The Fence-Painting Fortnight of Destiny: A memoir

by Meshel Laurie

  First published in 2013

  Copyright © Meshel Laurie 2013

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Email: info@allenandunwin.com

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available

  from the National Library of Australia

  www.trove.nla.gov.au

  ISBN 978 1 74331 448 7

  eISBN 978 1 74343 525 0

  Lyrics on p. 119 from You’re Just Too Hip

  Written by Dave Graney (Mushroom Music Publishing)

  Reprinted with permission

  Set in 12/17 pt Minion Pro by Bookhouse, Sydney

  Dedicated to my sister Sherri and my brother Pete,

  whose stories are their own to tell.

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  Mary and Tubby Laurie

  May I introduce you to Shit Box?

  Catholicism and the modern girl

  Primary School/Jumping on the frenemy roundabout/The Rabbits of Doom

  St Saviour’s

  High school and finally—NUNS!

  The demon drink

  Teenage inspirations

  Why was my dad so angry?

  Sex, drugs and rock’n’roll—but mostly drugs and uni

  Brisbane 1.0

  Melbourne, for good

  The back room of The Espy

  I got married

  Things I learnt from prostitutes

  The Killing Heidi incident

  The whore is born

  It’s Perth

  It’s Gosford

  Brisbane 2.0. As in, O God!

  Being human

  Happiness and its causes

  Where babies come from

  MTM & HH

  The road home

  PROLOGUE

  There’s a bloke in my neighbourhood who has no legs below the hips and he pushes himself around the place on one of those silver kids’ scooters. He reaches up and holds on to the handlebars with one hand, and pushes himself along the ground with the other, while his little dog waddles patiently beside him.

  Every time I see him I think back to a lady I used to know, a famous beauty, who laughed her head off as she delivered to me the mind-blowing lesson that I had a perfect body. Me, Michelle Laurie, the fat girl from Toowoomba.

  She didn’t say it in so many words, and she certainly didn’t realise she was delivering a life-changing epiphany. She was just passing the time, as time was very nearly passing her.

  As I look back over my life, I see great lessons learnt from revered spiritual teachers, but also from friends, strangers and even the odd junkie prostitute. I remember moments of enlightenment that arrived with a bang, and moments born of the self-reflection only true boredom can provide. I made a few decisions while painting a fence once. Those decisions turned out to be very noisy indeed.

  MARY AND TUBBY LAURIE

  I hate it when memoirs go into great detail about the lineage of the subject. I’ve been known to skip those chapters, along with introductions, which I realised I rarely read when I was writing mine. When I’m reading about someone else’s life, I want to get to the guts of the story as quickly as possible. What did they do and how did they do it? That’s what I want to know. I don’t care about whatever slum or serfdom their grimy ancestors crawled out of.

  Now that it’s my turn to write my own story though, I can’t help but think how integral the stories of my parents—particularly my mother’s—are to my own. It’s obvious to me now that it’s been my mother’s beliefs about herself and her place in the world—and by extension me and my place in it—that have propelled me forward, scrambling to prove her wrong about both of us.

  I won’t burden you with the boring bits of Mum’s life, which she would argue are the highlights. Instead I’ll take you into the unsettling corners of her early life that I reflect upon when she’s really getting on my tits. These are the facts that have eased our relationship over the years, which she will not know until she reads this book. They are facts I’ve garnered mostly from her old friends, my father and online record searches. From Mum herself there have been little bits and pieces I’ve heard and overheard along the way. Lines I’ve read between lines, and sadness I’ve heard in silences. Combined they are the truths that help me forgive her quirks, and my own, and help me to value our little wins too.

  Mary Therese Curran was born in 1950 to parents who’d both served in the Australian Defence Force in World War II. Although her mother Peggy had apparently always suffered from what was known politely at the time as ‘nerves’, it is believed that her father Bill’s ‘nervous’ demeanor surfaced after—and as a consequence of—the war. Bill and Peggy ran into each other in the late 1940s, so Peggy was relatively long in the tooth when she gave birth to her first and only surviving child at 28. It’s not known whether Bill was self-medicating his post-traumatic stress disorder with alcohol by then, but certainly by the time little Mary was old enough to store traumatic memories of her own, his alcoholism was wreaking havoc on the family. In toddler-hood, the shameful fleeing of the home began. Back and forth they would travel, Peggy and little Mary, on the train between the Bundaberg house they tried to share with Bill and the house of Peggy’s exasperated parents in Gladstone. ‘Paddy!’ the old woman would wail through the open front door of the big Queenslander and into the still, hot night. ‘It’s Peggy and Mary here again!’

  Peggy would drag herself, her child and whatever else she’d managed to throw together up the many stairs of her parents’ home. What marital advice she was given by her staunch Irish Catholic parents we’ll never know, but we do know that the same trip was made many times, until eventually Peggy left the big house in Gladstone alone, leaving little Mary with her grandparents around the age of four. Evidently, the arrangement at the Gladstone house didn’t work out, because the local nuns were brought into the picture and little Mary was shipped off to boarding school at the age of five.

  These memories we did hear a lot about as kids, but their true value was lost among all the other boring bits. It wasn’t until decades later that the tragedy of my mum’s childhood registered with me. This tiny little girl was sent away from her family to live, indefinitely, in a dormitory, with hundreds of other girls of varying ages. She was constantly informed that no one was paying her way, that her family couldn’t care for her and that if it weren’t for the charity of the Sisters, she would be out, all alone, in the street. Not surprisingly, she developed a bed-wetting problem and was routinely made to stand in the hallway beside her soaked mattress, while a nun by her side informed the other girls of the filthy thing she had done. She was physically, emotionally and verbally abused, fed on slop, and bullied into gratitude. Sporadically, she was visited by her mother, who was still moving in and out of her marital home.

  Mum has this thing, maybe it’s a coping mechanism, where she tends to view events from her early life throug
h the vague prism of her childhood eyes. She doesn’t know a lot about what was going on in her life and in the lives of her family at this time because, she says, no one told her. That’s all well and good for a child, but given that many of the players were still alive and in her life until fairly recently, it’s quite unbelievable that she never asked to be brought into the loop as an adult. What is clear is that little Mary had quite a lot of living—and dying—forced upon her in the first ten years of her life.

  Mary was nine years old, and living back at the big house in Gladstone with her grandparents, when she heard that her father was dead. She wasn’t given any further detail at the time, and as is her way, didn’t seek any out until I urged her to do so in 2009, after she confessed that she believed he had killed himself; for reasons that will become apparent, this had weighed upon her particularly heavily. Upon receipt of his death certificate, she was relieved to discover that although certainly alcohol-related, his death did not appear to be suicide.

  She had always described the scenario thus: ‘One of the times mum and I were away, Dad died.’ Rather less simplistic is the fact that by her tenth birthday, just over a year later, Mary was living in Toowoomba with her mother, Peggy’s new husband Tom, and Tom’s vicious spinster sister, Elsie. It appears that Peggy’s years without her daughter had not been spent entirely on the train between Bundaberg and Gladstone, because she met Tom during that period at the charmingly named Toowoomba Mental Asylum, some 500 km south of her usual stomping grounds. Tom apparently worked at the asylum in some capacity, and poor nervous Peggy was a patient. Again, little is known about her time at the hospital, although it’s believed she underwent shock therapy at some stage.

  Tom was a dedicated Catholic from a large family who’d never been married before and probably thought he’d spend the rest of his days living with his miserable little sister. Some years before, Elsie’s dream of becoming a nun was forgotten momentarily in the arms of an American soldier. Although Mary always knew Elsie was a bitch, she never had any inkling as to why—until Elsie’s middle-aged daughter, whom Elsie had given up at birth, appeared in the late 1980s to fill in the gaps. In a final cruel twist, Elsie was by this time very deep down the black hole of dementia and had no understanding, let alone memory, of who this nice woman with the flowers might be.

  It’s hard to imagine the pain Elsie must have endured upon meeting Mary, her new step-niece, so close in age to her own lost daughter. It was demanded that Elsie welcome this little waif into her family—the same family who pretended her own daughter had never existed. And in a twist that feels like it pushes the bounds of believability now that I’ve written it all down, Elsie would actually end up raising the despised interloper. On 23 December 1960, two days after Mary’s tenth birthday, while she was settling into her promising new life and looking ever so forward to being a big sister, Tom was revelling in the family he never thought he’d have, and Elsie was wondering what her place in this new family was going to be, Peggy overdosed on sleeping pills, ending her own life and that of her unborn baby.

  She left Mary orphaned, in a new town, with a family she didn’t know, and a step-aunt who truly hated her.

  For many years she maintained she didn’t know what her mother died of. ‘You must know!’ I used to demand insensitively. ‘What if it was breast cancer or something? We need to know these things.’ Finally my father told me, not so long ago, that she thought both of her parents had killed themselves—but she wasn’t too sure about her dad, which is why I thought it was so important to find out. The death certificate seemed to bring a lot of relief for mum in her late fifties, but I can’t help but think of the burden the two deaths placed on those frail little shoulders at the age of ten.

  In one of the very few lucky breaks my Mum received in childhood, her stepfather Tom turned out to be a champ, who loved and cared for her until his own death some eleven years later. Although she fought him initially, he had the strength to hang in with the little orphan he’d been lumbered with, over whom he had no legal guardianship or responsibility, but no one else particularly wanted. He clothed, fed and educated her until the day he gave her away at her wedding. ‘My Tom’ she calls him now. All the while though, Aunty Elsie was sneering around the place, sticking the boot in whenever Tom wasn’t looking.

  Curiously, for the first fifteen years of my life, I was dragged along for weekly visits to the Catholic old-age home, run by nuns, where Elsie was serving out her days. Mum insisted we go, even though we argued quite correctly that Elsie wouldn’t remember if we’d been there or not. Mary couldn’t give up on Elsie, just like she couldn’t give up on nuns, who had abused and humiliated her throughout her school years—but that’s my mum down to the ground. She really seems to feel that somehow she deserves hardship, and is almost grateful to those who visit it upon her. Perhaps it’s a Catholic thing.

  My mother was informed relentlessly throughout her childhood that she was not really very important in her own world, let alone the world. She was an extra in a complicated adult drama. Her mother-figures were troubled by deep psychological wounds—I’m including some pretty savage nuns in this description—and she was constantly abandoned. Is it any wonder then that having her own proper little family was so important to her, even if she didn’t know exactly what one looked like from the inside? Under those circumstances, it’s hardly surprising that she seemed so disappointed by what it actually was, by who we actually were.

  By contrast, my father’s childhood was downright idyllic. He was a much-longed-for baby in a peculiarly infertile Scottish Australian family. His father, my grandfather, had five siblings, of whom four married, but only two babies were ever produced. My father was the only Laurie of the two, and unless my brother Pete gets cracking, we will be the last in our long and possibly ignoble line of Lauries.

  Born in the same year as my mother, 1950, my father was doted on by his parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, most of whom lived within a two-block radius of one another in Toowoomba. They all still lived in those houses until I was almost in my teens, and I’d spend my weekends walking between them, just as he had done back in his day. He attended the same primary school as his father, had plenty of mates and girlfriends, and left school at the ripe old age of fourteen to get a job, as his father had done during the war. His biggest drama was hiding his teenage drinking from his parents, who were teetotalling Presbyterians. In fact, their complete inexperience with the demon drink made it fairly easy to convince them that dodgy hamburgers were to blame for the odd late-night spew, so covering his tracks didn’t present too much of a challenge at all.

  Graham Laurie, known as Tubby Laurie to his mates, which was everyone, was riding high in 1966. He’d been working for a few years, had his own car and had his oldies right where he wanted them. On the weekends, he and his mates frequented local dances, hoping to meet a nice girl and be chosen to drive her home. I’m told that as dangerous as it sounds now, it was quite safe and reasonable for young ladies to accept rides home from young men then, as long as a number of ladies were present. In any case the curfew was generally in the region of 10 p.m., so there was no shortage of dads in dressing gowns peering through the curtains making sure all was above board in the driveway.

  It was at one such dance that Tubby Laurie first caught a glimpse of the terrific set of pins he’s been following around ever since. He approached Mary Curran in her miniskirt, struck up a conversation and was granted permission to drive her and her girlfriends home. They were both sixteen at the time. Tubby swears he was ready to marry her then, but his hitherto docile parents had other ideas: they were less than impressed at his relationship with a Catholic girl. Tubby’s father Jim was a Mason for heaven’s sake! A Mick daughter-in-law was an embarrassment he was not prepared to endure without a fight. While other members of Tubby’s doting family were prepared to wait it out and see what happened, his parents launched an all-out assault on his burgeoning relationship.

  They threate
ned, they cajoled, they went looking for more suitable girls. At one stage they offered to buy their son a house if he’d marry the girl they liked most. When that ended badly—possibly in a father–son punch-up)—they accused Mary of being a slut who was bamboozling their baby boy with her treacherous sexual charms. For her part, Mary had been so deeply indoctrinated in the cult of Catholic Virtue that the suggestion she wasn’t a virgin stung her more deeply than any of their other barbs, and to this day she will not forgive it.

  As for Tubby, the slightly spoilt only child, the intrusion into his affairs by his parents awakened a rebellious streak that he’d never really had cause to tap into. He was determined to marry the Catholic girl his parents fought so hard against—and one week after his 21st birthday, the legal age of consent in those days, he did just that.

  For her part, it must have been incredibly moving for Mum to have a man fight so hard to keep her in his life—and the fight continued for many years. Relations with his parents warmed when the grandchildren began arriving, but never thawed completely.

  As for Tubby, I get the impression that this assertion of independence, and indeed of manhood, was nothing short of exhilarating! He was blessed in his youth with profound optimism—I suppose nothing had ever really gone wrong in his life, and he had no reason to believe it ever would, so he easily shook off the security of his family in pursuit of a great adventure.

  His positive thinking has see-sawed with my mother’s understandable pessimism for over 40 years now. She’s taken a lot of stick for her outlook, but I have to say that in those low moments, when my father has been left stunned by misfortune, it was Mum who just put one foot in front of the other and kept on going, dragging the rest of us behind her like Mother Courage with her cart. In a way, I think sorrow sort of feels like home for her.

  Between them are three children, who each take a little from column A, and a little from column B. I’ve inherited some of Mum’s outlook and some of Peggy’s mental illness, and as a consequence have been known to find a home in sorrow at times. I can also be the last optimist left believing in an adventure by the time it finally comes together, which in its way is lonelier.