Author: Elisabeth

A writer is someone who pays attention to the world. Susan Sontag.

My analyst’s room was a sunroom, separated from her double storey home by a wooden veranda. She lived in a suburban side street, walking distance from the beach. It was surrounded by windows and took in the sun. Cosy even in winter.

At the end of the bed she used as her analytic couch, she placed a vase of flowers, fresh each week. Gerberas on long stalks held up by green florist wire. Shop bought roses and stately bunches of lilies. Whatever was in season. 

I visited this room almost daily for twelve years, apart from during the long breaks over Christmas and Easter and when she took time off mid-year for two weeks at a stretch.

I rarely looked around her room, or at her, too embarrassed by my physical presence to manage the assaults of shame that came upon me, especially during the early years. I never asked to use her toilet which was outside the sunroom in the garden. I could not bear she should see my body move.

We talked about this fear and my decision to visit toilets in the nearby shopping centre rather than use hers, as a throwback to the days when the nuns gave an impression of never eating and of not needing toilets, a sign of virtue. To have a body that visited a toilet was to feel shame. 

It’s hard to see myself as I was then, from the outside.

I scurried like a possum into sessions and looked only in the direction in which I headed. I rarely glanced at Mrs Milanova and dived onto her couch for safety, free from her gaze.

I craved her attention and sensed I had it all the time I was there. I felt her presence and her interest with an intensity I have never known before or since. She gave me all her time and energy.

Thirty years have passed and I view the world through different eyes. Now I dare to look around me and see others, including Mrs Milanova whom I rarely meet these days, but hold in mind. 

This day then is the culmination of what I describe as a bad week.

It began on the Monday with a police person arriving at my door to examine a car I had reported the day before.

This car a 1996 Corolla, had clocked just over 100,000 kilometres but was well past its use by date for energy efficiency and safety, but proved useful when we needed an extra car. So, we kept it parked in a side street near to our house. An embarrassment.

Years before our daughters were grown and first learning to drive, my husband feared we might wind up with a line of wrecks in the side street belonging to our children who could not afford decent cars at the time. 

The only wreck that remains is this once white corolla, now so stained, the police could not detect fingerprints on the outside or inside the window.

Would be thieves had ripped apart the front console in a bid to get the wires fixed to start the car, without success, and so the car remains, an eye sore on the street and one we must deal with soon.

The police knocked at my door, and I answered while mid-way through my bank transaction. I had rung my daughter earlier, the one in whose name the broken-into car remains, to let her know. 

She did not answer, so I left a text telling her about the car.

Minutes later I received a message from someone whom I assumed was this daughter, though in retrospect the sender did not use my daughter’s name, and only said something about having a new number as her old phone was waterlogged.

I made the mistake of texting said number and asking if it was her permanent number. The person purporting to be my daughter, whom I believed was my daughter, messaged back to say it was permanent and ‘she’ was having a hard time getting a couple of bills that needed payment that day.

Foolish me, I messaged back to ask if I could help. Perhaps cover the accounts and she could later reimburse me.

That’d be helpful, my pseudo daughter texted back. I’ll send details.

Then I proceeded to go through the transaction, even as my pseudo daughter asked for $1950.00 in one payment to a strange name with an odd reference number.

The police interrupted at my door before I had a chance to press send. I returned five minutes later, after the police confirmed there was nothing they could do about the car. No CCTV footage and no fingerprints, the incomplete transaction was almost ready to go. The transaction was still in place.

The bank sent a security code then and I named my daughter as remitter.

I pressed send when my account froze. A message popped up from the bank saying there was suspicious activity, and I needed to ring the bank to clarify.

First up, I called my son in law, to ask if his wife’s phone was broken. Not at all, he said, and I knew I’d been scammed.

The rest is history, as in the long phone call to the fraud people at the bank and my sadness at the fact money had left my account. I had been tricked.

The bank person said they’d do their best to recover the money, but it might take thirty days.

As it was, the money was back in my account within three days

The scammers wiped all calls from my phone, but I’m grateful the bank was onto this activity, as much as I felt foolish for falling for the trick of the ‘Hey Mum’ text message. 

The day deteriorated further, or at least the next day. The next day my younger daughter who lives with us had noticed the cat, who has lived with us for twenty years, was poorly.

The cat had been thin and emaciated for some time but always ate well and continued to live a cat-like life of sleep and occasional demands for cuddles. After my daughter noticed the cat move to the garden and curl into a ball to sleep outside in the freezing cold, she reckoned it had gone off to die.

My daughter decided then to take the cat to the vet who agreed it was time to put the cat down, a gentle euthanasia rather than a slow cold death in the garden.

This cat had started its life as a feral, born in the bushes surrounding a car park and rescued from children who threatened its nest, by hitting it with sticks. My elder daughter rescued the cat and four others kitten, including their mother.

All cats were rehomed after visits to a vet for treatment and de-sexing and this one lived with her cat sister here for many years.

Mollie cat died during covid, and the other cat, Nousha (below) hung on till this end.

It was sad but also a relief. Noush was tired of living.

It was also a relief when the money returned to my bank account. It will be a relief when we sort out the damaged car and then hopefully this week will be over.

Just now I spent fifteen minutes in the kitchen with my younger daughter and her boyfriend. My husband was buried in the newspaper but he too participated as we tried to answer the 25 questions on The Age Quiz. 

To my mind we did not do well, getting 16 out of 25 correct, but that’s the way of it. You need to practise such quizzes and over time you improve. Still it was fun pitching our minds together to answer questions like how often the Eiffel tower gets painted. 

Trivia of life but nothing compared to our recent trials which are also trivial compared to the trauma of childhood everywhere and the pain that can lead some people into therapy or analysis. And that first led me up the footpath to Mrs Milanova’s house in 1986.

Buried alive

The squish of jelly fish on crumbling sand under my feet bothered me more than sharks, until I saw the film Jaws. Then for years I found myself scanning the horizon for signs of a triangular fin menacing the water’s surface. 

Years earlier, in summer we took the blue Ventura bus along Warrigal Road and jumped off before it turned towards Mentone shopping centre to walk the last stretch before our first sight of blue water curving its way towards the peninsula.

It wasn’t a popular beach as beaches go, but good enough for us, even on weekends in summer when you could barely find a spot to sit among the towels, umbrellas, and bodies.

Father Walsh drove us during the holidays when my sister was home from college. He parked his grey valiant in the side street alongside St Bede’s College, as if the sight of that venerable institution reminded him of his calling. 

I did not know this then, only that a trip to the beach in a car, in anyone’s car other than my father’s, was an exquisite pleasure to be savoured even as the seats were sticky hot and there was scarcely room on the back seat to breathe, jammed against two sisters and one brother or whichever of the kids made the trip with us. 

The water sparkled and the breeze whipped up eddies that frothed white like a row of marching girls in formation. 

At thirteen that awkward age between childhood and adolescence when your body is pushing itself out of shape from the thin angularity of your child self into some hideous shape I did not recognise, with fleshy bits here and there on my hips and bum and breasts pushing against my nipples. My bathing suit tight against my back was ready to burst at the seams. 

‘You’ll need a new one,’ my sister said, ever the one to notice, as if she was keeping an eye on me while I kept a closer eye on her. The way she moved beyond that awkward age into something I did not recognise. She was still short, not much taller than me, but she was rounded and wore bras. She wore a girdle like our mother, waist to thigh, with an add on suspender belt that kept her stockings in place. 

Dreadful things. I never wanted to wear one and as soon as panty hose hit the shelves I wanted no more of the dreaded strip of fabric you tied around your waist with bits dangling from front and back of your thighs to clasp onto stockings. When those bobbles broke off, as they invariably did in winter, when fawn coloured stockings were essential against the cold. Long brown socks were okay, but the older girls laughed at them by the time you were my age. 

On this day, no one was thinking about stockings or pantyhose. On this bright blue day with white clouds chasing one another in little tufts across the sky, the sun high and brightest yellow, it hurt my eyes. We thought only of reaching the water, sharks, and all. 

We swam. We splashed one another and the last one in shuddered at the indignity of an involuntary splashing. You did well to take control by leaping under the water without hesitation, while my sister and Father Walsh sprawled side by side on towels deep in conversation.

I wanted to be with them as much as I wanted to be in the water with the others. As if on cue the two oldies on the sand, my seventeen years old sister and the priest, no longer recognisable as a priest, in his navy-blue swimming trunks, nudged their way into the water. They could have been any other couple. He older, judging by the creases in his skin, but equally matched for vigour and a certain pleasure in each other’s company that I longed to share.

Home was a disappointment after Father Walsh took his leave. My sister retreated to her room alone and the rest of us propped in front of the television until the click of the front door and a shadow falling across the lounge room signalled my father. His shadow visible through the half open venetian blinds.

We switched off the TV as if by remote, in the days before remote controls, and scattered first to the kitchen, to the back yard, the two boys, and me and my sister, once our father was clear of the hall way, into our bedroom for safety.

My mother hummed in the kitchen as she boiled rice on the stove in readiness for nasi goreng, a recipe she brought from Holland. A recipe her family borrowed from the Indonesians whose land they had conquered.

In the late 1940s my father fought in Indonesia when the people there decided they wanted no more of colonial control. And the experience added to the pain of his participation in the war against German invasion. 

He brought those wars home and sat sullen in the front room grunting orders at my mother as if she was his inferior by rank while the rest of us knew to stay clear.

We were not guerrillas but needed the stealth of undercover fighters to protect us from his fury. It bubbled under the surface of his tired white shirts, brown around the cuffs and collar from wear. He ripped off his tie and let it fall to the ground beside his black shoes, which he had already kicked off. 

It was always the same. My father drank to a pattern. He kept the bottle in its brown paper bag even as he used a glass for its contents, as if he was tearing open a chocolate bar and breaking off bits to keep the rest for later.

He drank the lot in one sitting, slowly at first. You could gauge his mood as he spoke lightly to our mother at first sip as though she mattered. Only she knew as we knew, in no time, the gaiety of that first drink would shift to an irritation, as if something was scratching at his skin. Then into fury as if someone was kicking his shins. Finally to the vitriol that left my mother silent in her chair. Wary of any provocations, as he could not abide anyone’s existence, including his own.

Father Walsh was long gone by then. My sister bunkered down in her bedroom. I in my bed hidden behind an Edgar Allan Poe mystery as if I was looking for something that might scare me more than the tension in the house. 

A man buried alive.

I cannot think today that I should ever want to read such stories but in those days they offered a respite from life. As if they became my entry into a crazy state, when we knew only horror.