by Carmel Bird
I suppose all that gives you an idea of what the street was like.
The House
Our house, at number eleven Pomona Avenue, was extremely clean. My mother was in charge of this side of things and she had made a lot of rules. Nobody ever thought of breaking my mother’s rules. For instance, you had to take off your shoes at the gate so as not to dirty the path, which was painted pink. You carried your shoes up to the porch and put on slippers which were kept there, leaving your shoes in a rack. My mother would come out and clean the shoes. She had tins of black and brown Nugget and separate brushes for black and brown shoes. She also had a little black velvet pillow for shining the black shoes and a brown one for the brown shoes. When you were going out you carried your shoes to the gate and sat on the green garden seat to put them on. Wet weather was always a problem. I meant to describe the house but already I am talking about the way we lived. I knew other people who had to take their shoes off at the door but we were the only family who had to do it at the gate. Starting with the rack for the shoes, we had a place for everything. I was certainly not supposed to be getting in the hedge and leaving things there. My toys had a box in my bedroom next to my doll’s house. You could open the whole front of the house like a big door. Inside was a cross-section of a house with different wallpaper in each room and a father smoking a pipe in the lounge, a mother standing by the sink in the kitchen, a boy and a girl playing in the attic and a baby asleep in the cradle in the nursery. Hanging in the front hallway of our own house at number eleven was a photo of my mother in her wedding dress. This photo was tinted so that the grass beneath the bride’s feet was a strange lolly-green and the bride’s lips were jelly-bean red. My mother’s lace veil and satin dress were in mothballs and tissue paper in the top of the linen press. I was born exactly nine months after my parents’ wedding day. I was the only child. My mother’s white kid shoes were in the linen press too. By the time I was ten they were too small for me. By the time I was ten, of course, my mother had killed herself. Or, as I put it in the first place, committed suicide.
Getting back to the things in the hallway, we had a camphor chest with Chinese carvings all over it that my father brought back from the war. He brought me a red silk kimono with a dragon and chrysanthemums embroidered on the back. I grew out of that by the time I was ten too. My growth was not abnormal. My mother had very small feet, and the kimono was made for a very young child. In the camphor chest my mother kept lace bedspreads and linen tablecloths that she never used. Most of them were things she had made for her glory box. Because of the camphor, the moths wouldn’t get them. Our carpets were floral and we had a vacuum cleaner. This was a Hoover and the action of using it was known as hoovering. It made a very frightening noise. Because of her interest in cleanliness, my mother was often hoovering. There she would be in her apron, her dainty feet in knitted slippers, her hair tied up in a scarf because of the dust, hands in white gloves pushing the nozzle of the Hoover into the corners of the rooms, somehow getting it in behind the pianola, behind the wardrobes, behind the chest of drawers. My mother could get the Hoover in behind the kitchen cabinet where crumbs collected.
You should have seen our kitchen cabinet, which was designed and built by my father and was full of labour-saving devices, including a mincer set into the bench top. The ironing-board folded up on one side of it, and it had large bins for flour and sugar and smaller bins for salt and spices. The kitchen and bathroom were shining and spotless and you could always smell phenol. My mother kept supplies of soaps and cleaning fluids in the laundry. Besides the phenol we had cloudy ammonia, in which we soaked brushes and combs, and White Lily, Old Dutch, Bon Ami, Solvol, Lifebuoy and Velvet. We had a dining room where a big vase of flowers always stood on the table and where we had our evening meal which was called tea. We had our Saturday and Sunday dinners there. Those took place in the middle of the day. Relatives came to dinner on Sundays and my mother was well known for her generous roasts and also for her puddings, such as her Queen pudding, upside-down pudding, and King Edward pudding with golden syrup. I used to clean the silver every Saturday. People who hadn’t seen me for a while would come to dinner and say hasn’t she grown, Irene. My mother would say she’s going to be a big girl, and people would say she’s the spitting image of Fran’s eldest. I would play the piano and go into the back garden with my cousins.
Before going on to describe the garden I should mention the bedrooms. My mother and father had a room that was decorated in festoons of silk in a colour called old rose. The room was muffled and above the bed was a picture of a sunrise set into the leadlight window. One of my aunts said why did you have to have all those silk festoons, Irene, if the dusting was going to get you down? My bedroom was also pink but brighter. I had two white beds with pink candlewick covers. On the wall were two pictures of Russian girls in fur hats. My curtains were white organdy, washed once a week.
The Garden
I had a swing at the end of the back garden. My cousins and I used to fight over it and they were always making remarks about the way we had to take our shoes off at the gate. In the back garden we had a shed where my father kept the garden tools and poisonous sprays and fertilisers. We used to play shops in the shed. Once the others started smoking cigarettes in there but I was too frightened. Except for two apple trees that my father pruned and sprayed, and a small fish pond, the back garden was all rows of vegetables. The front garden was beds of flowers with some very neat rose bushes and a lawn. We had a statue of a frog. The washhouse was in the back garden. It contained a wood copper. I think my mother boiled the copper every day. The clothes were hung on a line that went from one end of the back garden to the other. Behind the washhouse were two stacks of wood, one for the copper and one for the fireplaces in the house. My mother was always ironing and she was very good at it. The dressmaker up the street used to bring bridal gowns and all the bridesmaids’ dresses down to our place for my mother to press.
Things that Happened
One of the things was lice.
Because she was afraid I would get head lice, my mother used to wash my hair every day. I had long black hair that I wore in two plaits with ribbons tied on the ends. After I got head lice somebody explained to my mother that if my hair hadn’t been so clean in the first place I probably wouldn’t have got them. She washed my hair in kerosene regularly.
Another thing was when I got ink on my tartan skirt and I tried to get it off with soap. I ruined the skirt so my mother said she would have to burn it.
The third thing was when my mother committed suicide.
I was at school. We were doing composition in the English lesson one afternoon, writing about autumn, and each girl had an autumn leaf on her desk next to the inkwell. Our exercise books were ruled in red. The date was in the top right-hand corner of the page. The headmistress came to the door of the classroom and looked in through the glass. She had white hair and a blue suit and cameo brooch. She tapped on the glass and said I had to go with her to the office. People had decided that the headmistress was the best one to break the news. I do not remember her exact words. I was staring at an ornamental clock on her desk. The clock part sat on the back on an ebony elephant. Dust was caked in the creases of the elephant’s skin. The headmistress told me my mother had been taken to hospital and had died there. She was very kind to me and drove me in her car to my aunt’s house. Later, I found out that my mother had made a King Edward pudding and then had swallowed the best part of a bottle of phenol and rushed into the front garden in her slippers and collapsed on the path next to the green garden seat.
I spoke of easing you away from this shocking fact, of comforting you after telling you this thing. But I think now I have no way of doing that. We lived at eleven Pomona Avenue a long time ago and before I was ten years old my mother took her own life. That is the third way I have expressed what happened. But no matter how I put it into words, there’s just no way of getting away from the fact.
Higher Animal
s
Cold-blooded killing within a species is rare among most higher animals.
Patricia Pitman, Encyclopaedia of Murder, Colin Wilson and Patricia Pitman [eds], Pan Books, 1984
I told them to run across the open field, and first of all I shot Shaun. He fell on his face in the long grass, and Ryan and Danielle just kind of stopped. I reloaded and got Ryan when he was running towards me. But Danielle was screaming and running all over the place. I hit her in the back and she kind of rose in the air like a ballet dancer—and stayed there.
Barry Williams
I don’t really know why Barry Williams ended up shooting his children as they ran across a field. I went to school with Barry, and when I opened the paper and read about what he had done, I started to try and remember anything I knew about him, or anything I had been told. There wasn’t much. But when someone you used to see every day as a child turns out to commit a triple murder, you try to trace the story back, piecing together the fragments, hoping to make sense of the tragedy.
I can’t make any sense out of it, of course, but if I put down some of the facts, I might start getting somewhere.
Barry married Leanne Shepherd. I know some things about Leanne that not many people realise. She looks completely ordinary, and did the most ordinary things, yet for some reason she has always been haunted by fears of disease and death. She told me once when we were nine that she had a tumour on the brain and had been given a month to live. Six weeks at the very most, she said. We were standing in the sand underneath the monkey bars in the playground at school. When I think about it now, I can see Barry Williams playing marbles in the dirt on the other side of the hedge, but that is really only my imagination.
I have got one clear memory of Barry at school. I was a better reader than he was, and I had to listen to him. The reading book was full of warnings about getting wet, cold, injured, tired or sad. I had to teach Barry the word ‘scissors’ so that he could read: Do not cut yourself with the scissors, Roy. The points are sharp.
Getting back to Leanne and her imaginary illnesses. She was never really ill, but just completely obsessed by dying and decay. And her mother, Deirdre, spent a lot of time thinking about refrigerators.
Deirdre Shepherd assessed every large sum of money by the number and quality of refrigerators it would buy. When she married Dominic he had just won some fabulous amount at the races, and so he bought her a Silent Knight, which, over the years, developed a louder and louder voice and gradually lost the ability to keep things cold. In summer it growled like a vigilant watchdog. A pool of smelly water collected on the floor around it, and Deirdre would fold up old bath towels which she placed around the edges to stop the water from making a river across the kitchen and out onto the back veranda. The floorboards began to rot.
Two hundred dollars, she said when the man over the road died and left two hundred dollars to the Salvation Army. Now that would make a very nice down payment on a General Electric. Yet the Kelvinator is probably a better proposition just now. She would juggle with the words Westinghouse, Frigidaire, Malley’s Whirlpool. She imagined a truck from Maxwell’s stopping at the front gate. Then a huge cardboard carton with strips of heavy tape around it would kind of drift up the path and down the hall. What brand was going to be inside it? What about Electrolux?
Leanne was Deirdre’s youngest daughter. I think she was her favourite. Leanne got engaged to Barry the year Piping Lane won the Melbourne Cup. Deirdre had five dollars on Piping Lane at forty to one, and when she collected her winnings she said, in a voice that had no trace of excitement, perhaps because she had said the words so often before in dream-rehearsal for this moment, That will make a very nice down payment on the fridge for Leanne and Barry. Guided by Deirdre, the expert, the couple chose a Frigidaire. Deirdre had her hair done for the wedding.
It was a big wedding with five bridesmaids and a sit-down dinner for a hundred and twenty at Camelot. Leanne’s bouquet shook the whole time in the church. I met Leanne in the supermarket not long after the wedding, and she told me it wasn’t the usual wedding-day nerves. She said she was pretty sure she had leukaemia, and she knew she was going to die before too long. She would never live to have children, and Barry would be alone in the flat with the wedding presents and the Frigidaire. Of course it didn’t work out like that at all.
You would never have thought, to look at Leanne, that she had these ideas. The whole thing with disease might have started when she had very bad headaches as a child. She was sure she would soon be dead from cancer of the brain, just as she told me. But the headaches faded and were replaced by pains in the legs. These pains she attributed to cancer of the bone. Then came cancer of the larynx, the stomach, the ovaries, the skin, and finally the lungs. By the time she was walking down the aisle beside her father, she was due for the fatal bout of leukaemia.
What she actually got was life in the flat with Barry. There was the Frigidaire and a daily phone call from Deirdre.
One time I was there when the phone rang, and Barry said, That’ll be Piping Lane with a new fridge for you, I expect. And then Leanne said, One of these days I’m going to take the kids and go back to Mum’s. All Barry said was, Make it soon, and be sure to take the fucking fridge while you’re about it.
Of course that’s only the bare bones of it all. But it’s a bit more than you get in the paper when you read the story about a father of three who shot his children when his wife was visiting her mother.
I told them to run across the open field, he said.
Buttercup and Wendy
This is the legend of Wendy Trull, who was the prettiest girl in Tasmania between 1955 and, say, 1959. A long time to hold any title, particularly that of beauty queen.
When you see a beginning like that, you know that Wendy must either triumph over terrible odds and end up as the wife of a diplomat, or she must be doomed. Will Wendy be found at the bottom of the cliff, broken like a wax doll, with strange juices oozing out, and her ears in a paper bag, you wonder; or will she have a wedding in the Cathedral, and an ironing lady, and a second house at the beach, perhaps even a third in the mountains and a flat in London? And for the children, a nanny who is more like a second mother to them than a servant. What is going to happen to Wendy?
Wendy lived with her mother and father and brother and sisters in a reasonably nice house with wide verandas on Windmill Hill. The needles from the pine trees collected on the verandas, and one of Wendy’s jobs was to sweep them up and put them in the incinerator. Wendy’s granny lived in a grim old terrace house in a poorer part of the town. Granny kept the brass doorknob on the front door gleaming, and in the passage, just inside the door, she kept a cow. You opened the door and there, standing sadly on the pink-and-green lino, was a brown-and-white cow. Cows’ eyes look very big indeed when you see them up close in the narrow dimness of an entrance hall.
If there are motifs and links in the lives of people, then the presence of the cow in her granny’s hallway can be related to the presence of a secret lover in Wendy’s attic. There were many years between the cow and the lover, but Buttercup, certainly an unusual pet, is somehow linked in Wendy’s life to the man in the attic.
The attic, not yet brushed by the jacaranda that would be there by the time Wendy came, was waiting for Wendy’s lover at the top of a house which was waiting for Wendy. Across the sea from Wendy’s island, in a part of the world called Kew (thousands of miles from London, for Wendy will not roam too far), there stood a warm brick house with a fancy wooden veranda and an attic. The attic was full of attic secrets and forgotten attic dreams.
The family who lived there in this long time before Wendy got there were the Fagans: Old Missus, her son, his wife, and their fat sons who spent many wet afternoons in the attic, where they read comics, did unspeakable things, and imagined that they were spying on the girls in the garden next door. The jacarandas dropped their soft-blue blossoms onto the grass where the girls sat painting their toenails and rubbing each other with oil.
Much of what they did was done for the entertainment of the Fagans in the attic.