MELA’S WHITE VW BEETLE COMES TO A CORNER AT THE crest of a steep hill in Bicton, less than five hundred metres from the riverside home she shares with her parents. She applies the brake at a stop sign, but the car goes straight through. At any other moment, on any other day, this would be of no consequence on the quiet suburban street – any other day, Mela would coast through, doing a gradual handbrake stop at the bottom of the hill. But not today.
An eighteen-wheeled truck comes down the hill at the precise moment Mela turns the corner, the bigger vehicle far too heavy and fast to stop in time. When they collide, Mela hears the splintering sound of her head smashing through the driver’s side window. Her face is embedded with glass. The car rolls. Her ribs crack, and her nose and right eye socket break, as chunks of gravel collect in her open wounds.
My grandparents say that my father is a scrooge for providing Mela with the battered old car that led to her accident. They have forever been offering her financial help, but she has forever refused to take it and insists on relying on Francis for a car. Mum and Dad have been to the Family Court, and Dad has to provide the transport for me between households, which most likely means he should drive me. But Dad’s interpretation is that he is to ‘provide the vehicle’, and Mela must do the driving. When he donated the beaten-up car to Mum, she accepted it against her parents’ better judgement.
Giving over the car was better than giving over his time to ferry me back and forth – besides, he has four VWs, so he can afford to spare one. He tinkers with them in his front yard, exchanging parts for other parts, then stands back and observes his work, beaming with pleasure as engines roar and fanbelts spin.
Paw Paw holds my six-year-old hand reassuringly as we walk down the wide, long hospital corridor into the light. Mum has been released from intensive care. I’m desperate to see her every day, although I find her appearance very frightening: the right side of her face is deformed with fifty coarse black stitches, knotted at the end of each wound, poking from her swollen red cheeks. The other side of her face still looks like Mum, so I position myself carefully on her left, and she now knows not to turn her head.
When I first saw her after the accident, I ran screaming and crying from the room. So from then on, every time she’s read to me in the hospital from my favourite Golden Books, I’ve tried not to look at her. Of course I can read them myself by now, but it’s nicer to be read to, and it gives us a chance to act as though nothing has happened. Our family is really good at that: pretending. It’s easier than facing the truth, after all, so Mum and I behave as though it’s normal to sit together like this on a hospital bed, reading. She can’t put an arm around me, though; her broken ribs make that too painful.
Today’s long walk down the corridor happens in slow motion. At first I don’t know it’s her up ahead. She is running, hurtling herself forward – barefoot, racing out of the light towards me and Paw Paw, terror on her face. She seems possessed and looks right past me, almost through me, the stitches that frighten me so much making her appear even more crazed. Her hospital gown flies behind her.
‘Mummy!’ I scream. ‘Muuuuuuummy!’
Paw Paw and I turn to see Mela run out through the hospital’s glass entrance.
I watch as my mother throws herself in front of a moving car. The driver slams on the brakes, but it’s too late. Mum rolls across the bonnet, her body hitting the windscreen in a tangle of arms and legs.
Paw Paw screams and pushes my face into the front of her dress. I wriggle free enough to peer out and watch hospital staff run to save the injured woman on the car.
Slow motion ends, sound comes back and real time resumes. I sob into Paw Paw’s soft, warm body, and she is crying too.
Paw Paw protects me as best she can from the reality of not only her daughter’s illness, but also the harsh truths of living between two homes and never really belonging in either.
Everywhere I go, I am different, even at home – especially at home. There are rules at my grandparents’ house like ‘Keep your shoes on,’ and ‘You must eat three big meals a day,’ and ‘Don’t leave any food on your plate,’ but at Dad’s the rules are the complete opposite: ‘Take off your shoes at the door.’ ‘Eat when you feel like it.’ ‘Put leftovers in a stew.’
At one end I’m mollycoddled and at the other it’s ‘fend for yourself’. At Bicton I’m tucked in at night and told stories like a proper little girl, with lights out at seven-thirty. At Dad’s I go to bed when I like and will stay up watching a tiny black-and-white TV in the corner of my room until the test pattern comes on.
Paw Paw tells me stories about the Flat People, who live in a big apartment block. There’s a ‘cleany-clean tribe’ and a ‘smelly foot tribe’. I’m not sure whether it’s a coincidence or she’s having a go at Dad, but the cleany-clean tribe sound an awful lot like my Bicton family and the smelly foots a lot like him.
‘Sausage, I love you.’ Paw Paw gives me a bearhug and tucks me in.
‘Where’s Mum?’ I ask as she turns on my nightlight.
‘She’s okay. You’ll see her tomorrow.’
I lie in bed listening to Mum’s screams. The sliding door down the corridor, separating my wing from hers, is closed. Low voices, now. Then nothing. I keep listening, afraid something terrible will happen if I go to sleep.
‘Come and watch me,’ I call out to Paw Paw the next day. I am up to my sixty-seventh jump on my pogo stick; my record is a hundred and seventeen.
Paw Paw comes out through the laundry to the back step, wiping her hands on a red apron. ‘Do you want to do some baking? I have a surprise for you if you do.’ She ties up my apron, then, ‘Ta-da!’ On my head she places a chef’s hat that she has sewn for me in secret.
I love it. I wrap my arms around her. She smells like jam toast and hairspray.
‘You know, when your mother was your age she loved to bake too. And sew. Just like you.’ She squeezes me a little tighter. ‘You know your mother would die for you, don’t you?’
I look up from my rolling pin, my face and sleeves covered in flour that’s somehow missed my apron. Yes, I think, of course I know that, you tell me all the time, but I don’t say anything.
Paw Paw gazes wistfully out the window at boats rocking gently on the water. She has tears in her eyes. ‘Well then.’ She forces a smile then brings out an array of sugar baubles and cake toppings. ‘What are we going to use as decoration? Let’s really jazz it up this time.’