Over the loud speaker, a voice rang throughout the school dormitories, and I heard my name.
‘Caroline Egan, office please, Caroline Egan,’ Sister Agnes called, and I thought maybe she’d seen me smoking on the fire escape with Wally and Deano. When I finally got there she told me to go to the shared phone in the hallway, even though we were not permitted to take calls during study. I wondered who it might be. I hoped it wasn’t about Mum.
What if it was Dad? Had something happened to him at the hospital in Warburton, where he’d gone to get off the grog and cigarettes? Maybe it was those tablets Mum crushed into his dinner to make him sick if he drank alcohol. Maybe they were harming him? I prayed it wasn’t Dad.
As I walked down the corridor between the rows of cubicles, I hoped it was just Mum feeling lonely and wanting a chat. But still I had a foreboding feeling and wished I were back in my study with nothing to worry about but the prosaic writing of Camus.
My track pants hung low, under my thick waist, a legacy of the weight I’d gained from too much snacking in study time. I caught a glimpse of myself in the window as I walked to the school foyer; a reflection I didn’t much like. I made a promise to start another diet and early morning jogs.
I picked up the hand-piece.
‘Hello.’
‘Cally, luv, it’s me.’
Was that a sigh in Mum’s voice?
‘Hi Mum, how are you? What’s happening?’
‘Oh, Cally, love,’ Mum sniffed. ‘It’s happened again,’ she said, her voice almost a whisper.
‘What Mum?’
‘The Gleesons, honey. It’s bad news.’
‘What’s wrong Mum? Another accident?’
‘It’s Russell. He died last night.’
I had to concentrate; I couldn’t speak. I waited for her to go on. Outside the wind howled, branches hammered, unforgiving, against the large glass windows that looked out to the school courtyard.
I closed my eyes and listened. All I could see was Aunty Mary and her big curls and milky eyes when she was alive and well and would listen to me play the piano in her lounge room. I thought of Maurice who had had taught me to listen with my eyes, to really listen so I could see things better. He told me that everything he saw and felt now came from his ears and his hands. He no longer tried to create images in his head, it was voices not faces that made him laugh or cry. And what about Nick? My childhood buddy who liked me to describe things so he could picture them in his mind’s eye, who liked to feel things around him to help him picture them.
Now, as the storm broke and the rain pelted, I thought the creaking branch would finally snap.
‘What are you talking about, Mum?’
‘Russell’s dead.’
‘How? What happened?’ I waited for the tree to crash through the window, to crush me. Not Russell. Not more heartache for my friends.
‘We thought you should know. There was an accident.’
‘A car?’
‘An accident, Cal, with a gun.’
‘A gun. Where? Were they shooting rabbits?’
‘No. It was a party. Some friends were with him. Cally, love, that’s all I know.’
‘What about Nick and Maurice?’
‘They are home with Uncle Ray.’
‘Are they okay?’
Of course they were not okay. Why was I such an idiot? Russell was dead. They would never be okay.
Twelve
Dad is dead.
First Aunty Mary, then Russell.
And now Dad.
He’s gone and everything hurts. My stomach aches as if someone has sharp fingernails ripping at everything inside me. And when I try to breathe my chest pumps too fast. I struggle for air as if there’s a pair of huge hands covering my mouth. At least they stop screams from escaping. Holding back all the anger I feel churning through my body, my arms and legs, the throbbing in my head.
Why Dad?
In a strange way, I try to hold on to that pain, never let it go. I never want to stop missing Dad.
Even now, thirty-three years later, it is painful to write. So, I do it the only way I know how, slowly, word by word. I wind back the clock, to the last year of my teens. I had just secured my first real job. I was finally a journalist. Well, a fledgling cadet journalist to be exact, a job that was bestowed upon me by a benevolent suburban newspaper proprietor, Bob Grant, who was worn down by my persistence. At first I hung around working for nothing and then for a small causal wage. Then I became a full-time cadet and he gave me much more than a regular pay packet. It launched a career I would love and embrace for many years to come.
Dad was fifty-three years old when he died. Or it may have been fifty-four, depending on which birth date we use, as Dad had two. His birth certificate cites March 20 but he said it was on January 20 so that was when we celebrated. Regardless, to me it was the worst way to die. Suddenly and prematurely.
Dad died of lung cancer, a few short weeks after the diagnosis that hit us like a hurricane; a whirlwind of change that made Christmas of 1980 tough going. I was working and had also just finished the first year of my RMIT journalism degree. Margie was preparing for her final HSC year at the same boarding school I had attended.
It started with a pain in his back. He was a fit man, still working three jobs to keep us in the best schools he could afford. He was off alcohol, having first replaced beer with Blue Nun sweet white wine and then swapping the wine for an evening treat of chocolate and a cup of strong Irish tea. When the physiotherapist who treated his back pain realised it wasn’t getting better he sent Dad to a specialist where X-rays revealed tumours in both his lungs.
Dad smiled through Christmas and was particularly courageous when he and Mum celebrated their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary on Valentine’s Day in 1981. Then came birthday celebrations for the youngest of the boys, Matthew, who turned twelve at the end of February, and John, who turned fourteen a week later. Dad never gave up on the idea he would be cured or that he would still be around for all our big events like Margie finishing school and my university graduation. Or was he just pretending?
While I was also holding on to hope, he died. It seemed quick, one Tuesday in March, late in the evening. It wasn’t peaceful but the morphine helped with the pain. After a short stay in hospital, Dad had come home to die. Mum nursed him. He couldn’t sit still, alternating between his bed and his favourite armchair then, for a little while, he would sit in a hard chair at the head of the dining table. Our big Catholic family moved around him; me and my siblings and our friends coming and going, stopping to chat whenever he was up to it. Our relatives, including his brother from New Zealand, and his Irish mates, all wanted to be with him.
In those last days at home he talked a lot about Ireland. In the final hour of his life he hugged us each in turn. He grabbed hold of our mother, his wife and best friend since he’d arrived in Australia nearly thirty years before. He told her he was going home. He told Andrew he was going surfing, which made me smile, as Dad could barely swim let alone surf.
I wanted to be alone. I rushed outside to the bungalow, burying my head in a pillow so no-one would hear me scream. I wished it had all been a mistake, the kind of wish I’ve made since, whenever truth is too hard to handle.
I’m not sure why, but the only time I ever really cried about Dad was a few years later when I visited his home in Ireland. Perhaps it was because back then we were not permitted to grieve, told to wipe away any tears, put on a smile and get on with life, get on with making our father proud and easing Mum’s pain by hiding our sorrow. I think we all knew, even subconsciously, that Mum would need all the help we could give. So, when I was finally alone and looking across the water, perched on a rock by the shores of Lough Corrib, where Dad swam as a boy, I wept for all the things I wouldn’t get to do with him. He would never see me marry, never meet my children.
In time, during my visit, Dad’s Irish family, now my Irish family, made him come alive again with the stories they sh
ared in the tiny cottage where he grew up. Right there by the kitchen stove and just below the attic where he slept, I listened to stories about Dad, first from his brother Andrew and later Andrew’s wonderful wife Bridie and my new cousins on the other side of the world. I felt closest to Dad there and I still do. I have now returned a few times to Inishmacatreer, the tiny village in the south-west of Ireland that hugs the border of County Galway and County Mayo. My beloved Aunty Bridie continues to share stories. One of my favourites was when he escaped from the seminary where he boarded when he was fifteen years old – mainly because becoming a priest did not suit him. And he was homesick. He rode his pushbike twenty miles from Balinrobe to his home. From then on he was a day student and had to ride the same route every day for the rest of his secondary schooling. Dad was the first boy from his village to go to university. He studied agricultural science for a year before throwing it in and heading to Australia, via London, where he worked as a bus conductor to save his fare.
Autumn comes early the year Dad dies, dry leaves crunch under my feet and swirl in the breeze. Like the anger and sadness in my chest, they move in waves. A rainbow of colour and emotion, from a dark, murky brown to burnt orange and bright yellow, flows through my body. The sun strains to warm me, to thaw my steely resolve not to crack. Eyes down, I watch the ground, the path littered with fallen twigs and crushed drink cans, faded chip wrappers and wet cigarette packets. A cool, early morning gust lifts my pleated skirt and goosebumps rise on my bare legs.
It’s only a few days after Dad’s funeral and I walk with my mother to the Glenroy Social Security office where the government employees will sort out Mum’s financial affairs.
‘Shouldn’t be too hard,’ I joke with her.
I want it over and done with so I can escape from the stifling interrogation, the gloom of McIvor Street and the misery of my mother. Today my mum looks fifty-three years old instead of forty-three, and she walks like an old lady, hunched over and frail, as we head down the familiar streets near my old secondary school in Glenroy. She is slow and weak with grief and medication.
I link our arms to give her support.
‘You’re shivering, Mum. You haven’t got enough clothes on you. Where’s your coat?’
No answer.
At eight o’clock we are first in the queue on the pavement outside the stark grey building, waiting for the doors to open. I study the other people arriving, the skinny bloke in his grubby, khaki overalls and then the young woman managing crutches and a baby on her hip. I wonder about their stories, make some up in my head – maybe the young boy is like Russell, and more than half of the teenagers in Broadmeadows, unemployed and desperate to find work in a place where there is none, looking for something useful to do.
I know I am lucky to have a good job. I miss my work already. I love being a journalist, working at the local newspaper, writing about people and their lives. Maybe I will write Dad’s story one day – the Irishman who sailed to the other side of the world, married his princess and dreamed of returning home one day with his new family, but then died. Not a good ending.
I remember Dad’s excitement when I got my newspaper cadetship and started my journalism degree. Only a few weeks before he died he was sitting with me, pretending to be well, beaming at my name, in bold print, ‘By Caroline Egan’. My very first by-line on the front page of the Essendon Gazette, a story about the ex-Richmond footballer Kevin Sheedy taking over as the new Essendon coach. I called him ‘the charming but disarming Sheedy’. ‘Where did you get that one?’ My brothers teased me when I took home the article. ‘Over the top or what?’ But now there would be no more stories to share with Dad.
Mum shifts beside me. Impatient now. Bloodshot eyes. She doesn’t sleep. She doesn’t eat. She doesn’t want to be here.
‘Name,’ says the John Lennon look-alike behind the grey desk.
‘Valerie Patricia Egan.’
‘Age?’ He almost spits it out. I am about to suggest that he introduce himself, that it might be polite to say who he is, how he can help, but I guess it doesn’t work like that here in the Glenroy Social Security Office, where it’s already frantic at nine o’clock, people lining up for the dole, sickness benefits, the widow’s pension.
‘Forty-three.’
‘Employment?’
‘Home duties.’ Mum’s voice is down to a whisper. ‘I’ve been looking after my husband.’
There were other jobs, I am about to add, even careers that Mum has had. I remember them, fleetingly, as he scribbles away and I wonder should I mention them all to him. Would he care? For a while, after her jobs at the King Street supermarket and at the Sylvania Hotel where Paul saw a man killed, Mum worked as a cashier at the then new Melbourne Airport at Tullamarine, not far from Dallas. The parking attendant job paid good money, Mum said, especially the evening shift, but then she had to leave. It turned out that Mum had trouble getting all the money from some customers who claimed they were ‘a few bob short’. She had a habit of making up the difference herself. And Mum’s last job had been at another nursing home in Essendon with Aunty Nellie, who was a matron there. She left it to look after Dad.
‘I’m just a housewife,’ Mum says, fiddling with her cigarette lighter.
‘Do you receive any other income? Investment accounts?’
The interrogator lifts his glasses up from his nose and looks at Mum now, to encourage a response, to fill the silence.
‘There are no investment accounts,’ I answer for her. ‘Mum left her job to look after Dad. They were still paying off our Housing Commission home.’
Fast flowing tears arrive, out of nowhere, blurring my vision. I feel ashamed for crying while Mum is holding it together. I am proud of her as I remember her as she was, just over a week ago, nursing Dad, massaging his back, the pain from the cancer moving through his body as she lifted him, turned and changed him, administered the tablets, performed the all-important enemas, all the time listening and talking with him, willing him to live, watching him die.
How long can her courage last, I wonder as I glimpse her as the young widow, lonely and anxious, worried for each of her eight children, the four youngest still at school, one at university, another in his second year of an apprenticeship. And what of the grandchildren growing up, a joy they would no longer share?
‘What about bank accounts?’ the clerk interrupts and I am back in the moment.
‘My mother has never had a bank account or a chequebook.’
I want to wrap this interview up now. We have nothing more to add.
‘Okay, do you have a death certificate?’ He asks and leans forward, now looking more like Frankenstein than Lennon. Mum twists the gold wedding band on her finger. I can’t look at her. We have been at it over an hour, we’ve filled in pages and pages of government forms about her income, her dependent children, what she spends on groceries and now he’s asking for a death certificate.
‘Do you have one?’
I don’t think we do, I have been sorting through papers with Mum and we found Dad’s birth certificate. The original birth certificate, on dark brown cardboard, informing us that Dad was ‘officially’ born in March, not January like he told us. So what does a death certificate look like? Should it be framed and placed next to all the other certificates on the wall, ones for Student of the Week, or the Bronze Star? Is there a medical term for the lung cancer that killed him?
‘Sorry,’ I finally answer. ‘We haven’t got one but I can chase it up.’
‘Great. Okay. Now, do you have any questions?’
Mum coughs and whispers to me, ‘Ask him’.
I hesitate. I feel sick. Just over a week ago my dad was still alive, a month ago he was at the MCG with my brothers, and at Christmas he was at lunch with my workmates, the journalists and editors from the newspaper, celebrating the end of a big year. He drove me there, came as my date and drove home alone, leaving me to go on to the after party. He never drove again.
‘Caroline. Ask him,
’ Mum says again. Louder now. But still I can’t speak. It all feels too sudden, too close to the last time I had to do all the asking, when Mum pushed me to ask questions of the doctor treating Dad’s cancer, urging the one question she couldn’t ask herself, ‘How long has he got?’
Back then we were sitting in a room at the Royal Melbourne Hospital, the consulting rooms of one of the specialists treating Dad, while he was tucked up in his hospital bed on the fourth floor joking with the pretty nurses, stroking their egos with his admiration for their commitment. Warm and funny stories, Dad told, bringing life to a ward of dying cancer patients. The professor of oncology sat in the chair before us, his manner too casual, too distant, or maybe he was just busy and overworked.
He told us that Dad was not doing so well. The cancer was aggressive and there was little that could be done for him now. The pain in his upper arm and shoulder, they had discovered, was from a broken bone. I flinch now and rub my shoulder, as I remember. For the last few weeks Dad had used his left hand to lift his right one so he could still shake hands with the stream of friends who called at the house to see him, to wish him well over a cup of tea. The professor told us the shoulder was broken but they wouldn’t operate. ‘Not worth it,’ he said.
Back then, in that stuffy medical office, Mum had coughed and nudged me.
‘Mum wants to know how long.’ There, I had done it. I had asked the doctor and I had to hear the answer, even if I didn’t want to.
‘We don’t really know for sure,’ the professor said. ‘But I would suggest inside of two weeks.’
Two-and-a-half-weeks later my dad was dead and buried. The professor was spot on.
Mr Social Security starts packing up the files and Mum glares at me. She’s at it again. She always wants to know when: when will Dad die, when will I get a boyfriend, when will the pension come – not even how much, just when.
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