Tag: australia

memoir

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.

Tags australia, childhood

fiction serial

The Cloud. Episode 35

1966, Sydney

Janet sat in the back of the taxi squeezed between her mother and her brother. Bernadette had her knees tight together under her thin pale green cotton dress, presumably, Janet thought, to avoid having to touch her daughter. Bernadette dabbed at the bruised puff around her eyes with her white hanky. Would her mother never stop crying?

Edward had his head out of the open car window and was naming the make and model of each car that passed in the opposite direction. When he got it wrong, Eric, stretched out in the front passenger seat, corrected him. It wasn’t a friendly correction. Her father’s fingers were still drumming, now on the shiny wood-veneer of the dashboard. His nails clicked like the crickets that had sprung under Janet’s feet as she’d walked out of the police station to the waiting taxi. The naming the car thing had been Philip’s game. How stupid of Edward to play it. Janet tried elbowing him, a sharp bony jab jab under his ribs. He turned briefly, stared at her, curled his lip, and continued on with the game.

The taxi driver, recently arrived from Greece and what a journey that was, sick the whole way not like his wife and three daughters and even the baby okay and couldn’t eat a thing for three weeks and had lost weight and never felt better since, had already learnt nearly all of the street names in the city. Or so he said to them as he accelerated through a red light. He regaled them with the name of each street just before he drove into it to prove his point.

Janet wanted the driver brother car street naming duet to shut up. She was hot, tired, and angry. How dare they all blame her. The Inspector had clearly known she wasn’t guilty. The way he’d looked at her. Drawn her apart from the others. Why didn’t they believe him? A proper policeman. She fingered the card in her pocket. The Inspector’s phone number. Just in case she remembered something else. She was to phone anytime. He was here to help. Such a terrible tragedy to happen to a lovely new Australian family. He hadn’t had time to say anything else nice to her. Her father had pushed them all outside. He had wanted, he said, to get home. Janet wasn’t sure which home he’d meant.

Eventually the taxi slowed and the driver leant out of his window. We’re near, he said. Forty-eight, forty-six, forty-four, and then Edward was shouting, and her father was pointing and the taxi slid to a halt outside No.36. Number 36, Macaulay Road. Their home for the next six months. Or longer if Eric couldn’t find their own house to buy at the right price. Janet leant back on the sticky plastic car seat and stretched her neck. Four large flies was crawling across the ceiling of the taxi towards her father. A brown spider, as big as her finger nail, stood upside down in the corner above her head. Its tiny feet tap tapped on the cream plastic. She’d read somewhere there would be insects here. But she hadn’t realised how many.

Edward was already out of the car, pulling open the black metal gate which scraped across the concrete with an unwelcoming scour, and jumping up the steps to the house. He lifted up a pot with a cactus type plant, felt around underneath, then held up a key in triumph. Her father was fumbling in his wallet, checking the unfamiliar currency. Bernadette was murmuring something about a tip and poor Philip, poor Philip not even seeing the house. The tree in the garden next to theirs was swaying and squawking. As the taxi driver opened the boot to get their cases out, it exploded into a swirling mass of flashing blue and green. ‘Budgies,’ said Janet, to no one, ‘those are budgies.’

Janet was last into the house. It took a few seconds for her eyes to adjust to the gloom. The house smelt of wood polish, lavender and something that was probably fly spray. She was confused at first by the lay-out. The house defied normal logic. It was long and thin, with the hall running down one side and all the rooms, apart from the kitchen at the end, off to the left. The floors were all wooden, apart from the kitchen with its smart black and white linoleum tiles. Each time someone spoke, the house spoke it back to them.

She followed her mother through the hall and into the kitchen. The same yellow spirals from the police station twirled from the ceiling in the light breeze from the screened off windows. Janet opened the kitchen door and stepped out into the garden. It was small and boxy with a large tree that she didn’t recognise, a brick barbecue with a blackened wire grill, a small square of lawn, neat borders with pretty flowering shrubs that smelt tropical sweet, and a wooden deck with four metal fold-up chairs leant up against the wall of the house. The timber fences on each side of the garden were just high enough to hide them from the neighbours.

A pale cotton net hammock was tied from two of the branches. She sat down on it and it dropped, almost to the ground. She pushed herself back and forward on it. It was quiet in the garden, just the rustle of leaves and the sharp calls of a few early birds gathering in preparation for the late afternoon chorus. Something nipped at her foot under the leather of her sandal. Then again and again. And then the other foot. She bent over to have a look. Her feet were covered in tiny golden ants. She tried brushing them off, but the more she brushed, the more they came. She stamped her feet. Smacked at the pain.

‘Janet, in here now.’ Her father had come outside and was standing on the decking. ‘Your mother needs help to unpack.’ Janet stood up and nodded. She didn’t look her father in the eye. ‘And your room’s the small one at the back.’ The smallest room. The dreariest room. Her punishment presumably. She sighed and, stamping her feet again, followed her father into the house.

Tags australia, clouds, serial

fiction serial

The Cloud. Episode 31

1966. Sydney.

Janet had never spoken to a police officer before. There’d never been any need. And now, with these two in front of her, their foreheads sweat sticky under the tight grip of their black hats, she wasn’t sure whether she should.

The tall one had taken her father to one side and was speaking to him. Her father was nodding his head, then shaking it, then nodding again. The policeman’s expression hovered somewhere between pity and irritation. Janet suspected he didn’t like dealing with death. Especially when there was no body. Especially when the no body might be in another country. At the bottom of the ocean.

Her father’s shoulders started to shake. His back convulsed. Long, deep lowing sounds came out of him. The sounds the cattle made by Pop George’s house when the farmer took the calves away. Janet couldn’t bear the sounds of the anguished cows. She’d bury her head under her pillow night after night begging Pop George to get the calves back to their mothers. And now she couldn’t bear her father’s sounds either.

The tall policeman touched her father’s elbow. Took a pace back. Turned to stare at the ship’s white hull until her father’s sounds shrank and tapered into the shimmer of the clammy heat. Stood in silence while her father scrabbled around for his dignity. Maybe she’d got that wrong about the policeman. Maybe he didn’t mind dealing with death at all.

Janet had read two P.D. James novels on the ship. She’d rather liked Inspector Dalgliesh. He was clever. Wrote poetry. Was unobtrusively handsome. This policeman wasn’t handsome. He didn’t look like a poet. His fingers were too stubby. His feet were too wide. And his nose reminded Janet of the platypus in the Welcome to Australia leaflet.

Perhaps his irritation signalled his suspicion. That something wasn’t right. That there’d been no accident at all but a premeditated murder. Or perhaps it wasn’t irritation but excitement. The policeman was hungry for promotion. Eager for something different. Something to make him famous.

Already hot, Janet’s armpits wept damp unpleasant wafts from under her t-shirt. She held her arms tight against her body. Kept the smell in. The shame hidden. She needed to hear what the policeman would say next. She took a step towards the two men but her mother pulled her back, frowned, and shook her head.

The shorter policeman, off to her right, and talking to Edward, seemed to have a problem with his face. Every minute or so he’d wipe his brow with a blue-checked cotton handkerchief. Edward’s ears were pink and his fists, clenched tight in front of him, were trembling. The short policeman looked over Edward’s shoulder to Janet and winked. Or did he? Janet couldn’t be sure. And then the policeman smiled. Rubbed his face again with the handkerchief. Janet tried to smile back but her lips were stuck shut. The policeman put his hand on Edward’s shoulder, said something to the boy, then turned to speak to her and her mother.

‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ he said, addressing her mother. ‘I’m Inspector Connolly. And that,’ he said, pointing to the taller man, ‘is Senior Sergeant Maxwell.’ Inspector. Just like Adam Dalgliesh in the books. ‘He’s just getting a few facts from Mr Waters about…’ He paused. ‘About your son.’ He wiped his face again.

Janet stared at his shoes. So black. So shiny. His feet must be terribly hot. The family were all in sandals. Even her father. Janet had never seen her father in sandals until this trip. The Inspector was speaking again. Saying something to her mother about immigration. About luggage. About how they, the policemen, would take them to their hotel to settle in. Then speak to them once they’d slept and showered.

‘You must be Janet,’ he said. He put his hand out as if to shake hers then drew it back again. Janet caught his eye and looked away. She was embarrassed for him. How short he was. How could a sergeant be taller than an inspector? That couldn’t be right? But he seemed nice. He had a smiley face.

The next day he’d tell her, out of ear-shot from the rest of the family, as they walked into the police station, that his mates called him Sniper. Short for Sniper’s Dream. He’d grin as he said it, and Janet’s skin would prickle and the prickle would feel nice and Janet would blink and look away and wonder whether she’d just found her first friend in this hot and clingy land.

To be continued.

Tags australia, clouds, police