Wednesday 11 December 1974
Abby
The mechanic checks the water and oil and fills the tank. Dad wanders off in search of the toilet. He’s even more gaunt than usual. During the past week I’ve offered him every type of food, but he regards my meals as a sick animal would: with suspicion or indifference. None of us is eating much right now though.
Charlie and I stand a few feet away from the car, in the shade offered by the half-roof of plasterboard and tin above the petrol bowsers. He smokes. I lean against one of the poles holding up the roof and feel the hot metal through my rayon dress.
Not far from the garage, two skinny brown dogs lie in the dappled shade of a stringy tree. One lifts his head to bite at the flies hovering around his nose, and then flops back onto the dirt. I move myself off the pole and peel my dress from the back of my thighs.
‘Eight bucks’ll do it.’ The mechanic drops the hood of the car with a bang. ‘Keep an eye on the oil,’ he says to Charlie.
I give him the exact money and he heads back to the garage. Dad strides the length of the building, still searching for the toilets, not having asked.
‘Have you told Mark yet?’ Charlie asks, dropping the stub of his cigarette onto the ground.
‘I don’t know why you think Mark will have some magic solution I haven’t thought of.’
‘Have you told him?’
‘Please stop asking me that.’ I wipe away the sweat from under my eyes then let my sunglasses drop back down.
‘Don’t you want to talk to him about what we’ve done?’
‘What you’ve done. And no, I don’t want to.’
That’s a lie. It would be a relief to tell Mark, to have him hold me and stroke my hair, say he’ll take care of it. But that won’t happen. When I let Charlie drive I put everything – both of our futures – at risk. This is not Mark’s problem to fix.
I walk away from Charlie. Our looping conversations don’t help anything. Even with endless hours awake every night to think, I can’t find a way to make this situation better. I need to protect Charlie from the police, and Mark, my children, my father from the truth. I need a way to assuage my guilt. And telling Mark won’t solve any of that.
‘Band on the Run’ blares from the garage, where two other mechanics are working on a raised ute. One of them is set to slide himself under the chassis, lying face-up on what I think is a door with wheels; the other one, shirtless, is standing beside him holding a can of soft drink, sweat on his bare chest.
I pace a small circle back to the car and see that Charlie has taken the front seat, though I’d told him that was Dad’s spot for the whole trip. ‘You don’t think you owe him at least –’ I point at the seat.
‘He doesn’t care.’
I sit down behind the wheel.
‘Dad’s not an idiot, Abby. He’s going to work this out. We need to tell Mark. We need advice from someone who’s not involved, someone we can trust.’
‘Dad’s not going to work it out.’
‘Well, aren’t you supposed to tell your husband things – isn’t that the deal?’
‘Dear God, stop. And don’t lecture me about relationships. You’ve mooned over your best friend’s wife for years.’
He slumps. ‘They’re not married. And I don’t moon over her.’
‘I thought they were married.’
‘You’re glad to hear that, aren’t you? Moon happy.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
Charlie looks out the window at the garage. Dad’s inside, squatting down to speak to the man underneath the ute. ‘Dad!’ He shouts for him to come to the car. ‘Good to go? It’s an oven in here.’
‘People are asking Mark about this, Charlie; he is involved, it’s his father-in-law for God’s sake. It was in the newspaper. Can you imagine if he knew the truth, what problems it would cause him?’
I speak quickly and watch Dad walk back to the car. Behind him, the mechanic blows me a kiss. Dad sits in the back without commenting on Charlie’s seat coup.
‘Bloke in there tells me this road was once a droving trail.’ His voice is flat. ‘Says there used to be a river that ran past here but over the years the cattle drank the life out of it.’
‘Cheery,’ Charlie says.
I check for oncoming trucks then pull onto the highway.
‘Do you two remember that first Christmas after your mother passed away?’
Charlie shakes his head.
‘How can you not remember that?’ I ask.
‘I was nine.’ He stares out the window, away from me.
‘I should’ve said yes to one of your mother’s friends,’ Dad says. ‘One with kids. They all offered to let us join their Christmas lunches, dinners. June only asked out of obligation. Christian charity.’
At that, Charlie and I exchange an eye roll. Aunt June never offered so much as a raisin without an air of martyrdom. I’d hated visiting her as a child, her spinster house sterile as a hospital ward, with begrudging, tight-fisted nods to hominess by way of framed prints – frigid flowers and vacuumed landscapes – and pert couch cushions made of some material that could catch fire from a warm body.
‘Endures life, June does. She’s always been that way.’ Dad sighs. ‘A few days before Christmas, before I dragged you to her door, she called to reiterate she was in no position to waste money on gifts. Can you credit that? “I’ve bought them something,” she said, “since I know you’ll want that. Tell them not to expect much.”’
‘The kids whose mother had died,’ Charlie says.
‘Maybe it’s good you don’t remember it,’ I say. ‘Maybe not remembering is a way of protecting yourself.’
‘You think?’ He reaches into his shirt pocket for his cigarettes.
The gift-giving hadn’t been the only bothersome part of Christmas as far as June was concerned. The possibility we’d sully her house was raised with us as soon as we arrived. ‘I’m not saying you’re grubby but I like to keep the place neat. It’s the way I am. I’ve gone to the trouble of having the carpet shampooed. I’d appreciate it if you’d take your shoes off.’ Which we did, Charlie and I so cut up and raw. Even now I can hardly stand to think of that day. It fuels me if ever I find myself resenting the work I do to make our own Christmases so perfect.
I glance at Charlie. ‘The table was set as though she thought a horde of animals was about to descend on her: a tiny Santa Claus centrepiece wrapped in plastic, vinyl covering the table. And she wouldn’t let us open the crackers. We ate in silence like it was some unseemly activity to be done with as fast as possible – no music, no talk, just the clang of cutlery on her horrible beige plates.’
Charlie blows smoke towards his cracked-open window.
Dad huffs. ‘Merry bloody Christmas.’
I look in the rear-vision mirror. ‘So why did you take us there?’
He meets my eye, sighs again. ‘Christmas was something your mother did. How would I know? Anyhow, she’s my sister.’
Charlie shifts in his seat. ‘Let’s listen to some music.’
‘There are tapes in the glove box. Grab the Helen Reddy one.’
He groans. ‘Seriously?’
‘What? The driver picks the music. That’s the rule.’ But it takes one verse of ‘I Am Woman’ for me to realise my poor choice.
‘How much of this claptrap do we have to listen to?’
‘It’s not claptrap, Dad.’
Charlie forms a gun with his fingers and makes as though to shoot himself in the head.
‘Whining about nothing. There are people in the world with no food or water. Why isn’t she singing about that?’
‘How about something less controversial?’ Charlie says, pressing the stop button.
‘Only if it’s by a woman,’ Dad says. ‘No good has ever been done by a man, Charlie.’
‘Nobody said that, Dad.’
‘That’s what your sister thinks. Isn’t it?’ We lock eyes in the rear-vision mirror once more. ‘Thinks it’s beneath her to be a mother.’
‘I absolutely don’t,’ I say. He’s in pain, lashing out. I should let this go.
‘It was enough for your mother, nothing to scoff at. It’s dignified work to take care of your home, husband, raise a family.’
I focus on the road, keep my mouth shut though there are a thousand things I want to say, though I feel stung and enraged.
‘Don’t think I’ve ever heard her say otherwise, Dad. Hey, do you remember my friend Jason from –’
‘Well, why do you want to be a lawyer then? What are you trying to prove? Mark earns a good salary. You’ll make his life harder by being at university now you have kids to look after. Who’ll be doing that? I suppose you expect him to. As well as his job. So you can go off and do what you want. Which, by the way –’ he flicks his hand angrily in my direction – ‘plenty of lawyers in the world without you.’
Breathe in, breathe out.
Charlie glares at Dad now. ‘You’re talking like a guy from the fifties.’
‘The fifties weren’t so terrible,’ Dad says.
‘You know what I mean. Abby’s a great mother. What’s your beef with her working? Sounds like your baggage, Dad, not hers.’
‘I’m well aware that women work. Skye worked. Donna works. But I don’t see why your sister, why young women now, are so hell-bent on creating division, making a big statement about it. It doesn’t need to be so bloody . . . pious.’ He sits forward so his head is closer to mine. ‘You should think twice about this, Abigail. You have a good husband and those kids deserve a mother. You don’t need to show off.’
‘Jesus, Dad,’ Charlie says. ‘Harsh.’
‘And wrong,’ I say. ‘It’s not showing off. It’s studying, to pursue a profession. Not grounds for personal insult. I’m not going back to uni to further the cause of women, though it’d be fine if I was. I want to be a lawyer because I care that people who are vulnerable, poor, wrongly accused, have an advocate, Dad. You might not have noticed, but I’m good at helping people. I’ve had a lot of practice.’ I look at Charlie. ‘I meant –’
‘It’s okay,’ he says. ‘I get it.’
‘So you’ll turn your back on Mark and your kids? Leave them to fend for themselves so you can help some strangers, puff yourself up?’
‘That is not what I’m doing.’ Breathe in, out. ‘Why does this annoy you so much anyway? Mark’s proud of me. Why can’t you be?’
He pauses. ‘Mark’s a good man. You did well there. I was impressed with the piece he did on the National Hotel commission. Very thorough. He’d make a good lawyer.’
Charlie offers me an expression that combines sympathy with the unspoken advice to drop the topic.
‘Some people want to be mothers, you know,’ Dad says, sitting back in his seat with a thump. ‘They get a bit crazy if they can’t.’
I wonder if Charlie hears this the same way I do. Is Dad telling us something about Skye?
‘June had a baby but it died,’ he says. ‘She never got to see it, doesn’t know if it was a boy or girl.’
‘That’s terrible,’ I say. And absolutely not where I thought this was going. ‘What happened?’
‘Things were different then,’ he says. ‘None of this giving birth in a bathtub. When she came to on the hospital bed she wasn’t pregnant anymore and they’d taken the baby away. Doctor told her it had been born dead and it would upset her to see it.’ He pauses. ‘She mentioned it over the years, wished she at least knew where they’d buried it. She worried about whether they’d baptised it . . . And then Hal running off on her.’ He becomes brisk and admonishing without warning. ‘You two should have shown her a little more understanding.’
‘How could we have been sympathetic about something we didn’t know?’ I ask.
He huffs. ‘When did you become so argumentative?’
We sit in silence after that. Charlie never does put on another tape; he and Dad fall asleep instead. I drive the long bleached bitumen road, wide open land spreading out on either side of it, passing wheat-coloured fields speckled with eucalypts, granite boulders, depleted dams and glassy-eyed Hereford cattle, in lots divided by strings of barbed-wire fencing: a landscape low and predictable. Small insects slam against my windscreen. Squashed cane toads spot the road. The road lies like a ribbon on the earth, heat rising from its mirage of an end, making it appear that just up ahead everything solid becomes quivering gas.
There are no houses here, no signs, no overhead cables or telephone poles. This is the land my mother spent her life trying to escape and for which my father pined. From the moment Dad bought the farm he was happy and energetic, as he’d been when Mum was alive.
When construction on the house began we went out to help, without giving any thought of what that entailed. Mark’s not much of a handyman, and I spent my time making sure the kids didn’t stand on nails or fall into trenches, so it was more of a show-and-tell event. We followed Dad around the site as he pointed out where the bathroom would be, the kitchen and doors, and described the merits of the septic system and generator he’d chosen. He tried to interest Sarah in the local topography – the mountains in the near east are shaped a lot like people’s heads – the Dreamtime story about the lizard and the lake, and his latest readings about raising cattle and poultry. We’d eaten dinner around an open fire, slept in tents. We visited once after that.
Mum wouldn’t have liked the farm one bit. She’d wanted us to be in Brisbane, so we could go to decent schools and she could enjoy the bustle and social life of a city. My parents were forever ‘going out’ or ‘having guests in’. I can only imagine how desperately lonely she would’ve been if Dad had insisted they live in the country.
I come up behind a truck with cartoon drawings of dope leaves and Varga girls decorating its mudflaps. Its fat wheels send out a spray of pebbles. I hold my left hand against the windscreen to stop the rocks shattering the glass. I recall my mother doing this from the passenger’s seat when Dad was driving, her long fingers decorated with gold rings, some with diamonds, some with gems of blue or green, the one-off ruby engagement ring she loved the most, the one that’s wrapped in tissues in my coin purse.
Mum said she was glad she had a daughter to leave her rings to, but they never came to me. At first because I was too young, and then later, when I tentatively asked for them, because my father simply said no. He didn’t want to give over any part of my mother to me, to anyone.
I knew how special the ruby ring was, not in a dollar sense, because the ruby wasn’t that big and the gold band was thin, but in sentimental value. Mum was impressed Dad had chosen it without help from her, and had chosen so well. She’d admired his initiative, a quality she said many men lacked. When he’d decided to propose to her, Dad had taken an opportunity (how, who knew, for the story was hers to tell) to remove a ring from Mum’s jewellery box, place it on a piece of paper, carefully draw a circle around the inside of the ring – not once but several times, for good measure – and then find a ring that was the perfect size, with a gemstone in her favourite colour, made in Paris, the city of her dreams. He’d applied calm, manly logic to the task of buying women’s jewellery then had the word ‘love’ inscribed in cursive where the gold touched her skin. ‘How,’ our mother would say, arm stretched in front of her, her eyes on the ruby ring, ‘could I have said no?’ Her wedding ring, while larger and more traditional, seemed almost an afterthought.
I grip the wheel tightly as I overtake the truck. The driver waves and honks.
And then I hold the car steady on an endless straight. I know the road will get more complicated later on, but for now only my arm muscles are tested. My mind is free to wander, which, today, is not good. But, lacking the energy to stop it, I stare at the road and give in to memory.
The end of my first day in grade one. I’d walked out of the classroom into a mass of mothers waiting for their sons and daughters. There was my mother: standing to one side of the other women, wearing cat-eye sunglasses, dark hair in a perfect dome, a patent-leather purse hanging off her angled forearm, a dress of blue shot silk. My mother, who never left the house without ‘eyes on and a perfect lip’, as advised by Amy Vanderbilt’s Complete Book of Etiquette. My mother, who bought expensive overseas fashion magazines. My mother, who asked my father to haul her sewing machine onto the dining-room table almost nightly, so that I became accustomed to falling asleep to the sound of whirring machinery and shaking wood. On my first day of school, and each day thereafter, she picked me up dressed like Elizabeth Taylor in a crowd of Julie Andrews, and her loveliness filled me with pride.
Even on our twice-yearly obligatory family stays at our grandparents’ farm near Kingaroy – which we knew she loathed – my mother dressed like a Vogue cover girl. I’m sure I disappointed her as a daughter. I liked to play outside and didn’t care much what I wore back then. She persisted with me, gently. I’d sit on her lap, both of us facing forward, her arms wrapped around me to show me how to thread a needle, sew a button. I had no interest in sewing but enjoyed the warmth of her enveloping me, her powdered cheek an inch from mine, the waxy smell of her lipstick.
The last time we went to Nan and Pop’s farm before Mum died, I found the courage to swim in the murky dam at the bottom of the hill. I dropped my dress in the grass and ran across the dried-earth rim that led to the water, wearing only my undies, trying not to think about what might be underfoot. I squelched in mud then dove into the warm water and swam, blissful, to the middle of the dam. Afterwards, I pulled my dress on and ran to the house to boast, but everyone had gone to see the new calves except for Mum. Before I could explain myself she bundled me off to the bathroom, asking why I insisted on ruining the pretty things she made me.
Once I’d washed, and my grandparents, Dad and Charlie had returned from the calving pens, we ate warm scones in the crowded kitchen while Pop’s cattle dog, Girl, sat by the open back door, watching me with anxious eyes. Charlie and I weren’t allowed to feed Girl but my grandparents – ancient, cranky – were so dismissive of her, yapping instructions at her all day, that I took it as my mission to sneak rewards to her. I went out to the shady porch and sat beside her, whispering advice, counselling her to run away while we slept, to head north, being sure to stay clear of the elephantine trucks that stormed the road throughout the night.
But the next morning she stared at me vacantly, as if we’d never spoken.
I thought it would be nice for Girl to swim in the dam, too, so that afternoon I’d tried to coax her in. But she wouldn’t get in the water no matter how many times I called, and Dad came down and told me to stop yelling at the dog.
‘You’re turning her into a nervous wreck. Don’t ask her to do something she’s been forbidden to. She knows better.’ He took a half-dozen steps away before remembering I was now also forbidden to swim in the dam. ‘And get yourself up to the house quick smart.’
After dinner, when Nan sent me to the kitchen to fetch her a glass of sherry, I caught Mum feeding Girl pieces of ham. I smiled, and Mum put a manicured finger to her red lips.
I pull the car onto the weedy verge to empty my bladder. I squat down and urinate, Dad and Charlie both still out like lights. Twenty feet away, a wallaby stands, balanced on its thick tail, watching and chewing.
I dig in my handbag for tissues to use in lieu of toilet paper. My fingertips feel the bulge of the ring in my coin purse. How could he have given it away? I drop my wet tissues onto the dirt, stand and pull up my undies. Neither Dad nor Charlie wakes when I open the car door and start the engine.
I stare at my father. His head is drooping to one side, spit drying white in the corner of his mouth. I love him. He enrages me. I am gutted at the grief we’ve caused him. I want to wake him and tell him I am sorry and cry. And shout at him, too, for the years of pain he’s caused. Cry and shout.
On the day Mum died, Charlie and I left her side only to use the toilet or eat in the hospital canteen. I wanted to help make my mother better but there was so much going on that made no sense. None of the nurses would give me a proper explanation about what went through the tubes and into her arms. None of them was sure if Mum could hear me when I asked her if she’d like me to tidy her hair. I tried to decipher the words on the chart that hung on the bar at the foot of her bed. I refolded her nightgowns.
Throughout her illness, Dad had whispered conversations with neighbours, drove us to and from the hospital, and moved around the house like a zombie. The day before she died he went to Kenmore High and taught his history and English classes. If I’d been in Dad’s shoes – an adult – I would’ve fought like a beast to save her, berated the doctor or demanded new techniques or fought for the attention of an outside specialist – something. But when it most mattered to speak up, Dad was quiet, still. And after a while I became quiet, too, because I didn’t know what else to do.
Not far outside Brisbane’s city limits, bushland gives way to sprawling trucking yards and rubbish tips before it turns to outer suburbia. Here, the land begins to hold more houses, all dropped on sharply defined plots, houses hunched low, neat and apologetic with boundary walls only four bricks high, plants cut back hard and ringed by small rocks so as not to take space they don’t deserve. Then come corner shops, schools and public swimming pools. Then suburbs with hills and valleys where wooden Queenslanders rise up on stilts like flamingos, with air flowing all around them, and lush gardens allowed to unfurl, their arms draped across fences and raised up to the sky. Telegraph poles, light poles and traffic lights stick up from the ground haphazardly, like tree trunks after a bushfire. In the distance, a clump of skyscrapers marks the city centre.
And the heat. Always, everywhere, the relentless garish heat.
I drive alongside the Brisbane River. Near the city it’s brown and indecisive, lumbering out to sea with thin swirling gyres covering its surface, as though the skin is reacting to some twitchy internal doubts. It’s tricky to tell which way the water is flowing. Dredging barges work the river, making it deep for cargo ships and for mining sand and gravel. I pass one bridge after another: the Story Bridge, the Captain Cook Bridge, the William Jolly Bridge. As we approach the Arnott’s factory I roll down the window to breathe in sweet, biscuit-scented air.