Diving into Glass

by Caro Llewellyn

  Perhaps it was combined with postpartum depression and a breakdown, but it was in the days following her father’s death that my mother swiftly and resolutely fell out of love with my father. Brink’s death was my parents’ end game.

  For forty-nine years I believed my grandfather died on my birthday. I had to read the passage about Brink’s death in Muttee’s memoir three times before I could fully take it in. According to Muttee, Brink died on 8 September – three days after I was born.

  Three days doesn’t seem like much, not until you have to revise the meaning of your start in the world. All my life I have celebrated my birthday and mourned the grandfather I never knew on the same day.

  Even more than discovering that Brink didn’t die on my birthday, it shook me when I re-read my mother’s poem, ‘Theatre’, in which she says that having pushed out her baby she felt relief, but beyond that all she had was a sense of everything falling away from her. She describes a bottle of whisky beside her bed, ten depressed days later, and Brink weighing the child like a lump of butter on Muttee’s kitchen scales.

  I’m sure I’d read or heard her read that poem in public before, but I had never realised its true significance. Since I had always believed my grandfather and I never met, I had always assumed the poem was about my brother, since it’s Brink weighing the baby on the scales.

  But now I understand I had it all wrong. That baby was me. What’s also suddenly clear is that she has the bottle of whisky beside the bed before Brink was dead. The whisky is not there because of her father’s death; it’s there because of me.

  Children love to hear the story of their first days and descriptions of their baby selves. It’s how we form narratives about ourselves and begin the record of who we are. When it came to my birth, though, everyone had a different version. At least in my mother’s poem my sense of my start in life holds true, which is that from my birth my mother was depressed and drank to dull the pain.

  Yet, in fact, none of these versions of Brink’s death is true. Not the one in Muttee’s memoir, not the version I’d believed throughout my life, not the account in her poem.

  According to a transcript of Ronald Brinkworth’s death certificate he died of coronary thrombosis on 9 September 1965, four days after my birth. Listed as a ‘retired poultry farmer’, he was buried at Willaston Cemetery on 10 September.

  As life begins, so it continues. Mine began with competing realities. What hope did I have? Apart from the question of what day my grandfather died, my life has often felt as though I was stood in front of a funhouse mirror and ordered to trust the distorted version that was reflected back at me. I became a questioning and suspicious child, hardwired to detect deceit.

  My mother kept the whisky bottle beside her bed. Anything to black out the three of us – me, my brother and my father. When the whisky was no longer enough, she swallowed a bottle of pills and lay down to sleep for good.

  What was that morning like for her? I never asked her directly, but it must have been premeditated. She pushed my father into another room. She put the phone on his tray, just like she did every day. Did he suspect something was darker in her mood than on other mornings? Did she give anything away, give him a hint of her plan? After she left him, she laid me down in my cot and put a bottle of formula in my fat hands. Did she kiss me? Where was my brother?

  Whatever resolution she had come to beforehand, in the drug’s daze something switched, sending her stumbling out of her room. Perhaps the bottle of formula fell from my hands and I cried out, perhaps my brother came in to rouse her. When she reached my father, sliding along the walls to keep her legs from buckling under her, she slurred the words, ‘Call an ambulance.’ I doubt my father had to ask why.

  My mother was released from the hospital into the care of the Begleys. Gran moved in to look after us.

  My mother saw a therapist for a while, but it didn’t stick. She preferred to take matters into her own hands. As with many of us, her way was to not think about it.

  I’m not sure how long she was away but, eventually, she did return and home life resumed its rhythm. But I can only imagine she must have been in a stunned haze. After all, in her absence nothing had fundamentally changed for the better. If anything, it had got worse, because now the incident hung in the air like a threat.

  She was in no state to nurse me, and our father wasn’t strong enough to hold me and manoeuvre a bottle, so I was fed in my cot with the bottle of formula wedged between the legs of a crocheted toy donkey my Aunty Babs gave me at my christening. Later my father told me it was Hugh who really watched over me.

  I think it must have been different for my brother. When he was born, our parents were very much in love. But in the midst of their unhappiness I learned to fend for myself and not make a fuss. He quickly caught up. We learned to stay out of the way; better still, to be invisible. We made the best of what we had and tried our hardest not to rely on the people who were really meant to look after us.

  For a long time, I thought misery was the norm. My brother and I learned to rely on each other. But he was older than me, so he took on most of that responsibility.

  Even though my mother wasn’t coping, or maybe because she wasn’t coping and my father thought it would help lift her spirits, he decided to enter her in the Women’s Weekly Mother of the Year competition. He filled out the forms, wrote a short essay about all my mother’s best qualities and had Gran post it.

  On the strength of his entry, she made it into the finals. A beautiful young woman looking after two small children and a man in a wheelchair. It was perfect Women’s Weekly material. If Oprah or Ellen had been on television back then, my mother would have come home with a new car and a sponsorship deal.

  Being chosen as one of the finalists meant a home visit by the panel of judges. They arrived unannounced early one Saturday morning. My mother had moved into the spare room by this time and when the doorbell rang my parents were in their separate beds. My mother opened the door to the strangers in her nightgown. The small group explained their visit, whereupon she invited them in to see me sleeping in my cot and my brother in his bed.

  They went first into my brother’s room but found him missing. Then they stood in my doorway, finding my cot empty. My mother began frantically calling out for us. Eventually she and the stunned judges found me, perhaps six months old, in my pram under the mandarin tree with my brother, not yet four, sitting on the lawn beside me. Apparently I’d woken up and my brother had taken me outside so my parents could sleep. We were quietly and happily passing the time on our own.

  Even despite the incident of the missing children – or perhaps because of it, since the judges surely considered us extraordinarily good and independent children able to amuse ourselves at such young ages – the judges awarded my mother first prize, which came with a bag of loot including a string of pearls and an electric carving knife.

  Whatever reprieve the excitement of winning the prize gave them didn’t last long. My mother was not faring well from the strain of home life and what had become a loveless marriage. Why would she? Tending to the needs of two small children and a man in a wheelchair would take its toll on anyone, even if there was all the love in the world.

  Each morning she woke up, brought my father tea and a piece of toast, hoisted him out of bed with the hand-operated lifting machine onto a commode in the bedroom. When he was done she washed him with a washcloth, dressed him, put him in his chair, brought him his toothbrush and toothpaste. Then she attended to a baby girl and a small boy before getting herself dressed and ready for the day’s run of activities. Just those few hours’ tasks would be enough to send most of us back to bed for the day, or turn to a bottle or pills. Or both.

  It was around this time that my mother started writing poetry, handwritten on scraps of paper and left lying around the house. Perhaps she hoped someone would read them and appreciate her pain. But my father couldn’t search them out from his wheelchair, and my brother and I were oblivious.
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  So my mother’s poems lay around the house unread and my father clung to what he could take control of: the letting business. He soon had the market so cornered, influential members of the real estate industry felt the pressure and decided to put an end to his venture. They lobbied for new legislation requiring local agents to be licensed. The examination to obtain a licence was held on the second floor of a building with no elevator. My father was stymied.

  Ever since he left hospital, my father knew that if he didn’t have money to make free choices, he’d end up institutionalised in the local Home for Incurables. If my mother decided to leave, he knew that’s where he’d end up.

  Then there was the question of me and my brother. He had a string of mighty incentives to maintain the facade that theirs was a happy marriage and to keep working.

  After being banned from the real estate business, he had my mother wheel him out into the backyard every day for two weeks. There in the sunshine he thought about other work he could do from home in his chair.

  My father did this whenever he had to make a big decision. Someone pushed him out into the sunlight and he sat there all day, thinking out a solution. We knew to leave him alone. It might take just a few days or it might take a number of weeks, but when he was done, not only would his face and hands be tanned, our life’s course would swiftly change direction.

  Ten

  The home in Dulwich they moved into after selling the shop on King William Road was a large colonial-style house with a red-tiled verandah, white guttering and a corrugated-tin roof. The large front door was framed on three sides by red, blue and yellow stained glass, surrounding a central motif of a blood-red banksia. From the outside, our home looked like everything was as it should be.

  The stained glass let red and blue shards of light into the hallway on sunny days. The entrance made onto a long corridor with three rooms off to either side. On the left, as you entered, was my father’s bedroom, my mother having taken up residence in the spare room directly across from his. Next on the left was my brother’s room and then mine. Opposite my brother’s room was a large sitting parlour with upholstered lounge chairs and a stereo on which my mother played Joan Baez, Flutes of the Andes and Nana Mouskouri records.

  Most of the records were badly scratched or buckled, because my mother and her friends rarely put them back in their sleeves after being played; they just stacked one on top of the other, often on the hot amplifier, which melted and warped the wax. Some were bent beyond playable. I hated it when the needle got stuck and repeated the same moment again and again, until someone lifted the arm and repositioned the diamond stylus past the scratch. For that reason I didn’t mind sorting through the stack of records every now and then, reading the round labels in the middle of each and sliding them into their plastic sleeves and correct jacket.

  I was my father’s daughter. He believed if you had something, you took care of it. You kept it until you could no longer wring another use out of it. I still cut the bottoms off bottles of moisturiser so I can scrape out every drop. Waste not, want not.

  Across the wide hallway from my bedroom there was a formal dining room with ivy wallpaper and a small fireplace. Most of the space was taken up by a large, heavy adjustable table of dark wood that seated ten people in its fully extended setting, but could fit fifteen or more if you found extra chairs and the guests touched elbows. There was a swinging door from the dining room into the kitchen, which opened onto a large porch with slat windows. Black and white linoleum flooring ran along the end of the house from the kitchen to the bathroom and laundry.

  In the backyard, there was a mature mandarin tree. In season it was laden with sweet, juicy fruit that I later took to high school to share with friends and throw at teachers we didn’t like when their backs were turned to write on the blackboard.

  There was also a fixed metal swing under a long trellis outside our back door. The trellis was covered in grapevines, which shaded us in the summer and in winter shrivelled up into knots of dead twigs. In the middle of the coldest months, I could never believe that the vines would bear fruit again – the thick grey trunk looked dried up and lifeless.

  On either side of the back door, under the shade of the grapevine, were two enormous white pots, each with a large pink camellia bush. My mother did well with the camellias, which thrived on the tea-leaves discarded from her teapot each morning. We had a seemingly never-ending supply of pretty pink camellias in glass vases through the house.

  We lived on a quiet jacaranda-lined suburban street called Swift Avenue, about a ten-minute drive from the city centre. At the time, Adelaide was a few hundred thousand people shy of a million inhabitants. As the government-sponsored water awareness advertisements on television taught me, I was born in the driest state of the driest continent.

  Adelaide was designed on a grid of right angles and straight lines. Wide boulevards, intersected by smaller streets and laneways, crisscrossed the city. Surrounding this were thick ribbons of parkland, and one of these parks was across a four-lane road at the end of our street. Sometimes it was lushly green, but most of the year it was brittle-dry twigs and dead grasses that snapped and cracked under my feet as I walked.

  Unlike the other parks, though, ours had a horseracing track. On race days, my brother and I spent a lot of time there.

  Hugh was often instructed by one or both of our parents, or he just instinctively knew, to ‘look after your sister!’ This signalled we needed to make ourselves scarce, which we did. We rode our bikes for hours on end and no one seemed bothered when we were gone for most of the day.

  Our favourite place was the racetrack. One day we misjudged the fast-moving traffic and only got halfway across the four-lane road before another train of cars and trucks came driving at us. Traffic thundered in front and behind us. I was a tomboy and tried to never let my fear show – particularly in front of Hugh – but I was terrified. He didn’t say anything, but he took my tiny hand as we waited on the small strip of white paint in the middle of the road as cars roared past on either side of us. People yelled through the open windows of their cars. ‘Stupid bloody kids!’ ‘Get off the damn road!’ Finally, when the coast was clear, we dashed across the road, our arms outstretched like planes.

  On race days we often lay down on the grass, right underneath the white wooden fence of the track’s inner border, with our ears to the ground. The rumble of hoofs pulsed through my small five-year-old body. I could feel the horses through the earth long before they took the last turn onto the straight in front of the old wooden members’ stand. It was exhilarating. The thunderous sound as the horses galloped around the corner – almost upon us – the smell of horse sweat mixed with the loamy track kicked up under the horses’ hoofs, the sounds of men shouting, the crack of whips on rumps, the guttural sounds of the horses outstretched at full pelt.

  I liked the horses, and wanted one of my own. I loved their smell and how the scent clung to my hands after I reached across the fence when the trainers let me pat one. I could feel the power through my fingers: horses spoke freedom. When I got home I lied about washing my hands before dinner so I could sleep with the scent.

  Hugh didn’t care for the animals so much. He liked them okay, and he always let me have time in the area where they brushed and prepared them for the track, but he was more drawn to the gamblers, the men inside. Everyone believed they’d backed a winner and my brother seemed entranced by the menace, liked seeing the broken fates of men whose loss had just hit home. We’d had our own share of disappointments and I think he liked to see that same look in other people’s faces, to know we weren’t alone in that feeling.

  My brother would somehow manage to coax my pocket money out of me and then coach me on how to talk our way into the members’ stand so he could place a bet. If I was ever reluctant, he’d push me in the back between my shoulderblades to get me to tell the man policing the entrance that we’d lost track of our parents, who were somewhere in the stands. I pretended to look u
pset and my brother did the best he could to seem like he was consoling me. Of course, they let us through.

  The bookies weren’t allowed to take money from children but, occasionally, if my brother was convincing enough and I nodded along in agreement to his assurances that we were under instructions from our parents and placing a bet on their behalf, they would sheepishly take our money, glancing over their shoulders.

  Our bets placed, we ran, ducking and weaving, saying, ‘Excuse me, excuse me,’ through the well-heeled throng. Adults always made way for us to stand right at the front so we could see the race. We yelled and shook our small fists in the air at whatever nag my brother had bet on, usually because he liked the horse’s name. If we won, which surprisingly we sometimes did, he took me to the corner store and I got to pick out all my favourite lollies.

  When it wasn’t a race day and our parents were busy, we caught yabbies with old meat we set out in the sun until it smelled high. We tied the stinking offcuts to long pieces of twine and dangled them in the cold water of the small creek, which ran along the outskirts of the park. We put our catch into dried-out paint cans filled with murky water from the stream. Once we had a good number we carried them home, sloshing water along the way.

  I helped to snap the dry sticks we collected as we walked. When we got to the backyard Hugh positioned the sticks crisscross atop scrunched-up newspaper to make a little fire in a small hibachi barbeque on the concrete slab under the grapevine.

  Over his fire he boiled water in an old aluminium saucepan blackened by flames and dropped the snapping creatures into the bubbling liquid. I watched the yabbies’ shells change colour from brown to orange. Eventually their big claws stopped clenching and their bodies floated lifeless to the water’s surface, at which point Hugh plucked them out with metal tongs and put them on a plate.