I can’t be sure what it was that drew me back to Dallas but I do know returning was like an addiction, a nostalgic yearning that had to be drip-fed. It seemed to hit harder once I became a mother, when I desperately wanted to show my three boys to my parents.
Once my boys were all at secondary school I enrolled in a home tutor program with a Broadmeadows refugee support group. I was soon matched with a woman who lived a few streets from my childhood home, in McIvor Street. I now had a good reason to stalk my childhood neighbourhood.
Damrina, an Iraqi Christian and a mother of seven, made some small progress with her English under my tutelage. More importantly, she helped me to remember there were good things that happened here, that it wasn’t all bad, as I had come to believe. Damrina was a great cook. She loved to feed me delicious, sweet Arabic treats, especially my favourite, almond and honey slice. As we ate, she provided glimpses of her hometown in northern Iraq, close to the Syrian border. Most of the stories were non-verbal gestures, as she pointed to the television where the horrific slaughter by Saddam Hussein was being played out.
‘I used to live over there,’ I said one day while we were cooing over her new grandson. I pointed to a row of houses across the road. ‘Behind those paddocks.’
‘You live here?’ Damrina smiled.
‘Not any more. We moved.’
‘Why?’ she said. ‘Why you leave? It’s so bewdifool.’
Was I missing something? Outside, children of all nationalities were playing cricket and that familiar crack of the ball on bat rang in my ears. At that moment, I was tempted to join in.
As a young girl, I always wanted to join in my brothers’ games whether it was cricket, football, marbles or rollerskating. Margie didn’t seem to care. She never whinged the way I did. She was happy on her own. Happy to cartwheel her way around the front lawn or make daisy chains from the weeds on the nature strip. One time, our brother Andy was teaching us a new trick he called the Fosbury Flop. He had set up an old mattress on the grass and tied a piece of rope from the fence to veranda. Then he took a long run up, threw his shoulders back and flipped his legs over the rope. ‘Too easy,’ he said, arms raised in the air.
I tried it but ended up with my legs tangled in the rope. I tried again, missed the mattress and hurt my arm. In pain in the middle of the night, I called for Mum, who rubbed methylated spirits on it and sent me back to bed. After two more days of complaining, Mum took me to the doctor and I ended up in plaster. I was devastated when I realised I would miss the school sports. Back then Nicky Gleeson was my best friend and we thought we were the fastest runners in our street. Nicky was the only boy who didn’t tease me. He didn’t brag about everything like most boys. Sometimes I pretended we would get married and go on adventures like the kids in the Famous Five stories he told me about.
Nicky’s dad, Uncle Ray, used to sing to me, ‘Cally, Cally, Cally, the girl with the cast iron belly.’ He made me laugh and I knew it wasn’t like when my brothers teased with names like Fatso, Buddha or Mop. But I got my own back when I perfected the Chinese burn and got more physical. I threw punches and missiles in a rage and one day I broke Mum’s beloved statue of the Virgin Mary with a shoe aimed at one of my annoying brothers.
‘Can’t you take a joke?’ the boys would laugh when I ran inside to sulk to Mum. ‘Stop telling tales,’ she said. ‘Maybe you ask for it.’
I think it was around then that I started to look for places to escape. The roof of our house was my favourite spot. But most of the time I made my way to Aunty Mary’s, sometimes Margaret was in tow but mostly she was with our mother, not so much tied to her apron strings as clinging to her legs. I craved the peace and quiet of the Gleesons’ house at number eight. I wanted to see Nicky too, to ride our bikes together, to collect tadpoles in the creek, or just to hang around together.
Like most suburban cricket pitches of the 1960s the McIvor Street pitch was mapped out in front of an electric light pole, near the Perrys’ house, across from our front door. From there I could watch all the action on those times when I wasn’t allowed to join in.
One day late in November 1966, when I was still five, I followed Maurice as he walked to the crease, watched him take the bat and tap it at the top of his right foot to ‘get his eye in’. He was good at cricket, but not as good as Nicky. Nicky was a natural. Got a swing like Bradman, Dad said, and everyone knew Nicky would play for Australia one day. ‘Then I’ll get a real cricket bat. A shiny new one.’
A howl went up from the gang gathered by the wicket and scattered around the makeshift boundary that Margie and I helped to draw with white chalk on the black tar.
‘Maurice’s not out,’ my brother Paul said. ‘You can’t go out first ball.’
Paul was Maurice’s best mate. He was everyone’s best mate and was always the captain of one of the cricket teams. Even though Maurice was older, he nominated Paul as captain because Paul was the brave one who took the blame for the stray ball that smashed the windscreen of old Harry Jones’s new station wagon. ‘Whinging Pom,’ Dad said when he came to complain.
Maurice had a couple more swings, squinting into the sun, searching for the fastball from Johnny Spiteri, who lived opposite the Gleesons. His sister, Gracie was Margie’s best friend and Mum said they were like two peas in a pod, always hanging around our house.
The Spiteri kids had no dad. He died suddenly and dad and Uncle Ray always looked out for them. Their mum came from Malta. The Andreous, who lived next door to them, were from Greece and the Spencers a few doors down were from Scotland and the Cappi family across from them were from Italy. Next door to the Gleesons was beautiful Anna from Hungary. There were a few Australians scattered in the street like the Wilson, Roberts and Walker families. I’m not sure where the Goldsmiths were from but I often wished that glamorous surname were my own. Of course, there were mixed families like our Irish one and the English couple on the corner and then there were the Simpsons and Perrys, some of whom still live in McIvor Street.
When Maurice was ready, he faced the next ball of the over, as it slammed passed the wooden fruit box, all broken and battered from the summer before. Out in the field I could see Russell Gleeson and my brother Tommy, who comes after Paul and before Andy. His real name is Thomas, after grandfather Thomas in Ireland. Tommy and Russell were best friends. They egged each other on as they called out to the girls standing on the protestant side of the street.
‘Bring those biscuits back here,’ Mum yelled from the front door, but the boys kept on dipping into a bag full of ammunition. The biscuits were the rejects Mum brought home from the factory where she worked during the night while we were all tucked up in bed. Dad called it the graveyard shift and said she should give it away. But each morning Mum arrived home with bags of Chocolate Royal biscuits in time for breakfast. Margie loved to save hers and then slowly peel the flakes of chocolate away from the marshmallow while I swallowed them in one gulp.
‘Get back to the cricket,’ Paul called to the boys as Nicky delivered a spinner that hit the wicket and Maurice was well and truly out.
‘Go get the ball,’ Paul shouted to me.
‘No.’
‘Get it.’
‘I always have to chase the balls.’
‘If you don’t field, you don’t play.’
‘You won’t give me a bat anyway.’
‘I’ll get it,’ called Margie.
‘Cally can take my bowl,’ Maurice said, walking towards me.
‘Don’t you want to play?’ I said.
‘I do, but my head hurts.’
Maurice took my hand and put it to his forehead where a big lump had formed.
‘Ooh, yuk.’ The bump felt weird, all hard and shiny. ‘What happened?’
‘Crashed into Fat George at the shelter sheds at school.’
‘Did it bleed?’
‘A bit.’
‘Did you tell the teacher?’
‘Yeah, she told me to go and lie down.’
‘That why ya late?’
‘I fell asleep in the sick room and when I woke up everyone was gone.’
‘Were you scared?’ Margie asked him.
‘No. But I was glad when Macca, the cleaner, found me wandering around in the corridor.’
I didn’t see Maurice for a few days – even when I went to play the piano he stayed in his room. And he didn’t come out to play cricket with us. Then one morning, about a week later, I woke up to Aunty Mary’s voice, outside my window. ‘Yoo hoo,’ she called, making her way to the back door. ‘You there, Valerie?’ Mum was folding clothes into the laundry basket on the back porch.
‘We took Maurice to the eye hospital last night,’ Aunty Mary said. She stretched her legs out in the warm sun, sucked on a Craven A, and blew the smoke from the corner of her mouth away from me.
‘What for?’ Mum said.
‘That eye was hurting again.’
It was too hot to play outside so I sat in the shade of the veranda, watching Margie play with Suzie, the stray Kelpie who hung around and fed off our scraps. I liked the way Margie rubbed Suzie behind the ears and let her jump on her lap, but I was too scared to touch her ever since the big dog ran at me on my way to school, barking and jumping all over me. I got so scared I dropped my lunch bag and ran. The owner of the dog came to school with a new lunch for me and the best cake I’d ever had.
‘What did the doctors say?’ Mum said as she turned the teapot around on the table.
‘Nothing much, Val. We waited a long time to see a doctor. And then we only got five minutes with him. He told us he couldn’t find anything wrong.’
‘I guess they know what they’re doing.’
‘Maybe so. But Ray was wild with them. They didn’t even check him out. Just sent us home.’
‘Cally, take Suzie for a walk,’ Mum called to me.
‘I don’t want to.’
‘Well, go and do something.’
‘There’s nothing to do.’
‘I’ll give you something to do.’
I knew she was just trying to get rid of me, which made me want to stay even more so I pretended to disappear.
‘You can get Seamus ready for his bath,’ Mum shouted to me.
‘Why can’t Margie?’
‘She does enough already.’
I kept listening through the open door.
‘Maybe the doctors were right, Mary.’
‘Hmm. I guess so. Maurice seems okay but I don’t know what to make of it,’ Aunty Mary paused and caught me staring at her. But she didn’t growl, not like Mum. She lit another cigarette and shared it with Mum.
‘Have you got a Bex, Val? Anything, an aspirin, something that will help settle my stomach?’
Mum shook out a packet of powder from the small box as Aunty Mary finished her tea. ‘Stay a while if you like, Mary,’ I heard Mum say. ‘I can see you’re worried.’