Author: Elisabeth

A childhood puzzle

‘It makes me cold to look at you,’ my mother said when the grass outside was thick with dew and the wind blew down the back streets from off the desert. I was in shirtsleeves and open toed sandals and although this wind came in over thousands of miles, it must have travelled overnight when the temperatures dropped to zero and the wind was full of ice and hinted at Antarctica.

‘It makes me cold to look at you,’ my mother said, and in her words I sensed the puzzle of my childhood:

Where did I begin and end? How could the cold wind on my skin, the chill through my bones become my mother’s cold?

Besides, I was not cold. I had the metabolism of a ten-year-old, a fit and lean ten-year-old who ran everywhere, even when walking was enough.

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In those days of winter cold, my hopefulness kept me warm. Until grade six and the early morning regulation milk at recess when for the first time I recognised the cold at the tips of my fingers.

No gloves in those days, just pink fingers that grew red and itchy the more I clung to the milk bottle.

I needed to give my bottle a shake to dislodge the frozen wad of cream on top. And soon enough my pink then red fingers lost all sensation.

‘Shake your hands,’ mother Perpetua said. ‘Shake them up and down. That way you’ll get your circulation going.’

She did not tell us to put down our milk bottles first and given my tendency to do as I was told, and given my fingers were useless, I used my elbows to shake the milk bottle of ice and free my hands from the grip of their numbness.

Milk went everywhere, not only over my jumper and tunic, but over the jumper and tunic of the girl who sat beside me and worst of all a projectile of milk shot across the quadrangle where we sat. It landed on Mother Perpetua’s habit.

Blobs of cream glistened in the thin morning sun, not only on the asphalt in front of me but all the way down Mother Perpetua’s black robes and even on her black shoes.

She reached for the rosary beads at her waist and from her pocket dragged out an enormous white handkerchief with which she wiped the individual beads as if she was reciting the rosary.

But she was not serene as when in prayer. Her eye brows furrowed into one long line of black under the stiff white band that ran across her forehead and held her hair in place and out of sight.

She sighed.

I did not know what to say. My milk bottle was empty.

No longer did I need to drink but the relief I felt at being spared the cold down my throat and in my hands did not protect me from the scowl on the face of the nun that stays with me until this day and reappears in dreams when I know that I have been a sinner and can never be forgiven.

The best year of my life

In the year I turned seventeen, my mother left my father again and this time their separation lasted an entire year.

We were used to weekends away during which my father binged to the point of eruption.

It began on Friday nights when he came home from his work in the city night with not one brown paper bag but two or three, a bottle of brandy per bag and he proceeded to drink them all one after the other until he became alternatively comatose or volcanic with rage.

By Saturday morning it wasn’t safe to stay and my mother bundled the last of us who lived at home, my younger sisters, brother and me onto the bus and we took off to Ivanhoe to stay with an uncle and his family or to Brighton to spend the weekend with another uncle.

Once my other brothers were old enough we might go to stay with one of them, but only for the weekend.  Rarely did it lapse into the week though there were times when my father extended his bender, beginning earlier in the week, missing work and forcing us out before the weekend had even begun.

For all these reasons, my second oldest brother who by then showed the makings of a successful businessman, with a wife, children and home of his own, organised for my mother to rent a house on the beach so we could stay away for good.

I think of this year, my final year at school, as the best year of my life.

We lived away from my father, so things were predictable. We had next to no money; I was used to that, but we could sit up late at night in the kitchen or living area and read or talk or listen to music without any fear.

My mother had told me she married our father because he looked marvellous in his uniform, as if these things mattered to her. She mattered to him more it seemed in so far as he had agreed to become Catholic to marry her and went through hours of religious instruction to pass the tests necessary before baptism.

He proved himself that way at least, but even in their early days, my mother described times when he would become moody, when he refused to speak to her for days. She’d done something wrong she could tell, but he did not say what and she had no idea what caused the distance and subsequent cruelty.

You couldn’t have known what was to come from their wedding day.

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As Alain de Botton argues, we need to be pessimistic when it comes to our choice of partners. My parents were no exception.

Whenever I see YouTube clips about domestic violence, stories that warn people of the tell tale signs, the possessiveness, the wish to isolate a partner from her supports, the slow insidious march of invective that stirs up within the abuser who in time comes to undermine everything his partner stands for, I think of my mother.

I have no memories of my father speaking to my mother in anything other than the negative. She was dumb and stupid, a whore, a terrible cook, a worthless piece of junk. His insults were endless and predictable to the point my mother believed them.

Perhaps that is why she went back to my father time and again. Perhaps that’s all she thought she was worth. Perhaps even after we had lived in the house by the sea for many months and she took the bus to her work along warrigal Road and saw our father in the front garden watering his plants she forgot his past cruelties and her heart rushed out to him.

He had lost weight she told me, as if to justify her nightly visits while the rest of us slept. When unbeknown to us she took taxis all the way back to our family home to visit our father who by then had sworn off drinking – again.

My mother lost weight, too. The two of them, slowly disappearing without one another and yet we all knew and perhaps she did too, should she go back to our father and drag the rest of us still living at home along with her it would only be a matter of time before his benders began again.

A miracle she said whenever our father was able to stop drinking for more than a week or two, a miracle a sign from God that all would be well now. My father had changed. He would no longer hurt us or criticise her or give us grief. He was a changed man.

It never lasted until that last stretch when only one child was left at home. It was only after all the children were gone that my father was able to give up drinking altogether and only then five years before he died.

Was it our fault he drank? He said as much often, nine bloody children, as if we had appeared on his doorstep like a load of debt that someone else had run up against his name.

As if it had nothing to do with him.