by Helen Brown
During that weekend I was so impressed by the talent of the other students, all of them amateur, I was reduced to silence most of the time. At the end of the programme we were invited to read our book ideas aloud. I scribbled a few paragraphs about Cleo and gave the last presentation. The room fell silent when I’d finished. Then people started asking questions. They wanted to know what had happened to the cat, and to our family. Several said they’d buy it if it was a book. That was when I began to realise Cleo and Sam’s story had legs.
The course co-ordinator told me about Friday Pitch, run by Sydney publishers Allen & Unwin. Writers could email their book proposals in on any Friday with the promise of a response the following week. It was for fiction writers but I thought I could be cheeky and send them a memoir.
Nestled in my new room I knocked the manuscript into shape while the girls settled in upstairs. Now I felt more confident our story might interest others, I fell into a routine. Armed with takeaway coffee from Spoonful, I’d write most mornings until my brain felt tired. Piecing our lives together in readable form helped me come to terms with some of the more painful experiences. If I wrote honestly enough, perhaps there’d be some healing in it.
Katharine and Lydia adored Shirley and loved their new living arrangements. Both easy-going girls, they’d always got along well, despite the seven-year age difference. Now Katharine was a teenager they’d grown even closer, swapping clothes and makeup. Currently in the throes of a charity shop obsession, they delighted in bringing home stinky old clothes glorified with the name ‘retro’. There was no tension over who’d have which bedroom. They quickly agreed Katharine would have the blue room on the left while Lydia took the one with apricot-coloured walls on the right.
Moving into Shirley made me regret that we hadn’t been able to afford a house of its size a few years earlier when Rob was still at home. With such a spread of age groups in the family, it was good to have more space.
If nothing else, having representatives from five different decades kept our regular family Sunday lunches lively. At a recent lunch, for example, Philip (b. 1962) had been wearing a T-shirt I’d talked him into buying because it had ‘Free Leonard Bernstein’ emblazoned on the front. To Philip, Leonard Bernstein was some old musician he didn’t listen to, like Leonard Cohen. He probably only wore the T-shirt because the design was retro-ish and therefore acceptable to his daughters. I (b. 1954), on the other hand, loved the T-shirt because I remembered seeing black and white reruns of the free concerts Bernstein gave to young people in New York. Katharine (b. 1992) knew who Leonard Bernstein was because she loved West Side Story. The first time Lydia (b. 1985) saw the T-shirt she studied it respectfully and asked in an Amnesty International voice, ‘Who’s Leonard Bernstein and why is he in jail?’
Rob (Generation X) took a grumpy old man’s perspective of Lydia’s GenerationY. He thought she and her ilk had no idea what tough times were like and they expected everything laid on a plate, from jobs to technology. Lydia gave the impression she regarded Generation X as a pompous lot. And as token baby boomers, Philip and I were easy targets for all the offspring. Not only had we stuffed up the world environmentally and politically, housing had been affordable for us, education free and employers had practically begged us to work for them. Borderline Generation Z, Katharine was the only one safe in these discussions because nobody had profiled Generation Z fully yet. Chantelle (b. 1979) tended to listen in silence at family lunches, no doubt wondering what sort of family she was letting herself in for.
Each of our daughters was beautiful and precious in her own right. Katharine at fifteen was a tall pale blonde blessed with her father Philip’s blue eyes and cursed with her mother’s large feet. A born extrovert, she laughed easily and was never short of friends. Books, her violin and musicals were among her many enthusiasms. She’d been thrilled to star in school musicals a couple of times, though always in male roles due to her height and alto voice: Wild Bill Hickok in Calamity Jane, Bert Healey in Annie. Short sopranos always scored the glamour parts. Katharine eventually agreed with my conclusion that most female roles were shallow compared to those written for men. Sunny yet sensitive, she was a conscientious scholar. In fact, I sometimes wondered if she took schoolwork too seriously. Katharine was desperate for a kitten. If we got one, she promised she’d clean its litter tray every day. Just as likely, the Dalai Lama was about to convert to Catholicism.
Lydia was a little shorter than Katharine with a pretty rounded face framed by straight gold hair. Her olive green eyes flashed with intensity. She’d inherited full lips and English skin from my first husband, Steve. Born just two years after her older brother’s death, she was almost a female version of Sam, apart from the fact that she was left-handed. But from the start she made it clear she was in nobody’s shadow.
Lydia never called me Mum. I don’t know why. She’d just come into the world assuming we were equals. I wasn’t entirely happy about being called Helen by my toddler daughter, specially when strangers dipped their heads curiously and asked where the poppet’s mother was.
She’d seemed unruffled when Steve and I separated soon after her first birthday. Later on, she’d learned to love Philip as a father.
Nevertheless, the impact on a child born into a grieving household is incalculable. From an early age Lydia appeared burdened with a need to heal the world. While her friends hummed tunes from Sesame Street, she sang ‘Stand by Me’. At the age of five she declared herself vegetarian, forcing me to lie about the content of the sausages on her plate. She even refused to eat chocolates moulded into animal shapes.
I’d hoped Anglican girls’ school might provide the consistency she didn’t get being ferried between two households every second week. The school chapel was one of the few places where her loyalties weren’t frayed. The Virgin Mother could be relied on to keep her mouth shut, and God wasn’t about to argue over custody. She fell in love with the vicar and asked to be baptised.
We’d had our ups and downs, especially when Philip was transferred across the Tasman Sea to Melbourne, Australia. Thirteen-year-old Lydia, railed against changing schools and countries. Once she’d made the adjustment, though, she became a high achieving all rounder.
Her final exams resulted in a scholarship to Melbourne University at the age of seventeen, and a bewildering array of degree options. She chose Economics and Political Science.
While her marks continued to be stellar through her undergraduate degree, the only work that put light in her eyes was with disabled people part-time.
She went flatting, then took a year off trailing through the Third World. With a lifetime’s experience stored in photographic files on her phone, it was time for her to settle down. All she had to do was babysit her old teddies in her fabulous new bedroom and resume her studies.
I was too infatuated with the new house to notice that our older daughter had something else in mind – a project which was about to challenge me emotionally, mentally, spiritually and in several other ways beyond my imagination.
Inspiration
Teachers appear in many forms
Lydia and Katharine wasted no time injecting personality into their bedrooms. We heard thumps in the ceiling as beds were shifted, pictures hung. Junk shop expeditions were made. Katharine brought home 1950s movie posters and a floral bedspread. She lined her walls with books and draped party lights around her window.
Lydia didn’t want me to see hers until it was finished. I already had a vague idea what was in there – not much apart from a chest of drawers and our old queen-sized bed. The fact she was sleeping in a bed of marital dimensions would have driven Mum to distraction. (‘What’s a twenty-three-year-old girl doing with a bed like that? Fancy encouraging her to have loose morals under your own roof!’)
While Lydia was busy decorating, she invited her boyfriend over for an exclusive preview. Tall and good-looking with dark hair bunched in a ponytail, Ned was a part-time jazz pianist. He had ‘one or two issues’ which Lydi
a assured us were managed with medication.
Beaming, Ned nodded politely at me before bounding upstairs. I didn’t mind Ned. At Rob’s engagement party we’d danced together to ‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin’ – a song that always reminded me of Mum peeling the eczema off her hands.
The eczema would’ve burrowed into Mum’s bones if she’d been around to see Ned lumbering downstairs the next morning. His fisherman’s jumper was fraying at the cuffs. I couldn’t tell if the shadow on his chin was designer stubble, or just plain neglect. Everything about him screamed ‘work in progress’.
Ned hummed nonchalantly as he poured himself a coffee. We’d never had a hummer in the house before. Lydia had spent the night at his place a few times, so I didn’t mind him staying over. In fact, I was more comfortable knowing she was tucked up in her own bed, with or without a boyfriend.
Philip wasn’t so happy. Striding into the kitchen in his work suit, he greeted Ned briskly and sat across the table from him. The temperature dropped several degrees as the two males eyed each other over the cockerel on the cornflakes packet. I got the impression there was one rooster too many in the room.
After Ned had gone, I asked Lydia if I could see her revamped bedroom. She shook her head. There were a couple of finishing touches she wanted to make. She’d show me later on, she said, after work.
‘Who have you got today?’ I asked.
‘Teenage boys,’ she replied. ‘We’re taking them to the aquarium.’
‘So you’ve got someone to help?’
‘Yeah, they’re pretty immobilised.’
Waving goodbye from the verandah, I watched her stride down the path to the grey bus parked outside. How she managed to transport her clients around in it was beyond me.
Whenever she drove my car, she could barely execute a parallel park without scraping somebody’s paintwork. In charge of the bus, she became a different person – capable, co-ordinated.
‘Have you got a licence to drive that thing?’ I called, only half joking.
She shrugged, climbed into the driver’s seat and gunned the motor.
The occasions I’d seen her load clients – some with feeding tubes and oxygen tanks – on board, I’d felt humbled. No way would I have been that selfless at her age. Lydia and her friends walked their high-minded talk.
Some people criticise Generation Y as selfish, living off their parents and being perpetual students/layabouts with an impossibly high sense of entitlement. Some even blame the L’Oréal advertisement ‘Because You’re Worth It’. Personally, I’ve never known a more idealistic lot.
Lydia’s involvement with disabled people began when she was sixteen and her class was encouraged to do voluntary work for a term. Her friends went for easy stuff like charity shop shifts. Our daughter had to go for something more demanding, which was how Alice, five years older than Lydia, burst in on our lives. While Alice’s mental disability was mild, her personality was storm force.
The first time she came to our place, Alice’s megaphone voice made Katharine dissolve into tears. Our visitor took a particular shine to Rob. While I was cooking dinner, Alice demanded to take a bath. I asked Lydia what we were supposed to do, but she hadn’t been given guidelines.
I ignored Alice’s unconventional request until her shouting became unbearable, upon which I filled the tub and handed her a towel. Hovering anxiously outside the bathroom door I asked if she was all right. ‘Fine,’ she yelled, and could I send Rob in now?
We ended up seeing Alice every week for about five years, gradually learning to respond to her demands as firmly as she made them. No, she couldn’t have three pizzas or a sleepover in Rob’s room.
After working with Alice, Lydia went on to care for many others whose needs were more complex. She learnt how to transfer clients out of wheelchairs, feed them through tubes in their stomachs, give medication and change adult nappies. She worked in a psychiatric hospital for a while, and as a respite carer.
People with disabilities had been important to her for almost a third of her life. She loved the work, and it had a social side. She and Ned had met as fellow volunteers at a summer camp for young people.
I couldn’t help smiling as the bus roared down the street. Our huge-hearted daughter claimed she wanted to make a difference in people’s lives. I was surprised she couldn’t see she was doing that already.
Later that day, she escorted me upstairs and opened the door to her room. I drew a breath. The shabby collection of furniture had been transformed into a chic Asian temple. Tibetan prayer flags bedecked her windows. Red cushions glowed against the walls. A small Buddha sat cross-legged between a candle and a photo frame, on top of a brightly painted chest. The effect was vaguely altar-ish.
‘Fantastic!’ I said, admiring the Tibetan wall-hanging a friend had given her. ‘It’s so . . . peaceful.’
The room was perfumed with unworldly calm, as if it could detach itself and float away from the rest of the house.
Lifting the photo frame, I’d expected to see a family snap from our last holiday. Instead, I was greeted by the smiling face of a Buddhist monk. Actually, the Buddhist monk. The one we’d met years earlier when he’d been passing through Melbourne. At the time, word had gone out to our yoga group that a Sri Lankan monk wanted somewhere to give a meditation class. All he needed was a room that could hold twenty people who’d bring their own cushions to sit on the floor. A small ask. I volunteered.
Irene’s net curtains had seizures the day his car pulled up outside our place. It was as if Queen Elizabeth and Father Christmas had rolled into a single entity and bestowed us with his presence. With a swoop of maroon robes and a pair of shaven-headed nuns in his wake, the monk sailed through our front gate.
In his knitted cap, gold rimmed spectacles and flowing gown, he was reminiscent of Yoda from Star Wars, except his ears were smaller and his sentence construction better. Radiating charisma, he accepted clumsy bows from Western admirers, most of them wives and mothers who’d spent a large part of their lives caring for others. Some were seeking inner calm; others were looking for the nurture they’d given away as if it had cost them nothing. Or enrichment. The few men who showed up in beads and Indian tops were too self-absorbed to be approachable.
I’d smiled obsequiously and bowed along with the rest of them. I didn’t know a thing about monks or Buddhism, but I wanted people to feel comfortable.
We pushed the sofas back while they arranged their cushions and blankets on the floor. It was a squeeze. Those who were able to sat cross-legged and started drifting into meditative states to show the rest of us they were way past spiritual kindergarten. A comfortable chair was placed at the front of the room, along with a small table and a glass of water. Plus a vase of lilies. The monk liked flowers.
Once everyone was settled, I found a space near the back of the room, a couple of cushions along from Lydia. I was surprised she was even interested. Being eighteen, she had plenty of excuses to shut herself away in her room. But she sat effortlessly cross-legged, her eyes round with curiosity.
Expectant silence hung over the room as the monk eased himself into the chair and flicked his robe into elegant folds. He sniffed loudly and cast a benevolent gaze over us. I couldn’t help giggling inwardly. No Christian priest, politician or doctor could hope for this level of reverence. His audience was enthralled, not necessarily because they understood what he had to offer, but because of his otherness. The world had made us hard-minded and cynical about most things, but we still craved mystery.
The monk’s voice was high pitched and sweet, but there was toughness at its core. Honey pouring over stone. He turned out to be an excellent meditation teacher. For the next hour we observed our breath, tamed our monkey minds, counted backwards and breathed through different nostrils while trying to pretend our legs weren’t giving us hell. We ended the session wishing ourselves and all sentient beings health and happiness.
As people stood to bow and leave their donations, the monk announced
that the nuns would be delighted to bless our house. Philip watched perplexed while the two tiny women chanted and sprinkled holy water in the corners of every room. He wasn’t over the moon about them sprinkling holy water on the television, but I assured him it wasn’t every day that people were offered a house blessing. I followed one of the nuns into our bedroom while she christened our bed cover. Her eyes were so deep they seemed to go beyond the back of her head. There was kindness in them, hardship too.
Once nearly everyone had gone, we stood with a few hardcore fans on the footpath outside the house to bid the monk and his entourage farewell. As he was about to climb into the back seat of the car, he flashed a movie-star smile at Lydia. ‘Come visit me in my monastery in Sri Lanka some day,’ he said before bestowing a royal wave upon us all.
I laughed the monk’s invite off, but Philip was wary, noticing the way Lydia’s face had lit up. Even though she acted grown up in many ways, she was still young and impressionable, he said. Gullible, even. He thought the monk arrogant and manipulative with his charm. I told him to stop being a fusty old dad before nudging him back inside.
After the monk disappeared down the street, I’d assumed he was out of our lives. A photo frame in Lydia’s bedroom was the last place I’d expected him to show up. Maybe she’d put him there because his beaming face and maroon robes toned perfectly with the new decor – a monk-ish style statement.
‘He’s my Teacher,’ Lydia said, taking the photo from my hand and replacing it beside the candle.
‘Your Teacher?’ I echoed, unsure what the word meant in this context and trying to piece together how a half-forgotten Buddhist monk could suddenly reappear in our house as a ‘Teacher’. He certainly wasn’t teaching her the three R’s. We’d already forked out a fortune in school fees for that. Guru? Mind controller?