Diving into Glass

by Caro Llewellyn

  ‘Anyone can put on a fancy suit,’ I said.

  My mother explained that sometimes art is just how you look at it. From then on I walked around the gallery looking at people sitting on the elegant wooden benches admiring the works, trying to decide whether they were more of the Gilbert & George trick or if they were real people looking at the art like we were.

  It seems to me that much of life is like that. It all depends how you look at it, and from whose perspective. What you know or don’t know, what you see or don’t see, changes everything.

  In a heroic gesture, given her grief and the turmoil we were in, before we went back to Australia my mother made sure we celebrated my fourteenth birthday as we’d planned. We caught the train to Dover, where we boarded the ferry that chugged slowly across the channel to Calais. I loved looking back at the steep bright cliffs knowing that we’d left one country and would shortly be in another. The proximity of two such different places was exotic to me. Once we disembarked in France we were met by a second train, which made its way to Gare du Nord in Paris.

  On the day of my birthday we had a celebratory lunch in a tiny fish restaurant near the Centre Pompidou. The floor of the restaurant was covered in sawdust. A mangy dog with frail hind legs greeted us shakily before lying down on the ground as if the excitement of us entering had been completely exhausting.

  An elaborate display of fish and seafood was laid out on crushed ice. I’d never seen anything like that before and the abundance seemed at odds with the place – the sawdust, the dog, and the owners, too, who seemed almost as battered by life as the dog. We selected the fish we wanted and it was taken to the kitchen and returned on large plates, steaming. It was a happy way to spend my birthday, but our little gathering had the forced cheerfulness of occasions that occur in the midst of a storm.

  After we’d eaten, Amanda took a photo of me standing outside the restaurant. The handsome waiter who’d served us lunch and wished me bon anniversaire came out and stood beside me. Just as the photo was being taken, he said to me in beautifully accented English, ‘And now you must look at me as though you are in love with me.’ And I did. What that photograph doesn’t show is that my mouth was full of ulcers, my gums bleeding and raw from stress.

  Not surprisingly, relations between my parents worsened when we returned home. Since our house had been let for our planned trip we couldn’t go there, so my mother rented a flat a block and a half from Dad and Becky’s house, where my brother was now also living. The flats were called Allenby Court and we lived in one of the ugly blond-brick boxes for about six months. It would have been convenient had I been allowed to visit Dad and Becky, but that was now forbidden to me. I was not asked to testify in court for their divorce as my brother was, but we got pulled into their battle in differing but equally destructive ways.

  I took up rowing and ran long distances. I needed to be busy, focused, successful and exhausted. I cycled to the rowing sheds on the banks of the Torrens River and was out on the river with my crew at 6 a.m. four or five days a week. After practice, I pulled a threaded needle through the large watery blisters on my palms. Then I cut the thread and got my crewmate Trudy to knot the ends so it stayed in place under the skin. This was a trick our coach taught us that allowed the air to quickly dry out the skin and form calluses. When I opened my palms up, they looked like a child’s first crude sewing attempt.

  It was beautiful to be on the river on cold mornings as the mist rose from the water. Skimming across the flat surface reminded me of ice skating with Becky. She’d first coaxed me out onto the icy surface with wobbly legs when I was about ten. It didn’t take me long before I was able to skate backwards and do fancy turns like she did.

  Out on the river, the focus it took to feather and dip a heavy oar in perfect unison with three other girls, and the strength it took to pull it through the water, required the kind of concentration I needed to get my mind off everything else going on. This was ordered and clear. You dipped, you pulled, the boat moved forward. We worked together as one. It was calm, controlled and it had a rhythmic predictability. Rowing was how life should have been.

  We were the champion under-15 team but also upset the university crews by winning the ladies’ Division One – the first time it had ever been won by a school crew. We were often in the newspapers with headlines such as ‘Thrilling’ and ‘Hot Pace’.

  Training for rowing didn’t consist only of time in the water, but also circuits, weights and running. I took it further and joined the long-distance running team, training and competing with them too. I loved the solitude of running, setting my eyes on the horizon and steadily moving towards it. I loved being so tired at the end of the day that I fell straight asleep and didn’t lie awake thinking about what was going on.

  By the time I was fifteen I had two part-time jobs. I worked two nights a week at a pancake restaurant, where the manager pinched my bottom and liked to stand right up behind me when I was pouring sodas from the machine in the kitchen. He stood so close I could feel his breath on my neck and his hard-on against my arse.

  I finished work after midnight and rode my bicycle home through the dark streets, because a taxi would have used up much of the evening’s pay.

  Friday nights and Saturdays I worked at the fresh food markets, where I had another job selling beautiful organic fruit and vegetables. My father’s friends sometimes came by to tell me how much he missed me and try to convince me to see him. But he never came to the stall himself. I guessed he had a new family to look after now that Becky had given birth to a son, Morgan.

  I started walking along the beach past Dad and Becky’s house, hoping he’d be out on the deck, see me, and whistle to call me in. I tried not to stare too long, but listened for the sound of his warble on the wind. I figured if it happened that way I could tell my mother it had been an accident and she wouldn’t be able to be cross with me. It never did.

  Eventually I just went up to the house and knocked on the door. When Becky came out to see who was there, she said, ‘It’s good to see you,’ hugged me and introduced me to my baby brother. Then she took me in to see my father, who was out in the backyard. By now we hadn’t seen each other for about four years. Hugh sometimes relayed messages and there were the visits to the market stalls by his friends, but apart from those second-hand greetings, and a present for Christmas and my birthday, we were estranged. I was terribly nervous when I saw him. I wanted him to like me.

  Throughout his life, no matter the bitterness of their separation and divorce, my father always acknowledged my mother’s pioneering and bold spirit to have taken him on. Despite everything that happened subsequently, he was grateful. She’d done something truly remarkable and he knew it. She was his saviour. Had she not polished the brass or shown up to his hospital bed that day with the roses, he’d have lived a very different life.

  My mother grew up going to dances in beautiful dresses. She read English Vogue – loved glamour and elegance. Yet she was willing, at least at one point – the best point, in fact – to hitch herself to the very unglamorous, inelegant daily routine of caring for my father. No matter what happened after that, or how any of us fared when it went sour, her actions at that time were heroic.

  My visits to Dad and Becky remained a secret. Then my mother decided she needed to escape an affair with a married man that had turned bad and informed me we would be moving to Sydney within a few weeks.

  I was about to enter my last year of high school in Adelaide, but the education systems were not unified across the country and in Sydney, where they did one more year of high school, I would be going into my second-last year. I liked school, but not an extra year of it. Let alone being pulled away from all my friends as I entered the most important year of school. There was little I could do to change that, but I did insist on being able to skip a year in the New South Wales system and jump straight into my final year. I was a year younger than my new schoolmates and far behind in every subject, but I worked hard and passe
d with an entry into the University of New South Wales.

  At sixteen, straight after graduating high school, I left home to move in with my new best Sydney friend, Brigid. On the morning I told my mother my plan, she was irate. When I reminded her of that later, she said, ‘But don’t you remember, I waved you off from the balcony.’ It was true, the day I loaded mybelongings into the back of a car, she did wave me goodbye from the verandah.

  Brigid and I lived in a small terrace house in the inner-city neighbourhood of Redfern, which was filled with burnt-out buildings and abandoned cars. The streets were lined with trash and broken bottles. I slept on a foam mattress on the floor, made bookshelves from planks of wood and bricks, erected a portable clothes rack and pinned a Matisse print above my bed with thumbtacks. I only had the money I’d earned at Scoffs Bistro in Potts Point, where I worked all through my last year at school. I didn’t care, I had French doors that looked out onto the street. I was happy.

  The interstate move had put an end to seeing Dad and Becky for a year, but after moving out I invited them to dinner at my new place when they next visited. By now my father was disability adviser to the premier of South Australia, John Bannon. He worked for the premier for seven years. The posting gave him a platform to fight for change on the national level throughout the late seventies and early eighties, work that was later acknowledged with an Order of Australia.

  I was terribly nervous about having them there. Brigid helped me clean the house and I measured the width of the front doorway to make sure my father would be able to get in. We prepared a meal I still remember in detail. We had talked about it for days, consulting recipe books – something I had never done before – and together we settled on veal.

  It must have been expensive, but I bought premium cuts from a fancy butcher and asked him to pound them into thin steaks. I lightly steamed spinach, which I laid on top of the meat, then covered them with fine slices of provolone cheese. I rolled each steak and tied it with string like a package from a hardware store.

  It was fiddly and I wasn’t accustomed to cooking like this, but I wanted them to know I had taken care. Brigid, a master baker, took charge of dessert. Together, almost to our surprise, we created a proper, grown-up, three-course meal. We set the table with linen napkins and even lit candles. From that night on, my father and I began to slowly come back together.

  But it took time. We lived in different parts of the country, although we talked regularly on the phone – after 6 p.m., when the rate was cheaper, of course. But it’s hard to rebuild something so broken simply with phone calls. And I was broken. Even though I knew what had gone on, I felt like I’d been abandoned. My father was a fighter, but I felt like he had let my mother win, and she went home with a trophy she didn’t even really want.

  At my new high school in Sydney, we read TS Eliot and Patrick White’s The Tree of Man. One day, our teacher, Miss Murphy, set us Sylvia Plath’s ‘Daddy’. I remember not being able to catch my breath as I read down the stanzas.

  [ … ] I tried to die

  And get back, back, back to you.

  I thought even the bones would do.

  But they pulled me out of the sack,

  And they stuck me together with glue.

  A few years later, I read Plath’s The Bell Jar and fell into a deep depression. I stayed in bed in my pretty pink sheets for about ten days. I read books, smoked cigarettes, got up to eat and then returned to my hibernation.

  The parallels between Plath and my mother rattled me then and still do. Both women walked around with dark secrets, showed a happy facade to the world but had another face for their families. The Bell Jar seemed to say it all and describe the person I had grown up with, but most importantly it let me see my childhood from the outside. I had lived this life, but I couldn’t see or feel it until I read Plath’s account.

  But it resonated in other ways, too. The book reflected my own hopes and fears back at me. I wanted a different life to the one I was headed for. I wasn’t being forced into stenography like Plath or a sewing factory like my mother, but my life was different to those of my friends and peers. I was still searching for a meaningful connection to the rest of the world.

  Recently I opened a literary journal and thought I was looking at a photo of my mother in her late twenties. It was Plath. And despite his disability, my father and Hughes were similar men. Both had big personalities. Even in his wheelchair, my father was commanding in the way Hughes was. Then there were their two small children. And me and my brother.

  After reading Plath’s book, I felt as though I had all the stuffing punched out of me.

  Twenty-five

  At university I enrolled in an English and Political Science degree, but didn’t last at it. My stronger urge was to reinvent myself away from my parents, so after six months I dropped out and flew to London with a one-way ticket and four hundred dollars in cash. I moved into a small apartment in the leafy suburb of Hampstead on a narrow street that led to the Heath.

  In London I felt I could be anyone I wanted to be. I had no context apart from my foreignness. There were no reference points. I wasn’t anyone’s anything.

  I dyed my hair black and went wild with a boy I called Tin Tin, because he had a blond quiff and pointy nose. He was from Birmingham, an industrial town in the midlands, which was worlds apart from the cosmopolitan life of London. He had moved from there a year before we met to get away from his past and try to make good, just like I was.

  The first time we slept together, we made love in the dark. When I woke up in the morning I rolled over and put my head in the curve of his side. I saw he had a jagged, violent rip of a scar from high on his chest to just above his belly button.

  ‘What happened?’ I asked when he blinked awake. I ran my finger down the length of the thick ribbon of whitened skin.

  ‘I got stabbed.’

  He’d been in a coma for six months and now he lived hard and fast like it could all happen again tomorrow and I loved it. We were wild together, thrashing out our pain in flames of booze, drugs and urgency.

  I had a full-time job working in a bar, but the salary was paltry. I needed more money so I answered a handwritten advertisement on an index card pinned to the noticeboard in my local laundrette. ‘Cheerful cleaner wanted.’ I called up, made a time to go see the ad’s writer and soon enough began working for Adrian and Celia Mitchell.

  They had a large house of four storeys, three girls, a dog called Daisy and a small backyard. Adrian, it turned out, was a famous poet and playwright, and Celia a Shakespearean actress. They could just have easily been accountants or lawyers, but by some strange twist of fate they were literary people. My long journey to a life in literature began in earnest.

  In retelling them, many of my actions seem reckless and haphazard, but even then – as a teenager – I had a better sense of self-preservation and knowledge than it might have appeared on the surface. I couldn’t articulate it then, or even think of it as a conscious choice, but I knew I had to break free.

  I jumped when my life depended on it. My instinct for flight was correct.

  Who could have known a little card in a Hampstead laundrette could set me on the right path? But something told me to answer that ad – over all the others on the board calling out for casual work – and with it began a new chapter of my life.

  After a few months cleaning for them, Celia and Adrian became like parents to me. Celia organised for me to meet actors Jonathan Pryce and his wife Kate Fahy. I became a nanny to their little boy, Patrick, when Jonathan was starring in the movie Brazil and Kate was performing with the Royal Shakespeare Company. They had a simple, stylish apartment with a vase of fresh tulips always on the table.

  One day when Jonathan came home, I told him I’d found the video of The Ploughman’s Lunch and watched it.

  ‘Did you like it?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, it was wonderful. But I don’t understand how they did the scene with you driving the Jaguar.’

&
nbsp; ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘When you were driving through that field!’

  ‘What do you mean?’ he asked again.

  ‘Driving,’ I said. ‘How did they make it look like you were driving the car?’

  ‘I just drove it,’ he said like I was a bit daft.

  ‘But you can’t drive,’ I said back, like he was the fool. ‘You get picked up every morning by the driver to go to the studio.’

  ‘Caro,’ he said, holding back his mirth, ‘I get picked up by the studio not because I can’t drive but so I can rehearse my lines and arrive ready to work. It’s Hollywood.’

  I had no idea he was as famous as he was, or even that those kinds of arrangements could be made.

  I seldom talked to my father while I was overseas. He was stingy about long-distance calls. So it wasn’t too much of a surprise that I learned about my little sister, Anna, in a blue aerogram. My father had elegant handwriting despite the effects polio had on his ability to hold the pen. I was also surprised at how he managed to write in particularly straight lines.

  My mother’s writing, on the other hand, was hard to read. The words curved downwards at the end of each line. Her letters, when you held them in your hand, looked like a sinking ship. I remember receiving postcards from her when I was little that I read by turning them as I went along the lines. It was like reading with a steering wheel. By the end of the message the picture on the front – some exotic locale or a work of art – would be upside down.

  With Becky’s help, my father was now addressing international conferences and writing papers for government that shaped local and national disability policies. He delivered impassioned speeches about the need for major shifts of thinking in the care and treatment of people with disabilities. He changed the language. People were no longer ‘cripples’ or ‘the handicapped’, they were people living with a disability.