by Tony Birch
Somewhere on the estate a radio was playing an Aretha Franklin song. She was my mother’s favourite singer. We looked up as her voice lifted off, and then drifted across the rooftops of our housing estate.
Alice’s hand brushed lightly against my arm. She moved away from me, and then swayed back into me. And then she slipped a hand into mine. It warmed my own.
I turned to look at her. She gave the slightest smile before looking away. She then stretched out an arm and pointed a finger into the night sky.
‘The moon, Michael, look at the moon.’
Ashes
Change for us came so unexpectedly. One day my father was stalking the family as he had done for most of our lives, skulking from room to room, accompanied by a menacing silence that we had long ago accepted. And then he was gone.
It all began when he found a cold sore on his bottom lip while shaving in the bathroom mirror one Sunday morning. He then spent half the day staring at the sore, picking it, and talking endlessly to my mother about some unexplainable fear.
‘I think I’ve got cancer. My mum died of cancer, you know?’ he repeated over and over to her, while following her around the flat.
She knew there was certainly something wrong with him, although it was not the cold sore that was the problem. By the time he visited a doctor a few days later, it was all too clear that his ailments were not physical but mental. The doctor told mum that this had been coming for some time. We could have told him that.
Just a week after he had discovered the sore on his lip, mum sat Katie and me on the couch and told us that my father had suffered a nervous breakdown, had been admitted to hospital, and it would be some time before he could come home again.
But he did not come home, not ever.
We visited him in hospital for the first time the following Sunday. We caught the bus out through the northern suburbs. I had driven this way with Charlie before in stolen cars, but Katie stared out of the window as if she had just arrived in a foreign country.
When we got to the hospital I was surprised at how beautiful it all looked. I peered out of the window at the flowerbeds and wide green lawns. When we got off the bus Katie lagged behind us as we walked towards the entrance. She looked frightened. It was not until we were inside the ward and I heard the heavy lock of the door slam behind us that I felt my own heart jump. I then felt a little scared myself.
As soon as we entered the room I could see my father sitting on a narrow chair on the other side of the room. He sat perfectly still. A woman about the same age as mum headed in our direction. She asked us lots of questions: who were we, where did we live, had we seen her own children anywhere on the way to the hospital? She was about to stroke Katie’s long dark hair, before mum put her arms around Katie and yelled at the woman to leave us alone.
It was not until we were back on the bus, having left the hospital grounds, that Katie and I felt safe again.
When we got home I told mum that I did not want to go back to the hospital. But she said that we would have to. That was the end of any protest. We began visiting my father each Sunday from then on. The hospital visits would consist of nothing more than watching him as he sat comatose on a couch while smoking cigarette after cigarette and responding to my mother’s attempts at conversation with monosyllabic replies or blank stares. The hard man had finally been subdued.
But over the following months things changed a lot for us. We gradually visited my father less and less, and eventually not at all, although I know that mum continued to go out there occasionally, only out of a sense of duty. We also moved out of the housing commission flat, which we could not afford anymore. We moved across the city to my grandmother’s house in Carlton, where my mother found some peace for the first time in many years, while Katie and I were a lot happier just knowing that dad was locked away.
In moving to my grandmother’s house it was obvious to us that my mother had deserted my father, even though he was in hospital. She left when she did simply because she could. It was the only time that she had been free of him since they first met. And she took advantage of her situation.
Most of what we owned, with the exception of personal stuff such as books and clothes, was left in the flat. My mother said that the furniture was no good anyway, and still carried the bed bugs from the old house in Fitzroy. She did bring all her kitchen stuff with her and, of course, her well-documented and organised photo albums.
One of the first jobs she did on arriving at Nan’s was to dig into that old box of hers and unwrap a framed photograph from an old pillowslip and tea-towel. She hung the photograph over the mantlepiece in the lounge room. When she had finished hanging the photograph we stood back and looked on in admiration. Nan then walked up to the mantle and ran her hand over the surface of the glass, tracing the outline of the child’s face.
‘Well, look at that,’ she said smiling, ‘little May.’
Katie had heard stories about May over the years, from mum and me, but had never seen this framed portrait of her.
She craned her neck back and looked up at the photo.
‘Is that May? Is that my big sister?’
‘Yes, it is, love,’ mum replied, while putting her arm around an eleven-year-old girl looking up at her two-year-old ‘big sister’.
Until the day we arrived at my grandmother’s house she had shared it with her boarder, Jack Morris, for many years. Her husband, my grandfather Liam, had been a railway shunter. He was hit and killed by a train in the Dynon goods yards one bitterly cold autumn morning when he lost his footing and slipped on an iced section of track.
Nan had met Liam when she was just sixteen, and they rarely spent time apart from the day they were married, two years later, until his death. The loneliness that she felt following Liam’s death was kept at bay during the days and early evenings while she was busy looking after her children. It was at night that she missed Liam the most, when she sat alone at the kitchen table and when she was lying in bed at night, desperately seeking Liam’s touch and warmth again.
After Liam’s death his accident insurance provided her with enough money to pay for a marble headstone and double plot at the Melbourne General Cemetery. My grandmother explained to mum that she had ordered the plot to ensure that she would lie with Liam again when her own time came. She visited and tended his grave each week. And whenever Katie and I had stayed over with her when we were younger, she would take us to the cemetery, stand us at the end of the grave and remind us: ‘That’s your flesh and blood there, don’t you two forget that.’
Her loyalty to Liam remained undisturbed until she met and then gradually fell in love with Jack. He was a local second-hand goods dealer, who first charmed my grandmother during negotiations over the sale of a queen-size brass bed that he had picked up from the side of the road in one of the richer suburbs south of the river. After a discreet courtship that lasted more than a year Jack eventually moved into a bungalow in the yard of Nan’s neat two-storey terrace.
My grandmother never admitted to her relationship with Jack. As a result, they had to forgo any display of emotion or affection towards each other, whether in front of her children, their mutual friends, or people in the street generally. No one could understand why they refused to be open about themselves, or why they never married. She could have done so, as there was no need for a divorce, and no scandal surrounded their love affair. They carried on their charade while in public, displaying no more than the civility expected between landlady and boarder.
Subsequently, any interaction between my grandmother and Jack in front of others contained an element of secrecy. They communicated through code, innuendo and gesture. It made little sense to anyone else, but most people went along with the theatrics rather than confront and possibly embarrass Nan.
Katie and I easily slipped into the comfort of my grandmother’s house. Katie shared a r
oom with mum, while I had my own small room out the back of the house, between the kitchen and Jack’s bungalow.
I was given a lot of freedom by my mother, possibly because she did not want me under my grandmother’s feet in a suddenly overcrowded house. I came and went by the back gate and stayed out later of a night than I had when we were in the flat in Richmond. If my mother had concerns she kept them to herself, and said nothing to me, except providing the one warning: ‘Stay out of trouble; she can’t have the police at the door.’
Katie enjoyed being around both my Nan and Jack — but most particularly Jack. She was fascinated by him and followed him around the house of an evening after he had parked his truck for the night in the street outside the house.
Jack was not like my father. In fact, he was unlike most of the men that we had known. He had a quietness and slowness of movement about him that affected those around him. We all felt more relaxed when Jack was around.
And he took an interest in us. He would ask me how school was going, continually emphasising the value of learning. ‘Look at me, son. Dropped out of school when I was twelve. I know nothing. That’s why I’m a dealer. Useless for just about anything else.’
But Jack was not useless and he did not ‘know nothing’. He knew quite a lot. He had read more books than anyone I had met. He could read the print off the page and then talk about a book to me for days afterwards. It was what we had in common, and what he repeatedly impressed on me. ‘Keep reading, Michael. And read everything you can get hold of. It’ll get you out, one day. It will be your way out, your escape.’
I did keep reading, although Jack never explained and I did not ask him where or what it was I was supposed to be escaping from.
When Jack got home from work of a night he would go straight into the brick laundry in the backyard, scrubbing away the grime and rubbish of the street that had attached itself to his overalls during the day. He would then polish his work boots until his reflection appeared in the toes, before washing and shaving himself in a small wooden-framed mirror that hung above the laundry trough.
On warm nights, Jack would sit underneath the peach tree in the corner of the yard wearing pressed trousers and a white undershirt. He would read the afternoon paper or a dog-eared novel that he had picked up on the road, while smoking a roll-your-own cigarette. When it was cooler, particularly during the winter months, he would sit in his room and look out through a window that faced into the back garden.
Jack kept pretty much to himself. Unlike most other men in the street he never went to the pub after work. In fact he only drank on special occasions and at celebrations, such as Christmas or family birthdays.
He would often bring home bits and pieces that he had collected during the day on the road, mostly toys and dolls that he would repair and repaint and then present to Katie. Although she was getting too old for some of the things that he gave to her, Katie took them with genuine gratitude and showed her appreciation by arranging them along the window of the upstairs bedroom.
Jack presented me with enough books to start my own library, including a complete set of musty, hardback world encyclopedias that he gave to me while scratching his head and puzzling over why anyone would throw books out with the rubbish.
Katie was particularly fixated by Jack’s habit of taking tobacco from a tin and rubbing it vigorously between his palms before rolling what he called a ‘whippet’, a slim, neat cigarette that he would light and smoke with purpose between burnt-orange nicotine-stained fingers. She would sit under the peach tree and watch as Jack rolled and smoked cigarette after cigarette, while I sat in a chair next to both of them poring over one of the volumes of my encyclopedia set.
And each night my grandmother would come into the yard and give Jack a cup of tea, presenting it to him with the standard formalities. ‘There you are, Jack,’ she would say, as she placed the cup in his hand. ‘A good day on the road?’
Everything was about ‘the road’. It was the same question every night, devoid of any obvious familiarity. They appeared suitably distanced from each other, although there was something else in their brief evening exchange. My grandmother could have easily placed the cup on the upturned fruit box alongside Jack’s cigarette tin. But she did not. She made a point of placing the teacup in his hand. They would then touch with a briefness that rendered their contact hardly detectable. But it was there, in the gesture and the near-smile on her face before she withdrew into the kitchen.
Jack would read each night until quite late before turning off the light. If I were at home and still awake I would sometimes hear his footsteps slip by my room and through the kitchen, and eventually into my grandmother’s bedroom at the front of the house.
One Friday night, after getting home late from the Carlton movie house, I came in the back gate just as Jack was closing the door of the bungalow and tiptoeing towards the house. He turned and looked at me. We said nothing to each other. He smiled at me, and then turned around and quietly opened the door into the kitchen.
This was the pattern of their relationship. And it would have remained so had Jack not started to cough into his handkerchief most nights after he had finished smoking under the tree. The cough became bad enough that he eventually had to go into hospital. When he came home a few days later, he took a piece of paper out of his suit’s coat pocket and handed it to my grandmother. It informed both of them that Jack did not have long to live.
One morning, soon after Jack had come home from the hospital, my grandmother, who was in the kitchen making a cooked breakfast for each of us, asked Katie if she could take Jack’s eggs, tea and toast to him in bed. Katie picked up the tray and began to walk out of the kitchen and into the backyard.
‘No, love,’ my grandmother called after her while standing at the sink, ‘he’s up in my room, with me.’
Katie turned around and walked the other way, towards my grandmother’s bedroom.
My mother, who had been sitting at the table drinking a cup of tea, looked up briefly at her mother and then smiled to herself, before looking down into the bottom of her cup. With the release of their poorly kept secret, there was nothing more that needed to be said.
And it was in my grandmother’s bed, the same one that Jack had restored and sold to her many years earlier, that he was comforted in the months before he died.
Occasionally, when the weather was particularly good, Jack would pull on his old dressing gown and sit under the peach tree, quietly rubbing, rolling and puffing as either Katie or I sat alongside him. He would ask questions of both of us, particularly me, about what it was that I was reading. But for much of the time, especially in the final month or so of his life, Jack stayed up in the front room listening to the radio or sleeping.
In the final days of his life the doctor who regularly visited Jack at the house advised my grandmother that she should move him to the hospital. It was an offer that was politely refused.
So Jack died in her bed.
I did not see him at all during the last week or so of his life. The bedroom door was kept shut and my mother warned us not to go near the room without asking Nan if it was okay.
On the day of his death I arrived home from school as the two ambulance officers, who had been called to the house, carried his body into the street. Katie was standing on the footpath holding my grandmother’s hand. She was sobbing to herself and sucking on the wet sleeve of her school jumper. Nan was not crying. As they carried Jack by her she would not look down at him. She looked out along Canning Street, across the nature strip to the other side of the road, where a few locals had gathered to watch at a safe, although hardly respectable, distance.
Jack was shrouded beneath a white sheet. His face was covered. I could see his hand hanging limply from the stretcher. His nicotine-stained fingers were close enough to touch. My final meeting with Jack was looking down at those fingers as I stood o
n the footpath, followed by the eerie sight of the ambulance disappearing around the corner into Elgin Street with its two heavily tinted rear windows resembling the large black eyes of a mechanical monster.
In the days before Jack’s funeral there was an argument between my grandmother and his own family over the burial arrangements. They wanted Jack cremated, which my grandmother violently disagreed with. But the family won the dispute, as she had no legal right to Jack’s body, seeing as she was ‘only his landlady’, according to his family.
The funeral was held in a small parlour in Smith Street, Fitzroy, just around the corner from where we had lived when we were younger. As we walked from the dim light of the chapel into the bright sun of the street, my mother pulled Katie and me to one side.
I am not sure why she decided to tell us there and then. Maybe it was being back in the old suburb.
‘Your dad, he’s out of the hospital. Been out for six months. He’s living in a residential near here. You two want to see him? I’ve got the address.’
I watched as a tram stopped in front of the funeral parlour to allow the hearse carrying Jack to reverse into the street. The commuters looked out of the window of the tram and in through the tinted glass, at Jack’s coffin.
I looked across at mum. ‘No, I don’t want to see him. No.’
She looked at Katie, who did not answer her. And that was the last mention of him.
A little more than a month after Jack’s death a registered mail parcel arrived at the house. I noticed it sitting on the table when I came into the kitchen after school. Katie was sitting at the table, next to the parcel, doing her homework.
I pointed at the parcel. ‘What’s that?’
‘Search me,’ she replied, shrugging her shoulders disinterestedly, without bothering to look up from her exercise book.