Back to Broady

by Caroline van de Pol

  By lunchtime I’m a mess and call my girlfriend, Vicki, whose husband is a policeman. They’ll know what to do. Vicki’s voice soothes. ‘I’m sure she’s fine.’

  Mid-afternoon and I can’t stand the waiting any longer. I reach my brother Paul at the cafe where he works. He tells me he’ll go to the house and wait for her to come home.

  He rings me. ‘Margie’s still not home.’

  ‘Can you check her room, look for her bag?’

  While I’m waiting on the phone, Paul finds the letter. He sees it on her dressing table. His name is on it, and then crossed out so it reads: Dear Family.

  ‘Read it. What does it say?’

  My hands shake so much I think I might drop the phone but it’s the only thing that feels real.

  I love you all very much. Don’t ever feel upset about my going – when I’m in heaven I’ll look after you all – and you won’t have to put up with any crap. I wish I could have made it, but it never gets easier and I’m tired, tired, of trying, and nothing ever eventuating. Please don’t blame yourselves for anything, I don’t want you to think of me, only think of the good times and the laughter, and you’ll be OK.

  Please try to stay together and neither of you blame each other – because it’s no-one’s fault only fate – inevitably. So I’m off to a happier place.

  Love you all

  Margie

  PS Please publish my writing on the bathroom towel paper.

  Burying my sister on her birthday was the hardest thing I have ever done. It felt like I had lost a daughter as well as a sister, me slowly turning into the overprotective mother. But sometimes, on the good days, Margie was my best friend. We swapped books and videos, shopped together for clothes. We laughed at ourselves like teenagers, teasing about boyfriends and weight gains and celebrating small wins like a new job or car.

  These are the memories I like to share with my young nieces and nephews when they come to stay and when they ask. My young niece, Jade Caroline, came to stay a few days with us. This was a time between jobs for me, when I had finished working in corporate communication and before I started lecturing at the university. I was doing my Masters and enjoying freelance editing from my office at the farm.

  Jade climbed into the back of the car with William and Daniel for the drive to school. James, at sixteen, is in the front seat itching to drive but for now he has settle for control of the radio.

  ‘Cally, can you please put Delta Goodrem on,’ Jade asks above the music of Coldplay or The Whitlams.

  I think I detect a groan from the boys but we are happy to oblige. Jade sings her way through ‘Born to Try’. The boys quickly scramble out at the school gates, forgetting to kiss their mother and young cousin goodbye. We go home to bake some bread rolls. Jade works the dough into shape and suddenly stops.

  ‘Cally, do you pray to Nana Valerie and Papa Jim?’

  ‘Yes, I do,’ I smile.

  ‘What do you say?’

  ‘I ask them to keep you safe, to keep my boys safe.’

  ‘What was my nana and papa like?’

  It wasn’t the first – or the last – time my niece had asked me about her grandparents. I loved it then and still do now. Each time I get out the photo album and connect our lives – ‘before the bridge’ and ‘after the bridge’.

  I remember Margie’s funeral as if it were yesterday, not twenty-something years ago. I can still picture my family and friends arriving at the church, the enormous show of support the only thing that kept me from falling when I was teetering so close to the edge.

  I can see my six brothers, Paul, Tom, Andrew, Seamus, John and Matthew, arms linked across each other’s shoulders, holding firm as they balanced Margie’s coffin above them. Careful, as if she might fall and break.

  Faces strained.

  Bodies bent.

  The weight of death.

  They walk in time, step by step, three of them older than Margie and three younger. When one stumbles at the last of the steps of the church I look away. I can’t watch. And across the church I see Maurice and Nick and I will myself not to cry. I have learned so much from them, so much about courage, strength and dignity. They will guide me through.

  My eyes trace the brown brick walls of the church and rest on the stained glass windows. Soft sunlight danced outside. It has been several years since we’d left Broadmeadows behind. But this church, Holy Child, the heartbeat of Dallas, still feels like home.

  It is fitting to be back where it all started, where we had come together for our parents, first Dad, and then Mum. I have no memory of their funerals, grateful for the daze of grief that shielded me back then.

  As Margie’s favourite music rings through the church and Linda Ronstadt sings ‘Love is a Rose’, I study each of my brothers. Matthew, with his sun-streaked hair, thick waves so like his father’s. Still a teenager, Matthew is too young to have suffered so much. He battled adolescence as an orphan, from the age of fourteen. I wonder how he would cope with his sister’s suicide? Suicide is such a horrible word. She took her own life. That sounds just as bad. I notice the tight grip of my brother John’s fingers on Seamus’s shoulders. Watching my younger brothers – so strong and so sad – makes me cry. As Seamus plays some of Margie’s favourite songs, Goanna’s ‘Razor’s Edge’ rings in my ears and I wonder how they would cope.

  The six boys, so handsome and proud, are all accomplished athletes. The evidence of their sporting prowess – championship trophies for swimming, ribbons for athletics and best and fairest medals for football – are now packed away in boxes. Stories become family folklore, ready to dish up with the turkey and gravy on Christmas Day.

  Early on the morning of the funeral, as Jon and I drove from the farm, my younger brothers Matthew and John followed behind. I prayed their old car would make the journey. I kept them in view in the rear vision mirror, just in case we had to rescue them. Always the worrier.

  My two boys were with our kind neighbour and her young children. Playing in the sand pit. Oblivious. And yet, as I waved goodbye I wondered how I might tell them about their aunty’s death. One day I would have to tell James his adored godmother had died.

  How do you talk to a child about suicide? How do you talk to anyone about it? You don’t. That I already knew. It remains the last taboo.

  We drove to Dallas deep in our thoughts until Jon suddenly swore. ‘Shit,’ he yelled as the car swerved in the gravel on the side of the road. ‘Flat tyre.’

  ‘Where’s the spare?’

  ‘Didn’t I ask you to get one?’

  ‘Sorry.’

  We left the shining white Ford on the side of the highway, and climbed into Matthew’s old car. I squeezed into the back between surfboards and wetsuits and sleeping bags. Comforted.

  ‘Can I have one?’ I asked my brother John as he lit up a smoke. I hadn’t smoked for years and we all laughed as I coughed and spluttered my way through it. We laughed at the idea of Margie watching it all. And I felt she was with me, in the car, walking into the church, sitting in our front row seats. We sat, the eight of us, side by side as someone played ‘Amazing Grace’.

  I tried to sing but stopped when I felt Andrew, beside me, shaking, whimpers escaping from him. I couldn’t be sure. I had never heard him cry before. I reached up and rubbed his back.

  Paul delivered the first of the eulogies, followed by Matthew and then me. He had no notes, just stories from his sister’s life. Margie’s legendary generosity, her nurturing of her nephews and her niece. Together we created a picture of our Margie, her childhood in Dallas, her time at boarding school and university life and her love of music and drama.

  Paul told of how he had spoken to Margie less than an hour before she died. He saw her at the tram stop in Park Street.

  ‘Just going into the city,’ she told him.

  Somewhere in the city she caught a taxi to the Westgate Bridge, climbed out and jumped. That poor taxi driver. Helpless, just like the rest of us.

  It’s that p
icture of Margie clambering over the rail desperate to find relief that haunts me. Contradictory images fight for prominence – her body flying, her body floating.

  I don’t know if she drowned, the policewoman said she would have been dead before she hit the water, that the speed of the fall from the top of the bridge would have killed her. I’m not sure how that happens. How fast, or how slow does one fall? Does it matter if it’s a leap or a dive or a simple step off the edge? Sometimes I imagine her changing her mind, her hands gripping the railing and feet pointing at the water, her body stretched as far as it can go, stretched into a thin line, hands holding on for dear life but a desire pulling at her feet, pulling her to the abyss below.

  ‘She’s all arms and legs,’ Mum would say when Margie called ‘Watch me,’ from the swings in our backyard. It seemed to me then that she could stretch her legs harder and higher than anyone I knew. My sister was happiest when on that swing, pushing herself to the top of the world, high above our garage roof where she would suddenly let go and jump off. ‘I’m flying,’ she would shout.

  Those images were with me all the time. When I fed baby William, read a book to James, brushed my teeth. And they returned when I clung to Jon late at night waiting for sleep to turn them off.

  But sleeping was the worst. ‘Don’t leave me here,’ I heard her calling to me in my dreams. Locked up in the John Cade ward, ‘certified’ for depression, for being too sad. To protect her, they said.

  As Paul walked away from the altar, his feet dragging along the blue carpeted stairs he nodded to Tom. He gave the reading, a message of hope: ‘Be not afraid. I go before you. Always. Come follow me and I will give you hope.’ And I thought of my two oldest brothers, only a year apart, doing their best to keep us all together in the hotel after Dad died. And again in our rented houses after Mum died. I imagined Paul and Tom on that Tuesday night after the news from the police that Margie was dead. The heartbroken older brothers together at the city morgue in St Kilda Road. Their duty to formally identify their sister. What did she look like? What was she wearing on that morning when a fisherman at Spotswood found her body on a stretch of water under the Westgate Bridge? Nothing can erase those images and that day from my mind – no kind of meditation and no amount of writing.

  She wanted us to understand, she told us in her letter. And I thought I did understand. I thought I knew the depression and the unending grief that overwhelmed her so that every day was a struggle. I thought I knew just how hard it could be for her to get to the shower. But did I really know the demons she battled? Would my guilt ever leave me?

  And the anger, where did it come from? For a long time I couldn’t speak about my sister’s suicide. And whenever I read over her letter I was both comforted and angry. I smiled at her words, ‘remember the good times and you’ll be okay’ because there were many of those good times. Those days when we got the giggles imitating strangers or remembering the crazy characters from our childhood.

  But it pissed me off when I read over that short postscript on her handwritten message to us. Please publish my writing on the bathroom towel paper. How dare she tell me what to do when she was about to check out? But anger, like guilt, is futile.

  Matthew, who followed Tom to the altar, helped to bring me back, helped me ‘remember the good times’. He talked about their shared houses in Victoria and Queensland. They went to concerts together, the most recent one Cyndi Lauper. They enrolled in acting classes at St Martin’s Youth Theatre. He would never forget his big sister, he told us through his tears. He would always be grateful for her having taught him what really mattered in life, to love and be loved.

  Was our love not enough? I sometimes wonder what I might have done differently. How I could have fixed it? I’m reading Jonathan Livingstone Seagull again and thinking about his dad teaching him to fly. He tells him to stay away from the edge to keep him safe. I think of Margie learning to fly. She’s like a ballerina gracefully lifting her arms upwards and out, gliding through the air. Her legs pointed and hands outstretched, jumping into the waiting arms of Mum and Dad. Like a seagull she is searching for a warmer place in the sun.

  ‘Faster. Higher,’ I hear her call to me in the backyard at McIvor Street, laughing, as I push the swing harder. And then she jumps, soars through the air, eyes wide open. She really is flying.

  After Andrew and John read their prayers of reflection the Eurogliders sang ‘Heaven (Must Be There)’.

  Hope dies last.

  Even when Paul read the suicide letter I still held onto hope. I thought the words were a cry for help. I thought we would get a second chance and together we would get her the help she needed. I promised myself, when she was missing, that we would find her, help her get back to university. We would find a miracle medication and all would be well.

  I rolled up the memorial booklet Margie’s girlfriend Cathy had prepared for the service. A kind of birthday present. I rolled it around and around in my hands, and opened it again to focus on her smiling face. We chose a black and white photo of Margie sitting at the grand piano at the hotel, taken when Mum was still alive. She was belting out a tune, grinning out at the whole world. A flash of happiness caught forever. The final song, ‘You Are the Wind Beneath My Wings’ rang through the church. I knew her spirit would always be in flight.

  Finally, we made that familiar trek to the Fawkner Cemetery to bury our sister with our mum and dad. The dry soil and pretty flowers fell across her coffin.

  I pictured the ripples of water closing over Margie’s body like when she was a child floating in the pool and holding her breath while I counted, the water drowning her pain.

  Fast-forward twenty-something years to October 27, 2016 and I quietly celebrate Margie’s birthday and anniversary with candles and music. Her best friend Cathy sends me a favourite photo of the two of them, arms wrapped around each other. Margie leaning in and grinning. I share the photo on Instagram with family and friends.

  Nick Gleeson sends me an email announcing that he has just finished reading my manuscript, not realising the significance of the date until the last pages. He writes, ‘I have said a prayer for Margie, and especially for you and your family. I am wondering if you should consider writing an epilogue. A small piece to say how you are today, what life is looking like for you and your family…’

  Those dark days of the last section of my story were a long time ago. Today, I enjoy a Bonnie Doon kind of serenity.

  I am married (still) to a wonderful man who has held my hand all the way, and I am the proudest mother of three remarkable sons who have had to manage life with a sometimes absent or distracted mother. And they’ve done it brilliantly.

  This story was a long time in the telling and there were times when I abandoned it because it was too hard or too overwhelming to remember and to write. But something kept pulling me back. I guess I was trying to make sense of it all. And when I read Maya Angelou’s quote, ‘there is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you’, I agreed it was better out than in.

  There is absolutely no doubt of the ripple effect of losing Margie, Mum and Dad on each of us and our families. I would be pretending to suggest that all scars are healed. But what is important is we all do go on, one day follows the next and another challenge or triumph follows the last. And, hopefully, we learn to talk about our sadness, our grief, our anxiety, our depression – open up about whatever it is that holds us back, even paralyses us. I would be lost without my girlfriends and our long conversations over a coffee or evening wine. Even if you feel all hope is gone, suicide can never be an option.

  Twenty-four

  Ryan Thomas Egan struts out to the cricket pitch, bat and ball in each hand. Only sixteen months old and already, Tom’s youngest grandson is preparing for his turn in the spotlight. His dad, Michael and partner, Jordan, have the cameras ready to capture it all. It’s the Boxing Day Test at Batesford and the Egan clan has gathered again, as we have done for nearly thirty years, first at Torquay then at Diggers Res
t and now Batesford, on the outskirts of Geelong where our numbers reach into the mid-fifties. Great Aunty Margaret Simpson (my mother’s younger sister and nana to my boys) is the matriarch supplying dozens of her home-made, secret recipe, sausage rolls. Parker Maisie, eight weeks old, is the newest addition to the family.

  My husband Jon is calling for the captains, my niece Jessica and son Daniel, to lead their selected teams – siblings, cousins, sons, daughters, grandchildren – onto the dry paddock with its impressive fake grass pitch and steel cricket stumps as we battle it out for the Jack Simpson Memorial Cup. The cup is in honour of our uncle who loved our Boxing Day gathering more than anyone and was a first-class cricketer who once met the great Donald Bradman at a schoolboys’ competition in Adelaide. Today, his sons, Andrew and Nick, will be the vice-captains.

  For the younger players, and their numbers are increasing now, Jon has hand-crafted a cricket bat made from a fence paling just like the ones Uncle Ray Gleeson made for us in McIvor Street. They will line up patiently in order of age: Connor, Kai, Anna, Keira, Levi, Olivia and Charlotte.

  For a moment, I wish my dad and my mum and my sister were here with us, celebrating the births (Leila and Parker) and the engagements (Mat and Monica, James and Karina), and welcoming home Shae from London. But more and more each day my gratitude for what I have overwhelms what I have lost.

  I glance at Jon with his clipboard, discussing match details with my three sons. They, more than anything – any medicine, any therapy or work – have helped me through the dark times. I’m in a good place, here in my sanctuary, surrounded by my family, grateful for them and the lifelong friendships that grew out of the castles of McIvor Street and Broadmeadows.

  Paul is out there at the crease, scoring a few runs and later missing a few catches. He takes cricket as he takes life – full bore and random. Perhaps the first and only boy to be expelled from Broadmeadows Technical School, Paul’s job is to make sure everyone gets some praise – or sledging, depending on your age – from the grandstand Jon has built under the shade of the towering Elms. ‘No-one gets expelled from Broady Tech,’ I’ve heard it said. But Paul managed to upset someone important there and Dad was advised to find a new school for him. Paul was the one who exchanged his youngest brother Matt’s new cricket bat for some petrol, long before Cash Converters became his preferred bank.