by Jessie Cole
‘Eat something, Mum,’ I cajoled, popping bread in the toaster. ‘Please, just eat something.’
‘I’m all right.’ She crossed her arms in front of her shrinking breasts. ‘I just can’t yet.’
The toast I’d buttered sat untouched on the benchtop.
‘I can’t stomach anything,’ she said. ‘Not yet.’
Grief time was long. I wondered how long it would take.
Nights were the hardest. I lay awake in bed, Gabe sleeping beside me, his arm lying limp across my belly. I wanted him to wake up and help me talk, to coax the words I needed to say out of my mouth, to break into the silence that had suddenly engulfed me, but he didn’t. I listened instead to the faint sound of my brother talking softly to his new girlfriend, Gemma. They’d gotten together a month or so before our father’s death. Jake was sixteen and Gemma was his first love. Through the thin fibro walls my brother’s words were indistinct, but I could hear his comfort, his relief, and I felt my own aloneness bang against my heart.
In the weeks after my father’s death I listened as my brother and Gemma began to speak their own language, a kind of mumbled, muff led dialogue that I cocked my head to try to hear. Even though we were often in the same room, I could not comprehend their words, and my whole body strained to untangle the murmured sentences. Occasionally, I spoke up in a fit of frustration: ‘What are you saying? Can I know too?’ Couples are their own universe, especially in the beginning, but I felt this exclusion deeply. After my father’s death, I longed for my brother’s company as though he alone might understand me, but I was locked outside their tiny circle and I fought the urge to force my way in.
≈
The visceral shock of my father’s suicide left me mangled. Outwardly I can only suppose I looked uninjured, but I felt as though I was actually broken—limping along, one of my arms fractured and hanging loose, my neck rigid and pained, my body grazed and raw. I felt like I had been tied to a car and dragged along behind it.
When I walked the streets of my hometown, people crossed the road to avoid a conversation. I imagined them thinking, Fuck, I’m not up for that today. Each one of them not knowing that almost nobody is, on any given day. That it wasn’t just them avoiding me, it was almost everyone. All the times they looked away from me were adding up. There was something terribly alarming about me, something no one could face. I was becoming invisible. A shadow-walker. The wounded part of me wanted to cry out, Why are you ashamed for me? What have I done?
I glanced down at my body, my arms and legs, checking that I was still intact, checking that none of my brokenness was showing.
Look at me, I longed to beg. Stretch yourself to look at me.
But I limped on, quietly. Slipping further into the shadows.
≈
Jake and Gemma and I walked down to the shore. We stood a moment on the cool morning sand. The beach beyond the yellow cottage was long and straight, the waves rough. There was no one on the white stretch, though out in the water we could see the dotted figures of early-morning surfers. We pulled off our wrinkled sleeping shirts and tracksuit pants and—in our mismatched underwear—went down to the water’s edge and let the waves rush over our toes.
‘Come on. I’m going in.’ Gemma’s voice was gruff, sleepy.
I looked from her to Jake, searching for some inexplicable answer, but my brother’s sad eyes dropped away from my gaze. Reaching out, he swept his arm around Gemma’s bare waist, this small gesture his only response.
‘I’m coming too.’ My voice sounded hollow, as though it came not from me but from some other, faraway place.
The water was cold and I stood still, watching the goose bumps rise up my thighs and across my belly. Arms tingling, I dropped my hands beneath the cool rise of the sea. I glanced across at Jake and Gemma, and they grasped hands and dived beneath the first crashing wave, coming up together and wiping the salt from their eyes. Jake cocked his head to the side and shook the water from his ear. Gemma held the length of her hair in her fist and squeezed. I jumped beneath the next wave, resurfacing with a small splutter. I tried to steady myself, the white roar of the ocean surging towards me. Manhandled by the pummelling force of the sea, my long hair was sticky, tangling around my arms. I lost my footing and found myself pushed back in towards the shore. Crouching in the shallows, I felt the current suck at me, and I watched Jake and his girl as they swam out past the smash of the waves. In a while they washed up beside me, though none of us spoke.
‘I can’t escape it,’ I finally blurted out. ‘I feel swamped.’ The sound of the waves drowned out my voice, but I tried again. ‘Myself, me. I can’t escape it. It’s swamping me.’
Gemma looked at me, understanding flickering behind her eyes. ‘The water’s rough today,’ she murmured.
The current pulled at us in a sudden surge and we all scattered out along the shoreline. Staggering up, I walked back to my clothes. I shook my shirt and slid it over my head, the wind blowing prickly sand against my calves. I did not turn to watch Jake and Gemma in the shallows but kept straight on instead, heading for the yellow cottage, exiling myself from the enduring bond of my brother and his girl.
≈
Back in Brisbane for uni, I was struck down by monumental headaches that came out of nowhere, driving me to my bed. On good days, I limped through the streets of my new city world, crying behind my sunglasses. I was a stranger, and no one crossed the street to avoid me, but sorrow clung to me and I could not shake it. Gabe still visited, but I could barely raise a smile. All the methods he had refined to soothe me—feeding, snuggling, teasing—none of them seemed to work. He took to holding out his forearm and saying, ‘Bite me. I know you want to. Just bite my arm.’
And I would.
‘Harder. You can bite harder.’
I was afraid of hurting him, but the feel of my teeth sinking into his skin gave me a sense of release. With nowhere for my feelings to go, I had imploded. Silent on the outside, inside I was detonating. But when Gabe let me bite him, sometimes I could smile.
‘You need it,’ he’d say.
Taking one for the team. No one could say he didn’t try.
≈
After my father’s suicide, I couldn’t regain my footing in the world. It was different from the way I had experienced my sister’s death. Zoe had been travelling for a year and I had been used to her absence. But my father had created so much noise, so much chaos, that without him I felt suddenly plunged into empty space. Despite this, parallels between the loss of Zoe and the loss of my father were oddly present. Zoe had killed herself two weeks after I started high school, and my father took his life three months after I started university. There was a sad kind of symmetry. A feeling of déjà vu.
My flatmate, Lou, the only shiny-shiny girl who’d come with me to Brisbane, was immersed in her uni course and rarely home. In the three months I’d been enrolled at uni I’d begun a few fledgling friendships, but they were hard to sustain. How could I move through the world in such distress without explaining it? But how to explain? What words could ever convey what had happened?
Simple exchanges became fraught.
‘So, what you been up to?’ a new friend would ask.
Well, my father committed suicide, so there’s that.
I’ve been having a little trouble not crying on public transport.
Actually, fuck, I think I’m going to cry now, sorry.
I didn’t have the kind of relationship with anyone at university that could possibly withstand the sentences that sprang into my mind, and I didn’t know what to say instead. It became easier just to avoid people altogether. In high school I’d felt alienated by this discrepancy between my inner world and my social world, but at university the incongruity was somehow worse. More jarring, less surmountable. At high school I had attempted again and again to share the realities of my experience with my peers. Mostly I felt unsuccessful. Mostly when I had spoken about my sister’s death or my unravelling father, I experienced
what I perceived as a withdrawal of connection or closeness. At the time I had thought it was because I didn’t use the right words. I had believed that there were right words, that I just didn’t know them yet. And sometimes, in some spaces, with some people, I had found comfort. Living in Brisbane, attending university, surrounded by strangers, I wasn’t capable of breaching that space.
Behind in my studies, I needed to ask for extensions. I fronted up to my tutor’s door and knocked.
She opened the door a fraction and poked her head out. ‘Yes?’
I stuttered out my request.
‘What’s your excuse? This is pretty late notice.’
‘Well—’ I told her the bare facts through the slit in the door.
‘Okay, then,’ she said. ‘Have another fortnight.’
The door closed in my face.
My words were unhearable. I could speak them even in the simplest, non-emotional terms, but people couldn’t experience them. My father was dead and there were no words to speak right.
I was nineteen and Gabe was twenty when we stopped using contraception. Cut adrift by grief, I looked to motherhood to soothe the pain of loss. My family had detonated—perhaps I could create a new one? I would find myself standing in the baby aisle at the supermarket, transfixed. Dummies, bottles, sippycups, baby blankets, those tiny, heart-rending ribbed-cotton singlets, booties, nappy-pins. I wasn’t thinking of children—I was obsessed only by babies. Tiny, dependent creatures, who slept and ate and gurgled. I wanted more than anything to need those baby items, as though they were talismans from the future I might one day have. Now living with Gabe in Brisbane, I began to chart my cycle on the wall beside our bed. When did I ovulate? I needed to know. It’s hard to unpick exactly what it was about babies I felt would help me. Perhaps it was as simple as a fresh start. A new human, untarnished by history. Someone I could create inside me and then sustain. Someone I could keep alive.
Once our baby was made I went to the doctor to confirm it. I rang Gabe from a phone booth outside on the street.
‘It’s true, I am.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes. Really.’
‘Really?’ His voice was faint and faraway on the end of the line, and I felt a flickering of unease deep within.
‘Yes.’
‘Right. Shit. Okay.’
I smothered the dread in Gabe’s voice with all my welling hope, and from that point on we could not truly hear each other. As my belly grew and grew, we became increasingly distant—me still at uni, him off at work. At night, the words we spoke collided then slid off into the dim corners of our city home. We were slowly coming apart, a silent rending.
≈
For the first year after my father died, the house in Burringbar sat empty like the abandoned cicada shells Jake and I found snagged on trees when we were children. Dust settled in a thick layer across the surfaces and the garden encroached, branches and ferns folding in upon the house, staking a claim. In time, my mother cut away the invading trees, swept the paths clean of leaves, and moved back home to the forest from the yellow cottage by the sea. Jake had finished school and left for study and the wider world, and the house—sprawling and large—was quiet without us.
By twenty-two I’d had two babies and moved from Brisbane back to the house of my childhood. Gabe had been unready for the challenges parenting presented. We were—the both of us—just kids, and the dream had been primarily mine. What we had seemed solid, but creating a family was a risky proposition. It was hard to predict if the structure would hold or crumble, unable to sustain the weight. Returning home with the babies was fraught, but not as fraught as leaving home had been. How rare it is for the dispossessed to regain their homeplace. When my family fled our home at the height of my father’s madness, we never expected it to be restored to us. We had believed that, once gone, it was lost. Utterly and forever. Returning, babies in tow, there was a sense of welcome in the rolling hills, the endless green expanse of the forest, and the curving, bright-pebbled creek of my home.
≈
When you’ve lost trust, it is hard to thrust yourself again and again out into an unsafe world. All around you are unknown dangers. You don’t know the topography, where to step to avoid uneven ground. In these circumstances, hiding could be seen as an adaptive behaviour. It is, after all, used to great effect throughout the natural world. Camouflage, stillness, silence, the digging of holes or hollows, or just slipping quietly out of sight. Put simply, it’s one way of staying alive. In a culture obsessed by ‘moving forward’ or ‘moving on’, there isn’t much space for the hibernation of grief. Even taking time to lick your wounds is often seen as an indulgence. When I retreated into motherhood and my forest home, I hid myself away from the misunderstanding of others. It was too painful to have no place in the world where my experience—the visceral reality of loss—could be honestly aired. But the forest—my homeplace—could hold my story. The forest didn’t mind how mangled or broken I was. And I needed time—quiet, rhythmic, soothing—a lot of time.
I was lucky—early motherhood did provide relief from the crushing weight of my grief. It could have gone the other way. I could have ended up with two babies and felt no differently than I had before, or perhaps—terrifyingly—worse. I knew I had taken a risk, that the cost of things going wrong wouldn’t be just for me, but for my children too. But as it was, the babies were so consuming I had little space for the rumination of self. Mothering offered me an emotional rest-stop, a reprieve from replaying the traumas of the past. The constancy of their needs, the relentlessness of their requirements, kept me firmly in the present moment. My very own version of a pilgrimage, of hiking some wild mountain trail. One foot in front of the other, carrying those babies, not looking away from the job at hand. But the thing about babies is they grow and grow and grow. In no time at all, they’re crawling then walking, laughing then talking. They are children, asking questions you haven’t figured out the answers to.
≈
Our days in the forest had taken on a gentle rhythm. Eating, walking, reading, eating, swimming, drawing, eating, reading … and swimming again. The waterhole was curved and clear, every pebble visible on the bottom. I floated on the surface of the water—arms spread wide, legs soft and drooping into the depths—watching the flitting sunshine between the leaves of trees high above. A leaf wafted down, landing softly on the water, sending ripples sweeping slowly outwards. Even in the midst of summer, the water in the shaded swimming hole was still cool enough that I had to edge in, braving the last part and plunging my head under with a gasping splash. I drifted, flat and quiet, and my children’s voices echoed from the boulders, reminding me of the world beyond the lapping water at my ears.
‘Mummy?’ Luca called from the bank. ‘My laugh has gone funny. I can’t find my laugh.’
Standing up, I slid my toes against the rocky bottom. Luca watched me with large, questioning eyes, giggling goofily in demonstration.
‘I love your boozies today!’ he said, ever the enthusiast. My youngest son had emerged as a glass-half-full person. ‘They’re lovely! They look happy.’
I cupped my breasts in my hands, unable to stifle a smile. Clambering out, I sat on the bank, gathering my small son into my lap. I held Luca tightly while Milla crashed about in the water.
‘Mummy?’ Luca’s voice was high-pitched, singsong.
‘Mmm?’
‘Nonny is your mummy, right?’
‘Yep. Nonny is my mum.’
‘Will she always live with us?’ Luca tipped his head backwards to glance at my face.
My mother worked from home, sewing cushions that she sold at the local markets. It was a small but time-heavy business, and though she was always present—willing to step in if there was some catastrophe—she rarely accompanied us in our daily activities.
‘I’m not sure. Maybe.’
‘Our daddy lives up the coast.’ Luca liked to do this, list the facts. ‘But where’s your daddy?’
&n
bsp; The past, coming up to bite. The suddenness of the question surprised me, and I was momentarily without words.
‘He’s dead,’ I said finally. It was the simplest answer I had.
Luca looked confused. ‘But why?’
‘He wasn’t well.’
‘Why’s he dead?’
I had answered this question truthfully for Milla, but he was five. At three, Luca seemed still just a baby.
‘He just wasn’t well, but he was old, older.’ The shadow of my morning headache hovered above my eyes. I didn’t want to get muddled in details.
‘He was old, not new?’
Luca sat a while, thinking, on my lap.
‘How old are you, Mummy?’
‘Twenty-five.’
‘Five? Like Milla?’
‘No. Twenty years older than Milla.’
‘Not old?’
‘No, not old.’
‘You’re not old, you’re brand-new!’
I laughed, kissing the top of his head, swelling with gladness at his strong, supple body beneath my palms. My children’s lives were so whole, so completely round, as though a circle surrounded each one, unbroken and unmaimed. Beaming faces, open and eager, blunt fringes and big eyes. Deep down, I believed they existed in a ring of safety, that they were somehow blessed, untouchable. This was irrational, I knew that, but I had to believe it to risk loving them so fiercely. Luca’s question—‘But where’s your daddy?’—broke into our quiet world, resounding in my mind. The sadness of it overwhelmed my smile.
≈
It had been six years since my father’s death, but I couldn’t quite shake the sorrow of it. The immensity of his devastation—the way my father’s response to Zoe’s death had continuously expanded, taking up all the space in our lives—still haunted me. I was frightened of my own propensities in that regard. Could I, if I allowed myself, go down that path? My father’s trajectory towards death had been terrifying. He was like a shooting star, burning wildly, crazy and then not, crazy and then not. Every decision I made after my father’s suicide was based on how I could avoid his fate. The parts of him that I knew I shared—his intensity, his passion, his impulsivity, his fearlessness, his creativity, his drive—I squashed them all deep down inside.