Bad Behaviour

by Liz Byrski

  ‘It’s so sad that he felt he couldn’t go on,’ she had said, ‘but the worst part of it is thinking of him dying alone. Imagine it, Tom, taking the tablets and then sitting there alone, waiting to die. It’s so . . . so desolate . . . thinking about it is unbearable.’

  There was a longish silence before Tom, looking at her steadily, said quite slowly, ‘yes . . . if that was what had happened, it would have been terrible.’

  It had taken several minutes before Julia registered what he had actually said.

  ‘Would have? You mean . . .’

  He nodded, still watching her. ‘Yes.’

  It seemed a lifetime before she could speak and in that moment she hated them both for excluding her, hated Tom for agreeing to it and herself for not realising it sooner, for not understanding that it was something that was likely to happen.

  ‘How could you, Tom? He was my brother.’

  ‘He was also my best friend,’ Tom said, ‘and nothing was going to stop him. He asked me. I couldn’t let him die alone.’

  She’d stormed out of the house then, got into the car, and roared off at top speed to the beach. She struggled up through the dunes to the flat sand, where half a dozen riders were galloping their horses through the shallow water. Despite the sun and the almost cloudless sky, the wind was freezing. Tears pouring down her face, Julia started walking, thrusting on against the wind and thankful for its wintry chill on her burning face.

  Tom was in his study when she got back but came out to the kitchen when he heard her. ‘I was worried about you,’ he said. And she walked over to him and he put his arms around her. ‘Your face is freezing and you taste of salt.’

  ‘You were right,’ she said, burying her face in his neck. ‘You did what I would have done if . . . if he’d asked me. Only you . . . I’m sure you did it better than I could.’

  ‘He was very peaceful,’ Tom said, holding her closer, ‘more peaceful than he had seemed at any time since Bali, or a long time before that.’

  Julia reaches across the desk now for some tissues and dries her eyes. ‘You had to have it your own way right to the end, didn’t you?’ she says to the photograph. ‘It really pisses me off because I didn’t ever thank you for saving me from the stinging nettles, or tell you how much I loved you. I hope you bloody well know it now.’

  And she turns back to the keyboard to finish her message to Zoë.

  ‘Are we nearly there yet?’ Harry asks from the back seat.

  Justine, driving, catches Zoë’s eye in the rear-view mirror and grins. ‘It’s still quite a long way,’ she says.

  Harry sighs, the weight of the world on his shoulders. ‘But how much longer?’

  ‘An hour, maybe a bit less.’

  ‘We could play a game, if you like,’ Gwen says, swivelling around in the front seat. ‘I Spy, or vegetable alphabet.’

  ‘Or a quiz,’ Zoë suggests, remembering back to long drives south with Archie and Dan, just a little older than Harry is now, and looking and sounding just the same.

  Harry shakes his head. ‘We did that on the plane. Can I play the games on your phone, Mum?’

  Justine takes her mobile phone from the bracket on the dashboard and hands it to him. He settles back in the seat, his fingers moving like lightning over the phone keys. From her seat in the back, Zoë watches Justine’s profile as she drives. There is a different sort of confidence about her here, when she is back in her own country. Until she came here for the first time, Zoë had given little thought to what that link to land and family might mean to Justine. She seemed, by then, so much a part of Zoë’s own family, but in this place, Zoë can feel its power. Justine, she thinks, is an extraordinary woman, strong, wise and loving. Zoë has gained another daughter; a very different woman, who has stitched another seam of love into her life.

  ‘Can I phone Dad?’ Harry asks now, brandishing the phone in the air.

  ‘Darling, you know there’s no signal out here,’ Justine says. ‘You can ring him when we get to town.’

  Harry gives another of his enormous sighs. ‘I wish he and Granddad came with us.’

  Zoë smiles, watching Harry as he goes back to the phone for another game. Back home, Archie is running the nursery while Dan is managing the subcontractors who are building a second nursery further up the coast.

  I know you must miss Gaby, Julia had said in her email. But you’ll soon have your second grandchild – I hope Rosie’s keeping well. And hopefully Gaby putting down roots in London is not as hard to bear as it was to have Dan racing off to war zones. Your loss is, of course, our gain. It may have started off with us keeping an eye on her, but these days I get the feeling she and Brad think they are keeping an eye on Tom and me.

  ‘It’s so sad that Richard couldn’t have been there to see them get the award,’ Zoë had said to Archie a few days earlier as she looked again at the photographs. ‘He wanted it so much, and should have won it in sixty-nine.’

  ‘And if he had, and if you’d been there with him, as he’d hoped you would be, we would never have met,’ Archie had said. ‘And I would have been a worthless, directionless beach bum without a good woman to keep me on the straight and narrow.’

  ‘I doubt it,’ she’d said, laughing and kissing him. ‘Some other woman would have been a pushover for your fatal charm and boyish good looks.’

  ‘Maybe. But I’m very glad it was you.’

  ‘Me too,’ she says, ‘very glad.’

  Zoë rests her head against the window now, watching the clouds of fine red earth billowing up from the tyres of the four-wheel drive. Ahead of them, the unsealed road stretches into the distance, red dust and gravel bordered by low scrub, and beyond that the haunting red and rocky plains of the Pilbara that she once feared and now has a longing to photograph and paint. A few years ago she wouldn’t have dreamed of coming here, bouncing over unsealed roads to a remote settlement, and sitting under a tree in the late afternoon, talking to Justine’s numerous aunties and cousins, losing herself in their storytelling. She still doesn’t feel completely at ease in this strange and eerie landscape, but she’s learned that a certain level of dissonance doesn’t have to be frightening. It’s like the gypsy with the lavender had told her; it’s what you do with it that matters.

  ‘You okay, Zoë?’ Justine asks now, catching her eye in the mirror once again.

  ‘Fine,’ she says, ‘just thinking, wondering why I spent so much of my life reacting to the past instead of thinking about the future.’

  ‘We spend far too much time on it, Zoë,’ Gwen says. ‘You and I, constantly mulling over, whether we behaved nicely, or could have done better, the things we should have done and didn’t. I think it might be pure self-indulgence. We’re older and wiser, and we don’t need to apologise for being who we are.’

  ‘I know who you are,’ Harry says, looking up from his game. ‘You’re Grandma and Nanny Gwen. I could of had three grandmas, you know, if I’d got born quicker. I would of got Granny Norah too, that would’ve been cool.’

  ‘Cool?’ Justine says, laughing and looking across at Gwen, and then back again at Zoë. ‘Terrifying, more like. You three would have been a formidable trio.’

  The class starts at ten and it’s just a few minutes to the hour when Zoë parks her car and hurries through the entrance to the courtyard. Ahead of her, a woman carrying a canvas bag with brush handles and a shiny new palette sticking out of it, pauses and looks around.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she calls out to a young girl who is wiping the café verandah tables. ‘Where do I go for the beginners’ watercolour class?’

  The girl directs her and returns to the tables, and Zoë slowly follows the woman into the building, remembering her own first day; the anticipation of discovery, the fear of looking stupid and of being the only one in the class unable to learn. Madness, she thinks now, the madness of her self-inflicted isolation. She is still surprised that all she’d felt was relief at Richard’s confession. Anger and reproach would have been logica
l but it seemed that the time for that had passed. As she put the pendant, that lifelong reminder of guilt and shame, into his hand, she’d known she was releasing herself to fly out of the cage she had built from the past.

  And now Richard is gone, by his own choice, and, she hopes, in some sort of peace. And Eileen is also gone, seeing out her last years as the life and soul of the nursing home, boasting about her grandchildren, particularly her grandson, leading the singing and playing Scrabble with words of her own making. Was this the girl she had once been, the woman she might have become had she not caught the eye of that unknown sailor? Zoë hopes that dementia banished her mother’s own guilt and shame, and let the real Eileen shine through. Sometimes Zoë feels she should have tried harder, that if she had been more forgiving and worked harder at her relationship with her mother, things might have been different. But she has lived too long with regret to let it rule her life again.

  A soft murmur of voices drifts out through the open door of the studio as she makes her way up the stairs. The studio where she sat at an easel for the first time is filled with another group of cautious beginners, each one assessing the others, fearing their own lack of creativity and confidence, wondering if they alone will fail to make the leap of imagination required to do something meaningful, possibly even beautiful, with paint and paper.

  Zoë pauses in the doorway, looks around for Gwen and edges towards her between the easels.

  ‘Were you able to pick up the photos?’ she asks. ‘Are they any good?’

  ‘They’re great,’ Gwen says, handing her a packet of prints.

  Zoë opens the packet, shuffles through the pictures and lets out a low, soft whistle. ‘They really are brilliant, aren’t they? Thanks so much, Gwen.’ She hesitates. ‘Are you sure you want to do this class again, it’ll be the third time.’

  ‘I’m sure,’ Gwen says. ‘This is where I want to be.’

  Zoë shrugs. ‘Up to you. Time for a coffee later?’

  ‘You bet.’

  Zoë makes her way to her own easel and turns to face the class.

  ‘Hello, everyone,’ she says, ‘welcome to the beginners’ watercolour class. My name’s Zoë. When I came to this class a few years ago, I hadn’t done any painting since junior school. I think I was having a bit of a mid-life crisis, because I turned up with some tubes of paint, a little curiosity and a rather heavy heart, convinced that I hadn’t a creative bone in my body. Well, painting introduced me to my creativity, and showed me different ways of using it. I had a lot of fun, learned a bit about painting, and a lot more about myself.’

  There is an appreciative rumbling and rustling among the women in the group. They look around again, the smiles a little more confident now; they are settling in.

  Zoë takes the photographs from the pack, hands them to a woman at the end of the front row and asks her to take one and pass them along.

  ‘It’s something of a tradition in this class that we start with a Western Australian landscape,’ she says. ‘Last month when I was in the Pilbara with my friend Gwen over there, we took some photographs and I thought it might be fun to work with these as a guide. It can be an eerie place, but the horizons, the colours and the contrasts are magnificent. This is my daughter-in-law’s country and through her, I’m learning to see it in a different way. And that’s part of what I learned in that first watercolour class, that it’s always possible to see things in a different way. That’s been hugely important for me, as a woman, as a mother and as an artist. So, I hope that together we can make this work for you too.’

  She pauses, watching the women examining the photographs. This is the moment she loves in every new class; the one in which they begin, and in which she can measure how far she has come.

  ‘Right,’ Zoë says. ‘If you’re all ready we’ll get going, and the first thing to remember is that with watercolour, the way you use the water is just as important as the way you use the paint.’ And she dips her brush in the jar and confidently strokes the water across the paper.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Special thanks are due to my publisher, Cate Paterson, for her patience, advice and faith which never failed through some very rocky patches in the writing of this book.

  Thanks too to Emma Rafferty and Sarina Rowell for their creative involvement and thoughtful, meticulous editing; to Roxarne Burns for reading an early draft and being honest about it; to James Fraser, Jeannine Fowler, Jane Novak and the terrific Pan Macmillan sales and marketing team for the huge effort and commitment that gets books onto shelves and into the hands of readers.

  Special thanks to Doreen and Freda who generously shared their experiences of being taken from their families.

  Love and thanks to Graham Murdock, for sharing his memories and interpretations of 1968, and to my wonderful family, Neil, Mark, Sarah and Bill, for their support and encouragement.

  And finally, thanks to the many people who have written or emailed to tell me to hurry up because they are waiting for the next book.

  The following books were very helpful to me in writing Bad Behaviour:

  Duchen C, Women’s Rights and Women’s Lives in France 1944 – 1968, Routledge, London, 1994.

  Halloran J D, Elliot P and Murdock G, Demonstrations and Communication: A Case Study, Penguin, London, 1970.

  Kurlansky M, 1968: The Year That Rocked the World, Vintage, London, 2004.

  Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, Bringing Them Home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families, Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, Sydney, 1997.

  McPhedran, I, The Amazing SAS, HarperCollins, Sydney, 2005.