‘You’re being absurd,’ said my father, in his weary voice.
‘Am I? Am I?’ demanded my mother.
‘Have you been drinking, Jen?’
‘And if I have, what about it? What about it?’
‘Please lower your voice. The children—’
‘Oh, so suddenly it’s convenient to think about the children, is it? You don’t normally bother.’
‘Oh, God save me,’ said my father. ‘Jen, I am not interested in having this conversation. Go to bed and get a good night’s sleep, and then if you want to have a sensible, sober discussion in the morning, we can do that.’
‘And what will we discuss?’ My mother’s voice was more combative than ever.
‘Anything you like.’
‘I want to discuss it now.’
‘What do you want to discuss?’
‘I want to discuss our marriage.’
‘No,’ said my father, with unusual force. ‘I’m not discussing our marriage now. Not with you in this state.’
‘In this state! Oh, Frank! You’re so pompous.’
‘I’m whatever you please,’ said my father. ‘I’m going to bed now. You can do what you like.’
I heard his heavy tread as he walked towards the stairs. There was a loud crash.
‘Oh, Christ,’ said my father, sounding more annoyed than anything. ‘Have you hurt yourself?’
‘Would you care?’ My mother was sobbing.
‘Perhaps that’ll teach you a lesson. Here, let me help you up.’
‘I don’t want your fucking help,’ said my mother.
I had never heard her say fucking before.
‘Come on, Jen. Listen, just grab hold of my hand.’ Then he said, ‘Okay, stay there. Stay on the floor and whine all night if you must.’
‘You don’t care, do you?’
‘For Christ’s sake. Goodnight.’
And he began to mount the stairs. My mother’s sobbing grew louder.
He stopped. ‘Can you try to restrain yourself, please? I mean, for the sake of the children, if for no other reason.’
She continued to weep and my father’s tread continued on the stairs. I heard the soft click of Pippa’s door closing and I closed my own.
How would I fall asleep, with ghosts and cannibals thronging in my bedroom, and my parents shouting outside it? In fact fatigue took over rapidly. I didn’t hear my mother going to bed, but in the morning she came as usual in her dressing-gown out of my parents’ bedroom. Nobody said anything about the previous night’s quarrel. We all kept our heads down.
The following evening my mother was absent again. As we sat silently around the kitchen table eating the dinner she had left for us, my father coughed in the way people do when they are about to say something.
‘Pippa,’ he said. ‘Nicky.’
We looked at him, and he cleared his throat again.
‘Your mother,’ he said, and then waited and began again. ‘Your mother’s been behaving strangely.’
We stared at him.
‘In fact,’ he said, putting down his knife and fork. ‘In fact, she’s gone a little mad.’
He studied his plate. Pippa said nothing, so I also remained silent, although I felt he desperately wanted one of us to respond, to attempt something in the way of encouragement or consolation or even contradiction.
‘What I wanted to say is, don’t worry.’
‘Don’t worry?’ Pippa was incredulous.
‘Well, she’ll come around. I know she’s a bit crazy at the moment, but it’ll pass. Believe me. We just have to be patient.’
‘And what will happen then?’
‘Funny things happen with women,’ my father said.
‘You’re saying this is change of life? Dad, Mum is only forty-two.’
‘I know,’ he said.
‘So you don’t think there’s anything we can do?’ He shook his head.
‘Or that you can do?’ she persisted.
‘No,’ he said. ‘She’s not listening to me.’
‘That might be because you’re not saying anything,’ observed Pippa.
My father cast her a glance of pure dislike and turned to me.
‘How will we go with the Kangaroos do you think, Nicky?’
‘Good,’ I said automatically. I was still trying to make sense of what my mother’s age had to do with anything; and I wasn’t even sure that I’d correctly heard the phrase change of life, which meant nothing at all.
‘They shouldn’t give us too much trouble,’ he said.
Pippa’s face was a mixture of contempt and disbelief. ‘How can you do that?’ she said. ‘How can you turn around and start talking about the football, for God’s sake?’
‘We haven’t got Knights,’ my father said.
‘No,’ I said.
‘But we should knock ’em over easily.’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Let’s hope it’s not another draw!’
I recognised this as a joke and smiled.
‘So you’re just saying,’ Pippa interrupted, ‘hold on, don’t worry, all will be well.’
‘I’m saying hang in there, Pippa. We’ll get through it. I know your mother pretty well and I’m telling you, we’ll get through it.’
‘Well, thank you,’ said Pippa. ‘I feel much better now.’
I could tell that this was heavy sarcasm, but my father smiled at Pippa with evident relief.
‘That’s a good girl,’ he said.
That night, I fell asleep without hearing my mother come in. She was there the next morning, in body if not in spirit.
Some of the commentators were predicting another thrilling match between Hawthorn and North Melbourne, but they were disappointed. It was the last home-and-away match. Hawthorn thrashed the Kangaroos by sixty-four points, despite the fact that Matthews had few possessions and kicked no goals. The commentators were still speculating that Lethal’s career was coming to an end. My father was split between triumph at the victory and despondency because this speculation might be correct. He had gone to the match with a group of friends and my presence hadn’t been required, but I was his audience that evening.
‘The greatest player ever, Nicky,’ he said. ‘It’s that business with Bruns that’s done this to him, I’m sure. Knocked the stuffing out of him.’
I wondered about explaining to my father that Launcelot had also had the stuffing knocked out of him. It was when he was in this kind of meditative, almost elegiac mood that I found him most responsive. And after my epiphany about the parallel careers of Launcelot and Lethal I sometimes felt that I possessed information that my father needed to know. But again I held my peace.
THE ELIMINATION FINAL AND THE QUALIFYING FINAL
I was glad when the holidays came to an end: it had been a miserable fortnight. School would be a relief. On the first morning of term, my father went to work; my mother prepared our breakfasts and packed our lunches, and she drove us to school as usual. It was a silent trip. Close to the school my mother without the slightest warning drove straight through a red light. It wasn’t that she was trying to get through on the amber; it wasn’t that she was speeding. She drove sedately through the intersection. Our passage was marked by hooting and shouting and the agonised squealing of brakes. How we had escaped death or catastrophic injury was not clear.
Pippa screamed; I think I couldn’t manage more than a squeak. My mother didn’t draw over and she didn’t say anything, but from the back seat I could see that she was trembling.
‘What are you doing?’ Pippa shouted at her. ‘You could have killed all of us.’
My mother steered the car over to the side of the road, and stopped. Her whole body was shaking uncontrollably.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, quietly. I leaned forward and could see tears rolling down her face.
‘Oh really?’ shrieked Pippa. ‘Well, that makes it all right then, doesn’t it? You’re sorry. That’s good.’
‘Please, Pippa,’ sh
e said. ‘Please. I can’t take it.’
‘I could have been dead,’ yelled Pippa. ‘We could all have been dead. You would have killed Nicky and me. And when I point this out you can’t take it?’
My mother put her head down on the steering wheel. Her shoulders quivered.
‘I’m getting out,’ said Pippa, grabbing her schoolbag and opening the car door. ‘Nicky, it’s not far to walk from here. Do you want to come with me?’
I stared at her speechlessly.
‘Suit yourself.’ She heaved her bag out of the car and set off. I stayed in the back seat. My mother still had her head down.
‘Mummy?’ I said.
She shook her head. I waited, and eventually she raised her head and started to rummage through her handbag for a tissue.
‘It’s okay, Nicky,’ she said, almost inaudibly. ‘Give me a moment.’
We arrived at the school without further event, except for passing Pippa, who was striding down the pavement. As usual, my mother let me off at the junior school campus.
‘Nicky,’ she said, as I climbed out of the car. ‘Don’t tell Daddy what just happened.’
‘All right,’ I said. ‘But Pippa will,’ I added, trying to be helpful.
She said nothing, but drove away—slowly and carefully, I was pleased to see.
I spent a lot of that day thinking about this incident. It had happened so unexpectedly, and I felt my reaction had been wanting: Pippa had done better. I wondered what it would have been like to die. Would people have found out immediately? In time (for instance) for assembly? Or would the news have trickled in later, leaving Miss Prentice to make the tragic announcement to the class? Would people be sorry that they hadn’t been nicer to me? And where would I be? Would I be in heaven? (I presumed I would be.) Would I be able to watch the consequences of my death? Or did you have to go through a kind of waiting room for heaven? Did you ever get to watch events on Earth? Could you be a ghost if you wanted to?
These thoughts were melancholy but also somehow pleasurable. I thought about my father, and wondered how he would feel about the whole thing. I supposed he would be quite sad. I thought about how we had gone to view Didie in her coffin, and imagined my father on his own in the same sombre room, but with three occupied coffins instead of only one. I wondered if anyone would have put mascara on my eyelashes. I felt sorry for my father in this scenario. I was inclined to think that, if against all the odds Hawthorn won the premiership, he would probably enjoy the victory less than if I had been there to talk to about it. I found this thought oddly comforting.
I was right about Pippa, who lost no time that evening informing my father about our near miss. My mother was in fact home for dinner that night, and had recovered her composure. When Pippa had finished giving a dramatic version of what had taken place, he looked at my mother.
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘It was a bad moment, but Pippa does seem to be making too much of it. A loss of concentration. That’s all. As usual, she is over-dramatising everything.’
She had a false smile playing about her lips. I hated it. It looked sardonic and superior.
‘Nicky?’ said my father, turning to me.
‘What?’ I said.
‘Were you frightened?’
‘No,’ I said, which was the truth. I hadn’t had time to be frightened.
‘Nicky!’ cried Pippa, furious with me.
‘I wasn’t,’ I said stubbornly. ‘It was too fast.’
My mother made a well-there-you-are sort of gesture to my father. ‘To use one of your favourite expressions, Frank,’ she said, ‘a tempest in a teapot.’
‘But were you frightened afterwards, Nicky?’ insisted Pippa. ‘When it was over, when you thought about it?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
My mother laughed. It was almost a jeering laugh. ‘Only when you thought about it,’ she said.
My father turned to Pippa.
‘What do you want me to do?’ he said. ‘Your mother had a bad moment when she was driving. It happens to us all. Lose concentration, only takes a second. It’s over, Pippa, and no harm done.’
‘Both your children were nearly wiped out,’ cried Pippa. ‘Your entire family was nearly wiped out. Don’t you care?’
‘Pippa, if you didn’t always create such major melodramas, I’d take you a lot more seriously, believe me.’
‘Oh,’ said Pippa. ‘Thank you so much. That makes me feel a really valued member of this family.’
‘Have we finished this discussion now?’ asked my mother, standing. ‘Have we established that we’re all alive? Can I take the plates, please?’
Pippa banged her plate on the sink and stalked away. My mother took no notice at all. My father wandered into the lounge and turned the television on. It was my turn to stack the dishwasher. Perhaps Pippa was guilty of over-dramatising the event; perhaps I had done so too. I felt silly for having thought so much about death during the day.
But she had done it. She had driven through a red light.
Yet there she was, that contemptuous curl to her lip, making it plain that she believed there had never been anything to worry about.
Yet she had been shaking, and crying.
I was confused and unhappy, and escaped upstairs as soon as I could.
One relief about the home-and-away games being over was that my presence at matches was in less demand, finals tickets being expensive and hard to get hold of. My father tended to go alone or with friends. That Saturday Hawthorn wasn’t playing: it was North Melbourne and Carlton at Waverley. As my father had predicted, North roared home by nineteen points and Carlton was bundled out of the competition (as the commentators put it). Hawthorn’s match, the qualifying final, was on Sunday, and they were playing Footscray. The house was quiet in the morning: the school choir Pippa belonged to was singing somewhere in the country and she had left early to join them. My father too had left, heading for the Melbourne Cricket Ground.
‘I’ve arranged for you to go over to Grandpa’s,’ said my mother.
‘Why?’ I said. ‘I thought you didn’t want me to go over there.’
‘I never said that.’
‘Oh,’ I said.
‘I said you couldn’t discuss certain things with Grandpa. That was all.’
‘Or with Rose.’
‘Yes, or with Rose. But I never said you couldn’t go there.’
‘Okay,’ I said, knowing this was untrue. ‘But I don’t want to. Anyway, you told Grandpa I couldn’t.’
She glared at me. ‘I’ve told you many times not to listen in to adult conversations, Nicky.’
It didn’t seem worth making the point that Pippa had listened in to this particular conversation, and reported it to me.
‘I have to go out, Nicky. Pippa’s away for the weekend. Daddy will be at the football all day. You can’t be here all on your own.’
‘Yes, I can,’ I said. ‘I’ve been here all on my own before.’
‘Not for so long. Don’t be stupid.’
‘I can,’ I said. I was angry: first she said (or as good as) that I couldn’t go there; then, when it suited her arrangements, I could. But I was losing the argument. Already she was shaking her head.
‘I’ll pick you up on the way home,’ she said. ‘Grandpa said you could come for lunch.’
‘I don’t want to,’ I said.
‘We’re leaving in ten minutes,’ she said. ‘Be ready.’
*
At Grandpa’s house my mother stayed in the car.
‘Aren’t you coming in?’ I said.
‘I haven’t time, Nicky. Honestly. Is it so difficult to walk up the path and ring the bell?’
‘No,’ I said.
As usual the fire was crackling and the jigsaw lay ready for me, but Grandpa seemed tentative.
‘Hello, old chap,’ he said, hugging me. ‘Haven’t seen you for a while.’
I said something about school, and being busy. Then I realised that of course I had been on holidays. I began t
o make an amending noise but realised too late how lame it sounded, and ceased mid-sentence, feeling silly.
‘We thought you might have got a bit tired of us,’ said Rose, also hugging me, but (I thought) with less warmth than usual.
‘No,’ I said.
She held my shoulders and stood back from me, regarding me intently.
‘That’s good, then,’ she said. ‘Shall I make brownies?’
‘Yes, please,’ I said.
‘They’re on the way,’ she said.
After a while things got better. Rose made brownies, and also pancakes for lunch, and Grandpa and I attacked the jigsaw with determination. This time we made more headway: I had been trying to fit a small cluster of pieces in the wrong area and, once I had found the right links for them, a few other pieces fitted in. Grandpa and I rejoiced together; the tension in the air dissipated and I felt more comfortable. By mid-afternoon the jigsaw was almost complete. By the time my mother arrived in the late afternoon to pick me up the three of us were locked in happy discussion around the final thirty or so pieces.
Grandpa answered the door and followed my mother into the room. As soon as I saw her I knew something was wrong: her face looked oddly drawn and the smile she had plastered over it was cursory at best.
‘Well!’ she said. ‘Time to go, Nicky. Say thank you.’
‘I just want to do this bit,’ I said. ‘Look, Mummy, I’ve nearly finished the whole thing.’
‘I haven’t time,’ she said.
‘Jen, dear,’ said Grandpa. ‘It’ll only take five or ten minutes. Nicky’s done so well today, we’d all like to see him finish it off. Let’s have a drink.’
She ignored him. ‘Did you hear what I said, Nicky?’
‘For goodness sake!’ exclaimed Rose, half-laughing. ‘Jenny, can five minutes matter so very much? He’s nearly there!’
My mother looked her up and down.
‘Perhaps you’ll be good enough to let me make decisions about my own son?’
Rose glanced at Grandpa, who spread his hands.
I sat, paralysed.
‘Oh, come on, Jenny,’ said Rose. ‘We can do better than this, surely?’
‘I’m not at all sure what you mean.’ My mother’s voice was frigid.
The Starlings Page 21