‘I suppose you have a right to know a bit about me, too,’ Kirrali said, slowly. ‘But what I want right now is some answers.’
‘I can give you answers but not over the phone.’
We agreed to meet but not for another week as she was busy at uni. When I asked her what course she was doing, she ignored my question. I didn’t push it — at least I would be seeing her soon. And I’d better prepare myself to talk about stuff I had never talked about before.
Sixteen
After the taxi ride and that first kiss, Charley and I got to know each other — rapidly. At first we hung out in his taxi behind the pub — him talking about politics and justice, and me earnestly listening. Then we would kiss, nothing more. Within a few weeks our relationship evolved. We fell into a pattern — I would go to the Boundary Pub on a Saturday afternoon, like I always did, and hang around with the usual crowd. A little later, Charley would arrive and spend about an hour or so with his mates. We wouldn’t talk to one another. Then he would leave, seemingly to return to his shift driving taxis. Instead, I would leave too and we would rendezvous in the dark car park, zooming away to his small flat nearby. I am not sure why there was so much secrecy but that was the way he wanted it. I just wanted him.
Saturday nights were precious. From the first time we slammed the door shut at his flat, it was full-on. Up until then I had resisted the persistent, fumbling attempts by local boys at parties but with Charley it was different. I was the one who threw myself at him.
We’d make love. Is that what it was? Afterwards, we would lie around, dashing from the hot sheets to the kitchenette to toast stale bread under the griller, racing back to bed, only to dot the sheets with scratchy crumbs. He took a photo of me once with a Polaroid camera and I tried, unsuccessfully, to snatch it off him as I was obviously naked under the blanket.
When I was with Charley, I was deliriously happy but I was careful not to show it. I knew the only way I could be with him was by appearing as if I didn’t care. At 10.48pm he would drop me off at the station. I’d catch the train home and he would go back to his night shift driving taxis. He didn’t ring me, he never asked for my phone number and he didn’t once come to my flat after I’d moved out of home. I couldn’t ring him as he didn’t have the phone on at his flat.
We weren’t a couple — we didn’t eat out together or stroll down the street hand in hand. We just had our secret Saturday night trysts. Nearly twenty years later, I can still recall the sensation of lying next to him and the heat radiating from his skin like a brick wall after a hot day.
So my daughter’s name was Kirrali. It was a pretty name. It suited her. I wondered who had named her — I wasn’t given that opportunity. When I first realised I was pregnant, I was in shock. Part of me was terrified but at the same time I would lie in bed at night and fantasise about the names I might call her. I was convinced I was carrying a girl. Somehow I knew. I imagined Charley coming to me and laying his curly head upon my swelling tummy and us lying there tossing around names like any other expectant parents. In these daydreams, his usually abrupt manner towards me would soften. I imagined us setting up home far from suburban finger pointing. We would live together in his flat, a second-hand baby’s bassinet crammed in beside our bed. We wouldn’t have much but we would be rich in love and the sharing of cultures. In my dreams ...
Instead of meeting up at the Boundary, I had arranged to meet Charley at his flat on the pretence that I’d made him a devil’s food cake. I had whipped up the cake that morning while my parents were out shopping and had carefully carried it in Mum’s Tupperware container in my bag, first on the train and then walking.
Later we were lying around, tucking into our second big slice of cake, when Charley suddenly got up and walked over to the window. I got up, too, and we stood there and watched a tabby cat trying to knock over a bin in the car park.
‘So, Charley, I gotta tell you something.’
‘Me too. I need to tell you something.’ He spoke so quietly, almost a whisper. ‘You make it hard though. The cake, your body …’
My heart started up like a Victa lawn-mower. ‘Say it.’
‘It’s a mistake. Us.’
‘I don’t understand. Why?’
‘Just because. I can’t explain it.’
‘You? Mr Opinion, who is never short of a comment. You can’t explain to me why you think we are a mistake. Maybe I made the mistake. For trusting you.’
‘Trust? Since when have us fellas ever let you lot down? While you have lied to us, taken our land and children and language away, not paid us wages for honest work …’
‘We are not talking about black–white relations. We’re talking about one man and one woman. Not everything is political, Charley.’
‘It is to me.’ He put his hands on both sides of my face and angled it so I couldn’t help but look him in the eyes. A tear slid down my cheek and on to my breast.
‘Goodbye, beautiful.’ Charley released his hold and the warmth from his hands instantly disappeared.
He grabbed his taxi keys and left. I sat amongst the frayed cushions on the floor of his dingy flat, too stunned to move. Perhaps I was hoping he’d return, do a U-turn. But of course he didn’t.
How could I have told him that I was pregnant? It would have been a pathetic thing to do, to sucker on to a man who obviously didn’t want me. To use the pregnancy as a glue, as a bond between us. To even think that the pressure to ‘do the right thing’ would manipulate him into staying with me, perhaps even marrying me. This was Charley and no amount of social pressure would sway him. I knew that. Perhaps that’s why I didn’t tell him. And why I didn’t fight to keep the baby. I felt powerless. And I knew he didn’t love me. I gathered my things — leaving behind my mother’s precious Tupperware container — and never went back.
Charley was radical, argumentative, stubborn, opinionated and every other synonym of difficult but he made me laugh. His skin was strangely silky despite the taut muscles beneath the surface. His eyes were both deep set and deep in colour, like black holes that sucked up the light. Impenetrable, really. I don’t think I ever got a glimpse of his soul, what he felt. He was either silent and inscrutable or a ranting figure spouting rhetoric.
By the time I told my mother, she had already guessed something was up. One weekend, I was sprawled on my bedroom floor flicking through one of her British homemaker magazines when she came in and sat down at the end of the bed.
‘How far gone are you?’ she asked in an even voice.
‘Fifteen, sixteen weeks.’
‘You’ve left it too late. You’ll have to have it adopted.’
Too late for what? An abortion? I’d never do that to my baby, to Charley’s child. Never.
She handed me a piece of paper. Sisters of Mercy Hostel, Old Devenish Rd, Cooma, NSW. I was being sent interstate where no one would witness my disgrace.
‘They have a hostel there for unmarried mothers.’
I wasn’t surprised. I’d had a lifetime to get used to the fact that my mother knew everything and organised everything.
She paused at the door, ‘Cherie, I know it’s hard but you will get over it. I wish you had come to see me earlier.’
I didn’t realise I had come to see her, I thought to myself. But I didn’t correct her. My mother had given me instructions on how to deal with my situation without mentioning ‘pregnant’ or more importantly ‘baby’ once. As for the word ‘father’ as in ‘father of my unborn child’ well, I knew that would never be mentioned. By her or by me.
December, 1966. I hopped on a bus to the Sisters of Mercy Hostel, as Mum had arranged. I was seven and a half months pregnant and had only just started showing. Luckily cheesecloth tops were all the rage and I could hide my tummy quite easily. I don’t even think anyone noticed at college — it was exam time and lots of girls had ballooned from stress eating. Anyway, I wasn’t the kind of girl who attracted rumours. I was known as a ‘goodie-goodie’.
Christmas Da
y was miserable. My mother had sent me a small parcel of food — mince pies and sweets that I shared with the other girls — but otherwise I kept to myself. I felt terribly sad and alone.
For four weeks, I languished in that cold, laughterless home for unmarried mothers. Then on 23 January 1967, after a fourteen-hour silent labour, I gave birth to my baby girl. In the brief moments that I saw her, I thought of her as my beautiful brown-skinned cherub. Then they took her away from me.
The next day, the nuns pressured me to sign her over for adoption. I was on my own. I was exhausted but I promised myself I would get her back. The nuns wouldn’t let me see her and I was too weak to walk to the nursery on my own. By the time I was strong enough to get myself out of bed, my baby daughter was gone.
Four days after the birth, I left that place. I shuffled onto the bus carrying my small travel bag without the one item I’d bought for my baby — a tiny little yellow jumpsuit with chickens embroidered on it.
I spent the next few weeks holed up at home — stuffing cabbage leaves down too-small bras to relieve the agony of my milk-engorged breasts. I would sleep during the day or go down to the lounge room to watch mindless shows on television.
My mother, of course, was firm and not very sympathetic. She steered the conversation towards my studies, made me hang out the washing and expected me to cook dinner on the days that she was working. She did bring me a cup of tea in bed at seven o’clock each morning — I guess that was her way of showing she cared.
It was a different era then. Things were swept under the carpet and there was no room for emotion.
Feeling sorry for yourself was especially frowned upon. Squeezing into my jeans, I started back in my second year of secretarial college as if nothing had happened.
Seventeen
Charley. How was I going to tell him? Would he be angry or glad we had created a child together and that she had been born without me telling him? I was fooling myself — there was no way Charley would be happy to find out that he had a child who was ‘tainted’ with gubba blood. The best I could hope for was that he’d be furious at me but not take it out on Kirrali. I was used to Charley being furious. So was the world.
How I was going to tell him wasn’t my only problem. Finding him would be just as hard. Charley didn’t stay in the one place for long. He went where he was most needed. His mother’s people came from the north-west of the state so he was often up there, fighting causes, visiting the Elders and listening to their stories, advocating on their behalf, helping kids out who were in trouble, visiting blokes he knew in prison. Sometimes he was up in outback NSW, around Bourke, where his father’s mob came from, and sometimes he was back in the city lobbying politicians, getting his defiant face in the paper with matching angry words.
I remember bumping into him once, years ago, at the airport. He’d just got back from six months on Fraser Island ‘teaching gubbas about bush tucker and survival’. I laughed, wondering what a city boy like Charley knew about bush tucker and hunting, but not for the first time, I’d underestimated him.
A year later, I got an invite to the launch of a book that he’d written on the topic. A very upmarket affair it was — bunya nuts and quandong tarts instead of the usual cheese and biscuits. Of course, I bought a copy and even made him sign it. To my tea bag, keep jiggling, Charley, it read. Private joke. To Charley I never really belonged at the protests and marches. I wasn’t ‘agitating’ since I wasn’t the one who had been wronged. I was merely ‘jiggling’ — a ‘moral tea bag’. I suppose he was also inferring that my brand of crusade was a watered-down substitute for the real thing. I accepted his criticisms, even agreeing with him. How could I possibly understand what it was like for him and other Kooris? Those I knew still had to fight a daily battle to be treated like everyone else.
I actually bought two copies of Bunya Tucker and hid one away in a box with photos, newspaper articles and other links to Charley. Like a bowerbird that is attracted to blue coloured items — pegs, wrappers, stones, trinkets — I collected anything that mentioned him. I even had his taxi identification card that I’d nicked from his taxi when I first started seeing him.
When I rang my mother and told her that I had something important to tell her and Dad, we agreed I’d go over for dinner the following evening.
On the train, I had time to reflect on what I wanted to say. I was hoping that Kirrali was going to be part of my life and I needed to let them know that. More specifically, I needed to tell them that their only granddaughter — my older brother and his wife had two boys — was Koori.
When I walked in the door, Mum was arranging a bowl of camellias. The table was set with a lace cloth and crystal wine glasses and tapered pink candles the same shade of pink as the camellias. Anyone else might have thought it was a special occasion but this was my mother’s nightly ritual. We sat down to roast leg of lamb and four vegetables while Dad poured each of us a glass of semillon.
I cleared my throat to speak, ‘I need to tell you something.’
‘Let’s say grace first.’
Dad dropped his head like a well-trained dog at Mum’s words. I felt the usual rise of anger at my mother’s level of control over the household and almost felt a small kernel of satisfaction that I was going to drop this bombshell on her. Grace over, my mother indicated that I could begin.
‘The daughter I adopted out eighteen years ago … of course you won’t have forgotten about that … well, she’s contacted me.’
My lips began to quiver. My news wasn’t coming out as confidently as I wanted it to. ‘She wants to know about her background. She wants to find out about her father but she may also want to meet her biological grandparents. In the future.’
Mum looked at Dad. Her face crumpled and she burst into tears. Although the child in me had hoped for a reaction to crack my mother’s usual poker face, I didn’t expect weeping. Nor Dad’s words.
‘We’ve been waiting for this. The last few years or so, when it seemed that you might not marry and have a family, your mother and I began to talk about the past. For the first time in many years, we talked about the adoption of your baby. You must understand, when we grew up you just didn’t have a child out of wedlock. You either got married in a hurry — a shotgun marriage they called it — or you gave up the baby. There wasn’t a choice.’ He paused to sip at his wine. His voice was unsteady.
Mum took up the story, ‘You remember Wendy down the road? Her daughter Lucy had a baby when she was just nineteen. Well, now she’s married to a very nice man and they have two more children of their own. A blended family, they call it.’
‘Let me go on, Nancy,’ my father said, admonishing her lightly. ‘Nineteen years ago, when you were, well, pregnant, we couldn’t imagine that any man would take you on after giving birth to some other man’s child. We figured the fellow, the father of your child, wasn’t going to marry you as we’d never even heard you mention his name, let alone met him. We didn’t know what to think. So we thought adoption was best for both you and the child, the baby being unwanted and all.’
‘Unwanted?’
‘Not planned. We didn’t know whether it was some awkward situation you found yourself in. We thought adoption would give you more of a normal future and the child would have a stable family. A loving family, like you had been brought up in. That’s what we wanted.’
‘I thought it was the shame of me being an unmarried mother,’ I said slowly. ‘And what your friends would have said.’
‘Back then, we thought it was about what was best for you. But since we got talking about it, we realised that maybe we hadn’t made the right decision. I mean, you would have coped. You were young but not much younger than your mother was when she had your brother.’
Dad smiled at Mum, perhaps in his mind’s eye catching a glimpse of the young woman that she once was.
‘It shouldn’t have been your decision to make,’ I pointed out.
‘We thought you would come to us and insist that you
keep the baby,’ my mother said. ‘We were steeling ourselves for that.’
‘But I didn’t know that.’
‘You were so young. You were in your first year at college. You had the rest of your life ahead of you. We didn’t want you to be burdened with a baby.’
‘She was my daughter.’
We sat in silence. Each of us lost in our own version of what might have been.
‘She’s obviously a young woman now. Can you tell us something about her?’ my father asked, breaking the spell of ‘what ifs?’
I told them what little I knew: that Kirrali was smart, that she seemed nice, that she was at university, but I stopped there. I omitted one fact about her. When it came to the crunch, I couldn’t bring myself to tell them that their granddaughter was Koori.
Eighteen
Kirrali finally rang and organised a time and place for us to meet. A Brunswick Street café, somewhere public and neutral — just like they recommend for a first date. I had taken an annual leave day off work although I could have justified taking a sickie, my stomach was churning so much.
By 2pm I was dressed, even though we weren’t meeting until later in the afternoon. I had changed my outfit three times, from jeans to a long skirt and handkerchief-top and back to khaki pants and singlet. While it felt like I was going for an interview, I didn’t want to look like I was. On the other hand, I didn’t want to look too casual as though I didn’t care about the significance of the occasion.
The café was a brisk walk from my flat through the back streets. It was the most glorious of spring days. The sky was the colour of turquoise and the front gardens were fresh with lime green buds bursting with optimism. I loved inner city landscapes — from three storey terraces trimmed with wedding cake lacework, to tiny worker’s cottages with striped tin roofs and modern glass and concrete warehouse conversions. I didn’t miss owning a car. Well, I hardly ever missed owning a car.
Becoming Kirrali Lewis Page 11