Mr Phillipps’ daughter and I set up a bonfire close to the house, carting armfuls of old papers and academic journals and the odd nudie picture of my mother and my English teacher. We threw them all into the flames. The smoke snaked up into the sky.
With Mr Phillipps dead, my mother had a change of attitude towards me and my family. She became more interested in contact. Following the funeral, I would ring her every Sunday morning. During each call, she still found the need to talk about how awful my father had been – adding to the thousands of times I had already heard her customary lecture. On the other hand, she would surprise me by asking about the children, about Debra, about me. Well, a little.
She also decided to proceed with the planned house in Noosa. A change of location, a new project, might help distract from her loss. My mother threw herself into supervising the construction and made the move within a year of Mr Phillipps’ death. The completed house was pleasant, with a balcony on which she could sit watching the river. She made an effort to socialise, joining the local music society and exercising her long-practised skill at taking the money at the door – no freebies – her white gloves protecting her from the germs. She developed a small circle of friends.
For all that, alone in this large house, her eccentricities had room to flourish.
I visited her once in that first year, flying up to stay a couple of days. After a few hours in her company, it was clear that her germ fetish had grown more intense. The white gloves, previously worn only on external excursions, were now mandatory whenever the front door was ajar, the fabric being anxiously tugged higher and tighter as she faced the outside world.
In her own kitchen, her habits were increasingly fastidious. At dinner time, she rapidly ate three small pieces of cheese with a couple of crackers, then moved to the sink to wash her plate. She stood by the sink, waiting for me to finish eating various parts of the meal I’d cooked myself, collecting each item as soon as it was surrendered – scooping up my teaspoon when I put it down, then my tea cup, then anxiously hovering, waiting for the plate from which I’d eaten my steak, then the bowl from which I’d eaten my salad.
‘Mum, I’ll wash up everything after I’ve finished.’
‘It’s better to do it as you go. I’m happier not to have the mess.’
Her self-absorption also seemed to be intensifying. As she hovered at the sink waiting for my wine glass, I let my eyes wander the room. Above the stove, there was a black-and-white photograph, presumably taken by my father, in which she was a nineteen-year-old ingénue, smiling for the world. Over in the corner, above the kitchen table, was an enormous framed photo of her standing in front of the half-constructed Sydney Opera House, circa 1971. And propped on a side table was an image from her time at The Australian Ballet, taken on a glittering Sydney Harbour, laughing with Rudolf Nureyev.
Topping off the collection was a large oil painting, with heavy gilt frame, that showed her as a young aristocrat – arms crossed, chin tilted upwards, dressed in a cashmere twin-set and pearls, presumably caught in an idle moment before the fox hunt at her English mansion. During my childhood, my mother always had a few photos of herself mounted on the walls, but here, in the new Noosa house, the urge had been more thoroughly indulged. It was as if her home had been taken over by the Anna Phillipps Appreciation Society.
Having finally claimed victory over my wine glass, the much-pictured woman pottered around the kitchen, wiping down surfaces that didn’t need wiping down. As she did so, she described her role in various local organisations.
‘In the Music Society, they don’t have any system for selling the tickets and keeping the money safe. They don’t have anyone like me, someone who’s been part of the industry.’
‘That’s where you can help, Mum. I’m sure they appreciate what you do.’
‘No, really, I had to take over the whole thing myself.’
Her narcissism seemed wrapped up in anxiety, in a need to prove herself worthy – as an aristocrat, as a friend of Nureyev, as a person with a spotless house, as someone who knew how to run a box office better than anyone else.
I sat at her kitchen table, watching her fret and boast and clean, always in clear sight of a photograph of herself.
This, I thought, is the problem with self-love. It’s so rarely reciprocated.
After dinner, we watched television together and then she asked me to ‘get the teddies ready for bed’. This involved us both mounting the stairs to the smallest bedroom. It was home to about twenty-five teddy bears, some of whose glimmering orange eyes I remembered from the hobbit hole in Armidale. They were of various shapes and sizes. Some were grouped together on a single rocking chair; others lolled on their own custom-made furniture. My mother stood in the doorway and pointed to a pile of woollen rugs.
‘They like being snug for the night.’
I placed a tartan rug over the group sharing the rocking chair, tucking in the sides. There were some smaller rugs and these I placed on various furry laps.
‘Keep the lamp on,’ said my mother when I went to turn it off. ‘They prefer a bit of light.’
If my mother’s germ phobia was becoming more intense, so was her spirit of reinvention. The next day, I noticed a stack of mail on the desk in the kitchen. Most of the envelopes were addressed to Dr Anna Phillipps. She must have decided, following her husband’s death, that his doctorate was an inheritable honour. She’d also had it included on her letterhead.
A typed curriculum vitae, copies of which she had stacked on the desk, presented what she now regarded as her background. The girl who, in reality, had left school at fourteen, in about 1938, had been transformed into a new woman.
Her CV now began:
1938–50 Educated at The Convent of Notre Dame, Yorkshire, England.
The dates given in this entry, I should explain, imply that my mother didn’t leave school until she was twenty-six. Or that, miraculously, she’d been born eight years later than the date on her birth certificate.
Next up:
1951–54 Trained as a journalist with the Yorkshire Morning Post.
Of course, by 1954 she’d been in Australia and New Guinea for eight years, but that chunk of her life disappears. According to her CV, she was still in Yorkshire, serving as a cadet reporter.
Then the New Guinea move finally comes, six years later than in reality:
1954–58 Played a major multi-faceted role in the establishment of Papua New Guinea’s first newspaper.
It’s a highly unusual case of someone transferring directly from a newspaper in the north of England to one in Papua New Guinea, with no Australian interregnum.
I don’t want to sound mean. The desire to shave eight years off your age is, I know, a common one, and probably sensible if you want to remain on committees and boards once you’ve retired. I’m more confused about why she thought Yorkshire was better than Lancashire; about why she invented a convent school, even though she was never a Catholic; and why she shrank her adventurous twelve years in Papua New Guinea to just four – seemingly with no point other than to fit in a pretend cadetship on a regional British paper.
As often with my mother, I found her real story so much more impressive than the one she concocted.
My mother’s spirit of perpetual reinvention also involved plastic surgery. My father, after their marriage break-up, would complain to me about the financial cost of my mother’s constant desire to go under the knife. According to him, she was an early adopter. It started when we were about to leave Sydney: when I was eleven and she was forty-five. This was in the late 1960s, when such things were not common. She was film-star good-looking, so the facelifts were odd – a continuation of the remaking of self that had seen her change name, country, social class and now her appearance.
Even in Noosa, all these decades on, the plastic surgery was clearly being topped up. Later, I found some of the receipts. Occasionally, as my mother moved around the house, cleaning and tidying, I could see the marks on the side
of her face where the latest tightening had occurred. The sight of these scars always made me feel tender towards her. Surely at some point a person could stop caring so intensely about what was thought by the rest of the world?
That night, my final night in Noosa, we went for dinner to the local RSL club. I was to meet my mother’s friends. There were three couples, one with a grown-up daughter in tow. They were all kindly, smart people, friendly towards my mother.
When the time came to choose our meals, my mother made a great show of not accepting a menu. ‘They know me here,’ she told me in a loud stage whisper. ‘They know I just have a tiny bit of fish.’
The waiter returned and started taking orders. As each person spoke – ‘I’ll have the steak’; ‘The Chicken Parmigiana and chips, thanks’ – my mother would clap her hands together in dismay: ‘I don’t know how you can possibly eat all of that!’ Or, ‘Oh no, not sausages!’ Or, ‘I couldn’t stand ordering that.’
When the waiter arrived at her side, she smiled primly and said, ‘Just my usual,’ to which the waiter nodded his understanding. My mother smiled at me, keen for me to notice how special she was, how different from her friends.
A little later, the waiter duly brought her a small portion of grilled fish with some lettuce on the side. She smiled her assent. The delivery of everyone else’s meal, however, was accompanied by loud groaning from my mother: ‘Look how many chips!’ ‘How are you going to fit it all in!’ ‘Really, I don’t know how you do it.’
After we’d eaten, we stood around outside the club, chatting. Everyone was in a good mood, despite my mother’s criticism of their food choices. The thirty-something daughter of her friends, trying to be pleasant, complimented my mother on her shoes, which were low-heeled yet brightly patterned.
The thirty-something daughter was herself wearing an attractive pair of high heels.
‘I don’t know how you can wear those,’ my mother replied, pointing to the offending footwear. ‘Only shopgirls wear high heels.’
The high-heeled daughter looked at my mother in some disbelief and then glanced at her own mother – searching for some possible explanation of why on earth anybody would put up with someone like this. Her mother smiled in that apologetic ‘I know, but please don’t make a fuss’ way.
I did quite intensely dislike my mother at this moment – the way she acted so superior to good people who were just trying to have dinner with friends. As we drove off, I wondered how they endured her.
I presume they simply forgave her rudeness, thinking it a sad consequence of her aristocratic birth.
Chapter Ten
After a couple of years of dutiful phone calls and a few more solo visits, I decided to drive up to Noosa with Debra and the children: a repeat of the trip years before when I took Debra to visit the Enchanted Girdle. Ever since the death of Mr Phillipps, my mother had been asking more about the children and their activities. Maybe she could at last take pleasure in our family. It seemed worth a try.
It was a long drive, spread over two days, and we rolled into Noosa just after dinner. As we approached my mother’s house, I counselled the children that they should refer to their grandmother by her latest chosen name – ‘Anna’ – avoiding the use of terms such as Nanna, or Grandmother, or Gran. My mother had long insisted she couldn’t accept being called a grandmother, as she was ‘far too young to be one’. Birthday cards to the children, if they arrived at all, were always signed ‘From your daddy’s mummy’, or ‘From your father’s mother’.
I’m not a professor of linguistics, but I’m pretty sure that someone who is ‘your father’s mother’ might also turn out to be ‘your grandmother’, but it was a point I ignored when speaking to the children.
‘Just call her Anna,’ was my firm instruction to those in the back seat.
We knocked on the door and were welcomed inside. My mother showed us into the living room, at which point we discovered we had a more immediate problem than the issue of what to call her. My mother had spread a large bed sheet in the centre of the floor. In the middle of the sheet she had installed a vinyl pouffe. Debra and I were invited to sit on the normal furniture, but the children were pointed towards what looked like a makeshift ebola control centre.
Debra looked at me. I looked at her. We both shrugged, wearily. With my mother, things just got weirder. We nodded to the children: do as she says.
‘Shall I sit here, Anna?’ said Dan, cautiously.
‘Yes, Daniel, I’ve made that spot especially for you and your brother.’
So the two of them – Dan aged seven, Joe aged three – sat on the pouffe, itself an island in a sea of sheet.
I presume my mother was worried that her grandsons would shed germs and dirt on her furniture and carpet, much like moulting dogs. If they sat on the pouffe, she could wipe down the vinyl with disinfectant, then gather up the bed sheet, complete with whatever skin cells they had shed, and put it through the washing machine, the dial turned to ‘hot’.
Was she now so mad, so clearly suffering from obsessive compulsive disorder, that I should have been a bit more sympathetic? Maybe. A nicer person would have been so. But all my focus was on my two admirable sons, who were politely complying with the commands of this strange, shrill woman.
I watched as they dutifully sat there, back to back, their faces serious and wary, like tiny Mexican bandits about to commence a duel. My mother put on the television to entertain them, but the pouffe was too small for them to sit side by side, so Dan shifted to allow his little brother to see the screen. For the next half-hour, Joe watched TV, leaning against his big brother’s back, while the big brother stared patiently in the wrong direction at the blank white wall.
When the program finished, my mother offered to show us the room where we’d be sleeping. Dan, relieved to be released from the Centre for Disease Control, leapt up the steps. Young Joe followed, his arm darting out to steady himself against the wall. I heard a distressed intake of breath from my mother. She leaned down to her grandson in order to address him directly.
‘Now, Joseph, you mustn’t touch the wall. If you touch the wall, you’ll leave a mark. Then Anna will have to get the whole wall repainted. And I don’t have enough money to do that.’
My mother ended the sentence with a little fake sob, underlining the gravity of the situation, as if poverty, starvation and a Dickensian workhouse were just one handprint away. My three-year-old was being invited into a detailed consideration of my mother’s finances, the questionable durability of wash-and-wear paints, and the exorbitant rates charged by Queensland house-painters.
He flashed her a look. It was as close as a three-year-old could get to: ‘Man, oh man, you are one crazy lady.’
Debra, for obvious reasons, volunteered to put the children to bed while I joined my mother in the living room. She offered me a beer and asked that I prepare her a Campari and soda. Once we were sitting comfortably, she searched around for a suitable topic of conversation. It took her three seconds.
‘What are you doing about your weight problem?’ she said.
‘I don’t have a weight problem,’ I answered, somewhat aggressively, perhaps tired by the drive.
‘I think you do,’ my mother chirped, in the manner of a woman uttering a mischievous witticism.
‘Well, maybe a kilo or two,’ I replied sullenly, ‘but it’s none of your business.’
I took a defiant swig of my beer.
‘I wouldn’t normally say anything, darling,’ my mother continued, ‘but it’s a health issue.’
This was an exaggeration. Even on official guidelines I was perhaps eight kilos overweight; I was not at death’s door. Like many people, I was a victim of the food pyramid – a government-sponsored program that instructed people to eat vast quantities of pasta and rice, a policy that resulted in us taking on the shape of a pyramid.
To change the topic, I showed my mother some photographs of a block of scrub Debra and I had bought a few hours from Sydney with our
old friend Philip. We were in the process of building a mud-brick house, using our own labour. One of the photos showed Debra, looking beautiful as she stood in front of a very large termite mound. The mound was a couple of metres high and a good metre wide.
‘Oh, look at the size of that ant-heap,’ my mother observed. ‘It’s almost as big as Debra.’
As was often the case with my mother, I found myself thinking, She can’t have said that. No way could she have implied that my attractive partner looked like an enormous pile of termite excrement. I felt my temperature rise. If only Mr Phillipps were here he could’ve grabbed Mr Toad and forced a change of topic. ‘I don’t think anyone has noticed my fine waistcoat . . .’
I told my mother that I needed to fetch the rest of the bags from our car. While passing down the hallway, I noticed she had two photographs of me on the table inside the front door. They were side by side. There was one of me at fourteen, looking painfully thin. And another, taken more recently, in which I was photographed from below in a way that made me look like Marlon Brando after eating a whale.
Whispering in our upstairs bedroom later that night, I told Debra about the twinned photos: one thin, one fat. She rolled her eyes, and presented her analysis: ‘It’s her way of saying, “This is him when I looked after him; and here he is under the regime of that fat girlfriend of his.”’
It was an analysis hard to dispute.
By breakfast the next morning, I was seriously regretting the trip, much as I had regretted the visit to the hobbit hole all those years before. Feeding the children their toast and cereal while my mother hovered with rubber-gloved hands involved more tension than I’d ever experienced before – at least in the period before I’d eaten my own breakfast. I’d also woken with a cold, which I knew my mother saw as a sign of weakness and loose living.
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