‘Oh, yes,’ she said to my mother, ‘we are supposed to meditate regularly. It’s a very strict system.’
‘How often do you need to meditate?’ my mother asked.
‘Actually,’ Debra replied, ‘a lot.’ She stretched out the word ‘lot’ so it seemed to have many, many ‘o’s, each one a window of escape from Mr Phillipps and his bobbing penis. ‘At least two sessions a day, of, oh, at least thirty minutes each, and we haven’t done it at all today so we’d better get stuck in.’
At this, Debra jumped off the banana lounge, like a soldier summoned to battle. I followed. We hurried into our allocated bedroom, shut the door and lay on the bed, breathing heavily, as if we had just escaped a mauling by lions.
‘Well,’ I said after a while, ‘you’ve now met both my parents.’
Debra and I enjoyed a lengthy session of ‘meditation’, which meant lying side by side, staring at the ceiling and occasionally clutching at each other in horror. Eventually we emerged to find our hosts in the kitchen. My mother was fiddling warily with something on the stove, while Mr Phillipps prepared drinks – a beer for himself and a Campari and soda for my mother. Both were clothed; more than clothed, they were now rather formally attired. My mother had gone from a bikini to an evening gown with a necklace of pearls. Mr Phillipps the nudist, had been replaced by Mr Phillipps the Oxford don. He was wearing the costume I remembered from school: fawn, sharply creased pants, lace-up leather shoes, a shirt and a Jesus College tie, topped by a dark-blue jacket with, stitched onto the pocket, the Oxford insignia he’d earned thirty years before. His close-cropped beard looked particularly tidy; black hatching on his angular face.
My mother, at this point, was still running her theatre company, based at the local university, while Mr Phillipps was teaching at a private girls’ school but hoping he might secure a position as a lecturer in English, again at the university. As we walked in, my mother was describing an academic with whom she was feuding, calling him ‘a common little man from a two-up, two-down in Yorkshire’. I resisted the urge to point out that this was precisely the form of accommodation from which she herself had sprung, albeit one county along. Instead, for the amusement of Debra, I invited my mother to expand on the subject of her background.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘not everyone can have posh parents like you.’
‘I suppose that’s right,’ said my mother. ‘Still, it was hard for my parents, working in India.’
I tried not to glance towards Debra but India was new.
My mother, as she stirred something on the stove, talked about the British Raj and how people such as her father would spend years battling the Indian heat, all for the sake of Empire.
With mischievous intent, I asked for specifics of his official position. ‘Was he Viceroy, Mum?’ I inquired.
‘Oh, nothing that posh,’ said my mother matter-of-factly. ‘He was Deputy Viceroy.’
I was still trying not to glance towards Debra, but I could sense her astonishment. I’d told her the stories of my mother’s fake past without daring to hope they’d become quite this ridiculous. Next thing, my mother would be serving a Rajasthani curry and describing it as ‘an old family recipe’.
Mr Phillipps suddenly leapt to his feet. Perhaps he knew this stuff about India was all rubbish and was trying to prevent my mother from digging herself in deeper. Maybe. Possibly. I don’t really know. Anyway, it was about to hit 7pm, which meant that Mr Phillipps was scurrying towards the television set. It was time for him to indulge his great daily passion, his raison d’être, his personal obsession: catching out the ABC newsreader in grammatical errors. He turned on the set and made himself comfortable as the news theme played and the announcer began his bulletin. Mr Phillipps didn’t have to wait long. ‘I think, old boy, you’ll find the phrase is “the motorcycle gang was . . .”.’ He looked up and smiled at my mother in triumph. You could tell he was thinking: ‘Oh, yes, a group-noun disaster in the first item; this will prove a bumper half-hour.’
The next item passed, alas without error, but soon there was a clump of pleasurable mistakes.
‘Why, oh, why can’t they understand the use of the subjunctive . . .’
‘An eccentric way to pronounce the word “kilometre”, if you don’t mind me saying so, old chap.’
(Hoots) ‘Fewer! Not Less! Fewer!’
With each of his triumphs, Mr Phillipps would look around the room, inviting our congratulations. Each time, my mother would applaud excitedly, rapidly clapping her hands while holding them close to her chest, halfway between prayer and acclamation.
Mr Phillipps was often like this. Much of what came from his mouth was either an attempt to boost himself or to put others down. In the same way, much of his conversation was designed to show off his large vocabulary, even if – now I think back – it was the same handful of ten-dollar words that were employed to make the point:
Discombobulated.
Peripatetic.
Post-prandial.
I have nothing against these words. I sometimes use them myself. But when Mr Phillipps used those words, it was his way of saying: ‘Look at me, I am special.’
This linguistic showing-off, though, was nowhere near as offensive as the way he talked about others – from the fellow teachers at his school to the local business people. Everyone was beneath him; the whole world had ‘contemptibly low standards’.
Back in the TV room, Debra appeared to have a plan to dispel Mr Phillipps’ cloud of negative thinking. As the TV news came to an end, she introduced the subject of the just-released French film Entre Nous. ‘Everyone I know loved it,’ she said. ‘Our friends from university, my sister and my dad.’
The story was chosen for its upbeat spirit. What possible negative response could any possible person have to the story of a positively perfect film which everyone positively adored? Debra’s conversational offering stopped Mr Phillipps dead, for approximately four seconds.
‘Oh,’ said Mr Phillipps, waiting out the four beats – one, two, three, four – ‘your father speaks French, does he?’
‘Well, no,’ said Debra, ‘he reads the subtitles.’
Again there was a pause in which Mr Phillipps considered the enormity of this admission.
‘I don’t know how he bears it,’ he said finally. ‘When one is familiar with the language, one finds subtitles to be an abomination. Whenever I’m watching a film with subtitles, I find I have to put my hand up thus . . .’
At this point Mr Phillipps mimed himself at the cinema, his chin cocked upwards, his mouth set in a supercilious grimace, his arm stretched out in front of his face, his hand turned horizontally to block out the lower part of the screen. He held the pose so that some of the imagined film could play out in French, his linguistic skills allowing him to comprehend each word as it floated from the screen. My mother, standing at the kitchen bench, swooned in admiration: ‘Oh, yes, he’s fluent in six languages.’
There was another pause, finally broken by Debra. ‘I think Richard and I . . . well, we do need to fit in our meditation before dinner.’
We returned twenty minutes later. The one inescapable appointment for both parties was dinner – held at 8pm in keeping with upper-middle-class British tradition. The dining room was formal, with a polished table, elegant chairs and a grand marble sideboard. For this first night, my mother had cooked tuna mornay – a dish that involved a can of tuna, some frozen peas and what appeared to be a large quantity of wallpaper paste. We sat around the table looking at it warily, like animals in Africa gathered at a poisoned waterhole. Even Mr Phillipps looked a little askance. He said grace, in the form he’d learned at Jesus College, but perhaps without the conviction that God had been personally involved in the preparation of this inedible stodge: ‘We wretched and needy men’ – this really is the wording of the Jesus grace – ‘reverently give thee thanks, almighty God, heavenly Father, for the food which thou hast sanctified and bestowed for the sustenance of the body, so that we may use it t
hankfully.’
My mother ladled out the food and actually it wasn’t too bad, the wallpaper paste so gluey it stopped anyone talking for at least five minutes. Finally, Mr Phillipps tapped his beard clean with his serviette – sorry, napkin – and sought permission to leave the table. My mother giggled coquettishly, as if to say, ‘You won’t guess what he’s up to!’ Her husband returned a moment later with two teddy bears, both sitting on their own tiny wooden chairs. These he placed on top of the marble sideboard, one at either end. Then he headed out again, returning with two more stuffed toys – a lion and a zebra. There was more coquettish giggling from my mother. This went on for some time, Mr Phillipps ferrying into the room the couple’s considerable collection of stuffed toys – some of them characters from Wind in the Willows; others from AA Milne; still more from Narnia. There was also a small army of teddy bears. By the time he finished, we were surrounded by furry forms on all sides, the candlelight glinting in their tiny orange eyes. It was even creepier than the nudism.
I understood, as I observed their behaviour, that they saw their enthusiasm for stuffed toys as enormously endearing and charming. They viewed it, if I read them correctly, as expressive of a certain Englishness: the sort of enthusiasm that might develop between, for example, two British aristocrats unaccountably detained in a dull country town on the wrong side of the world.
My mother giggled some more. ‘Well, say hello to them,’ she trilled in her best Queen Mother voice. And so Debra and I rose from our chairs and worked our way around the room, addressing individual teddies as required, and shaking the occasional paw when pressed.
‘Isn’t this one a fine fellow?’ my mother cooed, pointing to a rabbit dressed in a tartan jacket.
‘Yes,’ I found myself answering, ‘he really is a very fine fellow.’
Then from Mr Phillipps: ‘This chap is called Gombrill.’ And here he would put on a deep voice, in order to speak for Gombrill – ‘Hello, young Miss Debra, I’m Gombrill’ – leaving Debra to sheepishly reply, ‘Hello, Gombrill.’
Further discussion ensued with all the stuffed toys, including an earnest to-and-fro with some giraffes, as voiced by Mr Phillipps in a yearning alto: ‘We all have rather long necks!’ to which view Debra added her concurrence, addressing the giraffes directly, ‘Yes, you really do.’
After some minutes of this, I touched Debra on the shoulder, guiding her away from a group of lions to whom she was, of necessity, offering compliments on the luxurious state of their manes. We scurried to our room, muttering about the need to meditate once more.
The Maharishi is a harsh taskmaster.
Day two saw some more pool-based nudism and some resultant bouts of meditation. By 8pm we were back in the formal dining room. Thankfully, it had been cleared of soft toys. My mother had cooked Welsh Rarebit, her optimistic name for badly burnt cheese on toast. Mr Phillipps was back in his Oxford clothes, delivering his Oxford grace: ‘We wretched and needy men . . .’
I suddenly understood why he always used the Jesus College version. The wording was perfectly suited to my mother’s cooking.
Mr Phillipps took a bite of the food and shook his head in delight. ‘Superlative work, Hobbit,’ he said, using his pet name for my mother. The phrase earned a delighted giggle. We ate as Mr Phillipps entertained us from his store of meaningless whimsy. ‘I think I might go and varnish my grandmother,’ he said, eyes sparkling at his own Goon Show zaniness, and we laughed dutifully as if Oscar Wilde himself had been present.
After a few more hilarious sallies, Mr Phillipps and Debra cleared the table, leaving me and my mother momentarily alone.
My mother returned instantly to the topic which had long been a staple of our phone conversations: ‘You know, Richard, I have to thank you for finding him.’
‘Sure, Mum.’
‘And helping me escape your father.’
‘Sure, Mum.’
‘He was a terrible man, your father. Even in New Guinea, he’d get so drunk. I remember him crawling up the front path to the house, so drunk he couldn’t stand.’
I didn’t say anything for a second. It was all too familiar. Just how many times in the years since they’d separated had I been forced to listen to one of my parents attacking the other? It wouldn’t be hard to calculate: by this point, I was ringing my mother more regularly, maybe once a month, and my father every couple of weeks. Each time I talked to either they’d get stuck into the other, so let’s say twelve plus twenty-four is thirty-six per year, plus an aggregator for my dad, since there were a few years in which we were living in the same house. So, by this time, I’d heard their mutual insults on several hundred occasions, either my mother’s ‘Your father was a horrible drunk’, or ‘That bastard Phillipps’ from the other side. It’s amazing they didn’t get on better, since they shared such an identical hobby: bad-mouthing each other to their son.
But I didn’t say any of that. Instead I declared, with some aggression: ‘Mum, I don’t want to talk about it. I hate always having this conversation with you.’
At this point, Mr Phillipps, concerned by the sudden tone of disputation, emerged swiftly from the kitchen, a fluffy object in his hand. He held it aloft. It was Toad from Wind in the Willows. Mr Phillipps stood at the head of the table and waggled the toy at the two of us. He used his deepest voice: ‘No one has noticed my fine new waistcoat.’
There was a pause. My mother and I were too enmeshed in our stand-off to participate, but by then Debra had also re-entered the room.
‘Yes, Mr Toad,’ Debra said in a flat, defeated monotone, ‘it really is a beautiful waistcoat.’
The conversation, as planned, rapidly shifted to Mr Toad and his attractive attire. Mr Phillipps then moved on to the subjects of DH Lawrence, the poor standards of Australian universities and the lessons he’d learned at the feet of JRR Tolkien. He spoke on this last subject for some time. If my memory is correct, for about ten weeks.
Come the next morning we left Doriath a little after 10am, pleading a sudden work crisis at home. Our five-day visit had been cut by half. We drove up the dirt road and then out onto the highway. Behind us, the enchanted girdle closed itself tight.
Chapter Seven
Occasionally, with close friends, I would tell the story of my mother and her enchanted nudist hobbit hole. Knowing my advantage, I developed a dinner-party game called ‘Who’s Got the Weirdest Parents?’ It was entertaining but also revealing: once played, you could never again look over the red roofs of suburbia and imagine that life beneath them was anything other than screamingly odd. The rules were simple: you’d proceed around the table and each person would recount their parent’s strangest habit. The participant with the weirdest parent would win the round. Sometimes victory was mine, but surprisingly often I would lose: my mother, with her nudist husband, teddy bears and fake past, would seem rather drab compared to the tales of world-class eccentricity found in the bloodlines of my seemingly normal friends.
Hilariously, there’d often be one person in the group who’d say: ‘This game seems fun, but I’ll just sit out and listen. My parents are so boringly normal.’ But that same person – when pressed – would falter and say, ‘Well, I guess Dad was normal except for the way . . .’ And then out would tumble a tale of such frothing oddity that it would sweep all the other stories aside.
There was, for example, the tale of a father who, despite being a medical practitioner, would watch the TV with a pillow on his head, sucking a hanky, in order to cut down the radiation. Or there was the father who, despite being unemployed for two years, left for ‘work’ each day in a company-style car which he’d purchased to fool his family he still had a job. And then there was the finance executive who built a laundry in his carport so he could wash his clothes after a day at work because he didn’t like the idea of his wife touching his undergarments.
‘Is that the sort of thing you mean?’ asked the man with the underwear-sensitive father.
‘Oh, yes,’ those at the table rep
lied, helpless with laughter, ‘that’s exactly what we mean.’
My only hope in lifting my success rate at Who’s Got the Weirdest Parents? was if my mother’s eccentricities became yet more florid. Or if my father became dysfunctional enough that I could throw him into play as a two-for-one offer.
On both scores, I proved to be well placed.
After university, I signed up for a cadetship at the Sydney Morning Herald. Debra was still writing plays, plus some television scripts – Sweet and Sour, Bananas in Pyjamas, Police Rescue. We bought a flat in Kings Cross and then later, when we decided to try for a child, traded up to a house in Marrickville. The baby – Daniel – duly arrived, amid much celebration.
I know the stereotype is that a troubled upbringing makes it difficult to be a good parent: ‘You don’t know what good parenting looks like, so you have to invent it from scratch.’ I didn’t find it so. I loved my new role as a father, whatever the usual problems of sleepless nights and apple-juice stains on my work clothes. I found my life shifting in a thrilling and positive direction. I don’t know why I found it so fulfilling and straightforward: maybe I just copied Debra, who seemed to know exactly how to be a parent.
Years later, a friend confided that Debra had been her model for the mother she wanted to be: ‘She was warm and funny, committed but not hovering, ready to feed her children’s interests but not push them into things; a person her kids wanted to be around.’
So I was not the only one learning from her.
Meanwhile, my mother was content inside her hobbit hole with Mr Phillipps. The two had married and my mother changed her surname (to his) and then her first name (to Anna, thus moving on from both Bunty and the original Alice). Life was good within the enchanted girdle and she had no need for anyone else. I talked to her on the phone every few weeks, but rarely saw her. That suited me. My mother was uninterested in either the new grandchild or our new Marrickville house. That said, she did inquire why we hadn’t bought in Woollahra, a suburb which, during her time in Sydney, was considered the best. I explained that Woollahra was still considered the best and therefore cost many times what we could possibly afford. ‘That’s a shame, darling,’ she said in a tone of voice which suggested, ‘Well, if only you’d worked that little bit harder . . .’
Flesh Wounds Page 6