She gave them some bread and made herself a coffee and had a few fags to settle herself down. Then she found the baby’s milk had curdled in the bottle so she washed it out and put some orange cordial in it and tried to make the baby take it but he was that stubborn. Little bastard. It was then that she snapped.
Twenty-four hours passed before she washed the baby, dressed him and wrapped him up. When the ambulance men arrived she told them he had stopped breathing in his sleep. Within a couple of hours the police had come, Scotty had vanished and Sue found herself locked up.
That had been a year ago. Since then Sue had been in the Women’s Country Correctional Centre, far away from the city and the child whom she had not seen since the day of … when that thing had happened. A relentless, despairing longing for her child infected her spirit, her conversation, her very bones it seemed, yet it was possible that she would never see Scotty again.
‘It’s better this way,’ the gaol governor and the social worker and the Welfare told her. ‘Better for him. He’s nicely settled with a new family and you should be grateful. Placement of an older child, with Scott’s difficulties, is not easy.’
‘What do you mean “an older child”? He’s only four,’ she’d said. ‘What do you mean “difficulties”? I want to see him. I’m his mother. It’s my right.’ She said that often—‘I’m his mother, it’s my right’—and she knew they were thinking, well you don’t deserve to be, he’s better off without you. Deep down she wondered if they were right. Nevertheless, she ached for him. She imagined, given the opportunity, she would be a wonderful mother. Never again would he be hurt. She hadn’t even meant to, anyway, it was just everything getting too much … if she found some good bloke … she was off deadshits forever, and bashers and drinkers and junkies … she’d move to a little place on the coast … place with a yard and the sea down at the end of the street and Scotty would be okay in no time and she’d have a job and buy proper food and give up smoking and watch her temper and …
But might he have already forgotten her? Four was pretty little. Welfare said that she could write him letters if she liked and the letters would be forwarded on but Sue had never been much of a letter writer, not much of a writer actually, and couldn’t for the life of her imagine anyway that Scott would get much fun out of a dull old letter. No, it had to be something truly hers she could send him. Herself. She thought and thought about it, determined that he would have her gift on Christmas Day.
And an inspiration came to her! Excitement shaved the edge off her aching remorse. She joined the sewing class, twice a week, after laundry duty was over, down in the table tennis room off the main yard. Her gift to Scotty would come from her own hands, her own body. She rootled through the fabric scraps until she found what she wanted and set about making a pillow, a big jolly pillow with a delirious pattern of orange clown fish printed all over it. The sewing class supervisor offered to teach her how to use the Singer but Sue said no. The present would be all her own work. At first she was clumsy and the stitches were uneven and grubby where the cotton had got wet and knotty from her having to keep licking it to rethread the needle. But this made the pillow all the more special, all the more a gift only she could offer. From time to time she pricked her finger on the needle and the tiny smears of blood were glad evidence of her love. It was a huge pillow because she wanted the little bloke to be able to jump on it and roll in it and lie comfy as anything on it, all wrapped up like a silk worm, sort of.
It took her weeks to make, and with every stitch she wove love and hope and herself into its fabric. To stuff the pillow she was permitted to cut up an old foam rubber mat and she took immense pains over this, wanting the fragments of foam to be as small and comfortable as possible. The pillow took an enormous amount of filling and even when she thought it was full enough and sewed up the last seam she found that the foam settled lumpily and she needed to add some more. She did this with anxious urgency as Christmas was only one week away and the Welfare would be coming tomorrow to collect it.
Finally it was finished and the sewing room supervisor offered to take it then and there and store it for the Welfare. ‘No,’ said Sue, ‘it is not quite ready. I want to add one more bit. Can I take it to my cell tonight just to finish it?’ No harm in that, Christmas was coming, good cheer and goodwill to all, she was permitted. So, at nine o’clock that night Sue was locked in her cell with her giant clown fish pillow.
She waited until lights-out, then climbed into her bunk with the pillow. She was filled with a profound sense of seriousness and intensity, what she wanted to achieve was all-important, absolutely crucial to her future and that of her little boy. She curled her body around the pillow willing her smell to permeate every inch, a smell that said mother and love, memory and mercy, and she started to whisper a prayer, a story, a fantasy, a song of hope into the meticulously wrought thing.
This is from me, Scotty. Mum. Remember me? Remember how I used to give you a lovely bath down at the Clinic twice a week when you were a wiggly red scrap of a baby and remember me putting all that lovely Johnson’s powder all over your bum and blowing farts on your fat little tummy so you’d squeal and snort and grab my hair and I’d pretend to gobble you up because I loved you so much? Remember you and me, just us, in the flat together and you liked to sit on the floor and bang the saucepan lids together and the noise didn’t worry me or anything and I just let you do whatever you liked and never roused on you and then you started to walk and I called you me old drunk mate because you staggered around and banged into things and when you got better at walking we used to go together across the playground to buy me fags and I’d get you an iceblock or some chips at Macca’s and we’d sit on the swings while I had a bit of a smoke and you ate the chips and I’d lean over and nick one or two and, as a joke, offer you a fag in return? Remember? And how we’d watch ‘Wheel of Fortune’ every afternoon and I’d tell you about how I’d win it one day and we’d have a new couch and two cars and a barbecue and a trip up to Port Macquarie resort and a Black & Decker tool set and you could be the man of the house and build a new room for a baby if we got one, and remember how you used to get into bed with me to help us keep warm when it was really cold and how I’d snuggle up against your back with my arms all wrapped round you. Remember? And remember how I said I’d take you to Movie World on the Gold Coast, well I still will, one day and we might even get a dog and I’m going to find a house with a proper new bathroom and not just cold water, but all the hot water you could ever want and some football boots and I’ll come to meet your new teacher and I’ll be all la-de-da dressed up and you’ll be real proud of me in front of your mates … and it won’t be like when bubby was …
No! Bad things must not intrude into her message. She snapped off the dreadful image before it sank into the pillow. She concentrated on Scotty’s little peaky face and straw-like thatch of hair and pressed her whole body around the pillow, pretending it was him, and willing every ounce of her spirit into him, offering her darling child every skerrick of love and contrition and promise that she possessed. Finally, drained to exhaustion, she fell asleep, her body holding the pillow all night in a close embrace.
Three hundred miles away from the Women’s Correctional Centre, on Christmas Day, Scott received a huge parcel wrapped in brown paper on which someone had drawn big red candles and bunches of holly and a Santa Claus with a sack. Unwillingly, though she had agreed with Welfare to do so, his foster mother gave him the parcel. But ‘I’m not telling him who it’s from,’ she had insisted.
It didn’t matter that she didn’t tell him. Scotty knew. As soon as he had torn off the paper he knew. He stiffened as he looked at the grubby, shapeless mass. His eyes widened, his jaw dropped and he started to tremble convulsively. Terror swept through his little body as the old familiar smell of his mother filled his nostrils and he scrambled towards the back of the fridge to hide.
the kennedy family photo
Remember that Kennedy family photo? My fathe
r was always very taken with old Joe. He admired his toughness, his drive, his determination. Pretty much the way he admired old Mao. These men had the mentality that he prized. Driven by ambition, ruthless, determined to succeed. There was a sort of innocence about my father. He would hear no ill of either of these men and, admittedly, in those days of the sixties, what we had to go on seemed, perhaps, more rumour than hard fact.
Anyway, back to the Kennedy photo. Try and recall it, if you will. They are all grouped around a long couch, old Joe and Rose, standing centre back, the handsome young sons and up-and-coming sons-in-law spread out on either side of them, with here and there perfectly groomed young women filleted into the gaps. See the tough-jawed, powerful-faced sisters, clearly Kennedys, and see the ring-ins: energetic, athletic Ethel; fragile Joan, pretty-pretty blonde wife of the bully, Ted. (But we didn’t know that then, did we?) And there is Jackie. Sitting where her position allows her, centre couch. Wife of the soon-to-be President. Graceful, poised, pregnant with his child, the next Kennedy generation. All the President’s men—and women. Luvly, luvly, luvly.
See the determination in their faces. ‘They’re tough. Physically and mentally,’ says my father. (Into his mind’s eye comes another Kennedy family photo—all the happy Kennedys, minus frail Joan, playing touch football on the lawns of Hyannis Port.) ‘You can’t have the one without the other. A physically dissolute fellow can’t be tough mentally. That’s what matters. Rigorous discipline. Old Joe knows that. Look at what he’s made of himself and his family. By Jove.’
It was surely with that photo in mind of the happy family around the couch all looking determined for the camera that my father decided to have a family photo taken, too. Since it was not his job to order, not organise family affairs, it was behoven upon my mother (as it was behoven on Rose?) to arrange the session. She was less keen than my father. (Perhaps she already knew how the camera could lie.) After all, she never had any truck with my father’s heroes. Mao had too much Jesuit blood on his barbaric hands and, although she loved reading about Jackie and the little Oleg Cassini suits and the pillbox hats, she had no energy to waste on old Joe. Perhaps she discerned more than she let on. Perhaps she had doubts about the serenity of the matriarch Rose. Perhaps she knew better than any of us then.
Gathering her brood of sons for the photo session was not a difficult thing. They all lived under her roof and barely a night passed when they were not at home for dinner. The best meals they ever ate in their lives came out of their mother’s kitchen. So why should they not eat with her every night?
Gathering me was somewhat more complicated. I never ate there. I had married early and disastrously. (The family knew from the start that that was how it would be. A disaster. I, only later. At the time of the photo any realisation I had was only a slightly worrisome ache that I probed at gently, loath to be invasive, to insert the scalpel and really operate.) There had been intense parental opposition to the marriage. My mother, who came from Victorian squattocracy and had known a life of picnic races and Bachelors and Spinsters Balls and wool-shed dances and had a keen understanding of who was who and what was what socially in Victorian society (never mind that she had moved interstate to Sydney on her marriage thirty years ago), had threatened never to forgive me for throwing myself away so young and on such an insignificant person and from her attitude thereafter I had come to realise she meant what she said. (We had compounded our sin by trying to please her with an engagement notice in the Herald, but we had got the wording wrong which she said put her in a bad light. Didn’t we know there was a right way and a wrong way of doing things?) Anyway, the reason I never ate there was because we were never asked. This did not necessarily mean they had anything against us, specifically, staying for a meal. In this particular aspect, it was not personal. No-one was invited to eat there without a formal invitation. Pity help a dropper-in who thought they might be asked to ‘stay to dinner’. It was simply not done. In defiance of this I had instituted a system at my place where whoever happened to be round at the time was always asked to stay and eat and, to be honest, this became troublesome, expensive and tiring because with a two-year-old and baby twins I was perpetually exhausted. But it was the principle. I wanted our place to be known for warmth, hospitality, noise, music, all the things I considered my family home was not known for. Besides, my husband was a very generous sociable fellow and nothing put him in a better mood than playing mine host with the cask wine and the bolognaise. This sociability was one of the things my father had against my husband. How could a fellow get up fresh in the mornings and apply himself to the serious business of living if he had been carousing the night before? Something had to give. (It would, Daddy, it would.)
Our family photo session was not a success. It was not a Kennedy family photo session at all. The first problem was that no-one told me when it was scheduled. At 6 p.m. one winter Tuesday night while my eldest child played in a desultory, placid way with her baked beans and I sat in the ungainly posture that was necessary if I was to breastfeed the twins simultaneously, the phone rang and a brother asked, in an exasperated voice, ‘Where are you?’
‘What do you mean, where are we? What for?’ I yelled over the screams of the unlatched thirsty babies. ‘The photo? What photo? You’ve got to be joking. I’m feeding the kids. Holland’s not home yet. We’re not dressed up. How can we possibly get there?’
These types of problems are of no consequence to unmarried, childless persons and I was told to hurry and not hold up the entire family. Now, any normal, gutsy woman would simply have snorted with laughter and said ‘get lost’, but I was not a normal, gutsy woman. I was a craven girl-child, still clinging to the hope that my father would see some of the Kennedy ethos and charisma clinging to my personality and it simply would not do to ruin my chances by holding up the family. Milk was dripping from my long, brown, rubbery nipples and running down my tummy and the twins were purple with outrage but I put them on the floor, wiped my breasts with a teatowel, buttoned my shirt, rubbed the teatowel over my daughter’s baked-beaned face and lifted her smartly from her chair. With speed and organisation (for which I am well known, Daddy) I had those three little girls into clean jumpsuits and pink dressing gowns and little bunny slippers neatly fastened about their tiny ankles in five minutes flat and they looked like heaven. Except the babies both pooed their pants and one of them threw up. Out of the jumpsuits, into clean but more worn ones, scrub scrub the sick off the pink dressing gown, and then I attended quite sharply to Fleur who was eating the baked beans again, and smearing.
I dumped them all in their cots to keep them safe, while I threw on my new black polo jumper and my floral (home-made, best) skirt. One thing for sure, I intended to ask Holland for a hair drier for my next birthday. I have lank, flat-on-the-top-of-the-head hair and if it is to be halfway presentable it takes ages (and usually still looks dreadful) but a drier would help. I looked at myself in the mirror. I did not look like an elegantly coiffed Kennedy. The babies were screaming and I had to rush into their room because it was the sort of scream they emitted when Fleur had climbed in to play with them and she tended to squash them with enthusiastic love. I put on my eye make-up in their room, the better to keep an eye on them. I love eye make-up. I’ve used it every day since I was a sixteen-year-old student and someone said I had eyes like Gina Lollobrigida. (Come to think of it, this eye make-up caused almost as much fuss in the family at the time as when I married an unsuitable person.) I paint a thick line across the top lid, with a slight upward flick at the end and then I paint, inside my eyelashes, on the lower lid. So, we were as ready as we would ever be, but we had to wait for Holland as he had the mini van (not his, the company’s) and I had no taxi money as it was late in the housekeeping week.
I phoned to check at Holland’s office but, thank heavens, he had already left so I just hoped he was nearly home. The phone rang. It was my brother again. ‘Where are you?’ I told him that we were ready and just waiting for Holland and he deman
ded that I come in a taxi. When I explained that I couldn’t, the silence on the other end of the line signalled without doubt that he thought either I was fibbing, or wasn’t that just what you’d expect with her married to that no-hoper. One or the other, I resented both. I was breathless with outrage at his lack of sensitivity but then decided it wasn’t worth the angst, he was just an immature male ignoramus who hadn’t even taken the time to get to know my beloved husband, and I told him we’d be there as soon as possible.
Luckily, as I hung up, I heard Holland pull up in the street. That’s not hard to do as we lived in a rented terrace and you stepped straight from the footpath into the lounge room. The twins started to grizzle just then. Remember, I had interrupted their greedy feeding frenzy (and didn’t I know it, drip, drip, drip went the milk into my black jumper, making it smell like a cow byre). Holland came in with that watchful air that he had adopted as our little family expanded so rapidly, kissed us all dutifully, opened the fridge, took out a beer, poised it on the fridge top while he lit a fag and started to lower himself onto a kitchen chair.
‘No! Don’t!’ I shouted, to my own alarm. ‘We have to go straightaway.’
‘Go? Where?’ I told him over the noise of the babies. Holland dragged on his fag, poured the beer down his throat, without sitting down and said, ‘Okay’. (I felt for him. I did. I know he suffered from my father’s Kennedy worship. He knew that Dad didn’t think he could hold a candle to John or Bobby or Ted, and that I could have found myself a man of real drive. He wanted my father’s good opinion. He wanted the Kennedy lustre and glamour and money. Trouble was, he wasn’t driven and my father had long recognised this.) I know that it was in the hope of my father’s increased respect that he said ‘okay’ so promptly and at such inconvenience to himself and moved us without delay to the van, which was a pity because I didn’t see that Fleur had zipped back to the kitchen and grabbed two handfuls of squelched-up baked beans which she started to devour in the van.
Disreputable People Page 4