I put the advertisement for the house next to my computer, glancing at it occasionally throughout the day. My mother and I talked briefly about driving over to inspect it, but the idea passed as quickly as it had come. In my mind, the house remains as it was when we lived there, the layout of the rooms a little uncertain, some features more distinct than others.
‘What was your bedroom like?’ Odessa asked me after I told her about my mother’s chocolate brown study.
As the only girl, I had the prettiest room. It was decorated in blue and white, with a white chest of drawers, a white bed and white curtains that lifted and floated. When I wasn’t playing with my brothers or the other children in the neighbourhood, I would drag the portable record player out from my cupboard and listen to my favourite songs, pop tunes with lyrics that told a dramatic tale: Jon English’s ‘Hollywood Seven’, in which a young woman with dreams of stardom comes to a messy end in a seedy motel room; or Michael Murphy’s ‘Wildfire’, a song of a girl and her horse dying tragically in a blizzard; or perhaps Helen Reddy’s ‘Angie Baby’, where the lonely teenager disappears into her radio.
From my window, I could see Jonathan climbing the tree near the stone wall. In the early evening light, he soon became lost from sight as he scrambled towards the upper branches. Beneath him, Joshua weaved his way across the grass. Unsteady on his two-year-old legs, he called out to Jonathan high above him in a sea of green leaves. Beyond were the roofs of the neighbours’ houses, my best friend across the street, the boy we hated several doors down, and past that, the river, winding its way, the tide gently slapping the mud and rocky outcrops pocked with oyster shells that marked the edge of the peninsula. In the stillness of the summer evening, everything was quiet. Everyone was home. Families were fed and children would soon be ready for bed.
Downstairs, my father also had his own room. We called it a study, although he rarely worked in there. He, too, was a broadcaster, but he seemed to do most of his preparation at the studio. He would listen to music in his room, playing his favourite jazz or classical recordings on a system housed inside a cabinet he had built himself. Pausing at the end of each record he would adjust the balance, seeking a purity of tone that always eluded him.
One by one we said goodnight to him. When it was my turn, he would beckon me over to sit on his lap for a moment. He wanted me to hear a particular favourite. I would do as he asked, always telling him I liked it because I knew this pleased him, and then I would kiss him on the cheek, leaving him as he tried to bring up the bass, or perhaps the treble, searching, once again, for the level of perfection that he knew was in the recording but that he never seemed able to capture in the balance.
Upstairs, my mother closed my curtains, shutting out the night.
‘What happens when you die?’ My questions, like most children’s, alternated between a query concerning the mundane and a need for answers to the impossibly large matters of life. At the end of the day, before I allowed myself to drift into sleep, I veered towards the latter, wanting reassurance, a mapping out of the whole cycle that would alleviate my anxiety about the inevitability of the end.
‘Your body stops working.’
‘You can’t breathe or think or move?’
She shook her head.
Ceasing to exist was an impossible concept to grasp.
‘When you die, I will be all alone.’
She sat next to me.
I would have my brothers, she said, perhaps a family of my own. Besides, she was not going to die for a long time.
She stretched her legs out and I moved my body in close to hers. It was late, she said, and time for sleep.
I looked at her, unable to comprehend that we would not be like this forever. I didn’t want to grow older. I didn’t want a family of my own, and I didn’t want her to be gone.
She brushed my hair back from my eyes, as I asked her to make a story up for me.
‘What about?’
‘A girl,’ I said.
‘Just like you?’
‘Just like me.’
‘Once upon a time …’ and as evening fell outside my room, and the birds that descended on the garden at dusk flew off in one great swoop, I listened.
‘And then what happened?’ I would ask as the girl in the story separated from the girl in the bed, and that was what I loved: the tension between effecting this separation, yet maintaining a connection with my own life as the story reached out into fantasy, while still finding a hook upon which to curl a tendril in the world that surrounded us.
‘Well,’ my mother would say, and she would pause for a moment, giving herself time to pull it all together now, the beginning, middle and end looping back on themselves to create a circle.
And then, we would both lie in silence. She would perhaps be thinking of the work she had to complete or, on the occasions when it was all done, nothing in particular; she could simply enjoy the stillness of the moment.
In that instant, I loved her and I was happy.
‘That’s it,’ she would tell me, and she would kiss me once on the cheek, just as I kiss Odessa now, before turning out the light, the brightness of the day and all that it contained, finished.
Alone in the darkness, I would hear my mother’s footsteps going down the stairs. I would listen as she opened the door to her room. And as I glance once more at the picture of that sandstone house there on top of a pile of papers on my desk, I want to peer into the window of her study and see her, sitting at her typewriter. She is writing, the keys hammering across the ribbon, the words lining up on the page, and I am upstairs in the room off the landing, peaceful and sleepy now, running over the tale she has told me, one more time, just for myself, making minor alterations as I do so, while below, she pauses to light her last cigarette for the day, and then leans back, exhaling, as she reads over what she has written.
STRANGE TIMES
ON THE NIGHT GOUGH WHITLAM WAS ELECTED PRIME Minister, my parents held a party. It was summer and my mother wore a long Indian caftan; my father wore a seersucker shirt and casual slacks. They had drinks in the courtyard off the kitchen and Jonathan, Joshua and I watched from upstairs as the grown-ups drank red wine and ate dolmades, Lebanese bread and hummus from platters covered with vine leaves.
We woke later to loud cheers as the election results were announced. The country was going to change for the better, my mother told us later. Even my father, who was more conservative, was excited at the prospect of a new leader, someone who would give us our own national identity, he said proudly. The Labor Party was in power for the first time in twenty-three years but we didn’t understand the significance of what had occurred. My mother tried to explain that it meant better rights for women and Aboriginal people, as well as improved health care and education. She needn’t have bothered; we were already barracking for Whitlam and his ideals because that was what you did – you went for the party your parents backed.
The impact on my mother’s life was immediate. Soon after the election, the government established a Royal Commission into Human Relationships and my mother was appointed one of the commissioners. It was a radical change from her previous life as a broadcaster, and within weeks she found herself at the forefront of the momentous social changes that were occurring. As she travelled the country listening to evidence on topics as far ranging as homosexuality, abortion, the age of consent, domestic violence – issues that were still considered unsuitable for private discussion let alone public investigation – her entire outlook on the world was altering.
About a year after the election, my life also changed, but this change had nothing to do with the Prime Minister. Sitting at the back of the classroom, I took a test. I did not know what it was for, but I found the hidden sequences in numbers, the patterns in pictures and the junctions at which passing trains crossed. A few months later I was offered a place in an Opportunity Class for bright children. The question was, did I want to take it?
In my five years at primary school,
I had become increasingly unpopular and miserable. I tried too hard to get the other kids to like me. I was hopeless at sport and I had a PE enthusiast for a teacher. Always the last one left on the oval when the teams were picked, I would walk over, head down, eyes stinging as the words were finally said: ‘I guess I have to have Blain.’ Opportunity Class meant I could start again, where no one knew me, and I did not hesitate in my answer.
The new school was a half-hour bus trip away. I had to walk up to the overpass marking the divide between the leafy streets of our suburb and the flats that bordered the main road into the city. There I would meet up with Timothy, a boy who had also been selected. He lived further down on the tip of the peninsula in a house with a garden that ran onto the river.
He sat next to me on the bus and his voice was loud and boastful. Did I know we were the smartest children in the state? Timothy flicked a wad of paper at a woman with Down’s syndrome in the seat across the aisle, giggling as she rubbed at the side of her neck. He leant across and whispered the word ‘imbecile’ just loud enough for her to hear. I knew what he was doing was wrong but I was too weak to stand up to him. I could only shrink away, pressing closer to the window in an attempt to appear as though I did not know him, until we finally came to the new school. It was on the highway, a large cluster of formidable red brick buildings and cement playgrounds. After our tiny local primary, I looked at it with some anxiety, uncertain as to how I would ever find my way around. Timothy was undaunted, loudly asking everyone if they knew the way to the Opportunity Class, the one for bright children, and he thanked them cheerfully, oblivious to the sneers of other students.
Mrs Davis was our teacher for the next two years. There were twenty-five of us, and on that first day we all sat on the floor in front of her. Her slim, athletic legs, which were at eye level, impressed me immediately. The rest of her seemed far more ordinary. Her hair was carefully set in auburn waves. She even wore make-up, bright chemist colours of which my mother would disapprove. Her frock was nylon and her sandals were high-heeled. She didn’t look unconventional, and yet she insisted to the class that this was what she was. ‘And I expect you to be as well.’ We were not the only ones who had been hand-picked, she told us. She, too, had been selected for excellence. Her excellence was in teaching, and she was not afraid of trying out new ideas.
When the moment came for us to tell her, and each other, a little bit about ourselves, I felt my stomach tighten. The first girl to put up her hand said her mother was an actor in Number 96, the risqué soap of the day. Another girl, Sarah, said her father worked for Kentucky Fried Chicken; everyone was impressed. Timothy told the class his father was a judge, Supreme Court in fact, and he tilted his chin up as he spoke.
I barely listened. I was too anxious about how I would describe what my mother did. She was a royal commissioner, I could say, but I didn’t really know what that meant. She was investigating human relationships, a concept that was just as hard to grasp. Explaining my family would, I feared, only mark me out as weird from my very first day. But Mrs Davis clapped her hands. ‘Not your parents.’ She wanted to know more about us. Why had we decided to come here?
None of us knew how to answer.
Eventually a girl called Melanie put up her hand. ‘Because it’s an opportunity,’ she said, ‘to learn.’
‘Good,’ said Mrs Davis. ‘And that is precisely what we will be doing.’
At my old school, I had always done well. Being smart did not bring me any friends. On the contrary, it made me odd, or so I believed. When we did our multiplication tests, I made sure I got a few answers wrong; in English, I misspelled my words on purpose, stumbled over a sentence, or pretended not to understand what a story was about. But now it was different. During that first week in Opportunity Class, I found that my abilities were no longer something to be ashamed about. On the contrary, it was my potential lack of abilities that made me anxious. Now that brains mattered, I was no longer the brightest in the class.
We soon learnt that there was a genius amongst us. Smart enough to go to university already, he had been held back because his parents wanted him to be with children of his own age. ‘It’s Donovan –’ one of the girls pointed to where he sat eating his lunch – ‘he’s really good at maths.’
‘Georgia is a bohemian,’ Timothy declared, dancing in front of me. I protested, although I didn’t know what bohemian meant. ‘Well her mother is.’ He smirked. ‘That’s what my dad says. A bohemian and a feminist.’
Sarah, the girl whose father worked for Kentucky Fried Chicken, quickly established herself as the popular girl, the one all the boys liked. Melanie was a leader and was immediately elected to student council. And then there was Sam. Just as Donovan was our highest benchmark, Sam was the lowest point. He was incapable of paying attention and too fond of distracting others. Mrs Davis would shake her head each time he failed to listen, talked too loudly or uttered a pointless and seemingly stupid remark.
‘So, do you like it?’ my parents asked me, and now that I have a daughter myself, I know how eager they were to hear that I was happy. Children rarely supply the details we want in response to this question. I probably just said I was fine, and in this instance, it wasn’t so far from the truth; I was still uncertain about my place within the social hierarchy, but I loved the work.
‘We will have privileges,’ Mrs Davis told us. The first of these was a State supplied musical instrument. We could choose the flute, clarinet or oboe and we were to have music lessons every Wednesday afternoon.
We had no sports periods. ‘Instead we will exercise. Each morning,’ said Mrs Davis. She was a devotee of the 10BX plan, an exercise program for the Royal Canadian Airforce. She produced a slim dog-eared paperback, showing us diagrams of the routine we would follow. At the end of each exercise session, we had relaxation. One of us was selected to envisage a scenario (‘Something that will make your body sink into a dreamlike state,’ Mrs Davis explained), while everyone else lay on the floor and listened. I liked being picked for this one. I concocted elaborate stories, a swim in an icy cold river, lying on a warm boulder with willow trees waving overhead, a flight on a cloud through azure skies, a bed made of silken feathers; I was good at this and, surprisingly, not shy when it came to fantasy.
In the classroom, standard maths, reading and writing were all dismissed as boring. Exercise cards for equations and reading comprehension were stored in a cupboard, and only ever used when Mrs Davis was called out or was in one of her occasional bad moods. The rest of the time we experimented. We wrote novels, painted murals, cooked exotic foods and put on plays. After years of dull and repetitive learning, this was exciting.
In those first few months, we stuck together as a class. We were the special ones transplanted into the midst of an otherwise normal school. But the internal groupings soon began to grow stronger, as they always do, and it was Sarah and Melanie, the peer leaders, who began to separate, taking a few chosen ones with them. Melanie asked Mrs Davis to leave the classroom unlocked at lunchtime, and with no reason not to trust her, Mrs Davis eventually agreed. Selecting a few of the other girls and some of the boys to take with them, Melanie and Sarah would leave the rest of us in the playground, uncertain as to what they were up to, but wishing we could take part.
When they eventually asked me, I opened the door to find them all sitting in a circle, an empty bottle lying on the floor in the middle.
‘You can’t tell,’ Sarah made me promise, and I nodded solemnly.
It was Timothy who spun the bottle first and when it stopped, pointing towards himself, he rubbed his hands in delight. He spun it again and this time it pointed to me. As soon as it became clear that I was expected to kiss him, I said I didn’t want to play.
At the end of the previous term I had taken the class budgerigar home for the holidays, only to have it die within two days. My father had bought another one. It was identical, he said. No one would ever know. He had explained the situation to Mrs Davis, emphasisi
ng my distress, and she had promised not to reveal the truth, but as soon as she took the cloth off the cage, Timothy’s hand had shot up.
‘That’s not Noddy,’ he said. ‘What happened to Noddy?’
‘He died,’ I admitted.
‘You killed him,’ he hissed, enjoying himself now. ‘You’re a sadist.’
It was another word I had to ask my mother to explain; bohemian, feminist and sadist, and now, here at the game of spin the bottle, he was searching through his endless repertoire of insults to come up with yet another one. ‘Who would want to kiss you anyway?’ His smile was gleeful. ‘You’re frigid.’
At that moment there was a sound from outside and Melanie jumped up, checking the room was cleared of all evidence before opening the door an inch. It was only Sam, and as he attempted to push his way in, she blocked the entrance. ‘We told you we don’t want you. Go away.’ But Sam appeared oblivious to the need for an invitation, and he lunged forward, seizing Sarah, who was standing right behind Melanie, and planted a kiss on her lips.
‘Yuk.’ She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. The pitch of her voice raised a notch higher. ‘You are disgusting.’ She pushed him, hard, into the corridor wall, before slamming the door in his face.
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