Things were pretty frosty in our house for the next couple of weeks.
Usually within a few days of a fight, Mum and Dad made up and it would be okay again for a while, but Mum wouldn’t thaw this time, and Dad seemed to have given up. We heard them speaking in clipped, urgent voices in their room at night, and that felt strangely better than when there were no words coming from their room at all. Dad didn’t say goodbye to Mum in the mornings as far as I could tell, and sometimes he forgot to say goodbye to us too. I took to standing by his car door when I’d had my breakfast so I could at least see him before he left, and although he always looked sad, he would at least mess up my hair and smile at me before telling me to go inside before my mother started to look for me.
Mum didn’t go to church for two whole weeks. In fact, she didn’t go anywhere much for two whole weeks and was rarely out of her nightdress. She said Caleb was too sick for her to leave the house. Dad said Caleb would be fine wrapped up warmly in the middle hall.
Mum said, ‘There you go – you don’t really care about us. You just want to make sure you get to your precious meetings with all your friends and that monster of a sister-in-law.’
Dad said, ‘That monster of a sister-in-law was like a mother to me.’
Mum said, ‘Well aren’t you lucky you have her around given my mother is thousands of miles across the sea and I’ll probably never see her again.’
Dad said, ‘I’m not sure I could deal with two of you anyway.’
Mum said, and this worried me the most, ‘Well I can fix it so you don’t have to deal with either of us if you like.’
Mum started to eat food. As I’ve already made clear, this was not usual for her at all. She made four pieces of toast for her breakfast with lots of butter and jam, when she usually only had one slice with nothing on it. She started to put sugar and milk in her tea and had a biscuit with each cuppa, which was unheard of. She made more puddings than usual, which of course was a good thing as far as I was concerned, but then she ate a lot of them too. When she made rice pudding, which was my absolute favourite, she put big dollops of cream on the top of hers and kept her eyes on Dad’s eyes as she did it. He watched, but he didn’t say a word, which I thought was quite wise of him.
Caleb couldn’t keep his mouth shut as usual though and said, ‘Mum, I thought you were watching your waistline?’
Mum said, ‘Well, it doesn’t really matter anymore, does it?’
‘Why doesn’t it matter, Mum?’ Caleb asked.
Dad said, ‘Just eat your pudding, Caleb.’
Caleb didn’t go back to school for two weeks. He lost a lot of weight I wouldn’t have thought he had to lose and was always tired and breathless. His little grey trousers hung on him like an old man’s pants, and Mum had to make two new notches in his belt. When that didn’t work either, she tied a bit of rope through the loops and yanked them up to his bosoms so they wouldn’t drag on the ground. Most of the time he stayed in his pyjamas, so it didn’t matter too much.
I seemed to make Caleb nervous. Ruthy said he told her that I made Mum cross too much and it scared him. He also continued to be worried about Dad being sacrificed. He regularly woke up from nightmares, calling out for someone to take Dad off the cross. He told Ruthy he could see Dad nailed up on bits of old tree in a graveyard, and Dad kept talking to him and saying it would be okay but blood was coming out of him in all sorts of places and he knew he would be taken up to Our Heavenly Father.
Ruthy reminded him we didn’t believe you went to heaven when you died, you just got buried and got all mouldy in the ground until the bugs ate you, and that only Jesus had ascended to the right hand of God. This made Caleb much worse and he had to go on his breathing machine for quite a while. Mum asked him what had upset him, but he just looked at us through the clear plastic mask and didn’t say anything, which Ruthy and I agreed was lucky.
Dad worked later than usual most nights and didn’t come home for tellie and chocolate nights two Fridays in a row, which was very sad-making. He also wouldn’t let me go to the Sunday night meetings with him, which I think was the worst thing of all for me, because I couldn’t talk to him or mind his books or put paper markers in his hymn book or breathe in his nice smell. I think he was worried I would ask him questions or say things about what was happening and he didn’t want to have to answer me. When I did try to talk to him at home, he would make up a reason I had to go and do something else, or he had to do something else, and Ruthy said it was because I had a reputation for asking awkward questions.
I wrote him a note that said:
Dear Dad,
If you take me to the Sunday night meeting with you, I promise not to speak or ask a question from the time we get into the car until the time we get home. I will sit very still in the meeting and listen to every word. I will not turn around to look at the teenagers. I won’t whisper about people’s hats. I won’t kick the chair in front of me. I won’t hang around Brother Davies in case he gives me a mint before the meeting starts.
I love you.
Your oldest daughter,
Dorcas
I showed it to Ruthy, but she said I should just wait to see what happened and surely everything would go back to normal soon. What she didn’t know, or course, was what Mrs Edwards had told me about Mum wanting to leave us, so I thought I’d just keep that to myself and take her advice. Ruthy was, after all, much better at keeping the peace than me.
Ruthy and I spent a good amount of our time in the tree house when we returned from school, because Mum was definitely tied up in a long string of head or cross days. It wasn’t really fair of me, but I blamed Caleb for a lot of the troubles we were having. It seemed to me very convenient that as soon as things were tricky for him, he could get sick and then get all the attention and the tiny bit of love that Mum seemed to have left in her. She pampered him and made him his favourite dinners to encourage him to eat. She slept in a chair in his room for the first part of every night, and I think would have stayed in there with him if there had been enough room. She read a story to him before she turned the light off but wouldn’t let Ruthy and I come in to listen. She would grab him and hug him at the strangest moments and get quite teary as she did it.
I asked Ruthy at one point if she thought Caleb was going to die, and was that the reason Mum kept hugging him, but Ruthy said she thought Mum had so little happiness in her at the moment she had to spend it on just one person because there wasn’t enough to go around. We talked about why she was especially unhappy, and Ruthy brought paper out to the tree house for us to make our lists. We agreed we should write what we thought was the honest truth.
Her list said: Mum is worried about Caleb’s asthma and all Dorcas talks about is having a guinea pig which Mum believes will make him sicker. Mum is upset Dad is working more hours for Mr Bednarski but isn’t making enough money to bring Grandma for a visit from Scotland.
My list said: Dad has to work more because it’s too sad to be home and this is making Mum even crosser. Mum misses Grandma, who I think might be an especially good kind of mother because Mum misses her so much, and if she was here, perhaps Mum would be less cross. Mum’s heart has shrivelled up into a little unripe olive. Caleb is sick and Mum thinks I make him that way by causing trouble and fights. Mum doesn’t want me to have a pet to love and pretends Caleb will be allergic so she doesn’t mind he gets sick because it makes her story better. Mum only loves me because God says she has to because I am her kid, but she’s not going to church much now and that means God can’t remind her to love me so it’s getting harder.
Ruthy put her arm around me when she read my list. I noticed that she didn’t disagree. We didn’t move the beads on the string because Caleb wasn’t with us, but we agreed if he had been, we would probably have moved mine pretty much to the end of the rope.
In the past, I had been able to go over to see Mrs Johnson when I wasn’t sure about things, and she would sit and listen very quietly and patiently. She didn’t always know the answer, but she would pat my hand and smile at me and that made me feel that I wasn’t silly for having my thoughts. She told me life was an obstacle race, and I had to get fit enough to jump over each hurdle as I met it. I asked how to get fit to do that, and she said I had to have good friends to talk to, and that probably what I learned in church would be very helpful too. She didn’t believe in God, but she said any powerful belief could feed your heart and help you jump rather than falter. She said it was like physical food; we might all eat different things, such as we might all believe different things, but it all added up to nutrition for the body just as belief fed the soul.
This sounded a bit like Dad’s words about snakes and ladders, so it made me feel even more that my dad was very wise. And I certainly agreed with the idea that friends could help you because Anne King at Sunday school, and Maynard at school, and even Venita when she wasn’t fussing about clothes or what she looked like or her mother’s private parts, could somehow give me bits of energy to keep going. I said to myself it was like being plugged into a power socket and charged up. I thought this was a good analogy, and raced to tell Ruthy about it, who was impressed and wrote it down in her notebook. So it was terrible not being able to talk to Mrs Johnson about what was happening. I thought about breaking my promise and going to see her, but things were already so bad I decided it was just too risky.
I sat in Mr Driver’s garden next to Sixpence quite a bit, and sometimes wished and wished he would come and sit next to me and ask me what was going on, but he would just wave from his kitchen window, and I didn’t know what I could say to go and start a conversation with him.
One day though, when I was feeling very low, I started to cry on the little seat by Sixpence’s house. Mr Driver didn’t talk to me, but he came out of the house, picked me up, took me into the kitchen and sat in his chair with me on his knee. He put my head on his shoulder and patted me and said, ‘There, there, you’ll get another pet.’ Although I wasn’t really crying for Sixpence right then, that was about the most wonderful thing that had happened to me for a long time. I wished it would go on forever. Mr Driver smelled of wood and Palmolive soap and machine oil. His wrists were old and stringy and had lots of black dots and scars on them, but his arms were strong and he held me tight, and I wondered if God had sent me to Mr Driver because my Aunty Maisie says God never tests us beyond our endurance and I think I was nearly endured right out.
I seemed to get into trouble even more than usual at school, and I don’t really know why because I was trying very hard. Every morning I would wake up and say to myself, ‘Today you have to be perfect at everything’. And I would start out quite cheerful with that thought in mind, but in no time flat, as Mr Driver used to say, I’d queer my pitch. My bright, shiny intentions to be like a saint weren’t strong enough to make me behave like a good child.
I whispered in class so much I was sent to the headmistress three times in one week, and they sent a letter home to Mum, which of course I didn’t give her, and which Maynard signed for me instead. Rufus kept calling me Scabhead so I went into his classroom in the lunch break and took all his pencils to the electric sharpener on his teacher’s desk and sharpened them until they were just little stubs his fat fingers wouldn’t be able to manage. Unfortunately I didn’t do a good job of cleaning up all the curly wooden shavings, and some of them got in my hair and all over my clothes, so Maynard had to sign another note that was meant for Mum.
In weekly assembly I was at the top of a marching line and was meant to take all the babies behind me to the left towards the flag, but I decided to take them to the right, which meant the whole pattern of marching got messed up and there were children everywhere. When the teachers started to shout, I couldn’t help laughing and that meant another long sit outside the headmistress’s rooms to be told off.
On another day, when we were chanting the words for the flag – ‘I love my county. I salute her flag. I honour her queen. I promise to obey her laws.’ – I changed all the hand signals that are meant to go with the words, and some other children got confused and copied me. The neat pattern the teachers liked was all wrecked again and Mr Foster grabbed me by the plait and dragged me out the front and told me off in front of everyone.
Ruthy went all quiet and spent more time than usual in our room cross-legged on the bed writing in her journals. She was quickly filling the latest one up. She was what she called ‘in the throes of an enthusiasm’. She had several throes in the past. One had been to try to classify all the faces in the world into twenty types. She would watch someone and make notes of their features and decide which category to put them in. She had a page for each of the types and would add their name and a description of them to explain her choice. She said she was developing a typology. Every now and again when we were at the shops for Mum or at the meeting, she would point to someone and say, ‘That’s type thirteen – pointy,’ or ‘That’s type seventeen – fleshy.’
Another time she developed an enthusiasm for reading all the books in the library about Eskimo. She spent hours and hours poring over big stacks of school library books looking for any reference to them. When her enthusiasm wore off, she would look up surprised, as though she hadn’t noticed the world had kept spinning and that she had been away for a long time.
Since the day in the car after the union exams, Ruthy had developed a new enthusiasm about expanding her vocabulary. She chose three words every day and wrote them out, along with their definition, over and over again to help her remember them. She set herself the task of using them in a sentence that day too. As a result, at teatime we heard: ‘I think you should learn some new words Dorcas because of the impecunious nature of your vocab’; ‘Dad, can you think of an antonym for headstrong?’; and my favourite, ‘Mr Driver bears the loss of Mrs Driver with longanimity.’ I didn’t tease her about this, partly because at the moment any teasing between us seemed to end in an argument between Mum and Dad, and also because I was quite proud of her.
Instead of keeping her journal in the tin in our tree house with the rest of her collection of filled-up books, she kept the current one under her pillow and sometimes woke up in the night and wrote things in it using a torch. She wrote two letters to our brother Daniel, but wouldn’t show me what she wrote. I hoped it wasn’t bad things about me, because when I was very sad, I imagined Daniel coming home and telling me he wanted to spend all his free time with me because he loved me the best. And then he would go to school and beat up Rufus, and then punch Mr Johnson on the nose and speak sternly to Mum to remind her she was a Sister in Christ and should be happier more often.
Mr Driver gave each of us a torch on our birthday that year, but Mum had taken mine away because in art class I had decided to see what it would look like if I painted blue polka dots on my white school shirt and the stains didn’t come out. During the days since the exams, because I was so sad, and picking the sores in my head more than usual, if we both woke up in the night sometimes Ruthy would come into my bed with the torch and we would put it on under the covers so Mum and Dad wouldn’t see the light, and we would put our arms around each other and tell each other stories until one of us fell asleep.
Ruthy told very good stories. They were about children who did amazing things and won awards and travelled to exciting places and were on tellie a lot. She described what they wore and gave details about their friends and families. My favourite stories were the ones about a girl called Anastasia Armistad, who was very brave and invented cures for cancers and strokes and problems with your bowels. We agreed the cures for bowel problems were her greatest inventions because who would not want to be able to go to the toilet without someone helping you? Maynard told me that his grandpa had to wear a big nappy in his nursing home and sometimes it fell off a bit and stuff would ooze out and as a result Maynard didn’t really like to hug him and tried to sit a fair way away from him. His mother wouldn’t let him hold his nose, which is what he wanted to do, because she said it was disrespectful, but Maynard said his grandpa was disrespectful stinking everyone out to high heaven.
I asked Ruthy if I was as brave as Anastasia Armistad, but she said you weren’t really brave if you did risky things without even thinking about it, and I considered that for quite a while and decided it was probably true. She said I was more impetuous, impulsive and injudicious than brave, which made me guess she was studying words starting with the letter I.
I made up stories about kings and queens and knights. All the best knights were girls in my stories. Ruthy said this was quite unrealistic, but I pointed out they were my stories so that’s the way it would be. All the girl knights wore armour but had a special hinge so they could sit down for the toilet, because that was a problem that I had pondered for some time. When we’d made armour out of cardboard boxes Dad brought home from his work, it was quite an ordeal to unstick, unhook, un-staple and un-tape oneself when nature called. Caleb sometimes didn’t bother and wet himself, which made the cardboard go quite soggy, but he didn’t care.
My favourite story of my own was about a castle where there was only a queen and princesses and all the knights were girls. It was called Caramel, which is a bit like Camelot, but not quite. When other countries couldn’t kill their dragons or their enemies, they would send someone to Caramel and all the knights would have a meeting in a very lovely garden where rabbits and guinea pigs and dogs and cats ran all over the place, and they would decide whether to go to help or not. The price, if the knights of Caramel agreed to help, was that the country needing help had to give them one little girl baby as a reward, because the Caramel knights didn’t like all that sexing stuff Venita told me about at school, and it was better just to be given a baby than have to have it come out of your insides as you screamed blue murder for hours, which, according to Venita, was exactly how it happened.
In my story I was elected the head knight. Every girl knight had decorated armour, and mine had blue and green polka dots on top of the solid silver metal bits. I had a sweet little baby of my own called Arabella and a puppy called Plops, and a guinea pig called Thruppence, and the four of us lived in a small castle of our own and loved each other very much. Ruthy didn’t like the name Plops, but I had to remind her it was my story and therefore my choice.
In the third week after Caleb went to hospital, he went back to school. I hoped that would mean things would go back to normal, and Mum would get up and get dressed in the mornings, but she didn’t. When we got home from school each day, the house was cold and dark and quiet, and she was still in bed asleep. We crept in and put our bags away, and then agreed we should go to the tree house so we didn’t wake her up.
Caleb’s lungs seemed a bit better. He didn’t need to go on the nebuliser, and as long as he had his Ventolin spray in his pocket, he seemed to manage pretty well. But although his breathing was better, he was fidgety and shaky and anxious. He jumped from one topic to another, sometimes halfway through a sentence. He hopped up and down and squirmed and sort of darted about the place. The asthma medication could make him a bit like that anyway but he kept worrying about Dad being sacrificed and wanting to talk about it over and over again. Ruthy and I tried to reassure him that it wasn’t going to happen. It wasn’t what Mum meant. She just meant that Dad was going to keep working too hard for Mr Bednarski, but Caleb wasn’t convinced. He said he knew from the Bible that before they put Jesus on the cross, all the people around him started fighting with each other and being weird and that was exactly what was happening at home.
I got a bit sick of hearing about it and asked him how he knew it would be on the cross anyway. People had been sacrificed in lots of different ways in the past. Ruthy told me to stop but I went on about people who were tied to four posts and then stretched to death, and people who were put on altars and cut up into little pieces or thrown into fiery volcanos, and about Joan of Arc who was tied to a post with firewood under her and set alight.
Caleb gasped when I mentioned Joan of Arc and said that in his dream Dad was definitely stuck on a tree, so maybe he was going to be burned at the stake instead of hung on the cross. He ran round and round us on the floor of the tree house, which was very irritating, because there wasn’t really room to do that, and said he wouldn’t sit still until we told him about Joan of Arc.
Ruthy said okay, okay, if he sat down, we’d tell him what we knew, and that calmed him down a bit and he dropped next to us, crossed his legs and put his elbows on his knees to listen. Ruthy said she was pretty sure Joan was a French person, and it was something to do with religion, but she wasn’t sure what. Caleb asked if we were sure it was Joan, and not John, because Dad’s middle name was John, but we both said no it was a story about a girl. I knew a little bit about it because when I borrowed some books on knights from the state children’s library on North Terrace, there was a picture of her dressed as a sort of knight, so I read that section. I told Caleb I thought she was a Catholic saint because of being burnt, and he decided he’d ask his best school friend, Lincoln Waterford, because Lincoln was Catholic and would probably know the story.
Mum and Dad didn’t like us to have Catholic friends. They said that Catholics made up their own bibles that weren’t really properly the word of God but written to suit themselves. They had priests who were men who wore long dresses and lots of jewellery and did the job fulltime, whereas in our church the baptised people voted for all the positions in the church, and you had to do your ordinary job as well as your church job on the weekends and you didn’t get paid anything for it. Mum and Dad said the Catholics worshipped idols, which I knew for sure God said you shouldn’t do, and they had lots of crosses and statues of saints and things they would bow and scrape to, and this was very wrong. Dad said they also just gave jobs to other Catholics, which wasn’t really fair, and that’s why he was grateful Mr Bednarski didn’t only give jobs to other Jews.
I asked once if we could go and look at the Catholic heathens, but Mum and Dad both said they wouldn’t set foot in one of those churches. They said the men in dresses who ran the show walked around swinging balls full of smoke and that would give Caleb asthma and we wouldn’t like the smell. They said we wouldn’t understand the services, which were in Latin and deliberately impossible to understand so the men in dresses could keep all the secrets and the money and the power.
Mum said they made you stand up and go to a big step at the front and kneel down on the cold floor and they put a circle of white plastic stuff on your tongue, and then made you all drink out of one big wine thing and the priest wiped the dribble off your chin afterwards. We liked the way the Serving Brothers at our church passed the dishes of fresh white bread and little glasses of wine down the rows so we could help ourselves. Caleb said yuck about wiping the dribble off your chin and then made a really long string of spit and leaned over until it was almost touching the ground and Mum smacked his leg, but only gently.
Mum said Catholics had to go into a little room with a screen and tell the priest all their sins and then he would say amen and away you’d go with not a worry in the world. This seemed like getting off pretty lightly to me, and Mum said yes, it was ridiculous because only God could hear your real thoughts and read your heart and it was up to each of us to develop our own relationship with him and to work hard for his forgiveness.
She also said, ‘Besides, Dorcas, you would have to just live in one of those confessional boxes you’d have so much to say.’ We all laughed and Caleb said he’d bring me a mattress and pillow if that happened.
Dad said Catholics left all the hard work to the priests, and that Catholics hardly knew what the Bible said or went to youth class or midweek Bible class or Saturday night special classes or Bible conferences or Sunday school or Sunday night meetings.
Dad said most of the government was run by Catholics who put their spin on everything, which he didn’t think was right. I asked why the Christadelphians didn’t try to take over the government, but Dad said Jesus in the Book of Matthew said, ‘Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s’, and that this meant we could not interfere in the running of the world because everything was God’s will, and we might accidentally do something that wasn’t in His plans.
This is why Christadelphians don’t vote. They might accidentally vote for the wrong man and then they would be getting in the way of God’s will, and he might get pretty shirty about it. And you have to admit, if God gets shirty, he really gets a huff up. He drowns people, sends plagues, turns them to salt, kills their families and makes them walk miles and miles in the desert from one country to another without any real houses at the end of the walk.
Mum seemed very worried that if we had Catholic friends at school, they might tempt us over to their club somehow, and at the first sniff that a friend might go to the Catholic Church, she told us we shouldn’t play with them at school or go to their houses afterwards. As a result, the three of us had made a pact not to tell Mum or Dad about the Catholic kids at school, because we thought most of them were pretty nice, and it seemed a shame to stop talking to them. Not once did any of them ask us to say things in Latin or say bad things about Jesus or try to stop us going to Sunday school, so we thought it was a good secret thing to do.
Maynard wasn’t Catholic. His family was Church of England. He said his father called it the ‘one true religion’, but his oldest brother said it only existed because a horny old king wanted to get rid of his old wife and marry some young girl and made up the whole church so he could change things to suit himself, and then he got sick of her anyway and had her head cut off. I knew at least most of this was true, because I won a book on the Tudors as a Sunday school consolation prize, and there was a picture of Anne Boleyn in it, and one of Henry the Eighth who had the biggest calves I’ve ever seen. So I couldn’t see why this church was better than ours, because I’m pretty sure no Christadelphians had killed anyone and divorce wasn’t allowed so no Arranging Brother had ever changed the rules so he could marry another Sister as far as I knew.
After the union exams, nothing was much better at home. We couldn’t remember a fight between Mum and Dad lasting this long. In the past there had been noisier ones, where Mum would scream she was leaving and walk out the door, and Dad would let her go for half an hour and if she didn’t come back, he would get in the car and look for her and bring her back. Usually by the next morning they were a bit careful, as though there were actual bruises on their hearts but that were clearly starting to heal, and we were careful and didn’t make the situation worse, which usually meant if I didn’t make the situation worse by the next teatime we could all breathe a sigh of relief.
We were coming up to a record for the coldness in our house, and it didn’t look like it was going to end anytime soon.