Peter is introduced to Linda by a mutual friend one morning on the train to work. She flirts with him, this tall, gentle boy who is brilliantly blond in the morning light. She is short. She is a year or two older. She has beautiful eyes and long black hair and a cheeky smile and he likes the way he feels when she looks up at him. They chat shyly, swaying from side to side as the crowded carriage is pulled down the rails.
Later, when he is taunted by the men he dates about the little woman waiting at home, he will launch into a jeremiad about how it wasn’t supposed to be that way. We sorta become friends while we spoke on the train but, like, I weren’t interested in anythink really, just in someone to share a house with, you know? He will explain that the deal was: she had her room and he had his room. That things went fine there for a little while, until the Sunday morning she violated their agreement by entering his private sanctuary to serve him breakfast in bed, and then fucking seduced him.
And that is how he will always remember it: slightly wounded and wondrous, mainly for theatrical effect but also truly marvelling about how naive he was to think that just because he could complete the physical act of sex with her, he was meant to marry her. Still. He felt proud—for a time only, but even so, yes, very proud—to be doing what normal people did. He had something they had. He was, finally, inside.
Though he is nineteen, Peter needs his parents’ consent before he can marry Linda in the little bluestone Catholic church in the city. So he returns to Birchill Street, the papers folded crisply in his pocket like a bureaucratic exemption from his father’s violence and his mother’s contempt.
He stands in the living room and explains to them how he proposed to Linda and how she said yes and how he’s already asked her father for permission (leaving out the part about how he did so despite being frightened of her family—the father, the brothers; their hard drinking, their roughness).
Bill does not look up from his paper. Ailsa leans against the kitchen doorway listening, tongue cocked. ‘Look, we know what you are,’ she shoots, squinting at him over her long nose through ice-light eyes so close together they always seem crossed. ‘We know this won’t work.’ She agrees to sign the papers anyway.
And then there is nothing more for him here, in this house where he learned to walk. So he mumbles his thanks and leaves feeling heavier with each step as the full weight of his mother’s words lands on him and he realises there is nothing he can do to make them love him.
He won’t, for many years, realise the glorious corollary of this: that there is nothing he can possibly have done to make them not love him. And although he will come to know this over the next forty years, to hold the dry thought in his mind, he will never come to feel it in that part of him below the neck, where true security resides. This will leave him prone to the dark like a light bulb loosely screwed into its socket and flickering.
•
Why, at nineteen, would Peter have required parental permission to marry? Perhaps it was an administrative quirk at that particular church? Perhaps the parental consent Sandra remembers obtaining was in fact for something else entirely, the lease on her first flat, maybe? Or perhaps it wasn’t a permission form at all but rather, simply, a wedding invitation? Sandra does not remember. Like the year of her marriage or whether she had a wedding reception or the births of her children or the details of her divorce or the year of her sex reassignment surgery, she simply, genuinely, does not remember.
‘It’s a complete blackout.’
‘I don’t know, isn’t that weird?’
‘I’m not that good with dates and remembering.’
‘I’ve lost a couple of years. It doesn’t add up to me. It just doesn’t add up.’
‘I don’t really know, to be honest with you. I’ve just cut it all out.’
The things Sandra doesn’t remember could fill this book, could fill many books, could fill a library. Sometimes I imagine those books. They are unlike the books I grew up around: soft, yellowed bricks smelling of home. Instead they have immaculate spines and uncut pages. I hear the crisp crack they make on first opening. Some of the books are part of a series (Peter Collins: Early Years, Lives of Birchill Street, Peter Collins: Lost Years, 1973–89). Others are monographs (Adoption and the Catholic Church in Victoria). There is memoir (Early Influences, Rooms I Lived In), cooking (Cake Icing & Decorating for All Occasions by Beryl Guertner), history (A Social History of the Western Suburbs). This library of things Sandra doesn’t remember includes works in other media: a watercolour of Birchill Street at dusk, road maps, photographs, a shopping list scribbled on the back of a phone bill (eggs, flour, bread, milk, gin).
The library they fill, dark and silent as a crypt, exists as much as it does not: it has a shape. In this way, the things Sandra has forgotten are as telling as the things she remembers and this helps me make sense of a life that has left such light traces on the historical record. The dates and facts that can be externally verified are the stars I steer by. Much has been lost, but I have studied you for years now, Sandra P. You are my Talmud, my Rosetta Stone, my Higgs boson. Where my research runs dry, I can offer only educated deductions and informed imaginings, but what is the alternative?
Whatever its name, I refuse it. Sandra, this is your story. You exist in the Order of Things and the Family of People. You belong, you belong, you belong.
Bill drops Ailsa off at St Augustine’s and then he drives away. Anticipating that his mother might loudly proclaim her objection to his marriage, Peter has arranged with his friends Ian and Freda to sit near her during the ceremony and escort her out should this happen. And although Ailsa keeps quiet, her objection is still within the range of human hearing. Seeing her sitting there, silently smouldering, Peter knows that while his mother hates him for being different, and would abhor him more had he confirmed her clear conviction regarding his homosexuality, equally she doesn’t want this for him—the best chance at repressed normality offered by Melbourne in 1972.
He will never be sure why she comes that day. Perhaps it is for appearances, so that people won’t talk more than she thinks they already are. Perhaps it is staking her claim to some measure of the pride she is entitled to in raising a child to adulthood. Perhaps it is punitive or retributive or an act of witness to the injustice she sees in the ceremony, sitting there in silent incantation as if to say, ‘It’s bad enough that you are an abomination, but now you will drag this poor girl down with you.’ The three possibilities are not mutually inconsistent.
After the wedding, Peter and Linda take a tram with their friends back to their small house on Farm Street, posing for photos along the way in the early summer sun. Peter has prepared all the food for the party, buying scallops from the fisherman next door—who tipsily tells the couple that he is enjoying their party more than his own daughter’s wedding the week before because everyone is so happy and relaxed, sitting around tables in the small marquee out the back.
On Monday, Peter is back at work selling tickets at the train station during the day and cleaning a bank at night, where Linda comes to help out and keep him company. Soon he gets a better-paying job at a tyre company where the boss is a bully but, for the first time, Peter is finally able to start saving some money.
They look at a two-bedroom terrace on Benjamin Street in the suburb of Sunshine. As Linda makes small talk with the owner, Peter floats through the rooms, his mind reeling with ideas. Though the space is small and dim, he sees in it the home it will become: where walls and windows can be added and removed, how the furniture they can’t afford yet will be arranged, the colour he will paint the walls, the shape of the garden he will landscape.
Peter will forget the name of the hospital where his first child was born and whether he was there for the birth, but he will carry inside him always, etched in miniature, the floor plan of this house which he bought, on vendor’s terms, directly from the owner.
Turning up the music and propping the front door open, Peter and Linda build a front fence to the sound of Joe Cocker’s ‘Mad Dogs & Englishmen’, taking turns to go inside and flip the records. They do the housework together and the gardening together and their friends come over in the evenings to visit. Linda’s father comes over too, and helps Peter knock out the small front window and replace it with a larger one, and the freed light comes gushing in and over the bed where the couple wake excited about the new day, and curl up at night, whispering and laughing.
Peter starts renovating the rooms by himself, one at a time, using the skills he is gradually teaching himself by watching a neighbour renovate the house a few doors down. This is how he learns to build the exposed brick arches he is so proud of. He gets ambitious and installs an electric doorbell. Every time someone rings it, though, the lights flicker. ‘I don’t quite understand electricity,’ he admits to Linda the first time this happens, and they dissolve into giggles.
She adores him, her tall blond husband who is so handsome and funny and gentle. She loves watching him fold eggs into batter and coax weeds out of the ground and twirl spiderwebs down from the mouldings, her Pete who teaches her so much and makes her feel so safe, her husband who is so unlike the under-fathered boys and drunken men she grew up twisting around like a void. She loves how he sees things so differently and what it will look like, this life they are building together on Benjamin Street in Sunshine.
She doesn’t know that her whole family think he is gay and she wouldn’t have believed it if anyone had told her. There’s certainly nothing wrong in the bedroom, except for his frequent migraines. And the fearsome nightmares that make him thrash around, violently kicking her in his sleep. When he jolts awake, sweating, he tells her he is stressed by work: the boss, that bastard, it’s nothing, love, I’m fine, go back to sleep.
But the dreams don’t let up. So one Saturday afternoon when Peter is out with friends, Linda marches down to Olympic Tyres in Footscray, her thin lips set in a line. The door bangs shut behind her as she walks up to the dirty front desk and demands his pay, directly from the boss, informing him that her husband will not be coming back.
‘Oh yes he will,’ the man laughs, looking down at her.
‘Wanna make a bet?’ she replies, eyes narrowing. ‘I’m pregnant and I’m getting kicked in the stomach of a night because of you!’ She walks out proudly with the money she came for and goes home on the bus, looking forward to surprising Pete with the news that everything will be OK now. She can still work for another few months until the baby comes and he’ll find another job soon, there’s so many things he’s good at. The house is still empty when she gets home so she waits up for him and dozes off, around midnight, on the couch.
When we talk about newlyweds in 1972, we talk about children—not just the babies conceived as soon as possible after, and frequently before, the weddings but about the couples themselves, who were often still teenagers. This was true of Peter and Linda, both of whom were just doing their best to follow the script.
Their son Simon, named for Peter’s beloved younger brother, is born when Peter is twenty. And though he has been secretly seeing a man named Michael throughout Linda’s pregnancy, he is truly delighted when the child is born. He is ‘so fucking happy’ in fact that he breaks things off with his boyfriend. Lighting a joint, Peter writes him a note saying, ‘You need someone who doesn’t use somebody up just because they are lonely. Please understand, I have a family now. I must go straight and just think of being a good father and husband. I want my marriage to last.’ His second son, Nathan, is born nine months later.
‘Irish twins,’ he chuckles to the husbands of Linda’s girlfriends when they stop by to visit the new baby. ‘Every time I touch her something happens! We’re like fuckin’ rabbits.’ The words feel strange in his mouth, like he’s wearing, somehow, someone else’s dentures. The words he can’t say would feel much more natural: how much it has unsettled him; how their crying evokes within him the whiplash of his own father’s rage; how he feels even less at home here than in the house in which he grew up; how he is scared; how he is not coping.
He isn’t the one who hasn’t slept through the night in two years because of pregnancy and nursing; it’s not his hands that are cracked and bleeding from soaking dirty nappies in bleach and, unlike Linda, he goes to work, where he can finish a cup of hot tea. But still: Peter is, truly, not coping. He is constantly stoned. He cannot take a full breath. His eyes feel like dirty windows, he is so anxious that it is difficult to look outward. But, like his courtship and his marriage and his house and his kids and his shitty jobs, this unhappiness and increasing alienation from his wife appear to follow the script of normal life: the centre holds.
When Linda takes the children out, though, a peace suffuses their small house that has less to do with the absence of noise than with the space the silence clears for smaller sounds: the voice, for instance, that he practises softly in the shower behind the veil of streaming water. Not only pitch, but inflection, words, gestures. Or the refrain thrumming along his veins that signifies his only certainty and which says: you don’t belong here.
Driving into the city, his mind wanders as the car is sucked down the dark roads and he forgets, for long stretches, that he is the one steering and accelerating. He speeds up despite his mounting conviction that he is about to be incinerated by something like lightning.
How Peter met Michael and how he found out about his first gay bar are two lost secrets of history. There is no community press, no community radio, no visible community at all. For the longest time he had no gay friends or acquaintances, it was just him and his good wife. Perhaps there was a stranger who approached after a meaningful look, maybe a friend of a friend. Rumours, jokes, a rough gem of information mined from the shit the guys at work give each other on their breaks.
Regardless of how he got the information, he is now in possession of an address and he is driving there. The Dover Hotel. The Dover Hotel. Folded inside him these last weeks, he now takes the name of his destination out and holds it open in his mind where it bestows upon his solitary and hesitant trip the legitimacy of purpose. No lightning smites him as he walks through the door of the pub and up a flight of stairs. There is just the smell of stale smoke and beer and, as if from far away, a barman asking whether it’s his first time here.
‘Yes,’ Peter replies.
‘Well, you’re welcome to stay, mate, but things don’t get going here till ten, ten-thirty,’ the man says, turning to the sink behind him. It is 6 p.m. Peter thanks him and goes back down the stairs and out to the street to find a coffee lounge, where he sits nursing a coffee and pretending to read old newspapers until closing. Then he walks around the neighbourhood in large circles until it is late enough to return to the pub. But even though he’s had a practice run now, taken these steps once before and knows where he’s going, he still doesn’t know where they lead or what to do once he gets there and sees, for the first time, two men together. The uncertainty plays across his face like the movie of his life for those who watch him as he hesitates at the top of the stairs. His heart gallops in his ears and voices churn around him. The carpet is soft under his feet, and the men move over it, too slowly it seems, walking from table to bar or standing in small groups or pairs. He wonders if he is dreaming and then warm voices say something kind to him and relief floods through him and he can finally take a full breath.
He walks into his new job as tall and as bright as the white letters across the roof of the five-storey brick factory that spell out DARLING. Peter takes great pride in his duties as a laboratory technician at the John Darling Flour Mill, which consist largely of examining the various properties of the flour as it is made into bread in the test kitchen. He checks how it rises, analyses the moisture levels and adjusts the colour so that it can be sold to clients like McDonald’s and turned into idealised hamburger buns. He arrives on time each morning no matter how little he slept the night before.
It is early 1975. He’s a regular at the Dover now and the more people he meets, the more he learns about other places to go. These nights out are not about sex but about socialising and relaxing and exploring a world he never knew existed and, there, himself. Now when he walks past the bins of soaking nappies and in through the door each evening his guts don’t knot in dread because he isn’t really there. When he steps around the food flung on the floor or smells the milk turning in bottles in the sink, or when cries momentarily shatter his sleep like a glass flung against a wall, he doesn’t really notice because in his mind he is dancing at Annabel’s with Joe.
Joe, part Persian, part Italian, he finds quite gorgeous. But Joe takes longer getting ready in the bathroom than he does, which is saying something now that Peter wears a little make-up. It’s not really his cup of tea, this thing he has with Joe. But it feels more right than when Linda inquiringly rubs his back at night and, well, you do some things for companionship. Peter still wears his wedding ring but the radiant pride is gone from it now; that tiny manacle.
The pride is gone, too, from the house and the job and the kids, from the exposed brick arch and the funny old doorbell. It’s harder again to take a full breath these days. It’s harder to think and yet it seems like that’s all he does, chase his thoughts around in circles, trapped inside his head. He gives up on the bathroom renovation he so enthusiastically started; the gouged socket where the bathtub used to be recriminating him every time he goes in there.
Peter is not interested in tits, so he’s barely thought about it. But to the extent that he has, he just assumed that the showgirls’ sizeable bosoms are part of their costumes: made of plastic and somehow connected up and into the thick, bedazzled chokers they wear around their necks when they dance up on stage. But then it dawns on him that some of the queens are actually living their lives as females, in real bodies that they weren’t born with. Soon after this he overhears someone at a bar one night talking about taking female hormones and going through The Change.
It feels like a light switching on.
Finding a doctor is not easy. But he finally ends up at a small office in Carlton not far from the Dover Hotel. In response to Peter’s request for hormones, the doctor explains that the thing he is asking about is a small part of a long process. He also explains that the hormones will be detrimental to Peter’s health; they will shorten his life expectancy.
‘Look, well, I could walk out of here after this and get hit by a truck and still not have done what I wanted to do,’ Peter says.
‘If you still feel the same way in a week’s time, come back,’ the doctor says.
Peter is back a week later, even more settled in his convictions; the doctor writes the prescription.
He gains so much weight that they tease him about it at work. They call him the Footballer, say he would make a good fullback, that he is built like a brick shithouse. He laughs along and says something about all the beer he’s drinking, getting away from the missus down at the pub. Still. He grows his hair longer. Breasts bud beneath the collar of his shirt. At first, he is ‘gigged silly by everyone’ but then something changes. The odder he looks, the more protective they become of him. Even the rough guys who work out in the silo act kindly towards him. Maybe they admire his bravery, or feel sorry for him. Maybe they are simply making him feel as comfortable as he has always made them feel.
Each morning he takes out the stash he’s hidden from Linda and dabs chalky powder from the plastic compact across his nose before applying a thin layer of creamy black mascara, his mouth held in a perfect O in the rear-view mirror. He thinks no one can tell, but they can tell. What he doesn’t realise is that they no longer care. He is an excellent employee—eff icient, independent, a gifted conciliator—and he not only gets along with everyone in the office and the lab, he has effortlessly endeared himself to his colleagues. He has impressed his managers, who have been paying to put him through a management course in the city. The boss tries to promote him to a role that would require increased client contact. Though his colleagues are quite accepting of him, Peter feels both acutely self-conscious and militantly committed to his make-up and his hormones. It is his strong conviction that he cannot continue to do what he needs to do and still bring the requisite dignity to the role he entered as a straight man. Despite the protests of his boss, and knowing that he is turning down a good career, Peter refuses the promotion.
He tries to get home after work to put in an appearance at dinner and occasionally he goes along to his in-laws’ place for a family birthday, but for the most part now he acts as though he does not have a family. He goes out late at night without explanation. He is always high. He drops the names of places and people Linda has never heard of before. He vanishes on the weekends to go shopping with his club friends for cheap make-up and new clothes. He buys a blonde wig from a shop in the city and, though in retrospect he will describe it as a hideous plastic helmet, at the time he feels ‘fucking gorgeous’ wearing it into Annabel’s and out on the dance floor. He is leonine, solar, ecstatic in those too-short hours before he has to hide it away in the backyard shed, to glow golden in the dark until next time.
Linda knows something is wrong. It tugs at the corners of her mouth as she tries, at the end of each long day with the babies, to conceal the sagging skin of her stomach under her one good blouse to look nice for her husband. One weekend her mother agrees to take the boys so the two of them can visit some friends, another married couple. Peter drunkenly proposes late Friday night that they swap partners. Linda reluctantly agrees because she thinks it will save their marriage. But after the weekend is over, after they’ve collected the boys and arrived back home, Peter announces that he doesn’t love her anymore and that he is leaving her for the other woman.
She is shattered. Peter prepares to leave their home, a process that takes months, during which they still share a bed. She is viscous with sorrow over the death of her marriage, tortured by thoughts of this other woman and what she will tell the boys and the sight of the moving boxes in the bedroom. One night in bed, half-asleep, her foot absently grazes his. ‘Don’t touch me,’ he snaps. ‘I don’t like women to touch me.’
Peter is upstairs at Annabel’s, looking down at the dance floor. People are drunk and loose on pills. Sitting on Joe’s lap, he feels good, anonymous, energised. They are talking closely, flirting and laughing. Holding hands on the way to the crowded bar, picking their way back across the room between sips of Scotch and Coke.
This is when he bumps into someone and absently mutters, ‘’Scuse’, without turning his head. This is when Linda wedges herself in front of him, when he looks down at her small face and his own syllabus of errors.
He cannot explain to her that although he is at a gay club, holding hands with a man and wearing a wig and make-up, he is not homosexual. He can tell her only what he knows: that he is different. He doesn’t have a word for what he feels, he doesn’t know that such a word exists.
He also doesn’t know his wife: it is clear now that he has grossly underestimated her, not just how much she notices but how much she genuinely loves him. She begs him to stay. She begs him to get psychiatric help for ‘it’, which at that time included shock treatment. He doesn’t make his mistake of gross underestimation again. He really has to leave now. He begs Linda to let him take the boys. ‘You can have more kids,’ he pleads. Linda, incredulous, refuses.
‘I was in fantasy land,’ Sandra remembers. ‘It wouldn’t have worked because of what I had to do to survive. I had no confidence in myself, let alone bringing up a child, and what would it have done to a child in those days, to be brought up by this queer?’
Driving away from their house in his packed car, Peter is shaking under the staggering weight of everything he is leaving: his marriage, his children, his home, the majority of his possessions, and a letter for the lawyers which says: To whom it may concern, I—Peter Collins—admit to being homosexual and wish you to grant my wife a divorce on the grounds of sexual incompatibility.
He leaves Linda with two toddlers, a mortgage, no savings, no income, no car, no working bathroom and no way of contacting him. He leaves his need to please his parents; he leaves despite the fact that they will say they knew this would happen, despite the fact that it will provide conclusive proof of their longstanding conviction that he is unworthy of love. He leaves despite having no job and no home to go to. He leaves because, at nearly twenty-three, he is so old and so young. He leaves because of something that he still cannot name and because the only thing of which he is absolutely certain is that he isn’t meant to be there, on Benjamin Street in Sunshine with his wife and children. He has never felt so alone in his life. He is shaking with the sorrow and terror of it, this driving away from and towards himself.
For years Linda will dream about Peter coming back to her. For his part, Peter will remember that Linda had long hair and dressed ‘like a mod’ in miniskirts and white platform shoes; he will say that she was ‘quite a nice person, really’. But the other details of her personality, whether she had a good sense of humour, for instance, he will block out entirely. He will never really confront the exquisite hardship—financial, physical and emotional—that his leaving placed on Linda as sole parent of their children.
It is also true that he will be unable to celebrate Christmas for the next fifteen years; that the memory of Simon waving ‘Bye bye Dada’ at the front door will hurt his heart forever and that, despite knowing nothing at all about his sons for nearly forty years, when he turns sixty he will place a photo of those babies into a silver frame and carefully position it where he can see it each day upon waking.
Sandra remembers that she was barred not only from custody but also from access to her children because of her purported homosexuality: ‘I were told I couldn’t see them or they would catch what I had.’ This is how she understands what she remembers of the divorce, but the Family Law Act did not automatically disqualify a homosexual parent from custody or access. Decisions were made on a case-by-case basis according to the welfare of the child, having regard to the parenting ability of each parent and to contemporary social standards.
The latter certainly did not bode well for the homosexual parent, but it did not inevitably bar him or her from custody or access. Linda remembers that, at the custody hearing, Peter was granted open access to the boys on one condition: ‘He could come to the house any time he wanted to, but if he came in drag, he was not allowed to say who he was. It was too confusing.’ Peter never visited the boys and he never showed up for the divorce hearing. When their divorce was finalised on 22 August 1977, Peter Collins, also known as Stacey Phillips, was listed on the papers at address unknown.
Sandra understood the impossible outcome of that custody hearing to mean that she was exempt from the legal and moral requirements of spousal maintenance and child support, forever. She told me once, in the context of settling her will so that her estate goes to fund scholarships at one of the wealthiest universities in the country, ‘I just want it signed, sealed and delivered so that I know that my estate is going to be dealt with. Otherwise, it could go to my kids, it could go to my wife…’
When Linda remembers the end of her marriage, she is a little self-conscious but her tone is frank and never spiteful. Peter took the car ‘but I got stuck paying for it’, she tells me. ‘In them days, the pension, I remember it distinctly, it was ninety-six dollars. My house payment was thirty-two fifty a week. That left me thirty-one dollars a fortnight and all I could manage to do with that was pay some bills. I was getting food vouchers every week. When [the welfare workers] saw the boys with what they had on their feet, they said, “Are those all the shoes they’ve got?” I said yes. With holes in them and everything.’ Welfare would help at Christmas time, and so did Boys Town.
Peter still hadn’t finished renovating the house. ‘I was left without a bathroom. Nobody would help me do the bathroom. So, I had to bath the kids in the kitchen sink. I had to shower at the neighbours’. That was for three years I lived like that.
‘My family wouldn’t help until the house was signed over to me. I had to try to find him. Pete used to tell me about these people that he met, the nightclubs he went to and that he knew the spin-off group Play Girls from Les Girls. [One day, Play Girls were] on New Faces on Channel Nine. I phoned Channel Nine up and said, “Can I get a phone number for that act? I want to book them.” ’
Linda took the phone number to the police and told them she was trying to track down her husband, who wasn’t paying child support. A detective matched the number to an address in the commission flats near the city. The woman who answered the door there told Linda where she could find Peter.
‘I turned up. I had the boys with me and I had my sister with me. There was a girl there that looked like a guy, Pete was dressed as a woman and Simon was just staring at him, confused. I didn’t tell Simon this person was his dad. I got him to sign the papers. I cried most of the way home.
‘I was suicidal. I was at a psychiatrist and he put me on medication. I was going to overdose. I was going to kill myself and the boys. And I thought, “What if I die and they don’t? Or what if they die and I survive?”
‘I never said anything to anybody. I never saw any of our friends after we split. No one knew what to say to me. I wasn’t close to my mother. But one morning at 8 a.m. she turned up at my doorstep. I said, “What are you doing here so early, Mum?” She said, “I just felt like you needed me.” She saved me.
‘I had to snap out of it. Over the years depression has come on and off. You survive for your kids.
‘I was angry for a long time. I thought, if my boys end up like him, I’m going to find him and I’m going to kill him; that was how I felt in them days, but I got over that. I have never, ever criticised Pete to the boys. He was a good bloke. I did love him and for a long time I hoped he would come back. The only thing he did wrong was marry me, knowing the way he was. He said he did it because he wanted to be normal. It’s honest. He wanted to be normal.’
There are two photos of Peter and Linda at Simon’s christening. In the first, the couple stand stiffly in front of the brown wall of Our Lady of Perpetual Help with Bill and Ailsa between them, in a supremely awkward tableau. Little Simon, enfolded in white finery, is held by his grandmother Ailsa, who stares, unsmiling but not without something like pride, down the barrel of the camera. Bill, in a grey suit and tie, looks down at the baby, touching him stiffly as if in benediction or disbelief, the effect being less one of emotion than simply of a man unsure what to do with his hands. Next to Ailsa, Linda stands with her hands clasped in front of her, most likely already pregnant with Nathan. She looks radiant in her green dress, truly beautiful and proud. Peter, her opposite bookend, stands next to Bill at an angle to the camera; it should have made for a pleasing composition but the effect is jarring because none of the others have followed suit. Peter wears black pants, a knitted vest and a light purple shirt open at the collar. While the others are uniformly dark and plump and short, Peter is as golden and slim and tall as a sunflower. Looking at the camera with his eyebrows raised and his hands clasped behind him, he appears startled, as if he has interrupted someone else’s family portrait. In the second photo, a priest in purple robes sprinkles water over Simon’s head as Linda holds him over the font and Peter smiles—genuinely smiles—down on his son.
Sandra has kept these photos for forty-three years. She took them with her, along with her clothes, one towel, one set of sheets, one place setting, the punchbowl set received as a wedding gift and the car, when she left Benjamin Street. She carried them with her to the numerous houses she has inhabited in three states over the last four decades. She has lost along the way her parents, her siblings, one wife, one husband, her children, her stepchildren, numerous friends, two businesses, two houses, two cars and a big toe, but she has kept these photos close. The reason for their dearness, however, is less than clear.
‘I don’t know why I kept them, but I kept them…’ she said, vague but not evasive, when I asked her about it. She has never displayed them or shown them to others. You can barely see her baby son’s face. You can, however, see the faces of her parents and her ex-wife, none of whom she holds in particularly warm regard. So I wonder whether these photos are more in the nature of witness: I am the man, I suffered, I was there. I had a wife and baptised my son in our family’s church. I tried.
Though her appearance and her names and her roles have changed drastically throughout her life, Sandra has walked through her days with the same heart and the same bones and this, I think, is what the photos are saying. Without a family to hold her memories—to reinforce her existence by remembering moments from the book of her life with joy or embarrassment or empathy or still-jagged resentment—she is the sole bearer of her entire history. If she doesn’t attest to the early part of her life, the fact that it happened at all will vanish entirely. This is what it means to lose your mother, who carries within her irreplaceable memories of your personhood, and it is compounded exponentially by losing your entire family.
She gratefully accepted some of Ailsa’s good crystal (offered by her brother Simon), after the mother who repeatedly rejected her passed away. ‘I just loved crystal,’ she said when I asked her why. For a moment I see the child who grew up admiring the rainbows trapped in that glassware. ‘And there was probably something there as well, if you know what I mean…’
I do know what she means. It may be accurate to say that I feel it; that something inside me cracks crisply, as happens sometimes when boiling water is poured into glass. Just as Sandra keeps the good crystal, I keep a high school graduation ring, engraved 1973, six years before I was born. It is not in the spirit of fondness that a child who has been abandoned by her mother safeguards the physical traces she left behind. It is more in the way of self-confirmation: though I may be unlovable, to her, I am not so singularly grotesque as to have sprung fully formed from the ether. I am rooted just like others in the Order of Things and the Family of People.
The only time I have seen Sandra discomposed is when I ask whether she has ever attempted to find her sons using Facebook or Google. At this, she blushes so deeply that the whites of her eyes flare and her features wince slightly as though the muscles have cramped. For one heartbeat she says nothing. Just holds her head very still and looks at me through sea-blue irises under the high blonde bridges of her eyebrows. Great eyes, Sandra’s. Huge, strangely healthy-looking. Luminous spheres moving in their sockets like the wet blue earth on its axis, taking in everything we never want to see here.
‘It’s not my right to go into their life,’ she replies, too lightly. ‘I’m quite happy with the status quo. I think, leave good enough alone. If they really wanted to search me out, they could.’
Could they? Her name has changed so many times.
‘If they were looking for Sandra Vaughan, it would be very hard,’ she concedes. ‘They might even have grandchildren themselves. After all these years, it would be so complicated for them to tell their children. You think: Fuck, I don’t know whether I want to be part of that mess.’