Back to Broady Page 8

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘They might be sad or confused. It was a psychiatric hospital called Larundel. It was hard. Some days I just went home and cried.’

  ‘Why didn’t you leave?’

  ‘We needed the money. Your father and I and the three boys, Paul and Tom and Andy, lived in one room. We shared a tiny house in Preston with your Aunt Eileen, Uncle Tom and cousin Ann.’

  One afternoon a few months after Grandad moves into our house, he sneaks off.

  ‘Go after him,’ Mum says. ‘And turn that TV off. Quick. Follow Grandad. Make sure he’s okay.’

  I don’t want to turn off Blind Date and heartthrob Greg Evans. Why don’t you go yourself? I know better than to say it out loud, but what if something happens to him? I’ll get the blame.

  ‘Don’t let him see you,’ Mum shouts as I slam the door. I race to the corner and catch a glimpse of him. I guess he’s headed for the shops and I turn into Kiewa Crescent.

  I see Grandad ahead, his brown tweed coat loose over his slouched shoulders. What if I can’t catch him and he gets hit by a car? Like Lizzie, our little grey mongrel dog who was a bit mad.

  I run hard, chasing after Grandad. I have to reach him. He turns around as if he’s looking for someone. Maybe he’s seen me? I panic and hide behind a pole, wait until he takes off again.

  He slows up, shuffling his feet towards the busy intersection and danger at Blair Street. I can hear Mum’s voice, nagging, telling me to watch him, keep him safe. I can’t let him cross the road alone, even if it means him seeing me.

  ‘Grandad,’ I call, puffing and out of breath. ‘Grandad,’ I scream this time, hands cupped around my mouth, to echo his name. I sprint, puffing as if I’m in the regional finals, running hard to reach him. He stops to look at something dead on the path. I finally reach him, smell the Deep Heat that Paul and Tom massage into his sore back and rub into aching muscles. As I touch the sleeve of his woollen jacket, the brown checks almost worn through, Grandad smiles down at me. It feels like he’s been expecting me there beside him in the middle of the street. He slips his hand into mine. We look both ways, wait for the cars to pass and step out onto the road together.

  When I crawl into bed later that night, exhausted, I tell Mum that I thought Grandad was going to get hurt, that I wouldn’t reach him in time.

  ‘I was scared he might die.’

  ‘I know, love, thank you for staying with him,’ Mum says, hugging me close. She’s pleased. It feels good.

  ‘We nearly lost him once already.’

  It is strange to hear Mum admit her fear. On these rare occasions when I get Mum all to myself I want her to tell me everything about herself. But she rarely does. I want to know all about her mum, when she met Dad, her first job.

  ‘How did your mum die?’ I ask before I have time to stop myself.

  Mum hesitates, lets out a long, loud sigh but doesn’t say anything. I can hardly believe I’ve actually said it. Then she nudges me to make room for her while she climbs in next to me, under the blankets. She stares at the ceiling.

  ‘I was nine years old,’ she says, thinking over the words as if she’s deciding what to tell and what to leave out. I close my eyes and imagine Mum as a little girl in her blue cardigan and white frilly shirt like the one in the photo in the wooden frame on top of our TV.

  ‘It was December and I was in bed counting how many sleeps until Christmas morning. I had made a gold star out of an old shoe box at St Brigid’s. My grandfather Albert helped me climb up on the wooden chair to put the star at the top of the tree. He always brought home a tree from his work at the Fitzroy Council.’

  ‘A real Christmas tree?’

  ‘Yes. We had a real tree, and fresh turkeys too, from our own backyard.’

  ‘I know. You told me how you used to chase them around the yard and watched your grandad chop their heads off.’

  ‘It’s true,’ she says, ‘headless turkeys running around the backyard.’

  ‘When I was little I didn’t believe you.’

  ‘Well, it’s true. There were no shops where we could just go and buy a frozen turkey like we do now. And we made the pudding ourselves. I remember that’s what I was doing when I found out my mum, your nana, had a new baby, a baby boy called Vincent Patrick. But I knew something was wrong when my dad stayed at the hospital and only came home when I had gone to bed. He was gone again before I woke up.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Baby Vincent died on Christmas Eve. He was just a couple of days old.’

  ‘Oh no.’ I can’t believe what I’m hearing. Mum had another little brother.

  ‘Did you see him?’

  Mum shakes her head and looks over at Margie sleeping in the bunk opposite us.

  My little brothers’ baby faces, so pure and alive, dance before me as I bury my tears in her neck, kissing her wet face.

  ‘What about your mum? Did you see her?’

  ‘No. She never came home.’

  ‘Did she die in the hospital with the baby?’

  Mum nods, her eyes moving up to the cardboard boxes on top of the wardrobe where her other life is packed away. Photos and letters that I’m not supposed to touch or read.

  ‘What did she die from?’ I whisper, afraid that maybe I have already asked too many questions.

  ‘I don’t know. My dad, your grandfather, just told me she got sick. But then one of my aunties, one of my mother’s sisters, told me that she had a fall and bled when she was pregnant. They called it septicaemia.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘It’s a kind of blood poisoning.’

  I wish I had the right words to make it better, but I can’t think of anything to say or do.

  ‘I love you,’ I whisper into her soft curly hair that tickles my nose. ‘I don’t want you to die.’

  Nine

  Aalia and her family lived close to the Broadmeadows station so when I wanted a break from the long drive I took a train to see her. I spent a lot of my teenage years on that train but never at night. Such was my dad’s concern for my safety and the negative media portrayal of our much-maligned suburb. Broady Boys and their exploits were never far from the front pages of Melbourne’s newspapers. And it wasn’t always just the TV that told us what was happening. Sometimes the bad news came direct to us. Meeting Aalia’s ambitious sixteen-year-old daughter Kalila reminded me a little of myself at the same age. But where Kalila had her heart set on studying medicine and becoming a doctor, I was chasing the glamorous life of a globetrotting reporter.

  ‘Sure you’ll be on the TV one day,’ Dad would encourage me despite Mum’s frequent attempts to keep me grounded and my head a reasonable size.

  On my first visit to Aalia, I took the Upfield line train instead of the Broadmeadows one so I could enjoy another slow walk through the suburbs. I wanted to revisit the Sylvania Hotel in Campbellfield, where a few members of our family once worked. Many Tuesday paydays were spent sitting in the car with Mum and the younger ones. Waiting outside the KFC store opposite the hotel while Dad had a ‘quick beer’. Dad worked part-time in the drive-through bottle shop in the evenings for a few years. And when I was about fifteen Mum also got a job there in the dining room. Paul and Tom both picked up casual work in the bar while in their final years of school.

  One night, not long after starting as a barman, and with his driver’s licence barely dried, Paul didn’t come home at his usual time.

  ‘What’s keeping him?’ Mum said as she tried to distract herself with the shopping list and a huge pile of ironing.

  She went to the window just as a car’s lights flickered through the blinds. ‘Jim,’ she shrieked. ‘It’s a police car.’

  I dropped my book. Turned my attention away from Jonathan Livingston Seagull and his dad teaching him to fly, to my own father’s perplexed face.

  ‘There was a fight at the pub,’ Paul said calmly, but his shaking hands gave away his fear. Mum and Dad ushered him to the kitchen and I moved closer t
o the hallway door so I could hear.

  ‘A man was stabbed.’

  ‘Were you there?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  The voices dropped so low I could barely hear. Mum spoke next and her horror was palpable.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘There was an argument. One of the guys left and came back with a knife. They argued again and there was a scuffle near the bar. The guy with the knife chased the other one into the car park.’

  ‘Is he okay?’ It’s Dad’s voice now, slower, hesitating.

  ‘He died.’

  ‘Oh, dear God,’ Mum gasped.

  ‘Did you see it?’ Dad asked.

  ‘Not everything; I ran out to help. I held his head in my hands. Someone called the ambulance but it was too late. There was nothing I could do. I had to give the police a statement, and then they drove me home.’

  ‘Did you know him?’

  ‘Yep, he was a regular, he was a good bloke.’

  ‘I think you should give the bar work away, son, that pub has got too rough. It’s too dangerous now. Maybe you should too Valerie.’

  But no-one left the hotel. They needed the money and kept their jobs. The experience was to come in handy only a few years later when our family faced a new challenge.

  That event stayed with me for some time and fed into my already over developed fear of losing someone close. That could have been my brother lying dead on the ground, covered in blood. Anxiety overwhelmed me whenever Mum or Dad or Paul or Tom went to their part-time jobs at that hotel. I turned to prayer in the way I had when I was a young girl, retrieving my rosary beads from an overflowing drawer. Falling asleep with them in my fist.

  Things happened so quickly in our family that sometimes my head hurt keeping up with all the changes, and other times life moved far too slowly for me. It felt like forever to grow up. Then suddenly I was fourteen and trying on a glamorous long evening gown of blue crepe. Slipping my big awkward feet into a pair of white stilettos. My brother Tom, the blue-eyed golden-haired surfie, was getting married. Paul was best man and I was to be a bridesmaid and Margie a flowergirl. We were both getting a big sister. Tom and his fiancée, Trina, had graduated from Geoghegan College together. It was 1975 and they rocked on with the band AC/DC at a big party at the Broadmeadows Town Hall. The beautiful summer wedding followed, and after the Christmas holidays Tom swapped his panel van for a station wagon and his studies for a full-time job with the Commonwealth Bank. He gave his surfboards to Andy, who had by then caught the surfing bug, addicted to the big waves at Torquay and beyond. He was a strong swimmer and Dad was pleased when he headed to Spencer Street station each Friday afternoon after school. A train trip to Geelong and a weekend in the surf was better than hanging around Broady with nothing to do.

  Then, one morning a few months later, Aunty Mary died. She died on an icy cold morning on the first day of July. One of the coldest days on record, according to the weatherman on the Channel Nine news. For the first time in my life, I had a sense of real grief. Her sudden and unexpected death changed life in an instant.

  I can still feel the goose bumps on my arms as I remember that wintry day when hailstones gathered in the gutters. Margie and I sat watching from the lounge-room window as a procession of cars made their way past our house to the Gleesons’. Everything seemed to move in slow motion and the street was white, as if snow fell over Dallas. Or is that just how I want to remember her death now; more peaceful, orderly, than the horrible shock that it was? The ambulance, the doctor’s car, then the undertaker in the shiniest, biggest black car that ever appeared in our street. ‘Ugly hearse,’ Mum said, through her tears. ‘Don’t ever let them put me in one of them.’

  I remember that morning every time I smell burnt milk. Distracted and confused, overheating the milk for the porridge. I wanted to throw up, but I couldn’t move. I was too cold.

  ‘Throw the milk out and give the kids some toast,’ Mum said. She pulled a plastic scarf over her head, dragged on a big coat and headed for the front door. ‘I’m going to see if Uncle Ray needs anything.’

  I watched everything that day, like a peeping Tom drawn to the forbidden. A cameraman in a movie not wanting to miss a beat. I froze when I saw Nick in the back seat of a taxi with Michael, his friend from St Paul’s. They were brothers by then, after a formal adoption by Uncle Ray and Aunty Mary a few years before. I liked Michael but maybe Mum was right when she said I was jealous of his friendship with Nick. That may have been true, initially. But soon I began to understand things had changed. I couldn’t pretend we were still five years old, that we would be best friends forever.

  Russell was there to meet them as they pulled into their driveway. I saw their shoulders shaking as they hugged. I closed the blinds.

  The next few hours were a blur but I thought a lot about Aunty Mary and Nick. I imagined what it might feel like to be motherless. I thought about Russell and Maurice too, and their sister Donna; a mother herself, making the trip from her home on the other side of Melbourne, miles from Dallas. Was Nick walking through his house looking for his mum, hoping to find her at the kitchen bench, in the laundry, at the clothesline? But Aunty Mary was already in the coffin, alone in the funeral home. He didn’t get to say goodbye. I wondered about what happened next?

  I wanted to go to Nick, to hug him and sit with him and the others too. Tell them I loved their mother like my own Mum. But I couldn’t. I was afraid of death, like I was once afraid of the blindness. Fearful that it might be contagious.

  ‘It was emphysema,’ Mum told me as she boiled some eggs for breakfast the next day.

  ‘But why did she die? She wasn’t even sick.’

  It didn’t seem real. I felt as if Aunty Mary was still next door, waiting for me to visit. Waiting for me to run her messages, pick up her smokes and Lemon Sherbets from the shops.

  ‘It was very sudden,’ Mum said. ‘Sometimes it happens like that,’ she added, and I thought of her own mother, the nana I never knew.

  ‘Bloody mice,’ Mum screamed as she picked up the packet of salt for her eggs. We looked down at black droppings scattered through the fine white grains of salt. ‘I’ll have to set some more traps.’

  ‘What’s emphysema?’

  ‘It’s a nasty cough that makes it hard to breath.’

  ‘Is it from smoking?’

  ‘Who told you that?’

  I knew the sound of emphysema even if I couldn’t spell it. I could still hear her wheezing chest, sucking for air as Aunty Mary sat with us. Margie and me practising scales on her piano.

  ‘She died in her sleep.’ I heard Uncle Ray tell Dad later that night. ‘She was still warm in her bed, but she was already gone when I went in to say goodbye on my way to work.’

  I watched my dad grab Uncle Ray around the shoulders the way he sometimes greeted my older brothers. Never quite a full arms-around-the-chest kind of hug. More a pat on the arm or back and a ruffle of hair to show them he cared.

  ‘I don’t know how I’ll manage,’ Uncle Ray said.

  ‘You have to, mate, for the kids.’

  Death and illness seemed to hover over our house from that day on. After the stabbing and Aunty Mary’s death, whether I was awake or asleep, I saw dead faces flash before me. My friend’s dad who died of a heart attack in the shower, and little Wally from the end of the street who had leukaemia and his legs amputated. And Mrs Fraser’s boy Teddy who had a brain tumour. With each of the deaths, came the night terrors. And sometimes I was too scared to go to sleep and I lay there talking to God, asking him why children die. And why Aunty Mary, who was still young and had children to look after, had died? ‘God only takes the angels he needs in heaven.’ Mum told me, but what about those who needed her here? I tried to read. I put Roberta Flack on the cassette to calm me as she sang ‘The first time, ever I saw your face’, but still I couldn’t sleep.

  I wandered about the house contemplating what had happened to Aunty Mary’s body now it was in the ground. It seemed t
o me then, in the middle of all those questions, that the Church, where Mum and Dad took us to pray and to ask for help, didn’t always hear us. And maybe God couldn’t hear me now. And maybe bad things would always happen to the people I loved.

  One morning not long after Nick had gone back to school and Maurice had gone back to his job at the factory, I found my mother slumped on the floor in the laundry. I shook her and she woke up, confused.

  Would she be next?

  Ten

  When the traffic stops at the top of the busy Westgate Bridge I have plenty of time to take in the sweeping views of the city and the bay below before allowing my gaze to settle on the highest tip of the fence at the edge of the bridge. Sometimes, when the cars and trucks remain stationary for too long, I am tempted to climb from the car and walk to the edge.

  Today, as I make my way to Aalia and our English lesson, my fingers clutch the steering wheel. My eyes drift to the left and linger on the anti-suicide barriers that have all but stopped people jumping from the bridge.

  The traffic is chaotic. Welcome rains after a long dry spell have made the roads dangerous. A truck has slid into the back of a car creating a five-car pile-up in the middle lane.

  Come closer, I can hear the voice.

  Come closer, Cally.

  Come to the edge. Fly with me.

  I don’t get out of my car, despite the promise of peace, of escape, an invitation to leave it all behind. Maybe one day I will get out, go to the edge, lean over and take a longer look.

  Instead I lock the doors, shut my eyes tight and wait for the cars ahead to inch forward. Wait for the tears to stop and life to move on as usual.

  As I shift in my seat, tapping the wheel like a keyboard, I imagine what the edge looks like up close, how far away the water is, how deep and cold it might be. I wonder what it looked like back then, way back when there was no high fence, when anyone could just pull up, walk to the edge and fly.

  ‘Where’s Mum?’ seven-year-old Matthew wants to know as he spins his matchbox cars on the plastic road map we found in a red-light-special bin at Kmart.