by Fiona Capp
At least Nikos didn’t make a fuss. He gave me a big hug and we chatted as we always had. He had grown a silvery goatee. I told him it made him look quite devilish.
His hand automatically went to his chin. ‘Not too, you know, severe, is it?’
I laughed. The staff had always been divided about Nikos. Some thought him vain and self-important but his preening had never bothered me. His ego was nothing compared to those you bumped up against in Canberra.
When Nikos had asked me to come back to make the presentations at the grade-six graduation night, I knew I couldn’t refuse. I had taught these kids as preps and now they were going to high school. I wanted to see them off and wish them well. Even though I secretly found the whole idea of primary-school students graduating silly. You graduate from university. A graduate is someone who has earned a degree. I checked my Macquarie Dictionary just to make sure I wasn’t being an old fogey. I’d never been to one of these occasions before because prep teachers didn’t have to. Nikos told me all I had to do was say a few words, shake their hands when they came up to the front and give them a certificate. It sounded as if it would be over in no time.
Once all the parents and children were seated, Nikos led me up onto the stage. While he kicked things off, I glanced around at the new hall – an austere yet pleasantly airy building full of natural light, which had been designed to blend in with the two original red-brick buildings – and smiled at the familiar faces in the audience. I had been doing this kind of thing for two years now. I knew I would never enjoy it, no matter how warm the welcome or familiar the faces. At the same time, I had proved to myself I could get through it, that I could play the part without embarrassing myself or David. And that, I knew from experience, was no mean feat.
After I’d said my few words, Nikos began calling out the students’ names. One after the other they came up and, to my surprise, stopped by the microphone and began reading prepared speeches about their memories of their years at school, their teachers and friends. Quite a few of them recalled incidents from prep and mentioned how they had enjoyed having me as their teacher, which of course was lovely, but for some reason I couldn’t help feeling dismayed. At first, I didn’t know why. As the speeches went on, it dawned on me. The problem was the genre of the public speech. I had listened to a lot of speeches in my time travelling with David on the campaign trail. Often I heard him give the same one over and over again and knew that if he suddenly collapsed, I could easily finish it for him – although the thought of actually having to do this made me feel ill. David is a gifted public speaker but when you hear the same thing umpteen times, even the most inspired observations lose their shine. It’s all formula, formula – and here I was hearing it from the mouths of these kids who, although they were not exactly babes, still had their tadpole tails.
They were just saying what they believed was expected of them, thanking everyone for ‘being there’ for them and for being ‘caring role models’. Maybe they’d watched too many Academy Award presentations. There were flashes of originality and spontaneity, droll remarks about funny things someone had said or done, but overall, these little adults were such a long way from the anarchic four and five year olds I remembered that I couldn’t help feeling sad.
Towards the end, a pale girl dressed all in black like an emo came up and you could tell from the way she hung back from the microphone and launched into her speech at top speed, not looking up once, that – unlike most of the others who seemed to relish their moment in the spotlight – she didn’t want to be there. Her voice shook, she stumbled over her words and then she lost her place and seconds went by as her eyes flicked madly back and forth across the page in search of it. It was during this awful lull that my palms went sweaty and I found myself reliving, once again, my own misguided attempt at public speaking at high school, and everything that followed from it. What no one in the family dared, at the time, to name, but which my mother later referred to as my ‘breakdown’.
By the time I reached high school, Rosalind had already been there for three years and everyone expected me to be just like her: confident, sporty, top of the class, popular. Instead, I was a shy, average student, poor at most sports except – due to some physiological quirk – discus and shot-put. Initially, the older students would bounce up to me and say, ‘So, you’re Ros’s little sister,’ assuming I would pipe up with a clever or chirpy remark, as Ros would have done in my place. All I could do was whisper, ‘Yes,’ and slink away. I didn’t hold it against Ros – or at least I thought I didn’t. I just wanted people to understand that we were different. And most people eventually did – except for my mother who, having no need to worry about Ros, turned her full attention on me and what she regarded as my problems. At the time, I wished that she’d just leave me alone, that she’d stop trying to get me to join this or that club or sports team or drama class. Stop making me feel as if there was something wrong with being quiet.
I realise now that she was afraid I would end up like my father who, on arriving home from work each day, would give her a peck on the cheek and disappear into his study until dinner time. More often than not, he’d head back there once dinner was over. As a child I had almost no idea what his job was, apart from the fact that he worked for the Department of Defence. When anyone asked him about his work, he would make an evasive remark about not being able to say too much, as if he was involved in some hush-hush, top-secret operation. I assumed that he was doing more of this hush-hush work in his study in the evenings, but my mother always insisted that he was writing poetry. When they met, he’d had some early success with poems published in small literary magazines and she was convinced he would make his mark. Although he didn’t say much, he’d been good-looking in a dark, brooding way and his poetry suggested hidden depths. She’d imagined that she could draw him out of himself and foster his talent. They would mix in bohemian circles where her ability to inspire and organise would be valued.
It didn’t quite turn out that way. My mother fell pregnant with Rosalind, my father took what he assumed would be a temporary job with the Defence Department, and his much anticipated book of poems never appeared. My mother kept hoping that he would one day finish the collection but whenever she alluded to his writing, a snarl would quiver on his top lip, which Ros and I learned to dread. I don’t want to suggest that he was a bad father or husband. But he always had a distracted air, as if there were other, more weighty matters on his mind. As for his feelings, they were the poems he never wrote.
As time went on, my father lost touch with his poet friends and became more withdrawn. He had never been good at small talk and when he and my mother went out to parties or dinners – which was not very often – he would sit and listen and silently drink himself into a stupor. Because I, too, was reserved and inclined to brood, my mother saw me heading down a similar path and made it her mission to coax me out of my ‘shell’. I made it my mission to resist her. The tug-of-war between us left me feeling that I was forever a disappointment.
In my second-last year at school, I finally gave in. Ros had gone off to study law at university and her absence had an unexpectedly liberating effect. Perhaps I really believed that I could do it. Everyone, surely, nurtures a secret belief that they have untapped talents or abilities. (I used to imagine that I would wake up one morning with a beautiful, husky voice like Billie Holliday or Edith Piaf, and be able to sing in front of a crowd without the slightest hint of nerves.) Or perhaps it was because no one expected anything of me any more. I had always hated the pressure of expectations. It was better to be underestimated, I thought. That way you could come from behind and take everyone by surprise. And so I joined the debating club at school.
For the first few debates, we had a whole day and a night to prepare our responses to the topic. Because I was new to it, I was allowed to be first speaker for the affirmative. That way I could have my speech all worked out. I would learn it word for word and then, when the moment came, I would go into a kind
of trance and spout it off with my eyes fixed on the Honour Roll at the back of the hall. This allowed me to ignore all the faces gazing up at me, to pretend no one was there. It looked, apparently, as if I was just talking off the top of my head. The teacher running the club was so impressed she insisted, after a few months, that I do the rebutting and summing up. By this time our team was in the finals and the topics were handed out only an hour before the debate. I had floated through those early debates on a cloud of unreality, stunned by my own success. Because I had managed to fool everyone that I had what it took, I started to believe it myself. To believe that the necessary words would magically come to me.
As the debate unfolded, I madly scribbled notes on my prompt cards. So many strands of argument to draw together, so many points to rebut. Instead of the mental clarity I had hoped for, there was a traffic jam in my brain. All thought had come to a standstill. In a strange way, a kind of clarity did come over me, the kind of clarity that precedes panic, when you suddenly come to your senses. Why on earth was I doing this? What was I trying to prove? It was all so stupid. None of us believed a word we were saying. We were just showing off. Trying to outwit one another, to be grown up. Our teachers said we were developing valuable rhetorical skills that would help us out in the wider world. But if this was what the big wide world demanded, I didn’t want to be part of it.
My turn came and I stepped up to the microphone, amazed that my legs didn’t fold beneath me and that my voice sounded almost normal. Then I made the fatal mistake of letting my eyes rove over the audience. Every face seemed fixed in a jeer. My throat knotted, the words became croaky and jagged. I stopped for a sip of water, hoping the pause would help me compose myself, but when I saw my shaking hand clutching the glass, I knew I was gone.
Without looking, I shoved the glass back on the table behind me. As I turned to face the audience again, there was an almighty crash as shards of glass flew across the floor. I felt the water splash the backs of my bare legs. There were gasps and then guffaws of laughter and a general hubbub. Civilisation seemed to fall away. I was out on the savannah being pursued. My only thought was survival, to get through the speech and off that stage. I read the first phrase on my prompt card and then the next and the next, shuffling the cards at top speed until I had made all my points with the frantic, rising pitch of a race caller.
When there was nothing left to say, I dropped the cards at my feet and ran backstage and right out of the school, and never went back.
The girl with the emo look had managed to find her spot and had made it through the rest of her speech without incident. We all clapped extra hard and smiled with relief as she hurried back to her seat.
I pressed my sweaty hands against my thighs and hoped that my expression hadn’t given me away. Once the speeches were done, Nikos wrapped up the night and I was free to go. I knew, however, that there would be parents and students eager to talk. Luckily, Joe was back early, casually leaning against the bonnet and puffing on a cigarette while he waited for me. I made my apologies, implying that I had other engagements, and slipped into the back seat of the car, thankful for the tinted windows.
We were halfway to my hotel – how strange to be staying at a hotel in your home town! – when I got the urge to see the house my grandparents used to live in. I gave Joe directions and promised him it wouldn’t take long. It wasn’t really the house that I wanted to see, it was the garden. Two large suburban blocks deep and two blocks wide, with six enormous old pines trees by the back fence and rusted bits of machinery and broken crockery scattered beneath, half covered by dry needles, like hastily buried treasure. In the front garden, there were always annuals of some kind – snapdragons or daffodils or calendulas – amid the prize-winning roses my grandmother so carefully cultivated. And in both front and back gardens, this vast sea of green lawn to run around on.
On hot days, Ros and I would chase each other over the sprinkler that sent fine jets of water skyward like the strings of a harp, and climb the pine trees barefoot and pretend we were in a magic wood. If I was there on my own, I would crawl on my belly like a commando through the massive vegetable patch and hunt down snails and caterpillars and any other bugs I could find boring their way into my grandfather’s lettuces, beans and juicy tomatoes.
After the debating debacle, every anxiety or fear I’d ever known coalesced into one great, paralysing terror that made it impossible for me to leave my bedroom. For a month or more, a psychiatrist summoned by my mother came to our house. His name was Dr Schapiro and he had a long, craggy face and a habit of nodding all the time. At first, I couldn’t bear talking about what had happened and would sit in sullen silence. Unlike my mother, Dr Schapiro didn’t have a problem with silence. In fact, he seemed to quite like it, as if it allowed him to eavesdrop on my thoughts. The idea that he might be doing this was what propelled me to start talking. I said I didn’t really understand why, but I would rather jump off a cliff than go into the street and run the risk of seeing people – especially people I knew, and most particularly, people from school – and being obliged to talk to them.
And although I’d always been a great reader, I found that I couldn’t concentrate long enough to finish a page. The only thing I felt like doing was a jigsaw puzzle I’d been given for my birthday years earlier. I’d always considered jigsaws deadly but now that I had time on my hands, the undemanding nature of the activity was suddenly appealing. It was a one-thousand-piece puzzle of Van Gogh’s painting of his bedroom in Arles. My mother worried that it wasn’t healthy for me to be mulling over a painting by a man who had been mentally unstable and who had cut off his ear, but Dr Schapiro said it could be good for me – therapeutic. As if I could put myself back together by working on a jigsaw! It was such an insulting idea. I was tempted to give up on it, just to spite him. But by then I’d spent so much time staring at the damn painting, absorbing the grain of the brushstrokes and trying to distinguish one patch of floorboards or wall from another almost identical patch, that I was hooked.
As I was putting the final pieces in place it became evident that one piece was missing. My mother had been in my room with the vacuum cleaner while I was in the shower, so I blamed her. Mothers are so blameable. It seems to be their lot in life. She was always hovering around, asking me how I was going. Dad, too, was surprisingly attentive, perhaps because we were of a kind. As for Ros, she seemed to swing between pity and suspicion that I was putting it on. I don’t think she understood how it could happen. It was too far outside her experience.
The day I was able to leave my bedroom and have lunch in the kitchen felt like a small victory. Going outside, however, was another story. Dr Schapiro advised short excursions but every time I went into the street, even if no one was around, it was as if I’d stepped into a swamp or quicksand and was being sucked down. I would hear the same high-speed, insect-like chattering in my head that I did when I was delirious with a fever. Black molecules would dance before my eyes. What I had to do when this happened, Dr Schapiro said in his deep, slightly accented voice, was think of a place that I loved and felt safe in. A special place. A place where nothing could touch me. When he said this, I instantly thought of my grandparents’ garden with all its flowers and lawn and mysterious dark pines and vegetable patch. And doves cooing. There were always doves, or maybe they were pigeons, cooing timelessly in the background.
The miraculous thing was that it worked. Whenever I felt stirrings of panic, I would picture the garden and hear the doves and smell the pine needles and imagine that I was there and it would calm me right down. Very slowly, I began to venture out more and by the beginning of the next year, I was ready to go back to school. As I couldn’t face the pitying looks and the whispering that would go on behind my back at my old school, I convinced my parents to let me go to a high school in a nearby suburb where no one knew me or Ros. It wasn’t easy starting at a new school, but there were compensations – the anonymity of it, and not being in Rosalind’s shadow. If I’d lear
ned anything from what had happened, it was the importance of living lightly, of being silly sometimes, of not taking yourself and the world so painfully seriously. And of not letting yourself be crushed by what you imagined other people were thinking. I blithely made friends with all sorts of people, not caring whether we had anything in common. And to my parents’ amazement, my results improved dramatically. But I still knew that I had this flaw in me, these invisible cracks which, if I wasn’t careful, could open up again.
Now, looking out at the familiar suburbs of my childhood, I asked myself what I thought I was doing. Surely I was on, as my grandmother liked to say, a hiding to nothing. That lovely deep back garden had been subdivided and turned into a block of villas over thirty years ago. Did I want my memories of it overlaid with concrete and brick?
We were only a few streets from the old house when I leaned forward and said, ‘Thanks, Joe, we can go back now.’ I smiled at him sheepishly, relieved that I hadn’t said too much about where we were heading. Then I sat back and closed my eyes, thinking about how it wasn’t simply the garden that had mattered so much, but the comfort of my grandparents’ unflappable presence. They let Ros and me do our thing, let us roam as wildly as you can on two acres in the suburbs, but they were always somewhere around, pruning the roses or digging mulch into the veggie patch. So when Papa died during my third year at university, I finally heard the gate of my childhood slam behind me. Six months later, my grandmother sold the house and moved into a retirement village. Although I had gotten over my breakdown or whatever it was, the blow of losing Papa, and then the garden, left me feeling exposed. If I ever needed to invoke Dr Schapiro’s advice again, I knew I was in trouble. In my mind, the place had to be somewhere real, somewhere I could actually visit if I needed to. A place I had a deep connection with. A place that would always be there.
