Back to Broady

by Caroline van de Pol

  ‘Paul?’ my friend looked at me, contemplating which one of my six brothers I was referring to. Then he smiled, ‘The one with tattoos?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘On his neck?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why did he do that?’ He shook his head. ‘He’s such a good bloke.’

  I think Paul is as fed up as I am with his being judged so harshly for a dumb, drink-inspired moment (or two). Although in some quarters having this hard-to-miss artwork so close to his cranium garners respect, perhaps even fear. When he sticks his elongated, graphically enhanced neck out of his delivery truck window people and cars make room for him. Not that he wants it that way. Paul would generally pull up anywhere he likes, anytime, just to annoy anyone of authority. Most of Melbourne knows my brother Paul, and his son Luke who has joined him in the transport business. His clients all look out for him on the rare day he might miss work (one or two when he smashed his elbow; he now bowls with a crooked arm). Paul turned his life around with hard work, early nights and pre-dawn risings as well as regular, prayerful visits to the beautiful St Patrick’s Cathedral. Perhaps he’s there now, as I write, making sure our dear mother is remembered in the newsletter and in the prayers of the parishioners as the anniversary of her death approaches. When the cricket match finishes, Paul will change from his shorts and t-shirt to the red and white costume hidden in my bedroom to play Santa Claus, with his ex-wife Julie and daughter Hannah dressed as his helpers.

  Tom, the second brother, separated from Paul by only twelve months, has had another health scare and is missing from the gathering in 2016 – the first time he’s ever missed one. Tom, the kid with the terrible asthma, always teasing and testing my temper as a child, now has his wife, children and grandchildren to test his jokes on. I’m grateful for the surgeons who skilfully removed the lump from his head. He will bounce back from this too – as he always does. Paul and Tom and Seamus are alike in their devotion as grandfathers. Tom takes time out of his busy real estate business in the northern outskirts of Melbourne to take his grandsons and granddaughter to the adventure park, swimming pool or the movies. He’s always loved the movies and I remember how he spent many Saturday or Sunday afternoons picking Margie up from hospital to see the latest film.

  With his daughter Nicole now working in the business with him, and with his wife Trina’s blessing, Tom was able to share a trip to Ireland with Jon and I. On Instagram, we called it the James Egan Tour and our family followed us as we traced our father’s footsteps through Dublin and Galway, to the university he attended for a year and then out to the Renmore Barracks (where we’re told he did some military training), stopping along the way for the odd pint of Guinness.

  Andrew is also missing this year. It will give someone else a chance to win a trophy, suggests his son Casey, who is representing his family. I’ve just received an email from him wishing us well for Christmas and Boxing Day and letting us know he’s found a new place to rent by the waves and not too far from Los Angeles, where he has been based on and off for several years now. Andrew is the most frequent traveller of our family and has lived in a few countries and other states beyond Victoria, over the years. His work in fashion (designing and developing clothing for his own label and for a range of independent clients) takes him away a lot. His wife and business partner, Jaci, loves the lifestyle as much as him, and his children, Casey and Darci, are also now carving international careers in design and entertainment. Andrew’s face is smiling out from my photo gallery in his absence. He was Mum’s prodigal son, the one who could return from anywhere and help Mum laugh, coach her out of her sick bed when all of us had given up. He introduced the younger boys, John and Matthew, to surfing and even Margie lived in a house with them for a while at Torquay on Victoria’s west coast.

  ‘Where’s Andrew?’ my cousin Ann asks.

  ‘Not sure. You know him. He could surprise us and show up.’

  ‘Last I heard he was in Bali.’

  ‘Oh, I thought it was China.’

  We are interrupted when Seamus arrives, loud and excited, carrying up boxes of treats. He has an enviable collection of old vinyl records and once, when he heard I was hosting a New Year’s Eve party for my childhood girlfriends, he collated a few he thought I would like. His son, Derek and wife Rhiannon, helped cart the crates of records up to the house. There was Sweet and Sherbet and Ted Mulry Gang and then Abba, Neil Diamond and Elton John. He shared his love of music with Margie and when I pulled out the Linda Ronstadt album, Seamus gave me one of those big, childish grins.

  ‘She was one of Margie’s favourites,’ he said. ‘I think Paul took her to the concert at the MCG in seventy-nine.’

  Looking at Seamus now, beaming like Father Christmas with a sack full of goodies under his arm, it’s hard to see him as the same brother I was so worried about just a few weeks before this Boxing Day gathering, when his phone call woke me around 6.30 am.

  It was unusual for him to call at that time and I had listened with some anxiety to his message. He could hardly speak and asked me to call him.

  Oh, God, what’s wrong? was about all I had time to think as I had immediately hit the call back option on my mobile.

  ‘Seamus. Are you okay?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. But he wasn’t. I heard him sigh and sniff, and then something like a coughing fit.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘It’s work. They said I can’t drive. If I can’t go over the bridge I can’t drive,’ he blurted it out among his tears. ‘I have to drive. I have to work.’

  ‘It’s okay. Seamus. They can’t make you. Are you at work now?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is someone with you?’

  ‘Yes, but could you come over too?’

  ‘Sure. I’m on my way. What’s the address again?’

  The drive to Yarraville had been slow in the early morning traffic and it had given me time to collect my thoughts. Seamus was not only distressed because his employer was instructing him to drive across the Westgate Bridge but also because he was afraid of losing his job.

  ‘I’ve got a family. A mortgage. I can’t lose my job,’ Seamus had repeated it to his supervisor, then the HR Manager and the union rep when they joined us.

  Seamus was a great driver. He’d been driving trucks for years. He’d left school at fifteen but hadn’t enjoyed school since he was a little kid and a kind of dyslexia went undiagnosed and unassisted. I guess school was a little different in the early seventies: no remedial reading classes, no integration aides, no funding. He made himself the tough guy – the notorious preppie who beat up a grade-six kid who picked on him. And then one day, with the encouragement of his wife, Donna, he took himself to adult literacy classes and taught himself to read and write so he could read story books to his girls, Lisa and Jessica. Over the years, he’s managed to work his way through a series of trucking licences and easily manages those huge B-doubles when called upon. But he refuses to go over the Westgate Bridge – in a car, in a truck, as a driver, as a passenger. He has tried but he can’t do it.

  It’s my turn to bat and my younger brother John is wicketkeeper. After a few aimless swings, he gives me a tip, ‘Run in and meet the ball, Cal.’ I follow his advice and hit one for six. ‘Thanks John.’

  John is a natural athlete. He’s looking fit and athletic, desperate to give up the smokes. Hopefully for good this time, as he is the last of the brothers to kick a habit that was well and truly alive in McIvor Street. Both parents smoked religiously – Mum almost in a frantic way, sucking the core of the nicotine into her body, and Dad, more meditative, drawing in and out slowly as he contemplated life and his kids. John has tried to stop a few times and this looks like it could be it. He’s living by the beach now, close to the surf along the Great Ocean Road. It was the beach and the surf that helped him and Matt when they were young teenagers and went to live with Andrew, not long after Mum died. Back then John worked in the surf industry with Andrew’s own label, MCD, and t
hen with big names like Rip Curl and Quiksilver. For many years he was a casual for the offshore, fly-in fly-out rigs off Western Australia, which followed a stint on the Spirit of Tasmania where he met his English wife, Lisa. He’s a father of three and teaching his younger kids, Connor and Keira, to surf and to fish, while his oldest daughter Shae, the dancer, has just returned home from working in London. John says he has Margie to thank for his surfing talent. When Margie finished making sandwiches with Sylvie at the Torquay milk bar where she worked part-time, Margaret would drive her younger brothers, John and Matt, to the various surf spots around the west coast, The Rock at Jan Juc, Winkipop and Bells Beach. She loved nothing more than sitting on the cliff top watching her brothers paddle out and disappear into the waves.

  Now as the cricket game comes to its final overs it’s Matt battling it out with Daniel. The two youngest of my families I mix up so often. They look alike, sound alike and even sometimes think alike. Nonconformists. Like John, Matt has been in and out of the surf industry and even had a stint at radio and print journalism, but for now earns his living on the gas pipelines out in the ocean. Matt, so devastated by the early losses of his parents and sister while still so young, has, by his own admissions, been to hell and back. His story, like the rest of my brothers, would be a long and entertaining one, and maybe one day he will tell it. For now, he draws inspiration from the ‘good times’ he shared with Margie, at music concerts, in theatres and when they lived together in Fitzroy, Torquay and Alexander Headlands on the Sunshine Coast. They both shared a love of music and theatre (now passed on to his daughter, Jade) and both took to the stage as if they’d grown up on Broadway, not in Broadmeadows.

  Later that night, when the sun has gone down, after the cricket awards are given out, after Santa has visited and delivered his treats, and the young ones have performed their karaoke, Jon lights the backyard fire and we sit a while longer, telling stories and remembering.

  Matt and Will play a few songs on the guitar with Will’s girlfriend Steph holding up music notes on the iPhone. Matt’s daughter, Jade, sings Amy Winehouse’s ‘Valerie’ to Will’s strumming while James and his fiancée Karina provide some harmony. Daniel knew to escape early, vivid memories of his mother asking her three boys to play a little something for the family.

  Jon is beaming.

  I go inside for the tissues.

  Postscript

  In many ways, while writing Back to Broady, I tried hard to avoid writing about sadness – illness, death and grief. I didn’t want to seem self-indulgent. I didn’t want to write a misery memoir.

  But in the search for truth in storytelling and in reading literary and social theory as part of my PhD, I found I did have something to say about the world I inhabited and the people and places that shaped me. Perhaps what I had to say, and the thing that bothered me, was different and yet the same as what others have considered before me and will continue to do long after. I understand now that while we all have a story to tell of a life lived, some of us are blessed or cursed with the need to share it – firstly to witness it, then to remember it and finally make some record of it – in my case the artifice is writing.

  Did I have something new to say about life in a big Irish Catholic family growing up in a poor suburb of Melbourne where tragedy and death seemed to hover above those sun-filled childhood days of riding bikes, catching tadpoles, and building cubby houses. Perhaps I did have something to contribute in writing of a place that I believe had previously been neglected, overlooked in stories, both fiction and non-fiction.

  What started out as a biography about two blind brothers, friends of my childhood eventually became a kind of memoir of a time, place and community that was autobiographical, including the self but deliberately not self-reflexive. As the book took shape, transforming into a kind of hybrid writing it continued to maintain truth as its source, but with imagination as its guide. After all, why should truth exclude imagination? There are some who would argue that imagination is a memory aid that may enhance truth. Imagination helped me fill the gaps and overcome the silence that persisted when remembering factual events and stories from the past.

  Initially I called my memoir In Whose Eyes, an attempt to capture a theme around seeing, ways of seeing AND not seeing. My intention was to tell the story of two blind brothers who grew up next door to me in Dallas. They both lost their sight in childhood accidents – freakishly and separately, a year apart. In my story I wanted to create a record of our shared experience of growing up in Broadmeadows, of our connected childhoods, our connected families and our connected experiences, a kind of ‘historiography’.

  I always knew I would write about Maurice and Nick Gleeson because, of all the people outside of my family, they have had the greatest impact on me. When I was very young I was fascinated by them. Afraid too, because I didn’t understand what had happened to them, and I was desperately afraid that a simple knock to the head would send me blind too. As an adult writer looking back on that young, fearful girl, I realised that their inclusion in my story offered a metaphor. Their blindness, I realised, would help me to see.

  When I was older my fascination turned to admiration. I was inspired by the blind brothers; how they went about their lives, their work and the amazing things they did, the things they achieved. But perhaps most of all, their attitude to life – they saw things differently, had faith in themselves and the courage to move beyond what they couldn’t see, what they might not ‘know’. Their story also provides an allegory for the ways in which writers ‘see’. What are we blind to? What do we feel and touch? How intuitive are we and how needy of ‘truth’?

  It wasn’t until I felt I could ‘own’ this story – and later when Nick started writing his own memories – that I began to feel free to experiment and imagine the gaps that existed. It was here that I turned to the novelist’s toolbox to create character, dialogue and mood.

  One of the first units of study I selected when I undertook my Masters some years ago was called ‘The Other Side of the World: Literatures of Sadness, The Mind Body in Crisis’. It was the first time I had tackled writing creatively alongside an analytical examination of a topic, almost in ficto critical style that was new for me. The research for this unit introduced me to Freud’s work on melancholia and Julia Kristeva’s on depression in Black Sun. I studied the theories around experiences of pain and suffering and the role of art and literature in dealing with the troubles of our souls. And throughout an extended personal essay I wrote for the course, I worked in fragments of story (usually at 3 am), pieces of memory – of my experiences of depression, or more accurately, living with family touched by melancholia. Sometimes I included reflections, in a rather abstract way, about mental illness, grief and sadness – and suicide. At times, I was sure I was going crazy. I got sick. I couldn’t sleep. I walked the house in a daze, my head full of stuff I wanted to purge.

  That was back around 2005. It happened again more recently, in 2012 when I was hospitalised with double pneumonia. Illness trigged by my return to writing? It was like I was completing the full circle and I was back where I had started all those years ago, thinking about my mother, Valerie, my father James (Seamus) and my sister Margaret. What was this haunting of the dead? Why couldn’t I let them rest in peace?

  I can’t help but believe illness is of the whole body – especially the mind.

  A year after the pneumonia battle, I am in a waiting room at a medical clinic. I am in pain. My head hurts and I feel like I am about to throw up. ‘Come with me and lie down,’ the kind receptionist says. She turns out the lights. The doctor, an angel in a white blouse and grey skirt with big brown eyes smiles at me, recognises me (even though it has been many years since I have consulted her). My doctor asks a few questions about the headaches. How long? How frequent? How fierce? She talks about meningitis, brain tumours. She will see me as soon as she can but for now, I must stay here in the dark room, rest and wait. The tablet begins to work and the pain dissolves but
the head is fuzzy. I feel a little better, check my work emails.

  Later my doctor and I remember the time we first met (thirty years before) when she was the family doctor to my mum, my sister and me. She looks at me on this cold, wet morning and frowns. Now there’s only me, the only living female of my immediate family. I tell Dr H about my life, briefly fill in the past ten years since I have last seen her. ‘I’m writing a book,’ I tell her.

  ‘Well you’d have enough material to fill it,’ she smiles at me, hands me a tissue.

  My blood pressure is way too high, my iron way too low. We talk some more; tears fall but I don’t cry, I have too much work to do.

  As we remember our shared past, my doctor throws in little bits of the details of those memories.

  ‘Your sister was the Westgate?’

  I nod.

  ‘Your mum, the tablets?’

  I nod again and add ‘Septicaemia.’

  This time she nods.

  ‘Post-traumatic stress disorder,’ Dr H almost whispers it as she writes on the folder of notes. But I don’t go there with her. I know the expression PTSD and relate it to real trauma like war. But later, at home, researching for my exegesis, I read some more. Is there a danger in reading too much? Too much knowledge can be a dangerous thing. Ignorance is bliss. Who said that?

  In writing this memoir with its many and varied titles, Castles of Broadmeadows, Dallas 3047, Ways to Fly, there was a point when I turned my back on first person to third. Was it when I was writing the death of my mother? I think it helped when I was struggling to convey the depths of the shock and the sadness I felt when she died suddenly and tragically at the age of forty-five, just two years after my father’s death. But isn’t all death sudden and tragic? I had two weeks’ notice with my dad’s diagnosis of cancer and yet, even as the family gathered by his bedside, I believed he might live a little longer. For my mother and my sister there was no preparation. In fact, before my mother died we had enjoyed twenty-four hours of hope – all was well, we were told, she was out of danger. And then she died. With my sister, there was no warning that she would take her life on that day at that time.