by Alison Mau
Next morning I scooped up Tabitha earlier than usual and went to the salon to collect my hairdressing tools, only to find the owner pulling up outside in his flash car just minutes later.
‘What are you doing?’ he demanded.
‘I told you last night, but plainly you weren’t listening. Come down to your manager’s new salon and have a look for yourself!’
We both raced along the street and I nearly broke the door down trying to get ahead of him, and burst in demanding the woman tell her former employer exactly what was going on. It was evident to all that she’d left for exactly the same reasons that I was now trying to avoid his clutches; but there was no going forward with either of them from there — I made my way to the train station and headed home to search for another job.
Thankfully work was easy to find in Sydney at that time, and I was able to turn my attention to the more important focus — our wedding. As anyone around at that time would know, fashion had a very particular look in the late sixties, particularly the style made wildly popular by the gorgeous Bianca Jagger. I made myself a simple three-piece pantsuit (wide trousers, a fitted waistcoat and a white chiffon wide-collared blouse with ahuge Garbo-style hat with trailing chiffon trim).
Tim and I were married at the Sydney Registry Office on 8 November 1969.
As I walked into the chamber I heard a man’s voice — a clerk I imagine: ‘If I see one more woman in a fucking trouser suit, I’ll jump off the harbour bridge.’
As I turned the corner I said, ‘Best you jump then, honey.’
Tim knew a few people in Sydney, so two of his friends stood in as witnesses, and that was it. No big fuss, just a quick vow and we were out. Later that night I overheard one of his mates tell Tim they hadn’t signed with their real surnames, so if he wanted out of the marriage he’d be safe. Not a great thing to hear on my wedding night.
(Some years later when discussing divorce papers, my solicitor told me a witness can sign with Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck if they choose; the only requirement was for two people to be seen to have been there.)
We stayed in Sydney for about three years, with me working mostly in hairdressing and some dressmaking for clients on the side, and Tim doing not much work at all. In 1972, with my mother’s health starting to fail, we made the decision to return to New Zealand. This meant we were also able to grant the fervent wish of Tim’s very Catholic grandmother, who did not consider us truly married, despite our legal ceremony in Sydney. To appease her, a ceremony was planned at the beautiful Catholic Basilica in Christchurch.
It was to be a proper white wedding. I made all the clothes for the wedding party, which consisted of Tim and me, a maid of honour and best man, Tim’s half-sister as flower girl, and four little page boys. A client helped me hand finish the beading on the dresses over several weeks’ visits to the salon where I was working. The cake was made by my dear mother, from my grandmother’s wedding cake recipe.
On the morning, my bridal group arrived at the salon for hair and make-up to find another party had been booked in on the same day — so starting at 9 am, I prepared two brides (myself included), two mothers of the bride, and so on, in all fourteen women and girls. Five and a half hours later, we were ready. No one could see that my hair, perfect at the front and sides, was stacked at the back with rollers under a veil made from twenty metres of silk tulle.
The ceremony was a traditional wedding mass, and a lovely experience. The Sacred Heart Girls’ Choir, led by Sister Pascal, sang beautifully, and then turned up en masse at the party afterwards (I must have urged her to come when we had our initial meeting). This was quite the drama in itself as we tried to keep the choir girls, and a number of young, handsome men at the party, separate from each other. Sister Pascal missed her 7 pm curfew at the convent and on arrival in a very sherried state, found she was locked out. Tim and his best man had to heave her over the fence.
I still refuse to let what happened next sully the memories of that happy day, but the truth is that the relationship was only ever rocky, at best. We went back to Wellington, where Tim had his glazing business, but there wasn’t much there in the way of work for me. I moved back to Christchurch on the understanding he would follow me when he could. We were still living apart but visiting from time to time when, at Christmas, things tipped right over the edge.
12
TIM, ROUND TWO
I was working long hours, dressing the cast at the Shoreline Cabaret on the pier at Brighton. I’d spent four months making costumes for all the singers and dancers, sewing with my mother at my parents’ house during the day, and helping the cast get ready for the show at night. I had made some good money there, but the hours were long and the job very tiring. Tim arrived for the Christmas break and moved into my rented house.
About ten days before Christmas I got home after midnight, exhausted and desperate for sleep. As I walked in the front door Tim was immediately at me, red-faced and yelling, accusing me of sleeping around, calling me a slut and a whore. Nothing could have been further from the truth — I was far too tired to be thinking of anything but work, and there was precious little opportunity anyway; most of the boys at the cabaret were gay dancers. But a pattern was set that night, and as the days went by his accusations became more and more outlandish and his behaviour more erratic, until the night before Christmas Eve he snapped completely.
I’d got home from work, late in the evening as usual, to find he’d set himself up in the guest room. I asked him why, and all hell broke out. He cornered me in the lounge, shouting that I was a slut and he wanted me out of his life.
By one-thirty in the morning I’d had enough. I made myself a cup of tea, took my three little Australian terriers into my bedroom, and put several hundred dollars in an envelope with a letter to my parents. I wrote a note and put it outside the door, asking not to be disturbed until the next day.
Then I downed a bottle of sleeping tablets.
My dear mother told me, long after the event, that she’d known the next day something was wrong. Call it parental radar, premonition; whatever it was it propelled her to drive with Dad to my house, and there she found one of my dogs on the bed, licking my forehead. In a panic my mother sent Dad to the neighbours to call for an ambulance, then sat crying on the bed with me while the medics and police arrived.
The police told Tim not to leave town, and I was driven off, sirens blazing, to Christchurch Hospital.
There was no great optimism for my survival. The doctors said the situation was grim, and as is the custom in a good Catholic family, a priest had been summoned, and the last rites read over my comatose body a full two days before I woke up.
When I did come to late on Christmas Day, the first face I saw was Tim’s, standing by my bed. If he felt any pressure at all to behave himself in front of the nurses, he showed no sign of it. As one of the nurses fiddled with an intravenous drip, he looked at me with absolute loathing.
‘Why didn’t you just fucking well die?’
The nurse disappeared from the room in a rush, and shortly afterwards Tim was escorted from the hospital grounds by security men. As he left, he spat at me.
‘Now I can go back to my real life.’
The nurse gave me a long, thoughtful look.
‘Elizabeth, why on earth would you waste your life on such a mongrel?’ she asked gently.
‘You should be pleased he’s off to enjoy the rest of his miserable existence.’
Later that day my psychologist, Dr John Dobson, came to see me, genuinely horrified I’d tried to kill myself.
‘Lizzie, this is so unlike you after all you’ve managed to achieve. Why did you do this?’
I told him about the abuse, the ugly accusations . . . everything.
‘I think you’ll find Tim is reflecting what he’s doing back onto you. I want to talk to you after you’re released.’
As he sat
with me, my mind cleared enough to remember that the daughter of the Shoreline Cabaret’s owners was getting married the next day, and that I had promised to do the flowers for the ceremony and reception. I sat up and told him I intended to keep my promise.
‘That’s the Lizzie I know,’ said Dobson to the hospital staff, ‘I think you can let her go home.’
I did the wedding, then went home to my parents’ house to recover. I didn’t imagine for a moment I’d see Tim again, and for a long time I simply focused on getting better. Some weeks later, well into the New Year, Tim phoned from Wellington.
‘I’m coming back to Christchurch.’
‘Why would you do that?’
‘I’m coming back to be with you.’
Despite the shock of hearing his voice, I tried to keep my voice steady.
‘There’s nothing to come back to. I’m living with my parents now and you’re not welcome in their house.’
What I didn’t know at that point was that he’d phoned many times in those early weeks, telling my parents how sorry he was, and that he’d changed, and wanted me back. All the usual blah blah blah.
My mother took me out to lunch — a rare occurrence — and told me she thought I should give the relationship one more go. I was refusing to even consider it, but she was as persuasive as only mothers can be. Eventually I relented, and back Tim came, to pick up where we’d left off in our rented house. At least he appeared to have his anger under control.
He’d been back not long at all when the phone rang — a woman in Wellington, asking for Tim. She told me her name was Sylvia. I couldn’t think of anyone I knew by that name, so I passed the phone over, there was a bit of muttering, and he put the phone down.
‘Who was that?
‘Just a friend,’ he said evasively.
Several nights later she phoned again.
‘I’ll get him,’ I said.
‘No — it’s you I need to talk to. I may as well get straight to it. I’m about to have a baby, and Tim is the father.’
There was a pause while I took in this information.
‘Why are you telling me this?’
‘Well, I’ve got two other children, and Welfare has told me that if there are any more, they will take them all away. I can’t lose my children. Would you and Tim consider taking the baby?’
Quite the question. Mutely, I handed the phone back to Tim and sat down, unable to think straight. Eventually he urged me back to the phone.
Sylvia: ‘Tim says it’ll be alright.’
‘But who will look after it?’
‘You will. You’ll be its mother. I’m going into hospital under your name, to put Welfare off the scent. No one will ever know.’
I’ll admit that among the unwise decisions I’ve made in my life, this one ranks pretty highly. I agreed, thinking that perhaps this was a chance for happiness, for Tim and me to take a new direction as a family. The baby was born in January, and I flew to Wellington to meet Sylvia and collect the little bundle. It was a girl, a dear little thing, who even at a few days old looked very much like Tim, with his colouring and his dark eyes.
The mother was another matter entirely. I was horrified to find that ‘Sylvia’ was a prostitute I’d met in Wellington the previous year. Bleached blonde, with chipped teeth and, apparently, no conscience or social filter at all.
‘You have a lot of clothes,’ she said as we stood in her kitchen, and described her favourites, suits and dresses I knew were hanging in my wardrobe in Christchurch.
‘Where do you wear them all? And I really like your bedhead. Tim says you made it yourself?’
I asked her how she could possibly know what the contents of my bedroom were.
‘Oh, Tim flew me down there for a couple of days at Christmas. While you were in the hospital.’
I was shocked into silence, staring down at the little person bundled in my arms.
There didn’t seem a lot more to talk about to the woman who’d been sleeping with my husband, so the child (who’d been named Amanda) and I got on a plane back to Christchurch. Late afternoon we taxied to the flat to find it quiet and apparently empty. In the bedroom I found Tim, who’d plainly forgotten my planned arrival time, in bed asleep in the arms of a friend of mine. Supposed friend, I should say. Her name was Noreen; she was an opera singer, of opulent size, originally from South Africa.
Without waking either of them, I put Amanda in the crib I’d prepared in the second bedroom, crept back into the main bedroom and quietly gathered up all the singer’s clothes from the floor. On the way home I’d noticed her car, parked some distance from the house on the busy main road. It was 5 pm; rush hour. Perfect.
When my ‘friend’ woke a few minutes later to my tap on her shoulder, she was understandably shocked to see me and mumbled some ridiculous excuse — ‘He must have fallen on me in my sleep!’ Casting around in a panic for her clothes, she was confused to find them gone altogether. Watching from the door, I explained she would find them all on the bonnet of her car.
It was one of life’s true highlights to watch from my front door as she made her way up the road, stark naked, with Christchurch’s commuters hailing her. Toot toot!
Back at the house things were slightly less amusing. Tim was in a rage and ran at me, pinning me to the hallway wall, demanding that I stay out of his affairs. The moment he let me go I stumbled out of the front door and with a hammer, took to the planes of glass on his glazier’s van, smashing every pane I could reach. There was glass from here to forever — an apt enough metaphor for the state of our relationship.
Tim grabbed his clothes and took off, straight to Noreen the singer’s home, where he told her parents about Amanda. They were horrified, and said I shouldn’t have the baby, and in a way they were right of course; I couldn’t have a baby and it was the last thing I really wanted. And yet for a few days, a short suspension of reality, it was lovely. Each morning I would take Amanda to my mother’s house before I went to work, and Mum would look after her until I collected her in the afternoon. In the evenings it was just the baby, the terriers and me — much better company really than the departed Tim.
One morning not long afterwards, I’d just finished teasing up my hair for work when there was an official-sounding knock at the door. I was astounded to see my mother ushering Doug Sellars — the Welfare officer from my boyhood days — into the living room.
‘We’ve come for the baby.’
‘You realise that’s my husband’s daughter?’ I protested.
‘Yes, we know that. But we can’t involve you in this. It’s not your fault. Things will take their natural course. Just give the baby to us now, Liz.’
My mother was devastated, but I numbly took Amanda out of her arms, and gave her to the nurse they’d brought with them.
I never saw the little girl again. I remember the few days we had with her very clearly, and of course I often wonder what happened to her. But, as was my habit, I dealt with it by packing the feelings firmly away.
Neither Tim nor I wanted the expense of a divorce at the time we split, but seven years together was quite enough. He would remain my husband, in name anyway, for eighteen years.
13
BACKSTAGE IN BROADCASTING
It was 1972, and I was helping with costumes for the Shoreline Cabaret in Christchurch. Being a bit of a Jack (or perhaps Jill) of all trades, I was also doing the make-up for the lead dancer. One night a man called Joe, a floor manager with the Broadcasting Corporation, approached me backstage after the show and told me they were looking for a make-up artist for the NZBC television studios in Christchurch. I had absolutely no interest in it, and said so.
‘I’ve already told them about you. Would you at least come and do a demonstration for them?’
‘No, I really don’t want to.’
I’d had enough of being involved in
projects of that size and I just wanted to concentrate on my dressmaking clients. But he continued to plead so I gave in and agreed to go for the demonstration.
It was the worst thing I could have done, and ushered in what were perhaps the darkest years of my working life. It began piecemeal — they would call and say, could you do just one programme? In those days the programmes were mostly shown live, and the pressure was ghastly. Each job I did was on contract, $40 pay per programme, and it was hell.
I assumed that attitudes in television would be similar to those of the people I knew in theatre: fairly open-minded. Also, I wasn’t the type to go camping it up. Even though I was careful to keep to myself, the poisonous attitudes made themselves felt pretty quickly.
It was silly really, but the first time I noticed anything awry was at afternoon tea. I would arrive at the tea room for my break, and everyone else would quietly vanish from the room. Just get up and leave as soon as I walked through the door. It all washed right over my head at the time, but a friend told me much later that they didn’t like being around me. I was offensive to them.
Most of the time it was a word, or a glance, but occasionally their distaste turned violent. One afternoon right outside the make-up room, one of the directors attacked me out of nowhere. I hadn’t said anything; I had spent my time trying not to be noticed. He told the others he’d come to have a look at ‘her’ and he must have just lost his cool. Grabbed me around the throat and banged my head repeatedly into the wall. Then he just walked away.
Even the gay ones turned up their noses. There was a man called Peter, a producer and director as I recall, he was all posh and camp but he certainly didn’t want anyone to think that he and I had anything in common. I didn’t understand their logic; they were nothing like the theatre workers, who could be bitchy, of course, but were comfortable with any kind of ‘difference’. Once I was asked to fly to Auckland to work on a show at the studios in Shortland Street. There was a studio audience, and between takes I found myself a seat in the stands. As I sat down the lady beside me, who must have been part of the ‘crew’ herself, leant over and said, ‘I’ve just come down to have at look at the queer from Christchurch.’