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  ‘Mum’s gone to hospital,’ I tell him, glancing up from my second-hand copy of our Third Form textbook, Ecouter et Parler. I translate it to English, ‘Listen and Speak’. I love the sound of French, the language of love. I practise whenever I can, dreaming of one day going to Paris. My girlfriends Julie and Michele say they will come with me and we are already saving thanks to our part-time jobs at the supermarket.

  ‘Why?’ he asks as I turn to The Brady Bunch on TV. Smiling faces of Carol and Mike Brady beam into our lounge room with Greg and Marsha showing me just how lucky some kids can be.

  ‘Pourquoi?’ I say. ‘Elle est malade.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Mum’s sick,’ I say, closing my book; enough French for one day.

  ‘Did she hurt herself?’ Johnny takes over as he throws a football to Matthew and they start kicking it across the lounge room. Seamus is at the table sketching and listening. Dad says Seamus is the artist in the family and he’s proud of the drawing of a huge train engine that Seamus created in black Texta pen on the hallway wall. He keeps the door open all the time to show it off to our visitors. Mum says he should scrub it off. But we all like to admire the artwork that runs the length of the hallway.

  ‘Mum has bad pains in her tummy,’ I answer as best I can, heading to the kitchen to dish out the chow mein. I think it looks a bit too runny and wonder if I’ve left something out. Mum has shown me how to brown the mincemeat, chop the cabbage in ribbons, slice the onions and grate the carrots. I mix in an extra packet of chicken noodle soup and drain away the juice.

  Margie makes a toasted cheese sandwich for herself and cuts some off for Matthew. She’s gone off meat since she saw Dad pulling the guts out of a rabbit the boys shot. She keeps the sandwich close while she pours a Milo, just in case Andy pinches it.

  As I place the forks in the middle of the table I think about the pretty way Aunty Mary used to set their dining table, a cotton cloth with floral embroidery and silver cutlery set at each of their six dining chairs. I miss Aunty Mary and make the sign of the cross when I think of her in the way Mum does if she hears an ambulance or drives past a church.

  I pretend everything is normal. While the dinner bubbles I join my brothers in the football game. Matthew commentating and Johnny kicking goals through the open doors. But nothing feels normal anymore. Not since Dad called the doctor in the middle of the night the week before. Mum had barely moved from her bed for a week. She just lay there, looking at me with those dead eyes. I preferred it when she was angry and growling at me, not this awful, silent, sadness. The doctor came and jabbed Mum with a needle, wrote a prescription for more tablets and said she needed rest. After no improvement from Mum, the doctor found a bed for her at Sacred Heart Hospital in Coburg, the closest hospital to Dallas.

  It’s easier for me to tell the little ones that Mum has a pain in her stomach, than try to explain the problems inside her head. I don’t even know why Mum is sleepy and sad one minute, angry and shouting the next. At school, I am also wary about sharing the truth about Mum with my friends, but some of the teachers seem to know. One day I heard one of the old nuns say something about Mum and her ‘nervous breakdown’.

  Does that explain everything? I don’t know. There is no-one to ask, it isn’t talked about and all I know is I want to get out of this house of misery. I comfort myself with escape plans. And what of my younger brothers, content riding bikes, playing football and cricket? How do they process Mum’s illness and Dad’s drinking, in their young minds? I have to be grown up. But sometimes I feel like running away. Escaping to the bungalow and my music is the next best thing.

  One night, before Mum went to hospital, I could no longer stand being in the house with its suffocating sadness, always walking on eggshells. I had gone to a party, danced, drank Southern Comfort and Coke and decided I was never going home again.

  But after about the fourth drink I felt ill and became frightened. Was I turning into my crazy mother? I found a bathroom to hide where I sat in the corner on the cold tiles, sobbing and throwing up. Maybe home, despite all its complications, was still the only place I wanted to be.

  Mum pounced on me as soon as I crept in the back door.

  ‘You selfish little bitch. Who do you think you are coming home at this time of night?’

  It was an immediate cure for my earlier homesickness.

  ‘You’ve been drinking. Get out of here. Now.’

  Dad heard the shouting and came into the laundry. He didn’t say a word, just shook his head and glared at me. Say something, I wanted to scream at him but I knew better.

  ‘Disappointed,’ I heard him mutter. Disappointed, disappointed, disappointed. He may have only expressed it once but I heard it over and over. Be angry, wild or furious. Anything but disappointed, I begged silently. Then my father grabbed my arm, squeezed it so hard I thought it might break. He’d never hurt me before, never hit me or even yelled at me and had certainly never ever been ‘disappointed’. He kept on squeezing, as my mother hissed and glared at me like I was a stray dog that had pissed on the carpet.

  After the verbal abuse, the constant reminders of how worthless I was, how I thought I was special, better than everyone else, the silent treatment set in. I was okay with that. Maybe I’d finally discovered how not to fight back. I stayed out of my mother’s way. On the rare occasion she spoke to me, it was the formal ‘Caroline’. The harshness with which she managed to say my name made it sound ugly.

  Somehow I settled into Fourth Form at school and soon I was riding a brief wave of happiness. I had a small scholarship and was voted school house captain by my peers.

  I’d also been dispatched to spend some time with Tom and his wife Trina, while tensions between Mum and me cooled. It was Dad’s idea and he told me it was just for a while and that maybe I would find some time to get on top of my studies. I was fine with that. I liked having a sister-in-law and I was beginning to see that my presence, even if I didn’t argue, upset my mum. I accepted McIvor Street might be a happier place without me. The one thing I did worry about was leaving everything to Margie. I didn’t know how she would cope with the extra work around the house but hoped Mum’s moods were more stable when I was out of the way.

  On a Monday evening, when Tom arrived to take me to his house, I stood waiting with my packed bag. He’d changed from the suit he wore to his bank job into casual work clothes for a second job he’d picked up since he’d become a young dad. I had my books with me, including my latest acquisition, The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. I looked forward to some free time at Tom’s, some peace and quiet to read. It was a difficult book but I wanted to finish it, not least for Ms Manning, my beautiful English teacher from the Philippines. She presented me with the book after nominating my essay as best in the class. For the first time in my life I felt important. Who else but Dad would think my essay was good? I think Dad was more excited than me and started to believe I might one day be a journalist. But I also dreamed of being an air hostess, travelling to exotic places, anywhere away from Dallas.

  ‘Nothing more than a glorified waitress,’ Dad scoffed.

  Mum called him a snob, ‘Lots of nice people are waitresses. Don’t go filling her head with rubbish, she’s already too big for her boots.’

  As I headed outside to Tom’s car, he called me to my mum’s bedroom.

  ‘I think you should apologise to Mum.’

  ‘What for? I didn’t do anything.’

  ‘Just do it,’ he said, shifting his feet as if he wanted to move into a safer space.

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘She doesn’t mean it,’ Mum snapped. ‘See why I don’t want her here.’

  ‘It’s always my fault. She’s always picking on me. Even when I help nothing’s ever good enough for her.’

  ‘You’re so selfish, you only care about yourself,’ Mum shouted and moved towards me, arms out, ready to push me out of her bedroom, out of her life.

  ‘Just shut up, both of you,’ Tom yell
ed. ‘You should hear yourselves.’

  I stared at my chewed fingernails, my fat fingers fidgeting with the schoolbag. I tried to stop the tears but still they came from behind a wall of hurt and humiliation. They poured, thick and salty, rolling down my face, a face that felt so ugly that I knew I was deserving of her hatred.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  I think I stayed a couple of weeks with my brother and around the time I returned home I discovered Margie’s diary and read her scribbled teenage ramblings. I was stunned, but also comforted. One of her notes was from the previous January and included her own anxiety about Mum. Thirteen-year-old Margie wrote that she was waiting for me to come home from a church camp. She was angry with Mum who had spent the whole day in bed and it seemed to her no-one had remembered Dad’s birthday. After that us girls started sharing what were once our own secret thoughts – the idea that something was wrong with Mum. Talking to Margie, I discovered I wasn’t the only one who worried about Mum. But my younger sister was much better at managing her rages. Perhaps it was because she wasn’t usually the one in the firing line. Even now as an adult, and a mother, I wonder why I was always in the eye of the storm that was our mother. Did she really believe I got too much attention from my dad? Did she hate me for it?

  I often wondered what it was that sent our mother to bed for days on end? From her diaries, I knew Margie was just as much in the dark as I was. The doctors of Dallas and those consulted further afield all called it the same thing – nerves with a capital N.

  As a teenager, I was too ignorant to know what that meant. Too naive to question the daily menu of tranquillisers and sleeping tablets, anti-anxiety pills and then a new medication for epilepsy. The epilepsy was a surprising diagnosis that followed a period of fainting and fitting. I tried talking to Dad to understand some more, but I think he found comfort in the epilepsy explanation. Whatever it was, each time there was an ‘episode’ or relapse that dragged Mum down I believed it would be the last because of the way she could bounce back. And yet, deep inside somewhere, when I was trying to make sense of it all, I knew my mum was different to all my friends’ mothers.

  When Mum was sick I prayed we would soon get the old Mum back. The one who laughed and sang like Neil Diamond with her rendition of ‘Sweet Caroline’ ringing through the house. I missed the Mum who let me crawl into her warm bed beside her, the one who reached for my arm and held it hard across her rumbling, churning stomach.

  The ups and downs, the highs and lows of the merry-go-round of medication went on for months. When the latest ones had outrun their usefulness Mum went back to Sacred Heart, but this time for shock treatment.

  There the doctors stuck electrical currents to her head and zapped her brain, twice a day, every day, for what felt like an eternity. Margie had bad dreams and sometimes slept in my bed. I tried to find out some more about it, but decided it was all too gruesome and I was better off in ignorance.

  One wet afternoon at the beginning of winter while I was still in Fourth Form I caught the bus from school to Moreland Road. Some Kool Mints and flowers for Mum tucked under my arm.

  ‘Get me out of here,’ she said as soon as I walked in the hospital ward.

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘If you don’t get me out and take me home, I’ll climb out the window myself.’

  What was I supposed to do?

  Despite the relative peace at home, in a crazy way I still missed Mum and the boys kept asking for her. Maybe I should help her get out of the hospital. I could take her home with me on the bus and we could all lie around on the floor like we used to. Sharing a box of Cheezels and laughing at On the Buses or Please Sir with Mum drooling over John Alderton. It would be like the good times, Margie and Matthew doing their impersonations of relatives and the odd celebrity. We would fight over the best seat in the room. Push and shove for the best spot on the floor, closest to Mum, and she would laugh so hard she’d wet her pants. Not today, but maybe soon.

  Mum does leave hospital a few weeks later, with the doctors’ permission, and not smuggled on the bus with me. She sleeps in Margie’s bed, across from me.

  ‘Cally, love, can you get me my tablets?’ Mum calls to me as I barge through the front door, dumping my schoolbooks on my bed.

  ‘But it’s not time yet.’

  I pray that she won’t ask again. It’s not fair that I even have this stupid job, handing out tablets like treats. The right dose, the right time, the right order, just as the doctor has written it down.

  Mum pleads with me, her lips and eyes narrowing as she watches me. I tuck the key deep into a pocket of my tunic, hoping she will give up, and not go looking for the locked case under my bed, where the tablets are hidden.

  ‘Don’t be silly, Caroline. You can give them to me. Half an hour won’t matter.’

  I pretend not to hear her. I don’t want another fight. I hunt through my school bag to find my homework for the night. I think I’ll start with the grammar exercises and then have another go at the book review. I’ve borrowed a book, A Patch of Blue, from the school library. It’s about a blind girl and I think of Maurice and Nicky and how they never complain. I will stop complaining.

  ‘Who do you think you are?’ Mum sits up in the bed, leans on her elbow. ‘Who gave you the right to tell me what I can have?’

  Here we go again.

  I never wanted this job. But Sister Annette, who sometimes calls to see Mum, says it’s for the best. It’s to help Mum manage her medication and get well again. I turn to walk out of the room, the afternoon sunlight pushing through the smoke-stained curtains, desperate to brighten the dark, stuffy room.

  ‘Don’t you walk away from me,’ Mum screams, jumping out of bed, moving towards me. This time I don’t have the energy for an argument. I grab the leather case from under the bed, take the tiny silver key from my pocket and unlock the clips. I shake the pills, the blue ones in the plastic container, into my hands, tip out all in the brown glass bottle, grab the yellow ones in the strips of foil, and I throw them at her.

  ‘Have them,’ I scream. ‘Have the whole fucking lot.’

  Eleven

  On a recent trip to Europe, I stumbled upon a refugee camp on the Greek Island of Kos. As I wandered around the tents and suitcases I thought of the dangerous journeys my English students Damrina and Aalia had made from their childhood homes. Across land and sea, to Broadmeadows – on the other side of the world. Once I was back home I decided my next project would be to establish a creative writing group for the young refugees of Dallas and beyond. It was a way to again feel connected to my childhood home. Funny, there was a time when I couldn’t wait to get away from the place.

  When I was seventeen and contemplating how to fix my lax attitude to study, my father announced he had been doing some research of his own. He had arranged an interview for me at a Ballarat boarding school. Paul, who had enjoyed his years at Assumption College in faraway Kilmore, had recommended the school, St Martin’s in the Pines. His school friends had sisters or girlfriends there. I didn’t take much convincing, desperate for a chance to escape the increasingly erratic relationship with Mum. Luckily, the school had one last spot for the ‘Broady girl’.

  I was aware that I was there to work hard and make something of myself, but I also accepted my going away may have made things more harmonious for my family. To help with the fees, I had used Paul’s connections to pick up a full-time waitressing job over the summer at the then up-market Old Melbourne Motor Inn in Flemington Road. It’s now called RMIT Village, a city residence for country and international students attending the university. Luckily no-one knew I was only seventeen because the money was far better than anything I’d earned at the milk bar or supermarket in Dallas. For eleven weeks over the school holidays, I worked full-time and accumulated what was then a small fortune. I loved the job and there were perks like generous tips and free tickets to the newly launched and controversial World Series Cricket. Courtesy of Kerry Packer, I took my younger brothers
to Waverley Park to see the international players in action.

  It was study time and the end of the year was creeping closer. I was trying hard to read and review Albert Camus’s The Outsider but I hated it. I mean what kind of guy didn’t cry at his own mother’s funeral? My English teacher raved about it: the book’s style, economy of words and its controversial, existential views. I thought it was boring.

  As I battled with my essay in the silence of the tiny cubicle that had become my home for the past year, the wind raged outside my window, thumping like a hammer in my brain. Huge gum trees swayed back and forth in the forest that surrounded our dormitories and old branches moaned as they bent in the storm, threatening to crash through the window. I was hungry; it was nearly suppertime, but when I imagined the disgusting chocolate pudding the nuns might have recycled from dinner I decided to work through the break.

  Homework was not my strong point and I was lazy when it came to detail and proofreading. That night, I had a choice between the English essay and an economics one on fiscal policy and gross national product. As the trials for the Higher School Certificate were looming, I decided to tackle both assignments, as I needed some positive feedback from my teachers, to keep my dad happy, and earn me some freedom during the forthcoming study vacation and my eighteenth birthday celebrations.

  My boarding school room was more like a cupboard, with just enough space for a small, ‘built-in’ wardrobe, desk and bed. There was a good spot on the windowsill for a couple of indoor plants. Mum gave me a fern when I left home for boarding school, back in February, and it had somehow survived. The farewell barbecue in our McIvor Street backyard was a faded memory, although I had a family photo pinned to the board above my desk, to remind me of home. It was a colourful, happy photo of me in the middle of Mum and Dad, arms around each other, smiling. It was the only photo I had of the three of us together. Next to it was one of Margie and Mum and me on a family holiday. I stopped writing to look closely at Mum; she was wearing a floral halter-neck dress I made for her, her smile forced. Looking closer, it appeared Margie and I were propping her up. At least now when I was away from home, hidden in the bush, I worried about her less. Maybe that was Dad’s plan.