But when I returned from Alexandria and rang, she didn’t answer the telephone. I went shopping. Andrew had gone fishing. Judy came over to get her camera checked out at the local camera shop where she’d bought it because it wasn’t winding. After she went, I tried ringing Mum again. No answer. I decided to drive over. Surely if she hadn’t been feeling well she would have rung me?
After Dad died we had an agreement that as soon as she woke up each morning she’d open her Venetian blinds. This way, even if I was running late for work and didn’t have time to stop in, at least I knew she was all right.
In retrospect, it was the steadiest, calmest drive in my life. Almost as if the car was driving itself. Or, inexplicably, as if a power beyond myself and the car had taken over. Was in control.
I pulled up outside 10 Mary Street and the blinds were closed. Did I know unconsciously what I would find? Again, in retrospect, I think that I did. Yet, from the time I closed the car door to the time I reached the back of the house, I argued with myself that there was an explanation other than what I was dreading.
The back door was closed from the inside and the key was in the door — which meant I couldn’t use my key to get in. Standing on a garden bench and using a screwdriver that I found in the laundry, I was able to force a back window and climb in.
The house was in absolute stillness. It was stuffy, hot. It’d been closed up all day.
The only sounds were my breathing and my beating heart.
Standing in the kitchen, I called out, but there was no reply. I ran to Mum’s bedroom but couldn’t see her. I could now hear another sound — a mechanical, humming sound. Where was she? Where?
She wasn’t in the bathroom, nor in Dad’s room. I ran outside, calling her. No reply.
Back in the house, I retraced my steps.
From room to room. Nothing.
Except that humming sound coming from her room.
I ran inside, this time to the far side of the bed.
What tore from inside me was a cry, a scream, a howl of protest, pain, disbelief. It was all those things and yet it was something beyond them all. Months later I remember thinking how eerie the cry sounded — it was like I was being murdered.
My mother lay on the floor, on her right side, almost in a foetal position, her head in a pool of blood. The ventilator mask was on her face and the humming sound was coming from the ventilator on the fold-up dinner tray she used by the side of her bed. The biggest shock came when I saw that the right side of her face looked like it had been smashed in with a shovel. I removed the mask and saw that it was swollen grossly, to the point of disfigurement, more black than blue and purple, caked with blood. When I lifted her head, fresh blood ran from her ear. I tried to lift her, pull her up on to the bed but couldn’t. She was cold.
Immediately I rang Dr Hehir and told him Mum was dead. What! he cried out. I’ll be straight over.
I rang home and told my wife to let the rest of the family know.
I turned off the ventilator and noticed for the first time that the bed light was turned on. She kept a notebook beside the bed, and after using the ventilator she would write down the time. This was every four or five hours. The last entry read “ten to twelve”. It was now just after four o’clock. My mother had been dead for approximately sixteen hours.
The doctor confirmed what I’d worked out myself before anyone else arrived. Mum must have got up to use the ventilator and died of cardiac arrest while on the machine. She had slipped off the side of the bed and hit her head on the floor. The blood, all from her right ear, had congealed on the side of her face and also soaked into the carpet and bedclothes.
When the doctor arrived and we lifted her on to the bed, the blood ran freely for a short time and stopped.
Peter, the doctor said, she was dead before she hit the floor. She felt no pain. She would have closed her eyes and felt as if she was going to sleep.
The family arrived, one by one, and we said our goodbyes to her. The doctor wrote out the death certificate. I rang Labor Funerals in Bankstown.
Left alone with her, I don’t know at what point I stopped crying, or, indeed, if I did. She seemed so small, so vulnerable. She’d told me more than once she didn’t want to be buried with her golden earrings, so I removed them. That she was dead, that she was so badly bruised, that she was bloodied and cold made no difference. She was still my mother. I held her and whispered that I loved her.
Mum’s funeral took place the following Tuesday, 11 February. As with Dad’s funeral, Requiem Mass was in St Felix de Valois Catholic Church, Bankstown, and Father Kołodziej officiated.
She was buried with Dad in the family plot, Grave 973, Lawn A.
This time there was no soil from Poland to sprinkle on to the coffin.
As we were leaving it began to rain.
I was surprised to see how many of her friends turned up at the reception afterwards at 10 Mary Street, people that I’d forgotten from the early days in the migrant camps and from various western suburbs in Sydney. Mr and Mrs Budzinski from Yagoona. Children of Doctor and Mrs O’Brien of Strathfield, whom she’d worked for in the 1950s and early 1960s, were there, as were Mr Laurie O’Neil, his wife Philomena and their son Michael. My former English teacher from St Patrick’s, Brian Couch, under whom I’d studied English Honours, surprised me with his presence, as did Brothers Brian Berg and Julian McDonald. Colleagues of mine from work, and old school friends and their wives, all came to say their farewells and lend support.
When I shook the tablecloths on to the back lawns, in a light rain, sparrows flew out from among the salvias — as if they’d been waiting for the crumbs.
By three o’clock all the guests had left. The house was closed up but I knew I’d return tomorrow.
Going home, I detoured via the cemetery because I wanted to get some more photographs. By now the rain was starting and stopping frequently and more was predicted for the rest of the week. I couldn’t help but smile at one of my mother’s sayings, “The one who sends the rain will also send the sun.” The rain held off while I took the photographs.
Sayings
While she was alive
I took my mother’s sayings for granted —
those lines of words that came
so easily into her head
as if she were turning on a tap:
“Go slowly and you’ll go further.”
“Buy not buy but try.”
“Having one child is like having
one eye in your head.”
Or, “I’m not from the stepmother.”
Sometimes they made sense;
mostly they didn’t — not that I bothered
to stop and ask questions,
to think about anything that ran
deeper in my heart than blood.
Now that she’s dead they all make sense —
short, humorous, elliptical,
like blows to the head or heart:
spot on, up close, hard,
never missing their mark.
Sprzedaj!
Sunday, 22 June 1997
Today I spent several hours at 10 Mary Street. While the sprinklers watered the garden I aired the house, opened every door and window and marked students’ assignments I’d brought over with me.
Strange how everything here has aged all of a sudden. There’s a tenuous feeling in the air, a quiet, thin strain as if something’s about to break — something I won’t want to know about when it does, even though this day was perhaps the best time I’ve had here, alone, since late autumn. The house needed the visit. I needed the visit.
In church this morning I’d listened to a sermon about suffering, about acceptance of everything that we are born to. Nothing will ever change these Absolutes, and all the fret and worry in the world won’t relieve our anguish.
The quotation the priest used and later I found in the Bible cryptically accorded our days their importance:
As for man, his days are as grass:
For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone;
And the place thereof shall know it no more.
King David was right. We are like weeds.
My father weeded these lawns diligently by hand and now he’s dead. Weeds grow across the lawns and the flowers will start dying unless I keep coming back to water them. Where are the vegetables that grew so abundantly in the backyard?
As I was leaving across the front lawn, the lawn squelching under my shoes, the house said, Thanks.
Thanks for everything, I replied.
Getting into my car, the words of a Creedence Clearwater Revival song came into my head, There’s a bad moon on the rise …
The first noticeable thing about the sign that’s been put up in the front garden of 10 Mary Street is the word AUCTION, in big white letters against a red background.
The second thing that strikes me is the catch-phrase, one of those seductive clichés that estate agents use with flair, as if they’d invented the English language, BACKS ONTO RESERVE. Hopefully, this will be one of the property’s strengths, one of its selling points.
In smaller lettering, the sign says, 3 BEDROOMS, NEAT AND READY TO LIVE IN.
There is a contact name and mobile telephone number, as well as the address of Nolan’s First National in Burwood.
I’ve chosen a mate, Matt Nolan, from St Patrick’s College, Strathfield, to sell 10 Mary Street. The date for the auction will be Saturday, 16 August, at 2 p.m. Matt’s name stands out almost as prominently as the telephone number below “Nolan’s First National Real Estate”. Notices for the sale have been put into the Sydney Morning Herald and the local newspapers in the inner-city suburbs where Matt’s business is located. This will continue for a month. This way, he believes, it will attract not just buyers but also property investors.
The sale is the culmination of months of deliberation as to whether or not I should sell the house. The issue had been going around in my head like a spinning top. Finally, when the decision was made to sell, it came through a set of circumstances so dramatic and unforeseen that no one in my family or in the circle of friends closest to me could have predicted them, not in their wildest dreams or guesses.
The colours of the sign are red, blue and white. I look at them and unconsciously make associations with the Union Jack, with royalty, with the rhyme I learnt in the playground at St Peter Chanel’s:
Red, white and blue,
the girls love you —
they kiss you at the pictures
and hug you at the zoo.
Blue symbolises spatial distances, sky and sea. Red, as on the Polish flag, stands for death, blood and sacrifice. White, also on the flag, for purity and redemption, the Resurrection. As remote as it is, as highly improbable, I like to think that these three colours, in combination, in front of the house that was my home, is not just coincidental, that perhaps there is Providence in their presence, like a sign of hope.
As I take a photograph of the house in the morning light, it reflects the rising sun off its tiles and brickwork. Shadows fall across the fence from the two brushbox trees growing on the nature strip, one in front of our home and one from next door, Number 8. When the sun rises higher and the shadows lengthen they will merge, creating one large shadow over the house that is pleasant to have in summer because it makes the house cool in the mornings.
The roses have been pruned but the brunfelsias are in bloom.
The leaves on the gardenias are a yellow-green.
Even though it’s winter and the grass doesn’t grow much, it’s been cut and the edges trimmed.
The gates are closed and the yard is spotless.
Strangely, I don’t feel any regret in agreeing to sell the house after the shock of what happened.
When I drove away from Parkes the morning after my interview with Peter Tom was finished, I expected to be drawn back to a last look at the site of the migrant camp. The foundations and concrete blocks that were there when I first returned in 1984 had been removed. Tall grasses waved in the breeze. The trees growing along the side of the road had concealed the site that’d now become another lot of paddocks on a farmer’s property. But the last look didn’t eventuate. There was no slowing down or pulling over to the side of the road. I just kept driving into the morning sun, towards Orange, the Blue Mountains and home.
So too, here, I don’t deviate from the decision I made or, rather, the decision made for me by the person least expected and yet the one person whom I should have known would make it for me during the preceding months of deliberation.
What happened couldn’t have been avoided, either physically or mentally, even if I’d run to the end of the street or attempted to jump into outer space to try and escape the experience.
She was there, waiting, like she always waited when I needed help, whether it was after being pulled out of a cesspool or when I was too afraid to tell the nuns I wouldn’t be going on any more errands for them because I’d caught a cold the last time they sent me to the butcher’s in the rain. Like she said she’d be there the morning the two zebra finches flew into the yard.
It was time to let go of the house, unequivocally, and so, shortly after 28 June, everything was prepared for the sale. Like the sign on the front lawn said, the house was NEAT AND READY TO LIVE IN.
On Thursday, 26 June 1997, my wife was diagnosed with leukaemia.
We entered the doctor’s surgery at 7 p.m. that night. As soon as the door was closed and we sat down, he said, Kate, I’m not going to beat about the bush. You’ve got leukaemia.
No sooner had he finished those words, at that precise moment, I knew that our lives would never be the same again.
We discussed how she hadn’t been feeling well that week, the results of the blood tests she’d had done, how abnormally high her white cell count was and the type of leukaemia she’d been diagnosed with. We were told she’d have to start chemotherapy the very next day. The situation was “life-threatening”.
Shock. Disbelief. Bewilderment. Why?
The next two days were the kind of nightmare you read about or hear about or watch in a movie. Your life becomes a series of events that happen to other people. You never think they might touch your life. Or, if you do think about them, you push them out of your mind quickly because their details become too painful.
Journal notes help me keep track of each day.
Friday, 27 June 1997
We go to the San (Adventist Hospital). K’s haematologist is Dr Margot Harris. Tests and treatment begin straightaway. I stay till 3 p.m … Others visit, relatives, friends. In the evening I return … I feel like being angry, crying, everything, all emotions all at once … K doesn’t deserve this … I can’t get over the shock. She’s being so brave about it, positive, has a really healthy attitude to it all …
It rains lightly that evening, though in the morning I will doubt the heaviness of rain when I discover another kind of damage and find footsteps where I don’t expect to find footsteps.
Saturday, 28 June 1997
I have to go to work in the morning to attend to a few matters that it wasn’t possible to get done yesterday.
On the way over I stop to check on 10 Mary Street.
As I walk down the side of the house I notice that the flyscreens from the two windows are lying on the ground. How could that be? It rained last night, but — how — how could rain remove flyscreens? Was it a heavy wind? A storm? I don’t remember a storm warning for any part of Sydney on the weather report! It wasn’t raining that heavily on the drive home from the hospital. But then, winds don’t undo flyscreens and remove them!
As I turn the corner of the house I see that the flyscreens from the back windows are also on the ground. The window in the small bedroom, the “spare room”, as it was called, has been smashed!
It happens just like that — an instantaneous realisation that there’s been a break-in and the sound of my mother’s voice, sharp
, clear, Sprzedaj! The word means “sell”, and all of a sudden the deliberation, the dilly-dallying over what to do with the house is over!
Later, in the months and years after the new owners have moved in, I ponder over that experience. I know what I heard and I know how I heard it. It wasn’t just with my ears but with every part of me. It seemed that I first heard it in my gut and then it moved like a flash of light, spontaneously, outwards, into every part of me. My mother didn’t sound angry, but she sounded strict. It wasn’t just a request. It was an order. Do it!
I manage to crawl in through the smashed window and find blood on the carpet in the room and in the kitchen. Going through the house, I find chairs and lamps tipped over, drawers in the sideboard pulled open and rifled. The small bedside cabinet in Dad’s bedroom is turned over and its contents scattered — so too the dressing table drawers. The wardrobe doors have been left flung open.
In the hallway the linen press has had its contents dragged out, sheets, pillowcases, the leather bag containing my parents’ letters from Europe over the years and many of the birthday and Christmas cards they received.
In the main bedroom the top of my mother’s sewing machine has been opened and the machine is missing. The two wardrobes have had their contents searched and my mother’s old black leather handbag, the one she stopped using years ago, pulled out. In it, she kept a collection of fifty-cent pieces. It’s gone. Probably fifty or sixty dollars. She kept those coins for good luck. The only luck to come from this break-and-enter is — as the police will tell me when I report the crime — the fact that the thief didn’t trash the place.
When the police arrive we search the yard and house and find fresh footprints in the garden behind the garage. They trail through the garden plots, going west. The police officers deduce that the thief got out of the yard by climbing over the fence. After I ring a glass company to come and fix the window, I ring Andrew and ask him to stay at 10 Mary Street while I go to work.
That evening I visit Kate in hospital. She is in a buoyant mood. She feels more positive than yesterday that she will beat this illness. I return to 10 Mary Street and stay the night.
The Sparrow Garden Page 21
