Diving into Glass

by Caro Llewellyn

  There were definitely upsides to his life in the wheelchair. Something that suited the cheap part of my father’s character was that he never wore out his shoes. He had no more than two pairs at a time – usually a very long time. He would have had one pair his entire adult life but for Becky insisting he upgrade every couple of years.

  Travelling anywhere was always a big challenge. The Begleys, befriended after my brother escaped his cot and Greta Begley scooped him up, didn’t take sides when our parents separated, so they knew Becky too. They kept horses and sometimes came around to take Becky and my father to parties with their horse trailer hitched to their car. Compared with hoisting him in and out of the front seat and collapsing his wheelchair, it was easier and a lot more fun to wheel him up the ramp of the float, put the brakes on his chair and close the barn-like doors with him and Martin Begley in the back – particularly after they’d all had a few drinks.

  When we started travelling in airplanes with Becky, in the mid-seventies, my father was handled like cargo. To disembark, a heavy-set flight attendant would stand in front of my father in his seat at the bulkhead, bend down to drape my father’s limp arms around his shoulders, clasp his hands around my father’s lower back and heave him up. If the flight attendant was taller than my father, his legs dangled in the air like limp ropes as the attendant stepped around to the wheelchair and folded my father into it.

  Then he was wheeled to the emergency exit, where he waited while the long prongs of a large forklift raised up to the height of the door, came forward and hooked under the seat of my father’s chair. Even my brother and I could admit it was pretty funny, once we got over our embarrassment. If our father didn’t like the adventure of it himself, he never let on.

  Sometimes, when he was in bed resting, our father’s chair was a toy for me and my brother. The chair’s leather seat was lined with matted sheepskin that was soft and warm to sit on. One of my brother’s favourite games was for me to sit in the chair, let him wheel me to the top of Dad and Becky’s steep driveway and then push me down the hill as hard as he could.

  With the wind flying through my hair, I held on tight to the brake handles even though I was too little to push the levers on each side and tilt the rubber stoppers onto the tyres. Besides, my brother would have yelled at me if I had tried to slow down. Instead, I closed my eyes as I sped out into the middle of the street, where cars veered and screeched. This sport amused my brother enormously.

  Eventually my father would hear the shouts and screeching brakes from his bedroom, guess what we were up to, and whistle as loud as he could. My ears were as trained to my father’s whistle as a mother’s to her child’s cry. The whistle meant he needed something. Either that or we were in big trouble.

  ‘What the hell are you bloody kids doing? Come inside! Three!’ If he skipped counting to one and two and went straight to three it meant we were really in trouble.

  When he was truly mad, he smacked me. ‘Get the wooden spoon,’ he’d say, red-faced, sending me to the kitchen drawer to get the foot-long wooden spoon Becky used for stirring pancake batter. When I returned, chin to my chest, with the spoon hanging limply from my fist, he’d say, ‘Come here. Hold out your hand.’ It always took him a few moments to manoeuvre the spoon’s handle so he could properly clasp it in his feeble grip, during which time I patiently held my palm open on his tray, waiting for him to administer the hardest belting he was capable of – three feather-light taps. I cried as hard as if he’d given me welts.

  Since he couldn’t pick us up in his arms in time to thwart any one of a hundred daily perils facing a small and curious child, he had to rely on stopping us with his voice, making us believe that ‘no’ or ‘stop’ was meant as firmly as if he’d grabbed us by the arm and shaken us. I’ve never stopped believing that people mean what they say. If I say, ‘Please don’t do that,’ I’m not kidding around. I’m constantly astounded that people don’t take my words as the literal truth.

  I grew up understanding the importance of words. My father didn’t have anything but words. I learned from him to speak them carefully, and listen to them even more conscientiously. Perhaps that’s why I’ve always been so drawn to writers – what other profession is as serious about the words it uses?

  Seventeen

  I wasn’t an A student, but I loved school. I loved the routine of roll call, where it seemed like someone cared if I raised my arm and said ‘here’ or not. I loved running along the corridors between classes, the private space of my locker and, most importantly, I loved being with my friends. I relished it all.

  Even though school wasn’t always easy for me, I worked hard. I revelled in the days before the beginning of each term, when I rode my bike to the local newsagent to buy all new folders and exercise books. I covered these with sticky sheets of kitsch contact printed with horses galloping in speckled sunlight. I spent hours snipping the edges of the contact so it made perfectly diagonal corners and smoothing out the paper with my forearm – just like my father had done with the green felt of his tablemats – so there were no air bubbles under the surface. Then I made special labels for each subject, with my name, class and my teacher’s name, written as neatly as I could, in large childish letters.

  When my grade five teacher set us an assignment to write an account of our home life, I refused. I was a conscientious student, but how could I write about all the things that happened in our house? I was pretty sure that none of my schoolfriends’ homes were called ‘the flop house’, which is what our place had been coined by the numerous guests and waifs we had stay with us.

  When I told my teacher I wouldn’t write the composition, he screamed at me and told me to sit in front of the class. He was a former army man who used to make us march in formation around the playground, no matter the temperature, including once when it was so hot I fainted on the concrete netball courts and had to be carried to sick bay.

  When he wasn’t marching us around the quadrangle like his own private army of miniature soldiers, he used to put my friend George in the rubbish bin and tell him he was garbage. George looked bad because he had a poorly made glass eye, but I knew him to be one of the kindest kids in my class. He had a pet sheep that he used to bring to the playground on occasion.

  He never teased me about my dad, like other kids did, and I never teased him about his eye even though it looked like one of the marbles I used to flick across the playground. George was bullied mercilessly by the other kids when they decided to set upon him.

  One day George had enough of the jeers. He pulled the painted ball out of its socket and, holding it in his outstretched hand, chased whoever it was who had teased him.

  George’s glass eye looked terrible, but it was worse when he took it out. The skin of his eyelid fell loosely across the gaping hole and his eye rolled around wet in the palm of his hand. If he didn’t put it back in properly he had a completely white eyeball, which was even scarier to look at.

  After our teacher sat me in front of the class as punishment, I went home and told my mother everything that had happened. I told her about George in the garbage, about my assignment. I described the marching, and the beltings he gave to the boys.

  The next day my mother and I were sitting outside the principal’s office at 8.45 a.m. My heart was thumping in my chest. I watched the hands of the big clock on the wall tick around to 9 a.m., heard the school bell ring and the sound of children’s feet running along the corridors to roll call.

  Eventually the secretary showed me and my mother into the principal’s office, where I’d been only a few times before to get admonished for some wrongdoing or other. The principal asked a few questions before sending me back to class to fetch my teacher.

  He must have known something was up, because the look he gave me when I told him the principal wanted to see him was withering. He told the class to be quiet and continue with the work he’d set, but the moment he closed the door, everyone erupted in cheers.

  When he came back in
to the room it was almost the end of the period. His face was purple with rage and his usually slicked-back hair was falling down into his eyes. The next day we had a new teacher.

  I was often put on after-school detention, where I had to sit in a classroom with the naughty kids after everyone else had been dismissed. The light streamed through the large open windows while we sat with our heads bent over our little wooden desks, writing lines. I will not speak back to Miss Hornblower. I will not speak back to Miss Hornblower. I will not speak back to Miss Hornblower. I will not forget my homework. I will not forget my homework. I will not forget my homework … We had to write the lines one hundred times, as if that would set us straight.

  It wasn’t very often that I hadn’t actually done my homework. Mostly it was that when things got tough at home and I packed my bags to stay with family friends, I forgot to include it with my clothes. I couldn’t always keep track of what I’d need at school three days later. Invariably something I did need got left behind.

  I often arrived at the beginning of class with a signed note from whomever I was staying with, explaining why I wasn’t handing in the assignment we’d been set. After a while my teachers stopped believing me. If I wasn’t put on detention I was sent to the school counsellor, who instructed me to sit in the wood and metal chair across the table while he or she, usually a Miss, asked earnestly whether everything was alright at home. ‘Yes, of course it is,’ I’d reply, rolling my eyes after I exited the room.

  Eighteen

  A year or so after my father left with Becky, my mother closed the gallery and enrolled to finish her last year of high school. It was the seventies and she had found feminism.

  My mother was smart. She deserved a proper education and, in the beginning, I liked the fact that she was going to school just like we were. But the moment she found feminism, things got even more out of hand at our place.

  My friends at school had normal families: mothers who weren’t attending high school in their thirties, who wore bras and didn’t have countless boyfriends. Mothers whose boyfriends didn’t regularly beat them up or steal from them. Normal mothers stayed home and made tidy after-school snacks for their kids, as seen on TV. I wanted one of those.

  Other families had able-bodied fathers who drove cars and had sheds and could fix things. I wanted to go and live at my best friend’s place. Her mother ironed sheets and underpants and liked the English comedian Pam Ayres. Her father drove a Triumph Stag and played cheesy songs on his Hammond organ. They had a rumpus room and took condensed milk in their instant coffee.

  Nowhere was anything normal for us. Becky made after-school snacks and kept better house than my mother, but there was still my father in his chair.

  Even my mother’s star sign wasn’t a certainty. After reading the internationally bestselling astrology book Linda Goodman’s Sun Signs, she came out one morning and announced that she was changing her astrological sign. My mother didn’t like Goodman’s assessment of Capricorns so she deemed herself an Aquarian. To her reasoning there was only a clutch of days between that sign and her birthday, so what real difference did it make? My father’s sign happened to be Capricorn, so I’m sure that was part of her thinking too.

  Dad and Becky had bought a new art gallery, next door to the new home they had moved to in North Adelaide. It was at this house that I really hurt my father, towards the end of the long and hot school holidays before my first year of high school.

  My new school – a government school – had been an all-boys campus just two years before I was due to start. The school was largely made up of what were then the newest wave of immigrants – Greeks and Italians – and was considered pretty rough. Only a couple of my primary school classmates would be coming with me. The rest were off to private schools. I was eager for the change and the chance to make new friends, so I was even more excited for this new school year than usual.

  A few days before the first day of term, my father called me into his room to tell me he and Becky were taking me to buy my new school uniform. I should have been elated; I’d done nothing but talk about my new school and all its trappings. But instead my heart sank.

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Thanks, Dad.’

  I wandered out to find Becky. She could tell something had upset me.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ she asked. ‘Didn’t your father tell you we were taking you shopping today? I thought you’d be happy.’

  ‘Yeah, but I just want us to go. Just you and me, can’t we leave him behind?’

  Becky turned back to the sink to hide her disappointment at my meanness. ‘I think he really wants to come with us,’ she said, looking down at her gloved hands in the soapy water.

  I told her I wanted to leave my father at home so we could be quicker.

  Myer was the only department store in town that stocked my new school’s uniform, so I knew I’d see other kids there getting themselves decked out. If they saw me with my father, I’d be branded as the freak before I even got started. For once I wanted to be normal like everyone else.

  ‘We won’t take long,’ I said. ‘Pleeease can we just go?’

  ‘Alright,’ she said. ‘I’ll talk to your father, but I know he’ll be disappointed. He was looking forward to this.’

  I didn’t care, but the shopping wasn’t much fun. I felt too guilty. Worse still, I knew I’d disappointed Becky.

  When we got home, trying to make up for my cruelty, I ran straight into their bedroom to show off my new school gear for my father, the price tags still hanging from the collar. When I opened the door, I started screaming.

  He was covered in ants. They had been attracted by a wound he had on his big toe, which Becky had left undressed to air while we were out. Thousands of the black critters were crawling over him. They were on his face, streaming up his legs in a long train, travelling fast across his body. When she heard me scream, Becky came running and I was shooed out of the room. She hoisted him up with the lifting machine and, dangling in the air, he was pushed to the bathroom, where she turned on the shower and the ants were swept down the drain.

  Occasionally he recounted the story of the ants to shock people, and in his telling he was almost eaten alive, but he never mentioned to anyone why he had been left lying there on his own in the first place.

  I rarely forgot my father was different, but sometimes he did. Once, he and Becky went to an All Hallows’ Eve fancy dress party. They worked all day preparing the costume he’d been planning for weeks. Becky cut out a large O-shape from a thick sheet of cardboard and wrapped it in aluminium foil. Then she put the cardboard around my father’s neck so it looked like his head was on a platter and added the final touch of oozes of red jelly to look like blood.

  Becky wrapped him and his chair in a grey sheet and pushed him off to the party. She had painted her own face with white make-up and wore a pair of pink ballet tights. She strapped a number of my father’s sheepskins from their bed around her torso. They arrived at the party as a sacrificial lamb and the head of John the Baptist. Depending on how you looked at it, they were either the funniest or most macabre people there.

  When the host opened the door and immediately greeted my father by name, he was absolutely crushed. ‘How did you know it was me?’ he kept asking. Even though they won champagne for being the best-dressed couple, his mood was dark for days afterwards.

  Around this time my father enrolled to study Fine Arts at Flinders University. Along with these studies and the work of the art gallery, he held a weekly protest vigil outside the office of the university’s architect to protest the campus’s terrible accessibility. He had already been rejected by Adelaide University’s law school because none of their buildings were accessible. But even at Flinders – a much newer campus than Adelaide’s – Becky had to drive him up onto the pedestrian plaza in their little VW Beetle so he could get into the building where his lectures took place.

  He never graduated. After finishing the first year, they informed him none of the second-
year lecture theatres were accessible. He left university, but made sure they got the message; these days the campus has much-improved access.

  While my father had Becky to help him, my mother was alone. After she got her adult matriculation from high school, she went to Adelaide University. Study and campus life now definitely got in the way of her other duties – housekeeping, and my brother and me. Even at the best of times, domestic duty had not been my mother’s greatest strength. But once she was at school, things got looser still. She had other things on her mind.

  She loved her crockpot. In the morning she threw in some loosely chopped vegetables, a chunk of off-cut meat, a couple cups of water, salt and pepper, put the lid on and let it simmer all day. Of course, it was practical, and she had better things to do than slave over a stove, but the idea of a crockpot still puts a pit in my stomach.

  To the amusement of anyone who witnessed it, she made cake batter in a saucepan. There was no creaming the butter and sugar, or adding the eggs one at a time. She had no time for any of that. She dumped and slurped all the ingredients in at the same time before mixing them together so they were more or less blended and tipping the dough into a cake tray. Sometimes the cakes worked, mostly they did not. Although I’m sure my mother didn’t see the ratio that way.

  Years later, when he’d moved out of home and was living interstate, she sent my brother a cake with a five-inch nail in it. Other times she mistook salt for sugar. Sometimes the ingredients all worked, only to be forgotten about in the oven, so an hour later the kitchen was filled with plumes of smoke. With those cakes, my brother and I cut off the burnt bits and ate whatever was left with ice cream, to take away some of the burnt taste.