Sawdust

by Deborah Kay

  It returned to me the faith that even in the darkest of times the dawn can eventually make its way to your address. I pinned it down to that little girl. The great big force out there had sent her like a Moses-child to us, to rekindle, to re-spark, to give us another chance.

  I fell back in love with Chris all over again. Here again was the man of my dreams, the one I “moonily”, “floatingly” thought of and missed so badly every day when I was working as a nanny for the Godbolts at Rodds Bay.

  Life was starting again.

  40.

  When I went to the doctor to test for pregnancy and the result came back positive, I stood in the man’s office and cried. Just stood there and cried.

  ‘Is this what you want?’ he asked with a face offering a backstreet abortion, and between sobs I squealed back for everyone in the waiting room to hear: ‘Yes. Oh yes. This is exactly what I want.’

  I was so happy that even as I was leaving the doctor’s rooms I continued to cry in front of everyone waiting there.

  So seriously was the universe speaking to us, that Chris, my soldier, my knight, when he heard about my pregnancy, even opted out of the Air Force. I loved him for it. My heart raced and touched him because of it. He was my hero again.

  Only... only... unbelievably, he wanted to go back to Gladstone. To Gladstone! I couldn’t understand it. The idiot, the fool, the wombat, what was he thinking? Taking me back to that messy, ramshackle, dirty, drought-drenched place of my worst nightmares, the last place on earth I wanted to go.

  ‘Are you sure this is what you want?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes.’

  I don’t know, I don’t know. I guess I was pregnant, thinking differently, had this new chance at life and love, and relented. As bad as the thought of going back to Gladstone was, there was still something there; I had to admit it, there was still something in that hard soil, in the chaos of scrap metal and poisoned timber that positioned me there.

  Another harsh truth: Dad was still there, running his sawmill – Dan Gallagher Enterprises – on that exact spot, Perenjora Dam Road, Anondale. In fact, during our time at Ipswich and Bellbird Park we would even go and visit from time to time.

  Talk about life going on. Talk about sweeping dirt under carpets. Not just dirt but mounds of fetid, rotten, over ripe, smashed up, fermented slices of old pumpkin and watermelon under the carpet.

  That’s the way it was with Dad, with my entire family. We’d go and visit – I’d keep a very, very careful eye on the kids – but nobody said anything. What had happened should not be repeated – not to anybody. Not even among ourselves.

  Was the past really the past?

  You would think so. Mum was there too, in the same region, living in Gladstone in a house with her new partner, Ray. And knowing it was impossible for me to sleep under the same roof with Dad again – something “intuited” rather than openly stated by anyone – we actually started out our existence in Gladstone living with Mum.

  It was also a money thing. We were waiting for the sale of our house in Bellbird Park to eventuate and at the same time saving money to build a new house, our own brand new castle in Gladstone. We even had the plans drawn. And then they were redrawn.

  That was the funny thing, each time we had plans drawn up, Chris would sit with them for a while and there would always be something he objected to and we would start all over again. He kept finding things he did not like about the plans, kept delaying signing off on anything.

  Talk about a woman’s prerogative, I sure gave him his man’s prerogative, kept on giving and giving, until what? – we moved back out to Anondale. Yes, I had completely given in by then, willing to move back to Dad!

  Well, it was not quite under the same roof, because it was all part of a new deal: Chris and I would buy the house and two acres of the property off Dad, and Dad – that thick wooden casing who once held the entire structure of the house together – would be relegated to the old shed, the original structure that was our abode on the property when Mum and Dad initially dragged us all to go and live there.

  Talk about circles. Talk about living in a small, round world. Talk about going round in rings. Now I was taking my own daughters to live in that house where I grew up – or was it to that house where I was “ground down”?

  My son Dean would be born there... The entire sin of humanity, Original Sin itself, the entire planet seemed to revolve around Gladstone and Perenjora Dam, around Anondale. A world without stars. A world without sky. A world of darkness and sins, of big black crows and beasts. And there I was going back forever. Going deep back in there...

  The reality was Dan Gallagher Enterprises was struggling and Chris saw an opportunity to buy the house and property at a good price and help Dad out in the process. We even loaned Dad a further fifteen thousand dollars, which was written up by solicitors as a proper loan at a fixed interest, to be paid back in a reasonable amount of time. But this too would become a bone of contention between Dad, Chris and I.

  Dad had said he would be able to pay us back within three months, but as it turned out I finally agreed to a lesser part of what should have been the final amount – sixteen years later.

  I suppose, from a purely pragmatic point of view, buying the house at the time made sense. My knight in shimmering armour – now more like my knight in scalded, sinful rags – was taking me back to my roots.

  In the event, from the day we moved in, I refused to have Dad’s and Mum’s bedroom as our bedroom. Even though it was the only room in the house warm with carpets that still looked good – that’s where we stored our boxes.

  I could not help but see Mum and Dad there, king and queen under that royal white veil. Could not help but see Dad laying me down on that bed, my legs wide open, my jaws echoing with theories of royal families and long lost tribes that loved and cavorted in their incestuously small, simple circles. Could not help but see Mum standing there, peering over Dad’s shoulder ready with a slap of denial to my face.

  No, no, no, I could not bear to step into that room. Me, “the dirty little girl who had done such secretive things”.

  I hated that house, hated it. And the first thing I did was paint the walls. Actually, Chris and I were the first to ever paint the house. Until we painted it, it had always been bare fibro and unpainted timber.

  We painted the insides a whitish blue and the kitchen a fiery red and white so that it stood out like a British flag to the dam, to the highway, to the rail line, to ourselves, and so even the thick wooden beam near the kitchen that was so much like Dad in its solidity, looked different. Looked rustic, yet modern – nothing like Dan Gallagher.

  We determined to make everything we could look new and like our own.

  And in the background the trains chugged by and the cars whooshed forwards and backwards as in the days of my black past.

  41.

  Were we really able to change that house? Or maybe more poignantly, how did I get along with Dad? Well, the answer to that question is I got along with Dad fine. Just fine. As long as he was never too close to my girls.

  Dad, in a fatherly way, would try to hug me – and my bottom would stick out three miles. Also, on no account would I ever leave him alone with my children. Babysit? I wouldn’t even let the idea pass my forehead.

  In actual fact I never allowed my father to stay in any of our homes, not even when my sister would try to convince me to have him sleep over. I just couldn’t bear the thought of him sleeping that close to my daughters.

  Which makes me think of an incident while we were at the property – the strange but telling incident of the mung beans and the feeding of the sheep.

  One day, while I was still heavily pregnant with Dean, without knowing anything at all about feeding sheep, Sarah and Ruth got it into their little heads that they knew all about it. In fact, they decided that Dad’s flock of about 15 sheep looked so desperately hungry that they opened up a big 20kg sack of mung beans for the purpose.

  From the to
p of it, they started whooshing out the beans like they were building a mountain of food on the ground for the poor, starving animals.

  The sheep were, so to speak, happy as Larry with their huge mid-morning hors d’oeuvre, but even I knew that less than a twentieth of what the girls had given them was more than enough to feed the entire flock for a week. In point of fact, it took a mere litre bottle of the beans to feed all of them of a morning. And here were the girls dolloping out an after-breakfast treat so huge it could kill them.

  In feed terms, the beans were as filling as concrete; just a small amount would swell in the sheep’s belly and digest slowly through the day. And that would be more than enough to see them through a twenty-four hour cycle.

  In the distance, the dust – earth and sawdust – gathering around him, I saw Dad’s tall, gangly body like an agitated emu bouncing toward us from his shed. And God, oh God, knowing Dad, knowing that brutal temper, I was so afraid I started shouting at the girls, yelling words I didn’t usually use with them, telling them they were ‘idiots’ and ‘stupid’ and should have known better and asked before they acted.

  Dad arrived.

  ‘Jesus bloody Christ, what the fucking hell is going on here?’ Just as expected, he began roaring, seeing the sheep bleating and merrily eating at the mound of food around them. And then more urgently, his voice blew like a hurricane: ‘Pick up the bloody beans, for God’s fucking sake! Get the fucking, goddamned sheep out of here!’

  Chris, my knight, who it has to be said very seldom touched the girls as a means of punishment, totally freaked out. Next to him stood Sarah, our eldest, and he let out a yell and then gave her such a hard smack across her backside that it sent her flying to that dirty, awful, dry soil.

  Trembling together after that, Sarah and Ruth stared up at Dad, and everyone expected the sky to explode. In truth, we were all heaving, waiting for the inevitable: Dad to beat and kick the hell out of our kids, out of each and every one of us perhaps – just like he kicked the crap out of all those Jap soldiers, like he made Jacko Johns dance that night with his shotgun, like he nearly strangled Mum to death, like he nearly squeezed and shook the air out of me until there was none left.

  Only something else happened. Suddenly the earth seemed to stop and calm, the sheep moved off, and the mung beans lay silent.

  Dad shook his head at Chris: ‘What the ef d’you think you’re doing, mate? Just bugger off and leave the girls alone. For goodness sake, can’t you see they’re just kids? They don’t know what they’re doing!’ He pressed his teeth in that “mulling” bird way with his tongue.

  Dad, Lord Protector, was on night watch again. Batman, our hero, the protector of darkness, of everyone, especially children. In a similar situation he would have beaten the living daylights out of us kids, but here he was displaying his full, bright, spinning wheel of human colours. Displaying his glorious chummy heart that was a shield to everyone but his own. The face we show the outside world, the worms that reside within.

  I think the incident shook Chris more than it did me. But being me, and in the circumstance, I determined to persist and make the best of things. To scrape away the past. To sweep it as far from my mind as possible. Chris and I now even set about cleaning up the yard, that filthy rusting mess of overgrown weeds and useless, wiry trees.

  In the end, the problem was Chris, once again it was Chris. His moods came back, slowly but surely they came back. And they were dark, at times so dark it was difficult even for me to see.

  I’m not sure if it was in one of those moods, it must have been, but at a certain point Chris, who had been working as an electrician at the Nebo Smelter nearby, decided he was much better off re-joining the Air Force.

  So, guess what? The week I was due to have my much-desired, wished and prayed for third baby, Chris was travelling back down to Brisbane to get himself reinstated into the RAAF.

  As it turned out, he may have missed the birth of his son, but he was so happy to be back in the Air Force, so glad he hadn’t lost his sergeant ranking and that there was now a great possibility of being posted back to Amberley, that despite everything, despite it all, I had to be happy for him.

  The highlight at this time, beyond anything, was the birth of Dean. It was quick but painful. I had to be cut twice – and without painkillers – to let out Dean’s broad shoulders.

  But almost greater than my delight at giving birth was seeing the emotional high that heaved through Chris’s body when he knew he had a son. His own little knight.

  I was so happy for him, so happy that I’d finally given him the son he desperately wanted. Happier for him than I was for myself, if that was possible. I just felt blessed to have my new baby, boy or girl. Almost more amazing to me was that I had one of the Grove girls as a ward sister. Talk about small world. Talk about full circles. I still tasted the shame of that kiss on my tongue. That birthday kiss planted in her father’s mouth.

  But in the end, even Chris’s high with his little knight didn’t really matter – because his moods came back, continued to roll from his eyes, continued to gather like constantly darkening clouds.

  The reality, the sad reality because it came despite the upsurge in our relationship with the initial pregnancy of Dean, was that the moods were always there now, forming and then clearing, but never quite clearing altogether.

  With the constancy of those clouds, with their changing shades from grey to black to a kind of blotchy purple-green, our relationship was just a huge and damaging hailstorm waiting to happen. It hovered above us, always there, shaping and reshaping.

  Luck was on my side. When Dean was four days old, we found out we were going to Melbourne. It was nowhere near Ipswich, like we had hoped, but at least we were going.

  I guess I should have been over the moon we were leaving Anondale. Leaving Dad. Leaving that sordid, unenchanted world of memories. That House of Horrors. But next to me I had Chris. Chris and that purple-black cloud that was his head.

  It sometimes briefly passes my mind that maybe Chris was in some way punishing me – by taking me back to Gladstone, to the mess that was my past. Perhaps he even wanted to see how I stood up to it, to Dad? To see if I was still so meek, so available? But in the end he saw he could not stand up to it either.

  Knowing we were about to depart was like a triumph, like I had won something special. Like I had, in a way, beaten Dad – and Chris – at the same time. It brought back a memory. I was fifteen and at the time together with my first real boyfriend, Brad. Well, one day at about the time I was beginning to see Brad, Dad accused a school friend of mine of being a slut. Of smoking cigarettes and being a bad influence on me.

  The girl was not there, nowhere near our house at the time, but I was so mad at Dad, madder at him than I would have been if he had said those things of me. Instinctively, I don’t know what got into me, I slapped him. Slapped him so hard it split open his lip.

  I stared at him, my big Dad with his hard crow eyes and steel jowl, waiting for the retribution, waiting for him to knock my block from the one side of the room to the other. To strangle me. But in the end, breathing out and snorting like he was still capable of anything, he brought his big fist to my jaw – but just touched it, merely scraped the pores of my skin with it, and then humphed a second breath of sliding air and walked away.

  As he turned, in an almost proud way, he looked back at me and said: ‘You have a bit of Gallagher in you after all.’

  I was astounded, in the act of facing up to the beast I had vanquished it. At any rate gained some respect from it.

  Man is a strange animal. If I had stood there trembling I am dead sure he would have truly knocked my block off, but seeing me stand there staring at him with some defiance, he did nothing. Just walked away. Praised me. I see it as a sign of an inherent cowardice: when there is weakness, Man, men, show no mercy.

  Like the time I fought back and injured that girl, Dad had now stepped aside. If I had lost, if I had stood there shaking, I would have be
en seen as weak and almost certainly been trampled on.

  I remember feeling after this incident a little bubble inflate in me. It blew out all shiny like the whole world could see it expanding in me. I was actually proud as hell.

  Now, once again, Chris, in what was quickly becoming his very dishevelled armour, seeing that I could, if I wanted to, live near Dad, was whisking me away. My knight was becoming a real soldier again.

  We spent that Christmas, me, Chris, the girls and our new baby Dean, after those intense few months in Gladstone and that badly bent and twisted Anondale house, in an upmarket, self-contained luxury apartment in inner Melbourne.

  We were celebrating the Christmas of 1990, getting ready to set up our brand new lives reattached to the RAAF. At the same time, the rest of the world was beating its feet and making jungle sounds, planning the First Gulf War. Fear, the thought of wars looming, didn’t even cross our minds.

  It was a good Christmas. Both the girls raced around the apartment, swam constantly in the luxury pool, and had lots of fun with their dad. Even baby Dean behaved and seemed to enjoy it as best a newborn can.

  Soon after that Christmas we were placed in our new RAAF house in Clayton South. The date was January 2, 1991, the same day we were married, nine years earlier. It was a stinking hot day of forty-two degrees, so much for Melbourne’s cold weather. It would change our lives forever.

  42.

  Bar that one upsurge in happiness, deciding Dean’s conception and becoming pregnant again, which lasted a matter of months, it seemed Chris and I never really reconnected. We would have bursts of happiness and then the gloomy darkness would set in again; it was like a long drawn out boat ride on seas that refused to stop swelling and dropping. The sharing, which was there at times, would inevitably find its way behind a black rising wave and then sink down into a hollow and an energy-sapping vacuum would re-enter.