As soon as the rain dropped to a mist, we got dressed in wet-weather gear and I took the boys down for fish and chips at the Bondi Pavilion, a very rare treat. I actually just got chips so that the money would go further. We sat on a wet bench and looked out over the slate-grey sea. I wasn’t poor, I realised as I watched Toby teasing the soggy seagulls, taunting them with a chip until they almost took it from his hand and then pulling it away, laughing like a lunatic. Ben ran into the affray and sent the white birds scattering with a chorus of chaotic squawks. No, I was not poor. I was so rich. I didn’t need anything more than them. They were my treasure and they were priceless and perfect. And hot chips had never tasted so good. And I had enough cash left over to do a load of washing at the local laundromat.
The electricity went back on sometime on Monday. I knew this as we were greeted, as we came inside the front door that afternoon, with a red blip. There was a message on my answering machine. It was Bill. He started talking after my recorded voice and I was really hoping that he was ringing to tell me he could give me the fifty bucks he had promised me so I could start getting Ben’s uniforms organised. He hadn’t had it the previous weekend when he’d picked up the boys because he’d lost his job. So I was only half-listening, half-telling the boys to shut up with their yabbering when he casually dropped the bombshell that he and his girlfriend were moving to Darwin. Within the week. I had not seen that one coming! I took a deep breath and deleted the message while coming to terms with that piece of breaking news. While I was kind of pleased that he was going to put about a million miles between us, because I found it just so awkward to still be sharing a planet with him sometimes, I went cold because I knew the boys were going to miss the hell out of him and I was going to miss my quiet meditative weekends off. OK, I lie. What I was really going to miss was the riotous champagne gossip-sessions with Sam or Bobby that happened every second weekend. I loved being a single mum, being with my kids day in day out, with only them for company, but I really, really looked forward to those girls’ weekends too. They helped me stay relatively sane, kept my sense of humour finely tuned and my liver liberally lubricated. I loved my boys to the end of the universe and back but being solely responsible for them almost every minute of every day was like living in a heightened state of stress, always worrying, watching out, like a mother bird on her nest, ever on the lookout for danger. I wasn’t one of those mums who bathed her kids in a bathtub of Dettol every time they grazed their knees, but I hovered under them like a safety net at the park or when they were climbing trees. I wouldn’t let them slide down stair rails and I held them painfully close to my legs at train stations. My oasis in that sea of heightened maternal cortisol was the bobbing life raft of my weekends with girlfriends … where we would inevitably talk about our kids.
I was about to become not just a single mum, but a full-time-all-the-time single mum, and that scared me more than just a little bit.
All my cleaning clients were away for Christmas – a disaster of titanic proportions, because it meant we only had the dreaded single-parent pension for that whole time, and that barely even covered my rent: a major problem. I’d fallen a few weeks behind in rent and had to keep stalling every time the real estate agent rang. But it was Christmas. The most wonderful time of the year. Except it wasn’t. I would be spending it alone with my two boys. My family in Queensland had gone to Bali for a holiday. I had invited them all down to Sydney so we could have a big reunion for Christmas and a picnic down on Bondi Beach, but Mum had said, ‘Maybe next year. We’ve already bought the tickets to Bali.’
The irony was blistering. They were having an overseas adventure and I was living some Charles Dickens nightmare of poverty. All during my childhood my parents had seen great things for me. I was always the top of my class. The school vice-captain. The recipient of the Gold Coast Citizenship Award (whatever the hell that was for I don’t remember). So my future had looked bright to them. University. And then the Australian dream. Married. Own home. Kids. Labrador dog. Teaching job.
I don’t think they ever got over me running away to Sydney with a punk rocker, dying my hair every colour of the rainbow, wearing Goth make-up and then getting pregnant out of wedlock at twenty. I was the antithesis of the ideal daughter. I had spent the early years of my adulthood grappling with their disappointment, and sometimes it felt very heavy. I had asked them to help me more times than I could remember. At least once a fortnight for years I had swallowed that lump and rung home to beg for twenty dollars or, if I was really skint, fifty. They always did. I’d give them my bank details and they’d go and deposit sums of cash and I would wait at the bank to get it out at the other end. Bill had done the same to his parents. We’d run them ragged with our lack of budgeting skills. Mum and Dad always sent us a little money at birthday times but I almost always took it out of the kids’ cards and spent it on a cheap toy for them and the rest on food or bills. Every time I asked my parents for help, I felt a heavier sense of humiliation. Every single time I made that handout call, I knew that what I was really saying was that they were right and I’d screwed up. And so, more often than not, as a single mother, whenever I rang my folks I tried to make it sound like I was doing well. I didn’t want them to be ashamed of me. I wanted them to be proud of how well I was raising my boys. And so I never really let them know how much I struggled. It was Christmas time and I was scared, but I didn’t want to ruin their holiday with my tale of woe.
Seriously. I was financially screwed again. I was up the proverbial creek without so much as a ladle. I didn’t have enough money for food let alone Christmas presents. Mum sent me a Christmas card with one hundred bucks in it, which was a great surprise, but I put it straight on rent to get me up to thirteen days behind to avoid an eviction notice. The phone would be cut off next and then it would be impossible to find other casual Christmas cleaning jobs.
Bill, of course, was in Darwin, which was so far away he might just have been living on the moon. He was living with his folks up there and the family sent down a lovely Christmas package for the boys. I’d saved it up high in the cupboard for a surprise and knew they’d be thrilled. He’d come and said goodbye to the boys before he’d left and brought the girlfriend along. I’d met her a few times and although that green-eyed monster we all nurture deep down wanted to hate her, I couldn’t. She was just too nice. But I was sad that the boys wouldn’t have them around for Christmas Day. Some kids have their parents break up and occasionally their lives become a little more enriched (after the initial violently traumatic upheaval) as new partners come to the party and stepparents and their families offer more love and support to the kids. But my kids just got me and a Christmas parcel.
I’d used up my quota of welfare food parcels with everyone – Vinnies, Salvos, Lifeline. My last card let me front up to the Salvation Army for a special Christmas handout to people with children. The nice captain I had spoken to the week before, when I’d run out of food, put my name down and said to rock up the Friday before Christmas and they’d give me a big bag of stuff for the kids. This year Santa was going to be the Salvation Army.
Without anything but a vague explanation I asked Sam to come and watch the boys for an hour on Friday while I went to collect the gifts from the Bondi Junction Salvation Army. I caught a bus and then walked from the corner, past the old pub and into the wide leafy street lined with fancy terrace houses. I always did this furtive thing where I walked past the Salvation Army building, which had two stone staircases leading up to the main hall, as a sort of recon mission to make sure no one I knew was anywhere nearby – I even waited until there was no one, literally no one, not even a cat or dog, on the street before I put my head down and ran up the stairs and into the cool comfort of the church or hall or whatever they called it. There were always a gaggle of other losers in there and the entitled little Gold Coast princess daughter of the middle-class teacher parents always died a little to know she’d ended up right beside the guy who
stank of urine and was talking to himself and the old toothless homeless woman and the other two single mums with their hollow-eyed sprogs who were waiting there that Friday before Christmas.
I sat down on a long pew-like bench seat. The room was spacious and every noise echoed, a shoe squealing on the floorboards, a door slamming from somewhere in the body of the building. I snatched a quick squizz at the young woman next to me. She caught my eye back. The poor girl was sporting an enormous purple and green tennis-ball black eye and she had a scab on her top lip. She gave me a pained smile. ‘Merry fucking Christmas, eh?’
When I left, I had a huge plastic bag, an industrial-sized plastic bag, of wrapped gifts. It was going to be a lucky-dip Christmas that year. I’d be giving the kids presents and I didn’t even know what they were! I’d had to write down my details for them at my last visit. Two boys aged seven and five – I rounded them up a couple of years so they didn’t end up with stupid babyish toys.
Walking down the steps out the front, I suddenly froze. There, her bottle-green four-wheel drive parked at the kerb, was my friend Kate. She had the boot open and was pulling out toys. New toys. Like, she’d just gone to Target and cleaned out the toy section. In a blinding explosion of light I realised she was donating! On this horrid welfare merry-go-round you had the haves and they (the nice ones) donated, and the have-nots (me) who were the recipients of that generosity. I had never ever let on to Kate just how bad my situation was. It would have been too embarrassing. She lived in a world where she could barely conceive what real poverty looked like. She could not see me! I literally dived to the nearest wheelie bin on the street and tried to burrow behind it, but I realised I was being even more obvious so I ran like some deranged burglar with a sack on her back down the street from one tree to the next, like I was avoiding enemy fire. I slipped down a one-way alley that had oncoming traffic so I wouldn’t run the risk of her driving past me. I went the long way back to the bus stop, cutting up past Queens Park and across to Oxford Street. I eventually arrived home to the unit in Bondi, sweating beads of humiliation and shame. I felt like a beggar. It was beyond humiliating. I couldn’t understand why it was so fucking hard to just survive. I had cleaned more toilets than most people piss into in their lifetime. I had ironed enough sheets that I could cover a continent with them – including fitted sheets, and that was no mean feat! I worked hard. I loved my kids. I was basically a nice person. Why did the universe hate me so much? What was I doing wrong?
As soon as I got home I hid the stash of welfare presents in the hall cupboard up with Bill’s parcel. And as I walked into the tiny living room, I stopped and frowned. On my kitchen bench there was a huge box of fruit. Plums. Apricots. Mangoes. Cherries. And a Christmas card. I opened it, amazed and confused.
‘Is this from you, Sam?’
She shrugged and shook her head.
‘Nope. The doorbell rang and it was outside. I don’t know who put it there.’
I read the card, frowning.
You are great. Keep up the good work. Merry Christmas to you and the boys.
I didn’t recognise the handwriting. I started to cry because this is the sort of thing that sets me off. I tasted a cherry and it was so damn good. I hadn’t had a cherry in years and it went down so well with my salty tears. It tasted like my childhood. I didn’t know who had left me the fruit box or the lovely note, but I was swollen up with gratitude and suddenly the world was good again. It really was beginning to feel a lot more like Christmas.
I never, ever found out who left that box of fruit. Perhaps it really was Sam. Or perhaps Santa is real after all.
Waking up on our first Christmas without any family other than our tiny trio was lonely – but only for me, and only for as long as it took for the last straggling cockroaches to skulk back to the shadows, because then the bounding bundles of boy arrived, squealing and hooting.
‘He came! He came!’ they shouted and began jumping on my bed.
I smiled and dragged them by the limbs down into a group hug.
‘Did Santa really come?’ I asked, knowing of course he had because I’d put all the presents under the tree (a sickly-looking white plastic number I’d got for three bucks) after they’d gone to sleep. ‘Did he eat the bickie?’
‘Half.’ Toby nodded, wide-eyed. ‘He must not have been that hungry.’
‘Probably on a diet.’ Ben laughed and gave me a look.
I sometimes felt like a lying con artist, letting them think Santa was real, but it brought them such joy. Ben was off to school the following year so I knew it would only be a matter of time before ‘that’ kid told all the others it was all a giant hoax perpetrated by their parents. I let them wallow in the fantasy for as long as the bubble stayed aerated.
‘Wait till I’ve had a cup of tea and you guys have had some cereal before you attack the presents, or you’ll make yourself sick with excitement. Come on.’
As I hurriedly slapped together a breakfast, I was awash with memories of my childhood family Christmas lunches in Queensland when Auntie Joan would spoil us rotten and Uncle Jim would force us to push him in the pool and then cry foul. There were always cherries and cold meats and lots and lots of brand new presents. But, that year, I had the Bondi bug-box and us, largely donated gifts and a cold chook in the fridge for lunch. But it was enough. That year, it was enough. I’ve never seen kids eat bowls of cereal so fast.
Ben and Toby were bouncing all over the unit with glee as they ripped open presents. A giant water gun. A basketball. A set of skittles. Two Christmas stockings of chocolates. Lots of small plastic things I knew would end up being sucked into my vacuum, which sounded like a coughing chain-smoker, and a couple of brand new books.
And then the boys made a big deal out of bringing out a secret box and presenting it to me.
‘Ta-da!’ they sang.
Inside were handmade cards that they had done at day-care. Toby had even written his own name, backwards in mirror writing, which Ben thought was hilarious.
‘Look,’ he squealed, pointing. ‘He wrote Ydot. Sounds like idiot.’
Yep, the b was indeed a d.
‘Don’t say that!’ I frowned. ‘Toby’s three and I think that is awesomely clever. Look Tobe,’ I said taking the card to a mirror in my room as the boys trudged behind me. ‘See, Ben? It says Toby. The kid’s a genius who sees the whole world through mirror-eyes.’
‘Wow. Rad. That is pretty cool,’ Ben said, amazed, like his baby brother had some superhuman power.
Toby looked well pleased. ‘Yeah, so bum to you, Ben.’ He laughed, high-fiving me.
Toby didn’t really get what we were talking about because he obviously really did see the world through mirror-eyes. He would go on to write his name like that for many years, on purpose, like a trademark, to the great consternation of his schoolteachers. But that brilliant boy really does look at life through different lenses from other people and I love that most about him.
Ben had done me a drawing of our family and it was amazingly good, although I looked like a deranged banshee with enormous breasts – I wondered if that was Freudian but then, looking down, decided it was because I have enormous breasts.
Toby had collected some bird feathers from the garden at Butterfly Gardens Preschool and a shiny rock. We called the rock Rocky, because it seemed a fitting name, and I sat it on the mantelpiece and decided that my Christmas box of goodies had been the best present ever, ever.
‘These feathers are magical, Toby,’ I said and hugged him, and then Ben, so tightly they began to squirm.
I’d scraped together enough to take the boys for a picnic and we ate cold cooked chicken on bread rolls and drank lemonade down at the beach, and it didn’t rain, which was a blessing after over a month of daily precipitation. And I’d put aside enough for ice-cream cones at the parlour on the esplanade.
That night we all slept together in my bed
(we did this quite a lot), with the boys in their matching Christmas boxer shorts that Bill’s mum had sent them. I decided it wasn’t a lonely Christmas after all. As the kids wrapped their hot, sun-kissed limbs all over me in sleep, like tentacles, I really did think they were the two best people in the whole world and I was so grateful for having them in my life.
I was more emotional than I thought I’d be and Ben was as wound up as a slinky. He looked pretty slick in his brand new uniform. When I say brand new, I mean brand new for him. The uniform shop at the school sold second-hand uniforms for about a tenth of the price of new ones and, to be honest, I hadn’t really had any choice. They looked almost as good as new. Almost. I hoped no one would notice. I had gone all-out and bought him brand new black school shoes. They were only Kmart ones, but to my mind one new black school shoe looked like the next: all pretty daggy. We’d gone around every Vinnies and Salvos store looking for a better pair and I had really hoped we’d magically stumble upon some good-quality leather ones in his size that were or looked brand new, but that had been a bit of a long shot. While I had been pretty chuffed that I’d found a pair of grey shorts and some not-too-shabby runners, the black school shoes had not materialised.
‘You nervous?’ I asked Ben as we walked down the hill from the bus stop.
‘Nah.’ He grinned up at me. ‘It will be fun.’
But I saw a glassiness in his eyes that mirrored my own.
I had also splashed out and bought myself a disposable camera so I could preserve the memory of the monumental day, the very first day of BIG SCHOOL. It was so exciting for Ben, and it was a financial godsend for me because I wouldn’t have to pay child-care fees for him any more! Hallelujah for public schools. My mother was a bit freaked out that I wasn’t sending him to a Catholic school. I think she was afraid he’d be knifed by some hooligan. When I’d told her that it would make very little sense for me to send my son to a Catholic school when I was not a practicing Catholic, and in fact felt resentful for the many years of Catholic instruction and guilt that had been hammered into me, she’d been quite aghast. Mum could never understand how I didn’t believe what she believed, and I could never understand how she did. It made for something of a stand-off sometimes.
Madness, Mayhem and Motherhood Page 7
