Diving into Glass

by Caro Llewellyn

  My brother had a proper rod – nothing like the old guys’, but a real rod nonetheless. He could cast out far off the end of the pier, into the deep water. My handheld reel of fishing line on a spool was nothing in comparison. On the way to the pier we’d dig up worms which he attached to my hook, still wriggling, because he knew I couldn’t stomach it.

  I wanted a proper rod like my brother’s. Instead I cast out by pulling out the line until it sank under the surface of the water between the pylons. There we sat with our legs dangling over the edge for hours. We had an esky with juice boxes and sandwiches so we could stay out all day if we wanted. After consuming its contents, we used the esky to carry back whatever we’d caught.

  The sea was full of fish then, and we always came home with loot we then prepared on sheets of newspaper in the backyard. My brother taught me how to gut and scale. It turned my stomach the first few times, but I took pride in being able to prepare a fish properly so it didn’t have scales or any of the black blood attached to its inside cavity that made the flesh bitter.

  If the weather was no good for fishing my brother sometimes took me into the dark billiards room and we pinged balls across the green felt of the smaller tables with long cues, trying to look like we knew what we were doing. The bikers looked on, amused. Some gave us pointers. Eventually we got quite good, even though I had to stand on tippy-toes to get far enough across the table to hit the balls.

  Other days we took our pocket money and rammed each other as hard as we could in the dodgem cars. I loved the dirty, semi-industrial smell of the cars and the way they sparked electricity in the roof as we flew around the little rink.

  I also enjoyed flooring the accelerator and driving into the back of my brother’s vehicle at full throttle. I loved the sight of him jolting up hard against the steering wheel. I laughed so much I could hardly get my car turned around fast enough to get a lead on him, chasing me round the track to hit me every bit as hard. It didn’t matter that I was three years his junior, when it came to the dodgem cars I got as good as I gave.

  Every few months I went to stay with Muttee at her home in the country town of Gawler, about an hour from the city.

  At Muttee’s I felt like I could exhale. When I was little she made me smocked dresses and matching underpants so that when I swung around like a monkey on the jungle gym the boys wouldn’t be able to tell what was pants and what was dress. She said I should be more ladylike and not swing around with the boys but knew I would never stop my antics. So rather than nag or ban me from boyish activities, she made me matching underpants. I now consider those underpants a wonderfully kind, thoughtful and accepting compromise.

  I helped her thread sewing needles once her eyes began to fail and sat beside her as she whooshed the Singer treadle sewing machine across floral fabrics that she transformed into beautiful dresses. The outfits she made me always seemed to fit perfectly, although I have no recollection of her ever taking my measurements. Sometimes we talked as she sewed, but mostly I sat quietly beside her, watching as she pedalled her shoe on the metal plate that powered each stitch.

  I was a tomboy who didn’t like wearing dresses and had to be forced to put them on when I went to her house. But I was never truly reluctant, because she’d made them especially for me and I liked that feeling more than I objected to being in a dress.

  Muttee was always there waiting to greet me on the platform of the little country station. When I stepped off the train I ran into her arms, engulfed by her ample body. We walked to the car and she opened the big heavy door and waited for me to squirm into the front seat before setting my suitcase at my feet and slamming the door shut with a swift nudge of her hip.

  Muttee only learned to drive out of absolute necessity, after my grandfather died. She had a wonderful car – an eight-cylinder black Chrysler Royal assembled locally in South Australia. The car had fins like the Batmobile, a column shift along with push-button PowerFlite gears, and two-toned black and white leather upholstery.

  When she got in behind the wheel, she’d say, ‘Come and sit close to me now. Stay in the middle away from that damn door.’ She drove with one hand on the big white steering wheel and put her arm around me every time she turned a corner, because the passenger door had lost its catch and was in the habit of swinging open in the curves.

  At Muttee’s I didn’t have to hold everything in or together. I could just be a little girl. I loved it when she wrapped my hair in rags at night to make Shirley Temple–like curls out of my limp mop. Then one day she saw some workmen staring at me and one even whistled. After that, she let my hair stay flat, and the rags were used for dusting.

  Muttee smelled like Ponds Night Cream. She had a pink powder puff on her dresser and there was often pink dust on the surface around the pot, which I used to trace lines into with my index finger. She let me sleep in her big bed with her, under the heavy cotton covers and thick woollen blankets.

  I was not tall enough to get straight into her bed so I perfected a similar method to the one I’d used to get in beside my father. There were no walls to push off from, since the bedhead was between the two entrances to her large room. Instead I grabbed clumps of blankets in my fists and swung a leg up and over onto the thick white damask bedspread and hoisted the rest of my body up from there.

  When I had settled on the down pillows, Muttee often reminded me I was the only other person who could ever be in that big bed with her since her beloved Brink’s death. She said it was his spirit she felt when I was beside her, kissed me good night, and popped her perfect false teeth in the glass of water on the bedside table. She held me in her fat arms and listened to me breathe just as she had listened to her husband when he was alive, collapsed in exhausted sleep beside her after a long day on the farm.

  Muttee made food I dreamed of. Her custard was as smooth as butter, rich with cream and thick with the egg yolks she whisked in from her garden chickens. She flavoured it with vanilla and sprinkled it with cinnamon before serving it to me in a little bowl with a sparkled gold rim. I could eat bowl after bowl of it, and usually did. After I finished I often went back to the serving dish in the fridge until I was so full I had to lie down.

  She cooked chicken soup in beat-up triangular saucepans that came in threes so you could boil different vegetables on the same stove element. Later, I discovered that the soup was made with chicken’s feet, but she thankfully kept that from me at the time.

  Muttee loved to watch the tennis and the soap opera Days of Our Lives. One weekend we were watching the tennis with the air conditioner blasting. It was a long, extended finals match that had us both transfixed. During a commercial break she got up to quickly serve lunch. She brought out a large roasted duck’s leg, with roasted rosemary potatoes and mushy green beans and peas, on a big silver tray that she placed on a wooden folding table in front of my chair. She went to the kitchen to get her own tray, set it on a matching table in front of her big chair, and we sat eating our lunch with the back and forth of the tennis ball.

  The ball girls ran around the courts, chasing balls with their heads down, trying to be as inconspicuous as possible – how I carried myself most of the time.

  As we were waiting for Martina Navratilova to serve for the second set, my grandmother said, ‘Oh, this is so delicious. Daisy was a good bird.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The roast. Daisy.’ She took a bite, not quite understanding me.

  ‘This is Daisy?’ I asked with a sick feeling.

  ‘Yes,’ she said matter-of-factly. ‘It’s Daisy.’

  My grandmother didn’t think twice about telling me that we were eating the beautiful white duck, my favourite of all the gaggle in her coop. I vomited all over the silver tray and cried the rest of the day. Neither of us got to see who won that match until the six o’clock news.

  I felt special at my Muttee’s house. I often cried on the train trip home, at my feet a big box of vegetables from her garden, a supply of chicken soup, custard an
d jars of homemade apricot jam. Muttee wasn’t blind to things and I’m sure she worried about what was happening at home with my father gone and wanted to make sure we at least had proper food.

  There was tension between Muttee and my mother. I think Muttee disapproved of my mother going back to school and some of the other choices she was making. They spoke every Sunday morning when trunk calls, as they were called then, were cheaper. I loved running to the phone to speak to Muttee, but I remember my mother’s reluctance and eye rolling when she took the receiver from me and they began to speak. Sometimes my mother raised her voice and hung up the phone before I got a chance to say goodbye.

  I didn’t understand it. I loved Muttee, but I’m pretty sure Muttee thought my mother was behaving irresponsibly. She once scoffed that my mother thought she was better than everyone else. ‘Always a princess,’ she said.

  Twenty-one

  In those years, my mother had a lot of lovers. Why not? It was the seventies. She was a student, a burgeoning poet who wrote about women and children, her lovers and her heartbreak, and the perils of domesticity. She was being published regularly and to acclaim.

  Since she wasn’t working in a regular nine-to-five job, she was often home when I came back from school. Mostly that was good. We’d drink tea and talk before I’d go do my homework. But often, particularly after she took a married man for a lover and daytime was their time together, I came home from school and the house was dark and moaning.

  After a while I preferred going to my friends’ places and I stopped inviting them to mine. On the rare occasion I did bring a friend home from school, I made a point of stopping in the street outside my mother’s bedroom to talk very loudly to whomever I had invited over. I hoped she’d at least keep the screaming down. Later, she and a man would emerge, and my mother would smell like sex. Sometimes the whole house smelled like it.

  Child rearing didn’t really fit into her new version of herself and my brother and I were left to ourselves. My brother worked out how to shuttle between the houses, but I somehow got caught in my mother’s web. In the same way she couldn’t give my father to Becky despite no longer wanting him, she wouldn’t give me over either.

  Not that my father was making much of an effort. Maybe he thought I was happy, since complaining wasn’t my nature, or perhaps he thought a little girl should be with her mother. They were in court over the details of their divorce settlement, but not over custody of us, as far as I know. He’d given up that battle and I stayed put.

  I was moving house in my thirties when I came across a poster cylinder at the bottom of a box filled with junk. I almost threw the tube out along with the rest of the box’s contents but curiosity got the better of me and I opened it and pulled out a large black-and-white photograph of me at about eight years old.

  The image hit me like a blow to the chest. I clipped it with the pegs of a plastic coathanger and looked at it long and hard. It was a photograph obviously taken by a professional photographer. In it, I am holding a flame-shaped petal up to my chin. The ‘fuck you’ look in my eyes is chilling.

  My mother was shocked when I showed her the photograph a few months later.

  ‘But that was such a happy day,’ she said in disbelief. ‘We were on a picnic.’

  It was a picture of deep unhappiness and my mother could see it as clearly as I did.

  Once I said to her that I didn’t think I had a very happy childhood. ‘But darling,’ she said, ‘you had French wallpaper in your bedroom.’

  I often thought my mother behaved like she had just stepped away from a car crash and wasn’t quite in control of her actions. Taking responsibility for the wreckage was not something she would do easily. She could have put her foot down and driven headlong into a brick wall, got out to assess the damage and asked, ‘How on earth did the front end get beat up like this?’ And she would have meant it. There was a part of my mother that couldn’t connect her actions with their consequences.

  At an early age, I gave up trying to understand my parents’ abandoning me. I went inside myself – silent, steely and resolute that nothing would hurt me. That no one would ever get close enough to injure me like they both had. Some people mistake this trait in me for coldness.

  Many of my friends went through a vintage clothing phase – a rite of passage in most girls’ lives – but to me it wasn’t chic, it was poverty. Second-hand stores still fill me with dread, remembering the horrid little hand-me-downs I wore as a child. All those stores smell the same, no matter where in the world they are or how retro and hip they present themselves as.

  When I was eleven I got my first job, washing dishes in the local retirement home. The big aluminium pots were so heavy I could hardly lift them or turn them in the sink to wash them, but I didn’t care. I wanted my own money to buy myself new clothes.

  I was eventually let go by the matron when she saw how upset I was after one of my favourite old ladies died. If not my parents, at least the matron knew an old people’s home was no place for a child.

  In 1988, I became fascinated by the groundbreaking television series The Human Body. In one episode, the presenter, Robert Winston, stands on the deck of a boat surrounded by many buckets of water. After he picks one up and tips it into the sea, he says with a sweep of his arm behind him that the buckets on the deck represent the average number of tears wept by a person in a lifetime. That was a lot of tears. I wondered how they calculate such a thing.

  How many had I cried? When I was growing up there were people around who stepped in when they saw things were not going well at home. My mother didn’t like me going to Dad and Becky’s, but other people’s homes weren’t a threat, so I made it my business to escape to those places as often as I could.

  My Uncle George (I called him that although we weren’t related) was Chinese, and his real name was Patrick. He and his wife, Barbara, whom I called Aunty Babs, regularly took me into their home. Aunty Babs was a nursing buddy of my mother. She and Uncle George taught me to do the things they shared with their own children, including me in their family as if I were a member of it.

  Uncle George called me his fourth daughter. He often joked that I was his only real daughter because I was the only one who ate the dark chicken meat. No one in their family of six made me feel like an interloper once, although I never excelled at anything like they did. They always thrashed me at tennis and ping-pong and were academically much brighter than me. In the beginning the kids must have wondered why I was always there. I’m not sure how Aunty Babs and Uncle George explained it to them, but whatever they said, I was accepted as a member of their family without any question that I ever heard or felt.

  They lived in the hills out of town with a pool and a tennis court. Their three girls and I played elastics and jump rope endlessly in the large kitchen or out on the porch. The girls’ older brother, Andrew, volunteered in the local fire-fighting brigade.

  Life was ordered. Uncle George drove me to school every morning, even though it made for a third school drop-off on the way to his busy office. When we came home at the end of long hot school days, Aunty Babs made us snacks. Then we’d swim or play ping-pong, do our homework, eat dinner at the round kitchen table together, go to bed in tidy rooms and be woken up in the morning for breakfast, which was already laid out when we dragged our sleepy bodies in. More than four decades on, I can still remember their phone number as if I’ve been calling it every week since.

  Their youngest daughter, Fiona, was closest to me in age. She and I used to tell other kids in the playground we were sisters, then be teased about the obvious nonsense – me blue-eyed and blonde, her with thick jet-black hair and Asian features. Aunty Babs taught me how to make rice the Asian way – the perfect absorption method.

  Every Sunday Uncle George took us five kids to church. Aunty Babs stayed home and I mumbled through the hymns whose words I didn’t know. I took my cues from Fiona about when to sit, stand and kneel, but when they all went for communion I stayed on the pew,
feeling a little left out.

  Uncle George taught me things my father could not. From him I learned to ski and to shoot a rabbit. The first time he took me skiing, we drove through the night to the ski fields. I stayed awake in the back seat, watching his eyes reflected in the rear-vision mirror, sure they were closing shut and he was falling asleep. I chatted with him and fought my own drowsiness to be sure he stayed awake at the wheel, as the other kids lay slumped on each other and Aunty Babs dozed in the passenger seat next to him.

  The first morning on the fields he took me to the top of the black run, because I’d lied about how good a skier I’d been on a recent school trip. It took three hours for him to coax me down, slowly snow-ploughing the steep descent, rigid with fear and on the seat of my blue bib-and-brace ski pants. Other members of the family came searching for us, worried we’d been gone so long, but Uncle George sent them off. He stayed beside me, cheerfully encouraging me as we edged our way down the hill to the rest of the family, who were by then almost through lunch at the resort.

  Later on that trip, when my skiing had much improved, I ran into Uncle George and knocked him down so hard I dislocated my jaw. He lay very still on the blinding white ice for so long I was sure I had killed him, although in the end it turned out I’d just seriously winded him. Nonetheless paramedics were called and they carried him down the slope on a stretcher. They asked if I was okay. I knew I’d hurt my jaw, but I said I was fine. Uncle George was the one who was hurt. I kept my own pain to myself, as I had learned to do with my father. As a reminder, when I talk my jaw still clicks and moves sideways a little.

  Another lifeline was Amanda, a friend of a friend of my mother, who came to stay with us while she found accommodation after moving to Adelaide from Queensland. Amanda was ten years older than me – I looked up to her. She was always so kind, happy to see me, and interested in what I did and thought. She helped me with homework, put my hair in French braids and drove me around in her little Austin car, which she called Hetty. Amanda was well ordered and she took care with everything – particularly with me.