk about running a business of their own. After that I wrote Fresh! Market people and their food, a tribute to the cuisines of first-generation Italians and Greeks who’d come to Australia after the war.
With the confidence I’d gained from the books, I’d tried my hand at fiction. My first short story was published in an anthology edited by Susan Johnson called Women/Love/Sex. I couldn’t believe it when I saw my name in the list of contributors alongside real writers. I felt I was beginning my real life’s journey. I was becoming a writer.
When the man I’d met at the jazz festival returned to Sydney, he asked me out for coffee and told me he’d bought Women/Love/Sex and had read my story. He was the first person who spoke to me about it. He took me seriously. It was intoxicating.
I tried not to put Jack in the company of men I was seeing unless it was serious, but this was the most serious I had felt about anyone since Jack’s father and I wanted them to meet and get to know each other slowly. I dreamed of the three of us being together as a family. We arranged to ‘accidentally’ meet after school at a favourite café, the Tropicana in Kings Cross. I had ordered Jack a hot chocolate and I was halfway through a latte when he walked in. I feigned surprise.
Jack was always a polite child, he shook people’s hands and looked them in the eye when he was introduced, but on that day he was rude. He gave yes and no answers to inquiries, didn’t look up from his mug until, embarrassed, I excused us and left.
‘What got into you back there?’ I asked him in the car.
‘Nothing,’ he snapped.
‘Come on, darling,’ I pleaded. ‘I’ve never seen you like that. Didn’t you like him?’
‘You love him,’ he said from the back seat. I was stunned into silence. How could he have possibly picked that up in the ten seconds between being introduced and acting rude?
This man was wonderful with Jack and eventually – after a few false starts – we moved into his apartment on a tree-lined street in Kings Cross, which had a large balcony overlooking the city. We had lots of friends, held magical dinner parties and he enrolled Jack in the Conservatorium’s music program for kids. There Jack took up the violin, and his love of music and natural talent for it flourished. It was a magnificent gesture and I loved this man for it all the more. Jack had lessons twice a week, practised every day and learned not only to play but also to perform. Under his influence, my son was blossoming.
We’d been living together for about two years when we went to a friend’s wedding. There was an oyster bar set on a huge ice slab, champagne and a band, and we were dressed to the nines. On the way home, stumbling slightly in my high heels after too many champagnes, I was upset.
‘What’s wrong?’ he asked, holding my elbow.
‘You’ll never marry me,’ I bawled.
He was silent. I was desperate to be wanted and to be owned. I wanted security and forever and for someone to publicly declare to the world, I want you over all others.
‘If you won’t marry me, I will leave you. I want to be married,’ I said through tears. ‘If you won’t, I’ll find someone who will.’
And there was my ultimatum. I should have wanted him to propose to me of his own free will. But there it was. A few months later, for my birthday, he gave me a card asking me to marry him. He never spoke the words, he wrote them.
We were married in front of 120 friends and family in a little boatshed on the lip of the harbour. The long dark room where all the boats were stored we lined with baby olive trees I’d bought for each of the guests to take home and plant.
The day before, my mother and I had been up at 4 a.m. to go to the early morning markets. We walked around among speeding forklifts and piled the car with armfuls of tulips. I carried a sack of potatoes over my shoulder and we bought all the ingredients for the menu I was preparing with my friends. When we got home my mother filled the top-loader washing machine with water and put all the flowers in it. The house was full of friends and, together, we cooked for the wedding the next day.
At the ceremony Jack and Becky performed a violin duet. During the proceedings the celebrant kept referring to my husband by another man’s name. I wondered if it was a bad start to things. We didn’t take a honeymoon and, when he lost his wedding ring in a rainstorm in the week following the ceremony, I thought it probably had been.
For years we sat on an old sofa of my mother’s – once smart and elegant, twenty years into its l
ife it had lost all of its Italian chic and was sagging and threadbare. Every time I looked at it or straightened up the white sheet I used to cover the shabby upholstery, it depressed me. I felt I should have discarded the past, not carried it around with me like a bowerbird.
Many of our weekends began with newspapers on the bed, our cat, Rocket, curled in among the rummage, while we looked in the lifestyle section for nice write-ups or special sales and markdowns. After breakfast we set out with newspaper clippings and a plan for the stores we’d visit.
It didn’t matter how many times we did this – hours and hours of fruitless shopping – I still managed to convince myself at the outset of each expedition that today would be the day I could put that old sofa out on the street for someone in need to lug home.
The shop owners always sized us up as customers to attend to well. We looked like we were shopping with new love in our hearts. We’d be on first name basis with them in minutes. Every swatch of fabric came out and the assistants would patiently answer my husband’s many questions about durability and cleaning.
We’d wander off from the counter every now and then to talk about the fabrics and whether they would match our paintings and the colour of our walls. We bounced heavily to test the springs. We lay down to make sure we could stretch out fully and asked strangers to come sit with us to test if the couch would comfortably accommodate a visitor or two.
The assistants would write down the details. They discussed possible delivery dates with us and, inevitably, promised they could rush the order through.
We danced this step again and again. Shop after shop for three years.
‘Perfect,’ I’d say enthusiastically. ‘Yes?’ I’d look to my husband, pleadingly.
‘Okay. Thank you so much,’ he’d say, extending his arm to shake the salesperson’s hand, clasping the colour brochures and fabric samples under his other arm. ‘We’ll go away and think about it and call you back.’
Diving into Glass Page 16
