Summer

by Michelle Zoetemeyer

  I’d just sat back down when Mum pulled up. She drops Dad off at work on the days she has to work and takes the car. We’ve got a station wagon just like the Brady Bunch. I don’t know what kind theirs is, but I know ours is a Kingswood. Dad surprised us with it one day. He went to work in our old car and came home with a new one. Only it wasn’t really new, it was second hand. He bought it for his thirtieth birthday. I thought it was strange that he’d buy a birthday present for himself. He’s thirty-six now and he hasn’t bought himself a birthday present since.

  Mum looks pretty when she’s dressed for work. She has long blonde hair just like me, only hers is a bit darker. It’s normally straight like mine too, but today she set it with hot rollers and now it’s all wavy and curly on the ends. Her shoes clip-clopped up the driveway. “Hi there princess. What are you up to?” she asked.

  “Nothing. Just reading.”

  She tilted my book up so she could see the front cover. “Hi Brian, hi Michael, how’s your mum going?”

  Michael grunted.

  “You’ll have to tell her to drop in for a cup of tea; I haven’t seen her in ages.” She clip-clopped past me and into the house. “Don’t sit on the cold concrete Jenny, you’ll get piles.”

  “What are piles anyway?” I asked.

  “Never mind, you’ll know what they are when you get them.”

  Far out! She walked straight past Brian and didn’t even notice the mess he’d made of her garden.

  “My goodness, the place looks like a bomb hit it,” she said entering the lounge room.

  Ha! Looks like he’s in for it after all! Brian’s Lego was all over the lounge room floor. The room isn’t very big, so it doesn’t take much to make it look messy. Last year Mum and Dad put up new wallpaper and built a unit. Well, Dad built it, Mum just helped. Now, the whole sidewall of the room is made up of shelves. The shelves are all different sizes to suit whatever’s on them. The World Book Encyclopedias are on the bottom shelf because they’re the heaviest. Mum put Pa’s wooden caravan on the shelf above the books, because she said it needed to be the centre of attention. Pa even put curtains and bunk beds in the caravan and bought some draught horses to pull it. Actually, I think he already had the horses and he made the caravan to fit them. Either way, it’s a beauty.

  Next to the caravan was Mum’s bull. She told me it’s carved from a single lump of wood and it cost her eighteen dollars. She put it on lay-by and paid it off at a dollar a week. A big bowl with a glass cat hanging over the side sat on one of the top shelves. The bowl was shaped like a fish bowl, but it didn’t have any fish in it. It was full of matchboxes that we’d collected from different places. Except, other people collected most of them and then gave them to us.

  Two wooden aborigines stood stiffly on the shelf next to the fishbowl. They were really tall and skinny and one had a spear in his hand. I think they’re kind of ugly, but Mum says they’re art.

  At the moment, the lounge room sparkled from one corner to the next. The wall unit was covered in cards hanging from threads of tinsel. Hand-made decorations hung from every shelf and Christmas lights were strung around the windows and on the tree. The place looked like a fairy palace at night when all the flashing lights were on.

  The Christmas tree is supposed to look real, but it’s not. It’s the same one we use every year. Like the wall unit, it was covered in hand-made decorations. There were matchboxes wrapped in Christmas paper with tiny bows and dried pine cones painted red and green and sprinkled with glitter. Chains made from strips of red and green crepe paper were criss-crossed around the tree. Last year’s tiny felt stockings with coloured trim hung from the branches, making them sag. I could even tell which ones were mine. They were the ones with the cardboard presents in them. The messy ones were Brian’s.

  The Santa with the moving arms and legs was stuck to the top shelf of the wall unit. His arms and legs were sticking straight up making it look like he was jumping in the air. The angel I made last year sat on top of the tree. Apart from the face, which Kate helped me draw, I made it all by myself. I know it’s not cricket to brag, but I think it’s a ripper. Everyone else thinks so too.

  I made the angel’s body from cardboard rolled into a cone and the head from a ping-pong ball. The arms are actually pipe cleaners wrapped in cotton wool and covered with scraps of material and the hands are just bits of cardboard stuck to the ends of the arms. I sewed a long-sleeved dress, trimmed with lace and bric-a-brac to go over the body. She has strands of wool for hair and wings made from pipe cleaners covered in white pantyhose. I glued patterns out of silver glitter on the wings and sewed sequins along the hem of the dress. When the lights flash, she sparkles.

  She looked lovely sitting on top of the tree. A bit cross-eyed maybe, but otherwise lovely.

  There are presents for each of us under the tree already. Aunty Christine sent them over from South Australia. Last year she came to visit, but this year she’s staying home. By the time it’s Christmas, there’ll be plenty more under there. We’re having Christmas lunch at our place this year. Mum and her sisters take it in turns each year and this year it’s our turn. Usually we take the presents to whoever’s turn it is and put them under the tree before Christmas. That way, we don’t have to worry about leaving them behind on Christmas day like Aunty Audrey did a couple of years ago. She had to drive all the way back to Belmont to collect them and we had to wait until she got back to open our presents.

  The cross-eyed angel sat on top of the tree looking down at the mess Brian had made. She looked almost as upset as Mum did. Luckily for Brian, only one of them could rouse on him and Mum had already claimed that job. She called for Brian to come and clean up his mess. I could hear her going on about her not going to work all day just to come home to a messy house and decided it might be a good time to find something else to do. She was just as likely to get me to help clean up otherwise. I could still hear her going on as I snuck quietly past her and into my room.

  “Mrs O’Reilly is coming over this afternoon, so I’d like to have the place looking respectable.” Mrs O’Reilly’s house is always spotless, but that’s only because she never lets anyone do anything in it. We have to stay outside whenever we’re there, which, thank God, isn’t very often.

  The last thing I wanted was another boring afternoon listening to Mrs O’Reilly and Mum talk about who’s sick and who’s faking it. Then, when they stopped talking about that, they’d just talk about everyone.

  I think I’ll go and see what Ed’s up to.

  Chapter 19

  Friday, 29 November 1968

  Maggie had no sooner curled up on the lounge with a cup of tea and a book when Stephen came in. “Can I borrow the car please? I won’t be back too late.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Just over to Stanmore to pick up Mark, then we’re off to see Tully at the Royal later on tonight.”

  “Off to see who?”

  “Tully. Remember that new band I was telling you about?”

  “No, not really.” Stephen was always talking about some band or another. Girls and music seemed to be the only things of interest to him at the moment. Maggie was still a bit uneasy about him being out late, but she knew she couldn’t keep him home forever. She figured he would be off to uni next year anyway, so she might as well get used to him doing his own thing. If Michelle was anything to go by, they would see even less of him as he became more entangled in his own life.

  “Keys are on the hook,” she told him.

  “Thanks,” said Stephen, leaving her to her book.

  “Will you be home tomorrow,” she called after him. “Your father and I are going the Warner’s place. You’re welcome to join us.”

  “What’s the occasion?”

  “Just their annual recovery cum Christmas party, I’m pretty sure their kids will be there too.”

  “It’s a bit early for a Christmas party isn’t it,” he called from his bedroom.

  Maggie hadn’t re
ally thought about it. It wasn’t that uncommon to hold Christmas parties in late November. She supposed the Warners didn’t want to compete for guests by leaving it until closer to Christmas.

  Stephen came back out in his usual attire of denim jeans and a tee-shirt. “Aren’t you going to change for the concert?” Maggie enquired.

  “Nah, it’s not that sort of concert.”

  “Well, what sort of concert is it?”

  “I dunno, just not that sort, I suppose.”

  Maggie knew when she was asking too many questions, so she let the matter drop. She detested sounding like a nagging parent almost as much as she disliked sounding like a whinging wife. Maggie and Peter had always tried to treat their children like individuals, with needs and wants of their own, and not try and take control of their lives like some parents did. The way they saw it, unless their kids gave them reason not to trust them, then the default position should be one of trust, not mistrust.

  “See ya Mum.”

  “So, you coming to the Warners’ or not?”

  “Yeah, probably. Unless I get a better offer, that is.”

  “You could do worse, you know,” Maggie said playfully.

  Stephen was still laughing as he headed down the front path. “Yeah, I know.”

  She had to admit, it was not easy watching the children grow up and embrace their independence. With Michelle away, Stephen was the only one left for Maggie to worry about. Not that she didn’t worry about Michelle, she did. But, she knew that Michelle’s fierce independence meant she would survive no matter what. Michelle’s insistence at studying in Newcastle was enough evidence of her determination to succeed. She wanted to study engineering, but refused to do so under the tutelage of her father, so she moved to Newcastle. Now, just like Maggie had done fifteen years before her, Michelle boarded with Maggie’s Aunt Beatrice and travelled home by train every couple of weeks or so.

  Of course, things were different then. The conservative values of the fifties could never compete with the more liberal and free-spirited attitudes of today, and Maggie was glad about that. She had often wondered how things would have turned out had she met Peter fifteen years later. Would it still be such a crime for a young girl to fall in love with an older, divorced man with two small children? She didn’t think so.

  In spite of the restrictive attitudes that permeated Australian society in the fifties, Maggie recalled her time at teachers college warmly. She remembered the Tuesday night dances in the assembly hall where students on the piano provided the music. Each week, one of the four college houses was responsible for organising the dance, and they would occasionally pick a theme to make it more eventful. Then, there were the dances at the YMCA hall in King Street where they would dance to Nat King Cole and the Glenn Miller band. Every so often she and her friends would pool money from their paltry allowances and buy a new frock for the dance. They would take it in turns to wear the new dress, so that by the time their second turn arrived, sufficient time had transpired for nobody to notice it was the same outfit.

  It was impossible for Maggie to think about her college days without her best friend Dianne Pembroke coming to mind. During the two years of college they were inseparable. In their free time they would go to the beach together or walk to Civic Park and sit under the trees with their favourite books. Sometimes Bea would insist Dianne stay for dinner so that she would not be forced to “give the blokes coming out of the Trades Hall, half pissed on second-rate beer and Fovene, something to gawk at”.

  Dianne much preferred Bea’s colourful, laissez-faire personality to that of her stupendously boring parents. So much so, that Maggie suspected Dianne would arrange her departure from Bea’s place to deliberately coincide with the six o’clock closing of the Workers Club, which was located upstairs in the Trades Hall building, and thus ensure a dinner invitation from Bea.

  Maggie laughed. Thinking about Dianne made her remember the time she and Dianne went Christmas shopping at Scotts in Hunter Street. Dianne had taken the good part of an hour to painstakingly select a smart white blouse as a gift for her mother. As they were leaving the store, a young boy raced past and accidentally bumped her, causing her to drop the parcel. The sleeve of the blouse fell into the soot and grime that coated the streets of Newcastle and the blouse got filthy.

  Dianne swore like a trooper while Maggie tried to suppress her laughter at Dianne’s most unladylike display. Maggie told Dianne she sounded remarkably like one of the shift-workers coming out of the culpable powerhouse in Zaara Street. Dianne had been so worked up about Maggie’s lack of empathy that she had stormed back into the store and demanded they exchange the blouse for a clean one. She told them that she had been careless in her haste and had not noticed the stain on the sleeve. Had she done so, she never would have handed over her savings for such an item, and could they please remedy the situation without delay. Of course Dianne forgave Maggie for her impertinence and they laughed about the incident all the way home.

  On the weekends that Maggie stayed in Newcastle she spent most of her time with Dianne. They would sit for hours at the local milk bar, sipping spiders and discussing their futures. Maggie had clear memories of Dianne telling her that she was not planning to stay and teach in Newcastle once she had fulfilled the conditions of her scholarship.

  It was the end of Trinity term and their second year of college was almost over. Until then, Dianne had not discussed such a notion. Dianne informed Maggie that she intended to graduate from college, finish her three-year stint at a local school, and move to Sydney. According to Dianne, she was not going to settle for the parochial, small-town life of Newcastle. There was no way that was going to happen to her. She was going to be the headmistress in some posh girls’ school, living in one of Sydney’s wealthier suburbs.

  Maggie had not known it at the time, but the promises she and Dianne had made to each other to stay in touch were as naïve as every other plan they made that day. The last she heard, Dianne was married to a mechanic, had three children, and was still living in Newcastle. Maggie on the other hand, did not stay in Newcastle as she had told Dianne she would. She moved to Sydney to be with Peter as soon as her teaching bond allowed.

  Maggie picked up the book she was reading and smiled. When the principal told Maggie and the other students on their first day of college that the next two years would shape their lives, she had no idea to what extent that would be the case. Yet, looking at the book in her hands – A Critical Examination of the Belief in a Life after Death – Maggie knew without a doubt that Mr Griffith Duncan had been correct.

  It was during her time at Newcastle Teachers College that Maggie had developed an interest in reincarnation and life after death. It was just after the Drama Club’s performance of Blythe Spirit. At first, the antics of Charles, his dead wife Elvira, and his second wife Ruth had simply entertained her. It was not until after the show that Maggie found herself thinking more and more about the séance scene. While Helen Clark’s performance as an inebriated Madam Arcati had been genuinely funny and convincing, Maggie had been more intrigued by the séance itself.

  Maggie asked herself a pile of questions to which she had no answers. Was there really life after death? If so, was it possible to talk to spirits? Maggie realised that she had never really given the matter any thought until then. Even though Maggie had always been dissatisfied with the idea that if you were good you went to Heaven and if you were bad you went to Hell, she was embarrassed to admit that until she had seen Blythe Spirit, she had never bothered to critically analyse what those well-established views meant.

  So, although the twenty third of September 1952 would be remembered by most as the night of the performance, Maggie preferred to think of it as the first day of her new life. It was that unmistakable point in time at which she came to realise that she could no longer continue through life without exploring the matter further. She read everything she could find on the subject. Books on life after death, spiritualism, reincarnation,
and parapsychology, she read them all. And while she no longer believed in Heaven and Hell – her mother’s intolerance and prejudice had contributed significantly towards that outcome – it was fair to say that her beliefs could no longer be summed up in a simple sentence or two. If you asked Maggie, she was still on that clichéd road to discovery.

  And who better to share her journey than her soul mate. The knowledge that Maggie and Peter had met as a result of their mutual quest for information pleased Maggie immensely. At the time, she had believed their meeting at the bookshop was a good omen. Standing amongst the numerous books on spiritualism and theosophy, Maggie’s concern that her independent and unorthodox views were likely to be a deterrent for would-be suitors was quashed. Instead, it turned out that she met a man who delighted in her inquisitive mind and encouraged her to explore to her heart’s content.

  Although Maggie conceded that her work and family life prevented her from spending the kind of time needed to thoroughly research and understand a subject, that didn’t stop her from reading as much as she could whenever she got the chance. Sadly, even that had become more difficult of late. It seemed that it was a very rare day indeed that she got the opportunity to sit quietly and read. Take Ducasse for example. Maggie was convinced that she’d been reading it forever and she still had a handful of books she hadn’t even started. Being the pragmatist that she was however, Maggie had already resigned herself to the fact that she was unlikely to get to any of them until her much-anticipated holidays.