Births Deaths Marriages

by Georgia Blain

  ‘Who do you want to speak to?’ My mother edged closer to the table, her fingertips also on the upturned glass.

  There was no hesitation this time, it moved straight to Jonathan, stopping decisively in front of him. He pushed his chair back, the legs scraping against the floor, and as he did so, the kitchen light blew, a shattering of glass shards raining like sparks from a firework after the explosion. ‘I don’t want to do this any more,’ Jonathan told us.

  My mother tried to calm him. It was all right. It was just the fuse. It had blown most nights. Steve volunteered to fix it straightaway, but she said it could wait. She would light a candle.

  ‘Freaky, hey?’ Steve’s grin was wider than ever as he sat back down at the table, ready to begin again.

  ‘I think we’ll give it a rest.’

  Jonathan, whose alarm was more than just a momentary fear at the strange coincidence of a light blowing as the spirits spoke, was shaking his head, rocking slightly as he did so. The voices he heard, which he must have tried so hard to ignore, had for one brief instant collided with the reality of the outside world. We did not know that at the time, but when I look back, I am aware that he had a sense of his own strangeness, even then.

  ‘Don’t be like me,’ he had begged one night after we’d had a particularly bad fight. I was lying in my room when he came in to apologise for what he’d done. ‘I’m so scared of what I am.’ And as he began to cry I had not known how to comfort him.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

  He just shook his head. ‘I’m not normal.’ It was all he said.

  After we packed up the ouija board, I stayed up and listened to him and Steve talking. I sat outside the door and tried to make out their conversation. I could only hear small snippets, the mention of people at school, girls they liked; it was not particularly interesting. There was nothing that gave me a clue as to Jonathan’s interior life, and I think that was what I was wanting; something that would let me know who he was, where he’d gone. Or perhaps that is just the adult’s desire; maybe I wanted no more than to hear what Steve thought of me, that they both thought I was okay.

  After Jonathan was diagnosed with schizophrenia, I occasionally would bump into people who had known him at high school. I still do. Sometimes they recall how hard he had tried to fit in, to be part of the group. The ones who had come to our place would remember me banging on his bedroom door, bursting in as they quickly stashed the drugs, the smell of old bong water musty, because at first it was dope but in later years, it was heroin, or so they said. (‘We would have just finished shooting up, when in you’d come, pigtails, school uniform, shouting at us to turn the music down.’) I found it hard to believe that I could have missed something like that, and my mother tells me now that she is fairly certain his drug intake was limited to amphetamines, magic mushrooms, LSD and even cough mixture for its morphine. I do not believe she is looking for some small comfort in the fact that he stopped just short of heroin, she simply wants to clarify the details.

  I remember a lot about him, but there is also so much that has gone, and at times I go to her, wanting to know, to flesh out a sketchy memory or to correct a recollection that could be false. She always stops what she is doing and answers me, her recall clear and sharp. Often these conversations end in tears, both of us momentarily overwhelmed by the sadness that became so much a part of his life. We stand together, hugging for an instant, but like many who have gone through a similar experience, we have had to learn to cry with an awareness that this must be kept brief. There can be no diving in.

  ‘His friends found him weird when he was stoned,’ she told me when I asked her about the drugs. ‘I mean everyone is, but they said he was more than just strange.’

  That holiday in Candelo was probably the first time I was aware of him smoking. I was young and didn’t know why he’d been growing away from me. But at least the marijuana gave me something on which to blame his behaviour. The following year, when we went up north again, this time without Steve, there was no doubt that Jonathan had begun to slide over the edge. I couldn’t tell whether he was stoned or not, he was just weird most of the time. As we huddled together in a shack that let in more rain than it kept out, I thought we had truly descended to the pits. The filth I was used to, but this was more than just dirty.

  The next morning I saw what had made the smell so bad. Dead rats pinned to men’s underpants had been tacked onto the rotting fibro walls. The installation had been left by the last resident, a young woman who, we later learnt, had gone mad. We packed up and left that morning. In the local milkbar, my mother heard of another place we could stay. A deserted church that was surprisingly civilised. It was our last family holiday, but I remember little about it. Only two images remain: the walls of that shack, and a photograph I have of Jonathan sitting on the steps of the church, skinny, face obscured by a mat of pale hair, eyes staring blankly out at the chickens scratching in the front yard.

  But at Candelo, there were moments when I felt he was still with me. I could convince myself that the separation was not quite as bad as I had feared. When they weren’t off smoking, he and Steve began to hang out with me more often.

  We played games. An intense combination of hide-and-seek and chasings, a game that involved taking prisoners and rescuing each other. We also played Sardines. Steve was best at that one. Quick, fearless and nimble, he would climb into impossible corners, leaving us wandering around trying to find him. Usually Joshua was the last one left looking, and we would whistle softly, giving him clues as to where we were. But one afternoon, I was surprised to find that it was I, and not he, who had been suddenly left alone.

  ‘Jonathan,’ I called out, because I had seen him only moments earlier, both of us bumping into each other at the door to the lounge room, he going in, I coming out.

  ‘They’re not in there,’ I’d told him, but he hadn’t believed me.

  I went back there, thinking that I may have been mistaken, but the room was empty. I checked under the drop sheets that covered the furniture, and behind the door. I listened for the sound of suppressed laughter, and then wandered back out into the hall.

  The front door was open and a shaft of light illuminated white dust dancing in the stillness.

  ‘Where are you?’ My voice was loud in the quiet.

  The response was faint, the laughter of ghosts; a peal that faded as you opened the door to find nothing but old toys still stacked in the cupboards, cardboard boxes rotten to the touch, tin rusted, the past abandoned, its inhabitants gone.

  They were not in Jonathan and Steve’s room. I could see that at a cursory glance. But I began to rummage through their bags, uncertain as to what it was I was trying to find. There were empty cigarette packs scrunched into a ball, Tally-Ho papers and, in Steve’s bag, a crumpled centrefold. I straightened it out and looked at the image, feeling ashamed and excited, before screwing it up again and stuffing it back.

  Out in the hall, the only sound was my mother’s typewriter. She was working on an article she had to deliver. Had she seen the others? She looked up briefly and said she hadn’t.

  ‘I can’t find them anywhere,’ I told her.

  Hearing a faint note of dismay in my voice, she stopped what she was doing. I leant in towards her and she brushed my hair back from my face.

  ‘Have you tried the laundry?’ she suggested.

  ‘Are they in there?’

  She kissed me on the cheek and winked. ‘Go and have a look.’

  The laundry was a lean-to out the back. It opened onto a courtyard overgrown with weeds, a place we had not yet explored.

  ‘Where are you?’ I called.

  For a moment there was silence, and then I heard it once more; a faint giggle, closer now.

  ‘Aha,’ I said. ‘I know you’re here.’

  There was a tall thin cupboard in the corner, and as I pulled on the door, someone inside must have pushed, sending me backwards. For one brief instant I saw them all: Steve at the t
op, Jonathan in the middle, Joshua at the bottom, each curled up on their own shelf. And then the force of the door opening toppled them forward and out they fell, one by one, landing on top of each other.

  Jonathan stood up first, his wide mouth splitting into an awkward smile he couldn’t suppress, and as he caught my eye, I held my breath and looked away.

  Behind us Steve jumped up and down in excitement. ‘Top spot, hey,’ he kept saying. ‘We thought you’d never find us.’

  It was the giggle, threatening to turn into a snort, that made me glance at Jonathan again, and I breathed in deeply, my eyes watering with the effort.

  ‘What’d we look like?’ Steve asked. ‘There on the shelves?’

  I glanced at Joshua on the floor looking up at each of us, and then back to Jonathan, and I tried so hard. Legs crossed, I doubled over with the effort. But as the cupboard finally collapsed, each shelf falling with a slam onto the one below, while Steve stood with his hands on his hips, staring at it in wide-eyed amazement, I knew I was gone.

  ‘Jesus.’ Steve turned to the pair of us.

  Jonathan’s shoulders shook, a slight twitch that made me bite at my lip as I met his eyes. He wiped at a tear and his whole body heaved with the release. I, too, gave up trying to hold it back, and the laughter, when it came, was a snort and a splutter, an explosion of sound that was out of my control.

  Standing next to the collapsed cupboard, there was nothing we could do. It was hopeless. We were both crying now. Just one glance and we were off again, and as I clutched my sides to try to stop the pain, Steve just stared at the debris and then back at us, shaking his head in wonder.

  THE GERMAINE TAPE

  IT WAS 1972 WHEN MY FATHER INTERVIEWED GERMAINE Greer for the ABC. I was eight at the time, and although I had heard of his guest, I certainly didn’t have enough interest in what she had to say to sit and listen to his program. But then, I never listened to any of his broadcasts, not even when he interviewed Elton John. His show was all talk and no music; it was quality adult listening and, as such, it held no attraction for a child, not even his daughter.

  My father’s program, Let’s Find Out, was particularly popular with women. Years later, I still come across his listeners, who tell me what a wonderful voice my father had and what a perceptive and intelligent interviewer he was.

  My first reaction is usually one of surprise. I am more used to people wanting to talk about my mother and how her work in mental illness or feminism has changed their lives. When they approach me, that is the conversation I am expecting and most of the time that is what I get. But sometimes I am taken off guard. I stand awkwardly, forced to listen politely to anecdotes about my father, to share in someone else’s memories of him, all the time waiting for a chance to extricate myself.

  My mother had a copy of the interview, taped from a recent replaying of the broadcast on a program looking at feminism. She offered to drop it round. She told me I would find it ‘interesting’, and although I was curious, I also had some trepidation about hearing my father’s voice again, the crispness of those consonants, the roundness of those vowels, the boom that could carry from one end of the house to the other.

  It would not be the first time I had heard him since he had died, and I was surprised at the apprehension I still felt at the prospect of listening to a recording of him. I have photographs of him and me together, and letters he wrote to me when he separated from my mother (usually asking me to tell her something he refused to communicate directly himself). It is rare that I look at them with any more than a detached curiosity about him, similar to the kind of interest I might feel on seeing a photograph of a stranger whose eyes or smile have momentarily caught my attention.

  His voice, however, was a different prospect. I was not prepared for how it would affect me the first time I heard it, about two years after he became ill with a cancer that killed him in a matter of months. I was sixteen at the time, and I listened, lights out, alone, to one of his programs replayed on late-night radio. It was not his words I heard – I do not even remember who it was he was interviewing – it was just that voice, filling my room, bringing him back. And after five minutes, I turned it off. I could not bear the confused feelings it provoked in me.

  My father was proud of his ABC voice, a voice that was cultivated to sound as close to the required BBC standard, with as little trace of an Australian accent, as possible.

  When I was about five years old, and my brother eight, he would call us into his study, one at a time, to interview us. I would wait outside his door for my turn, looking forward to the microphone, the immaculate Nagra which he always handled with a cloth, the click of the smooth metal switch, followed by the turn of the tape reels, and then that extraordinary capturing of our voices.

  ‘Tell me,’ he would say, ‘about your day.’

  And although I was always the most compliant in nearly every aspect of our lives, although I put all my toys away, made sure that I never stepped on the white border of his Chinese rug, never touched the windows of his car (an act that would cause him to pull over immediately and angrily wipe off any fingerprints with a chamois), in the interview room, I rebelled.

  ‘No,’ I would say.

  I didn’t want to be interviewed, I didn’t want to do as he told me. I wanted to sing, and it was always the same song, ‘Go Tell It On the Mountain’, that I insisted upon warbling into the microphone.

  He would try again, promising me I could have my way once I had answered his questions.

  ‘No,’ I would insist, and he would take out a clean, neatly ironed white handkerchief and wipe away the slight sheen of sweat on his forehead.

  It was a warning sign my brother would have heeded immediately, but one that I knew I could ignore. I was the favourite, and from an early age I was aware I could push further than anyone else would have dared. I would look him straight in the eye and sing, that same chorus, over and over again, while he waited impatiently for a chance to break in with a question I would once again refuse to answer.

  When my mother dropped the tape off at my house, I didn’t listen to it straightaway. In fact, it was several days before I heard it. She left it in the letterbox and I picked it up as I was heading out on an errand, only to leave it in the car.

  I rarely talk about my father, even with my closest friends. I used to tell occasional stories of his physical violence, recounting the facts of particular episodes, sometimes picking moments I had witnessed, other times retelling stories my mother had told me. After a while I realised I was testing myself, verbalising the details to show that my father had not affected me and that I had come to terms with who he was. It was a lie that I gradually learnt not to inflict upon myself any longer.

  Detailing his extreme physical outbursts was also an easy way of making people understand why I had so little love for him. But there was so much I could not describe in neat episodes. His presence alone created tension; it was the threat of what he might do that kept us tiptoeing, scared, around him. Each night we ate dinner in silence, knowing that the wrong word, a dropped piece of cutlery, even the scrape of a chair could set him off. He would slam his fist down and we would wait, uncertain as to whether worse would follow. We felt relief each time he left the house and fear each time he returned.

  Sometimes when I tried to describe him, I took a different tack. I would tell one of a selected range of stories concerning his obsessive behaviour, an anecdote we could all laugh at. Eventually I gave up telling even the ‘funny’ stories. I would be halfway through recounting a particular episode when it would slowly become obvious that what I’d intended to be a light amusing tale had become painfully awkward.

  I didn’t know how the tape would affect me. I wanted to listen to it, I was curious about the kind of questions he would ask, but it was not until several days later, when I was driving to visit a friend, that I slipped it into the player. It was raining and the traffic was heavy. As I waited at the lights, trying to clear a patch of vision in
the fogged-up windscreen, my father’s voice, with all its theatricality, filled the car – ‘I confess I feel myself somewhat challenged’– as clear as if he were sitting next to me. ‘My guest is the redoubtable Germaine Greer.’

  Redoubtable. Formidable. This was how my father described my mother when he was in a good mood and performing, usually at a dinner party, glass of red in one hand, guests gathered around him. They were words he used with mock fear, in the face of her achievements. And as his fame continued to slip and hers to rise, he developed a new line, calling himself by my mother’s surname in a loud voice as he poured himself another glass of shiraz.

  As far as I know he never questioned my mother’s desire to work and have a career, although I think he found her popularity and success difficult to deal with. In order to counter this, we were always led to believe, probably more so by her than by him, that although she may have had the greater fame (she had a radio show, a daily newspaper column, and regularly made social documentary programs for television prior to her work on the commission), he was the ‘proper’ broadcaster and the better interviewer. As for issues such as childcare and housekeeping (which were the extent of his understanding of feminism), they were taken care of by cleaners and live-in nannies. Women’s libbers, bra burning and the redoubtable Ms Greer were happening on the outside; they had little to do with our lives, or so he would have liked to believe.

  Shortly after starting her work on the commission, my mother began to realise she was going to leave him. It was a process that took a few years. As her resolve grew, and became more obvious, my father retreated to his study increasingly often. Sometimes we wouldn’t see him for an entire day. He would close the door, turn out the lights, draw the curtains, and sit in his armchair in the near darkness, legs stretched in front of him so that his feet did not rest on the white border of the rug, hands covering his face.