*
Living new. Beyond flung words and felling silences Elayn’s courage was a gift. The family can’t control losing her, there was no choice in that. The choice now is: what are we going to do with this? How can we somehow glean the positive from it? The end is the start.
*
As a family we talk about Nonna a lot. Pray before children’s bedtimes for her, have an increased number of photos around the house. Ticky has six blu-tacked in a shrine above his desk. If her favourite songs or movies come into our lives we tip a hat. Speak of her, reminisce, keep her alive in our hearts. And by this. These words. It is her turn now. What Elayn always wanted, what we all want. The gift of attention.
*
Katherine Mansfield of her mother, in her journals: ‘She lived every moment of life more fully and completely than anyone I’ve ever known – and her gaiety wasn’t any less real for being high courage – courage to meet anything with.’ Elayn demonstrated high courage repeatedly with her audacious choices. From her teens onwards she was restless with the path laid out for her by others. She needed transformation, escape, and acted on it. From the desert of her childhood. The country town of her teenage years. The suburban trap of her married world. And eventually, finally, from life.
Gratitude, now, for the high courage Elayn taught both my daughter and myself. ‘You cannot find peace by avoiding life,’ Virginia Woolf wrote. And so I dive back into it because it can be avoided no longer. Have to find peace within it, not removed from it.
*
Elayn wore her nudity like an armour of modernity. I never wanted her style, her loucheness, her topless swims; her diet belt that whirred around her waist from a central pole in front of her that was meant to, somehow, wobble off the fat; her ridiculous high-heeled shoes that robbed her of comfort. She hated my daughterly judgment. To me, she was surface. She felt the chill of my judgment as I felt the chill of hers. How ridiculous it all seems now.
*
The gulf between us roared back into our relationship on the final night I saw Elayn. She wanted me to do an illegal U-turn across double lines into incoming traffic to get her cash out, on the other side of the road. I snapped that no, I’d do it my way. Which meant driving two hundred metres down the road and turning left into a side street then doing a legal U-turn and turning back onto the main road, at traffic lights. We both flinched into an old, wounded silence. Still capable of the ancient ways, the familiar ruts of hurt. Then Elayn withdrew her money and I drove her on to the enveloping of family, my family, who she loved so much. But all through that final birthday dinner was the memory of the injured silence, over both of us. As I drove Elayn back to her flat I put it aside and told Mum that I wanted to check in with her every day from now on. She said all right. Commented on what a happy, close community I had around me. How strong it was, how lucky Andrew and I were. I agreed. We were both learning to move on.
*
Yet we had come full circle as mother and child. Found our way back into acceptance, and love. It was a step into maturity.
And so I climb out of the lair, hold a face to the light. No longer so violently twinned to this situation. I feel an immense unlocking. A miraculous calm after the furious raging of a storm that has been at the centre of my life, for my entire life. It’s gone. Extinguished.
*
I have been rescued. By this. Writing. To understand. It has hauled me out. The prospect: a renovation of serenity. And so I begin again by doing what I really want to do. Work. Aspiring to an existence with a lot of quiet in it. Turning from people I don’t need in my life. Shunning bitsy busyness. Finding the courage to say no. I need to be good at being alive again.
*
My body has been locked in its own battle with stress. But then quite suddenly it clears. Months down the track I realise I’m righted. The loosening has happened quietly of its own accord. A lightness has come back, just like that.
Striding into the light.
*
Elayn was an iceberg, with the bright blast of her above the surface then the great, murky mass that we knew little of underneath the water. Vivaciously public yet secretive; barely speaking to friends about the euthanasia time bomb at the centre of her later life. She put on a damned good show.
*
‘Energy is eternal delight,’ William Blake said. And that was Elayn. What will never be forgotten: the beguiling lift of her energy. Energy is seductive. Energy is enthusiasm. Energy is life.
*
The good times. Holding on to them. The relief, in a visit after my daughter was born, of Elayn being fine. A new female in the family had broken the intensity; soldered us. How miraculous that a little girl in our midst would unite us. As if there had been something unsavoury about how we’d been for so long, as if Elayn and I had to grow up. To shield this fresh new female life from it.
*
My eight-year-old daughter laughs at me now as I do Zumba; not cruelly, but still, she’s laughing. Just as I used to at Elayn, yet the dancing I’m doing now is the dancing of my mother, just as Biahbi’s dancing will one day be mine but she doesn’t know this yet. I hope I never disappoint her as much as I disappointed my mother. But it’s out of my hands. I was never enraptured by Elayn, just as my daughter is not enraptured by me. I had a difficult relationship with my mother, as she did with her mother, yet I’m determined not to repeat the pattern. I know that the relationship between mothers and daughters can often be fragile, a landscape prickly with hurt and shock. But I will do everything in my power to never push my daughter away.
For fathers and daughters, it’s often different. Andrew and Biahbi have a fervent, forgiving bond that feels unassailable, shutting me out. I’m okay with that; I have it with Bob too. The difference between Elayn and me: I celebrate it. Am grateful for it. There is no competitiveness.
*
Suffering should always open the door to wisdom.
26
Six months since the writing was begun, the maelstrom of bewilderment that was this book. Now, finally, stilled. The blanket is drawn up, I am tunnelled in warmth. Writing is, has always been, a response to a deep perplexity. An excavation of the truth.
Writing is a response to a wound of the heart. And a pen is a furious balm.
*
V, the counsellor, tells me there could have been a million reasons why Elayn did what she did, and it’s extremely common to feel guilt in these situations.
She tells me my mother was terribly conflicted. At the end of her life she did something out of love – a birthday dinner. Then something out of anger – a suicide. ‘I think the reasons were in her, not you.’ V adds, ‘Elayn was angry all her life.’ My mother waged an almighty battle before death, with herself, that no one was privy to. It was a complex death. She is the anchor to a world of pain, pinning me down, and I have to cast myself adrift to survive. And kick towards the light.
*
What has been learnt: that the greatest chasm between two people – out of all the chasms that can swamp – is love withheld, by a parent. If you want to do the most damage, try messing with that most primal of human bonds. Love withheld, as a weapon, can lock up a life. Elayn’s love was like black market money – there was nowhere secure to deposit it. I could never hold onto it strongly enough. The love would overwhelm with its bounteousness then be flintily withdrawn. For desert-months.
*
Love is all you need from a parent. Like milk. The sun. A blanket on a cold night. Ben Okri wrote that we should learn to extricate ourselves from all the things that have moulded us, which possibly limit our free and undiscovered road. I had to free myself from a parent who knew nothing of my secret road. Yet does any parent, of any child?
*
With Elayn I acted volcanically. It was pure, ugly emotion; a heart pumping with love. Outrage. Pique. I never grew up with the expectation that my mother would wrap me in her arms and love me unconditionally; would look after me. The solitude of love. She is more arrestingly with m
e dead than alive, her absence a presence.
Marguerite Duras said, ‘our mothers always remain the strangest, craziest people we’ve ever met,’ and this feels true, perhaps because mothers can show their daughters their raw, ugly, complicated selves like no one else does.
I am still recognising wounds from childhood for what they are now, back from when my parents’ marriage fractured. In middle age, several years ago, I had been feeling suddenly, inexplicably, raw; deeply vulnerable and grieving about my parents’ breakup when I was ten, about my father’s remarriage and my imploded nuclear family.
What was this unbearable fresh hurt within me? But then came the accepting. That no one is perfect, least of all myself, and that everyone you come across is your teacher in some way. How are you growing from the experience of knowing them? And with that came a release into joy like sparks flying off an anvil.
*
For much of my adult existence. I wanted to live a big life – just not Elayn’s big life. I never wanted to be a woman where fear dictated every choice. She didn’t either. She was a good teacher.
*
One day, in the thick of the warfare yet again, I recalled Lexi’s words about the woman who did a good deed every day of her life and lived by that creed. I rang Mum after a period of non-speaking. The relief of the love on the end of the phone. The glow of everything being all right. We both wanted this. But only one of us took the next step, always took the next step.
*
Laved. How I love that word and long for the salve of it. It means pouring water upon, washing, soothing. Laved, and lumen. Good, strong, lit words. ‘I beseech you enter your life,’ Ezra Pound wrote. Yes, it is time.
*
Once, in my mid-forties, I made a trip to Sydney from London. Elayn and I were good. I did not ask her if I could stay with her, I’d learnt. I checked into the Hilton and she visited. She liked this. I wasn’t intruding into her world. I wondered on that trip if she was vicious to me, during all those years of exile, because I’d chosen to leave her? Because hurting someone is sometimes the only way of holding them. And was there something of that in her final act? A plea to be noticed. To be etched like acid into all our lives.
*
On the top shelf of Boh’s bookcase, the carcass of a yellow balloon. Stabbed in anger at Nonna’s funeral. He kept it in the pocket of his school shorts. And now it’s a memorial to his beloved, complex grandmother. Next to a collector’s Batman car and a strip of party photos from a photo booth. The things we keep. All the children, hurtling into a growing up.
*
This is a story of now, about old people slipping through the cracks in the cram of life’s whoosh. About dignity. Choice. A clash of generations. Guilt. About slipping away because you don’t want to be a bother to anyone – but by doing so you become more of a bother to everyone close than you’ve ever been in your life. It was all quite magnificently her. So, very, Elayn.
*
‘For we think back through our mothers if we are women,’ Virginia Woolf wrote. No one shapes our lives more, as girls and as women, than them. Katherine Mansfield said the mind she loved must have wild places in it. My mother’s mind did and I loved her for those wild places that blazed freedom and spontaneity and vivaciousness and courage and reclusiveness; a love of the mysterious, replenishing alone. She loved to ring-fence her solitude, as do I.
*
What is lost: the complexity of Elayn. She wasn’t evil, or bad, or wicked. She was just a woman. A contradictory, wounded, thinking, empowered, impetuous, exhausted, mighty woman. She chose, most often, a fighter’s path. No female has had a stronger presence. It was never indifferent. Even her silences were volatile. Strike a match to them and boomph, immolation. Everything was vivid. The love of my life, and the hate of my life.
*
‘Grief is the price we pay for love,’ Queen Elizabeth said in her message to the United States after the 9/11 attacks. With Elayn there is grief; tremendous, demolishing grief; and because of that, of course, so must there be love. Tremendous. Demolishing.
*
Elayn created disturbance. As books should, as women should.
*
Men got in the way of my mother. They complicated her world. She had lived heroically for so long. She was always trying to end complication, and her final act was a way to end complication. She wanted the medicine of simplicity. Don’t we all?
*
Elayn never reduced herself, as a woman, as a wife; never allowed herself to be rubbed out. She refused to be trapped in a proscribed life. Her lesson: don’t succumb.
*
I’ve never been a perfume person but now I am wearing Elayn’s White Linen. Slipping into her way of being; wanting my children to have a particular ‘mother scent’; stamping the memory of me, and her, into them.
*
Anthony Burgess said that literature thrives on taboos. This is taboo:
•I wished my mother dead at times. Wished for the relief of that, the release. How wrong I was. There was no release in her death. Only a tightening of the grip.
•Elayn was at once at the centre and the periphery of my little family. We were all so busy. She stamped my life more strikingly than any other person yet I should have allowed her more space in it, as she should have with me. Two wary women, circling each other.
•There was a visceral horror of her closing over me. She tried to form me yet I spent my entire life trying to unform that image she had of me. My mother, my home-born enemy.
*
Our eldest brother was less savaged by Elayn than either Paul or myself so he is not a part of this story. Indeed, he would have a different story. He is on a different path, in a different life. No sibling can speak for another.
*
Elayn was careful never to disclose her age. I honoured that at her funeral, and in this book.
*
Lu Frank, a reader, wrote of her mother: ‘I had dreadful guilts up until this year over so many missed opportunities. We were like chalk and cheese, and if we had one wonderful day the next would be terrible and I’d spend it broken hearted. But I heard someone saying: “You can rewrite your story . . . by forgiving yourself. Saying over and over the good times. If I had more experience I would do it differently. The past is finished. Move on. Remember the best bits.” I now feel much, much better, having resolved and changed my slant on things.’
Every day back then was a tricky and tenuous experiment. But every day now, I remember the bravery, the audacity, the smile, the dazzle. Selective remembering. For survival.
*
A great giggly smile coming over my hours. I am back. Elayn will never quite hold me. Because she conveyed the impression that children did not complete her but reduced her. She made me feel a colossal loneliness within my blood family; that I wasn’t quite right.
Now, I have a determination to mother differently. The tea lights glow in their lanterns. Something has recalibrated. ‘You feel the bands break that were riveted about your heart,’ Gertrude Bell wrote and yes, yes. Sleeping with the abandonment of a child again, limbs splayed. The world a vast yes again, freshly yes.
*
It feels like a rifle butt has been jammed into my heart for so long and now, finally, it’s removed.
So I turn inward to what’s always been there – family. Not the family I’ve held restlessly in my blood all my life but the family created around me. So it is Andrew. Ticky, Boh, Biahbi, Jages. They rescue me and don’t even know it. The gratitude for them, and it’s never said enough. My sanctuary, my harbour, my rest from the toss of the world. Here, at home, in this place. I will stop running, make a go of this.
My world flying open again, like a door into light.
*
I marvel at friends who have a closeness with their mothers like a deep, best friendship. My daughter loves me with a physicality almost sexual – tenderly kisses me, pulls me to her, demands the fiercest of cuddles; her want draining mi
ne as she drapes herself over me and slips her limbs into mine.
I do not stop it or push it away because I’ve endured a lifetime of a mother withholding. And this is a tonic. Firming me for the world.
*
Remembering the blazing moments: sleeping in a tight bed with Elayn in Japan; going to three movies in a row in one of our marathon sessions, crying with her for five minutes after watching Breaking the Waves; gulping individual chocolates from the trays of boutique chocolate shops together; marvelling over the Winged Victory of Samothrace in Paris and the unicorn tapestries in New York and a bowl with river lines of Kintsugi in Tokyo; yakking and yarning about neighbours, shopkeepers and superstars; because we could bare our truly ugly, gossipy underbellies to each other and no one else, and get it. And I know that everything was all right, really. We had love. It was okay. And I am as flawed as she was.
*
Most of all, just missing her. Even though she had held my life hostage for so much of it. She always filled it up, even by absence. The disbelief that she is not here now. The rangy absence of her. Every day the absence.
*
Why are daughters so incurious about their own mothers’ lives? What sin was committed here? I never had an inkling about why my parents split up, never questioned it deeply. And now I am on the wrong side of Elayn’s narrative. An outsider to her story. I chose not to access it while I could; never made much of an effort to be on the right side. That flinty acceleration of the next generation into a new era, new lives. And then suddenly, of course, it’s too late.
*
V’s definition of a mother: someone who provides shelter. Comfort. Support. Had my mother provided any of these? Not as an adult. We did not have black murderous rages in our family, we had silences. The piracy of silence. And now it is gone. It is good. There is a lot of good.
*
In some of the beautiful old art deco cinemas still dotted forlornly around Australia, there used to be what is known as the crying room.
It was a room reserved for mothers, where they could place their babies in a line of cots while they watched a film and got a break. But if the baby cried the number of the cot would flash on the screen and the mother would come back and tend to her child. Some of the crying rooms had glass inserts in the wall so the film could still be watched.
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