by Rod Jones
After the argument about the novel, David went quiet. He went off by himself. That night, he took from her handbag his brown cylindrical bottle of Amytal with its label from the United Friendly Societies Dispensary and swallowed all the tablets. He disappeared and hid under a blanket on the back seat of Molly’s EH Holden in the dark. It was Molly who found him. She pulled the blanket away. David didn’t move. He might have just been asleep but he felt cold to her touch. Overcome with dread, she managed to bring him around and drive him to a doctor in Cowes.
They cut short the holiday and returned home the next day.
‘He’s very fragile,’ Molly told Olive on the phone. But Molly was fragile, too.
School resumed, but David did not attend. For six weeks, he hardly left the house. He watched television twelve hours a day, in the living room with the blinds drawn. When Molly protested, he told her that he found it comforting to hear the mawkish theme music come on before the midday movie, that he didn’t want to think, or see anyone. He fired his toy gun into the phone when his English teacher called to ask about his absence, and began to smoke Fiestas and to drink brandy and dry ginger. Molly looked on, powerless. Something dark crossed her mind: she had lost her husband and her mother and now she was losing her son.
He stayed home from school. He smoked his Fiestas. He fired his toy gun into the phone.
When David came out of his retreat and went back to school, he was a different person. Girls. Parties. Beer. These were his priorities now. He was not so different from other boys, after all, thought Molly, reassured.
David was more sociable but he was also more combative. His politics veered sharply to the left. Molly tried to talk him out of going to the first big Vietnam moratorium, but he went anyway. That night she watched it on the news, 100,000 people bringing the city to a standstill.
David seemed to have contempt for anyone who didn’t share his views. He was argumentative, challenging everything she said. ‘Anyway, what would you know?’ he asked her. ‘You’re uneducated. You never finished school. You don’t read.’
His behaviour frightened Molly. It was as though there were two Davids now. A quivering anger affected his face, his speech, his gestures. The little boy who had been ‘highly strung’ now began to exhibit volcanic eruptions of feeling, when he lost his self-control entirely. Was there a crack in him, a faultline in his psychic structure? Rage burned in the soul of her son, driving him towards a destiny which his mother felt could only be tragic.
After the night David had swallowed the bottle of Amytal at Cowes, Molly had tried to avoid arguments. But, without Percy, she felt she had to try to be firm with David. Sometimes she put on an act, but she couldn’t make it last. David simply ignored her, or worse, flew into another rage. When he abused her, she took it all with a kind of pained smile. ‘I’m deaf in one ear and can’t hear out the other,’ Molly told him.
Then she went to the kitchen and took a couple of Vincent’s Powders.
Molly had protected David through his childhood, hidden him away from the enemies who prowled the streets in cars searching for him, kept him safe from bullies at school, taught him to dress well and encouraged him always to be at the top of his class. But now, Molly felt defeated.
One day, soon after he turned seventeen, Molly asked David to sit down in the living room with her. She had something important to tell him. She had been getting her courage up for this all day. Even now she had made her decision, she found it difficult to speak. Finally, she blurted it out. ‘I didn’t want to tell you. But you have a right to know.’
In this way, David found out he was adopted.
There no longer seemed to be any rules.
‘You going out again tonight?’ Molly asked.
‘Yes.’
‘But it’s a school night.’
‘We’re going to the library at Melbourne Uni to study, Mum.’
Molly knew that from the university they went to the Mayfair Hotel in Elizabeth Street, even though David was under age.
‘You going with Jack?’
‘Probably.’ (She knew that meant: yes, certainly.)
Still at school, but a year older than David, Jack already had his licence. David said Jack had a girlfriend, Kiki. Artistic. Short hair. Trouble. She dumped him regularly, got drunk, cut up her face, so he said.
David borrowed Jack’s records. Bob Dylan. Jimi Hendrix. John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers. The sound of Eric Clapton’s wailing guitar came from David’s room. Once Molly found a matchbox of marijuana in his sock drawer. ‘What’s this?’ she demanded, when she confronted him with it.
‘Just some grass,’ David said. ‘No big deal.’
Molly looked at David with the hurt look that had come into her face. She felt weak and vulnerable and so very alone. Her tone of voice was harsher, as if steeling herself for some further disaster to come.
‘What time will you be home?’ she always asked.
A useless question. She knew she wouldn’t be getting an answer, but she felt she had to ask.
A new ballet was due to open and Molly was working all hours. She sat up late at her Singer sewing machine, the TV on for company. There were costumes all over the living room, lengths of material marked with her flat blue square of chalk, ready to be pinned up on her dressmaker’s mannequin. David was out there in the night somewhere, with people she didn’t know, at a pub or a party. She waited up for her son to come home.
When the Matriculation results finally came out in December, David did better than they had expected. He won a scholarship to study Law at Melbourne University. Molly could not have been more proud. All her years of struggle and sacrifice, trying to be a good mother, had worked out, after all.
Her son was going to make a brilliant barrister.
After Percy’s death, Molly had continued to visit Alfred. She was accustomed to the drive along Victoria Parade to Richmond, turning right at the Skipping Girl sign. Sometimes, David went with her. More often, he was busy with his study and his friends, and Molly visited her father alone.
Now in his late seventies, Alfred’s eyesight was failing. He could no longer drive, and Molly took on the responsibility of doing his weekly shopping, taking his pension cheque to the bank and paying his bills. When Alfred had a stroke, he went to live in a bungalow behind his niece Lily’s house in Brighton.
Lily’s house was only half a mile from Dendy Street. There was nothing left of the orphanage now. It had been torn down and turned into a housing estate. Her old school at Brighton Beach was still there, though. Every time Molly drove to Brighton to visit Alfred, she was overcome by an almost mystical feeling. That day, half a century earlier, when her mother had taken her to live in Mr Butler’s orphanage, reappeared before her like a vision. Those memories were no longer accompanied by the presentiment of trouble and gloom, but by a golden feeling of peace.
Alfred was not happy living with Lily. One morning when Molly arrived to visit, she found him sitting at the table in his bungalow mixing a cup of rat poison. He eventually died from another stroke.
Molly was executor of Alfred’s will. Before the sale of his cottage in Richmond, she went to clear out his things. There was a drawer in his wardrobe where he kept his documents: the will, the house title, and the marriage certificate, which told her the things she had found out when she was a little girl, the year she had come home from the orph
anage. She also found a brass plaque, mounted on cherry wood, commemorating the death of his younger brother Archie, paid for by his regiment.
Cathy
FITZROY, 1975
THE LANDLORD WAS planting a passionfruit vine in the courtyard the morning they arrived. Planting it with an ox heart, he assured them, was the secret to a healthy vine. He asked if they were married, and glanced at their hands. Yes, married, David told him. Cathy wore a gold ring that passed as a wedding band. Her belly had not yet begun to show. They signed the lease, paid a month’s rent in advance, and the following Saturday they moved into the house. It was around the corner from the Standard Hotel, in King William Street.
Cathy had no furniture of her own. After her two years in London, she had been sharing a poky terrace house in Victoria Parade with some nurses. Hers was the attic room. It was how she’d lived in London, everything improvised, everything temporary. All her clothes fitted into one suitcase. The day they moved into King William Street, she packed her cassette player, the Pentax SLR she’d bought duty-free in Singapore on her way home, and her favourite novel, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, bought as a souvenir on a driving holiday in Dorset.
Cathy was twenty-two, the same age as David. She was tall, slim, pretty. She wore her glossy, chestnut hair long, and her brown eyes, outlined with mascara, looked huge. People sometimes asked her if she was a model. At weekends she wore jeans, cowboy shirts, a suede jacket. On workdays she wore skirts, jumpers, and the trench coat she had bought in London.
That afternoon, while David was still unpacking, Cathy went for a walk to explore the streets. She took photos of the neglected terrace houses, the derelict pubs, the Gothic doorways of St Mark’s. She’d met a famous fashion photographer in London, and gone to his studio in Notting Hill. She had dreams of doing a course and becoming a professional photographer in London. She didn’t want to be a typist all her life.
Saturday afternoon drunks stared at her through the open windows of the Napier Hotel. Women weren’t allowed in the public bar. She passed abandoned workshops in the backstreets, a rickety garage where a lone man was tinkering with an engine, a panel beater’s shed scarcely big enough for a car to fit inside. On the corner of George Street there was a milk bar run by a family of Greeks. At one end of Napier Street, near Gertrude Street, were the grim blocks of flats. Across a front wall, someone had daubed in black paint: Smash the Housing Commission. Towards the other end of the street was the Perfect Cheese factory, with its faintly nauseous aroma of parmesan.
No one wants t’be trapped inside a fantasy. The graffiti was painted over an advertisement for Glen Iris bricks; on the other side of the hoarding was an advertisement for Crest beer. She stood there for a long time, staring at the sign. Trapped inside a fantasy.
They met in London, where David was researching his thesis on the General Strike of 1926. They made love in her bedroom in Swiss Cottage, with its smell of sandalwood candles, watched over by a never-used spinning wheel in the corner that was there when she moved in. When she came home to Australia, she phoned him. ‘It’s Cathy,’ she said. ‘Do you remember me?’
‘I certainly do,’ David said, and she could feel his smile through the phone. There had been something about David that had stayed with her: his curly hair, his intense gaze, his idealism. He wasn’t like the other men she had met in London, couriers for bus tour companies, hustlers, sleazebags. She was attracted to his intellect, the excitement of student life.
In Melbourne, they went to a few parties together. They went to the Clapton concert at Festival Hall in April. By then, David was staying most nights in her attic room in Victoria Parade. The window open at night, they could smell the Carlton and United Brewery.
Cathy was on the pill in London, but not when she came home and spent Christmas at the farm. Months went by. She didn’t have a prescription. She kept meaning to go to the doctor. One night Cathy told David, ‘I’m late.’
They talked about what to do.
‘People say you should trust your gut reaction,’ David said. ‘I know my gut reaction—I’m happy you’re going to have a baby.’
From the very beginning, David was sure.
The next days passed in a haze. Cathy was so worried, she couldn’t think straight. Nothing had been decided. They might move in together, they might not. And as for getting married—who could tell what was going to happen?
‘Still, if he asks me,’ Cathy said to herself, ‘I’ll say yes to him.’
They promised themselves to sit down and talk about it, but they kept putting off the conversation. David in particular seemed to be procrastinating.
‘I’m going to need to decide something soon,’ she told him.
‘Listen. I’ve never told you this, but I was adopted. I don’t even know who my real mother and father were. Can you understand how that makes a person feel?’
Cathy threw her arms around him and hugged him. ‘It must feel odd, not knowing who your parents are. Not knowing where your roots are. Do you ever feel lost?’
‘Lost? No. But all my life I’ve felt different from other people.’
She wanted to keep hugging him, to console him, but at that moment something stopped her and she moved away. There were her own problems to worry about. ‘Well, we still have to talk about what we’re going to do.’
‘I couldn’t stand the thought of you giving up the baby. It’s ours now!’
‘It might be easier if we got married.’ Both of them were quiet for a long time. ‘I’m not asking you to do anything you don’t want to,’ she went on. ‘But this is a big thing. We have to talk about it. It wouldn’t have to be in a church. We could just have a big party with lots of food and booze and dancing.’
‘Look, no one gets married these days,’ David said. ‘You might be able to go on the Supporting Mother’s Benefit.’
He was still a boy, really. She doubted he was ready for the responsibilities of being a father. ‘Maybe we shouldn’t say anything to people just yet. Not until everything is settled,’ she said.
David came over and kissed her on the side of the head. ‘Let’s not talk about it any more. Things will work out.’
Next day, he was on the phone to all his university friends telling them the good news, and they went out every night that week to celebrate.
THEY SLEPT IN David’s single bed, but when David’s mother visited and saw how they were living, she offered them her own double bed. David fetched it on the roof of Molly’s station wagon.
Cathy had been dreading meeting Molly. David said he had told her about the baby, and Cathy was afraid of being judged. But within minutes the three of them were laughing and joking around. His mum had bought them some curtains to brighten up the place. David fixed the brackets for the curtain rods with superglue. Miraculous molecular bonding, promised the advertisement on TV.
Cathy had worked for temp agencies in London; now she worked for an insurance company in Queen Street. On weekday mornings, she caught the tram to the office in the city, rows of girls with typewriters and piles of claim forms, all frightened of the manager. At five-thirty, David was waiting for her at the tram stop on the corner, outside the Perseverance Hotel.
It was June; it got dark early. On their way home, they passed a terrace house where the owners kept the curtains open. Cathy liked to look into the lamp-lit front room, the fire blazing, the walls of books, the bottle of wine uncorked. Why was it tha
t the lives of other people always seemed more authentic than her own? One day, she promised herself, she and David would have a room like that. When they got home, they ate spaghetti bolognese in the bare living room, huddled in front of the kerosene heater.
In the evenings, David hammered on the keys of his heavy, old-fashioned, manual Royal typewriter. There were pages and pages full of typing mistakes, angry crossings-out. She offered to type up his thesis for him. She could type faster than he could. Anyway, Cathy wanted to be a part of that magical university world. She imagined sitting in seminars with fellow students, discussing ideas. She would read great books and write essays, as David did. She loved the warm, dry smell of the Baillieu Library, all those books waiting on the shelves like unborn souls. But Cathy knew she was not a word person. At the National Gallery, the paintings gave her feelings. Colours, brushstrokes, human figures—with these she felt at home. Whenever there was any kind of confrontation or argument, she froze.
David paced up and down. ‘This is such shit,’ he kept saying. She knew he didn’t really want to be studying history. He spent his afternoons in the library, reading interviews with writers in the Paris Review.
Cathy stopped typing and took a cigarette from her packet of Benson and Hedges. ‘I’m going to have to tell my dad soon. All right?’
She’d been putting off telling him. Her father would want to drive down to Melbourne and see her, and Cathy wasn’t ready for that. She and David were going to have a baby, but they weren’t going to get married. Her father simply would not understand.
Cathy was an only child, and her father always thought she needed looking after. Her mother had died of cancer when she was twelve. It was a time of Cathy’s life she didn’t like to think about—coming home from school to find all those cars parked in the drive: the doctor, the District Nurse and so many other visitors.