For a Girl

  I learned slowly. This is one of the things I learned: if your body needs to cry or make noise or punch the air or roll up in a ball and shiver, and instead you accommodate a small child—watch Play School, read stories, go for a little walk—or otherwise ignore what your body is telling you, your body will not stop trying to tell you. It will make you tired, more tired than you have ever felt. The weight will press down on you all day and into the night. It will make you unreasonable, like a bomb about to go off. The bomb will go off.

  In our sessions, while Stace moved over my body, soothing, untying the knots, testing, breathing and singing, I often did nothing but cry. I howled out loud sometimes, tears springing from my eyes, snot falling from my nose to the floor, then shed quieter, saltier tears that brought a measure of relief. At these times, I was nothing but the water of my tears, a long river. I had no idea I had so much crying in me.

  Stace had Dr Seuss’s fox in sox tattooed on her arm. I’d see it sometimes as she worked. Her dog Bea, who used to lie on the floor of the massage room, died in the time we were meeting. She got Bea’s pawmark tattooed on her foot and I used to look at that too, through the hole in the massage table.

  I learned that my body’s pain often had a message. I started to talk to my body, to my right leg, to my back muscles, to my heart. Tell me, I would say, tell me what the matter is. And my body would speak. It may be that other forms of grief are locked somewhere else in us, but babies are in our bodies. They form there, they emerge from there, they remain connected there our whole lives. It was my body that needed to tell me, to help me learn what I had done.

  Although I didn’t know it at first, I had gone into the past to find baby Ruth, the child I gave to strangers. I would come back changed. It would take three years.

  The house of my addled mind

  WE BOUGHT THE HOUSE IN Thomas Street by accident. A real estate agent I’d come to know phoned to tell me she had this house that needed work and the price had come down. We went to see the house and ruled it out because it needed so much work and we didn’t have enough money. Six months later, the price came down again and the agent phoned me and said we should make an offer. Although we didn’t know it, she only included us in the invitation so she could push a buyer with more money than us up in price, but the other buyer withdrew at the last minute. The family who owned the house were keen to sell so they sold to us.

  We bought the house by accident but, even so, everyone said we bought well. We got a survey map from olden times and found out Thomas Street was once called Enoggera Terrace. This seemed apt. There were no trees in the yard so we planted some.

  The drought started.

  Before the contract settled, we discovered the house itself had problems too. According to the surveyor, the western edge was sitting in the neighbour’s yard. The solution, shifting the house, would be expensive and complicated. We could have backed out at that stage—our solicitor advised us we should—but we decided instead to proceed, not really knowing why.

  The day we settled we went over and drank champagne. I hadn’t been to the house since we’d bought it and even though it was empty of the detritus of a family’s fifty years, it felt strangely cloying, as if one couldn’t take in enough air. We quickly gravitated to the backyard. We returned a few days later with the architect and builder, and the same thing happened. We walked through the house and met in the yard. It’s a strange thing to say, but it was as if the house pushed you out.

  ‘Look at that view,’ visitors said, and it buoyed me up.

  At first we decided to renovate before we moved in, but then our rental sold so I suggested we should live in the house while we planned. This will be great, I told David, like camping. We’ll understand the breezeways, the play of light at different times of day. It will make for a better renovation.

  Before we moved in, we arranged for the men who wear special suits to remove the asbestos sheets that lined the kitchen and laundry. After they finished, our builder Dave found live termites in the back half of the house. The termites had eaten out most of the western wall, which we’d have to replace when we removed the aluminium cladding. Termites don’t like hardwood, the termite exterminator told us, so the structure was probably okay. He was strangely enthusiastic. He described the termites’ achievements like they were his children making the honour roll.

  During the Christmas break, we went to the house intending to remove the wallpaper from the living and dining rooms and clean the mouldy ceilings. We’d already taken up the carpets after they filled the vacuum cleaner four times and were still nowhere near clean. We were to move in at New Year. Where the men in special suits had removed the asbestos sheets, Dave had put up plasterboard as a temporary fix. Our light switches hung out of the walls on bits of taped-up wire.

  We used an abrading tool to score the wallpaper in the dining room, planning to steam it off so we could paint. I let Otis use the abrading tool, like a pizza wheel with spikes, as this was something he could do. Late on the first evening, I asked David why the wallpaper colour looked powdery, like lead paint looks powdery. We tested and found out that the wallpaper was full of lead. Lead was used in wallpaper dyes as well as paint, apparently, although most people don’t know that. We had been letting Otis help all day. There were flakes of leaded paper everywhere.

  We stopped immediately, removed Otis from the house and then cleaned the floors and masked as much as we could of the remaining leaded surfaces with paint or tape.

  We researched lead poisoning. Children take up heavy metals at twice the rate of adults. A piece of lead paint the size of a ten-cent piece would kill Otis. Smaller amounts would affect his growth and brain development. In the United States, lead has been named the number one environmental hazard for children. We agonised over whether to get Otis tested, decided against it as the pain of a blood test seemed unfair and there was nothing we could do if we had poisoned him but wait.

  Life-threatening acute lead poisoning is treated with chelating agents, chemicals that bind with the molecules of lead and take them out of the body. Chelating agents are themselves hazardous to human health. Sometimes they damage the liver or kidneys on their way through the body. But if the alternative is death, chelating agents are better than nothing. For chronic lead poisoning, chelating agents are not used. They’re too dangerous. The only thing you can do is wait and hope. We masked and re-masked whatever leaded surfaces we came across and prepared to move in as planned at New Year.

  When we started packing up to move, I realised I didn’t want to bring my father’s ashes with us to our new house.

  Dad had died five years before. His ashes had followed me from Stanley Terrace, where he was in the laundry tub cupboard and couldn’t see the fig tree, to Prospect Terrace, where he took up the back of the garage and missed the view of the gum tree in the bushland reserve, to the rented house that had nothing more than a backyard shed for him, though with louvres through which an edge of a mango tree was visible. I wasn’t proud of the way I’d kept him, but I hadn’t known what to do with him.

  I had the ashes because the woman Dad had been living with when he died, Pat, offered them to us once Dad was cremated. My brothers had no interest. Mum was still in Perth. So I’d taken them.

  Ian and I met Pat and her daughter for the first time at the funeral home where the consultant (that’s what it said on her badge)—who had amazing fairy-floss-pink hair in a beehive—took us through possible coffin accessories. Pat and her daughter, the mother of a toddler, wanted to put a teddy bear on the coffin because, they said, Dugald so loved teddy bears. He regularly gave them to the toddler. Pat and her daughter wanted a teddy bear rather than a cross.

  Pretending I was not, as a middle-aged woman, narcissistically wounded by my father’s affection for this unknown toddler—the affection he had never shown me, his actual daughter—I began to wonder if we were in the right meeting. I know denial is a natural phase of grief, but the Dugald Ian and I knew did not love teddy b
ears. He eschewed sentimentality of any kind. He told us Santa Claus was made up and thought ‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right’ was a love song. His most frequent morning greeting was, ‘You kids, shut up!’ delivered in a considerable state of irritation because we’d made enough noise to disturb his sleep.

  In the last decade of his life, Dad hadn’t responded when I called and left messages. He’d lost touch with Mum as well, after he’d asked her to marry him again and she’d refused him (pride, you have to have some pride, she told me). I later learned he’d written near the end to tell her he was dying—metastatic brain cancer by the time they found it—and she’d spoken to him several times, but then he’d stopped calling. He’d also told her she wasn’t to tell us he was dying, so she didn’t.

  I had a notion that if I could put my father to rest with his own mother, who had loved him dearly, I might find some peace about his death. By telephone, I confirmed that my grandmother’s ashes were in a box in a wall at the crematorium gardens at Albany Creek north of Brisbane.

  The next day, I put my father in the car beside me and drove out to the crematorium. I took Otis with me, explaining on the way the best I could the difference between cremation and burial, hoping that when we got there he wouldn’t ask where the furnace was, hoping he would fall into a much-needed sleep on the way home. When we arrived, I left my father’s ashes in the car and went inside with Otis. I didn’t have an appointment.

  I had told Susan, the consultant I’d spoken to on the phone, that I was seeking to lay my father to rest with his mother. We found two adjacent niches overlooking the garden.

  ‘This will do,’ I said. ‘This will be perfect.’

  ‘It will cost you to move your grandmother,’ Susan said. ‘And you’ll need authority.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ I said.

  ‘And time,’ she said. ‘It will take time.’

  There’s no nice way to dump your father’s ashes. While Susan answered a call, I took Otis and went out to the hot car and picked up Dad, whose sealed plastic urn was still in the Body Shop paper bag I’d carried it through three houses in. I took Dad and left him on Susan’s desk and made an exit while she was still on the phone. Urgent, I mouthed. We’re moving.

  She stared at me as I backed out of her office.

  Having done nothing for years, I found myself needing to deal with my father’s remains now. I was becoming used to this new self that needed to do things now. It was as if my body was running the show for the first time in years, and I had as much choice as a newborn baby and no loud squeal with which to protest.

  A few days later, I received a receipt for my father’s ashes from Susan, together with a quote and many forms that needed many signatures.

  We moved in after New Year as planned. I tried to create a home at Thomas Street but I didn’t have enough energy to contend with a house that disagreed so vehemently. Come a cold snap in April, we discovered rats. I found evidence of them, a half-chewed apple, and then I started to hear them gnawing the wood inside the cupboards in the night. They are habitual gnawers, apparently, to keep their teeth a length that suits them.

  Our rats lived in the roof cavity and came down in the night through the places where there were still no walls and ceilings, the front veranda, the lean-to laundry and toilet out the back. I was seeing a counsellor at the time, and he told me that rats will attack small children. He had a rat phobia, I learned, but for a few weeks, until we dealt with the rats, I slept in Otis’s bed with him.

  We set traps, baited with bread and peanut butter sprinkled with chocolate, all organic. I’d hear the traps snap in the night but the rats didn’t die; they thumped around the kitchen with the traps on their backs. David had to go out and use a shovel to send them on to the next life. Finally, I bought poison, something I thought I would never do, and threw it into the ceiling cavity. The rats stopped coming.

  I called the men in special suits to come back. Otis had found so many pieces of asbestos in the backyard that I could build a wall with it, I told them. I said the terminal diseases caused by asbestos—mesothelioma and lung cancer—take thirty years to manifest themselves and that while for David and me it was less important, for Otis it was a huge burden. He is three, I said. He will die a young man if you don’t find all the asbestos. They stared at me and didn’t say anything.

  It was June and the house was a refrigerator. There were holes in the walls, in the floor, and no insulation in the roof. I was swimming at South Bank in unheated water. It was so cold I would shiver uncontrollably after I got out. In those months of midwinter, my swimming was something akin to ice bath treatment in a nineteenth-century Scottish mental hospital. When I was this cold, I forgot what I was upset about.

  Otis was happy, oblivious to the dangers and relieved he was able to draw on the walls to his heart’s content since they were coming down in the renovation, but I feared for David. He became more inward-looking. I think he worried about money, about how we’d afford the house if my life disintegrated any further. I was still meeting my work commitments but only barely. Someone told us that many renovations end in divorce. The architect did drawing after drawing but none of them worked.

  Some mornings I arrived home from the ride into South Bank to swim and as I climbed the stairs to the front door felt heavier with each step until I reached the threshold. I wanted neither to go nor stay, just to remain there forever in the morning sun. It was the strangest feeling. I started to believe it had to do with the physical house as well as the house of my addled mind.

  The sewer in Hope Street

  ONE NIGHT AFTER DINNER, WE decided to go for a walk. Otis had an enduring interest in underground drainage systems. The year before we’d carried a small chisel-like tool and a torch with us on walks to lever the lids off water drains so we could have a good look at them. In the evenings at Thomas Street, we sometimes walked to an enormous water pipe in Hope Street and debated what kind of drainage system it was part of.

  But this night, Otis had been slow putting his shoes on, slow getting ready, and it was like a weight bearing down on me, a weight that had been pressing me down all day. We had finally set out when Otis remembered he needed his builder’s helmet. We must go back, he said. David said he would go back.

  I yelled at Otis that I would not wait any longer, yelled at David, walked off flooded with feelings I could hardly contain.

  I found a place to hide up the street, an open garage attached to a house whose residents I was sure were away. I crouched in a corner and made myself as small as I could. I was shaking as if cold and crying. Fear, I knew this to be fear now, although I didn’t know what I was afraid of.

  Some time later, David and Otis passed me, David chatting to Otis, trying to give the impression that we were a normal family.

  I was still crying, holding on to a concrete wall. It was holding on to me. I watched David and Otis pass, a happy boy and his dad, and for the first time the thought occurred to me that they would be better off without me. They would be better off without me, and I would be able to end these tears.

  I did not let this thought take hold, not then. I made myself walk after Otis and David. I found them where I knew I would find them, in Hope Street at the water drain. Is it a water drain? Or a sewer? I think it’s a sewer. Yes, certainly a sewer. They were sitting up there and they saw me coming from the bottom of the hill and when I reached them David said my timing was perfect. Otis had just started to worry—had just started crying, in fact, I could see, because his mother had walked off in a blind fury for no reason he understood.

  I let David hold me and I held Otis and the three of us sat there and in this way we survived.

  As well as Stace, during our years at Thomas Street I was seeing a counsellor who practised solution-focused brief therapy. I’d gone to see Wayne when my first novel was published and I was getting ready to leave my salaried job and become a writer. Once I left work and was happily writing, I stopped seeing him. After I hurt Oti
s with the stroller clip, I went back.

  Wayne was different from Mick, whose approach mixed family therapy with transactional analysis. If Mick was too complicated, Wayne was so simple I sometimes wondered if he understood anything. He certainly didn’t look to my childhood to explain what was wrong. As far as I know, solution-focused brief therapy points us towards what we do right rather than what we do wrong and encourages us to do more of that.

  Over two walls of his office, Wayne had put up drawings done by children he’d helped, and he had a climbing plant that he stuck to the wall so that it ran around the drawings. I went to see him fortnightly then weekly, and in the time we met, he covered a third wall. We talked for an hour at a time. At some stage, I told him that his therapy put a whole new meaning on the notion of brief. He smiled and said it was as brief as it could be.

  He said things like: You need to see this in a context of what you are moving through. This is the hardest thing you have ever faced. You did the only thing you could in the circumstances. Sometimes you focus on what’s wrong and not what’s right. Here is your ego; here is your spirit. Breathe. He had very light blue eyes, or grey, that were among the kindest I’ve ever encountered.

  I read Anne Manne on being a mother. She says you hand in your ticket to suicide at the door to motherhood. I reassured myself with this notion, that I had handed in my ticket at the door. But of course, once you have seen that place where pain might cease, you will go back, you will go back there and some will stay.

  At the times I thought like this, I made myself look at a photograph of Otis and me. It’s one David took on a trip to Byron the year after I had pinched Otis in the stroller clip. It’s late afternoon. The sun has set and the sky behind us is extraordinary colours. Otis and I are in silhouette so you can only see our outline. We stand the same way and we’re hand in hand against this beautiful backdrop. Even though you can’t see our faces, you know we are close, at one in whatever we are doing, absorbed by what we are seeing, in the moment together.