But for a time the feeling of freedom was temporary, coming and going like a shadow that he could not pin down. He entered rapidly into unwise and clinically questionable relationships but eventually aligned his star to another divorced person, the ‘cream of the crop,’ a lady called Girda Braun.
‘I loved that bloody Annie,’ he told his buddies in the bar for the following year or so until they were bored to death with the whole matter. ‘Jesus Christ, I loved her and those bloody kids. Never a cross word between us. Never.’
‘Where do you think she went when she took off?’ asked his mate in the Jackie Howe singlet one night when the subject had reared its ugly head again for the umpteenth time.
‘Where do you think? Cleared off with another bloke, of course. Took my station wagon, pride and joy, it was. I’ll see she can never hold her head up in these parts again. Tell everyone who knew her what a tart she was, is and will always be,’ he said in his savage know-it-all tone.
‘Didn’t you see it coming?’ asked his mate through a cloud of smoke, bored at having heard the saga over and over during the ensuing months.
‘No way. Treated her like a queen. I was a bloody good provider, bloody well devoted. Had everything they wanted. Those kids were the best dressed kids in town. That bitch has got my beautiful new station wagon to run around in. I worked my guts out for them, slogged from daylight till dark seven days a week except for five or six months during autumn and winter. But that doesn’t count. Everything they wanted, they got. Mind you, I never thought she was true blue. Always thought she was the scum of the earth. Told her so from the day I married her. Turned out to be right. Self-fulfilling prophecy or some such word like that.’
A litany of self-pity and self-praise followed until the mate’s eyes glazed over and he said it was time for him to be getting home to watch ‘Combat.’
No, Conrad, they did not quite get everything they wanted or needed, nor were you capable of providing same. You forgot the little luxuries money can’t buy. Trivialities like respect, dignity, compassion. Ever heard of those?
There were days and nights when Annie wanted him to hurt as much as she did and hoped that it was so.
At other times she did not care a hoot.
He wanted her to hurt the way that he was hurting for reasons that he barely understood. He wanted it very much and he would lie awake at night wondering how this could be achieved. By using the power of his vile tongue he could belittle her in the eyes of the townspeople and thus build himself up as guiltless and hard done by.
But Conrad soon recovered from his broken heart, marrying the woman called Girda Braun as swiftly as they could get to the altar, a marriage being a totally delightful prospect for both of them.
There’s a ready market out there for good providers like Conrad. Girda, with her shrewd, calculating mind, knew he was excellent husband material and together they would live happily ever after.
Annie delivered the children to the wedding and afterwards stood at the corner of the shopping mall for Conrad and Girda to drop them off to be collected and taken home. As the car drew to a gentle halt, the children climbed out of the car being driven by their beaming father, his head cocked to one side in delight, his eyes shining with anticipation. He was so obviously ready to be a new person, or to have this new woman accept the person that he already was, whichever was more convenient and cost him less money and effort.
Annie, leaned in the window and said to the dreamy-eyed couple,
‘I hope you will be very happy.’ No expression. No inflection. No expectation, either.
Did rage still dwell in his soul?
‘Oh, we will, we will, thank you,’ replied Girda graciously, finishing with a merry laugh.
Conrad smiled, his weathered face as soft as butter, his hand grasping his newly beloved’s knee. I wish you joy of each other, Annie thought with an internal chuckle at being free of the ties that bound her to inflammatory Conrad.
Annie merely shrugged with a knowing smile to herself as she led her children towards the car to take them to where peace and contentment lay waiting.
Of course you will be happy, Annie muttered to herself as the adoring couple drove off into the night. Why wouldn’t you be? How could you not be?
Annie could not stem the powerful relief at being out of the marriage. Her face incredulous, she climbed into her little Datsun and drove her children into the night.
Nothing lasts forever, neither the bad nor the good. Only the memories, the fleeting recollections, remain while one still draws breath. No matter how much time passes memories are there as keenly felt as yesterday.
That was one of the key things about regret, Annie learned. Regret for lost opportunities and years wasted in sorrow and captivity. Although relieved and at peace, regret was for a time a constant in her life, accompanying her throughout her days and sleepless nights. Lost youth, broken dreams.
Divorce resembles a death in many ways. Death of the hopes for the marriage, death of a possible future with a person once loved to one degree or another. Loss of faith in one’s ability to work towards a viable relationship. An open pit of uselessness into which a person may flounder and fall.
For the first few days of the separation she had felt useless and bereft, truly floundering as she had expected to. But this feeling soon changed when Conrad came to the door trying to persuade her to return to their home. She knew with certainty that she could not do so, could not drag her children back into the Purgatory that had been their home.
Weighed against the freedom from fear, the rising, scathing annoyance one could stir in a partner simply by being in the same universe, Annie’s huge wash of relief at being away from Conrad was overwhelming. She was less tense, confused and unsure of herself and in a short while, no longer spent wakeful nights fearing the next day. Having the children to care for was her saving grace. She had to be up and doing every morning and had little or no time for the luxury of brooding.
Realizing she was not the crouching cretin she was told she was, she attempted to blossom a little. She found she was appreciating the opportunity to do her own thing, reading until 2 a.m. if she so wished or sewing clothes for her children until some ungodly hour. Watching gentle television programs instead of the blood and thunder and murder Conrad had preferred. At last accountable to no-one about the money she spent and what she spent it on, she no longer had to make detailed lists and beg forgiveness after the purchase of material and wool to clothe her children.
Her worst fears lived through, she knew that having her children to tend to would be her saving grace. She could not afford to fall apart at the seams. That was not an option. It was out of the question that she should not keep functioning on a level that would not allow her to brood and hide away from the world. Every day must be greeted cheerfully, breakfasts made, lunches cut, uniforms made ready. Pets tended, timetables adhered to, meals prepared. These actions, sometimes performed as though by an automaton, kept her connected to the real world even on days when she did not want to be, when memories and fears for their future haunted her relentlessly.
She set herself to making a nest for her children in her old family home, painting the kitchen and four of the bedrooms, even beginning to paint the outside of the large old Queenslander but finding this beyond her capability.
She fought her way through the layers that separated her from the truth of the world she lived in and found that she was not the idiot she had been taught to believe herself to be. Nor was she useless or hopeless or a blot on the face of society. It seemed that everyone she knew felt a broken marriage and a broken home were the worst things on the face of the Earth. Where once she would have thought that way herself, her worlds had been turned upside down and her opinions were altered as a consequence. She now knew that any marriage was not worth dying for, not worth laying the life of her children and herself on the line simply to live up to outdated beliefs that families must be held intact at all costs. There were far worse thin
gs than being divorced and ‘dead’ was one of these.
The longer her husband had reinforced these opinions within her, the more she had internalized them. Now she was free and no longer had to stifle the part of herself that told her she was a worthwhile person. For a while even the simplest of everyday freedoms were foreign to her, but her pulse kept beating and she came alive again. Over time, something subtle changed within her until she knew she was no longer an emotional cripple.
She had years of accumulated weariness and bullying to work off. But she was up and running again, never to have to cower to this man again, her heart uplifted and beginning to soar again as it hadn’t done for eleven years.
‘I was as good as dead and I’m alive again,’ she told her mother one evening over a scotch and dry. ‘He may have got everything financially out of the divorce but I’ve got my precious children and that’s really all that matters to me.’
He had cast a long shadow over her future but she knew now that she would survive and one day be whole again. A broken home and a world turned upside down were sad and momentous matters but necessary under the circumstances and a step on the road to healing.
Her mother gave her old, worldly-wise smile.
‘We knew you would come through in one piece, or rather, we trusted that you would. Now you only have to repair the damage he has done to you.’
Thus Annie, like an increasing number of women in her generation, took her children into a nebulous future with the clear hope that they would be better off and would survive against all odds. Although they seemed to plunge with a kind of suddenness from their family home out into the world, the seeds of their leaving had been planted long before they ran with desperation into the beyond. Not very far, physically, but a world away from where they had been, surviving the train wreck, picking themselves up, dusting themselves off and learning how to enjoy the sunlight.
So the wheel of existence turns and we go from one situation to another which is hopefully an improvement. If we are fortunate we can all survive the train wreck that can bring us down for the remainder of our days and we can again restore the wrapping on our souls until they are whole once more.
From lying in the long grass at the side of the railway line where the train wreck has left us shattered and bleeding, to gathering ourselves together from where we have lain with our souls pulverized like shards of glass surrounding us, we resemble a phoenix emerging after a long sleep, a little battered at first but with the strength to reinvent our broken souls.
Keeping our options open is not merely a survival mechanism but is a right of every adult who wants to endure against a worst case scenario and to change their circumstances.
Many of us spend our lives looking for the elusive love that will cure all hungers. A few of us find it and are able to recover our crippled psyches with the aid of a special person, a beloved parent or kind friends. Some of us come late to the conclusion that it’s simply not possible and give up hope or are too damaged to ever trust again.
Every life has its secrets. One can only hope to understand one’s own. Or if not understand, then learn to live with the aftermath of the long term actions committed against us.
5. An Outing With Two Short People
Two o’clock on Saturday afternoon brought the arrival of Mork and Mindy to our house for babysitting purposes. Mork is a little short guy of five with black curly hair inherited from his mother, along with the fair skin and the blue eyes of their joint Irish heritage from both sides of the family tree. Mindy, at three, has similar coloring to her big brother and is a little whirling dynamo as opposed to Mork, who has a more placid and laid back character.
Their current desire for entertainment on that windy, cold day seemed to be to visit the Waterbird Habitat and Lake Annand to feed the birds, mostly ducks and a few ibises. We drove along the main street of our little rural city singing at the tops of our voices, happy little nonsense songs that children love. Our day was full of joy at being out and about doing what we loved on this winter afternoon in our rural city on top of the Great Dividing Range in northern Australia.
This little expedition was back in the days prior to the local residents being warned not to give bread to the birds as it was not part of their dietary regulations. We were a little disappointed later by the directive from the higher-ups, but we made the best of it while we could and in the times that followed we simply went and admired our feathered friends.
However on that particular day bread had not as yet been deemed harmful to the bird population of our home town. The afternoon was cloudy and gloomy, but we set off to buy day-old bread and to follow our inclinations in spite of the overcast sky. Saturday was usually the best day to feed the birds as they would not have had too many visitors during the week and were ravenous by the weekend, jostling up to us in great numbers.
Sundays found them a little more standoffish and independent. If there was a public holiday on the Monday and you arrived all agog to feed them, you might as well just stay home and keep your bread to yourself as far as the birds were concerned.
Firstly, we arrived at the Waterbird Habitat and got ourselves to the water’s edge. Ducks, ibises and pretty little water hens with blue beaks and red chests abounded. We stayed for quite some time with our loaf of bread, pulling the slices into tiny pieces so that we wouldn’t run out of food for all the birds we wanted to treat to afternoon tea.
Clucking and calling to them, we persuaded the birds to come to the water’s edge. They rushed over, climbed out and gathered around us, voracious in their hunger. When we walked away they followed us and we led them along dropping crumbs like Hansel and Gretel as they walked through the forest.
Further up towards the King Street gate there were many hungry customers waiting for us, much to the children’s delight. Then over the road to the playground we went, where Mork and Mindy made great use of the equipment.
Later, after doing more distributing of bread on the way back to the car, we took off for Lake Annand. Although it was drizzling by then, the short people insisted that we treat the birds there to the last few slices of bread. The children were well equipped with parkas but I wasn’t, so I promptly proceeded to get very cold and damp indeed.
At Lake Annand, the birds were also extremely hungry, mounting the embankment to get at their providers. Some ducks were quite large and Mindy, a pretty little five-year old with long dark hair, although not a timid person by inclination, grew more than a little troubled.
Hearing a yell, I looked down to see her holding a bleeding finger.
‘What happened to you, Mindy love?’ I asked her with concern.
With her natural flair for the dramatic, Mindy said, ‘One of the kids at preschool bit me.’ Then she rethought the story. ‘No, that duck bit me.’
In my mind I opted for the duck story as she had not been to preschool for a week, seeing as school holidays had rolled around.
I was getting colder and wetter by the minute.
‘Let’s go,’ I told the children, shivering miserably as we tossed the last few pieces of bread towards the motley crew of ducks that were still out in the weather.
We reached the car and climbed gratefully into the warmth. It was growing late by then, so we decided we would like an easy dinner—or rather, I decided.
I suggested Hot Dogs in a way that would hopefully sway the majority of opinion my way.
‘Yummy,’ greeted me from the back seat, so that was settled. We would go and hire a video and have a nice, cozy evening.
I had hot dogs at home but no bread rolls, so we tried two corner shops. No bread rolls. I was getting wetter and colder each time I emerged from the car.
Then to the video store, where, after much to-ing and fro-ing and changing of minds we finally decided on Supergirl. At least that was one problem solved.
Off we went to two more small shops situated in the same shopping center as the video store. One was shut. The other had no bread rolls.
Hurrying back to the car through the rain, Mork, who was in charge of Supergirl, tripped and fell headlong onto the bitumen. A grazed knee and a broken heart took place, while Supergirl went flying out of her case and onto the road.
I cuddled him and told him to be brave, that we would be home as soon as we could buy some bread rolls, rescued Supergirl and helped him to his feet.
Giving him my one and only grubby tissue, I told him to hold it against his knee until we got home.
Fastening them into their seatbelts as quickly as I could, I was by this time, cold, wet and nervously wrecked. I was still hurrying to get on with the bread roll business as quickly as possible to get the children into the warmth of the house.
Mork: ‘Ma, I can’t get this tissue up the leg of my jeans.’
Mindy: ‘Ma, my finger hurts where the duck bit it.’
Ma: ‘Never mind. Be brave. We’ll be home in a jiffy and I’ll fix everything up.’
Another corner shop to try. Rain was pouring down by this time and both children were suffering much pain so I told them,
‘Look, I’m just going into the shop. I’ll be where you can see me all the time and I’ll only be two seconds, right? I’ll lock the car and if anyone comes up to the door, don’t open it. Okay?’
At last in Bridge Street, my frantic quest was rewarded and I found a packet of bread rolls. Off we went, post haste.
‘Straight into the bath with some antiseptic in it, Mork, honey,’ I told him as I ran a hot bath.
Mork limped into the bathroom looking in a state of sad disrepair.
Mindy sat on the couch, the picture of abject sorrow, her finger wrapped in tissues and cradled in the crook of her arm.
‘Ma, my finger still hurts. Can I have Supergirl on now?’
‘Not yet, Mindy, sweetie,’ I told her distractedly. ‘Wait until your brother’s out of the bath and I see to your finger, then we’ll all watch Supergirl together.’
Eloquent Silence Page 14