Rose by Any Other Name

by Maureen McCarthy

  ‘There’s a cardboard breakfast over there,’ she says, pointing to a tray near the door with a small packet of cornflakes sitting in a white bowl. ‘Milk in the fridge, and I think there is a banana left in that bag of fruit we brought. Bread too. Don’t make toast though. It will make the room smell all night.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I say gruffly, emptying the cornflakes into the bowl and reaching into the fridge for the jug of milk. With sliced banana on top it isn’t bad. In fact, it tastes absolutely delicious.

  ‘So, Rose,’ she says, ‘what happened?’

  ‘Nothing happened,’ I snap, continuing to eat the cornflakes hungrily. ‘I just got caught . . . in the rain.’ She sighs and gives me a meaningful look but I turn away. ‘I just . . . didn’t feel like sleeping in the van,’ I add weakly. I toss up whether to tell her about the night surfing and decide against it. She’ll only think I’m crazy, and anyway it’s hard to believe I actually did it now. Maybe I am crazy.

  I finish the cornflakes and go brush my teeth. By the time I come back from the bathroom she has the light off. I get into bed, thankfully. I can tell she’s cross with me for keeping her at a distance, but I’m not sure what to say. Even though I’m so tired, I don’t immediately curl on my side to go to sleep. I lie on my back and look up into the darkness. I owe her something.

  ‘It’s good being here,’ I say awkwardly, at last. ‘Thanks, Mum.’

  She murmurs, ‘That’s okay,’ and, ‘Goodnight,’ then shifts around a bit getting comfortable.

  I think that she must have decided to go off to sleep because she turns her back to me and doesn’t say anything. I just I lie there, staring at the yellow streetlight pouring in around the edges of the curtains, knowing that I’ve been a rude pig but not knowing what to do about it.

  ‘You know that we all know, don’t you, Rose,’ she speaks softly across the dark space between our two beds. My breath catches in shock. ‘That you and Zoe’s father had a sexual relationship?’ she adds, as though I might not understand her meaning.

  My response is to become instinctively still. I’m lying there, stiff as a shop manikin, a rabbit in the headlights. I want to run and hide, but where would I go to at this hour? The quietness between us becomes so heavy, so pregnant with unsaid things, that I have to sit up a bit because it’s hard to breathe.

  ‘No,’ I say at last, ‘I didn’t know that.’

  ‘I suspected, after we dropped off those flowers,’ she tells me quietly, ‘and your sisters knew it intuitively even before that, so . . .’ She rolls onto her back. I watch her profile against the window as a flood of raw emotion fills my chest. Shame, anger, and then a weird, cocked-up kind of relief are vying with each other for first place.

  ‘So why didn’t you say anything?’ I ask, utterly confused.

  ‘I should have,’ she replies quickly, ‘but I was so furious. I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t trust myself.’

  ‘Furious?’

  ‘I wanted to kill him.’ Her voice is low, barely above a whisper and full of raspy venom. ‘I actually worked out a plan. Ask your sisters! Cynthia found me out. First I was going to knife him. Then I was going to run him over. Pretend it was an accident. I had it all worked out. I was at the point of employing someone to track his movements. They . . . your sisters cottoned on and . . . talked me out of it.’

  Kill him? Run him over? What the hell is she talking about? I’m so shocked at this that I can’t speak. My mother is the most peace-loving person I know and also the most kind and compassionate. She sends cards and flowers, and takes around casseroles, not only to friends who are having a bad time but to friends of friends! To anyone she hears about. She is always phoning people, driving them somewhere, helping in some way, and making excuses for their bad behavior. She was the one who got Dad involved in all the social justice stuff, all that prisoner advocacy, the refugees and the abused women. Dad gets the credit but everyone close to our family knows it was Mum behind it all.

  In short, my mother doesn’t do violence.

  ‘You were planning to kill Ray?’ I say, just to make sure I have it straight. And it is suddenly such an outrageously horrible thing to say that I feel sick. I want to chuck something at her. That familiar profile looking up at the ceiling is driving me crazy. So self-satisfied and middle-aged! ‘You had no right to . . . even think that,’ I splutter, ‘much less plan it or . . .’

  ‘He had no right,’ she cuts me off fiercely, ‘none whatsoever! At his age it was evil of him to seduce you.’ She stops for a bit and shifts about angrily in her bed. I think she has turned to face me but I stay rigidly on my back. I won’t turn and look at her. ‘How dare he do that to my . . . beautiful daughter!’

  I gulp down my anger. So keep it to yourself! I want to yell, because I don’t want to hear your opinion of him or your beautiful daughter or . . . I can’t cope with any of this. I feel like I’m drowning in something thick and black and stinking. But I hold it together. Just have to because . . . I owe it to Ray.

  ‘He didn’t seduce me, Mum,’ I manage to say very slowly. ‘I loved him.’

  ‘Of course you loved him, ’ she snaps back, ‘but it was still wrong!’

  ‘I know it was wrong!’ I say. ‘I should never have . . .’

  ‘I don’t mean you did wrong!’ she bursts out angrily. ‘It wasn’t your fault! He is the guilty one. That . . . creepy old bastard!’ She begins to sob and I feel absolutely terrible because I can’t move now, much less speak. I’m breaking in two.

  You see, I can understand this from her point of view. I can. Her eighteen-year-old daughter was sleeping with a guy older than the husband who left her! How upsetting, not to say humiliating, would it be! But I can’t move and the words won’t come.

  ‘I still want to kill him!’ she shouts through her tears, sitting up, reaching for the tissues. ‘With my bare hands and . . . so does your father!’

  ‘Dad?’ I say weakly. This is rock bottom. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine Dad getting to know about Ray and me.

  ‘You should have seen your father when he found out! He was livid . . . I have never seen anyone so angry. Once the girls talked me out of my plan, he and I joined forces. We were going to have it out with him together, take out a court order, anything, but . . . Anyway, the girls talked us out of that too. They said that you must be given . . . space and the respect to work things out for yourself. But I’m still not sure if we should have confronted that bastard or not! We both felt so helpless.’ She stops to cry some more and I lie there like a block of wood.

  Shit! This is so so so so excruciatingly horrible. So humiliating! The whole friggin’ lot of them know everything! So what must they think of me? The weirdo youngest sister who can’t cut it with guys her own age so she has to go off chasing men old enough to be her father? And I’m going to be seeing all of them the next day. Oh Christ! I turn on my belly, hide my head under the pillows and tell myself that I will never ever come up again.

  Dad! My mind goes numb. I haven’t spent more than an hour or two with Dad in months. Since leaving home, it’s been easier, somehow, to just avoid him. All my sisters see him regularly now, and Cassandra too, but I never go. He rings me most weeks and he’s always inviting me out for a lunch in the city, or coffee if I don’t feel comfortable going to his new home. But you’re always welcome any time, pet . . . just give me a ring. Cass gets in most nights at six. I won’t be much later. Right! As though I would willingly be one minute alone in a room with her!

  The one good thing about this conversation is it’s happening under the cover of darkness. Mum can’t witness my leaking eyes or choked-up throat. How dare she? How dare either of them judge Ray? I will never blame him for what happened. Never!

  ‘Mum, you don’t understand!’ I try again from under the pillow in my wrecked, croaky voice, because it is very important that she understands this. ‘Honestly, I was as into it as he was. I was . . . more into it than he was!’

  ‘Believe me
, I understand.’

  ‘I was crazy for him,’ I blunder on miserably. ‘I wanted it to go ahead. I . . . rang him all the time . . .’ It is so bloody humiliating admitting all this to her, of all people, but she has to understand the truth. I did ring him all the time. And by the end he wasn’t ringing me back. I was driving him crazy. That’s the truth of it. I am on the point of telling her this last bit when she cuts me off sharply.

  ‘I do understand, Rose! The same thing happened to me when I was your age, with a much older man. Believe me, I understand exactly how it happens and it doesn’t change the fact that I hold him totally responsible!’ She spits it all out furiously.

  ‘What?’

  ‘He is totally responsible!’

  ‘What do you mean, the same thing happened to you?’

  ‘Look, it happens, Rose,’ she gives a deep sigh, ‘all the time. One of my first-year university lecturers hit on me when I was eighteen or nineteen. I was so flattered. Before I knew it, I was in up to my eyeballs in an affair with a married man over twice my age. I came to the university a bright, sparkling girl, full of confidence, and by the end of the first year I was a mess. I failed every subject . . . everything. It took me years to recover! I’ll tell you all about it some time . . .’

  I am so shocked that I can’t even nod.

  ‘But listen, darling, we’ve got to see Gran tomorrow and . . . your father, too,’ she continues gently, ‘so let’s just give it all a rest now, and get some sleep. Okay?’

  ‘Okay,’ I say meekly, ‘Night then.’

  I stay awake long after her breaths become deep and even. The occasional noises she makes in her sleep, the little sighs and snores, are more comforting than anything. At one point I think she must be awake, too, because she calls out, ‘Rose,’ quite loudly.

  ‘What, Mum?’ I ask softly. ‘What do you want?’ But she’s asleep and doesn’t answer. Ray saved my life, I want to remind her. Don’t forget that, Mum. He saved my life. Don’t hate him . . . Don’t wish him dead . . . That is the line I keep coming back to. It makes me feel easier somehow, not so lonely.

  I find myself wondering, What would Roger make of it all? Is this the kind of family stuff he wants me to write about? I laugh a bit to myself as the silly sentences for my next column pile up in my brain like clumps of soggy seaweed.

  Don’tcha just hate it . . . when you’re on the brink of a big discovery and the person you’re getting the mind-blowing piece of information from suddenly decides to . . . shut up? Your mother lets slip that she had this past you had no idea about. It has everything to do with what is happening to you and . . . she decides to go to sleep!

  We don’t wake until after ten. By the time we’re up and dressed and packed, it’s nearly midday and we’re both starving. Mum pays for the room. We pack her gear into the back of the van, wander up the street to a local café and take a table overlooking the beach. Amazingly, the only sign of the storm of the night before is great clumps of black seaweed all the way up the sand, and a certain drenched look to everything which is kind of invigorating. I think of myself down on Childers the night before and it still seems vaguely unreal, like one of those weird little dreams you have in that time just before waking, especially the surfing. Did I actually do that?

  We order eggs and bacon, mushrooms, orange juice and coffee. The service is good and the food is better. I look at my mother as she talks to the waiter, a young pasty-faced English kid about my own age, with dyed blond hair and silver rings in both ears. She is asking all the usual, tedious stuff about where he comes from, what the weather would be like in Britain at this time of the year, and how Australia is treating him. The guy prattles on in his chirpy London accent, and I have a rush of pride in her. She is always so warm and friendly to everyone.

  Then I remember last night in the motel room and my mood shifts sideways and down a notch or two. She wanted to kill Ray! I shudder, hearing again the way she spat the words at me. The depth of passion in her voice was unusual for Mum. I could tell it was coming from somewhere very deep inside. So what happened to her? We grew up on stories of Mum and Dad meeting each other and falling in love and getting married. Crazy, I know, but it’s shocking to think there was someone else in Mum’s life before Dad!

  She looks really good in her sky-blue dress. Her dark red hair, down and freshly washed, is pushed back from her face with combs. She looks younger, more vibrant than I think I’ve ever seen her before. After getting so thin and pale and freaked-out looking when Dad left, she is now back to a good weight. But not so plump and motherly as she used to be. Being this slender suits her. She looks fit and her skin is glowing. We’re both quiet, tucking in hungrily. I keep picturing her young again, with her arms around some older guy, in some seedy, half-lit bedroom, having strange hands undo her bra, her jeans pulled off before they even reach the bed . . . I shake myself. God, Rose! Cut it out. This is your mother!

  ‘So, off to see Grandma?’ I say, putting down my knife and fork for a moment. ‘Will you be able to handle it all, Mum?’

  ‘Well . . .’ she shrugs. ‘I guess I’ll have to try, won’t I?’

  Before long, we’re back in the van hurtling along the coastal road towards Port Fairy. It’s only forty minutes away, on flat land covered in coastal scrub. The day has opened up for us, warm and blue sky, and light, layered clouds skim in careless threads across the sky. She leans over and begins to fiddle around with the radio buttons.

  ‘I wouldn’t mind hearing the news,’ she mutters. ‘Okay with you?’

  ‘Sure.’

  I wind down my window and let in some of that fresh, warm air from outside. The careful tones of the radio announcer tell us that there has been a murder in some small town in Gippsland, and that there is a danger of bushfires. Also that the temperature will reach twenty-seven degrees. Perfect. Mum and I smile briefly. We both think that twenty-seven is the perfect temperature for a summer’s day.

  ‘You don’t need to worry about meeting his girlfriend,’ I say casually. ‘You look really great.’

  ‘Well, thanks, Rose.’ She gives a small smile. ‘But apparently this Cassandra woman is a good fifteen years younger than me, so I can’t really compete, can I?’

  ‘It’s not a competition, Mum!’

  ‘Oh no!’ she says with a wry laugh. ‘Of course not!’

  ‘I mean it,’ I say awkwardly. ‘You’re much nicer looking than her!’

  ‘Thanks but . . . I’m nervous.’

  ‘Don’t be!’

  She’s going to come face to face with her ex-husband and his new woman. I want to tell her again how there really is no competition, that she’s already the winner. He’ll see that. The days of her being a vulnerable mess are over. But how do I tell her that without sounding like a complete suck?

  ‘You will be okay, Mum,’ is all I can manage. ‘You’ve got us, remember.’

  Mum doesn’t reply but she gives me a little smile, reaches out and squeezes my hand briefly.

  ‘Anyway,’ she says gamely after a little while, ‘I’ve decided to get back on the horse when I get home.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I’m going to go out more,’ she says, and then adds, ‘I’d like to meet a new man.’

  My mouth falls open before I can think.

  ‘Well, why not?’ She seems surprised by my reaction. ‘Your father and I will be divorced soon.’

  ‘It’s too soon, Mum,’ I say quickly. ‘You’re only just getting over . . . everything. It wouldn’t be a good idea to hurry into that kind of thing. Honestly . . . everyone will tell you that.’ Just the idea of her going out and meeting men makes me feel . . . ill.

  ‘I’m not looking for someone to marry!’ she continues cheerfully. ‘I just want to test the water, see what’s around.’

  See what’s around? Jeez! This puts me seriously on edge. If it was hard imagining her years ago with some older guy, then it is doubly awful trying to imagine her in that situation now!

&n
bsp; ‘Have you spoken to any of the others about this?’ I ask, thinking it would be just like my crazy sisters to encourage her.

  ‘No, I haven’t asked their permission yet,’ she jokes. Then, when I don’t laugh, ‘You, Rosie, are the first to know that your mother is about to go out on the tear!’

  ‘How,’ I ask, trying to sound casual, ‘are you going to go about meeting a new man?’

  ‘The internet,’ she says calmly, as though this is an obvious and reasonable answer. ‘Apparently there are all these sites you can clock into that offer . . .’

  ‘Mum!’ I protest loudly, before she can go on. ‘You can hardly work your mobile phone! You go to pieces if you have to send an email!’

  ‘It’s time I got over that.’ She waves one hand airily. ‘Veronica is going to help me. It is how she met Frank, you know.’

  ‘Really?’

  Veronica is Mum’s oldest friend. Her husband was killed in a road smash about three years ago, and within a couple of years everyone was marvelling when Veronica turned up at a function with a new bloke. I guess he’s still on the scene.

  ‘She is going to come and stay with me for a few days,’ Mum says, ‘and explain it all.’

  ‘You should think seriously before you go on the net. I’ve heard all kinds of stories. It could be dangerous!’

  ‘No more dangerous than driving with you,’ she mutters, and then turns and smiles to let me know she’s joking.

  ‘You’d be a sitting duck,’ I warn, still feeling weirdly unsettled. ‘Those sites are riddled with creepy old men.’

  ‘Creepy old men, huh?’ she repeats lightly.

  ‘Yeah.’ I turn and look at her. She is staring straight out the front window, but I can tell she is trying not to laugh. The words sit between us for about five solid seconds before I find the grace to give a grim smile.

  ‘Okay. Okay! I get your drift. Touché.’

  Mum takes this as her cue to let the giggles rip.