by Judy Pascoe
That was the end of that era. Life wasn’t always full of grief, sometimes we forgot Dad for ages, occasionally then we were torn apart by the memory of him, then it would go away and in time return sporadically, just like an old friend.
35
And it all went on, life for everyone. There was no death anywhere making Dad’s death even more irregular. Eighty-year-old aunts had their jubilees and gold and silver and ruby celebrations, and friends’ parents became grandparents and it seemed nobody died anymore. I actually longed to see death again, thinking that if I could watch it, someone else’s demise, then I could understand it. Or maybe it would remove the pain of my father’s death. But everyone seemed immortal.
Occasionally I thought one parent down, only one to go. And I suspected my mother wouldn’t die for a long time. She’d live on like a Woolly Mammoth so I wouldn’t have to go through the grim affair of her death until I was so much older that I hoped I wouldn’t care as much. And the sky that had appeared to open and take my father away was eventually sewn up again where it had torn apart. The jagged seam mended and the sky became the vast blue above that represented the possibility in a life that you could make anything happen.
Then secondary school came and I was desperate to redefine myself, not to be the girl whose father had died. I dreamt of going away to school where no one had borne witness to my past, but there was no money for that, so I spent my secondary school with all the girls who limited, I felt, who I was and kept me trapped in that identity. I longed to be described as something else, the smart girl, the girl who was good at swimming, even the bad girl or the girl who smoked and went off with boys. But I was forever the sad girl whose father had died, that identity was propped up by everyone.
I don’t know if my brothers had the same problem. They went off to a different school where they became known by their last name. Their first names were never used. Even Gerard the baby grew up and became O’Neill. I asked what they were called if they were in the playground for example and the teacher wanted to single them out. If someone called, O’Neill and they both responded, then it was, ‘Not you, O’Neill. You! O’Neill!’
And they’d point to the particular O’Neill they were after. My brothers didn’t think this was funny or unusual.
After the initial freedom of escaping the straitjacket of school I remained somehow living alongside of life, outside the gates of the city. I was always drawn to people who were missing a loved one, sometimes even a limb. It was a great curiosity to me to know people with both parents, they to me had everything.
I had so few memories of my father, and my mother either didn’t want to share hers or she didn’t have enough to go round. My brothers were similar. Edward had drinking insights, recollections of Dad at football matches or being shown how to knot a tie or make a dove-tail joint. Nothing that helped me.
I was looking for something broader, an image of him as a person rather than as a father.
‘What’s your strongest memory of Dad?’ I asked James from a standing start, no warning at all that I was about to knife through the niceties straight to the personal.
‘I’ve only got the vaguest memory of you in all of it,’ I said.
‘I remember not existing,’ he said. ‘Not feeling like I was wholly on earth,’ he said. The words could have been mine.
That was the oddest thing. James had always felt like me, thought like me, but I’d ignored him I suppose for that reason. I was more interested in what Edward thought and how much Gerard knew and as my mother was always the focus, we all had relationships with her that somehow precluded relationships with each other.
There was an anger towards my mother, all four of us had it, all for different reasons. It would still cement us when we were together and she wasn’t there. It was our intimacy, our unexpressed anger at her. We could recall plotting against her, trying to poison her at one point with something from Edward’s Chemistry set, but it was bright green, so she knew immediately there was something wrong. We had mixed it with lime green cordial, which she never drank anyway, so we gave her that warning, but she swore she was going to call the cops and get us all put in a children’s home.
She still floated above it all, my mother, usually wearing something no one would ever consider wearing, but somehow pulling it off. Even though Dad’s death had happened a long time ago, there was a part of all of us resentful and lost in the thin walls of that house. We were all of us a bit indistinct. But sometimes I was as angry as I’d been the day she’d betrayed me to the priest and Mr King. It was the pain and hurt of a ten year old. I thought the boys were immune to it, but I saw glimpses of their anger.
Once we met for a picnic, the whole family. My mother was still as thin as a post, with very little interest in food, but obsessed that everyone else should eat.
‘Get a sausage for the kids!’ Mum yelled over to my brother Edward who was turning the blackened crescents on the portable barbecue. He waved his tongs in my direction. I grinned back at the sight of him sweating over the hotplate. The smoke twisting up through the grey rattling foliage of the scraggly gums to the heavens above. He passed some sausages around to the children. Then I noticed him stack a plate of food and pass it to our mother.
I saw it, everyone seemed to except Edward. It was a plate of charcoalled food, the scrag end of everything. Gerard found it very amusing.
‘Mate, that’s burnt to buggery,’ he said.
And I saw Edward’s face. He looked awful. And he’d thought he loved her, I could see him thinking. If he did why had he passed her a plate of inedible food?
‘Sorry, Mum,’ he said.
And Mum raised an eyebrow of acknowledgement in his direction to let him know she understood the symbolism of it.
That day she snapped at James as well. He often treated her like a child, patronized her if she got a word or a fact wrong.
‘Don’t treat me like an imbecile because I’m not one, and if I am one, so are you,’ she finally said.
And I saw James have to tunnel into himself to find out what his problem was. She had no time or etiquette for helping us work out our anger. She was angry too, she said. It was a fact of life. It didn’t stop us wishing she could be a little more helpful.
I had my own score to settle with her. We’d agreed to meet, but it had to be somewhere neutral, I thought. Somewhere without domestic distraction, I said. Not that either of us was interested in domestic detail, but we would have the excuse of it, if it was there.
I wanted an apology. I don’t know what for. I just knew I felt I deserved one, for having to be her daughter, like every mother should apologize for their behaviour, for their choices, what they did and didn’t do. I was prepared to apologize too for being an adolescent and this was the moment I had chosen to do it. I was hoping my mother knew this, that she could read my mind.
We met up a mountain above the heat of the suburbs that stretched out to the sea below us. We sat in the cool rainforest; not the crows and sparrows of the suburbs, but the cracking call of the whip bird and the tinkling of the bell bird punctuating our conversation. And the picture of the suburb below, it was our inescapable identity card that we both held in our hearts. It was a peculiar meeting because we each wanted something from it, to take away to start anew, a resolution to begin again.
My mother had burst through the door dramatically: the car was overheating, she was lucky to make it up the hill. What did we have to meet up here for? Her eccentricities that had always amused me had over the years begun to grate.
It was her idea, I reminded her.
Now looking at each other we couldn’t remember the reason for the meeting. To see each other, to exchange snapshots of our past, our version of it, but why now? Why not last year or the year before. I didn’t know.
‘What was Dad like?’ I asked, not knowing I was going to. My mother wasn’t fazed, didn’t stop to take it in or hammer the importance of the moment home by leaving a long pause.
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�Oh, I don’t know,’ she said.
‘You do.’
‘I don’t. I’ve almost forgotten him.’
‘No you haven’t,’ I said.
‘I’ve tried to forget him and I’ve spent so long doing it, it’s almost worked.’
I tried again. ‘What was he like when he was young?’ I asked.
‘You’ve seen pictures,’ she said.
‘I’ve seen pictures, yes, but was he, I don’t know, funny, happy?’
‘He was like you.’
That was all I got out of her, but it helped somehow.
‘Tell me again how you met him?’ I said.
‘They,’ she started, referring her gaze to the suburbs below, ‘your father and Ab, moved a house on to the block next door and I made them a cup of tea and that was that.’
I’d heard it before, but I loved the feelings the description gave me. I’d invented the picture of that day. The house brushing the trees as it came down the street, bumping up over the gutter. My mother watching with her mother as half a house floated past the window.
‘Did Gran say make them a cup of tea?’ I asked.
‘No way, I saw your father and said, I’ll take them in a cup of tea.’
It was a powerful portrait for me, my parents’ meeting. Their eyes seeing each other for the first time. In the nether world four children are already waiting to parachute to earth to join them.
From the hindsight of the mountain I could see the fences and boundaries of the suburb below. I could escape geographically, but not mentally. I could be angry with my mother, throw things at her and yell at her, demand my apology or that she read my mind, but it wouldn’t change the fundamental problem that she was not my father and that was what the problem was.
I didn’t know that all I wanted, all I needed, was my father’s love. I didn’t know why I didn’t know it, why someone couldn’t tell me. Firstly, that I could have it and, secondly, that my mother wasn’t going to give it to me. It had taken me such a long time to work that out. The years of pain, trapped in my foggy beaker.
Slowly then over time my feeling towards my mother softened and she became what she always had been to me – my mother. I realized I was asking for something I couldn’t have. I couldn’t have a father’s love from a mother or the other way around. People were separate, and I had to accept that sometimes you don’t get the other, or you have it for ten years, or ten days, and you have to make that enough to last for a lifetime. But you can’t get the same love from anyone else. And it ruins your life if you try. That was a liberation for me learning that finally, but it came a long, long time later. I learned this, and that some roles remain unfilled.
36
Many years after that I called on my father again. I don’t know why, still no one else had died. I hadn’t even been able to expunge my grief for him at someone else’s funeral.
I don’t know what made me decide I needed to talk to him. It was the anniversary of his death and I went to his grave. I said, sorry.
‘Don’t be,’ he said.
‘But I’ve shut you out, forgotten you, left you for dead.’
‘You have to and you’re here now.’
‘I’m an opportunist,’ I said. I don’t know why I said that.
‘Love your mother,’ he said. ‘She’s a good woman.’
‘I know,’ I said, over and over again. ‘I know, I know, I know. I just regress when I see her. I become ten.’
‘Next time see if you can be eleven.’
Instead of flowers, I left a pile of sodden tissues on his grave.
It seems a long time ago that I was rocking back and forth on that swing with Megan, not a care in the world apart from which figures were sprinting past in the raw blue above. That is a million miles away, almost. If every day is one hundred miles, then every year is thirty-six thousand, five hundred miles, then twenty years is seven hundred and thirty thousand miles away, not a million, but a long way.
But the past is a place I like to visit and the clouds are still in my life in massive formations. Sometimes they appear in pictures that contain everyone’s lives and everyone’s story. I see my own as well in great layers and they make me think of Megan and how we could compare our stories in the cloud friezes. My story would be contained in hers and hers in mine. The story of the tree would be in there but from both perspectives. I miss the freedom of interpreting the clouds with her from our great swing and the freedom of being a child at dusk.
Over the years I’ve noticed the eccentricities surface in all four of us. We all lay dormant in our pupae until later life. It wasn’t until then that we all allowed ourselves to take up the gift of freedom that our mother had demonstrated to us daily. They all have their own stories, my three brothers, and I can’t tell them for them. We have talked about the tree and what it meant, but it has been gone a long time and now there is a brash eucalypt in its place.
They’ve never really said why they wouldn’t climb it and talk to Dad. That all remains unsaid. I knew it embarrassed them at the time and they didn’t believe it, or if they did they would never admit or act on it. James might have, I thought, on a desperate day, but it would have been like saying a prayer out of habit or hope, even when you don’t believe in God.
Edward has the most children and it’s not a Catholic thing, he just has a lot of children and they all have perfect teeth. Gerard unexpectedly took over Dad’s business from Ab and has made a great success of it. James was a late starter, later even than me because he wandered the world for many years.
‘Thursday’s child,’ my mother would always say, ‘has far to go.’
He joined a religious sect for a while. Mum went to rescue him from somewhere in France. I imagine her pulling him out by the ear, as if he was still eight years old. They got on a plane and she brought him back. She didn’t even go in to Paris. None of us could believe that.
‘Why would I want to?’ she said. ‘That’s not what I went for, is it? I went to get your damned brother back.’
Still all wasn’t squared with God, or at least that’s how I felt my mother saw things. If she’d felt even with Him there wouldn’t be this anger. Since Dad’s death she had shaken her fist at Him symbolically and promised to get back at him.
It was two Christians who bore the brunt of her grudge. She couldn’t take Him on in the ring, so she had to pay back some of His disciples.
There were words at her front door apparently the day she opened it and found the two women on the top step. Words along the lines of God being unreliable and a shoddy excuse, open to any interpretation that took your fancy. The two Christians took it well by all accounts. Then there was a push and much evidence debated in the court room as to whether a foot was placed inside the threshold before or after my mother attacked. She paid the price though, my mother, for closing the door on the foot of one of the women. It wouldn’t have been such a bad injury, but the woman was wearing sandals and she broke her ankle and her foot in several places.
Mr Lombardelli was a key witness at the trial. He was just passing on his way to lawn bowls and he saw the whole shocking scene. My mother wasn’t ever convicted, there wasn’t enough evidence, but the shock of it was terrible.
37
About the same time, Mum turned fifty-five and she said she’d come to the end of her time in the suburbs and she sold the house. We hated her for doing that. We couldn’t believe she could be so selfish, but we knew it was time for her to move on. She had outgrown it and so had we. The eucalypt that had been planted in place of the poincianna had always looked a desperate substitute. All the memories were with us anyway, deep inside, we didn’t need the house any more. We didn’t know that then, we cajoled and objected and tried to work out reasons why she should keep it. She was retiring, she said, and moving to the beach, up north.
‘It’s not some geriatric, shopping mall shit hole,’ she said. ‘Like old people seem drawn to.’
‘What are you going to do there?’ I asked.<
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‘How should I know,’ she answered.
‘You won’t know anyone.’
‘So, I’ll meet people.’
I was just trying to put her off.
She was right though. It was a little settlement, old and untouched, just south of where we had spent that summer holiday after Dad had died. And she met him again, the drain man after eighteen years. It was a casual thing at first. They’d never stopped thinking about each other in all those years. They hadn’t kept in touch, but they always knew through acquaintances what the other was up to. They met at the end of a jetty where they both were fishing. My mother is a great fisherwoman. She loves the fight.
It began with just the two of them going on fishing excursions out to the Bay, then as the months went on we realized it was more serious. When I first saw him again in the driveway of Mum’s house, I cried, the great welting sobs returned. It reminded me of what my dad would look like if he was still alive. He would have been similar, not that old, still young enough to have his health and his retirement. Why, why, I thought as I sobbed, eighteen years after his death, did he have to go so young? It was hard to explain my tears to my mother and the drain man, but they knew. The drain man was still Dad’s replacement, even after all those years.
They live together now in a beach house surrounded by hibiscus bushes full of grasshoppers. The drain man’s name is George, but we call him Hunk, because he still is.
It’s not like a normal love affair, the type you get used to hearing about. They are two deeply attractive souls engaged in the struggle of relating, and they emanate a charge when they are together.