by Biff Ward
A year after the leg, she really unravelled physically. I had moved from Adelaide back to Canberra, the country I called home. I’d established a bolthole in a friend’s house in Adelaide and continued to work there, travelling back and forth often. There was a crisis—a slight stroke perhaps, some confusion and not eating much. Her landlord got her to hospital. Mark flew over to Adelaide and when I arrived, I found him beside her bed, the smell of antiseptic sharp in the air.
Oh, blessed day, I thought, someone else will be caring for her.
My euphoria lasted a few seconds.
They’ve taken her gloves, Mark whispered. She’s really upset.
Oh, God, I muttered.
I pictured them tugging at the white interlock and tutting at what they found underneath.
This is going to be a nightmare, I hissed.
She wants her razorblades, too.
Oh, no.
Nurses and doctors and social workers peeked round the corner and crooked their finger to invite whispered conversations in the corridor.
How come she hasn’t seen a doctor in over thirty-five years? they asked. It’s unheard of.
They were alternately incredulous and scathing.
She doesn’t like doctors, we said.
Without any consultation, we had marshalled a protective stance.
What are the razorblades for? Why does she want to wear gloves all the time? They went on and on with their questions. The secrets she held in her body were being exposed. There was nowhere to hide, except in our obfuscating answers.
Back beside her bed, Mum dozing, I raged to Mark through tight lips, I feel so pressured, so embattled. These people’s questions—it’s too much. I can’t bear it.
Oh, well . . . Mark made little comforting noises.
I can’t stand how she is, I ground out. I just hate it.
Watching her drowsing face, Mark said, I was just thinking how cute and gentle she is.
Laughter snorted out of our mouths and noses. As we tried to stuff it back down, I said, Well, the truth must lie somewhere in between. Or else it’s all true.
We held hands and wiped a few tears because both were indeed true, hating how she was and loving her all these tired years.
Later my sweet Hannah came. I was in the corridor, caught on the way back from the toilet, a new nurse asking me questions in a stagey whisper. Shaking with the effort to contain myself, I took Hannah’s hand and turned away, back to Mum’s bed.
Five minutes later, Mark and Hannah stood in front of me, side by side. You’ve done enough, they said. You don’t need to be here. We’ll stay.
What? Really?
Yes, go home, they said. Go.
They were probably glad to be rid of my trembles. Walking through the grounds of the hospital towards Goodwood Rd I wanted to dance. Back at my Adelaide home, my friends were bidding at an auction for the house next door. I grinned at everyone, I glowed.
But later still, round at my old house, now Hannah’s place, there was a new shock waiting. We were complaining, Mark and I, about the hospital staff and their attitude to her gloves, the pushiness, the disbelief. We couldn’t, we wouldn’t explain to them because the words—razorblades, obsession, flesh, gouging, blood—were too taboo to use with these bustling strangers. We were moaning at her desperation to get new razorblades, at how she was asking us to do this for her.
Mirabel, Mark’s wife, and Hannah stopped their tea-making, their movement, to turn and stare at us.
Her hands . . . we trailed off.
But it’s just a rash, they trilled. What’s the big deal?
Mark was still stumbling a reply when I realised what had happened. What she did to her hands, had been doing for forty years, was so unimaginable that neither of us had ever put it into words. Neither of us had described it to anyone, not even those closest to us, not ever. Way back when they first asked, we used the code: ‘She says she’s got a rash’ which meant ‘It’s actually something else that’s going on here’. We assumed, in that unconscious way one does, that those closest to us imbibed the code of pain we carried because they loved us and that they, too, knew what was really happening, that they knew what we had lived with. But of course what they understood was what we said: she had a rash.
The code was the same one we used for the drowning of Alison: ‘She says she fainted’. It’s true she said it but it’s not what happened. Just as it was true she said she had a rash on her hands but it’s not what was hidden by her gloves.
When she left hospital, it was to go into supported accommodation, a huge church-backed hostel for the elderly poor, so Mark and I went to her room in the boarding house. I packed her clothes and gathered knick-knacks from the little table. We threw away packets of razorblades.
I said to Mark, I can’t bear to think what we might find when we look further.
I know, he nodded. He nodded some more, looking hard at the bed and the cupboard, willing himself to a decision. I’ll do it. I’ll move the furniture.
When he came back that evening, I took his arm. How was it? I asked.
Not too bad, he said. Well, pretty awful actually.
What?
Down beside the bed, he said, against the wall. Lots of tissues with blood on. Razorblades. Rusty tweezers with blood.
Oh, God . . .
We stood together, a sombre huddle in the daffodil kitchen. We tried to believe that this was the end of it.
It wasn’t quite. She lived another two years and managed to smuggle gouging equipment up to her room and still always wore her gloves. She was arguably the most eccentric in that large gathering of oldies.
A few years before, Mark took photos of her on the empty beach at Glenelg and carried them back to his studio in Sydney. He painted a portrait based on how she looked that day. It’s a good-sized oil painting: a little old woman alone on a beach, handbag clutched at her side as those who have spent time in institutions do. She’s all in tones of brown clothing and dark eyes that hold you down. He’s captured how she was in the end—the slight body, the steely certainties, the wraith come into her power, radiating the energy of a survivor. Her isolation is complete as she stands sturdy at the centre of a vast landscape of sand and sea and sky and breakwater.
Mark Ward, Portrait of My Mother, 1992, oil on canvas, 102 × 77 cm
It’s a love portrait, this last one. My brother to his mother.
I’ve often wondered how it happened that a woman who had no public life, a homemaker of the 1940s and ’50s who endured a major mental illness, is survived by three portraits. Admittedly, two of them are by her son. So I went back to the Paddy Taylor portrait: the beautiful, enigmatic young woman of the ’40s.
I wonder what drew Paddy Taylor to paint it. I wonder if he painted other people in their circle of artists, teachers and journalists or if there was something particular that drew him to paint my mother. Was she fey to him as well? Was he in love with her too? Did he paint her because some notoriety was attached to her after the inquiry? Did he even know about the inquiry? Did Dad ask him to paint it as a way of capturing the happy years, which even then he could feel slipping away? Did they pay for it or was it a gift?
She died in her sleep when she was eighty-three. They looked for her when she didn’t come down to breakfast. Picturing her asleep, I thought of her daytime naps, how she always slept on her side with her hands clasped by her face. But perhaps I was romanticising, perhaps a heart attack in your sleep throws you about, jerks you into an unnatural shape. By the time we arrived, the bed was made and there was a red rose on the slope of her pillow.
We spent several days planning and arranging, as you do. Family arrived and cups of tea were consumed. On Sunday afternoon, the day before the funeral, I burst from the house.
I have to go, I said, pulling on walking shoes.
I stumped all afternoon through those suburbs just to the south of the city of Adelaide—Wayville, Goodwood, Hyde Park—weeping as I walked. I stopped in small parks
to sit and sob. Spears of grief were shafting into my belly, taking me on a roller-coaster of emotion that blindsided me. I was glad she was dead, glad it was over, relieved that there would be no more crises, no more embarrassments, no more anguish. So where had this come from?
Finally, about five o’clock, it came to me. I had cradled a tiny buried childhood self, a kewpie doll three centimetres long, curled out of sight, hoping always, all my life, for just one real conversation with my mother, just one day of my life when she was actually There.
I had a last long sob, tucked away under a native frangipani in the corner of a park where toddlers were playing.
We had bought a cardboard coffin for her two years earlier because it had to be ordered from interstate and took three weeks to come, so you couldn’t do it at the last moment. Mark and Hannah assembled it on Hannah’s outdoor table and painted it with lilies. In 1998, the White Ladies had never seen such a thing, so there were meetings with the Health Department and compromises made. But when Mark and I and our children gathered, they brought out the coffin with its long green-stemmed lilies and she lay in it, resplendent in the bright red dress Mark had given her that she never wore. Her hands were covered by the folds of her dress. Neither they nor the gloves were on display now.
Her sister Lib, two of her nephews and several of her cousins came to the funeral, as well as the owner of the boarding house where she’d lived for twenty years. There were a couple of women who had known her in her last years and four of my friends.
Mark spoke of her gentleness and Brendan, his second son, played on his Zimbabwean thumb-piano. Genna spoke tentatively of mental illness. One of Mum’s nephews performed a rousing prayer.
I said that she belonged in Adelaide: it was her blood’s country. I told them that wherever I took her in my car, she pointed to houses that she’d visited when she was young and recounted family histories of people I had never heard of—the events of her life before she left Adelaide aged twenty-four.
The last time I took her on a picnic, I said, we stopped on the cliffs at Noarlunga on the way home, looking out over St Vincents Gulf. She started to describe boats, the wool clippers that plied up and down there in the ’20s and ’30s. Her eyes lit up as though she could see them still, and she pointed and gestured to where they came in groups, dozens of white sails flying north.
I picture her, I finished, her soul at least, floating out there above the Gulf, looking down over Adelaide. It’s her rightful place.
We played ‘Begin the Beguine’ and ended with ‘The Blue Danube’ to summon the young woman, the beauty she had been, who had danced at establishment balls and parties through the 1930s, who had captivated my father.
At the cup of tea afterwards I noticed that her cousins, a group of women in their eighties, were all tall and slim, each dressed in a version of the standard navy Chanel suit with discreet white trim. The money that sustained everyone in that family, except my mother, had done its job. These women were well-preserved.
Isobel, Mum’s favourite, came over to me and said, What do all these young people do again?
I looked at them, my three and Mark’s two, Brendan with his dreadlocks and Hannah in her leopard-skin top, and doing a quick tabulation that stretched the truth only slightly, I said, four of them are artists and the other one’s a psychologist.
The slightest ripple ran downward from her shoulders so I knew she had shuddered. Oh, she said faintly, oh, I see. For Margaret to have produced five grandchildren like these was quite beyond her.
After they’d all gone, we, her children and grandchildren, went to a café in Glenelg, the geography of her final thirty years, and had a raucous lunch. Later we walked on the breakwater and decided we would scatter her ashes there.
That evening, I boarded a small plane to fly to Port Augusta for work the next day. As the plane headed out over Henley Beach and rose above the Gulf where I had pictured her spirit, I swear I saw her face outside the window. She looked in at me, a small smile gentling her features but still, as always, she was ineluctably other, herself alone.
Epilogue: The Grave
Her ashes. Mark and I flew to Adelaide. With my daughter Hannah, the only one of us still living there, we returned to Glenelg, to the same café for another lunch. Afterwards, Mark climbed across the giant cubes of stone to the end of the breakwater and threw most of her ashes into the Gulf, into the slipstream of her windjammers. Hannah took a photo of his silhouette, Akubra in one hand, can of ashes in the other, his arms raised wide in salute, the Gulf waters glittering beyond.
The leftover ashes we divided into three small jars. One went to Balmoral that same day, where the house and garden were being transmogrified into a retirement village by my cousin. The stage of construction meant we could put that little capsule deep inside the original foundations, among stones laid by her great-grandfather. The jar with its ashes was sealed in there the next day.
The second lot we launched on bark sheets into the Torrens beside her childhood playground, the orchard now a suburban hillside.
The third jar went to Sydney. Next time I was there, Mark and I went to Woolwich Point and Mosman and took small scoops of dirt from each of the gardens of their first two homes, the homes where Dad believed, at least some of the time, that this marriage might turn out all right.
Alison’s grave, North Ryde, Sydney
Then we took the three offerings, her ashes and the two lots of soil, to Alison’s grave, our rectangle of buffalo grass at North Ryde. We mingled them together, Dad and Mum with Alison.
Acknowledgements
I am deeply indebted to those who shared memories of my parents with me. First among these was Jean Yule, my late aunt, who fielded my every question with intense concentration and engagement. Others who told me what they could remember are Libbie and Erica Nelson, Ken Macnab, Ian MacDougall, Bid Williams, Jack Caldwell, John Ryan, George Pittendrigh, Christopher Ind and Lyndall Young—I thank them most sincerely.
The staff of the sepulchral Manuscripts Room at the National Library of Australia were unfailingly patient and helpful with my queries. The Centre for Historical Research at the National Museum of Australia provided me with a sublime writing environment. The Writers' House, Varuna, in Katoomba, supported me with a fellowship, writing companions and an ongoing involvement. I thank these institutions and their wonderful staff members.
For reading various drafts and providing useful insights and comments, my gratitude to Robyn Cadwallader, Jenni Savigny, Jenn Shapcott, Jessica Aan, Jacqui Price, Jan Cornall, Rosemary Luke, Mag Merrilees, Barb Holloway, Adrian Caesar, Genna Ward, Hannah Allert and Francesca Rendle-Short. For reading drafts and also for always and ever being available to listen to my ups and downs, I thank Sue Burgoyne and Di Lucas.
My family—fifteen of them—read an early draft and all gave their approval for me to continue. I am blessed by their generosity.
I am grateful to those who provided emotional and practical support—my Encouragers—Mary Fraser, Peter Stanley, Charlie Ward, Jane Yule, Mirabel Fitzgerald, Trish Fairley, Helen Barnes-Bulley, Gilliant Hunt, my Interplay friends, Glenda Cloughley and my grandson, Tully Bond.
My team at Allen & Unwin—Sarah Baker, Sue Hines and Richard Walsh—have been unfailingly supportive, respectful, thorough and professional: a complete delight to work with.
Lastly, my deep and lifelong gratitude for my brother, Mark Ward. He travelled with me through the heart of this book and offered me complete support and appreciation for what I was doing all along the journey.
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