A glimmer of my mother’s reality came through to me. Over time, although I was unable to articulate it, I began to realise that when Mum looked at us she didn’t see us. She patted our long golden locks, stared into our deep blue eyes, and fixed us up in dresses and hair ribbons to match the peaches and cream complexions she saw on us. Who she saw when she looked in her own mirror, I had no idea. She sometimes said she was of Irish and Scottish descent and tinted her hair a reddish brown to keep whatever image she had of herself intact.
I came in from work one evening to find Mum in a state and she said that the police wanted to speak to me. I didn’t have a clue what this might be about and was more puzzled than ever when she said she’d talk to me privately after dinner. She wanted to get Dellie and Leonie out of the way first.
When at last she sat down, her manner was extremely agitated. ‘Tell me everything about that trainer of yours,’ she ordered, and at first she wouldn’t explain why she wanted to know. Her questioning flew in the face of the indifference she had previously displayed towards my swimming aspirations, and I began to feel I was suspected of something.
I told her the little I knew, which wasn’t much. She asked me if he’d ever taken me to his flat. I admitted to the one visit and that we played chess—there was nothing more to tell.
‘The police say he’s been interfering with young girls,’ Mum finally told me, ‘and they want to talk to you to find out if you’re a victim too.’ I almost burst out laughing for a minute, because he had been kind to me but hardly interfering. ‘I mean putting his hands in your swimming costume, or getting you to change your togs in front of him,’ Mum snapped. I was confused because men weren’t allowed into the ladies’ change room.
‘In his flat! Does he ask you to change in his flat?’ Mum’s voice began to rise. He didn’t, of course, and I thought Mum was going to become angry because I had nothing to tell her, but eventually I was able to convince her.
When two detectives came to the door later, she explained that she’d questioned me herself and that I couldn’t tell them anything. ‘Roberta’s undersized and underdeveloped for her age. She’s a fast swimmer and good at diving, but she’s nothing a grown man would take a fancy to,’ I overheard her saying. ‘She doesn’t weigh more than four and half stone soaking wet.’
As I lay in bed that night I thought about this description , which seemed to carry with it the implication that I was seriously unattractive and no man would be interested in me. Mum’s opinion appeared to be corroborated by the fact that, if my trainer had been making passes at some of the swimmers, he had certainly overlooked me.
At the time I was only training three nights a week and on weekends because, with the Magnetic Island Swim on hold, I had no goal beyond keeping up my speed and distance. I intended to discuss the police visit with my trainer the next day, but Mum wouldn’t let me go to the pool. When I went on the weekend, he was no longer amongst the group of sun-tanned trainers and retirees playing chess on the grass behind the diving board. The front door of his flat, which he invariably kept open, was closed, and I never saw him again. My attempts to find out what had happened to him from Mum were met with pursed lips and mutterings that I shouldn’t care what happens to ‘dirty old lechers’. Under the circumstances, I felt it would have been inappropriate to ask anyone else. I remembered his kindness and thoughtfulness towards me, and I didn’t want to make further trouble for him by behaving in a way that might have appeared as if we had been close. On the other hand, none of the other trainers seemed remotely interested in giving me any guidance, or even keeping score for me on the miles I swam at each training session, so I missed him sadly. I had to keep note of my own distances and try to watch my own speeds.
Mum’s friend Nellie picked up with a bloke around this time. We were all very fond of Nellie; originally from what she called ‘the UK’, she was now getting on in years. Nellie had been a good friend to our family, passing us kids freshly baked biscuits and cakes as we passed Lowth’s Hotel kitchen where she earned her living as their cook. Later, when she worked at the Mansfield Hotel, she would come on Sundays to take us, all dressed up in our best clothes, on bus rides around town and to have ice-cream sundaes and other treats at the Garden of Roses Cafe on our way home. When she retired, Mum arranged for her to board with old Mrs Scott, who was on her last legs, and this relieved me of the task of staying over at her house at night when Edie was out of town.
Nellie’s man was much younger than her, and because she was a bit deaf he was able to slyly introduce her to strangers as his mother. She was glad to have male company and was generous to him, buying him clothes and a gold watch and leather wallet. He began to stand over her for money, and she started turning up with black eyes and bruises on her frail old arms and bony body. Eventually he assaulted her so badly that the police ran him out of town.
One night, the police came to our house to say that they had received a phone call from Dessie Mills, who was in some sort of trouble and wanted someone to go and get her. She had rung them because we didn’t have a phone and the police station was just three blocks away from us. It was midnight and Mum didn’t want to leave the house with Leonie and Dellie sleeping, so she woke me and asked me to go with Arthur to see what was the matter. Dessie had told the police she would be waiting at a phone box outside the post office a few blocks from her house. When we got there, we couldn’t see her, so we circled around and found her house dark. We didn’t know what sort of trouble the police had been referring to, and Arthur felt he couldn’t just bowl up to the front door of her house as the children would be asleep. Back to the telephone box. As we were driving slowly past, for about the third or fourth time, I noticed something that looked like a sack in the grass. We stopped. I went over and yes, it was Dessie. Her clothes and hair were covered in blood, her eyes swelling to black, her face broken and bleeding. Reg had beaten her up.
On the station at Torrens Creek, they hadn’t had alcohol in the house and it was a hundred miles to the nearest pub. But now that he was in town Reg had open slather at hotels and was either unwilling or unable to control his drinking. Beating up his wife had become a regular occurrence, which I had heard the adults whispering about, but this was the first time I’d been confronted with the hard evidence.
Dessie had passed out in the grass. I woke her up and helped her into the car. Reg was in the house so she didn’t want to go back there. We drove her to our place and Mum came out to the car to help her in. I was sent back to bed, sick to my stomach with the scene I’d just witnessed. Reg had thrown a glass of beer at Dessie when she’d asked him to stop drinking and go to bed, so she smelled like the stale beer glasses we had had to clean up after Arthur’s gatherings. But the deeper, richer smell of sticky blood was mingled in the rotten odour.
With my dream to become a surgeon apparently out of reach, and even nursing training appearing to be out of the question, I had begun to think seriously about what lay ahead for me. I wasn’t able to come up with many options, but, slowly, what was becoming clear to me was a host of things I did not want to be. Like most convent-educated girls, I had even considered the sisterhood at various stages. However, I had been deterred by the nastiness of some nuns and the idea of having to live ‘in peace and prayer’ with women who had their own problems and preferred not to deal with them. I completely dismissed this idea when I was expelled from school. Also, I had run into one of my old classmates who had told me she’d heard that I was being ex-communicated anyway.
Now I decided that I would never marry because I didn’t want any man beating me up. I hadn’t thought much about men or marriage over the years. With no father or brothers in the house, we girls had never been very comfortable around men, and the idea of actually living with them was, if anything, a very remote concept. Arthur’s appearance at our house had caused a lot of tensions, and I was particularly unnerved by the way my previously strong and independent mother had turned herself into a maid, happy to do his biddi
ng and for no obvious reward. First, witnessing Nellie’s experience of ‘love’ and then finding Dessie in the grass and learning that she had been beaten into this wretched state by the man who claimed to love her, the father of her children, completed my disillusionment.
I was still as skinny as a pole and small for my age, and it wasn’t as if I had to beat men off with a stick. So the decision I made that night, to avoid men and marriage and not to leave myself vulnerable, wasn’t much of a burden. At the same time, I was growing curious about these people—boys and men—and I noticed that it was not only their clothing that made them different from us, they behaved differently too.
Dessie went back to her husband, explaining to us that with small children there was little else she could do. Children, I thought then, too, were out. They chained women to situations where they could be beaten. When I next saw Reg he was his usual gregarious self, and it was hard to reconcile his sober state with the injuries I’d seen on his wife and the condition she’d been in when we found her.
‘Nemo me impune lacessit,’ I’d recite to myself from my studies in Latin. ‘No one will attack me with impunity.’ Not Arthur, not Mum, and not a husband.
Dessie often came over to our house and sat around talking with Mum, mostly about boring housekeeping matters but occasionally they had deeper conversations in which I was eager to participate.
We were chatting about nothing in particular one day when talk turned to childhood memories and how far back each of us could remember. Mum remembered ducks, and running around amongst them when a drake reared its head and was suddenly much taller than her. She remembered her fear. When it was my turn, I told them about my memory of being put on the petrol tank of a motorbike and being taken for a ride. Mum visibly paled and said, ‘You can’t remember that. Who told you that?’
‘No one told me,’ I insisted, ‘I remember it. Who was it, Mum? Who took me on a ride?’
‘Haven’t you told her about Jimmy?’ Dessie seemed to know about this person who had come to our house all those years ago, or perhaps she had even been there at the time. I was deeply curious and wanted to know more.
When Mum didn’t reply, Dessie said, ‘Well, you can’t put it off forever. Someone’s bound to tell her eventually and it would be better coming from you.’
Mum said that she would tell me later, but I said, ‘No. I want to know now.’ I knew that unless she told me immediately, while Dessie was there, she would put it off and get cross with me when I asked her next time.
So Mum said, ‘You have a brother. His name is James. He grew up and left home, and I’ve no idea where he is. He doesn’t write and he’s only been home that one time since you were born.’
Here was another secret to be added to the store that Mum had kept from me. I realised then that there was a conspiracy of silence among Nellie, Aunty Glad, Dessie and Leila, and possibly our neighbours, who must have all known but had probably been told not to talk about our brother with us.
I was growing used to the fact that our whole family seemed to be based on secrets and deceit, and my sense of security in the idea of family was considerably undermined.
Dessie’s best friend, Val Ludgator, often came around to visit us with Dessie and her kids.
One day, Val and another friend were shopping in the main street where a TB-screening van was parked. Because they weren’t rushed for time and wanted to try out anything new, for a giggle the women stepped into the van and had their X-rays taken.
A few days later, Dessie came screaming into our house. Val had received notification that her X-ray had been unsatisfactory and had to go to the hospital to have another. Dessie accompanied her, both thinking the TB-van camera had been playing up. At the hospital the second X-ray was taken and they were told to wait until it was developed.
The doctor came and told Val she had tuberculosis and was being admitted to hospital immediately. She wasn’t allowed to go home, even to get clothes or toothbrush, and she was scheduled for major surgery as soon as it could be arranged. Dessie was sent to tell her husband, Jim, and get her things, but because our house was closer, she came bursting in there first, very distressed.
The bakery where Val worked was closed immediately and within the next few days a huge plastic sheet was put over it and the entire building was fumigated. So, too, was the Ludgator’s house. Everyone who had spent any time in Val’s company, including Mum and us girls, was ordered to report to the hospital. Meanwhile, we heard that one of Val’s lungs and most of the ribs on one side had been removed, and no one was allowed to see her.
Of all the tests taken, only mine was positive, so I had to go back for a series of X-rays. Long ago, Mum had decided that I was old enough to explain my own business to the doctors, so she always refused to take time off from work to accompany me to the hospital. Consequently, I had been treated quite poorly and often rudely by certain doctors. My file was very thick due to all the illnesses I’d suffered, and often the doctors didn’t bother to plough their way through it before hustling me out of their offices.
Once, when I had gone to the casualty ward with an asthma attack, the doctor had tapped my file and asked me if I liked coming to the hospital. I didn’t, of course, but I didn’t know where else to go when I was gasping for breath and thought I was going to die.
My relationship with doctors grew worse after Val’s episode when I was put on a list for regular compulsory TB X-rays. For days before each X-ray, I had to work out in my mind what to do if they tried to keep me in hospital and wanted to cut my lungs out. I received no feedback from these X-rays, just another appointment card setting out when I was next to present myself. Instead of weakening my resolve to become a surgeon, I determined to be a better and more caring doctor than the ones I was coming into contact with. Such were my dreams.
8
Mum became increasingly remote and inaccessible. She was away long hours at work, especially in the early morning, which was when Arthur and I would end up in all sorts of fights. He was often hungover and would want us to get out of his way in the bathroom, so that he could dress and go to work. But Dellie and Leonie also had to dress and go to school, and I had to be at work on time too.
Arthur resented the authority which I’d always had in the house when Mum was absent, and detested the way I’d jump in when he told either of my sisters to do other than what we had always done. He was forever saying, ‘You keep out of this. Dellie (or Leonie) has to get out of the bathroom when I say so. I’m the one who has to go to work around here.’
For my part I resented his presence in many ways. I had learned from Mum that he didn’t contribute to our upkeep or pay any of the bills generated by the household, and he had personal debts all over town. He spent a great deal of his money, as he always had, buying drinks and currying favour amongst the people who frequented the pool room where he had his barber shop. The idea that he could exercise the authority of a father-figure was laughable to me. He had no experience dealing with children or teenagers and had already demonstrated his ineptitude.
When my numerous pleas to Mum to sort this situation out fell on deaf ears, and after a particularly distressing argument with Arthur, I packed up and went to live at the YWCA hostel. I called in at the hostel one evening on my way home from work, spoke to the Matron, with whom I had a good relationship dating from when I used to pick up their laundry, and asked if I could be a boarder. I moved in the next day. When I told Mum I was leaving, she reminded me that she’d been out in the world working at the age of twelve, so she felt that I’d already had more home-life than she ever had.
There were no individual or shared rooms available at the Y, and even the dorms were full. The only places on offer were beds and lockers lined up along a wide hallway; a sort of enclosed verandah which ran crosswise through the middle of the hostel. Apart from the few items of clothing which I wore constantly—my work clothes and swimming costumes—the rest of my gear had to be kept in my suitcase and stored in the l
uggage room. The environment, with its strict regulations about our comings and going, set meal times and rules about washing and hanging out our clothes, was reminiscent of the orphanage and I felt safe there.
My board was three pounds seventeen and six a week, for which I received sleeping quarters, breakfast and a good meal at night during the week, with an additional light lunch available on weekends. My pay at the newsagency though, was only four pounds five shillings. This left me with seven and sixpence a week with which to buy lunch on work days, washing powder and soap, pay my entrance to the swimming pool, go to the pictures and, if necessary, buy clothes. Often I had to sneak a few slices of bread and marmalade from the breakfast table to eat at work, so the idea of having anything left over to save towards clothing was laughable.
Dellie, at this time, was still bed-wetting and getting into terrible trouble for it at home—Mum kept a thick off-cut of leather to flog her with. She rebelled by stealing sums of money anyone left around, and before I moved out she had been driving me crazy by wearing my clothes and putting them back into my cupboard and drawers dirty. When I was trying to get dressed to go to work, I would find that things I had planned to wear were gone or dirty, so it had been a real problem. Also, she was encountering the burden of racism at her school. Outside the house, Dellie was still shy about confronting people, so she was pushed around a fair bit.
I became alarmed when she came by the newsagency a few times in the middle of the day, with only feeble reasons for why she was not at school. She came in the company of a rather unkempt looking white girl, and I couldn’t help but think they may have been up to mischief. One day after work, Dellie was waiting for me outside the shop and asked if I could give her some money. When I explained that I had barely enough to live on myself, she said she would be back the next day at lunchtime, then I was to point out things I wanted from the stores and she would get them for me.
Snake Cradle Page 16