by Michael Sala
My mother stares down at the ground and somewhere past it. ‘When I was her age, I remember visiting my grandmother.’
She is talking about a woman I’ve never met but have heard a lot about, a woman that supported the Dutch resistance in World War II—though her son, my grandfather, was a collaborator.
‘I saw her just once,’ my mother murmurs. ‘My father took me there on the back of his motorbike. We got to the town early and we went to the nearby forest where my father used to play as a boy, and we lay side by side on this mossy ground. My father told me that if I closed my eyes, fairies would come out around me. I closed my eyes and heard his breath, and I imagined all the fairies around us. It’s the only time that I can remember being close to him. Anyway, when we went to my grandmother’s house, I had to stand to one side. I wasn’t even offered a chair. My grandmother was very wealthy, she had servants and a huge house. She had this silver bowl full of expensive chocolates. The only time that she looked at me for the hour or so that we were there was when she took out one of those chocolates, unwrapped it, and fed it to her dog.’
She falls silent. I want to lean over, touch her hand like I used to when I was young.
‘The children carry the sins of the parents,’ she says softly.
‘What?’
‘My grandmother said that about us. Maybe she was right in some way. Maybe that’s why it’s still so hard for me now.’
I cross my legs and lean back in my chair. ‘Well, May has a good life. You and I may have a complicated relationship, but with your granddaughter, it is simple and beautiful. That’s something positive to focus on.’
‘Yes,’ my mother says, brightening a little, ‘yes, it is. She’s the best parts of both of us.’
We clink our glasses together and drink.
The next morning, as I am getting out my breakfast, my mother hobbles into the kitchen.
‘Would you like a cup of tea?’
I smile back at her. ‘No thanks. Can I make you one?’
‘That’s all right, Michael.’
I feel her still hovering at my back. She puts a hand on my shoulder as I am making my cup of coffee.
‘You know, I’m really sorry,’ she says.
‘For what?’
‘I’m sorry that you think we have a complicated relationship.’ There is a sudden accusing glint in her eyes.
‘Don’t all adult children have a complicated relationship with their parents?’
My mother’s face does not change and she walks away.
My mother says that it’s the pain from her back that prevents her from sleeping, that keeps her moving around the house at night, and now we can add to that the fracture in her ankle that she acquired on a recent trip to Melbourne. The broken ankle increases her restlessness and makes her move around more, and the movement makes the broken ankle worse.
‘Perhaps it is a sign,’ my mother says as she stares down at it.
‘Of what?’ I ask her.
‘You know, that I made the wrong decision in leaving Brian.’
‘I think the universe has better things to do than punish you for leaving Brian.’
‘Yes,’ my mother says, ‘maybe you’re right.’
~
After I left Myrtleford with my daughter, my mother smoothed things over with Brian. She blamed Christmas, the heat, her back. She apologised for telling him to leave the house and apologised on my behalf, too. Brian forgave her although he assured her that he wouldn’t forget. He never forgave me, though. He would sit on the corner of her bed some nights and cry with his head in his hands and tell my mother that it had been the most humiliating experience of his life, being told to leave the house by a young man.
But I wasn’t the one that had told him to leave, I said to my mother.
‘I know,’ she’d answer. ‘But he thinks you were.’
If I phoned up my mother and Brian answered, he wouldn’t say a word to me, no matter how polite I was. He would simply pass the phone to my mother and say, ‘It’s the arsehole.’
‘I do feel bad, though,’ my mother tells me now, reflecting back on all of that. ‘I think that maybe I turned you against him. I think that I talked too much about him, and maybe that’s too much pressure to put on your children. Words and stories can be dangerous. Maybe I made him sound worse than he really was.’
‘Maybe you did,’ I admit. ‘I never know what I’m supposed to do with the information.’
My mother nods. ‘I guess that I should tell you more of the good things. When I used to wake up in distress from the pain in my back or the nightmares, he’d make me a cup of tea and he’d rub my legs for hours when they got sore. You don’t know how many nights he did that.’
‘You’re right, I don’t.’
We stare at one another in silence.
‘But there were always the inconsistencies,’ she goes on, ‘to keep me from really feeling good around him. I felt very controlled in all that, constantly off balance. Each morning he would get up and say, “I love you… today.” Or sometimes he’d say, “I like you, today.” It was like a weather report. But I felt safe with him. I knew that he would never leave me. And out of all the men in my life, he was probably the kindest. Don’t you think?’
Back to this word, hospitality. If you delve deeper into its origins, beyond Latin, to the European languages that came before, ‘hospitality’ has its roots in the words ghos, meaning ‘guest’, and poti, meaning ‘master’ or ‘powerful’. And maybe, when you put all of this together, it means that in order to be hospitable to your guests, you need to have the power to get rid of them in the first place.
In some ways, my mother looked after the men in her life very well, but I am still not sure that she could ever be hospitable to them. All I know is that, for many years, I lived there too. I lived there with her for longer than I thought. When you are used to motion, leaving is at once the easiest and the most difficult thing in the world. My mother ended up leaving my house after five weeks. When I dropped her at the train station, she sadly touched my face and told me to look after myself. Then she left for Sydney to stay with Con. She called me a week later.
‘Hello, Mike,’ she said. ‘It’s Mum.’
She said her name with an inflection at the end, as if she were posing a question.
I asked her how she was.
‘I don’t know what my next move will be,’ she answered. We both waited. The phone hissed softly between us. ‘I don’t know whether I will try to find a place in Newcastle after all. I didn’t feel so good there. It’s best sometimes to move on. Maybe I’ll go to the Gold Coast. I’ve even been thinking of Myrtleford again.’
‘I guess you have to do what you have to do.’
She gave a sigh. ‘It’s all up to me now that I’ve left Brian.’
I remained silent.
‘And how are things with you, Michael?’ she asked.
‘I’m fine.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes.’
The silence expanded between us once more.
‘A mother,’ she said, ‘can worry for her sons, you know.’
‘I know,’ I told her.
A few weeks later she left a message on my answering machine. Her voice had an arthritic edge of cheerfulness. You could almost mistake it for hope. She’d moved to Albury, which was not so far away from Myrtleford. I had to come for a visit sometime. She gave me Brian’s mobile number in case I needed to contact her for anything.
We didn’t talk for a long time after that.
Sometimes in the middle of the night, I have nightmares. I’ve had them since I was a child. I wake up afterwards and forget that I am an adult. For a moment I am terrified of the darkness, too terrified to move. I speak in a rush and my words don’t make sense. I am a stranger inside my own body. When this happens, Emily touches my shoulder and tells me to go back to sleep. But I make myself get out of bed and walk through the house without turning on the lights, the cold seeping t
hrough the floorboards under my feet and resting on my neck.
I check on my daughter. I go downstairs and make sure the elephant is facing the door. Emily calls softly to me again from our bedroom, but I keep walking, up and down, up and down, in the darkness, on the creaking floor, feeling the pressure and give beneath my bare feet, hearing the wind and the ocean outside. I have to do this to remind myself that I am a grown-up, and that the house is now my own.
Acknowledgements
I am deeply grateful to Keri Glastonbury for her invaluable insight and support over the course of this book; to Rebecca Starford for her fantastic editing and her enthusiasm for the work; to Martin Hughes for believing in the value of the stories; to Scott Brewer, who read and commented on the various drafts of this work tirelessly and was there with his brilliant mind, friendship, guitar, and occasionally, even a ute and various gardening implements; to my fellow writers, David Kelly, Ryan O’Neill and Patrick Cullen, who have each, in their own way, helped me to arrive at this point; to Ben Matthews for telling me to write; to Charlotte Wood, who gave me my first break; to Cate Kennedy, who has been an inspiring example and wonderful supporter of me, as she has been for many other writers; to Raimond Gaita and Debra Adelaide for their generous endorsements; to my daughter, for motivating me to get started; to my mother and brothers for the journey we shared, and the things they made me see in the world and in myself; to my wife, Kimiko, for her unwavering love and the beauty she brings to my life.
I am also indebted to the University of Newcastle, particularly the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, for the critical funding and support that it has provided to me over the years.
Different versions of two chapters in this book have been previously published. Chapter 9 appeared under the title ‘The Men Outside My Room’, in The Best Australian Stories 2011. Chapter 10 appeared under the title ‘Like My Father, My Brother’, in the anthology Brothers and Sisters.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © Michael Sala, 2012, 2017
The moral rights of the author have been asserted.
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First published by Affirm Press, 2012
This edition published by The Text Publishing Company, 2017
Cover design by Sandy Cull, gogoGingko
Image by David Lichtneker/Arcangel
Page design by Jessica Horrocks
eISBN: 978-1-92541-075-4