‘I don’t know what you’ve been doing that you have a cold,’ she said as she looked lovingly at the sink.
‘It’s just one of those things, Mum. Chance. Nothing else,’ I replied as I spread Vegemite onto Joe’s toast.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘I’ve never had a cold. Never in my whole life have I had a cold. And my teeth are perfect. I went to the dentist last week and he said, “Anna, I don’t know why you bother to come. Your teeth are perfect.”’
‘That’s very lucky, Mum.’
‘It’s not luck. It’s care.’
She nodded vigorously, indicating the enthusiasm with which she agreed with herself. After that, she washed three plates, just to celebrate.
My mother had always held the view that ill health was a sign of moral decay and misbehaviour. Being sick deserved no sympathy and certainly no treatment. Doctors – aside from plastic surgeons, I suppose – were the problem rather than the solution. These views were held so firmly they even survived the manifestly undeserved death of Mr Phillipps. Maybe she saw his sickness as the exception that proved the rule.
In all other cases, illness was caused by indulgence in undisciplined lower-class practices. These included:
• eating garlic;
• going outside with your hands exposed, rather than encased in white cotton gloves;
• walking around in thongs;
• ordering from the menu at restaurants instead of asking for ‘just a little bit of fish’;
• being fat;
• being common;
• eating hot chips.
If, in my phone calls to her, I reported a visit to a doctor, she’d become instantly concerned.
‘What? You went to a doctor?’
There’d be an incredulous pause on the other end of the phone.
‘Well, no wonder you’re sick.’
Even apart from my cold, the visit was turning into a disaster. I’d wanted my mother to properly know her grandchildren, yet she remained so uncomfortable and anxious that it was impossible for them to form any connection. The children treated her as you would a madman wired with explosives. They were polite but enormously wary. Debra tried to jolly everyone along, especially me, but I could see she was tiring of the task.
After breakfast I suggested a trip to the beach. My mother, surprisingly, said she would accompany us. She drove us there in her car, but, once arrived, she refused to step onto the sand. Instead she stood on the concrete path, her white gloves pulled tight, guarding our kicked-off shoes. We had a quick swim and returned to find that she’d been busy with our footwear. All four pairs of shoes were now in an orderly row, largest to smallest, the laces splayed outwards in a neat pattern.
Love is a difficult thing to express and everyone has to do it in their own way. Perhaps, in those neatly arranged shoes, largest to smallest, my mother was showing her affection in the only way possible.
All the same, by the time we’d arrived back at the house, I had a strong sense that Alice/Bunty/Anna wanted us to move on. For a start, she’d spent the drive making promises to the car that it would be thoroughly cleaned once we removed our slightly sandy limbs.
‘How long are you staying?’ she asked over dinner that night in a tone of voice that carried an edge of panic.
I paused, already realising that we’d never survive the length of visit we’d planned, four whole days – a period which now seemed geological in length.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘we were planning to go back on Friday morning, but it is a very long drive . . .’
‘Oh, yes, darling,’ my mother said, seizing the opportunity, ‘it’s a veeeeeery long drive.’
‘So,’ I continued, ‘maybe we need to leave on Thursday morning or maybe even tomorrow evening.’
My mother nodded, as if she had been newly apprised of the distance between Noosa and Sydney. ‘Yes. It. Is. A. Very. Long. Drive,’ she repeated, hitting each word in turn.
‘So,’ I said, keen to accept the hint, ‘best we go back tomorrow, maybe mid-morning so we can get a good start.’
Our stay had been cut in half, just as our trip to the hobbit hole had been halved all those years before.
And, once again, it was to the immense relief of all combatants.
Six months later my mother rang and announced that she planned to stay with us for the night. She was in Sydney for an arts meeting and needed accommodation. You’ll think I’m being unpleasant if I claim she only stayed with us because she was horrified at the cost of Sydney hotels, so let me put it this way: Sydney hotels are very expensive.
A maternal visit was an alarming prospect and made me want to give the place a thorough scrubbing. I was keen to avoid a repeat of the incident in which my mother had taken a pump pack of Spray n’Wipe and cleaned our stove-top to death. I was also aware that she’d have an opinion on the size of the elephant in the room, the one named Richard. And so, prior to her arrival, I cleaned and I dieted – annoyed all the while that I cared so much about the opinion of someone with so little interest in me.
Debra offered to assist with the big clean-up, but I waved her away. ‘She’s my mother,’ I said as I scrubbed at the sink, ‘so it’s my problem.’
But Debra shook her head. ‘We’re in this together. Besides, the woman always gets the blame.’
I said to Debra, ‘Why should you be responsible for her opinion about the house, or about me being fat. It’s nothing to do with you. You shouldn’t care what she thinks.’
Debra shrugged, wearily, as she walked past me to the laundry, returning with a bucket of cleaning gear. She knelt on the kitchen floor, squirted some Jiff onto her cloth, and started scouring a recalcitrant skirting board. As she cleaned she started singing – I imagine for comic purposes. It was a mournful slave song from the American South. She was hopeful, it seemed, that some sort of chariot might swing low and take her to heaven.
Swing low, sweet chariot
Coming for to carry me home . . .
I moved on to the back yard, polishing the sides of the barbecue and squirting window cleaner onto the glass doors. I could see Debra moving around the kitchen, scrubbing out various cupboards. By now she was singing ‘Let My People Go’ in a yearning alto.
Oh, let us all from bondage flee,
Let my people go!
Amusing? Well, up to a point.
I tackled the bathroom, washing the ceiling with sugar soap, causing streams of caustic chemicals to splash directly onto my face. On the upside, I was sweating so much I just had to be losing weight. Debra, meanwhile, was now in the laundry, collecting all the disinfectants and detergents.
She marched past me, carrying a large box. ‘When your father visited we had to hide all the grog,’ she observed. ‘Now your mother’s visiting, we have to hide all the cleaning products.’
I moved on to the boys’ bedrooms, while Debra got busy in the lounge room. As I moved past, I could see she was spraying the dog with air-freshener. I could hear her singing Death be my friend and take me to my lord.
Or something like that. OK, quite funny.
Three days later, my mother knocked on our door and I showed her in. She was wearing what she called her ‘travel suit’ – a tweed skirt and jacket, with contrast trim, stiff and fitted like armour. Her hair was pulled into a tight, fierce bun; her face was powdered with make-up. As she walked up the hallway I could see her usual reflex of anxiety – pulling her gloves on a little tighter. Onto the kitchen table she unpacked all her food for the visit: small amounts of cheese and crispbread and some home-made muesli, all of it in a series of small Tupperware boxes. ‘I don’t really eat anything at all,’ she said yet again, ‘really nothing at all.’
I showed her around the house. She admired Dan’s bedroom, with its collection of soccer trophies, and observed that Debra was a ‘natural mother’. This, I’m pretty sure, was my mother’s codeword for ‘fat’. I took pleasure in the fact that, as yet, she’d said nothing about me.
We went f
or a walk, me slightly ahead with the two boys, while Debra followed with my mother. I could feel my mother’s eyes on me as I pushed up the hill. She was battling with herself about whether to say anything, anything at all, and, to be fair to my mother, she managed to restrict herself to just one small point of disappointment.
‘You know,’ my mother said to Debra, ‘he used to be taller.’
The next morning we asked my mother to look after Joe while we took his older brother to school. All she needed to do was sit him in front of the TV and supply him with some Vegemite toast. While we were away, she put the toast in front of him, left the room, then came back five minutes later to find the toast untouched. She reproached him in her usual posh accent: ‘You haven’t eaten your toast. You must do it now. Otherwise I’ll get into trouble with your daddy and I’ll cry and cry.’
It may seem odd that I can report her dialogue with such accuracy, but she later recounted the whole scene to me, playing her own part with some vigour. According to her own account, she left the room for another five minutes, came back and checked again. ‘Oh, good boy, you’ve eaten your toast.’
Joe, who by now had turned four, looked up at her and said calmly, ‘I haven’t eaten it, I’ve hidden it. I want you to get into trouble with Daddy.’
For a woman with a germ phobia, the hidden breakfast was not good news. Somewhere in the room was the Vegemite toast, sending out its greasy germs and buttery spores into the air. My mother became frantic. My tiny son would not help, refusing to say where he had hidden it. She was on her hands and knees, pulling aside couch cushions, peering under rugs, hyperventilating as she tried to find the toast. We came home to find her still crawling around the room: hair astray, stricken, pale. She left for her meeting soon after, a broken woman.
Once she’d gone, I asked, ‘What did you do with the toast, Joe?’
My boy wandered over to the stereo system and retrieved the toast from behind a speaker. He let flash a tiny triumphant smile. I frowned at him while secretly cheering him on.
Throughout my life, I’d never been much of a match for my mother. But I’d had a role in bringing into life someone who was.
Chapter Eleven
With my mother alone in Noosa, my father was increasingly alone in Sydney. After the mishap of falling off his boat and sundry other disasters, Robyn had thrown him out yet again, although their relationship seemed to limp on. He was living in a downbeat apartment in Bondi, his funds having been exhausted by too many wives, too many boats and too many houses. His drinking had resulted in a clutch of medical problems which saw him regularly hospitalised.
Despite all this, I wanted to maintain a connection, if only to avoid the guilt of the inattentive son. Unlike my mother, my father seemed to enjoy being with my children, on the rare occasions he saw them. Hoping to build on this, I’d offer to pick him up and take him to watch his grandsons play soccer, the game of his youth. Sometimes he’d agree, but mostly he seemed reluctant. Whether it was the cold winds of the soccer field or the way it would eat into valuable Saturday-morning drinking time, I’m uncertain, but I found the reluctance annoying. Despite good grandparents on Debra’s side, my boys were still hungry for family. On the rare occasions my father turned up for soccer, they were thrilled. His lack of interest in them reminded me of his lack of interest in me.
To be fair, he had become darkly depressed. He’d ring Debra, working in her home office, and talk about his despair. On one occasion he claimed to be preparing to commit suicide as she listened. ‘I’ve got the pills lined up. Give me one reason not to take them.’
Debra replied, ‘Give me a minute, Ted.’
Actually, she didn’t say that, although she confessed to the urge when she told me the story. In reality, she talked to him for an hour about his grandchildren – how they’d miss him and the way he wouldn’t see them growing up.
Later that night, she reminisced about a day when my father had been in hospital and we’d taken Joe and Dan to visit. Ted’s eyes had lit up when the two boys came into his room. Joe had performed a little dance by Ted’s bedside in order to cheer him up – doing twirls and jumps and ridiculous bows. Dan – older, more serious – read aloud a piece he’d written that had just won a short story prize for young writers. As Debra recounted the details, she became teary. ‘That day, when I saw the pleasure in his eyes, it was so awful to think what he’d missed out on, of how he could have been a grandfather to them, of what he could have meant to them. I remember when Joe danced, Ted said, “I can’t take my eyes off him,” and I thought, “You know, Ted, you never had to take your eyes off him. No one required it of you.”’
In the course of telling me about my father’s phone call, Debra had gone from a glib Jocasta-like joke about the would-be suicide to deep sadness about my parents – the proper paternal grandparents our children had been denied, and the way they’d missed out themselves on the experience of getting to know our two fabulous boys.
It was a shift in emotions I found familiar. I’d often experienced it when talking about my mother and father: I’d be jokey, then maudlin, then a bit pissed off. It was hard to stare at them full on; they needed to be held at arm’s length. The disappointment I sometimes felt could only be defused by considering them as a comic tale, a ripping yarn, a bundle of eccentricities.
And yet there was an undertow of sadness which I did my best to ignore.
Ted’s last year was marked by the kindness of strangers. I’d receive phone calls after he’d collapsed in the street or become miserable in a bar. People looked after him. He’d give them my phone number and they’d call. They’d report his latest drama like it was fresh news, a problem that had surely never occurred before.
‘He’s fallen over in the street. I hate to say this, but he may have drunk a little too much.’
‘Your father is in our restaurant. He’s become quite upset. I think his wife has just left him; is that right?’
‘He says everyone is trying to crucify him. I think he must have had some really bad news.’
I appreciated their optimism – that here was a good man, a man who had taken a single, and recent, tumble.
Then one night, late, the phone rang and a doctor said my father was in hospital and might not make it through the night. He was seventy-five. I drove to the Prince of Wales Hospital in Sydney’s Randwick and walked into the ward. My father was unconscious on the bed, his body large with fluid. He’d had what the doctors called an upper gastrointestinal tract haemorrhage. I sat with him through the night and was there when he died in the early hours. The cause of death was a haemorrhage due to cirrhosis of the liver – his blood was flowing out of his oesophageal varices into the rest of his body. According to the medical certificate his blood-alcohol level at the time of death was .2, a level at which, I discovered later, ‘you need help to stand or walk and at which blackouts are likely’. Who knew that the cause-of-death certificate would be such an unforgiving document, such a clear inventory of one’s sins?
I was working on radio by then, presenting a program in the late afternoon, which meant arriving at the office at about 11am. It never occurred to me not to go to work. Although it seems strange to me now, I turned up as normal. A few hours after my father’s death, I was reading out the traffic and interviewing politicians. I do remember crying just before I went on air. My friend Philip was working at the station and he walked over and cradled me as I stood in the middle of the office, suddenly sobbing. Selfish, I know, but I wasn’t really crying for my father. I was crying for the yearned-for parent I didn’t receive, but whom we all feel we deserve.
While I was on the radio, Debra rang my mother to tell her the news. My mother sighed knowingly and blamed – accurately, but unfeelingly – my father’s drinking. Debra talked about the funeral, which we’d now have to plan, asking if my mother would want to attend. My mother responded by introducing the subject of Mr Phillipps’ funeral – describing in detail the large cathedral in Armidale and how many
hundreds of people had attended, listing their names with little squeals of triumph. ‘Well,’ my mother concluded with a hoot, ‘it won’t be like that for Ted. I can’t think who will come.’
When I arrived home, Debra described the phone call, and how she found herself holding the phone at a distance from her ear so as not to be too close to my mother’s glee.
‘I felt protective of your father,’ Debra said, surprising herself. She then gave me a tough look. ‘She can only come to the funeral if she agrees not to badmouth him.’
I rang my mother and set the terms of her attendance at my father’s funeral: no comparisons with Mr Phillipps, no criticising Ted to his grandchildren, no comments on the paucity of mourners. My mother signalled her agreement with a querulous snort, indicating that she was bravely bearing the weight of some unreasonable demands.
In the event, eleven of us attended my father’s funeral. His old friend Steve Stephens had already died, so the funeral party consisted of me, Debra, our two sons, my mother, Debra’s father, Max, and our friend Amanda, as well as Ted’s final estranged partner, Robyn, a single old friend of my father’s from Canberra and two chaps from Bowral.
I gave the eulogy. I talked about my dad’s achievements, his adventurous character and the fact that he’d lost his way. I told a story that seemed to sum up his best side: when I was seventeen, there was an arts festival in Canberra called Australia ’75. I spotted a notice appealing for last-minute accommodation: it was for a group of twelve indigenous dancers, travelling down from the Northern Territory. I asked my father if we could put them up in our suburban home and the answer came straight away: ‘Of course we can. That would be great.’ I spent the week living at the festival, sleeping in a tent with my friends, while my father enthusiastically hosted the indigenous dancers, cooking them breakfast in the mornings and sharing beers at night. It was a measure of his gregarious spirit.
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