Category: Writing

Inflated basketballs

I have a photograph of my childhood family sheltered in one of those plastic frames and held together with magnets. It sits like a transparent block on top of my work desk, there amongst the clutter of papers, pens and other stationary in the unholy mess I call my desk top.

I look over at the crowd, all nine of us photographed the last time we came together as a group in 2009.

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When we were young we followed the usual trajectory, each child shorter than the preceding one according to age but over the years our heights have stabilised into an irregular jumble.

Second daughter, but I’m the tallest of the girls and my youngest brother is the tallest of all five boys.

At this point my husband sticks his head around my door to say goodbye. He’s off for a walk with his friend. They travel around the outskirts of Melbourne in search of walks of interest.

As I wave him goodbye I remember how two weeks ago just as I was settling into a burst of writing on a typical Sunday morning, my daughters’ boyfriend who’d just walked out to go to his work at a café in Albert Park, interrupted my flow to tell me that someone had smashed my front car window parked in the driveway and also his car window on the street. I checked further up the road and discovered another car a few doors up had also suffered the same fate.

We rang the police who offered to send a report. They would not come out to check the damage given there were no witnesses. What could they do after the culprits had run?

The vandals most likely used a fully inflated basketball, which they threw against the windscreen with full force to create the crater effect, almost identical on every car. Or so the man from Windscreens O’Brien said after he put the new glass in place. He told us that he had been called to repair the windscreens on a number of cars in our local side streets after that night.

Now I wonder, could lightning strike again? Would someone not satisfied with their first burst of damage come back for more or would they take their rage and destructive impulses elsewhere?

I have trouble understanding vandalism, the rush of satisfaction a person gets when they destroy or efface someone else’s property or perhaps even a person.

I know about the pleasures of imagining revenge but always in my fantasies, forces beyond me damage the person against whom I would have my revenge. Someone else does the deed.

In my imaginings, someone else, or something else gives them grief and I take pleasure from my opponent’s downfall.

‘Schadenfreude’ I think it’s called but it doesn’t happen much that a person whom I wish ill upon comes to grief and I’m glad of this.

Guilt would creep in fast, too fast for me. Given a lifetime of worrying as a child about doing damage even to strangers.

This preoccupation took over, whenever I saw a banana peel on the street or broken glass or something else that had the potential to attract a person’s foot as they walked by, something that could do damage if trod on unexpectedly.

I needed to remove the object and make the area safe.

It was enough to put the glass or peel into the gutter, but if I ignored it and walked past without removing the danger, the persistent image in my mind’s eye of someone coming to grief on that broken piece of glass, or someone sliding across the concrete after landing on the banana peel left me in spasms of guilt.

I put it down to infantile omnipotence, the idea that everything is my responsibility. If good things happen then I am good. If bad things happen then I must be bad.

This is the way little people operate. They believe they are the source of everything that happens to them, at least when they’re very small. But over time they get help, mostly from parents and teachers and siblings to realise that there are things outside their control; that they’re not responsible for everything.

Forces come into play to moderate our omnipotence. Of course it’s a problem if those forces come in too vigorously. If as a small person a parent or some other person in authority, or a bully at school – it doesn’t much matter who it is – but if that other person makes the little person who thinks they’re good at something, suddenly realise they’re not, the realisation can be devastating.

Small children need to be let down gently. It does not do to crush a small person’s confidence.

Back to my siblings, all eight of them, all of us lined up, the girls in front, the boys behind, even now gendered rather than placed chronologically.

Whose idea was this to put the girls in front?

Being one of this crowd has had a profound effect on me and the person I have become. For good and for bad.

I was in a group therapy session many years ago and one of the women who had been silent for weeks managed to talk about how hard it was for her as an only child to find the courage to speak up.

Me, I find it easy to speak up but even as I have my say, I feel a clutch at my throat and the thought travels through my mind, what will the others say?

What will the others think? Am I speaking out of turn? What gives me the right?

And so I transfer those sibling experiences onto other groups I join. Always the same willingness to get in there and have my say, accompanied by the fear, the shame, the horror that I will get it wrong. Offend. Do damage.

Even as I know there’s not necessarily a wrong, only a stream of voices. Some coincide and others clash.

Perhaps that’s where the vandalism comes from.

Someone who can’t find the words to speak. Someone who doesn’t get a say. Someone who can’t be heard, and who chooses instead to smash the front windows of other people’s cars with an inflated basketball.

A letter to my father

Dear Dad

I know it’s against the rules to blame anyone, but I blame you. I’m all grown up now and should know better, even so, it’s hard to get beyond that sense that I keep chasing you in all these men I’ve met over the years who turn out wrong, not because they themselves are wrong but because they’re not you, the you I needed when I was little.

You even spelled my name wrong on my birth certificate, not that it was you who spelled out the letters. You must have gone to Births, Deaths and Marriages to register my name and sat in a small office with a clerk whose job it was to take down the details. And you got it all wrong, my name spelled in the English way and not the European and even the births of my other siblings, the ones who came before me, you listed in the wrong chronological order.

How could you do that? Were you addled, too overwhelmed by the birth of your seventh child, your sixth child living, to notice that the clerk put down a ‘z’ instead of an ‘s’, to notice that the clerk listed your first born daughter as younger than her older brother.

These things matter, to me at least, even if they did not matter to you. It’s the order of things. The way we’re put onto this earth to live out lives in a certain order in families from oldest to youngest, but you paid it all little heed. We could all be one just mess of children, each one indistinguishable from the other.

And then that decision to name me after my mother, your wife. What about that decision? Did you have a say in it? I found out later I should have been named Petronella after your mother, but my mother told me you hated her so much, your mother that you wanted none of your children to be saddled with that name. That was good of you. Bad enough to be saddled with my mother’s name but then to cop your mother’s name, the one you supposedly hated, far worse.

You were tall and intelligent enough to beat Barry Jones on Pick a Box not that you’d have tried. You’d have had to front up on the television screen in front of all those viewers. Not for you the performance, at least not one held in public. You preferred your own company but then from time to time when you grew lonely you took off in search of one of your daughters, one would do, preferably the oldest but if she was not available and my mother was nowhere to be seen you’d go after me or one of my younger sisters.

But I was smart, Dad. I knew how to avoid you. I knew how to make myself invisible, as thin as a sheet of paper. I knew how to slide from room to room on tiptoes, silent as a beetle and just as small, and you did not see me as I slid down the hallway past those double glass doors that led into your chamber whenever you called out my name.

You called and you called and the more you called the more I plugged my ears and hid from view, from you, from everyone. Out back to the laundry toilet with the door closed tight even without a lock. You refused locks in our house. You wanted access at all times but you could never access me, could you Dad? You could never get to me, inside my body, under my skin or into my brain.

I held firm. I held you at arm’s length and now I have to suffer the consequences, the guilt that slides like treacle down my back and sticks to every pore of my skin, making it hard to breathe.

My younger sisters weren’t as smart as me. They heard your call. They came when you called. They went into your bedroom and closed the door behind, and even though they were five and eight and I do not know what happened behind that door, nor am I ever likely to know because the older one of those sisters has sealed her lips tight like a clam and she will not speak to me nor to any of the others and the younger one cannot remember other than to tell me how ten years later when she was fifteen and we older ones had all left home, she heard you at her doorway late one night.

She knew you were there. She knew you were naked. She could see your silhouette against the hall way light. She knew it had reached the stage it was her turn, but our mother arrived in the nick of time.

‘Leave her alone,’ our mother said and you skulked away like a rodent. Never to pester her again, except in her nightmares.

As for me, you still appear in my dreams, not as often as before. I can still feel your presence at night in the dark when I tread over cold tiles to the toilet and hold my breath fearful of your touch. Always your touch, the touch I avoided throughout my childhood, the touch I feared that has made me now into a woman afraid, afraid of closeness, afraid of penetration, a woman who has sealed herself off from too much bodily connection. And I could not reclaim my body long after you had left. No body, no chance of penetration, no chance of invasion, no chance of the burning touch that drives even stronger people mad.

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