Category: Writing

Not the staying type

“Like sexual desire, memory never stops. It pairs the dead with the living, real with imaginary beings, dreams with history’ Annie Ernaux

Unlike sexual desire, which is capped by pleasure, memory has its devastating moments when we trawl through the past and rediscover our pain. The dead paired with the living.

In her book, The Years, Ernaux reminds us, over time we will be forgotten. This erasure involves pitching into the future to a time, as in the past, when we did not exist. A sobering thought.

In the January of 1972, my nineteenth year on earth, my sister Claire, and her friend Kris, whom we nicknamed Honey, moved into the back section of a spacious brick Edwardian house in Caulfield near what was then known as the Caulfield Institute of Technology. The section we rented backed onto Royal Parade at the end of a narrow walkway. 

We moved in during the warmth of summer with no idea of how cold the place would get once winter kicked in. We moved there as an escape from life at 336 Warrigal Road in Cheltenham, where my sister and I lived. A double fronted, cream brick veneer, my mother loved because it was brand new and held every promise, for her at least, of a better life. 

As in most stories, this better life did not follow, and my sister and I could not wait to get out once my sister finished her final school year and knew her fate tertiary-study wise.

I was already at university on a cadetship to the health department. They paid me $12.00 a week during my four years of study, on condition I repay them by working for at least two years in a health department facility, most likely a hospital.

The prospect didn’t faze me then. Like the place we rented in the summer when we had no idea of how intolerable winter’s cold could become when a single kerosene heater that stung your eyes and made them water was all we could afford for heat. 

I had no idea a hospital social worker’s life could be so grim, any more than my mother realised within almost minutes of moving into our new home in Cheltenham when my father’s drinking escalated to the point we spent many weekends bunkered down with relatives to protect us from his rages.

Life has a way of turning out differently from how we expect. In the two-bedroom section of our new home on Royal Parade, my sister and I shared the larger bedroom with its one window facing the side footpath and one wardrobe. At night I watched stars through the scrim curtain. 

The shower recess, at the end of a corridor onto which our bedroom backed, led to a broom-cupboard sized bedroom, which Honey occupied. Beyond the corridor, as you made your way to the only exit, you moved through a dark windowless room, which we used as our living area. 

In the centre, we plonked an old blue couch, a hand me down from some friends. Beyond this door the kitchen consisted of a single sink and stove, and room enough for a tiny table and three chairs. Its windows, row upon row of frosted slats. The type you find in toilets which you flicked up in summer for whatever breeze they offered. But the place never became too hot, hidden under the bushes of an ancient garden that must have been there for at least one hundred years. 

Despite its raw ugliness, like the outhouse or woodshed of a grand house, our place became the go-to of all our friends, most of whom still lived at home with their parents.

We spent the night of the election-to-end-all-elections in 1972 when Gough Whitlam finally because our first Labor Prime Minister, stretched across the living room floor on mattresses and inflated Li-los people had brought from home for the long night of celebration.

Those were the times when the young men in our midst, Jack, Neil, Mick, Hurry, Pete, Ernie and Kevin, to name a few, all Saint Bernard’s boys downed beer by the dozen, while we girls guzzled on cheap port mixed with lemonade, or those who were less inclined to sweetness or more health conscious, brought litres of orange juice to mix with vodka. 

I did not have a political bone in my body then but picked up on the fervour of my friends for the Labor Party and for reform for a way beyond the born to rule mentality of those who backed people like Billy McMahon. I followed their lead but could never take on their passion for football. 

Memories come back with all the resilience of the past however much it disappears almost the minute it’s lived. Memories skitter, like the time we watched a football game in Collingwood and later ate pizza in South Yarra, my first taste of pizza beyond an earlier genuine version with my first ever official boyfriend from university. Alex.

Alex sat at a table among a group of his cronies from another Catholic boy’s school somewhere in Preston where he lived with his mother and father. His father ran a concreting business.

A success story. His family lived in a double storey house with a concrete front and back garden. Alex was tall and skinny and to my mind he was gawky. Gomer Pyle gawky. But he liked me. And given no other boy took an interest in me I went along with him to visit his parents, to parties at the Italian Club in Brunswick, to gatherings of his cousins.

Alex introduced me to pizza, thick with a thin topping of tomatoes, basil, and olive oil. Napolitano style, he told me. I disliked its stodge, and lack of topping. 

Alex studied applied engineering and lived in a world so different from my own. But he drove his own car, a grey Falcon and was prepared to travel all the way from Preston to Cheltenham to pick me up for events and to take me home after late nights studying at university. 

Alex was good to me, but I was not so to him. I was dismissive of his overtures and although sexual desire rumbled underneath and Alex and I tried furtive manoeuvres in his car outside my home late at night, we never moved beyond what people described as funny business. 

We wagged university one day on the pretext of travelling to study in the Monash University library and parked in the back of someone’s parking lot where there were plenty of trees and no one to be seen. Alex tried again to offer sexual satisfaction as we listened to Carol King on the radio. The earth did not move under my feet. It stuttered to a halt. 

I disliked Alex’s desperate attempts to pleasure me. His other overtures. He sent me poems, handwritten on paper torn from lined note pads, with his awkward attempts at illustrations. Someone else’s words, because Alex could never find the right ones. 

By the end of that summer Paul returned into my life, fresh from his sojourn to Tocumwal where he had worked in a hotel to get a handle on his future. After a short spell with his parents in Edithvale, Paul moved into an apartment with a friend Ivan. They rented a second floor flat in brown brick where the two men shared cooking and cleaning.

Ivan called me aside at a party one day, ‘He’s not the staying type,’ he said of Paul and for a minute I believed him. 

It was not Paul in the end who was not the staying type, nor Alex. It was me who wandered away from what seemed to me in those days when I could not predict what the future might hold, a grim future ahead with either of these men. 

Sexual desire and memories clash between the living and the dead, to jumble Ernaux’s words, and all we have left are scattered images across the tapestry of our lives. 

Filthy fingernails and green leaves in fishbone

‘My truth doesn’t travel in a straight line, it zigzags, detours, doubles back.’ Abigail Thomas.

When she was eight, an ambulance took my eight year old sister to the Fairfield Infections Diseases hospital which was then a quarantine facility to guard against polio and tuberculosis. These diseases floated around my childhood consciousness in words I overheard on the lips of grownups. The way they took people from their homes, disrupted lives and whole families implicated in the contagion. 

At least rheumatic fever did not spread from person to person in the way of polio, but it erupted in overpopulated areas and unhygienic places. With hints at the contagion of dirt, even as we knew a modest amount built up resistance. 

Thomas Embling hospital for the criminally insane has replaced the infectious diseases hospital in Melbourne today. When you walk through parkland close by the Yarra River you can see the old buildings in their higgledy-piggledy glory, as if they are still trying to keep people at arm’s length. 

For many months my mother struggled to visit my sister in hospital, not only because of restricted hours but because her youngest still needed a pram and my mother had to endure a long walk beyond our primary school to the bus stop near Cotham Road and from there the yellow bus all the way to Ivanhoe.Then more walking. An eternity’s worth of time, so many houses to pass, so many strips of grassland, so many foreign sights before green pastures and eucalypts surrounding row upon row of wooden buildings came into view. 

Me and my sister among the hydrangeas before they hauled her away.

It comes back to me now during this most recent Covid pandemic alongside memories of my time at Heatherton psychiatric hospital, which was once used as a sanatorium. 

And all these places, these sanatoriums and quarantine stations bring to mind Janet frame’s Owls do Cry in which she writes about the fictional Withers family: Francie, Daphne, Toby and Chicks, dirty children. To be dirty was to be spurned and set aside like so much rubbish in need of removal.

‘Look at your fingernails,’ Mother Mary John said to me in my tenth year when she inspected my doily for needle work. A lace edged piece I had chosen; it was covered in deep crimson red poppies and blue cornflowers. The stamens were buttercup yellow. The colours sent thrills through me, so much I failed to notice the smear of grubbiness that inched its way into the linen gaps every time I stitched my corn flowers and poppies into place. Chain stitch round the edges, stamens in French knots, and green leaves in fishbone. 

I hid my hands behind my back as Mother Mary John scolded me for the dirty child I was. How was it most other children in my class had pink fingernails with white moon crescents at the base and clear white lines where the nail ended? None of them had the thick pencil line of black that sat as stubbornly as a bitumen road under each finger. 

Filth amazed me, the way it built up over the course of each week. From Saturday night when we each had a bath – our only bath – all the way through to the end of the week when I noticed other lines of black on my legs and arms, like ants crawling in disorder. My socks which started the week a dull white from too many washes, by the weeks end were brown with a build-up of dirt that crept through the gaps in my blue plastic sandals and turned to mud whenever it rained.

These things were a problem at school. At home with my sisters and brothers no one cared. No one checked my nails for the black lines, as my older sister dragged my long hair into tight plaits that sat on either side of my head. 

‘Hold still,’ she said as I fidgeted from one foot to the next and she tugged at my head to keep it in place. Her hands were firm and deliberate. She only hurt when she encountered a snag of tangles, which happened often enough but less often once she had wrangled my hair into braids. I slept in them at night so that in the morning when my sister unravelled them to begin again, the only tangles were in the superficial stray hairs that fell out of place by day.

This could be a metaphor for my life in those days, a metaphor for my life now, only I do not know how to use it beyond the thought of life as unruly, and unpredictable. And even though in my head I’m steeped in Murakami’s notions of fate, the way all seemingly random events come together to create an order that makes some sense. In my life the patterns which become evident when I step back and cast an eye over past decades, once upon a time seemed as random as the weather. 

My admiration for Murakami pales by comparison to Janet Frame’ s writing. A woman who speaks to my childhood like no other. 

One of my literary supervisors once complained that although the character of Mrs Withers in Janet Frame’s Owls do Cry was said to be based on Frame’s mother, her actual mother was nowhere as slovenly as the book suggests. 

Does this matter? 

Frame’s story is of a mother, like her own, a woman of elegant words, and strangled hopes who tries to survive against the odds. Who fears her husband and is terrified of things going wrong. As they do. She cannot wrangle her children into shape any more than my sister could. My sister pulling my plaits into order only to have their strands fall loose. A thick strand falling across my eyes in class, and my teacher, who could not abide dirty children, whose presence offended her eyes, scowled. 

We were a blight on the landscape like the people in quarantine facilities and infectious diseases hospitals who must be kept separate from the rest of us for fear of contagion.