by Rebellious Daughters- True stories from Australia's finest female writers (retail) (epub)
My crush then was a private-school boy I caught the bus with and had nearly gone out with in Year Ten, until he tried to kiss me and I wriggled away, terrified of my own inexperience. Brigitte and I got drunk at my house one Saturday, opening a bottle of cheap champagne with the shower running so no one would hear the cork pop. We rang my crush from a public phone; she spoke to him while I listened, too scared to speak, despite the champagne. They traded flirtatious insults for a while, Brigitte denying that I was giggling in the background, until he told her we should come over and give him and his friend blow jobs. We hung up and went home, laughing at what we decided must be a joke.
I have a full 200-page diary from this period in my life. It is an intricate, unbearably detailed catalogue of my crush, interspersed with an escalating record of my adventures in intoxication, including taking my pink drink bottle to school and drinking my dad’s cask Rose from it at lunchtime. My friends and I befriended an older guy who was repeating Year Twelve. Dennis sold marijuana and gifted us with samples; he invited us to his house for a party where he was planning to cook an oversupply of leaf into spaghetti bolognaise, but instead he introduced us to bucket bongs and vodka. I ended the night lying on his front lawn, vomiting under the stars, while Brigitte looked for me inside. Mum picked us up.
‘Has she taken drugs?’ she asked Brigitte, as I emptied my insides into a bucket between my knees.
‘No, Mrs Case,’ she said. ‘She just drank too much. She doesn’t drink, so it’s all gone to her head.’
The next morning, I woke with a hole in my memory. Mum asked me, again, if I’d taken drugs. I told her no, but admitted I’d been in a similar state the weekend before. She brought me a glass of water and the small television from our formal lounge room, which she set at the end of my bed. I asked her what my punishment would be.
‘I think your body has punished you more than I could,’ she said. ‘You’re old enough that I can’t stop you doing this if you really want to, though if you make it a habit we won’t be driving you to places where you’re going to drink. But do you want to feel like this?’
I didn’t, but I did want the delicious feeling of losing all my brain-circling concerns about how to act and what people thought of me. I wanted to feel my inhibitions dissolve.
Meantime, my crush had stopped catching the bus. I decided he might have died, as only a melodramatic teenage girl could, and started wearing a black armband made of opaque stockings to school. I’m sure I didn’t even half-believe he was dead; the pretence was likely an excuse to mourn his absence. Then I got drunk at Dennis’s birthday party and kissed my first boy (after I literally fell into his arms), in a relentlessly public display that meant we were the talk of the school on Monday. He was handsome and nice and I heard, improbably, that he liked me, I might have gone out with him if I could look him in the eye. But I couldn’t, and found myself walking away whenever he came near.
Mum likes to remind me that at this time I would tell her that it didn’t matter if I passed Year Twelve, because I could always repeat. ‘Everyone repeats,’ I apparently told her. But my diary, at the rare times it diverges from its main subject (the boys), tells a different story: ‘Did five hours of homework on Monday, six and a half hours last night. So far only two hours tonight, but the night is young yet!’ My parents found out I’d been skipping early morning lessons for months so I could catch the bus with my crush. As well as inevitably telling me off for skipping school, they told me I should realise that he wasn’t interested in me and let it go. I don’t know how they knew about my obsession, but I suppose if I was wearing black armbands and bursting into tears at bus-stops, and most of my conversation with my friends was about that topic, I probably wasn’t hiding it all that well. They repeated it over and over – He’s not interested, let it go – until I burst into tears. I didn’t stop for nearly an hour.
When I’d finally calmed down, Mum asked me if I’d seen a counsellor. I reported what she’d said to Brigitte, incredulous. Who sought help for boy problems?
‘Maybe she’s right,’ Brigitte said.
I lit a joint sitting in my open bedroom window, looking in the direction of my crush’s house across the farm and the distant main road that separated my suburb from his. Then I worried that Mum or Dad might come in and discover me, so I climbed into the closet, where I had to light it again and singed my eyelashes. I hoped no one would notice that my lashes were shorter on one eye than the other.
A week later, two months before my final exams, Mum read my diary and I was searched for drugs in the principal’s office, at my parents’ request. I had a joint in the pocket of my school uniform, but they only searched my bag.
I was furious that Mum had violated my privacy, but given what she’d read, there was nothing I could do. Mum said she was worried about me, that she couldn’t figure me out and was driven to read my diaries because I wouldn’t tell her what was going on. I was grounded until the end of exams, driven to and from school each day, banned from seeing my friends except Brigitte, who dropped me. With nothing else to do, I threw myself into studying for my exams and aced them, getting into university after all, although it wasn’t journalism course I’d wanted but teaching instead, like my parents.
My mother’s intervention diverted me from the path I’d been hurtling down. I was shocked out of my obsession with the boy and wrenched away from the friends she mistrusted. I scraped through my studies although it would still take years to fumble my way to what I wanted to do. Forced to remake myself, I did change. But though I’m like her in so many ways, I didn’t become my mother. I, too, have a compulsive need to prove myself ‘good’ (or ‘good enough’). But my measures are different from hers.
My mother seems soothed by the existence of rules and boundaries, letting them guide and contain her, and trying to teach her children to do the same. She’s always been able to disregard those who don’t respect authority as misguided. I’ve never met anyone so naturally resistant to peer pressure, or so it seems from the outside. I admire and envy this about her. Maybe she likes maths because if you learn and follow the rules, you’ll get the right result: there’s no ambiguity. I can see how comforting this would be. Unfortunately, it bores me stupid. Where’s the story in it?
I’ve spent much of my life trying to crack a different kind of code, one that’s maddeningly centred on ambiguity: other people. How they work, what they think, how I fit in and how I might do it better. My diaries were an early vehicle for that; these days I write memoir, or transfigure my experiences into fiction. I often wondered why I was driven to write my deepest secrets and private observations down, even though they could get me into trouble if discovered. The answer is simple: it was how I studied to be a teenager. In high school, I applied the lessons literally, and almost lost myself. Later, I learned to adapt them to fit who I was, what I loved, what I wanted in life.
I remained a nerd all along, after all. It was just that my chosen subject was nowhere to be found on the curriculum – and it wasn’t judged by my teachers, or my parents, but by a far more exacting audience: my peers.
THE PEACOCK HOUSE
NICOLA REDHOUSE
I was not at my mother’s divorce proceedings. Either of them. For the first, when she divorced my father, I was only nine months old. I was never told where they had married, and the photos of the wedding were packed away in boxes; but the building in Johannesburg, where my father had ended it by handing my mother a get – the official Jewish document to release her from matrimony – was something we passed every day on the way to school. I held on to its white stucco presence as tangible proof that my parents had once been united.
By the time my mother’s second divorce was underway, I was 18 and the white building and Johannesburg were fading relics of my migrant experience. I stayed well away from the year-long proceedings in which lawyers thrashed out the division of my mother and stepfather’s belongings. I left my older sister to the responsibility of supporting my mother
through it.
Memory does strange things when coupled with guilt, and I cannot recall what I was doing at that time, though I know I heard nothing about the legal proceedings, and I asked nothing. There was a long period, months, in which my mother would have gone into the city, to Sydney’s legal district, to sit through listening to solicitors parse the intimate and domestic detail of her second marriage.
Not taking interest in those proceedings was the way I could punish my mother. I wanted to reprove her for both her marriages. For the first, where she chose a man who decided, in the end, he preferred men, and so for giving me a father who – despite his attachment to us, and though he stayed present and loved us fiercely – would never live under the same roof as us. And for the second, where she chose a stand-in father for the rest of my childhood who I’d wish, night after night, had a softer heart and could love the three of us – my mother, my sister and me – more.
I have three memories that return to me often from the time in my life when my mother was approaching her second divorce. They form a triptych of a family in atrophy, of the slow and insidious effects of domestic violence.
In the first, I am sitting in my sister’s dimly lit bedroom with my mother, who is crying. My mother is still only in her early forties, young and striking, with her greengrey eyes, which the past five years have made darker, deeper set, and her thick, brown hair in a cropped cut. She’s always been slightly more daring in her choices of hairstyles than her contemporaries – once she even sported a bright blue rat’s tail. We are living in Sydney, our second move after the immigration. The first was to Perth, where my mother met my stepfather and married him. Sydney is better for my stepfather’s business. So my sister and I have had to change schools again, and we can no longer see every weekend my father and his partner, who had followed us to Perth from South Africa. Now we visit them four times a year during school holidays. There has been a lot of crying.
Back in my sister’s bedroom, my mother is ruminating over an argument she has just had with my stepfather about a picture in his study. It is a portrait of his late wife, and my mother has finally, after six years of marriage, asked him to take it down. Over these years I have heard many of their fights, which usually begin quite benignly – my mother has told my stepfather about a dining table she wants to buy, or he wants to go on a holiday with her but she is reluctant to leave her two young children. And I have listened as these small matters have grown barbs. The furniture, in particular, is an incendiary topic. The house that we live in, with its three levels of formal and casual dining, lounge rooms, bedrooms and chandeliers, is almost entirely furnished in the grand antiques that my stepfather and his late wife had chosen together. My sister and I are used to the average-sized houses of suburbia that my mother has rented since our arrival in Australia, with their damp spots and slightly worn carpets. This is like living in a pristine mausoleum, so my sister and I play nervously among the glossy oak chair legs and the silk tassels of Chinese tapestries, frightened of the ghost of the first wife.
Though the house is palatial and the walls sturdy double-brick, I have still, for years now, heard my stepfather rage at night, calling my mother brain-damaged, a half-wit, the doors slam and my mother cry. This night terror is deep inside me. During my high school years, I find it hard to sleep at friends’ houses or go away for school camps; I am never sure if home will be where I left it, or if the walls will have imploded. I have nightmares in which my mother, who is a diabetic, is dying. It is a strange death: she is standing on a street corner leaking sugar from a small hole in her hip, and I am watching it pool like blood at her feet. And there is nothing I can do. I have no way to stop it.
Like my mother in the dream, I was also leaking: my capacity for joy was draining from my body. I should have been going to movies, and sleeping in, and having fun drinking and smoking weed at the parties that my school friends were starting to throw on weekends. Not me. I was wound up tight as a spring – waiting for catastrophe, feeling frozen at the parties, often with a stomach ache, agitated to get home where I was sure my presence would diffuse the fighting.
I thought that, if my mother could see this, if she could see how much I was suffering, how anxious this life made me, she would summon the courage to leave my stepfather. I bore down into myself and mustered a force of excess that was designed to get her to notice me. I started smoking. I stopped eating. I swam laps of our swimming pool like a shark. I became thin and strong of mind. I studied harder than anyone could study, forcing my mind and body to sit for hours and read and produce essays, acing my Year Twelve final exams.
My mother saw what I was doing; she was proud of me for my academic achievements, and concerned about my disappearing frame. But she could not leave her husband; not yet – she believed she had nowhere to go. We had no family in Australia, and in those years her world had shrunk to the friends she had made together with my stepfather.
I began to try to leave her, instead. I got my first real boyfriend, and stayed out too late with him, coming home one night long after my curfew without a key and leaving my handbag on the front step for my mother to find in the morning, a foreboding of a daughter snatched away in the night, while I slept in the car around the corner with him, safe and sound. By the end of that year, even though I was only 17 and still found it hard to go away even on school camp, I tried to live in France for a year. As the plane came in to land over Paris I realised what a huge mistake I had made: I was now too far from my mother to save her, or for her to save me. It was a particularly cold European winter, and the Eiffel Tower presented itself like an omen, shrouded in fog that would not lift. I couldn’t eat and went into a black hole of panic, which I only emerged from six weeks later when my mother flew out to take me back home.
On our way back to Australia, we spent a week in London, staying in a hotel in Belsize Park, where she fattened me up on Pret a Manger sandwiches, buying me coats and shoes, and taking me, like a child, to all the great sights: the Tate, Harrods, Piccadilly Circus.
The second memory is this: I am home from my failed trip to France and I have climbed back into the house from my secret roof-top spot beyond the ledge of my bedroom window, where I have stubbed out a cigarette and doused it in water. I am about to make my way to the bathroom to wash away the smell when my mother comes into my room and tells me she is leaving. The marriage is over. The violence of language has turned physical at last, as I have feared, and she tells me he struck her. She is so distressed that she doesn’t even notice the lighter in my hand or the fug of smoke around me.
My third memory is set in the days that followed my mother’s decision to end her marriage. She and my stepfather have been due to move into a new house that they have bought. This house is much smaller, as they are expecting my sister and me to leave home in the coming years. But now that the marriage has imploded, my mother’s lawyer has advised her to move into the new house immediately; to take occupancy, which will stand her in better stead for receiving the house in a settlement. My sister and I are packing her belongings into her car: her books – Primo Levi and Isabelle Allende, all the classics and the bad crime novels and the cache of Agatha Christies she got me hooked on; her many boots; the luxurious cream coat she bought in Switzerland, which I always wanted to borrow; her toiletries (the honeysuckle peach of her Christian Dior perfume now the scent of panicked endings). We are all driving away from my childhood house and for the last time I glimpse the ostentatious leadlight peacock that adorns the window at its front. I don’t know this yet, but two years will pass before I see my stepfather again, two years in which he never tries to contact me, the child whom he has spent the past decade introducing to people as his daughter.
For ten years after that rushed departure, the peacock house of my childhood found its way into my unconscious, appearing as the background to my nightmares. I dreamt of wild bears breaking down the windows of my pretty bedroom with its cotton-candy drapery, and of the garden, though it appeared a
s an untamed savannah in which a lion was stalking me. Later, when I was pregnant with my first child, I dreamt that my dog was drowning in the peacock house’s pool, the aloof agapanthus and beastly staghorns that grew at its edges framing the scene of horror.
I saw my stepfather again only once after the marriage ended. He happened to be at a party that I went to in my early twenties. I saw him across the room and felt I had seen a dead person. I had made myself consider him dead, I suppose, to alleviate the hurt of knowing that he had never tried to contact me, despite being in my life through most of my childhood. I dropped my champagne glass to the floor and ran to a bedroom, where I sat, shaking, feeling a mix of grief and rage, both at my mother and him. I hated my mother for having brought him into my life at such a young age – an age when I was bound to grow attached to him. I thought of the intimacy he and I had once shared, his hand guiding me through the waltz at a school dance, his voice cheering me at my netball games. I remembered him beside me in the car, driving me to my first day of primary school, and in the audience at my high school graduation. Now this man, who had been so connected to me, seemed like a stranger. I grieved for our lost intimacy but also raged at the memory of his punitive control: the time he’d ordered me to write down and date my phone calls in a blue ledger he placed beside the antique scales that sat in our cavernous entrance hall, because he’d felt the phone bill was too high. The time he’d wanted us to learn defiance and forced my sister and me to march to the end of a rickety jetty in Western Australia, past the sign that said ‘Enter at your own risk’ while I got dizzy and my sister, terrified of deep water, cried. The time he drove even faster down a highway because my mother had asked him to slow down.