As soon as they were cool enough to pick up we snapped open their shells with our fingers or crushed the thick claws with our teeth. Those we couldn’t open that way we placed on the concrete ground and hit with a hammer. The meat we sucked out was sweet and tender and their crabby smell lingered on our skin well into the evening, even if we were instructed to use soap to clean ourselves up after the feast.
Eleven
After two weeks sitting in the sun, my father re-entered our world to tell us he’d thought of a new way to make money. My mother did not drive and electric motorised chairs had yet to be invented, so whatever my parents did next, it had to involve customers coming to them. To the disbelief and dismay of friends and family, the sailor and his nurse became art gallery owners.
My father called in an advertisement in the newspaper for artists to have their work exhibited and sold in our house. It was pretty weird – even by our standards – when my parents suddenly had strangers wandering through our home, looking at paintings and sculptures. Our bedrooms were off limits to the arrangements and the dark-green ivy wallpaper in the dining room made that space unsuitable for anything but the boldest art so it was usually only the hallway and sitting room that were used for exhibits.
As unlikely as it was, the experiment worked. A few years later they opened one of the most successful art galleries in the state in a purpose-built gallery in our suburban backyard. Neither of my parents had known the first thing about art. They grew up counting sheep and heads of cattle, collecting eggs, living by the seasons. I’m pretty sure neither of them had stepped inside an art gallery of any repute before they decided to open one in our home, but my mother learned to hang paintings and my father was a convincing salesman.
Opening in 1968, Llewellyn Galleries turned my parents into hipsters; my mother took to wearing miniskirts and tight poloneck sweaters. By 1973 – the year I turned eight – the gallery had had eighty-three professional exhibitions. That amounted to a new show every three weeks, each one involving negotiating with the artists, hanging, marketing and publicising, opening, selling and closing. Straight after one exhibition closed, another opened. The schedule didn’t let up and I think they both liked it that way. The busier they were, the less they had to think about their misery. I learned early how to lose myself in work.
My mother was very good at ‘flipping the switch’. She could be dark and gloomy with us but, when it was needed, she transformed into a great hostess and bon vivant. She was the life of the party. Her moods were sometimes hard to keep track of, but it was good for us all that she could summon that up when required.
My father could sit in the gallery all day, waiting for customers. He started reading books on art history and a few young, up-and-coming artists gave him crash courses in art appreciation. The exhibitions and the artists often made the papers and my parents became celebrities in the burgeoning Australian art world of the seventies.
Artists such as Bert Flugelman became family friends. Bert’s elegant stainless-steel sculptures made Rundle Mall and the plaza of the Adelaide Festival Centre bright spots in a dreary cultural landscape. He had a withered arm from polio that hung like a dead branch from his shoulder and I could never work out how he made those beautiful, perfectly formed reflective sculptures with one arm, but he did.
Franz Kempf, Annie Newmarch, Robert Boynes, Sydney Ball – all were regular guests at dinner parties that went long into the night. My brother and I often woke up to scores of empty wine and beer bottles, overflowing ashtrays and other detritus littering the dining and sitting rooms. Usually the dining table was left as it was the moment everyone finished their meals, pushed back their chairs and went to the sitting room to smoke and drink more, listening to James Taylor records and talking about art and politics until the very early hours.
My mother made it into the papers on her own when she saved our local parklands from becoming a commuter car park. She organised rallies and my brother and I helped her paint placards to wave. We had a bucket of eggs thrown at us once, but the petition she initiated got 10 000 signatures, which she delivered to the local council’s general meeting in a large wheelbarrow she bought for the occasion. Having alerted the media to her plans, she dumped the hundreds and hundreds of pages of signatures on the front steps of the council building. The next day, it was on the front page of every paper in town. A couple of days later, the council’s plans for the car park were abandoned.
At this point my parents were a charismatic and complementary pair in business, if not in life. Their talents far exceeded their origins or station. My father, given his love of command and order, would no doubt have gone on to have a decent naval career had he not been struck by polio. My mother, given her defiance, may not have done so well within the nursing hierarchy. Maybe she would have found something she was better suited to, or got an earlier run on her life as the poet she was about to become.
What they achieved, where they were so clearly and forcefully heading, was counterintuitive. It was extraordinary how my mother and father forged something better. My father’s disability didn’t hold them back, it spurred them on. It pushed them both into achieving more and living more interesting lives.
The nurse and the seaman became real players in Australia’s vibrant cultural scene of the sixties and seventies.
For me, the myth that misfortune begets meaning was being solidified.
Twelve
Trouble was brewing between my parents, but the dinner parties, openings and picnics, which were happy times, continued. With other people around there was relief in the pretence that they were a team and we were a functioning family.
My parents carefully secreted their true feelings but the reality was that they were trapped together in an ugly vice of need and unhappiness, which was laid bare when it was just the four of us. The fights intensified.
Even so, we never missed our annual family beach holiday. I’m not sure which of them insisted on keeping to this ritual – it could have been either one of them, because they were similarly strange like that. One moment they could overlook our needs, verging on neglect, the next they’d insist that we take a family holiday ‘for the benefit of the children’. It was dizzying.
Grandfather drove an old blue and white Holden station wagon that he never took over 25 miles per hour. I often teased him that I could ride my bike faster than he drove, but my taunts never persuaded him to put his foot down. He was a steady-as-you-go man and a steady-as-you-go driver.
He often ferried us around the city from one outing to another, and holiday time was no different. By now my father had a collapsible wheelchair, and Grandfather packed it into the back of his car alongside our little cases and drove us out of the city. Back then, long before the freeways, the road to the South Coast was narrow and potholed. The journey was marked by lush green vineyards, enormous fields of wheat and windswept barren hills that curved down and dropped into the ocean.
Each year we stayed in the same rented house in the small seaside village of Aldinga. The house was on a wide street, lined with low, scrubby bushes, a few blocks from the beach. Every morning my brother and I ran with empty saucepans in our hands to meet the milkman, who arrived on a horse-drawn cart. The milkman ladled still-warm milk from a huge metal canister into our containers. As hard as I tried, I could never walk back up the uneven stone path as fast as my brother without leaving a trail of white splotches in my wake.
At the end of the street was a reserve of dry, sandy scrubland, which we walked through to get to the beach. My father’s wheelchair crackled over the sticks as we pushed him along the rocky path to the edge of the sand, where he watched on from a distance as my mother, brother and I swam in the cold blue ocean.
I would like to think I waved at him from the water and ran back up along the sand every so often to tell him about the fish I’d seen or the crab that bit my toe, but I’m not sure I did. He made it easy for my brother and me to get on and not worry too much about him, never compla
ining, asking lots of interested questions about our antics when we did eventually return to the side of his chair.
One day, on our way back from swimming, our wet towels dragging along in the dirt as we walked, we came upon a thick black snake lying perfectly still across the path. It looked dead. My father yelled for us all to stop in our tracks, but my brother walked into the shrubbery to find a stick. My father kept yelling, telling my brother to leave it alone, but he couldn’t be stopped.
‘Don’t be stupid, Dad,’ he said. ‘It’s dead. It’s not going to bite me.’
My brother walked up close and started prodding until the snake’s top half raised up. It opened its mouth to show its large fangs and started hissing. My brother jumped back and my father began banging his hand on his tray, but of course he made almost no sound at all. My mother stamped her feet and started screaming, and the snake slithered away in the dust.
At the house, a large wooden chest was filled with children’s dress-ups. I loved putting on the pirate or cowboy outfits and performing little scenes with my brother for our parents. Our acting almost always included me dying in some catastrophe or other, after which my brother, who for many years declared he wanted to be an undertaker, laid me out and delivered the news of my death to our bereaved parents.
There were many variations of this scene over the years. Whether I was a slain pirate or had been shot down in a cowboy duel, I was told to lie on the nearest table. There my brother crossed my little arms on my chest and draped a sheet over me with instructions to keep my eyes closed when our parents came to identify the corpse.
‘Yes, that’s her,’ they said, solemnly identifying my tiny body through pretend tears. My brother said how sorry he was for their loss and lowered the sheet back over me. They’d all keep up the game, my brother asking whether they wanted me cremated or buried. They mixed it up – sometimes they discussed a small wooden coffin and a beautiful headstone with poignant words about my short life, other times they decided to have me cremated. The minute I heard the word cremation, I got sick of being dead and jumped off the table. I didn’t like the idea of going up in flames.
When my mother shone her light on you, there was nothing better. She was fun and funny. When she was feeling good, she was full of energy and did her best to make our lives normal. They both did, but the heavy lifting fell to her.
I was often frustrated that my mother resisted learning to drive, when it would have saved us so much time and given us all more independence. As it was, either I did the shopping from the local delicatessen at the end of our street or she rode her bike to the supermarket and piled the groceries into a large wicker basket she had strapped to the back. We had to rely on friends and my father’s parents if we wanted to go anywhere further. If I wanted to go to a friend’s house, I had to ride my bike or get their parents to pick me up if they lived too far away.
Now I understand why she resisted. I think she recognised she didn’t have the temperament or concentration for getting behind the wheel. More importantly, if she added driving us all around to her daily to-do list, she’d have had even less time to herself. Driving would just be another responsibility, even if it had made some tasks easier.
But that choice also meant that if ever my father were to be included in our outings, we had to call on others. My father could telephone people to organise that, but even then one of us had to put the phone and the address book on his tray so he could dial the number. Usually it wasn’t worth all the bother, so he just stayed behind, in bed or minding the gallery.
When we went on picnics with other families, they picked us up from our jacaranda-lined street on a Sunday morning, when the gallery was closed, and drove us up the narrow winding roads to the Belair National Park, a beautiful nature reserve in the hills. There my brother, the other kids and I ran around in gumboots, climbed trees and played hide and seek, while the adults lay on blankets and my father sat in his chair on some piece of relatively flat terrain.
My mother packed a picnic basket and there were always flagons of wine for the adults. Those were fun days. We often brought our kites, but they usually got caught in the trees unless we walked to the large oval, where we could launch them unfettered high into the sky if there wasn’t a football match in progress. If there wasn’t enough wind to pick it up, our mother would run fast to give the kite the lift off the ground it needed.
In those moments, it was as if the darkness and trouble had never existed. I often felt like I had two mothers. Or that I had dreamed the messy version she could be. One was lively, caring and hilarious, the other was someone to be very careful around.
Thirteen
My father was an early riser, even if there was no actual rising without my mother’s help. He was usually already awake when I wandered from my bedroom to the edge of his high bed to say good morning and crawl in beside him. The bed was raised by four three-inch-high wooden blocks to allow room for his lifting machine to wheel into the gap. My father slept motionless on a mountain of specially cut foam, a sheepskin rug to stop him from getting bedsores, and pillows to elevate his legs and lungs so they could drain of fluid during the night.
My father’s side of the bed seemed like a mountain range because of the peaks and valleys made by the oddly cut foam wedges and pillows at both ends. In the middle was a steep dip. The other side of the bed – no longer slept in by my mother – was as flat and smooth as a plain.
On account of the blocks under its legs, the bed was hard for me to get into, but I soon worked out a method of hoisting myself up by clutching the blankets on what had been my mother’s side and pushing off the wall. It took some effort but it was worth it, because it was that or talk to him while sitting on the floor.
Beside him in bed, we’d often watch Sesame Street together, counting the numbers and waiting for Cookie Monster to appear or for Oscar the Grouch to come out of his trashcan.
If it was early, before Sesame Street, we often played snap or go fish. My father’s chest was the table and, when it was his turn, I handed him each card from the pack without looking at it. We made up a set of our own rules for snap so my father could play; I still had to slap down my hand on the cards on his chest – gently – but he was allowed to simply say ‘Snap!’ to make a play for the stack. I learned to shuffle even though the pack was big for my hands.
But mostly he read to me. It was his job to read the words and mine to hold the book steady and turn the thick, cream-coloured pages of my favourite book, Oscar Wilde’s The Happy Prince, which my mother gave me for my fifth birthday. Sometimes I jigged the book up and down to make it hard for him to keep track of his place on the page. He never got mad at me or told me to quit fooling around. Polio taught my father patience, and he had a ton of it where I was concerned.
I made him read that book so often, he must have known some of it by heart.
High above the city, on a tall column, stood the statue of the Happy Prince. He was gilded all over with leaves of fine gold, for eyes he had two bright sapphires, and a large red ruby glowed on his sword-hilt.
It’s an unlikely love story of a statue named the Happy Prince and a swallow who fall in love on the eve of a cold winter, somewhere in Europe. I still have that book, the pages of which I turned time and again for my father to read to me. The cover is ripped and curled, and the pages are stained, but it remains one of my most treasured possessions.
Just as my father’s polio meant my parents got to be hipster gallery owners, his condition meant I had a relationship with him that was very different from most of my friends’ relationships with their working and largely absent fathers. My father was around all the time. I took for granted playing cards with him in the morning, watching Sesame Street, having him read to me and hanging out with him all day in the gallery.
If my father’s door was closed in the morning, it meant he was getting up. I’d knock to let him know I was there and he’d either yell ‘Hang on!’ or whistle, depending on where he was in the proc
ess of getting dressed. If he wasn’t ready, I sat on the hallway floor and waited. When he was respectable – when he had on his trousers, his corset and a singlet – he whistled, which was the all-clear signal that I could come in.
My father never regained the muscles in his stomach and couldn’t sit up straight without a seventeen-inch-long whalebone corset, which he wore every day despite the long drill of putting it on. Each morning my mother rolled him over onto his side and lay the corset flat on the bed. Then she pulled at his stomach and shoulders like she was unfurling a heavy carpet and rolled him back on top of it. Then she fastened twenty-five hook-and-eye clasps down the front, pulled three straps tight and buckled them.
For years he wore corsets bought from the women’s undergarments section of Myer. The corsets came in pink and flesh tone, and he had both.
My parents repeated the daily steps of their routine like a pair of synchronised swimmers. It was efficient, effective and fast, considering all the manoeuvres.
I realise how unbelievable it is that it only occurred to me in my forties that we didn’t have an accessible bathroom in our home. Sure, I was young, but it just shows how little I thought about the logistics of my father’s situation, even well into adulthood.
Children live and accept their reality, even if it entails a pot in the bedroom and a wife carrying her husband’s waste through the house every morning, which is what I now understand she must have done.
At first, the only thing that came to mind was that, for close to a decade, my father never felt the joy of water cascading over his body. Before I thought about him using the toilet, I thought about him showering.
Diving into Glass Page 7