Back to Broady

by Caroline van de Pol

  I tried it but ended up with my legs tangled in the rope. I tried again, missed the mattress and hurt my arm. In pain in the middle of the night, I called for Mum, who rubbed methylated spirits on it and sent me back to bed. After two more days of complaining, Mum took me to the doctor and I ended up in plaster. I was devastated when I realised I would miss the school sports. Back then Nicky Gleeson was my best friend and we thought we were the fastest runners in our street. Nicky was the only boy who didn’t tease me. He didn’t brag about everything like most boys. Sometimes I pretended we would get married and go on adventures like the kids in the Famous Five stories he told me about.

  Nicky’s dad, Uncle Ray, used to sing to me, ‘Cally, Cally, Cally, the girl with the cast iron belly.’ He made me laugh and I knew it wasn’t like when my brothers teased with names like Fatso, Buddha or Mop. But I got my own back when I perfected the Chinese burn and got more physical. I threw punches and missiles in a rage and one day I broke Mum’s beloved statue of the Virgin Mary with a shoe aimed at one of my annoying brothers.

  ‘Can’t you take a joke?’ the boys would laugh when I ran inside to sulk to Mum. ‘Stop telling tales,’ she said. ‘Maybe you ask for it.’

  I think it was around then that I started to look for places to escape. The roof of our house was my favourite spot. But most of the time I made my way to Aunty Mary’s, sometimes Margaret was in tow but mostly she was with our mother, not so much tied to her apron strings as clinging to her legs. I craved the peace and quiet of the Gleesons’ house at number eight. I wanted to see Nicky too, to ride our bikes together, to collect tadpoles in the creek, or just to hang around together.

  Like most suburban cricket pitches of the 1960s the McIvor Street pitch was mapped out in front of an electric light pole, near the Perrys’ house, across from our front door. From there I could watch all the action on those times when I wasn’t allowed to join in.

  One day late in November 1966, when I was still five, I followed Maurice as he walked to the crease, watched him take the bat and tap it at the top of his right foot to ‘get his eye in’. He was good at cricket, but not as good as Nicky. Nicky was a natural. Got a swing like Bradman, Dad said, and everyone knew Nicky would play for Australia one day. ‘Then I’ll get a real cricket bat. A shiny new one.’

  A howl went up from the gang gathered by the wicket and scattered around the makeshift boundary that Margie and I helped to draw with white chalk on the black tar.

  ‘Maurice’s not out,’ my brother Paul said. ‘You can’t go out first ball.’

  Paul was Maurice’s best mate. He was everyone’s best mate and was always the captain of one of the cricket teams. Even though Maurice was older, he nominated Paul as captain because Paul was the brave one who took the blame for the stray ball that smashed the windscreen of old Harry Jones’s new station wagon. ‘Whinging Pom,’ Dad said when he came to complain.

  Maurice had a couple more swings, squinting into the sun, searching for the fastball from Johnny Spiteri, who lived opposite the Gleesons. His sister, Gracie was Margie’s best friend and Mum said they were like two peas in a pod, always hanging around our house.

  The Spiteri kids had no dad. He died suddenly and dad and Uncle Ray always looked out for them. Their mum came from Malta. The Andreous, who lived next door to them, were from Greece and the Spencers a few doors down were from Scotland and the Cappi family across from them were from Italy. Next door to the Gleesons was beautiful Anna from Hungary. There were a few Australians scattered in the street like the Wilson, Roberts and Walker families. I’m not sure where the Goldsmiths were from but I often wished that glamorous surname were my own. Of course, there were mixed families like our Irish one and the English couple on the corner and then there were the Simpsons and Perrys, some of whom still live in McIvor Street.

  When Maurice was ready, he faced the next ball of the over, as it slammed passed the wooden fruit box, all broken and battered from the summer before. Out in the field I could see Russell Gleeson and my brother Tommy, who comes after Paul and before Andy. His real name is Thomas, after grandfather Thomas in Ireland. Tommy and Russell were best friends. They egged each other on as they called out to the girls standing on the protestant side of the street.

  ‘Bring those biscuits back here,’ Mum yelled from the front door, but the boys kept on dipping into a bag full of ammunition. The biscuits were the rejects Mum brought home from the factory where she worked during the night while we were all tucked up in bed. Dad called it the graveyard shift and said she should give it away. But each morning Mum arrived home with bags of Chocolate Royal biscuits in time for breakfast. Margie loved to save hers and then slowly peel the flakes of chocolate away from the marshmallow while I swallowed them in one gulp.

  ‘Get back to the cricket,’ Paul called to the boys as Nicky delivered a spinner that hit the wicket and Maurice was well and truly out.

  ‘Go get the ball,’ Paul shouted to me.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Get it.’

  ‘I always have to chase the balls.’

  ‘If you don’t field, you don’t play.’

  ‘You won’t give me a bat anyway.’

  ‘I’ll get it,’ called Margie.

  ‘Cally can take my bowl,’ Maurice said, walking towards me.

  ‘Don’t you want to play?’ I said.

  ‘I do, but my head hurts.’

  Maurice took my hand and put it to his forehead where a big lump had formed.

  ‘Ooh, yuk.’ The bump felt weird, all hard and shiny. ‘What happened?’

  ‘Crashed into Fat George at the shelter sheds at school.’

  ‘Did it bleed?’

  ‘A bit.’

  ‘Did you tell the teacher?’

  ‘Yeah, she told me to go and lie down.’

  ‘That why ya late?’

  ‘I fell asleep in the sick room and when I woke up everyone was gone.’

  ‘Were you scared?’ Margie asked him.

  ‘No. But I was glad when Macca, the cleaner, found me wandering around in the corridor.’

  I didn’t see Maurice for a few days – even when I went to play the piano he stayed in his room. And he didn’t come out to play cricket with us. Then one morning, about a week later, I woke up to Aunty Mary’s voice, outside my window. ‘Yoo hoo,’ she called, making her way to the back door. ‘You there, Valerie?’ Mum was folding clothes into the laundry basket on the back porch.

  ‘We took Maurice to the eye hospital last night,’ Aunty Mary said. She stretched her legs out in the warm sun, sucked on a Craven A, and blew the smoke from the corner of her mouth away from me.

  ‘What for?’ Mum said.

  ‘That eye was hurting again.’

  It was too hot to play outside so I sat in the shade of the veranda, watching Margie play with Suzie, the stray Kelpie who hung around and fed off our scraps. I liked the way Margie rubbed Suzie behind the ears and let her jump on her lap, but I was too scared to touch her ever since the big dog ran at me on my way to school, barking and jumping all over me. I got so scared I dropped my lunch bag and ran. The owner of the dog came to school with a new lunch for me and the best cake I’d ever had.

  ‘What did the doctors say?’ Mum said as she turned the teapot around on the table.

  ‘Nothing much, Val. We waited a long time to see a doctor. And then we only got five minutes with him. He told us he couldn’t find anything wrong.’

  ‘I guess they know what they’re doing.’

  ‘Maybe so. But Ray was wild with them. They didn’t even check him out. Just sent us home.’

  ‘Cally, take Suzie for a walk,’ Mum called to me.

  ‘I don’t want to.’

  ‘Well, go and do something.’

  ‘There’s nothing to do.’

  ‘I’ll give you something to do.’

  I knew she was just trying to get rid of me, which made me want to stay even more so I pretended to disappear.

  ‘You can get Seamus ready
for his bath,’ Mum shouted to me.

  ‘Why can’t Margie?’

  ‘She does enough already.’

  I kept listening through the open door.

  ‘Maybe the doctors were right, Mary.’

  ‘Hmm. I guess so. Maurice seems okay but I don’t know what to make of it,’ Aunty Mary paused and caught me staring at her. But she didn’t growl, not like Mum. She lit another cigarette and shared it with Mum.

  ‘Have you got a Bex, Val? Anything, an aspirin, something that will help settle my stomach?’

  Mum shook out a packet of powder from the small box as Aunty Mary finished her tea. ‘Stay a while if you like, Mary,’ I heard Mum say. ‘I can see you’re worried.’

  Three

  Finding my way back to Dallas by train all those years after I’d left shouldn’t have been difficult. But things aren’t always as they seem.

  The platforms were confusing and my memory played tricks. I was anxious about arriving on time for Damrina’s lesson.

  The timetables flashed new station names and train lines that never existed before. Somehow I jumped on a train just as it was pulling out of the platform. As soon as it stopped at South Kensington I realised I’d made a mistake. I planned to do a swap somewhere along the way. I would pick up another train to take me back to Southern Cross or North Melbourne. Instead the train sped on through the suburbs, Footscray…Seddon…Yarraville. All so gentrified now. The old weatherboard houses removed or restored with soft new colours. There were more trees, quaint boutiques. Young families riding bikes along the path by the railway line.

  Suddenly I was at Spotswood with its tangled industrial messes, the shoreline of the bay, the bridge. That’s when I saw something flying through the air, someone falling…a video played in my head, a slow motion silent movie; a scene I knew by heart.

  Enough. I shook my head and pushed my mind to another time and place. A time when McIvor Street was all I knew.

  When I was a child we walked to church. There was either no car or no petrol. And sometimes just not enough room for all of us. Holy Child Church was in Blair Street, the heart of Dallas. I was only allowed to cross the street with a grown-up or one of my big brothers. My school was next to the church, a small wooden building painted blue. It had a white cross on top. Inside the building were beautiful painted statues of Jesus the Holy Child, and Mary and Joseph.

  We were always late for Mass on a Sunday, even the late Mass. We would sneak into the back row just as Mr Schaeffer started singing at the top of his voice, ‘How Great Thou Art’. After Maurice went to hospital I always carried my pink rosary beads to church with me.

  ‘Sit still,’ Mum snapped at me. We were almost sitting on top of each other with eight of us in our cramped pew. I was on the end, next to Mum, and on the other side of Mum was Margie, nursing Seamus. She was a natural, dancing him on her good knee to make him laugh. The other knee was strapped in a white bandage to cover the stitches where the doctor sewed up her leg when she flew off the swing. Margie loved our backyard swings. I would often find her alone there, singing Mum’s song ‘Que Sera, Sera’, pushing and pulling her little legs in and out to go higher and faster, as if she was trying to reach the sky. And then she would let go and jump like she was flying. When she cut her leg, there was so much blood I thought she would die but she was so brave. My little sister was scared of the dark, snakes and big dogs, like me, but not the swings or the blood.

  Next to Margie was Andy, then Tom, who sat between Paul and Dad. As the priest mumbled something I couldn’t understand we took turns at standing up and then sitting down again. I stared into the bright candles on the beautiful altar and dreamed of touching the purple and white flowers next to them. On the other side of the aisle were the McDonalds, who had eleven kids and took up two rows. Soon we would have seven kids, after the Easter bunny had been. But I don’t think Dad wanted eleven kids.

  Mum took a shiny card from her prayer book and stared at it for a long time, her fingers touching the Virgin Mary in her blue robe and white veil. When she lowered her head, and joined her hands, I copied her.

  ‘Say a prayer for Maurice,’ she whispered to me.

  ‘To help him see?’

  She nodded and dabbed her eyes with a tissue.

  I prayed for a little while, and then got bored. I played with the blue frill around the edge of my pinafore, a soft corduroy material, the same as Margie’s, but hers was pink.

  I thought how pretty Mum looked at Mass, in her purple and black dress, her hands resting on her big stomach. She looked different at home in her old brown slacks, her hair in rollers, tucked under an old scarf.

  ‘Why don’t you have a hat or gloves like the other ladies?’ I asked her.

  ‘That’s old-fashioned,’ she said. ‘Had enough of all that when I was your age,’ she grinned and poked her tongue out at me. I laughed and covered my mouth. I liked seeing Mum happy, but I couldn’t stop thinking about Maurice and the tears in Mum’s eyes when she told me to pray for him.

  I wondered what it would be like in hospital with my eyes covered in bandages. What would it feel like not to be able to see, not to see my mum’s face again? Or see my little brother Seamus, babbling at me, pulling at my ears. What would it feel like to never see him as he tried to walk? His slow baby steps all wobbly and his big happy smile when he reached me and fell into my arms, giggling? And what would it be like not to dance and sing with Margie when Dad turned the television off and we pretended it was a real concert?

  I grabbed at the small beads and rolled them in my fingers to stop the tears. I concentrated on the man with the velvet bag and its wooden handles. He passed it to my dad who put a small envelope into the bag and nudged Andy when he forgot to drop his twenty cents into the collection. An old man with a long, grey beard and small, half-opened eyes and scars on his face, sat in front of us. He raised his hands to the altar where Father Murphy stood singing.

  ‘Christ have Mercy,’ said Father Murphy and then the man lifted his hands into the air like he was a priest too. He looked holy like that with his hands open to God so I copied him, my arms wide open and pointing to heaven.

  ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ Mum slapped at my arm.

  ‘What’s that for?’

  ‘Don’t be so rude.’

  I couldn’t hold the tears any longer. I reached out to Seamus for a cuddle, but he wiggled his way out of my arms and ran up the aisle towards the priest. Mum just laughed at him. It was nice how people always smiled at him and Margie. But I couldn’t remember the last time I got a smile from Mum. Maybe it was because she was too tired or because there were too many of us to cuddle.

  When Mum took Seamus to the back of the church to the Crying Room with all the other mothers and noisy babies I followed, desperate to be noticed. After a while I climbed under the seat to read my Little Golden Book which Aunty Mary gave me and fell asleep.

  After church I ran to the Gleesons to see if Maurice was home from the hospital, to see if his bandages were off.

  ‘He’s not home yet,’ Nicky said. ‘But his eyes are fixed.’

  My prayers had worked and God had heard me. Soon Maurice would be home and we could finish building the tree house with him.

  But the day after the operation his sight began to blur again.

  ‘False hope,’ Dad told me. ‘So sad. A terrible trick of the eyes.’

  ‘They want to try again,’ Aunty Mary told Mum as they sat facing each other at our kitchen table while I washed the dishes and Margie dried them.

  ‘The doctors said the knock to his head had torn the retina, but they think they might still save one eye.’

  ‘I hope they can.’

  ‘I don’t know, Val.’

  ‘He’s such a brave boy.’

  ‘I know. One minute he was climbing out of bed, smiling up at me telling me he could see. He looked at the greeting cards and read some of them.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘He started wal
king around his bed, making his way to the bathroom when he stumbled. “Mum,” he said, “it’s blurry again. Mum, I can’t see.”’

  I washed the same teacup over and over while I waited for someone to speak.

  ‘You know what, Val, he didn’t cry, not once.’ Aunty Mary dabbed her eyes with her fingertips. Mum dropped her head over a mound of vegetable peels and pulled out a tissue from inside her bra.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Mary.’

  I could tell Mum was crying when I saw her shoulders shaking. Then they were both crying and holding each other. It wasn’t loud crying, not like when Margie fell from the swing and not the kind of screams when Seamus was hungry. Aunty Mary lifted a pretty handkerchief from her sleeve. I turned my eyes back to the soapy water and dirty fry pan.

  ‘I can’t believe it,’ she said. ‘Even Grandma’s holy water didn’t work.’

  The night of Maurice’s second eye operation my dad came to our bedroom to say goodnight. It was about a week after the first operation and a couple since the accident at school. Margie and I knelt with Dad by our beds to begin our prayers. Together we made the sign of the cross.

  ‘Dear God, please bless Maurice, and make him better, and my Nana in heaven and my sister and brothers. Amen.’

  Then we climbed into bed and Dad told us our favourite story of the leprechaun that lived behind a big white rock on the lake near his house in Ireland. He took out a photo from his wallet to show us.

  ‘It’s called Lough Corrib,’ he said. ‘It’s the biggest lake in all of Ireland and it’s right there next to my house.’

  ‘Can we go there one day?’

  ‘Sure we can, Carly love,’ he smiled. I loved the way he called me Carly.