by Deborah Kay
It rang through my head that visit to the police station in Gladstone we did not even know was going to happen until the very last minute – because, essentially, she was a coward. Mum was terrified and weak. She did not know how to speak to or approach us or look us in the eye and have a decent conversation with us.
Definitely not me. And yet I cannot help in my way but feel sorry for her as she phones me every weekend in her old age now and pleads her love to me. I know she is merely trying to make up for the past, the hurts, the injuries, the insensitivities, the cowardice. I know that. But it is confusing. Still confusing as ever.
At sixteen, willing now to rebel, as if to prove her right, I did go ahead and try it: God’s weed. With Chris’s friends. But even I had higher expectations than it turned out. In the event, I coughed my eyes out like that first time I tried cigarettes – everyone laughed – and nothing happened.
The only high I got was from lack of oxygen and the deep whooping from the back of my nose and throat. The big high that they all used to get off on – and talk about incessantly – just didn’t happen for me. I was spared that, at least that one injustice I was spared. The potential for addiction.
A few months later, with the help of the Godbolts, I did finally gain a more or less meaningful job – in a nursing home looking after old people. And... I moved back in with Mum. Yes, Mum. It was convenient. The location of my new work was nearby Mum in Burrum Sound and I could be close to Chris again, could see him every day.
Despite living with Mum again, and despite a surprising equilibrium we found in our relationship, what saved me was love. This new love of my life, Chris Pyke.
We were both young and enthusiastic and got away – out of the house – whenever we could. Mostly we went camping with his friends who spent whole weekends down at Agnes Waters on white empty beaches that appeared as infinitely long and assured as our love.
Chris’s friends were always looking for a wave and a bit of fun, and yes, smoking God’s weed. They also drank and snorted what have you.
We all used to sit around listening to music on an old battery-operated cassette player and would sing along by a fire. We also sat and lay in the hot sun, sat and lay much more than we should have by today’s “slip-slop-slap” standards, and had sex, yes, lots of sex.
We were at that age when we were old enough to think we knew what we were doing. And that was half the fun... just believing in ourselves, having faith in ourselves out there in the hot-hot sun and swimming and surfing through large, unending waves. We were, in plain English, having a good time, enjoying ourselves, and for once in my life I actually felt like I was in control, like I had some power over my life.
I remember once, during a sudden wind on the beach, just as the sun was setting, one of the tents came down, and we all watched expecting someone to come running out of it shouting for help, yelling what the ef was going on. But instead of any bodies springing out of the tent, we watched as the now floppy nylon clung to a strange looking configuration of curves.
Set against the dying sun, the massive insect that seemed to reside inside the nylon, bobbed crazily up and down. We had no choice but to sit and watch with curious interest.
And then slowly we realised what was going on. And in the end all we could do was laugh and laugh and just laugh some more, realising it was not one insect in there but two – both of them intent on finishing what insects do. Replenishing the earth.
Those were some of the best memories of my life. So giddy, so absolutely liberating; I felt free and in charge of my own head.
Could it last? The moon hovered white and pasty above.
34.
We believed in one another, Chris Pyke my shiny knight and I. We were in love and we knew it because we could laugh and play and make love together at the same time. He was always there for me. Well, most of the time – if one remembers that little incident of the caravan.
And then one day, like all men, he asked that question: ‘Why did you let your father touch you?’ And I should have known. I should have known then. Rather than seeking understanding, he was... I don’t know, not quite angry but annoyed and mystified. Like other men. Like the rest of them.
‘I don’t know. I don’t know why,’ I replied, needing to think. Asking myself: Why?... Why now? Just like this, out of the blue? I felt like I was being judged all over again. Not just judged but accused. Life, love, mateship, nothing but nothing would ever let it go. He was no different to Brad, my first male friend, just a fella, just another fella who always thought the girl was somehow weak or just plain deviant or wrong – maybe even the coaxer, the temptress.
Yes, the temptress and teaser, like men never did anything wrong, never broke things, were only ever led by all these serpentine Eves in their magnificent Gardens of Eden to do ill.
Dad was right, in his way right again – no one would ever understand. But what they wouldn’t understand, just like him, is what he did, he did. It is a strange and immature thing, but it seems to me when some men grow up with an idea about women, about girls, the opposite sex, or get an idea about them put into their heads, it is like trying to cut through metal to change their thinking.
But in the end, Chris, like Brad, I guess out of expediency, perhaps out of love, I hope out of love, turned away from it, turned the other cheek. That is not to say that he forgave, or ever really understood, but that he stuck by me. Or was that with me? I don’t know, I really don’t, but he stayed the course, the long, long course, through thick and thin. Just plenty, plenty thick. Much more than I could have expected.
Who is to know these things? Who is to know what is below the shiny plating that men on white horses wear? You see the signs but you ignore them. You are a human being, needy, wishful of acceptance. But you find out in the end. It just takes time. So much time. It is slow. It can be gruelling. But I was used to gruel. I could stand it for long, long periods of time.
Chris joined the defence forces – the Royal Australian Air Force – in September 1979. He was sent to Edinburgh, South Australia, and I went to live in Brisbane with his relatives, so that I could feel closer to him while, for three months, he undertook his basic training.
At the end of that year he was posted to Melbourne, to do his radio technical training, later to be called avionics, at Laverton Base, and so I followed him there too. We lived together during that time, until July 1981 when Chris was posted to Newcastle, and of course I followed him there too.
It was obvious Chris and I were made for one another, and on January 2, 1982 we married in a chapel at Sandgate, near Brisbane. I was nineteen.
Exactly three days later, Chris was transferred again – this time to Malaysia. Talk about a honeymoon. Yes, exotic, it was exotic all right, in a different sort of way, because RAAF wives were at that time not allowed to work. Only have children.
One exciting thing about Malaysia was that my Grandad, Dad’s father’s grave was nearby, at the Kranji War Cemetery in Singapore. We went there for a visit once, and I found it. Not only did I find it, I unexpectedly found the whole experience very moving and kind of surreal.
Looking down at that white headstone with the ANZAC emblem on it I felt both dizzy and kind of elevated, knowing this man, my biological grandfather, died for something he believed in. He gave his soul to our way of life... the lucky country we live in today. And he did it despite Dad. With no thought to how he would turn out.
There it stood, that white headstone, and I saw it with my own two eyes – set against a yellow, buttery sun that looked like a bullet would never cross the air below. And yet so many died there. So many. It was something Dad would never do. See that heroic tomb. Never in his entire life would he see it except in that way he always saw things, by living and seeing inside me.
I am completely sure he must have seen it through my eyes as I lay my retinae on Grandad’s well-scrubbed but gallant tomb and thought of Dad drunkenly bayoneting and karate-kicking all those Jap bastards who killed his dad
and changed his life forever. I wished that day I’d had the chance to know this man. This man – an Aussie hero – who gave seed to my dad. Perhaps the war could have come earlier and I would have been spared?
Because I couldn’t work in a paid job in Malaysia, I became a Red Cross volunteer and played sport. I loved the team interaction of playing in the netball and softball teams. I also won the ladies dart competition. Being involved in these things was good because I at least got to mix with other RAAF wives and other expats and saw a bit of the Malaysian world outside, a world which otherwise would have been denied me.
What wasn’t so good about this time was that the year we arrived turned out to be the year Aunty Bev died. I received a letter from Mum telling me the news. For once she communicated to me. That day, that night, was a sheer nightmare.
I walked about sad and crying, mourning from deep inside my gut for the woman I loved so much and who suddenly drifted away because of Dad’s misdeeds. And while this was going on, while Aunty Bev with her warm hands and cool eyes that never judged and only ever saw into the best parts of me, was fresh in her tomb, Chris, my shining RAAF husband was changing out of his Air Force blue, readying himself to go out with his pals on a boys’ night out.
‘What’s your problem?’ my knight shimmered, turning to me, his skin smoothly shaven, his moustache still drooping but now immaculately clipped.
Yeah, what was my problem? How long could a person mourn? An hour? Two hours? When I tried to tell him, he just fobbed me off. I was here and she was thousands of miles away. Plus I hadn’t seen Aunty Bev in years. That was true. That was the absolute truth. Other things were true too.
What, for example, did he know about those hands? Those hands which had warmed my skin, which had rushed like warm water through my brain in a world darkening with stones on all sides around me? What did he know about that smile? Those eyes, those grandmotherly eyes that looked not into my eyes but always into my heart? Those eyes that saw only the good in there? That breathed oxygen into a human soul?
Chris looked down at me with what I can only describe as an invisible upper lip that sat as cruel as a common pirate below that little moustache of his. His mouth gazed with a hidden tongue so bitter it sunk into my chest with the sting of a caning.
In front of his morose, puzzled face I felt I could not mourn. In front of him, Aunty Bev did not exist. He had better things to do. The boys – as boys do – were waiting. They would not wait for long. They would go on without him. I stared after him, seeing the back of his paisley shirt going through the front door. My knight, my knight in wild shining armour was at my side but was no longer at my side.
There was worse to come. I did not know it would happen so soon that my knight’s horse would fall over.
That night when he got home, I knew, I could smell it through his alcohol breath, I could see it on his still festering lips, the quickly dehydrating colour of his mouth, that he had been with another woman. I could just see it; nay, I could feel it. A woman knows these things even though men cannot figure out how. I didn’t scream or shout. Just looked him in the eye, questioning, silently.
As I lay beside him, that full and white Malaysian moonlight shining through our windows onto our faces, I asked why. Why? He said he didn’t do anything, but I knew he was lying. So I fell asleep with tears trickling silently down my face, wondering why. I was a good wife; I loved him with all my heart. I was so hurt and knew I loved him still. Obviously, it crossed my mind, I wasn’t giving him everything he needed. I suffered in silence and couldn’t bear to tell anyone what he had done; I had failed him, not lived up to expectations.
The very next day, close friends of ours, the Robertsons came to pick me and Chris up, to take us into George Town, Penang, to set up bank accounts. Jan Robertson, especially, could see that I was very upset, but I just did not feel I could share my agony or grief. I did not want to share it, not so much for my own protection or because of shame but because I did not want the Robertsons to look at Chris differently. I think I was defending him. I must have been.
Over the coming months, I tried to find out more from Chris, I just needed him to be honest with me, not that I ever considered leaving him, not a hope in hell, I loved him too much for that. But like a true man, like a true military man, he kept his silence. His indelible code of giving out only his name, rank and number.
But I found out, eventually I found out – three years later, after three whole years, when we got back to Australia he finally admitted it. After three years!
The trouble was, by then, I knew it wasn’t the first time – I also knew it wouldn’t be the last time. It was a normal RAAF night out with the boys, part of the runway, so to speak – playing up on your wife. Or did they think of it rather as simply “playing without your wife”? She would understand. Yes, yes, of course, what reasonable wife wouldn’t?
I wasn’t one of those “reasonable” wives. I didn’t like it, it hurt like hell. It turned out, it hurt like crazy. But I never spoke of it to other RAAF wives. I never spoke of it to them even though they all talked about the “poor wives” whose husbands used to go, regularly, to Hat Yai, a town in southern Thailand, close to the Malaysian border… to enjoy their time off.
These wives who were sympathetic towards others, to so many other moral causes, said it was normal, but I did not like it, no, no, I did not like it. I could not understand, could never quite make the leap in my head, why the men needed to be with other women.
Betrayal was a word that kept jumping into my head. Betrayal, even in my marriage, seemed to be my friend. Only it seemed so soon, so soon after we had pledged our vows to be with one another and no other.
I suppose, in retrospect now, what affected me most on that night was Chris had not allowed me to mourn. Chris Pyke, my husband, my lover, my friend, my knight in shining armour, had not been at my side to serve me like the true soldier he was meant to be. Didn’t even care – was only interested in serving himself and his military buddies. Was only interested in getting it off with some unknown exotic dancer or whatever else offered itself to his hungry lap. Yes, a night out with the boys from the base was so much more important than an angel. Than the death of Aunty Bev, the only woman in the entire world who had touched his lover’s soul.
There was another thing that upset me about my husband’s betrayal – something else that really, really got to me. It was not that he had put his proud soldierly male penis like a machine gun into another women, it was that his tongue, his male tongue that had touched mine, was kissing this exotic other. Some young so and so he had only just met. Kissing her.
The lips... the mouth, so sacred to me. Just ask Mr Grove, who I offered my tongue to for nothing. For a birthday greeting. Just ask Dad, who used my lips like a common girlfriend, my lips that had saved my sister from the evil in her path.
He knew – Chris should have known what it meant to me. The honesty that resided in there. In the mouth. On the edges of the tongue. The knight’s shiny armour hadn’t just become tarnished; it was beginning, so soon, piece by piece, to fall off.
In the end, and despite everything, it was not all bad in Malaysia. In fact, there were still some good times, even fulfilling moments of deep love between Chris and me, well, as deep as they could get knowing what I knew now. One of those times, one of those moments, was in Phuket, Thailand. While on holiday there, I fell pregnant.
It may be a normal part of the sway – and nature – of life. Especially for married couples. But for me becoming pregnant was like a silver-lined dream. It was the gold I had dreamed of since I was four years old and tried to lift teeny little Aunty Beatrice – Mum’s Mum’s baby girl – from the cot and nearly got beaten for it.
It was a dream ever since Dad and his mates held and caressed me and showed me what a cute little girl I could be. I wanted my own. I wanted my own family. My own tribe. I wanted something normal and non-creepy in my life. Something I could cherish and grow... if only I could... and this
, this was it.
Through children, through my own child, I could achieve that. Maybe. No, yes, not maybe, I could. I had more confidence in that act of becoming pregnant than I had in anything in my entire life.
As though a confirmation of my vision, it was at this time that I won the Ladies Dart competition. The vision ahead was as clear to me as that bull on the dartboard.
35.
My dream. Just like in those romantic books I read all the time, this was it – my dream coming true to be a mother.
With pregnancy it all came racing before me, that need to live and love and cradle. To hold in my arms my own. To show I was better, to show I was better than my own mother, to show I could be the best mother on the planet. Only I really, really wanted to be that. The best mother on earth.
I know, I know, who doesn’t say that? But it was a passion with me, like a job one loves, a musical instrument one holds and caresses out of sheer devotion. I really and truly wanted to show I could be a parent and a mother – something more than a mere biblical stick figure causing chaos because the Lord hath handed us down His seed and said go forth and multiply.
I wanted to multiply, I did, but I wanted it to be with love and show it could be real. I wanted children I could love, children who, maybe, with a bit of luck, would one day love me back.
Sarah eventually came – four weeks after my twenty-first birthday. My mother and my sister Marge came to visit around this time, my sister arrived with her toddler son, Samuel, and already pregnant with her second child.
Though younger than me, I did not deny her. Did not want to take any attention away from her. I just wanted my own. It didn’t matter what I looked like. I was so big, so round, so fat – like Mum at her worst. Like Mum in her plastic astronaut weight-loss suit. I had put on 20.5 kilograms.