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  Follow the signs to intensive care.

  Step through the heavy door into the ward.

  Eyes fixed on the big bed in the middle of the room.

  Mum’s face hidden by the plastic mask across her mouth.

  Step closer.

  Grey shadows around her eyes.

  Hot hospital lights.

  Tubes in her nose and both arms.

  Coloured and tagged wires flow from under the stiff sheets.

  Mum’s shrunken, limp body is attached to humming machines. Machines helping her breath, feeding her, checking for her heart beat, keeping her alive.

  I stumble around, lean into her bed.

  A nurse comes in, shifts one of the beeping boxes to the side to make room for me. Pulls a chair close to the bed.

  ‘Talk to her,’ she says.

  ‘It’s me, Mum. It’s Cally.’

  I take my mum’s hand and try to rub some warmth into it.

  ‘You’re going to be okay.’

  I turn to the nurse, standing by, nodding for me to go on. ‘She can hear you.’

  ‘We need you, Mum. We need you to get better, to come home.’

  I stop, gulp hard and swallow the tears.

  ‘Margie is cooking pumpkin soup for you. The boys are waiting for you.’

  ‘You’re doing well,’ the nurse whispers to me. Her eyes are wet.

  ‘I need you, Mum. I need you to help me pick my wedding dress, choose the flowers. Maybe tulips? And we have to find something special for you to wear when you walk down the aisle with me. Navy or green, they both suit you.’

  I still had to book the priest and the church for the autumn wedding. I would get on to it when I got home.

  ‘We’ve decided on St Brigid’s where you and Dad were married,’ I tell Mum, a shrinking, unblinking body in the tidy bed. ‘And where Paul and Julie, and Aunty Margaret and Uncle Jack were married. It will come around quick, Mum.’

  Jon comes to visit, and sits with us a while. ‘She doesn’t even look like your mum,’ he says as we walk into the corridor towards the lift.

  ‘I don’t want to leave her alone,’ I tell him.

  ‘The others will be here soon,’ he says holding me tight.

  ‘I guess the doctors know what they’re doing.’

  On that second day, they discovered Mum had an infection. Septicaemia. They told us they would operate and drain the poisoned blood. She would get better once they had done that and treated her with intravenous antibiotics. She wasn’t going to die. Like Aunty Mary, she was too young. She was just forty-five years old. She would get stronger, and soon she would be home with us. We had told Andrew not to rush down from Sydney. We told the rest of her family that she had turned the corner that she was going to be okay. I could smell the hospital disinfectant and hear the squeaking black and white linoleum as someone repeated it, ‘Your mum’s going to be okay.’ They operated overnight and we waited together for the call.

  ‘She’s made it through. She’s weak but she’s fighting.’

  On the third day, just after the sun has set, the hospital is almost deserted. Lisa, the practical nurse from the country who spent those first hours in intensive care with me, pulls back the curtains and makes room for us to move in close to the bed, closer to Mum. She is slipping away.

  The machines beat on, tracking her heart, her kidneys, lungs, and blood pressure. If she is dying, why don’t they just turn them off? Let her die peacefully, with dignity, not hooked up with needles in her arms and wires coming out of that horrible hospital gown.

  Margie can hardly speak. She sobs, hugs Mum hard and promises to keep on trying for her. Paul is next, lifting her face gently from the pillow, close to his cheek, bright blue eyes like Dad, misted over now with tears.

  The Egan Gang. I watch them, standing there beside Mum. Tom leans in and kisses her, letting his gold locks fall over his eyes. John watches and waits, bites his bottom lip hard to stop it quivering. ‘I love you, Mum,’ he says. Seamus, seemingly the toughest of the lot, is restless. Fidgets and coughs, the asthma almost choking him as he steps towards his mum to hold her. Then it’s Matthew’s turn. At fourteen, the youngest. He’s silent, holding back. Moving like a robot. Is it shock? First Dad, now Mum.

  Mum dies a few minutes later. Her children by her bed. Some of us holding back the tears that will only fall in private. Others sniffing quietly. No-one really cries. Perhaps too afraid of upsetting each other. We weren’t allowed to cry when Dad died. ‘Be strong,’ Mum told us. Lisa returns to the room, busy with the machines.

  ‘She’s gone,’ she said. Confirming what we already knew.

  And then, ‘I’m so sorry.’

  The crisp white uniform moves around us as Lisa unclips wires, turns off some switches and pulls at a plug or two.

  ‘Stay as long as you like,’ she says.

  For what, I wonder. She’s already dead.

  And then I remember Andrew, making his way here from Sydney. We should stay until he gets here. Why couldn’t she hang on? I let the tears fall now, crying for my brother. I imagine his rush to the airport, the long, lonely flight down. ‘Mum’s favourite,’ we always teased him.

  Andrew gets the news from Uncle Jack, in the hospital car park, ‘Your mum’s dead.’ John comforts him in the corridor soon after.

  It doesn’t seem fair. He should have been there to say goodbye. But I know it doesn’t always work that way. I think of Nicky Gleeson, away at boarding school when his mum and his brother died. And I remember how he once told me that whenever he smells mandarins he thinks of his mum. ‘I could smell the sweet, ripe mandarins when Dad told me she was dead.’

  Just eighteen hours after the operation to remove the poison from Mum’s tired body she crumbled with ex-haustion. Her vital organs failed her; first her kidneys, then her lungs and finally her heart stopped as her blood pressure dropped, too low to recover.

  She died at 8.04 pm on January 3, 1984.

  ‘There will be an autopsy,’ the police said when they visited us at Moonee Ponds. They left us there, confused and sad, in the rented house trying to make sense of the last twenty-four hours. Orphaned and afraid to think of what might come next: the funeral directors already at the door.

  Nineteen

  ‘So how was Broady?’ Jon asks as I pull up at the cattle yards behind the hay shed, glad to be home.

  ‘Much the same,’ I smile and watch him wrestle with the old billy goat who doesn’t like having his ageing toenails trimmed.

  ‘And McIvor Street?’

  ‘Bit quieter these days.’

  I still return to Broadmeadows regularly, sometimes to visit my childhood friend Donna, who still lives across the road from my house at number four, and sometimes to wander around the neighbourhood and remember. On one visit, a few years ago, when Donna’s mother was in palliative care and Donna was nursing her at home, Maurice accompanied me. As I stepped into the Perrys’ home it was like walking into my own home all those years before. The same fireplace, but the old wood heater replaced by a modern gas one, a door to the left of the front entrance led to the bedrooms and at the other side of the living room was the tiny kitchen and laundry. Even the back porch with hanging baskets, felt so familiar and comforting.

  Mum was gone. The pub was gone. But we hung on. Sometimes clinging to one another, sometimes forging ahead, alone.

  Gradually, life pulled us back into the ring, and in many ways my younger sister was leading the way. With renewed determination, Margie threw herself into her studies, enrolling at a new university, following a year out working. This time it was Melbourne State Teacher’s College. She chose drama as her major.

  We spent the summer after Mum died adjusting to this new kind of family, one without parents and without a home base. For about a year, we stayed together in a rented house in Strathmore. Paul was managing a pub in Fitzroy and Tom and Andrew were beginning to establish their careers in real estate and surf wear, respectively. Seamus continued with his gardeni
ng apprenticeship. He planted beautiful gardens across Melbourne’s northern suburbs. John dabbled in a couple of part-time jobs and then went back to school, skipping a couple of year levels. With some of my sweet-talking to the headmaster, John was permitted to go straight into Fifth Form (Year Eleven). Matthew agreed to another stint of boarding school for Fourth Form, or what we now call Year Ten.

  I made a career move from a suburban to a regional daily newspaper, The Ballarat Courier. Jon and I postponed our planned Easter wedding until October.

  A few months after the wedding we moved to a small farm on the outskirts of Melbourne. Life in the country with my new husband and a baby on the way seduced me into a kind of fairytale. Looking out onto the lush green paddocks with cattle grazing in the dim morning sunlight, it was a stark contrast from our Brunswick bedsit where Jon and I woke in those days. Back then the pre-dawn darkness was interrupted by the clunking of the Sydney Road tram and my 5.30 am alarm as it rang through the one tiny room, divided by cupboards into a bedroom, sitting area, kitchen and bathroom. I’d secured a job at the Melbourne Herald just after we were married and the bedsit was a great way to save a house deposit.

  From the farm, I continued to work at Rupert Murdoch’s empire. Despite the drain of the daily commute, I still loved the rush of chasing a breaking story. But as motherhood drew closer I found myself dreaming of staying at home with my new baby, growing vegetables and nurturing the increasing number of calves in our herd. I was ready for maternity leave – after following the royal tour of Prince Charles and Princess Diana, and cutting out my story of Pope John Paul II’s Australian visit with my final by-line.

  ‘Why don’t we go out for a while,’ I suggested to Margie on one of my last stopovers from work to home. ‘Let’s celebrate your birthday. Twenty-three is still young enough to party,’ I joked. Margie had taken over the Brunswick bedsit when Jon and I moved to the farm.

  ‘No thanks. I don’t feel up to it,’ she said, still focusing on the TV and Tony Barber on Sale of the Century.

  Out of habit, or to fill the silence, we both started trying to answer the questions Tony threw at the contestants.

  ‘Remember when Dad made us watch It’s Academic?’ I asked.

  ‘Who could forget? Every Sunday night at five thirty.’

  ‘He thought you would be on it one day.’

  ‘That was you.’

  ‘I don’t think he cared. Just wanted one of us there.’

  ‘Maybe it was Matt. Remember how he knew all the Australian prime ministers’ names before he was five?’

  ‘Come on, Margie. Let’s get out and have some fun. What about a play? Anything on at St Martin’s?’

  ‘Not sure, but maybe we could go next week. I’m tired.’ Margie sipped on her mug of Chicken Noodle soup.

  ‘You’ve got to get out. You can’t sit here all the time on your own.’ I knew I pushed her, even when I promised myself I wouldn’t. Maybe my maternal instincts were misdirected even if I was now the oldest female in the family.

  ‘I don’t want to. I can’t.’

  ‘You can’t? What does that mean?’ I tried to stay calm. I picked up the dishes and started rinsing them. I worried she was spending too much time alone. ‘Would it help if you talked to someone.’

  ‘What good can anyone do? They can’t bring them back.’

  I had no answer. Mum had been dead two years and Dad more than four, but sometimes it felt like they’d been gone forever. Some days I could hardly remember their faces or hear their voices.

  ‘I think I might go away for a while,’ Margie announced.

  ‘What?’ Had I heard her right?

  ‘I need time to think, to have a rest. I might go and stay with Matthew in Queensland.’

  I didn’t know what to say. Why would Margie leave? She finally had a good job at The Herald in the picture library, a busy room in the editorial section, on the same floor as me. Sometimes our shifts crossed over and we had lunch together at Collins Place. She had an income and somewhere to live. A holiday might be good, but not a permanent move away. Not now. At the back of my brain, swirling around my head, I heard the concern of Margie’s boss who had called me at home only the week before.

  ‘Margie’s work is fine,’ Sarah told me. ‘But I’m really worried about her. She seems lost. She doesn’t talk to anyone, unless she has to. She doesn’t even look at me when I speak to her.’

  I wanted Sarah to stop there; I didn’t like where the conversation was going. Sarah was a good colleague and had given Margie a great chance with full-time work, but I was nervous about the way she was talking.

  ‘I don’t want to alarm you but it’s just a bit difficult for us to work with her,’ she went on as I held my breath. ‘Sometimes Margie is standing next to me as if she wants to say something but she just stands there and waits for me to speak to her.’

  I struggled for something to say, to be polite, but the silence continued while she waited for me to speak.

  ‘I think she needs help,’ Sarah said.

  ‘Thanks for letting me know.’

  What else could I say? Why can’t you be more compassionate? Why can’t you understand we are not all the same? I wanted to scream at Sarah and the well-meaning friends who suggested she pull her socks up and get over it. Grief was paralysing my sister. I knew she was struggling but I didn’t know how to help.

  With all this fresh in my mind, I convinced Margie to come home to the farm with me. After dinner and a cake, we kept busy by painting the cot together, a family heirloom renovated by Jon and now in place in the spare room where Margie slept. The room that would soon become our nursery.

  Later that night I knocked on the closed door. ‘How are you feeling?’ I asked, sitting on the edge of her bed. ‘Are you still thinking of going to Queensland?’

  She looked up and nodded as her book, Anna Karenina, fell from her hands.

  ‘Sometimes I just can’t stop crying. I hate everything, everything in my life. I try to keep going. I really try, but I feel so tired now.’

  ‘Is it work? The flat? Your friends?’ I searched for a reason, looking for someone or something to blame and something to fix.

  ‘No, none of that.’

  ‘Is it Mum?’

  ‘I think of Mum all the time.’

  I glanced at the growing collection of baby stuff, a bassinet waiting for its bedding, a foldaway cot and bag of clothes from my girlfriend, Michele, a year ahead of me in motherhood. I felt so lucky. I had everything – a husband I adored, an exciting, satisfying job at the newspaper, a new home and a baby to look forward to. As I picked up the book, I wondered, for a moment, if Margie resented me, and my life.

  ‘You must hate me sometimes,’ I said aloud, without thinking.

  ‘I don’t hate you,’ Margie sniffed. ‘I love you,’ she said. ‘But I don’t want to be like you. I just want to be me. But sometimes I don’t even know who “me” is. Sometimes I think I’m someone else, like a character in a book, as if my life is happening to someone else. I think I’m going crazy, like Anna Karenina. She talks to me.’

  A week later I helped Margie pack her bags for her trip to Queensland and some time with our youngest brother Matthew. I visited them just before my baby was due. Matthew was completing Year Twelve at Maroochydore High School and Margie had some work in the ginger factory at Buderim. I admired them both for the way they were trying to start afresh, so young and in a new state with little support. John and Gwen were the exceptions — a local couple who had given Matthew a place to live when he first arrived at the school. Gwen then helped Margie find work with her at the factory. I suppose it was natural to worry about my siblings, but I was so proud I asked them both to be godparents.

  A few months after she’d left, Margie returned home, early in the spring of 1987. I was at home settling my tiny, three-week-old baby boy, James Patrick, when a frantic phone call came.

  ‘I feel sick,’ Margie’s voice came muffled down the phone line.

/>   ‘What is it?’

  ‘I don’t know. I just feel strange.’

  ‘Have you been to a doctor?’

  ‘No. I don’t have the energy. Some days I can hardly even get out of bed.’

  ‘Is it flu?’

  ‘Maybe, but it feels like something more. My stomach feels heavy. I feel heavy down below.’

  ‘Is it your period? Are you due?’

  ‘No, it’s not that, it’s just this feeling there.’

  ‘I’m coming down. See you soon.’

  Together we walked across the road from Margie’s Grattan Street flat to the Royal Women’s Hospital and waited in casualty. I had been in the same hospital only the month before. I remembered how scared I felt, how I wished Mum was still alive, to tell me about childbirth, babies and motherhood.

  Margie rested her head on my shoulder as we waited. ‘You’ll be okay,’ I said. ‘You’re in the right place now.’ She looked pale. She’d lost so much weight that her skirt hung down on her hips instead of hugging her waist.

  When a young man in jeans, open-neck shirt and white coat walked over to us, I squirmed in the plastic chair. He looked like he was playing dress ups. Was he the doctor? Or an intern, just doing the rounds until an older, wiser doctor came on duty?

  ‘Hi, I’m Nigel,’ he said. I almost forgave his youth because he looked so much like my younger brother, Matthew – sun-drenched hair and dreamy blue eyes. Still, Nigel seemed too young, too good looking to be a doctor, too inexperienced to help Margie.

  ‘So tell me what’s been happening?’ he said to Margie as she pulled away, fingers stiffening and clawing at my arm like a scared cat.

  Nigel looked from Margie to me, waiting. She finally mumbled something about pains in her legs. ‘My stomach hurts too,’ she said. ‘Sometimes I can’t even walk the pain is so bad. I used to walk a lot when I was in Queensland with Matthew. I would walk from Alexander Headlands to Maroochydore every day. Do you know it? Sometimes I’d walk twice a day, if I forgot the milk or eggs or some broccoli for dinner.’