by Deborah Kay
By the time Ruth was about eighteen months old it became too much to bear. We were going to split up. I am not sure what held us together, other than the fact that the RAAFies, the guys and girls at the base, might say something, might think badly of us, might point fingers and say that Chris had failed, couldn’t even keep his marriage together.
Chris could not stand the thought of that, of others pointing fingers at him as though he had messed up. From my perspective, feeling the emotions of what he was feeling as well as having to consider my own needs, I couldn’t bear the thought of taking the girls from him; I felt I didn’t have a right to do that... to rip our family apart.
I also, at all costs, it played on my mind like a plague, like a dark, rotted cheese, did not want our girls growing up in a dysfunctional family like mine or Chris’s was. He did not want that either.
So we held it together – like glue without the sticky substance. Like cheap ineffectual adhesive that has already gone dry and no longer bonds. It was around this time Chris’ brother, Aidan, moved in and lived with us, so our house wasn’t just for us anymore. Aidan’s girlfriend also stayed over most of the week. Then about a year later, my brother Sam and his partner Annie and their baby girl moved in as well. I could hardly imagine it myself – I was just like Dad. Like “have-a-chat, come and stay at our place” Dan Gallagher.
I cannot say I didn’t enjoy it. I obviously enjoyed the company, especially at dinnertime when we all sat around the table chatting and sharing the day’s events. But in the end, I can only say it made me think it must have been much easier for Dad inviting the world to stay over than it could ever have been for Mum.
As the so-called “stay-at-home” mum, I had to do everyone’s washing, all the cooking, all the cleaning, most of the looking after the kids, as well as looking after other people’s kids.
The only thing I did not do – at my firm insistence – was Annie’s baby’s nappies. Annie also kept to herself, while privacy, time to myself, time even to be with my own husband, what was that? All I saw on my brow was fog and sweat and people, big and small, spinning around my eyes.
Yes, Mum, I understand that part a little more now; it couldn’t have been easy. Actually, I was desperately tired most of the time. I needed something else. I needed more than to just wake, work, and breathe.
Enter Josh Kelly.
38.
Yes, enter Josh Kelly, and I have a confession to make. I had an affair. I did exactly what I said Chris had ever harmed our relationship by doing. Don’t ask me where I found the time, but somehow I did. Everything was splintering and fracturing around me, and in the cracks, in the little peepholes of light between, spilled Josh Kelly.
A little like Chris in the early days, he was another saviour. Someone I could talk and chat to and that I felt understood by. He was unruffled and even tempered and seemed to take the time to listen to the day-to-day stuff. That was important to me, especially since the fact was Chris was no longer there for me.
We, Chris and I, that is, never even fought – because we did not want the kids hearing us yelling at one another. We were literally scared out of our boots to have the kids see us like our own parents, caterwauling and yowling at one another like jungle animals fighting over dead prey. We did not want that. That much we knew about each other. That we did not want to set that kind of example. But even on quiet terms, in good moments, we hardly spoke anymore.
The reality was we didn’t argue or raise our voices when we needed to because there was simply no communication. We were unhappy, unhappy with each other, so, so unhappy, and it was there – loudly and clearly – for all to see. Only for us it existed silently within our heads, within our bones, in the anxiety of our body language. In all these ways we were fighting with one another – like robots violently bumping and pushing against one another all day long, we were a long, silent noise.
Exacerbated by Chris’s depression, his moods, by the comings and goings of visitors, by working out how we were going to pay for things, and maybe worst of all, by Chris continuing with his boys’ nights out, there was nothing left between us.
Feeling exonerated by circumstance, I did what I shouldn’t have done.
I had known Josh Kelly since I was sixteen and his family were like family to me. His father was in the same timber-cutting business as my father. In fact, his older brother and his wife were to become one of Chris’s and my closest and best friends, and are Dean, my son’s godparents. Chris and I are godparents to one of their three children.
And so all I know is that at that time, when I was going through all this turmoil and trying to break through to Chris, Josh was kind to me. He was sincere and considerate. At any rate, he was definitely more understanding than any man I had met until then. Well, except perhaps for Mr Dreamboat Doherty, my schoolteacher. But at that time Josh Kelly was the tree-stump, the maturity, the emotional fixture I needed.
He also had a beautiful voice and would sing directly to me when we would go to watch him perform at local venues or even at parties that we held at our house. One song in particular he would sing to me was Chris de Burgh’s “Lady in Red”. Not only that but at these public events he would let my daughter Sarah sit up on his knee and he would sing Billy Ocean’s “Suddenly” with her.
He was so good with both my girls and they loved him in return. Maybe, maybe, I like to think so, he is the reason Sarah has a great love of music today.
Josh Kelly represented the absolute opposite of my marriage, the absolute opposite of everything in my relationship with my once knight in shining armour, and yes, yes, we went that extra distance together. It was love, I am sure; I am sure it was love.
But I had caused it to happen, I was a woman, I had the maturity, the presence of mind. Even worse than with Dad, I was a mother and a fully responsible human being now. I could make or deny these decisions. And in this case I had chosen to go ahead. To go all the way. To enjoy and lap up the moment.
To that extent, in the final analysis, I suppose I was as bad as my husband, maybe even worse, because Josh, unlike Chris’s girls, was no “floozy“. He wasn’t just the result of a girls’ night out, a bit of alcohol-driven fun; he meant something to me. Not only that, he was a friend of both Chris and I and regularly stayed in our home. I guess that’s how we found the time, he stayed in our home. Another visitor!
If I can be kind to myself for just one second, here’s the heart of the matter: Josh was single at the time and if Chris, my husband was not around, I could have married him. I could have easily sworn my vows to Josh Kelly, a man who stepped back into my life like a responsive anchor to hold me calm and still at just the right time.
On the other hand, that I could have sworn vows to him was easy to say, even to think in retrospect, because at that time it really, really was at gravel end between Chris and me. Even having sex with Chris, my once lover and friend, had become a duty. It was an echo with no voice, I just had to lie back and literally think of my flower garden. I could do it no other way.
As a point of fact, as a young teenage girl I would love to sit and look at the water lilies growing in the dams on our property at Anondale... I always had a sense of peace looking at them. And through my life I often think of those beautiful singular white flowers with their bright yellow centres and the glossy green leaves and remind myself of the “exotic quietness” they gave me during those stressful times. When Chris and I were making love, it was those floating lilies I thought of.
People can judge me now, as they did then, throw the Ten Commandments at me, but what happened between Josh and me was an affair that I could feel burning through the stomach and peeling in the chest. I am at least sure of that. The intensity of it. It happened only once, that is the truth, and it happened when our hearts leaked over and were unable to say no any longer. It did not happen again, though the feelings, I have to be completely honest, remained.
Josh even, at one stage, said he would help set me up in a place of my own an
d be there for me, but still I didn’t have the heart to take the girls away from Chris. So I made the decision to stay married to Chris, but went as far as to tell Josh that he was one of my biggest sacrifices in life. It may have been a bigger sacrifice than I could have imagined.
Like the tide beneath a wave, Josh and I continued to feel that ripping pull for one another for years to come but we never repeated our unfaithful act. Eventually, Josh fell in love with Clare, a girl who was a barmaid at the Acacia Ridge Hotel, at the other end of town, where he sang more often now.
I was truly happy for him. I remember thinking, even though I was married, how I had to let him go and just suck it up. I believed he deserved to make a new life with someone that was free, that was available to him. Someone who was not such an entangled mess.
And as these things happen, we all became great friends, Chris, myself, Josh and his new wife, Clare. Occasionally, I would even look after Justin, Clare’s little boy from a previous marriage. He was the same age as Ruth and they got on like a dream.
Josh and Clare even asked Chris and me to be part of their “wedding party”, but there are some things in life I have to decline. I just could not stand up beside them on that sacred platform; it was still too raw and painful for me, seeing him marry someone else.
Chris and I did, however, go to the wedding. It was a fine and bright ceremony, but I cried so much that day. So much. I explained it away by saying that weddings always did that to me.
Tears dripping through his own musical green eyes, Josh even told me at the end of that day, his new wife only metres away, that he would always love me. I guess it was love. I guess it was. Despite my infidelity, despite my self-flagellation, at least I can carry that around in my shameful bush of locks.
But it had all become too much for me... Chris, visitors, lovers, boys’ nights out, everything had become like the weight on bare flesh of a rough and itchy blanket in the summer.
I had to get away, even if only for a short while. Even I knew that. So, I took the children and went for a two-week break from everyone and everything. I went up to my sister Marge’s place in Burrum Sound.
Only even that short break would turn into something darker than I could have ever imagined.
39.
It was only my second night at my sister’s and Chris who was going to call each night to say goodnight to the girls, called with an ultimatum: if I did not come back home immediately he would hang himself. Yes, hang himself. Do exactly what his father had attempted to do.
‘I have a rope around my neck,’ he said with the desperation of a long-suffering prisoner of war, ‘and if you don’t come home I’m going to kill myself.’
I saw in front of me the image of his hanging dad that had implanted itself in his every brain cell, and I knew well he suffered from depression. But it was the noose he was holding around my neck that right at that moment I resented. He was using it to squeeze us together. Only the more he squeezed, the further I wanted to drift from him.
To my mind, it had already come to a head. The storm clouds had already let their guts out. What he was doing only confirmed every riling feeling in my veins I had against him. But at the same time, I felt guilt, overwhelming guilt, like it was because of me that he was doing what he was doing, like I had let him down.
I was trapped; it pricked through every pore in my flesh and I could not shake it off. It only made me feel more resentful. Holding the phone, I put my foot down and refused to go.
The reality is, in my head, in my heart, I think well and truly in my soul, I had already parted from him. This threat had made sure of that. Only, on the other side of the line, his trembling voice was desperate and real; it was getting louder and more insistent. Still I refused. His voice lowered and he begged, even cried and howled, but I remained firm. I was not moving an inch.
In the end, he jumped in his own car and came to fetch me.
But rather than seeing in his heroic trek, love, passion and devotion, I detested him for it. The fact that I knew he needed help didn’t help me – or us – at all. And now he was at my sister’s doorstep, hundreds of kilometres from Bellbird Park, ready to whisk me away – or commit suicide. He was, in plain English, holding a knife to my heart. Not only that, he insisted that my sister look after the girls, that they remain behind, and I saw in his mood, in his determination, that he just wanted me to himself.
I had never left the girls by themselves anywhere before, other than when Marge stayed with Chris to look after Sarah while I was in hospital having Ruth, and he knew that. He could see in my balking eyes that I hated and despised him for his demand, but he just stood there, waiting for me like an expectant child, like he didn’t care.
His need – I could see it in those curving “temple” eyes of his – was greater than my not wanting to be parted from my girls. It was that stark.
Maybe I should have shouted and screamed and thrown a fit. But I wasn’t like that. When I looked at him, I saw every sinew in his muscles pressing me to obey or else. Like a chattel, I sometimes think of it like that, I agreed. I left my girls behind with my sister and went with him back to Bellbird Park.
I would never get over it, though. It may not have been quite obvious then but in my system there was something I needed to flush out, and everything but my mouth was saying it was him.
I remember when we finally got back home, Chris was trying really hard to reconnect with me but I just wanted to be left alone. I was missing my girls and deeply abhorred him for taking me away from them. I was so sad, so in a way lost, but in the end, as in all things, our life together continued and within a few weeks the girls were back with us...
It is a funny thing, even in a horrid, empty relationship, especially once we have children, have a mortgage hanging over our heads, time somehow passes, the grass grows and needs mowing, and life moves on.
I thought about the horror and emptiness of it every day. And I was reminded of it every morning and night as I saw that spousal face next to me. The nights were always the longest and the worst. But ultimately I had to get up every morning, get off my emotionally roller-coasting butt, and get on with it. I had to get the kids to school and preschool, help out at the school, do the washing, the washing up, make arrangements, go to my job, make sure I did more than my bit to supplement our never quite sufficient income. And so it passed. Time passes.
And no matter all my wondering how people can live in black holes, Chris, my old rusted knight and I, lived on.
To supplement our income, I continued with my day-care work, looking after other people’s children in my own home while they in turn went about their business. The truth be told, I wasn’t prepared to leave my children with anyone else while I went out to work, so working from home seemed the only solution to bringing in the much needed extra dollars.
For some of us anyway, the more our partners fall by the wayside, the more we put ourselves into our children, and this is what happened to me. I did not see anything wrong with it. Nothing. It is a mother’s calling. I was already devoted to our two girls, loved them like the day they were born, but without that partnership, without Chris really there, it was like everything became even more about the kids.
Through the hot, wretchedly humid days at our home in Bellbird Park, a kind of little miracle happened. There was this one little girl in my care whose name was Rebecca, and I don’t know what it was but with each day I saw her the more my heart wanted to encircle and embrace her.
Maybe it was that with her awkward little running body and bushy head of dark brown hair, she reminded me a little of that tiny girl from my past; that skimpy girl, free and loving and full of heart that I could have been? I don’t know. But I literally fell in love with her.
It actually pained to hand Rebecca back to her mother of an afternoon. Yes, I said pained. With Sarah by now in Year One and Ruth at preschool, I cherished this little bundle that did not even belong to me.
I don’t know if it was purely horm
onal, or if perhaps like a miracle it was a “word” from the great mysterious forces in the universe, but the almost daily sight of this little girl, despite the black emptiness between Chris and I, was changing the way I saw things. I began to view Chris in a more positive light and soon I realised what I wanted, what I really wanted.
It took a while for it to dawn on me, but when it did, I felt immediately it was right: what I wanted was to have another child. Through that little girl Rebecca, almost desperately I was becoming maternal, clucky, chirpy, whatever you want to call it, but the obsession grew, and grew; I had to give birth to another one of my own.
Chris, who was not even so sure about having any more children after Sarah, and had only reluctantly agreed to becoming pregnant with Ruth (ironically his favourite now, I guess now that all the temper tantrums were over), was very sceptical again about this new urge in me.
But somehow, I think it was that paradoxical twist, that remembering how he did not under any circumstances want to have another baby after Sarah – because he did not believe he could love another child as much as he loved her – and then seeing the flowering of Ruth into his favourite, that made him eventually relent.
Perhaps it could happen again? Perhaps, better still, we would have a son? What soldier, what knight in shining armour, no matter how rusted and worn, does not want his own male progeny? His own little knight?
Chris agreed – and the strange thing was that through this little girl, Rebecca, this little girl who was my past and possibly my future – Chris and I stepped out of the shadows and began to love again. For a while it was like the dark brooding shadow over our house that burnt a strip of emptiness down the middle of our queen-size bed, was moving off and would never come back.