by Peggy Frew
Sometimes, during these visits, Helen’s mother recognised her, sometimes not. Sometimes her mother thought she was somebody else—once she thought Helen was Eileen Mackie, and cried, saying how beautiful her voice was. The nurses said this sort of thing was normal—and also that it was normal for dementia cases to hold on to the practice of making small talk even when all understanding of themselves and their surroundings had gone. Hello, said Helen’s mother, and, Very well, thank you, and yourself? and these phrases did indeed seem to be automatic.
Helen’s mother, the nurses said, was ‘a lovely patient’. Helen took this to mean that she didn’t cause any trouble, like some of the others—the old man who came shuffling down the corridor, bare-legged and gleeful and surprisingly fast, his pyjama top flipping up at the back to show his flat, sagging bottom; the woman who shouted out from her room, hoarsely, incessantly, Fuck! Fuck! Fu-uck!; another woman who Helen saw sitting up in bed, using both hands to scoop stew from a tray into her own lap.
Helen’s mother mostly sat in silence, her eyes cast down, her lower lip jutting. Her body inside her dressing gown was very small and—unlike her old night-time body, plush and curving within its nightdress—looked dried out, insubstantial. Helen sat with her, every now and then looking at her watch. She made herself stay the full forty minutes, and it was excruciating. She was often plagued by the diarrhoea feeling that had overtaken her in the hospital that day with Mrs Parker, and the hush of her mother’s room would be broken by rude internal burbles and groans.
Helen didn’t speak to her mother beyond saying hello and goodbye, and if her mother came out, as she occasionally did in the early months, with a nonsensical statement such as, Shall we go to choir? or, Nobody told me the Barkers were coming—and then, later, as her words went awry, It’s just a tish, or, They’re my smerts—Helen did not respond.
Once, when they had been sitting in silence for some time, Helen’s mother, who had not replied to Helen’s greeting nor acknowledged her presence, suddenly shifted around in her chair and fixed Helen with her gaze. Her face softened and she smiled. Her expression was melting, rapturous—it was, undoubtedly, a look of love.
Helen moved in her chair.
Helen’s mother’s eyes followed her.
Mum? said Helen. Mum? It’s me, Helen.
But the look had gone, slid away.
In the end she just lay in bed, her eyes closed. She was not even very old—she was in her early seventies—but she looked old and small and papery, her hair and skin pale, her soft fingers moving against the blankets as if seeking a comfort that was always just out of reach.
The nurse who rang to tell Helen her mother was dead sobbed over the phone. She was my favourite, said the nurse.
Helen, standing by the telephone table in the new house at Avoca Street, felt upstaged. Wasn’t she the one who should be crying? But if she started now it would seem competitive. How nice it would be to cry—to collapse into it, to release the tight, cold feeling at the back of her throat, to sob herself into a quiet emptiness. But Helen crying and Helen’s parents, it would seem, were mutually exclusive.
There was something about her, said the nurse. You know? She had a rough, smoker’s voice. Still waters run deep, I s’pose.
Helen had to work hard not to slam the phone down. I’ll come tomorrow morning, she said.
Helen found Mrs Parker’s number. Mrs Parker didn’t cry—she tutted, and sighed. Helen’s mother had clearly disappointed Mrs Parker. Helen wondered if it was because she hadn’t become the different person Mrs Parker had spoken of that time in the kitchen—if it was because she hadn’t become the right sort of different person.
There was a service, of sorts. Nothing churchy. Helen, Mrs Parker and the nurse from the nursing home watched as two men in cheap suits lowered Helen’s mother’s coffin into the grave in which Helen’s father already lay. The gravel-voiced nurse cried. Mrs Parker sighed. Helen’s bowels sloshed and cramped.
Driving home, Helen was visited again by that gnat of a memory—Mrs Parker in the dining room of the house behind the surgery, her fingers tapping Helen’s wrist. Your mother is very proud of you. Perhaps she should have asked Mrs Parker to tell her more about this, more about her mother—the person she was when she was with Mrs Parker, the person who was proud of Helen. But she couldn’t. The idea of her mother harbouring this secret regard for her was as unbearable as the memory of her mother’s giggle in the night all those years ago, or of her father’s ‘white spider’. She would not barge in now to where she had never been welcome. And anyway, what would be the use? What might she find? Love, perhaps, love like a dirty secret, twisted up and shoved into a dark corner—and what would she do with that?
Helen reached to the passenger seat, to her bag. She rustled through it, one-handed, but found only an empty liquorice allsorts packet. With her finger she wormed into it, and then sucked, dug sugar from under her nail with her teeth.
She would leave love out of it. But this pride her mother felt—assuming it had existed; assuming it wasn’t a figment of the imagination of Mrs Parker, with her strong and whimsical and unsatisfiable expectations regarding Helen’s mother—why was this kept hidden from her, Helen? Was it the old fear of spoiling a child—as if an entire upbringing of rigorous denial could be undone with one word of praise? Helen gave a weak laugh. Was it because of Helen’s father—the exclusive devotion he had required, which had set the shape of their family and held it so firmly bound? Perhaps. Helen felt a moment’s envy for Mrs Parker, her mother’s confidante, an outsider.
The road was borne up, along a crest. Knobbly sun-bleached hills fanned out, strewn with boulders and small whippy-looking trees. Helen put down the window for a moment to let the hot wind into her hair.
Another memory arrived, quick and sharp and unannounced: her mother coming in from the surgery with a white apron on over her usual yellow blouse and brown skirt. Her mother going to the supply room, her steps brisk. Her mother’s practised hands tearing open rolls of bandage, shaking a vial, dropping a fat syringe into a kidney basin. Her mother being a nurse—helping her father, on a busy day? She couldn’t remember now, the context was not there. Only the expression on her mother’s face as she worked—attentive and absorbed, and, yes, proud.
It was Helen’s career that her mother had been proud of, according to Mrs Parker. It was not Helen’s marriage or her children but her career that her mother had paid attention to, been interested in. Had it been envy, then—stemming from her mother’s frustrated pride, her neglected intelligence, her unsatisfied ambition—which had stood between the two of them?
Just for a moment, Helen felt it, an untainted sympathy. Only a snatch, like the grey-green toss of leaves at the corner of her eye as the fence lines flew past, the dams, the clumps of trees. And then it was gone, once again beyond her.
She drove along the freeway. It was summer, and the paddocks under the high sky were silvery and ragged. There were no clouds. The world seemed very big, and possibly uncaring, but she was moving through it, she was wide open, and whatever it offered she would gather up in great armloads and devour.
SHELLY BEACH
Shelly Beach was off the island, back over the bridge and around towards Kilcunda, away from Melbourne.
Shelly Beach was no more shelly than any other beach. In fact, less. The sand was coarse, and sand is made of shells, in part, ground-up shells, tiny pieces of them, but there weren’t any whole shells, none at all. There were big brown-grey rocks at each end, and flat darker rocks across the middle, going out into the shallow water, and pockets of sand and rock pools, and huge crashing waves beyond.
It was at Shelly Beach that nine-year-old Anna climbed onto the biggest rock and disappeared over the other side, to where monstrous, invisible explosions took place, from where jets of spray shot into sight, high in the air, then seemed to pause before breaking apart and slapping back down.
Nan running, slow in the grainy sand, slow on her thick brown l
egs.
Junie standing by the towels, bite of apple in her mouth, eyes locked on the empty place, the fountains of spray.
Nan running, Junie standing, and, in a rainbow mist, wet hair pressed pink to her scalp, limbs froglike on the shining dark rock, a grin of determined triumph only slightly slipped—Anna, reappearing.
It was at Shelly Beach that twenty-one-year-old Junie, squinting into a sunset, shivering in a jacket that had been Nan’s, having drunk before driving perhaps one more glass of whisky than she should have, magicked Anna back again. Just for a moment. Junie’s eyelids lowered, the light stretched and shimmered, the sea jostled, gunmetal, glittering—and Anna, grinning, watery, came crawling over the rock.
But there was nothing beautiful in this. No relief. No marvellous falling away or splitting open of the Junie she was, the Junie she’d become. No return to anything unreachable or longed for or forgotten. Instead, fury, narrow, violent, unstoppable. How dare you? How could you? Why? Why? Why?
She drove back to the island, to the empty house, too fast, skidding at the Anderson roundabout, revving up the hill.
And it was at Shelly Beach that forty-year-old Paul told thirty-seven-year-old June that he was having doubts about their marriage. This was in the summer, Esther and Maggie and Cal busy in the rock pools, four or five other groups of people set up along the sand—umbrellas, drink bottles, bags of food—someone’s small tan dog trotting in important loops from camp to camp.
They were seated on the same, sideways-spread, towel.
‘It’s not working,’ Paul said in a quiet voice. ‘I keep thinking it’ll change, but it hasn’t.’
Panic. Salt on her lips, dripping from her hair. She seized another towel, stood, wrapped herself, sat back down. ‘What’re you doing?’ she hissed. ‘We can’t talk like this here.’
‘I’m sorry.’ His lips were shaking. ‘I’ve been trying to say it, but I keep losing my nerve.’
Cal ran up with a clump of wiry purple seaweed. ‘Look!’
‘Nice one, Callie!’ June reached for her sunglasses. ‘Can you find another one like that?’ Watching him run back down the sand, aching at his eager legs, the dimples over his elbows. Turning to Paul, whispering: ‘How long have you felt like this?’
‘A while. I don’t know. It’s happened before, and then I thought everything was okay …’
‘When before?’
‘When you were so angry all the time, when Cal was a baby.’
‘But I haven’t—I’m over that. Aren’t I?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Well, I thought I was.’
He was shielding his eyes with one hand, elbow on knee. ‘I’m not so sure,’ he said.
‘But since when … ?’
‘A year. Eighteen months maybe.’
Her mind leaped, frantic. It was the three kids, so much harder than she’d thought it would be. It was her painting; she hadn’t had a show for years, it was so difficult to get anything started, or finished. There were parts of herself that she was waiting to get to—this wasn’t quite it yet, the life she meant to have. Had she neglected to let Paul in on this, the incompleteness of things?
‘But why didn’t you tell me?’ She spoke too loudly—a woman looked over.
They both waited until she looked away again. Then Paul said quietly, ‘I should’ve. I fucked up. I’m sorry.’
His hand was on the towel between them, the hairs on the backs of his fingers beaded with water.
‘What can we do?’ she said.
A shadow moved in. Drips fell and pocked the sand. June looked up at the children, all three, standing there.
‘We’re hungry,’ said Esther.
And, at the same time, Maggie: ‘What’s the matter with you two?’
It was the next week, at Shelly Beach, that June, standing on one of the high flat rocks, looking down on Paul and the children playing in the shallows, began to laugh.
She was thinking of her possessiveness, its hugeness, how it had seeped into every corner, surrounded them both. It had been vile, and she at its mercy. Yet they survived it. What had brought them down, the two of them—what she now believed had brought them down—was something so much smaller. A hairline crack. It was this. Once, perhaps two years ago, in the deepest of red-wine nights, Paul had said that he was afraid that she, June, would one day betray him. Have an affair. Do a Helen. That it was somehow in her blood.
She laughed, up on her rock.
And of course this was snatched up by the terrible part of her that was always searching for confirmation, for judgment. She had not been able to see where in Paul this statement came from—his frailty, his need. She had only been able to take it personally. Always she had held herself so rigidly away from Helen, away from the parts of herself that might have Helen in them. This was what it meant to be her, June—to not be Helen, to not do what Helen did.
She could see now what she should have done, when Paul had said that. Just loved him, like he was a child, heaped her love and attention on him, allowed him his moment of insecurity, been big enough to allow it. Instead she had reacted, hardened, turned away.
She laughed into the wind, tears sliding from the corners of her eyes. For all her efforts not to be Helen, not to be selfish, not to betray Paul—because of these efforts!—she had betrayed him. Herself, too. She had betrayed them both, thrown them both over for an obsession with, a devotion to, the shadow of the thing she was most afraid of being.
PAUL
Paul, as a young man, had two very near misses in cars. When he says young man, he means eighteen, nineteen, having only just got his driver’s licence. In the darkness over the bed where Paul and June lie a young man appears, climbing into a car, light and slender, very serious. Thinking himself grown but so young—a child, really.
He was driving home after being out, seeing bands. He’d had a fight with his girlfriend. Was he drunk? He doesn’t think so, actually; more just angry. But he shouldn’t have been driving. And it was late, it was wet, he was going too fast around a corner—you know Brunton Avenue, where it curves around beside the MCG? Yeah, there. And the car just spun out, did a complete three-sixty. Nobody saw. It was so weird. No other cars around, him just sitting there, his heart going a hundred miles an hour. He yelled, to nobody, Did you see that? Threw out his arms. Fucking hell, did you see that? And then a car was coming, and he had to start the engine and get out of the way. Drive off home like it never happened.
And then the other time, very similar scenario, but it was in Sydney. Maybe a year later. Crown Street, Surry Hills. In fact, almost exactly the same situation—a fight, and driving when he shouldn’t’ve been, and doing stupid stuff, going too fast.
This one a few people saw—he remembers there was a couple walking along the street and when he came out of the spin he was right there, beside them, and they jumped back and grabbed on to each other. That was the worst part, seeing how close he’d come to actual damage, to hurting someone.
The cars spin circles over the bed. June—or is she still Junie?—listens. Their bare skins touch, under the sheet. This is before the children, when they sleep naked, when there is no one they might need to not be naked for in the middle of the night. They are at Airey’s Inlet, in a borrowed house. They have been at the wedding of some friends, on the beach.
Once Paul was hitchhiking, in New South Wales, and it was late, he’d mistimed things and ended up in a car in the dark with this guy, somewhere between Mullumbimby and Byron. He was even younger then—seventeen, maybe even sixteen—still at school, this was during the holidays. And the guy, the driver, who’d seemed okay at first, started to ask a few weird questions. How many girls have you slept with? Do you like blowjobs? And then Paul saw that the guy had his penis out. And Paul said, Stop here please. And the guy said, No, no, I’m not stopping. And Paul said, Please stop, I want to get out. And the guy said, Just show me yours, then I’ll stop. And Paul said, No thanks, just stop, I’m not interested in thi
s. And the guy stopped and let him out, and drove off, and left him, skinny kid on the roadside in the dark, middle of nowhere, full of relief.
He climbed a fence and slept in a paddock. He had his sleeping bag, and anyway it was summer, he hardly needed it. Woke up to a circle of staring cows.
Another time he was walking home from a party, very late. He was maybe fifteen. Eastern suburbs, off the main road, just houses, quiet area. And someone was standing under a tree. And Paul got a bad feeling. And then a second person stepped out of the shadows. He never got to see them properly. They were men, that’s all he knew, and they meant him harm.
He ran, jumped a fence, cut through someone’s yard, climbed another fence. Hid, for a long time, behind a shed.
And one time—so stupid!—Paul went swimming by himself, at Anglesea, off season, no surf patrol, nobody there, not one person on the beach or in the water. He was fourteen. He had a wetsuit his cousin had given him and he wanted to try it out. He got caught in a rip, did all the wrong things. He panicked, tried to fight his way back in, got really tired. Luckily the waves weren’t too big, that was probably what made the difference. He fought and fought, thinking, Shit, I’m going to die. And then he turned over on his back and floated for a few seconds, trying to catch his breath, and that was when he remembered what you’re supposed to do. And he let it take him out—so far out, it was scary. He thought about sharks.