Tony and John helped out, of course, as much as they could, but while it eased some of the pressure, each dollar they gave was a small piece torn from his pride. It didn’t matter that he’d worked hard for twenty-odd years to support us. A man was only a man if … You know the story.
There was no fighting it. He was what he was, and that meant he was as much a victim of his pride now as I had always been.
Then Mum dropped the bombshell.
“No. I won’t allow it!” He slammed his fork down so hard on the dinner table that the plates jumped. “Your place is here, not slaving in some factory.”
“It isn’t ‘slaving’. I’d just be packing biscuits. Gracia can get me the job. She says it’s easy.” My mother’s voice was quiet, reasonable. She knew how much she was hurting him. “And if I took the early shift, I could be home by four.”
“So, you talked to Gracia. Why didn’t you just write to the newspapers. Tell everyone …”
“There is nothing to be ashamed about!” Suddenly, the dam burst. I had never seen my mother so worked up. Even when they were fighting, she rarely raised her voice. Now, she was shouting. “Next week you go into hospital. Then what? The boys are doing all they can, but they are only apprentices, they can’t support us. And they shouldn’t have to.” When she was upset, her Italian sometimes got confused, and a number of Spanish words crept in, but we understood her. “It may hurt your pride, Sergio, but you can’t eat pride, and you can’t pay it to the bank.” She took a deep breath.
“Do you think I want to go to work? How many people want to spend half their life in a factory, packing biscuits into boxes? But they do it, and so will I. Until you are well enough to work again.”
The look on her face allowed for no reply. I watched the fight drain out of my father’s eyes. He pushed the chair back from the table, and walked slowly towards the door. Mum took a step forward, then changed her mind and watched as the door closed behind him. She sniffed once, then began to clear the half-full plates from the table.
I stood up and touched her gently on the shoulder. She turned and attempted a weak smile. Then she spoke to me in Spanish.
“La primera gota de la medicina siempre amarga.”
The first sip of the medicine is always bitter.
Putting the plates onto the sink, she placed her arms lightly around me. “He will get used to things. Just give him a little time.”
Time was the one thing my father had plenty of. Months of time; and that was what was killing him.
11
SOME KIND OF DISEASE
I didn’t think I could ever feel sorry for the guy.
Mr Plamenatz, I mean. After all he’d done to make my first months in High School such a pain. I should have cheered when he burned the science lab down — the way all the kids in his Year Nine class did, once they were all safely evacuated and the girls (and some of the boys) had stopped screaming.
He didn’t actually burn the place down, he just singed it a bit, really. Once all the smoke cleared, and the fire-brigade went back to their station, there wasn’t so much damage at all. Except to old Valium’s pride.
No one was exactly sure of what caused the fire. He was carrying out a demonstration, and he must have dropped something that didn’t like being dropped. There was too much confusion for anyone — except maybe the inspectors from the Education Department — to work out the exact details.
He was probably lucky that there was only a week to go before the break. The holidays would give the whole thing a chance to die down a little. As it was, he had to put up with anonymous voices calling out things like, “Do you smell something burning?” every time he’d turn to write on the board. He’d spin around and glare at the person he thought might be responsible, but he could never prove anything, so he just had to cop it.
It completely ruined his discipline. It’s hard to stand over someone and make them feel nervous or self-conscious, if they’re smiling at you like you’re sharing some secret joke.
He took the last two days of the term off—with a “virus”.
That was enough to cheer me up and take my mind off the problems at home, at least for a while, but the news I received from Miss Vegas on the day before the holidays took me totally by surprise.
She kept me back after English. Plamenatz wasn’t at school and she was smiling, almost, so I knew it couldn’t be anything too bad.
I hoped.
“Well, Lisdalia. You’ve really done it this time.” She was looking out of the window, and I couldn’t tell exactly how she meant that.
“What do you mean?”
“You made the final. Of the writing competition. I told you it was good enough!” As she spoke, she turned to face me, and held up an official-looking envelope. “The presentations are at the University in August. That’s when you’ll know if you’ve won. Well, what do you say?”
What could I say?
“That’s great.” I was trying to sound cool, but I was more excited than I’d imagined I would be, and I think it sneaked through into the way I spoke the words.
A thought struck me. “Miss, what’s the prize? If I win, I mean.”
She sat down on the desk, and passed me the envelope. “I was sure I’d already told you. When you win, the school gets five hundred dollars worth of books for the library — which should make Mr Parnell very happy — and you —” she paused for effect “— all you get is a gold medal. Oh, and a ten-day trip for yourself and your parents to Queensland during the September holidays.”
I told Mum when I got home.
Dad was still in hospital, getting over the first of his two operations. He hadn’t responded very well to the anaesthetic and they were keeping him in for a few days, until his breathing improved.
Dr Raymond had decided on two separate operations, so that Dad could have the use of one hand while the other one slowly recovered.
The damage was pretty bad, he said, and my father had left it far too long, and done far too much harm before deciding to get help. He also said (in private, to my mother) that he didn’t know how my father had put up with the pain.
“It must have been excruciating,” he said. My mother had a lot of trouble with that word when she told me about the conversation later — “especially in his line of work,” the doctor had added. He obviously didn’t know my father.
Or maybe he did.
Because he also told her, confidentially, that the main reason for doing the operations separately was to delay my father from returning to work — giving his right hand, at least, a little extra time to recover.
“I know how frustrating it will seem,” he said, “and he’s going to convince himself that he’s ready to go back before he’s really able. But if he isn’t very careful, he could do inoperable damage and cripple his hands permanently. If he hasn’t already.”
Even with all that going on, Mum was really excited when I told her about the competition. I could tell, because she asked — in Spanish — “Why didn’t you tell us about it sooner?”
“I didn’t know about it,” I lied, just a little bit. “Miss Vegas entered my poem … I guess she didn’t want to get my hopes up until she knew.”
“Well, now she knows.” Mum smiled and ruffled my hair, the way she often did. “You father will be so pleased.”
I looked at her doubtfully, and she caught my drift.
“He’s very proud of you,” she said. I must have laughed, because she went on, suddenly serious: “He would never tell you … it’s not his way.” She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. She was speaking from twenty-two years’ experience, and that sigh said it all. “But he is very proud of you.”
“Still, I’m not a boy, so it doesn’t really matter, does it?” I know I sounded bitter. I suppose I was — hell, I know I was — but there was no point in taking it out on her.
“It does matter. To him, it matters very much.” She picked up an apple from the basket in the middle of the table, examined the
skin thoughtfully, then placed it back among the rest of the fruit. “You know, you are the only thing that we ever really fight about. He always says, ‘Who will marry a clever woman?’ or ‘What kind of a life will she have?’ ”
“He makes it sound like some kind of disease!”
“Perhaps, in some ways — in some places — it is.” She sat down at the table, and I took the seat opposite her. “Did you know that your Nonna was very clever? She loved school and she always did really well. And I am told that she played piano like an angel. But in those days …” She paused for a moment, and left the sentence hanging, unfinished.
Nonna Maria? Clever?
My grandmother spent her whole life wearing mourning-black, cooking boatloads of pasta sauce and saying an endless Rosary.
“But she doesn’t even own a piano. And she never reads a book, except at church.”
“All that ended years ago. Her father took her out of school when she was fourteen, and a year later she was married.”
“But you said she was clever. Couldn’t she have gone on to university, or something?”
“Don’t you understand? No one from the village went to university. Her father was being criticised for allowing her to go to school as long as she did.”
“But that’s so unfair!” I knew what Tanja’s answer would be to that line. So, obviously, did Mum.
“There has never been a law saying that the world must be fair, Lisdalia. The world just is, and we must live in it as it is.”
“Maybe that’s how it was. In the Stone Age. But it doesn’t have to be like that. Not any more.”
She reached out and placed her hand over mine. “It isn’t me you have to convince, querida. It is your father.”
12
WONDERLAND
During the second week of the holidays, Michael’s father took us to Wonderland; “us” being Michael, his mother and me. Mr Harrison (I suppose that should be Petty Officer Harrison, but he didn’t look at all “Navy” out of his uniform) was home on leave, and I could sense a difference in both Michael and his mother.
Especially his mother.
She seemed to come alive, and her face had the same … excited glow that I’d noticed sometimes on the faces of the girls my brothers would bring home — before the novelty wore off, and they got bored senseless, listening to discussions about body-building or the advantages of a fully-blown V8. My brothers really know how to show a girl a good time!
Mr Harrison was just like an older version of his son. He had the same eyes and the same smile, and the same habit of rolling his tongue around inside his lips when he was concentrating.
We went on all the rides at Wonderland, but gave “The Beach” a miss. It was too cold, and besides, Mr Harrison said that he’d seen enough water to last a lifetime. I laughed, but I’m not entirely sure he was joking. He was counting the months to his discharge. They all were.
What I couldn’t get over was how much they touched. Mr and Mrs Harrison, I mean. They held hands and linked arms and kissed more in that one afternoon than I’d seen my parents do in the previous five years — and out in the open, too. I know my parents love each other, but it’s like my father always says: “Your mother knows how I feel. I don’t have to parade it in public”. I don’t know about that. Once in a while, I don’t think it’s such a bad idea.
When we got home, I stayed over for tea. I liked the easy-going atmosphere. I was used to it, of course — I’d visited often enough — but this time Michael’s dad was home, and that lifted the whole occasion.
We had veal schnitzel, Michael’s favourite — and his father’s — and I noticed that nothing, not even the salad dressing, had a trace of garlic in it. Mr H hated garlic. It’s funny how you compare everything to what you’re used to at home. Just about the only things my father doesn’t have garlic in are ice-cream and his morning bowl of cornflakes. And I’m not entirely sure about the cornflakes.
* * *
Later, Michael walked home with me.
As we reached the corner, I turned and looked back across Boundary Street. It was a little after seven, and the sun was setting behind the hill on the other side of Elizabeth Drive. The whole skyline was blood-red, and the trees on the top of the hill were like a handful of outstretched black witch-fingers. There was a sinister beauty about the whole scene.
In all the years we’d lived around the corner, I could never remember just standing there and looking across like that. It made me think about how much we take for granted. Boundary Park. Even the name said it. Drive for two minutes in one direction, and you were in the country: farms, cows and sheep, the whole deal. Terry Dickson country — or Franco Carniato or Slavko Jovanovich country; it all depended on which farm you happened to stop at.
Two minutes in the other direction, and you were in the middle of suburbia: brick and tile and fibro, a few small trees — and not a cow in sight. A slice of both worlds. How could you want to live anywhere else?
I looked across at Michael. Just twelve months ago, that was exactly what he’d wanted.
Who needed Sydney? Who needed Boundary Park? He’d been uprooted from his home and his friends and dragged interstate to a place where he didn’t want to be, where he didn’t fit in; picked on by bullies, ignored by almost everyone else … But he’d made it.
I looked down the street to the house where Riny had lived — and died. And I wondered what he might have been like now without her influence and her friendship when he’d had no one else. Without her help when he was preparing for the swimming race that had meant so much to him — which still meant so much now, but for very different reasons. There were lights in the windows; the new owners had just moved in. But to Michael — and to me — no matter how long they lived there, it would always be Riny’s house.
I turned my gaze towards the sunset, and stared until the red began to burn its colour into the backs of my eyes.
“Michael …” I had to wait a moment for a reply. He was looking in the same direction as I was, and I’m sure his thoughts were miles away on the other side of that spectacular skyline.
“Yes?” He answered without looking at me.
“I’m glad you moved from Middleton.”
Now he did face me; and he smiled. “So am I.”
I know I was only just turning twelve, and at that age you’re not supposed to have “those” emotions, but at that moment I felt a kind of strange, empty, warm sensation deep inside my chest, and suddenly I understood the look I’d seen on Mrs Harrison’s face that afternoon, as we’d stood and watched her husband and her son on one of the rides.
I think I even began to understand how my mother could put up with so much from a man who was embarrassed to hold her hand in public. For that feeling, I’d forgive a lot, too.
We walked around to my house without speaking, but once or twice, his hand just brushed against mine, and the feeling was electric.
13
SIMPLE …
Coordinator!
Julie Vegas stared at the pile of manila folders on her desk, and then let her gaze drift longingly out through her classroom window.
They don’t want a year coordinator, they want a full-time social-worker …
Shane Thomas was in the exclusion-room again; nothing particularly serious, but he just never seemed to learn. One thing after another… after another. She looked at her Tuesday timetable, to work out a time to interview him.
There goes period three …
She pencilled it in.
And they’d finally thrown Maddie’s older brother out of the school. Not that it was unexpected, but Maddie was pretty upset, naturally; the poor kid really loved him. There was far more going on there than met the eye.
Maybe another talk, later in the week.
And Mr Petrantonio was home from hospital — and almost back to his usual form. Lisdalia would be …
“Cup of coffee, Jules?” Terry Price broke into her stream of thought. He was leaning around the doorpost.
“Lunch is half-over. I’m sure there’s some union rule about working through all your breaks.”
She smiled and closed the folder. Terry was the resident comedian, and never appeared to do any serious marking or preparation, but the kids loved him, and he seemed to get results.
“White, no sugar.” She moved towards him as she spoke.
“Hey,” he moved fully into the doorway, and put on a shocked expression. “I didn’t say I was making it, did I? Just because I feel sorry for you, and try to take you away from all this” — he waved his arm around the room — “doesn’t mean I’m willing to turn myself into a kitchen helper. Besides, you make much better coffee than I do.”
“Dream on, Terry. I don’t even make coffee for my father … not often anyway. And he’s far more helpless even than you. Or so he’d have us believe. Next, you’ll be telling me your mum makes your lunch for you every morning.”
“Has she been talking to you again? She promised she wouldn’t.”
She punched him lightly on the arm. “Go on, get out of here. And don’t make it too weak. I can’t stand weak coffee.”
“Yessir, Miz Julie,” he replied, in a reasonable imitation of a Mississippi drawl. And he moved off towards the staffroom rubbing his arm, and mumbling to himself.
She shook her head and followed him, clutching her folders, and wondering why some people found everything so simple.
* * *
“It is simple, Julie. You just have to stop caring so damned much.”
“That’s easy for you to say, Terry. But you can’t switch off, just like that.” She snapped her fingers in the air in front of her.
“Maybe not.” He placed his empty mug down on the table between them. “But it doesn’t mean it has to take over your life. You’re a teacher, Jules. They aren’t your kids; they have parents … most of them. And you won’t help any of them if you don’t back off a little bit. You’ll burn out. Then what use will you be?”
Lisdalia Page 4