by Biff Ward
Yeah. Yeah, we could, Mark said, casting his mind over Saturday morning lists.
We swung off the end of the Harbour Bridge to follow the curves towards Mosman. I remember these roads, I said, every turn. I could do it in my sleep.
You never forget, nodded Mark. It’s that childhood world.
We reached Avenue Rd, turned up the hill where Dad piggybacked Mum home in her sexy gown, over Raglan St and down to the top end of Clanalpine St. Mark stopped the car.
It’s so much smaller! we chimed.
We cruised down and parked across the road from our house and tumbled out, all eager. Then we stopped. Dorothy’s house next door, the tiny wooden cottage overhung by giant plane trees, was gone, replaced by an apricot, cement-rendered palazzo with not a leaf in sight. Shaking our heads, we turned to the semidetached home that was once our whole world. The downstairs cellar where Mum vomited up the rat poison has become a room with glass doors and a window at the front. The upstairs balcony where Mark slept has become an open verandah, balustraded in Queenslander-style railings. The 1940s uniform of cream on red brick and tile is quite banished by gleaming pale grey paint. We drifted across the road and stood at the fence, blurting little sounds, stray words floating around us.
A woman appeared up on the balcony.
Can I help you? she called.
We used to live here, we answered. We’re just looking.
Oh, how nice. Do come in.
Are you sure? We were holding back from rushing the gate.
Yes, really. Please.
We stumbled onto hallowed ground. Up the side of the house, both of us twitched our hands to where the cellar door used to be. It was bricked in. No one would know. I could feel the slide of the bolt in my fingers and thumb.
She ushered us into the unexpected: the house was empty. They had just bought the place and carpets and furniture were yet to come. We walked the length of the line of small rooms through the sharp smell of fresh paint, stark white paint. The sun poured in through curtain-less windows onto those white walls. The house had become a ship of light.
The woman was all smiles and interest. We talked dates and pointed to where the cement tubs and copper used to take up a wall of the kitchen. We chatted with her and at the same time gave each other little signs and nudges, creating moments of solitude by moving on with the kind woman and leaving the other behind. I wanted to stay there all day with Mark, I wanted to sit with him in the backyard and walk those rooms again and again. But after fifteen minutes, all the niceties were exhausted and we left, our footsteps slowing once we were out of sight.
Starting in my twenties, I had dreams about that house. Not nightmares exactly, just unhappy, anxious dreams. I was alone and scared, or I was alone and unsure if someone was coming towards me, or I was alone when a ghost-like presence passed through a door—but always there was darkness, a brooding, cold, daytime darkness that had me waking in muted horror. I didn’t have the dreams often, just a couple of times a year, enough to let me know that they were here to stay.
And stay they did, until that visit to those white rooms. Over the next year or two they were washed away by that luminous Saturday morning light.
Mum, it turned out, had words of her own. Not that I could raise anything directly with her but when she was at my place one day I told her I was interested in her stories, any stories, from when she was young.
I don’t want to talk of the past, she said. Those things you remember, they’re special. Moments you don’t want to share. They’re just for you alone.
Well . . . whatever you . . .
Like, she said, on a gush of air, after I saw that film of the Russian Revolution, I suddenly remembered this incident from when I was two or three. It came back to me as though I was there. Everything. I could feel the temperature, the smells of spring and the silky touch of my mother’s dress. It was a greeny-blue dress.
I was leaning on the porch rail. She had been about to prune something, but first her story. Nothing would have stopped her.
I remember, she said, we were standing at the end of the upstairs balcony, just my mother and I. I had her to myself—that hardly ever happened—but for some reason it did this morning. We were looking out from the house, over the horse paddock. And I heard Father’s steps, walking up behind us over the boards. He said, ‘A terrible thing has happened. It’s in the papers. They’ve killed the Russian royal family. All of them, even the children.’
Mother was horrified. She rushed inside with Father. I followed them and found her sitting on a chair in her bedroom, moaning and saying, ‘Oh, the poor children, the poor dear children.’
Wow, I breathed, what an amazing story.
She went on as though I hadn’t spoken.
I had no idea what had happened or who the children were or why Mother was upset. Later I asked my father what it was about. When he told me, I asked, ‘Where’s Russia?’
‘Over there,’ he said, and gestured in the direction of the horse paddock, ‘over there. A long way away.’
The horse paddock was the end of the world I knew, so for years and years I thought Russia was over there, beyond our fence, in the countryside where we never went because the road to town headed in the other direction. I can remember the feeling, that just over there, out of sight beyond the horse paddock, was Russia where people killed children, especially poor dear royal children.
She was laughing uproariously by then, but still nothing was going to stop the surge of her telling.
It seemed as though my mother and father cared more deeply about this than about other things I ever heard mentioned. Except that after a few days they didn’t speak of it any more. They’d been horrified, and then there was nothing. So I thought I was the only one who remembered.
She told this story of the killing of the Romanovs with an energy that belied the context in which she placed it: that she didn’t wish to tell me her childhood memories. Yet she clearly delighted in having an audience for this extraordinary story that had, with the passage of time, acquired comic elements as well.
After she’d gone, it occurred to me that the assassination of the Romanovs must have been, for people of her parents’ class, a before and after event, a where-were-you-when-you-heard moment.
The deeper resonances of her story eluded me for days and then arrived in my consciousness one morning as I prepared breakfast. Here I was, trying obliquely to explore the silence around the event of Alison’s death that occurred in 1941 when she was twenty-five by asking her to tell me about her life in the 1920s. She responded with a story from 1917 which was particularly focused on the killing of some children.
The pondering took my mind back to Sydney, imagining her Sydney of the early ’40s and suddenly I thought of the ferries, those green beetles scuttling across the water. The engines made a chugging sound that was echoed in a reassuring vibration under our feet. Inside there was the sweet rich smell of hot oil and outside the sting of sea-salt chipping at our toes or even spray wetting our faces.
The first journey of my life, being brought home from hospital, was down through the city in a tram and up the harbour by ferry to Woolwich. Alison would have made the same journey when she arrived twenty months earlier. That warm, oily shudder and swish of the sea is something we must have shared.
It was the only real story I ever got from her. Taking her ‘for a drive’ or ‘for a picnic’ was a way of being with her that was easier than having her slashing my garden or being in her wretched little room. We trawled through cemeteries and parked outside grand old homes that were now function centres while she explained which Ind or Hooper or Lilleycrap had lived there and when they’d had to give it up.
Once when we went to Victor Harbor for her birthday treat, she pointed to a house and said, That’s where we stayed, every summer.
There? Really?
Yes. And there, she pointed to another house a few doors down. That’s where the Wards stayed.
Truly? You were here together? As kids?
This was beyond my imaginarium.
We’d be on the beach, she answered. We were about twelve.
I didn’t know you knew each other back then!
Oh, yes. Our parents weren’t close friends, but we knew them. Of course we did, she finished, as though it were self-evident.
I wondered if their attraction started on that beach. Or was it at a party or dance when they were nineteen, twenty, all dressed up and no sand between their toes?
Mum’s delusions often had an element of the romantic in them but I was finely attuned to calibrating the true from the untrue and there was something about this memory, the way it popped out au naturel and was not embellished with grandiosity, that gave it the ring of authenticity. For me, it has become fact: they knew each other from the age of twelve or so.
We drove round Encounter Bay and Middleton and had afternoon tea in a café where we ate apple pie, her favourite.
She nodded off as I drove home. The sun was slanting between clouds as it dropped to the west and a golden haze filled the front seats. I looked over to her and the words ‘I love you’ coursed through my mind. There was a slow, even pace to my driving. She stayed asleep and I kept smiling across at her, a peace in me I had never thought to reach.
FOURTEEN
The Desk
In Dad’s final years his body fell apart. He’d had a triple by-pass that was wearing out and a bout of bowel cancer. A stroke had left him with slurred speech and a hair-trigger tendency to cry, which has a technical term: latent emotionalism. For Dad it meant sobbing uncontrollably when he even laid eyes on one of his five children or any time he heard JR, devoted companion of his final years, arriving home. He cried watching Keating win the 1993 election.
He also had emphysema from his smoking days and osteoporosis which had caused three vertebrae to crunch in on themselves like brittle toffee. He was bent forward almost at right angles from the mid-rib point. It was extremely painful, so he spent his days in a chair full of cushions to soften the impact of any firm surface. Increasingly, they shifted from his house in Beardy St to JR’s Queenslander in Texas, a dot of a town halfway between Goondiwindi and the coast. With JR plumping his pillows and keeping his newspapers coming each morning—The Australian and The Sydney Morning Herald—he could sit on the verandah and look south to the ranges.
JR was nurse and carer as well as lover and she managed several crises in which he ended up in the small bush hospital on the edge of town. One time when he was seventy-eight, Mark, who was there in Texas, rang me at eight to tell me Dad was expected to die that night.
Go and be with him, I said. Stay with him. Don’t let him die alone.
He waited until JR and Dad’s sister Claire had gone to bed and then he walked down to the hospital.
He rang me at dawn. He didn’t die! He said. We’ve just been talking.
It took me nearly all day by plane to Brisbane, then a bus and a friend’s car, to get to his bedside in Texas. He looked up, his face alight, and tried to hold out his arms. I leaned in and laid my cheek against his. His voice was deeply croaky. I thought I was going to die, he said. I really thought I was.
Yes, I nodded. We all did.
But every time I opened my eyes, Marko was there. I just felt I couldn’t—not with him there.
When we arrived the next morning, there was much kissing and hugging before he reached for the papers, while we arranged fruit and flowers. There’s not one, he crowed breathily, not two, stabbing at the paper, but three stories on the front page about the Libs being stuffed!
It was the period of Hewson and Fightback hoop-la and he was revelling in the chaos.
Yes, we laughed.
I’ve waited all my life for this! he breathed. He held his ribs against the pain as he chuckled.
After a week of cheering him along, I went home and we reverted to phone calls on Sundays. We would traverse the latest on his health, the politics of the day and family doings. His voice by then was perpetually slurred, and warm, always warm in its tone.
My news at that time consisted of detailed accounts of high drama in the life of a close friend of mine. Her son, a young man, had had several periods in a psychiatric ward and was diagnosed with schizophrenia. As a result of helping her, I found myself talking more and more about my mother. I started attending meetings of the Schizophrenia Fellowship where I undertook speaking training with Anne Deveson and began giving talks on what it was like growing up with my mother’s illness.
I didn’t consciously decide, I just found that I was being open and loquacious with Dad about what I was experiencing, especially with the young man, my friend’s son. I did not protect Dad with euphemisms about events that I found hard to describe and he might find hard to hear. I never spoke of Mum or the connections I was making there, but I was relentless in giving him descriptions of the terror and despair, as well as resilience and love, in my friend’s family.
Suddenly, one day, he cut across what I was saying and asked, Do you think Mum had schizophrenia?
I answered instantly and definitively, Yes, I do.
I see, he said, I see.
There was a long long silence down the wire from Texas to me in Adelaide. And then he cried a little.
I understood that part of what we had exchanged was the fact that any expertise and confidence about mental illness was now in my hands rather than his. In asking his question, he had broken our taboo on the subject. He sounded both sad to hear my answer and relieved to hear my certainty. Even so, I was flooded with reactions. There was the possibility that he really hadn’t been sure for all these fifty or sixty years, in spite of what doctors told him, in spite of his own knowledge. I wondered if my insistence on describing the turmoil of schizophrenia had been unfair, only to understand a second later that it was this very persistence that had got us to this moment, this juncture at the heart of our own family story. I would not have thought of him as a troubled soul, but in that moment, in that question, I knew that the pain of Mum’s illness had never left him.
Barb, Dad’s second wife, told me that Dad was quite clear that Mum had schizophrenia. She’s mad, he told her, in his pejorative way. So Barb was amazed that Dad asked me that question. He had no doubt, she said.
But I think it was not the surface question that he was asking. I think he was responding to my openness, these new words I was using, and he broke our code of silence to do it. He asked me that question because I had walked back into the schizophrenia maelstrom—but in a different age where it was (slightly) easier to talk about. We continued that day to refer to Mum and her illness in soft sentences that curled gently around each other. We were sparing with our words because too many would be overwhelming. We had no experience of profligacy here, we were tiptoeing.
It was so hard for you, I murmured. Awful.
Yes. For all of us.
You did a great job as our father with all that happening. His breathing was rattly.
In educating myself about schizophrenia I had learnt that he had been unusual in two ways—firstly, in keeping us with him when Mum was in hospital rather than sending us to distant relatives and, secondly, in keeping our house open and welcoming, in not shutting down, in not retreating into a private world.
We were so lucky to have you.
We were both crying. Then eventually, he said, It’s good what you’re doing now. Speaking about it, helping your friend.
When we hung up, my skull was gliding its plates into new alignments as our code-breaking exchange found its home in my body.
A few months later, Sunday again, me blurting the latest I’d witnessed of mental illness, he interrupted again.
His voice all croaky, he said, I’m sorry for all the terribleness you had with Mum.
Terribleness. What a strange word: so childlike. Yet it clumsily acknowledged the horrors that had occurred and the silence that shrouded them. I was standing on the second-hand stripey carpet in my study looking out through the lush lemon tree
.
Eventually, I said, Thank you. That really makes a difference.
We snuffled together with sighs and odd words. For me, at that time, it was enough. Fifty-two years old, a gift of solace to the girl in my soul.
In 1994, a year before he died, I had a whole week with him, just the two of us in the big sunroom which had been draped across the back of the Armidale house in Barb’s time. His desk that I remembered as so neat was a riot of dust and disorder. There were still five or six dictionaries on the shelf but they had slid sideways and nudged into a cascade of letters, cards, bills, children’s texta pictures, yellowed newspaper cuttings, photos of school carnivals, biros that didn’t work, opened packets of Quick-Eze and odd, broken objects reminiscent of the leavings from a garage sale. His own books had multiplied into so many editions and paperback offspring that the whole collection had long ago moved off the desk and now took up three planks of a bookshelf.
I helped him with doctors’ appointments and various errands, but for him the rhythm of his days, safely ensconced in his padded armchair, was the papers in the morning and the crosswords for the afternoon. He couldn’t keep up with the crosswords so he would tear out the page, fold it carefully and add it to the huge whispering sheaf already on his clipboard, an old man’s folly, a bit of a joke but also a game, a pleasure, some leisure at last.
One afternoon, he looked across to where I was reading and said, I always thought life was about doing more, that I had to hang on. But now I realise it’s really about knowing how to let go.
Is there something you’re hanging on to now? I asked.
He started rambling about his work and I saw that the real issue was the book he hadn’t finished. He might be spending his time on his sheaf of puzzles and talking politics with me, but the unfinished book hung over him like a succubus, siphoning off his joy.
On the third day of talking about it, he said, I want it finished but I can’t do it.
There was something in the intonation, a slight emphasis on the ‘I’ rather than the ‘can’t’ that gave me the clue.