by Rod Jones
‘Because it’s what your father wants.’
‘Leave my dad out of it. I want you to write your book. I want us to earn some money so we can live in Greece, the way we planned. I’ll find a job and save the money, if it comes to that.’
David could not keep still. He sat down for a moment, jumped to his feet again, marched back and forth in the living room, muttering to himself.
‘Look,’ she told him. ‘Our future involves a typewriter, not a rifle. I just want you to drop all this nonsense about killing Fraser.’
‘Is it nonsense?’ he challenged her. ‘Well? Is it?’
Cathy recognised the signs. She would have to watch out.
There was a knock and Murray barged in. ‘Have you heard the news?’
Murray, with his tired, careworn face. Why was it that revolutionaries had pale faces? As if they deliberately made themselves look like martyrs, eschewing the luxury of sleep… staying up studying the political situation…wrecking their health for the sake of the workers.
A few minutes later, Vanessa arrived. The three of them left to catch a tram into the city.
So had it come to this? Cathy alone. David didn’t even like her, apparently. It was hopeless, then. Lately, when she tried to talk to him about her feelings, he left the house. Where did he go? To George Street, of course. He was always with Murray and Vanessa; they were like commissars in khaki.
Cathy now regretted she had not gone with them. Her boiling thoughts would give her no peace. In the end she put on her coat and set off for the tram stop in Brunswick Street. The people on the tram seemed oblivious to the import of the day. But instead of settling or reassuring her, this only added to the air of unreality.
It was a blustery afternoon. The wind blew the sun out of the cloud, then snatched it away again. There were not many cars in the city. The police must have blocked the traffic down at Elizabeth Street. The intersection in front of Parliament House was already crowded and Cathy felt oppressed by the ugly mood in the air. People holding signs with Fraser swastikas were marching down Bourke Street. People holding up more signs. Hang Fraser! Hang Kerr!
Groups in the crowd were chanting, ‘Kill Fraser! Kill Fraser!’ There was a lot of noise. She looked around, panicked, trying to find David. After a while, the chanting died down. Then another chorus of chanting started up: ‘Hang Fraser! Hang Fraser!’
Somehow Cathy found herself in a group marching down St Kilda Road to the American Consulate. There were lines of police in place. The demonstrators pushed towards the building; the police pushed back. She was caught in a wave of movement. Suddenly, there were people at the back throwing rocks. Instinctively, she ducked. There was the sound of splintering glass from the consulate. A cheer went up.
The mood had turned irrational, more angry shouting and chanting, more cries to lynch Kerr and Fraser. The crowd surged again, and she felt herself pushed forward. She fell to her knees. She was entirely helpless: there was just the sensation of falling, the letting go, then the sudden surprising motionlessness of being on the ground, waiting for the pain to arrive.
She felt eerily relaxed. Nothing much had happened. She was all right, the baby was all right. She was on her knees, that’s all. Her knees stung, but it was nothing. Except: she couldn’t get up. She tried one way then another to shift her weight and to use her hands to climb back to her feet, but she was still kneeling there on the sharp little stones of the gravel.
A hand was helping her up. Dark blue trousers, blue shirt, dark tie—it was a policeman! He was a young man, younger than David. That hand, she thought, might have been going to strike her. That taste of blood in her mouth was a presentiment of the blow. But now, as in a dream, the protesters continued to move and yell around her, their faces loud, their voices unnaturally muted and soft, and the policeman was still helping her to her feet.
‘Are you all right?’ he asked.
‘Thank you.’ She smiled. Cathy wanted to be polite to this man. Her knees were stinging, but she was not in any real pain. Not the diabolical pains inside that she feared. She pulled her dress down to cover her bloody knees and moved away.
The crowd was thinner. She could see the US consulate again. Near the front, there was David! His right hand was turned back, concealing the half-brick he was carrying. It was only because she was standing behind him that she could see it.
The election was called for the 13th of December—the day of their wedding.
David told her that, for the month leading up to the election, he had to exclude all other thoughts from his mind: he was campaigning for the re-election of the Whitlam government. The CIA-backed coup had to be reversed at all costs. David wore a permanent scowl. She accused him of making it his civic duty not to smile; he seized on any suggestion of humour or levity from her. Their wedding, his writing, seemed no longer important to him. It was as if he had shut the door on her, too.
If David went out, the prospect of his arrival home gave rise to a feeling of foreboding. On those evenings when there were visitors in the house, not just Vanessa and Murray, whose company Cathy had come to loathe, but even Henry, or their other friends, she preferred to stay in the bedroom. Anyway, she told herself bitterly, she wouldn’t be missed: her pregnancy was to them an impediment to the revolution. She refused to be part of this national anger, this madness that had broken out, the vicious arguments and fights at social gatherings, the insults, curses, people who would never speak to each other again.
Through all this, Cathy kept to her room and, finally, she allowed herself to grieve for her mother.
She remembered how, in the year after her death, she would wake and feel her mother’s presence. Not the sick mother of the final year, but the younger, radiant woman she remembered from earliest memory, the blue silk dress Mum used to wear for Dad, with nice shoes, and red lipstick and her blonde hair done up, pruning her roses, waiting for Dad to come in from the paddocks, the scent of wartime romance in the afternoon among the ordinary farm days. Dad still drove the old red tractor then, not the newer, green John Deere.
Mum was too sick to eat at the table and Cathy remembered those woeful mealtimes, just twelve-year-old Cathy and Dad, the awful silence as each of them put food in their mouths and chewed.
That’s when it had started, the choking sensation when she tried to speak. For what, really, was there to say? Only unbearable things. It was better to live euphemistically than to look truth in the face. That block in her, the difficulty she still had trying to express herself: it had all begun back there.
Her mother would sit on the verandah in the late afternoon, if she was well enough, and look at her roses. When Cathy came home from school she would go and sit, still in her uniform, on the verandah with her mum. Mum, already diminished by illness, would try to ask her questions about school. And Cathy, full of intense sadness and dread, could only respond with a word or two. ‘Yes, Mum, everything’s good. I’m at high school now, don’t you remember?’
Cathy feared there wasn’t much time left, so she put her energy into noticing everything about her mother, trying to fix her image in her mind for all time. These mental photographs of the frail, precious woman were different from the mother who would later return from death to sit in Cathy’s room in silent vigil while she slept.
One afternoon, instead of the invalid’s nightdress and woollen gown, Mum had put on that blue silk dress (with
her old slippers), made an effort with her hair, and applied lipstick. Even at twelve, Cathy had understood what Mum was trying to do. It was like a charm, just for a moment to escape from the broken present back into unbroken time. But the effort it cost her to dress like that had taken its toll, and she couldn’t sit on the verandah very long that afternoon.
It was during these days of November—after Gough had been sacked, when the whole country had gone mad, when David’s temper flared and his behaviour was at its most volatile and unbearable, when she needed most the sanctuary of her mother on the verandah to console her—that Cathy realised something important.
She had kept her mental photographs of her mother inviolate all these years. Now she understood that a crucial part of her had remained weak, the part that choked and struggled to find words as she sat at the kitchen table with Dad. In less than two months, she would give birth to her own child. She needed to let those secret, hoarded moments go in order to stand up to the world and protect her child.
The spell was broken.
As the tide of uncertainty swept the nation, Cathy went back to the afternoon on the verandah overlooking the roses. One moment her mother was sitting there in her blue dress; the next moment she had evaporated like smoke.
If David noticed the change in Cathy, her new strength, he didn’t say anything.
When she tried to get him to sit with her and go through the lists she had compiled for their wedding—who would be sleeping where, how much meat they would need for the barbecue, how many kegs of beer they should order from the pub in Arcadia—he ranted about the Liberals, the scum who had got us into Vietnam and brought in conscription. What if they did win the election?
David quoted Chairman Mao: political power grows from the barrel of a gun. Be that as it may, she maintained resolutely, she could play no part in it. They were moving further and further away from each other.
She wondered if a couple like them could last, David its mind, Cathy its heart. It wasn’t that she didn’t have a mind of her own. A mind can be trained to argue and write essays. But can a mind be trained to love?
Another night, another scene. It was an argument over fish and chips, of all things. Jack pinched a piece of David’s fish and he turned suddenly murderous, chasing Jack into the kitchen and putting his fist through the back door. Everyone was terrified. The following day, Jack moved out.
‘How did the back door get broken?’ her dad asked, on one of his visits. Cathy had forgotten all about it. She knew she had to pretend that things were all right, for the sake of her baby.
‘Some idiot at a party one night,’ she said.
THE WEEK BEFORE the wedding, they drove up to the farm. They stopped to have a counter lunch at the Royal Hotel in town. At the next table was a group of men in suits, real estate agents by the look of them, Cathy thought. ‘When the Libs win on Saturday, it’ll be just the boost the business community needs,’ said one of them loudly.
‘Just you watch the stock market pick up on Monday,’ said another.
The next moment, David was on his feet, shouting at them. ‘What the fuck are you morons talking about? Fraser should be shot!’
The publican asked David to leave.
A nation divided.
On Saturday morning they drove into town early to vote absentee. The booths were set up in the primary school hall. David was wearing his Labor T-shirt. Locals turned and stared at them. A farmer said, ‘Gough’s going to lose, you know.’ David glared back at him; all Cathy wanted was for him to remain calm.
They called in at the motel to check on David’s family. Molly had driven up the previous afternoon. She invited them into the characterless motel room for a cup of tea. They sat on the edge of the single beds.
‘Have you voted?’ David asked his mother.
‘Not yet.’
‘Don’t forget.’
‘I won’t. I’ll do it on the way to the farm.’
Cathy and David tried to reassure each other that the election wasn’t yet lost. But their hearts weren’t in it. Cathy felt that their future was being stolen from them. She had noticed that Molly always tried to avoid getting David started on politics. Now she turned to Cathy with a smile. ‘All set?’ she asked. ‘Is there anything I can do?’
‘Dad’s got everything organised, thanks.’
‘I’ve made a few sponges. They’re in the car. I’m keeping the cream in the fridge here so it doesn’t go off. I’ll whip it when we get there. How’s the little one? Been kicking much?’
‘Kicking? Oh yes!’ Cathy put both hands on her belly.
‘I’m going to spoil him rotten!’ Molly smiled. ‘We’ll buy him so many toys, won’t we? We’re going to love him, and watch him grow into a wonderful man. Or maybe woman!’
There was a knock at the door. It was David’s Aunt Olive, who was staying with her husband in the room next door. She was dressed in her best clothes, but she looked haggard and thin. Olive was in her sixties, but looked much older. Cathy guessed it must have been the hiatus hernia Molly had told her about. The trembling old lady with her burnished complexion and her white woolly hair gave Cathy the impression of a photographic negative. Molly boiled the electric jug and made her sister a cup of tea. The cup rattled on its saucer in Olive’s hand.
‘How’s Hoppy today?’ Molly asked.
‘Oh, you know him. He doesn’t like anything out of his normal routine. I had to drag him into coming at all.’ She turned to Cathy. ‘Are you going away for your honeymoon?’
‘We haven’t had time to think about that,’ David said.
Cathy said, ‘We’re planning a few days at the pub in Lorne.’
‘I haven’t been to Lorne in years,’ Olive said. ‘I suppose you’ve got your wedding dress ready?’
David said tersely, ‘I’m wearing what I’ve got on.’
Olive looked at her sister. ‘Molly, are you really going to let him get married in jeans?’
‘I’ll bloody well wear what I like!’ David roared.
‘Now, David,’ said Olive. ‘We’ve always got on well together, you and me. Let’s not have words, today of all days!’ Olive sighed and went back to her room.
‘What a bore!’ David said.
‘Everything’s a bore for you, isn’t it?’ Molly said harshly. ‘Everything’s a nuisance. Why can’t you just let yourself enjoy your wedding day? Why do you have to spoil things for everyone else?’
‘Like who?’
‘Well, like Cathy here, for a start.’
‘Oh, Jesus Christ! Stop bugging me!’
Molly sniffed. ‘You really are a piece of work. If you don’t behave yourself, I’ll get in the car and go home!’ Molly turned to Cathy. ‘I don’t know what we’re going to do with him.’
Cathy remained silent: no one would be able to say that it was she who had provoked him into a fight today.
‘Go on,’ said David, ‘keep talking about me as if I’m not here. I’m going to the bottle shop.’
‘A fat lot of good that will do!’ Molly shouted to his departing back.
The two women were left alone.
‘As if I could ever get him to do anything.’ Molly shook her head.
‘I know life hasn’t been easy for you,’ Cathy said.
‘I had to learn some hard l
essons about people when I was a little girl.’
Cathy knew that Molly had grown up in humble circumstances, but Molly had only recently told her just how difficult and complicated her life had been.
Well, we might end up living a difficult life too, Cathy thought. David a psychiatric patient. Or worse, drinking himself to death. Theirs would be a lonely, difficult road. There might come a time when there was no longer any connection between them. David quarrelled with everyone these days. Except for Henry, the friends he chose had a bad effect on him. Jack was in Sydney with some girl and couldn’t come to the wedding, even though David had insisted on inviting him.
Cathy usually tried to keep her friends at a distance. She made excuses to them about David. They misunderstood his blunt honesty as rudeness. But today they would all be there. And the election, on top of everything. And David had already started drinking…
Molly was still sitting on the side of the bed, shaking her head and muttering to herself. ‘Yes, life was hard when I was young.’
‘When I think of you as a little girl in the orphanage—it makes me want to cry!’
‘It really wasn’t all that bad,’ Molly assured her. ‘The kids all got along with each other. My best friend was a girl called Bonnie. We were in the same dormitory. I remember how we used to talk and talk. I wonder what became of her?’
‘Have you ever tried to look her up?’
‘It was a long time ago,’ Molly said. ‘Fifty years.’ She shook her head, as if she could hardly believe it. And from the look on her face, Cathy knew she didn’t want to talk about it any more.
Henry would be arriving on the midday train: he didn’t drive, and they had arranged to pick him up from the station. Cathy was worried about Henry: he had been depressed since recently breaking up with Daphne.
Henry stepped down onto the platform, spotted them and raised his hand. He was carrying a scuffed briefcase and a rectangular parcel wrapped in shiny paper. Cathy smiled. Of course Henry’s wedding gift would be a book. David waved back with his open bottle of Carlton Draught.