‘Parents, despite their strongest resolutions, end up sounding like their own when they talk to their children.’ Gwyneth Lewis. Nightshade Mother: A disentangling.
Not the words. The vitriol in tone. The poison.
The other day in the kitchen and grating parmesan cheese for dinner, Gertie, the dog ran underfoot. She loves to lick parmesan flakes from the floor as they fall.
‘Ga weg,’ I said to her. ‘Go away.’
Then I qualified my tone, ‘Schat,’ which means sweetheart.
Childhood earworms from my Dutch mother tongue.
I often say them. Schiet op. Hurry up.
Vlug. Be quick.
Doe Niet zo dom. Don’t be so stupid.
Vies. Dirty, followed by a sound that might not be a word, so much as a grunt of frustration.
Veis bah. The bah pronounced like a sheep’s low bleat, but angry in tone.
Of all the Dutch words racing into my mind, there are only two whose tone is endearing:
Schat. Sweetheart, and its diminutive, schatje, alongside heerlijk which means delicious.
Mooi meisje, a pretty girl
Verschrikkelijk, something terrible,
Slechterik. A baddie. My mother points them out on the television screen.
Terms of derision or anger.
Not surprising when you consider the ease with which our parents admonish us with such words.
Most of these words emerge in my mother’s voice, even as she was the one renowned for her kindness. My father for his cruelty.
For some reason, I imagined all parents balanced out like this. Loving mothers, awful fathers. It seemed to play out in other families from my school, except for in one of my cousins’ families where both parents, my mother’s youngest brother and his Australian born wife, where both seemed kind. And another uncle who married a woman from Indonesia, Dutch born. She seemed ferocious towards her children, in a firm and disciplined way that left me in awe.
This family lived in Ivanhoe in the most amazing house. It teetered on a hill as if the house grew uphill. The top half was single storey and as the house ran downhill it formed into a second storey with a long veranda that spanned the upstairs section.
The veranda jutted over the sprawling downward slope of the garden while underneath covered a closed over section where the laundry lived. Where all their bikes, tools, and outdoor equipment sheltered.
This dark place was made even darker with hanging grape vines running across the veranda balustrades and down through a curtain of magnificence, green in summer, red in autumn, and in winter like the gnarled fingers of an old man all the way down. Lace work to peek through when we played outside in cold weather and a curtain of cool at the height of summer.
Inside the house, separating the kitchen from its living room to one side and dining room and lounge on the other, was a long fish tank. My uncle’s pride and joy. It housed tropical fish of all shapes and colours. Temperature controlled, there was a light shining on this tank day and night. It highlighted the iridescent blues of the angel fish with their black stripes and upper wispy angel wings to either side, and the blue and red of the Cardinal tetras darting back and forth.
I loved to watch the fish whenever a tiny streak of black appeared at their rear end. A fish mid poop. Their poop appeared in long thin strips or full stops of black that fell slowly to the base of the tank and were lost among the grains of sand and pebbles lining the base.
I could watch those fish for hours. The way they spooled from one end of their watery home to the other. My uncle had installed a miniature mock shipwreck at the base of the tank in one corner. In another, he erected a ramshackle concrete cave into which the fish swam and momentarily disappeared.
He alone was allowed to feed his fish, weekly as I recall, for fear of overfeeding. If you fed the fish too much, they did not remember they had eaten. Fish did not have brains or memories like us. They were likely to eat and eat and eat if they saw food. And if they kept on eating they would explode. Just like that. A balloon popping. Only fish had insides that would smatter all over the clean glass of the tank. It would not be a pretty sight.
I feared an over-fed fish as much as I disliked feeling over fed myself, which was rare except when I went to the few children’s parties to which I was invited.
There was one in grade six. Libby Howard’s birthday. She lived in a double storey 1950s cream brick house on Burke Road in Deepdene. To me the house was a palace. All these separate rooms, and downstairs a vast family room, which her parents had cleared of furniture and set up with a long table filled with food. All the traditional fare: party pies and sausage roles, fairy bread and angel wing cup-cakes, loaded with whipped cream and tumbling with bright red strawberry jam that spilled down the sides. Chocolate frogs in clear plastic beakers set, as if in a pond of green jelly, and Cheese Twisties, orange and crunchy, in a bowl alongside the golden yellow of crisp potato chips. And there were lollies.
I had never seen so many lollies in one place and marvelled the other kids did not fill their pockets with them but took only one or two snakes, or a handful of jelly beans, raspberry creams or smarties, while I longed to scoop handfuls into the deep pockets of my party dress for later.
I was lucky with this dress. One week earlier, Mother Mary John had told me during lunch time she had a parcel for me to take home at the end of the day. She gave me the brown paper wrapped object, squishy to touch, and told me to stash it in my bag. I was not to open it or examine its contents. Or show it to anyone. It was a secret and it was for my mother.
I did as I was told. But the parcel was not for my mother. The two party dresses inside would never fit her. One was my size, almost exactly, and the other, in pink, was two sizes smaller and fitted my younger sister.
I was lucky therefore to receive a birthday invitation to Libby Howard’s party. She invited the entire class. A chance to give my new dress a trial run. People, except for Rosemary Russo, whose father ran the green grocers in Ivanhoe, did not invite me to their parties. I figured because I was too shabby.
But here I was at Libby Howard’s in a party dress complete with layers of blue lace over a silk petticoat, fitted with pockets, one on either side and tucked away under a white sash. The pockets were deep enough to hold at least two full bags of lollies if I’d had the courage to snaffle them. I did not.
Instead, when no one was looking I ate them. And like the fish in my uncle’s tank, I could not stop. When it came time after all the party games: pass the parcel, pin a tail on the donkey, and musical chairs, for which Libby’s dad, not her mother, to my amazement, stopped and started the record on its turnstile, we sat in front of clean white plates with clown patterned napkins to eat our fill.
We were allowed to put anything we liked in our plates as long as we began with at least one savoury piece. A sausage roll would do, or a pie or piece of the fruit. Libby’s mother had cut the fruit into triangles and decorated the into a heart shape on a plate. Hulled strawberries, pineapple pieces, apples, and pear. With green grapes a plenty.
I chose little from this section. I wanted to fill myself with the stuff I rarely saw in such quantities, except in shop windows. The cakes and biscuits, the row upon row of chocolate eclairs. Chocolate icing over pastry that melted in my mouth. And the mountainous meringues, best of all for their sweet crispness, smattered with crushed mint chocolate freckles, and tinned passionfruit as sweet and tingling as the fruit tingle lollies Mrs Howard had opened from their life savers wrappers and added to the lolly bowls.
The ache in my gut in the evening when I returned home ruined it all. I felt like the fish before they exploded, only I never exploded and that night. In my memory at least, one of the nights of the long hard howling when my father took in too much drink and scared my mother. She holed us up in the bedroom I shared with my big sister. All seven of us and my mother on my bed against the wall.
The two biggest boys had left home by then. If only they were still at home, they would keep us safe. They were now nearly as tall as my father. They would not let him hurt us.
My mother in the dark corner of my bed tucked in as far away from the door as she could, huddled under one of the grey army blankets to ward against the night air that grew colder by the minute. And the window was too far away from the bed to leap across and escape into the night.
My father at the door, salivating like a wolf. He was angry at my mother, and the rest of us, her snivelling kids. He shouldn’t have had us. Too many brats and all because of our mother.
And she tried to ignore his presence at the door. We kids holding our breath in case our father should move beyond the door and come too close.
For reasons I never understood, it was enough for him to stand at the door and growl. As if he was planning to eat us all one by one, like the fish who could not stop eating. Only the fish were tiny and my father was huge and we were smaller than him but not so small that he could not slice us up one piece at time, beginning with my mother who seemed to disappear by the minute.
She clutched onto her rosary beads and when my father slammed the door shut behind him after one of his several visits she prayed the rosary out loud.
All the mysteries. Hail Mary full of grace….
And this was the night concertinaed in my mind alongside many other such nights when my big little brother Frankie jumped out of a window and walked around the streets alone until a police patrol car found him and took him home.
When the police rang on our bell and they brought Frankie inside, frowning at the idea of this small boy roaming the streets, my father changed his mood, and spoke to them politely. My mother came out too and told the police her husband had been drinking and he was violent.
The police went into the loungeroom and spoke sternly to our father. They told him to behave himself. They told our mother there was nothing they could do.
‘It’s a domestic,’ they said. ‘If he hurts you. If you have bruises to show. If there is blood, then we can take him to the station, but for now, it’s up to you.’
The night ended here in my memory.
With the fish still swimming in their warm bath through plastic tendrils of fake sea weed rippling to the top of the tank and my uncle tipping just the tiniest amount of dried fish food onto the surface of water.
Finally, we slept. My mother returned to her room, where he was snoring.
And although there were a few more muffles of discontent in this night of unsettled sleepers, the worst was over.
Till the next time.