Memory 2

My father pops up at the oddest times. Which is strange as he’s dead and not even buried. I see him in the square of my jaw and the blue of my eyes. My mother’s eyes are brown. If I’d been born with brown eyes, would things have been different? Would I have had an astygmatism? When I had the operation to correct it (a failure), I might have been two or three or four years old. The hospital might have been near Wagga Wagga. Or Lismore. Or Cootamundra. Or somewhere else entirely. The bedspread was pink, the room was more square than rectangle, and two wooden chairs flanked the bed. Was the bed a child’s bed or an adult’s bed?

I watch the scene often, perched in the upper left hand corner of the room, perhaps where the fan might have been, if there was a fan. The room is light and cool, sun dappling over the linoleum floor. There are white gauze curtains that keep out the glare. My mother is arriving in a pale green cotton dress. Short, above her knees, at least it should be given we’re in the mid 60s. She may have a matching handbag swung over a tanned arm. My father is somewhere behind her, short-sleeved, socked and sandaled. There is a faint homely smell of child’s vomit and disinfectant. Four arms are outstretched towards the child. There should be bandages around the child’s eyes but I don’t recall them. Maybe there’s a nurse or a doctor there. The doctor would speak to my father, not my mother. This is Australia out in the scrub. Women aren’t allowed in bars, and men shoot the big red roos between their eyes, flashing steel along their bellies, and a month or two later there’s a rough-haired five-pronged mat on the bedroom floor or flung degenerate over the back of the settee.

The little girl isn’t wearing the bandages over her eyes when the farmer slits the throats of the cull yows in the hot dark barn out back. Blood spraying and dogs running and the loudmouthed cocky perched on the fence post squawking and caterwauling. Women are not allowed in bars but wee girls are allowed to witness a murder. It’s not the thick-armed farmers with the red necks but those pootled old arthritic yows with the whites of their eyes rolling straight back to heaven.

The pink bedspread. Was that only for little girls with blue eyes? Did little boys with brown eyes get a blue bedspread? Is it important, some fifty years on, that the bandages don’t feature in the memory.? There was no need for covered eyes in the hospital. There was every need for them in that hot dark barn out back. I shut my eyes and smell the sweet thick iron of spurting blood. Hear the rage of the white cockatoo cursing and keening.

My father donated his body to medical science. I haven’t managed to bury him yet.