After what seemed an age, but she daren’t peep in case they saw her, she heard their voices.
‘Melly,’ called Daddy.
‘Melly,’ called Glenda.
‘Melly,’ called Kit.
Melly buried her face against her knees and shivered with pleasure. They were worried, that’s what. When Daddy comes and finds me I’m going to jump out and go boo and make him carry me all the way home, she thought. I’ll snuggle up against him and tuck my head under his chin and feel the bristly whiskers and smell his lovely Daddy smell and hold him tight around the neck. She pressed her chin hard against her knees and listened to them calling. The rock was cold against her bottom so she eased herself into a half-crouch. Then a terrible thing happened. She wet her pants. And worse still, as she did so, she felt a big poo come out, just like that, before she could stop it or anything. She went rigid with shame. A big girl like her. They would laugh. Glenda would know. They mustn’t find me, she whispered to herself, never, not now.
And they couldn’t find her. It was pitch dark now and although the stars were starting to come out the moon had not yet risen. She heard their voices calling, calling, and she heard Kit start to cry.
‘What’ll we do?’ she heard Glenda say, and she sounded worried.
‘It’s impossible to climb around the rocks in the dark,’ said her father. ‘You two stay here and I’ll run back and get the torch. I was an idiot not to bring it in the first place.’
‘I want to come with you, Daddy,’ she heard Kit say.
‘No, you stay with Glenda.’
‘I’ll go,’ said Glenda. ‘You two stay.’ Yes, yes, whispered Melly. You go, Glenda. Then it might, might, just be possible to come out of hiding. But her heart sank.
‘No,’ she heard Daddy saying. ‘I don’t want you going along the beach alone in the dark.’
‘Please,’ said Glenda. Let her, let her, prayed Melly.
‘No,’ said Daddy. ‘I won’t be long.’
‘I’m coming with you,’ said Kit and when Daddy started to tell her to stay with Glenda, Melly heard Glenda say, ‘It’s okay. I’ll wait. Off you go.’
Silence. Melly knew they must have gone and just over there was Glenda and just here was her with a horrible lump of poo in her pants and no Daddy or Kit to tell her it was all right. She felt her lips dragging down at the corners as if they were being pulled by hard little hooks. She twisted her mouth to stop it happening but she couldn’t. It was all too hard. She felt so sorry for herself. She started to cry.
‘Melly? Melly, is that you?’ She jammed her fist into her mouth to stop the sounds and tried to hold her breath. ‘Melly?’ Glenda waited. Melly waited.
Then Glenda whistled her little whistle. It was a familiar, cheery little whistle. She did it again. Melly didn’t know why but she suddenly heard herself return the whistle, very softly, not very cheerfully, but a whistle it definitely was. Glenda whistled again. Closer. Melly whistled. A little louder. Then Glenda. Then Melly. She heard Glenda scrambling close by.
‘Melly, I’m here, sweetie. Can you see me?’ Very carefully Melly stood up and looked over the rock. Right in front of her was Glenda.
‘I’m here,’ she whispered. Glenda turned and saw the little head. She put out her hand.
‘Come here.’
‘I can’t,’ said Melly and began to cry harder. ‘I can’t.’
‘Never mind,’ said Glenda. ‘I’ll climb over to you.’
‘No!’ cried Melly. ‘Don’t!’ But it was too late. Glenda was climbing down beside her.
‘What is it, chicky? You’re all right now. Daddy will be back in a sec.’
‘No,’ said Melly, in despair. She whispered something.
‘What?’
‘I’ve done a poo in my pants,’ she said, surrendering.
‘Oh,’ said Glenda in a quite ordinary voice. ‘You poor old thing. What a nuisance. Come on, let me help you.’
‘How?’ said Melly, in astonishment.
‘First up, let’s tip your pants out,’ said Glenda. ‘Fishes don’t mind a bit of poo.’
‘Don’t they?’ said Melly, horrified.
‘Nah,’ said Glenda. ‘Not a weeny bit once in a while.’ As she spoke she had carefully removed the little girl’s pants. ‘Hold my hand now and we’ll just climb over the rocks to the water. Isn’t it great the way your eyes can gradually see even when it’s really dark?’ It was true. Melly had no trouble seeing her way back over the rocks. Still holding Glenda’s hand she went with her to the water’s edge. Glenda waded in alone and Melly could see her tipping out the bundle and scrubbing the pants. Back she came. ‘Here, let’s give your botty a bit of a wipe with your pants.’ She did so then waded back and scrubbed again. ‘That’s better,’ she said casually to Melly. ‘Don’t put them back on. I’ll throw them into the washing machine tonight. No harm done. Hey, I think I hear the others.’
‘Don’t …’ said Melly.
‘No,’ said Glenda.
Nobody was cross with Melly that night. As she lay in the bunk room on the sandy sheets she thought she heard a noise in the bottom bunk. She stiffened and took her thumb out of her mouth, leaned her head over the side and listened carefully. Yes, definitely, Kit was crying. She lay back down for a minute and thought. Then, as easily as anything she slid off the top bunk and crouched beside her sister.
‘Don’t cry, Kit,’ she said, patting her sister’s head with little soft comforting pats. ‘Don’t cry,’ and she snuffled up to her cheek and gave her a kiss.
‘I miss Mummy,’ sobbed Kit. ‘I miss Mummy so much.’
‘So do I,’ said Melly solemnly. ‘But it’s going to be all right.’ And she hopped onto Kit’s bunk and snuggled her way in against the wall, and soon the two little girls were asleep.
the great divide
Aunty Ruby O’Dowd reared me really. Mum, Dad and Grandma were too busy running the pub, The Reef, which really took off in the fifties, up there in the Alice. When I think of the family in those days I always associate them with smells: Dad’s was beer breath, Mum’s was the brandy and milk breath and Grandma had the sweetish whiff of port about her. Not that they were drunks. Well, Dad might get a bit noisy just before closing time but he was a fair and hardworking publican and Mum and Grandma would have been mortified to be considered ‘drinkers’. They considered themselves much too genteel.
‘I’m run off my feet,’ they’d say to each other and anyone else twenty times a day. And I was under their feet, making a crawling bawling nuisance of myself. When Grandma died it was even busier. ‘I’ve got my work cut out for me all right,’ Mum would say, for by now The Reef was the best known pub in the Alice, eagerly sought out by commercial travellers, magistrates on circuit and officers of the Aboriginal Protection Board. What’s more, Mum played a very prominent part in the town’s social and charitable affairs. It was good for business.
She solved the problem of me by handing me over to Aunty Ruby when I was, must have been, oh, about four, because that’s when Gran died and Mum needed to grow an extra pair of hands. Aunty Ruby’s domain was the kitchen, so the kitchen became my special domain, too. It was where I ate my meals and had my hair combed and my shoes cleaned and where I packed my school satchel and spilled out its contents every afternoon and where, a bit later, I did my homework and made balsa aeroplanes and read my books, and picked my toenails when Aunty Ruby wasn’t looking.
From the beginning I loved this fat, puffing, perspiring person with her front like Dad’s roll-top desk and her big waggly backside. Once, how silly, I jumped up and pricked her bosom with a pin to see if it would burst like a balloon. Aunty Ruby’s shape and my mother’s shape did not bear comparison and I knew which I preferred. My mother had a bosom of uninviting rectitude and no backside in evidence at all because it was tightly contained by what she called her step-ins, a necessity for any self-respecting woman, ‘not like those New Australian girls pouring into the town with their backsides wiggling shamelessly a
s if they were Sophia Loren, God help us.’ The question of Aunty Ruby’s unrestrained backside never came into her conversation. Apparently Aunty Ruby was a different category again.
Aunty Ruby lived over the other side of the riverbed and Mum said that her place was a credit to her and she’d trust Aunty Ruby with the keys of the hotel safe if she had to. I did not know then about Aunty Ruby’s children, boy and girl, who had been taken away by the Protection Board. All those years I simply assumed that her obvious and enveloping love for me was entirely natural and I was the only little child in her life. I s’pose Mum knew. She must have but no-one ever told me and Aunty Ruby never said a word. It is almost unbearably poignant for me now to recall those years. What can she have been thinking, feeling, as she combed my hair and helped me do up my buttons or handed me a freshly ironed shirt or drew me onto her lap for a song and a cuddle before bedtime? What can she have felt as she tucked me into bed at night and kissed my freshly washed face? Do I imagine now that sometimes her great dark eyes, with the whites so white, seemed full of unspilt tears, just trembling on the ridge of her eyelids, unshed but scarce contained?
Mum was a great one for cleanliness and she sang the praises of Aunty Ruby’s cleanliness to me and Dad and her friends and the barflies that infested the ladies’ lounge, and registered her disgust about ‘those Todd River ones, filthy, absolutely filthy the way they live, someone should do something, dogs everywhere, noses running, flies in their eyes and never even bothering to brush them away, a scandal, gives them all a bad name, it’s a shame …’ She had no compunction expressing all this outrage to Aunty Ruby, and Aunty Ruby would shake her head and groan and shrug and roll her eyes in agreement. She had no hesitation about sending me over to stay with Aunty Ruby in Race Week and Ball Week and any other week when she was run off her feet too badly. ‘You could eat your dinner off Ruby’s floor,’ she said. Ruby was ‘an example to the others, what they could do if they tried, you can’t be too clean and some of them are her own relations, isn’t it wicked, if Ruby can then …’
I was sent to boarding school in Adelaide when I was eleven. Retrospectively it seems so appalling if I try to imagine it through Aunty Ruby’s eyes. Her last child sent away, too. I recall my puzzlement the morning I left when Aunty Ruby stood over in the corner beside the range with her back to us and wouldn’t turn round until Mum put her arm around her and sort of pulled her towards me. I remember shuffling in embarrassment and even pulling away a bit when she hugged me so hard, and Dad saying, ‘Steady on there, Ruby.’ The look on Mum’s face was one I couldn’t then fathom, although somehow I knew it had nothing to do with me at all. I think, I hope, it was one of compassion.
Because compassion is in short supply, particularly among adolescent schoolboys caught up in the great adventure of growing up. How shameful it is now to remember how easily Aunty Ruby faded from my life or concern despite the gifts of herself she had showered upon me. I had to be reminded during the yearly visit home to go over the river and visit her. ‘She’d love to see you poor old thing she’s aged so much and her arthritis is dreadful she’d be so grateful …’ I went and was cursory and offhand and eager to hurry away to more exciting pastimes. I did it as a duty, nothing I would have thought to do myself, and when Mum commented that despite everything, ‘you could still eat your dinner off her floor she’s that house-proud,’ I scowled in youthful impatience and mocked this obsession with cleanliness.
Dad died in my final year at school and Mum stayed on, although The Reef was gradually overshadowed by more modern pubs and motels. When I was twenty-three Mum died and I went up home for the funeral. It was a crowded, rowdy, good-natured affair with a splendid wake after and I only caught a glimpse of Aunty Ruby, mammoth and creaky, moving round the kitchen with the other helpers. ‘Catch you later,’ I signalled, but with one thing and another, well, I was back in my Adelaide office before I knew it.
I was not to return to the Alice for twenty years. The pub had been sold and there was nothing for me there. I worked hard, too hard, married, was dissatisfied and created dissatisfaction, divorced, worked harder, and wondered about where love fitted into my life. Middle-aged and sorry for myself. It was then that the letter came from Aunty Ruby, an apologetic letter, sorry to trouble me, could I help her find her children. Her children! My God, how could I not have known? With one massive clout of remembrance my childhood raced up to catch me and I recoiled in horror at my neglectful, arrogant ignorance.
I knew the system. I had the contacts. I found her children—at least I found Pauline. I was too late for Steven. He had died of, what can you say? Confusion. Pauline was only a year or two older than me and had made Aunty Ruby a grandmother five times over. It is impossible for me to imagine the bewilderment and wonderment, the aching, hollow lost feeling and the joy with which Pauline received news of her mother and gazed at the photo Aunty Ruby had sent me. She was much lighter than her mother. The Protection Board had told her she was a half-caste and let her keep the Pauline part of her name. She never knew the O’Dowd part. She was a child from nowhere. Until now.
We made arrangements to go up to the Alice. Pauline, her husband and the five children. I had demurred. Surely Pauline would want to see her mother alone? Would I not be in the way? No, she insisted, I knew her mother, her mother had been my mother, hadn’t I told her as much? I would put them all at ease, help bridge the gaps, fill in some of the past.
We took the Ghan up from Adelaide and Pauline questioned me almost nonstop about her mother, wanting every little detail I could squeeze from my memory. Laughingly I recounted the cleanliness business and the store my mother had set by that. My tone was flip, unconvincing. Underneath I was feeling deep shame that for so many years I had denied Aunty Ruby at least one of her children, myself. I would, perhaps, have been better than nothing! The anecdotes of my childhood and the protestations of how I had loved her rang hollow to my ears. I despised myself.
We took a taxi over the Todd out to Aunty Ruby’s place, the same little house she had always lived in. Pauline was nervous and tense, the children awkward and giggly. We went up Aunty Ruby’s path atremble and stopped at the foot of the verandah when the old, old lady, leaning on a walking frame, opened her front door to us. I can’t describe the confusion of the next minutes other than to say it was the outpouring of undiluted human emotion, terrible and wonderful in its power. At last, I recall, we were sitting around the table in Aunty Ruby’s immaculately scrubbed kitchen and she was taking the teacups carefully off their hooks on the dresser and setting them on the tray. The jug began to boil and I watched as, carefully, with her clawed, crippled, shaking hands, she took the cups one by one from the tray and sterilised them over the sink with the boiling water.
‘Oh, Aunty Ruby, you don’t have to do that for us,’ I started, reaching towards her. ‘We know …’ She turned slowly to look at me with those great luminous eyes, the tears still trembling on her eyelids after all these years. We stared at each other, across the great divide.
now melt into sorrow
There are beacons, shafts of lights that just for a moment pierce the darkness with a glorious white beam and illuminate our shreds of humanity in even the most bleak and lonely place. I’ve clung to the beacons that flashed out to me in that courtroom. It is not enough, but it is something—for me. Sadly it was not enough for my son. A week later he decided to call it a day.
I always tried to attend when Johnno was scheduled to appear in court. It was one of the small—and pathetic—ways I had of keeping in touch with him. Generally someone would ring and let me know—people for whom Johnno was a regular, like the blokes at the Talbot or the cops at Kings Cross or the admitting officer up at Caritas. But to them Johnno was just one of a flood of helpless wrecks that got washed up on their shores and would soon be sucked back out to sea. They ministered to him with what they had to offer—kindheartedness, a hot shower, a decent meal, some pills, a warm coat, and watched him drift away again.
‘He’s due in court again,’ they’d say and give me the time and place.
We had had a short hiatus. Johnno had been at home with me, being ‘compliant’ the word is. We went for walks together, I gave him a haircut, got some vitamins into him and played checkers. One day we discovered the Bondi Pet Palace and Johnno’s enthusiasm was boundless. It became our daily destination. If we arrived outside the shop before opening time Johnno would press his face up to the glass, shielding his eyes as he tried to see through the gloom inside and if no-one came to open up he would bang on the glass until someone did. Once it was the owner, a fiercely moustachioed, bad-tempered fellow with a bald egg head. ‘Boil it hard, old man, five minutes at least,’ I muttered to myself, like Mr Polly. Usually it was the shop assistant, a frail-looking girl with a miserable expression. I could tell Johnno alarmed her with his shambling gait and his intense examination of the animals but my presence reassured her, I think. Because of this I stayed in the shop when I would have preferred to wait outside, away from the smell of birdseed and mice, the chattering of caged birds and the gurgle of water in aquariums. So enthusiastic did my son become that he took to bringing paper and pencils with him and sat down on the shop floor to sketch his favourite—a turtle. I asked the girl if she minded and she shrugged with disdain.
The hiatus dissolved. My house was full of turtle drawings and Johnno would now sit for hours through the night staring at them and whispering in some mysterious and deeply private language. His eyes became lost and crazy and he stopped eating. He wandered the streets alone now. I ceased to be visible in his realm. I knew he had stopped his medication and I could only wait for the next calamity. This time the call came from the Bondi police station. There’d been a bit of trouble was all they said.
Disreputable People Page 2