grief – Sixth in Line

On misery, the Murray River and maggots in a wedding cake

‘Beyond the fixed stars and variable suns…’ James Joyce Ulysses

Last night the wind howled, and it took energy to convince myself, the tall oak in our garden with its high and crooked branches would not drop one onto our roof.

In the particular lies the universal, or so I’m told. I can believe. For isn’t it so, these howling storms and the bleak weather with which we’re faced mid-autumn in Melbourne, Australia while on the other side of the world people roast, is also a reflection of the volatility of our times.

The worst of times and the best of times, only who’s to say.

In 1992 we hired a houseboat on the Murray, three small children, one husband and two adult friends, a long-married couple who chose to stay childless and enjoyed the company of our children in small doses by way of remembering their own child selves. If they ever took the opportunity of reflecting deeply.

On this boat, I read Janet Frame’s memoir, Angel at my Table. Stretched out after lunch while the other adults slept and the children played, on one of the pull out beds in the living area cum kitchen area.

I wept when reaching the section where a sister died drowns, first one sister then another. Dickie hearts, which no one knew about until they died, and in the aftermath, Frame’s life is turned around towards even greater desperation.

I was grieving then too, much as I tried to maintain a cheerful demeanour. The analysts had only months earlier decided I was unsuitable for their training, and I could not see how I might go on in my chosen career beyond putting one foot in front of the other.

We took turns to steer the boat across the slow river, which at a time of receding drought was shallow in places, such we got stuck. We needed to drag tall poles to ease us out of the mud.

If only it was as easy to tug myself out of my hidden despair. If only I knew then that time would pass and the pain ease. That I would find other ways of using my mind to manage my life, that over time I might find even more rewarding than wearing the title, psychoanalyst.

It was to be a medal of honour, like the coloured badges I collected as a young girl guide. A badge for being able to set up a tent. A badge for making a telephone call from a street phone, coins in the slot, dial the number and pull on the receiver in that order, then speak to your mother or sister or brother at the other end. A badge for sewing on your badge, in neat whip stitch. To stop the edges from fraying. Small marks of development.

I knew this was how a person grew. You learned to do things you were previously unable to master. You absorbed new forms of arithmetic. Division, multiplication, and fractions. You learned to spell long and obscure words. You rote-learned the dates of wars and kings and queens from the past. The date of Federation in Australia. Easy because it happened at the turn of a century.

You learned the colour of your nation’s flag, and the mysteries of the rosary, the joyful and sorrowful mysteries, the luminous. You scrolled through the stations of the cross, and committed the Credo, (the ‘I believe’) to memory. You repeated the ten commandments, only they had protestant ring. You rattled off the Our father, whose final sentence differed from the Our Father they recited at Girl Guide camp one Easter time when you were the only Catholic child present.

The small differences between the ways people peeled their potatoes, some under running water. A waste. Others in a sink filled with water which grew murkier by the minute as each potato was robbed of its dusky over coat.

So much to learn in childhood, and much of it I managed, always on the edge of amazement as if I had learned words by rote and could hold onto them only if I recited them out loud and from the beginning.

I did not understand the things I learned. Just the words. It left me with an uneasy sense of fraudulence. As if I could recite swathes of knowledge by rote, but if you prodded me, stopped me mid-stream and interrogated the meaning of what I was saying, I would lose my place. A type of stage fright and I could not speak or think or understand the mysteries of the world.

I felt this way when I first read Sigmund Freud. The case histories of Anna O and Little Hans. On the page, these stories simple, but the voice of the great man had an old-fashioned tone. It took time to absorb and even then the ideas he offered floated in the air like so many dust motes I could rote learn, but not corral.

I went once to an evening lecture conducted by one of the newer members in the 1970s, a Lacanian analyst from South America who spoke non-stop for over an hour.

Not one word made sense to me. Granted I was new to this language, and he was of Lacanian extraction. Jacques Lacan’s writings translated into English are not for the simple minded. They are dense and opaque. Belonging to universities and in need of interpretation before you can grasp something of their essence.

Even today, decades later, my eyes glaze over when I read Lacan’s writing. Not so Freud’s but then, it was all gobbledygook, and even more veiled than the words of the bible.

Mid-afternoon on the Murray after we stopped somewhere for lunch and tied our boat at anchor to one of the many jetties along the river’s edge. I watched the overhead sun illuminate the skies. Best at twilight when we were again at anchor and readying for the night when the sun danced across the red cliffs looming over the water. They threw reflections as though someone had folded a sheet of paper in half. Each side carried a replica of the other. Mesmerising.

And Janet Frame took me to the ice cold of New Zealand and that room at her aunt’s whose walls were lined above the picture rail with the chocolate boxes of her dancing career. Her trophies. And at night after Frame’s sister had joined her, the one who later died, the two ate their way through every single chocolate putting back the empty boxes on display.

Imagine the aunt’s horror when she discovered they had been scooped out. Those chocolates would soon be inedible but no matter to her. The shock, the scandal, the horror. And Frame’s shame.

It reminds me of the times when as a child I stole lollies and was duly punished. It reminds me of the top tier of our wedding cake, which still sits in a tin, sealed with silver masking tape at the top of my kitchen cupboard.

Nearly fifty-years-old now, this cake will only be opened after one of us dies. I would not chance it ahead of time. Or maybe I would. Superstition says, it’s dangerous to open it ahead of the death of one of the partners, unless you open it when you should. And we missed that event because we never baptised our children, in the Catholic way.

So, there were no milestones other than anniversaries when it was once okay to open the tin.

In my mind’s eye, I open it and see maggots. Though they could not survive for long, or get in. I see saw dust. The cake crumbed to powder. I see a perfect cake dulled by time, the once white marzipan icing, now yellow, but inside who knows.

And in this night of blustery winds, the tree branches stayed in place for now at least and the world as we knew it, at least here in Hawthorn continues.

The incest taboo serves perpetrators

2023, the year of the rabbit, of jumping over obstacles and coming into luck.

None so far from what I see. Or so says the miserable me. While every day is a day of luck, says the optimist.

Be grateful you’re still alive. These words have a church-like quality, as of straight from my mother’s mouth.

I’ve been thinking about her lately. The anniversary of her death on 10 August, nine years ago. The way she cried in her 92nd year when she heard about the death of her six years younger sister far away in Holland.

My mother did not grieve so visibly over her three brothers. They went before their sister, even the youngest, the first to die when he was only eighty.

My mother and her siblings. In 1982 before they hit advanced old age.

My mother had expected it, given her youngest brother’s years of ill health with leukemia. And expectation of the worst outcome is a good way to foreclose the feeling when it happens.

It’s no surprise then.

You’ve grieved ahead of time in tiny increments and never fully experience the full rush of sorrow that comes on you unexpectedly when someone drops dead out of the blue.

Out of the blue. Out of nowhere, only it’s never quite like this. There are hints of its arrival beforehand, however much we ignore the red flags of the future.

I went to an all-day seminar on the perversity of child sexual abuse where three women speakers filled the day with their words at the Wheeler Centre. They organised this event themselves. No one else had wanted to put on such an event. And because of the sensitive content, they restricted numbers.

The first speaker opened the session to say nothing in the room should leave it. One of those events when we’re urged to secrecy. This is strange when I think on it because the whole time during the discussion – still seeping into my bones – they encouraged us to speak out about our truths.

The incest taboo only serves the perpetrators and one way to counter it is to talk about it. Yet here we were, a group of some forty people, encouraged to speak and to listen while also urged to wrap ourselves inside a bubble.

Now writing about it here, I find myself perplexed.

Funny the way incest begets more secrecy. It happens in secret and then you’re urged not to speak about it. When you do, shame washes over you yet again. As if you hold a terrible secret that no one else can know and it becomes so powerful it’s almost overwhelming.

For me there was an additional load. The ghosts of the analysts were there in the form of one speaker, an analyst whose paper was most harrowing of all because she talked about the sexual abuse of infants and young children. The whole time she spoke I wanted to vomit. The room was electric, and everyone sat silent, mesmerised.

As much as these talks left me reeling, the day itself was an adventure. Into the city on the tram, then out on a train towards Brighton – my first ever journey on the Sandringham line – in drizzling rain, for an early birthday dinner for a friend who also joked about keeping her age of seventy a secret.

I told her there was nothing to be ashamed of. But she worries about the prejudice of publishers who won’t touch a writer past a certain age for fear we will not produce more.

In the middle of this sumptuous and generous dinner with nine people, including the birthday person’s friends and family, we listened on and off to the gruelling game between the determined French soccer team and the wonderful Matildas.

I’m not given to paying much attention to sport of any ilk, but this game had me hankering for success. Mostly on behalf of my youngest daughter who was out with friends in Brunswick to watch the game.

She was desperate for the Matilda’s success. A soccer team emblematic of change. Women playing a traditionally male game.

We might say there’s one obstacle leapt over in the year of the Rabbit. But still one woman a year is killed in Australia through intimate partner violence. An underestimated fact that sticks in my throat.

My mother could once have been such a statistic. And we in turn.

The bus trip I took as a child in my memory, seated beside my mother. A yellow bus that travelled along Canterbury Road and took you into the heart of the Camberwell shops. It dropped us at the top of the hill near the railway station.

My mother wanted to visit Dickory Dock, an underwear specialist, still standing today. She needed a new girdle.

In those days women were fitted out, not trusting their own ability to match their body size with the underwear needed. The cost of a girdle was an investment, like buying a new overcoat. Maybe almost as expensive.

There was a picture theatre nearby on the corner of Broadway Boulevard and Bourke Road that’s since closed. Could it be I worked there as an usher when a teenager?

I have memories of doing this but no evidence beyond a faded memory of wandering through the Hoyts’ theatre aisles, torch in hand with an open flat box of ice-creams held by a cord around my neck and protruding from my chest.

If I held this job, it was not for long. I was fourteen when we left Camberwell, so it must be the sight of myself as usher blended within my imagination and memory that has turned me into this young girl, purposeful and strong as she carries her goods to sell. And for the first time earning money of her own.

Dickory Dock was nestled alongside other non-prepossessing shops near the Palace Hotel with its stench of beer and stale cigarettes. This was where my father must have bought his alcohol in the days we lived nearby.

My mother in the fitting rooms of Dickory Dock and my father flashes bright in my mind. Like a shadow.

Through the gap under the curtain, my mother’s pink feet splay alongside the neat black heels of the assistant who was prodding and poking at her thick form to get the fitting just so.

I watched my mother’s toes, a bunion on either side. The bunions had grown so big all her shoes were misshapen. I dreaded the thought the same might happen to me. Those deformed feet, nails poorly clipped as if it had been too hard for my mother to bend over and tend to them.

My sister often sat on the floor in front of my father’s chair to clip his toenails. He liked her to cut them short, and she, young person of many talents, obliged.

My father will kill us all one day I thought waiting outside that cubicle. My mother first, then my useful sister, then me and my younger sisters and finally my brothers.

And we would all lie there in pools of blood, our bodies piled high like the bodies I had seen in books on the Holocaust, only those bodies were naked, and my father would not have taken off our clothes beforehand.

At least, I hoped he would not.

We took the yellow bus home again that day, back through the leafy streets of Camberwell and when we arrived home, my father was seated in his chair by the fireside, blue soldiers of flame standing in formation along the gas heater. My mother timid as a mouse.

All this in 1966, the year of the horse in the Chinese calendar. People born that year have good instincts and powers observation. They can think for themselves, despite their enthusiasm and friendly impulses. And they’re good at jumping over hurdles.