Author: Elisabeth

Bombs, birds and twenty firsts

I don’t remember the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I wasn’t born yet, but the other day talking about the war in Ukraine, a colleague told me the instigators named the first bomb ‘Little Boy’ and the second ‘Fat Boy’. Such sinister names for sinister entities that wiped out millions of lives in the moment and beyond

I have had multiple encounters this week with people extolling the virtues of categorising, of diagnosis, of giving something a label. It riles me even as I found myself on another walk with the dogs collecting corella feathers. They’re scattered over the nature strips around our neighbourhood, under trees. 

I felt like a child looking out for each feather, white with yellow traces on the edges, small or large. I compared the condition of each quill, clean or ratty. The smaller ones pure white with fluffy down at their roots. 

My daughter reminded me when I came home that bird feathers carry disease and in this time of Covid I shuddered. But my other urge during the time of Covid and while out walking dogs has been to collect abandoned masks.

There are many of them strewn far and wide across the streets. Whenever I walk, I play a game in my head called ‘spot the mask’. Most walks I will encounter at least two or three and some of them superior masks, cloth made, not just the throw away.

I do not touch them for fear of contamination, a fear that goes back to the early days of Covid where every single surface threatened to contain traces of the dreaded virus and handwashing became a national pastime.

I’m less paranoid about the masks on the ground and about the bird feathers but even then I washed my hands after I stowed my feathers in a vase.

Emily Dickinson writes that Grief is ‘that thing with feathers’. Grief or hope or some other such virtue. I can’t remember which, but I relish the idea of anything with feathers. They allow us to fly, beyond the ordinariness of our tired and tawdry lives, to soar high above rooftops and away into other places.

In the year I turned 21, my boyfriend’s mother offered to host a barbeque in her back garden to celebrate my coming of age. During this year of twenty-firsts most of my contemporaries celebrated their birthdays in various ways, usually a party at their parents’ home, or for the wealthier ones in a restaurant somewhere. The stag and hounds in Templestowe, The Willow restaurant in Albert Park. Posh places to honour their child’s arrival into adulthood. 

It seemed a good idea at the time. My boyfriend’s mother made salads. My boyfriend bought the sausages and mince which his mother converted into patties and slipped between several slices of fresh white bread. There was red tomato sauce and yellow mustard laid on tables replete with potato crisps and Twisties for the snackers. There was beer and wine, red and white, plus a small quantity of champagne for the toasts. Lemonade for the non-drinkers and children.

I helped to blow up balloons, including some my boyfriend tied to trees in the back garden and a bunch of them at his letter box in the front to signify a party about to happen in this house.

Most of the balloons had burst by the time our visitors arrived.

My memories of this event are thin. No colourful details to add. No amazing events when I look back on the photos someone took, copies of which I still hold in my green photo album, the chronicle of my childhood into early adulthood. Among them I see my younger brother as a fourteen-year-old, mullet haircut and looking fresh and happy alongside my youngest sister. Not much older than him and every bit a teenager. Elsewhere there are photos of university friends, people I have not seen in forty years and all of them full to the brim with the pleasure of enjoying someone else’s party. 

For isn’t this the way of things. It’s a joy to celebrate another’s birthday but our own birthdays are bittersweet. For me almost unbearable that year when I turned twenty-one.

Someone told me I’d need to make a speech and the thought infiltrated my mind throughout the first half of proceedings, so much so I imagined a glug of whiskey to the tune of a glass full might give me the courage I needed to speak fluently to my friends.

As it was, all I could do was blurt out a few words of thanks and I was done. The prickles of anxiety, the red-hot shame that shot through me as I stood up, the centre of attention that night could not be softened by the weight of several ounces of neat whiskey. It only made things wiorse.. 

After I had embarrassed myself by having nothing of any worth to say beyond the trite thankyou that are a speech maker’s staple I slunk inside. I found my way into the darkened lounge room and there on the carpeted floor beside my boyfriend’s mothers’ armchair, I had a little kip.

Just a few moments to sleep off the whiskey which by now had entered my blood stream like a deadweight. My mind slipped out of gear into a fuzzy blur and all I could do was close my eyes. Hours later my boyfriend shook me awake.

‘People were looking for you,’ he said. ‘They wanted to say goodbye.’

He was not bothered by this it seemed to me then. Nor was his mother who stood at the door, now draped in her pink dressing gown, hair pulled back ready for bed. She did not look as though I had committed the crime of abandoning my own party, the one she had arranged for me.

No one said a word about my absence which in some strange way only made things worse. As if what I had done was so bad it needed to be filed away in the wardrobe of unmentionables where it might gather dust and lose all toxicity.

I have celebrated other birthdays since, mostly the big markers, the ones that are multiples of five and ten, the thirties, forties, fifties and sixties, but I do not enjoy such events. Bittersweet pointers to our arrival into the world. They mark the beginning of our lives, at least of our lives in the world and are a constant reminder of the passage of time until we die.

It’s the first question a person asks when we hear the news of a death: how old were they? How many years had they been visible on this earth? 

It is a marker for how much grief we might then extend. If they managed to hit their eighties or nineties, even their seventies or sixties, we can give a sigh of relief.

At least they had a long enough life. But if they did not make it to twenty-one, if they only managed years in single digits, if their lives were cut off in their prime, we lament all the more fiercely for what might have been. A life like a house demolished too soon, its doors flung open to the elements.

In a movie the other day I watched a young girl kiss the envelope containing her first piece of writing before she shoved it into the slot of a red post box. Elsewhere, someone in another movie, talked about how you might put your wish into a bottle. Then ship it off to sea. 

Or turn your bottle into a type of genie. When you rub the sides or open its cork a genie pops out, and voila, you have three wishes. 

A wish in a bottle without a genie speaks to me of the blue/green of oceans and a glass container that has made its way over the water and past many lands to find itself on some remote coastline.

To be found by some unlikely person, usually a child, who will unravel your note, cherish your words, and bring your voice into the light of the day. 

That’s not my only wish these days. I have a far greater wish percolating away, though I’m not now free to say.

Early in 1993 when Paul Keating brought the Labour party back into office for a final term, I sensed my luck was in. I knew I was carrying the speck of an infant inside my belly but fearful it might slip away, just as its predecessor had done months before.

I had anticipated an early menopause at 42 and that I might never enjoy the pleasure of another baby in my arms. I kept this wish to myself, until I was certain this speck had every chance of coming to fruition. 

This little wish is now 28 years old.

Otherwise, my wish today takes the form of getting my book out into the world. I wish with the same fervent hope I wished as a child when I prayed to God to let something good happen, or else in the case of my father, to stop something bad from happening. 

To this end I slipped a tiny bubble of what I believed was Lourdes water from my Holy Communion rosary beads into my father’s tea one Sunday morning after Mass. As he sipped his tea, I watched him through the corner of my eye and imagined a man transformed. 

Typically, on Sunday mornings after he had run out of alcohol the night before and was by then beginning to sober up, my father tended to be a quiet and considered man. A chastened man. A man who gave no trouble to anyone, least of all, to my mother. He became a man who drank tea, laced on this day, not with alcohol, but with Lourdes water. 

Then, for several days, after my father did not bring home the brown paper covered bottle from work, and I began to hold out hope that my efforts at a miracle had worked. That the tiny drop of water taken from a stream near where Bernadette met her apparition of the Virgin Mary in a grotto in France, became a wish fulfilled.

For a while I had decided on Bernadette as my Confirmation name, but after ten days of sobriety, my father brought back his brandy in its usual paper bag and resumed his usual weekly late weekly drinking that culminated in blind rages on Saturday. So I changed my mind about Bernadette.

A few years later I chose another name, Veronica. After the woman who offered her veil to Jesus on his way up the hill. He had dragged his heavy wooden cross from the garden of Gethsemane, along the streets of Jerusalem and onto his crucifixion. The image of his blood-stained face was imprinted on the fabric forevermore. The shroud of Turin. The veil is still supposed to exist, but I no longer believe in such miracles. 

At the time, when I took on Veronica’s name to add to my already heavy first and ‘Christian’ names of Elisabeth, Margaretha and Maria, I had no real expectation of anything other than a life of sorrow.

It was not fair, I concluded. My mother had enjoyed a wonderful childhood, or so she told us often, with her virtuous parents who tended their many children well. 

Their huge house, nestled on the cobbled streets of Haarlem, with skiing in winter, and boating in summer. With fields of tulips against long flat fields filled with potatoes. My mother’s childhood had been one of uninterrupted joy. Or so she led us to believe. 

Impossible I now know but I bought the idea as a child and my mother enjoyed the telling of her stories, the idealisation of her past, just as her present became increasingly hideous, here in Australia, so far from her beloved parents and stuck with a man who accused her often of being one of those women who took money from men. 

As if she could, I reasoned. She did not look like such a woman, if such a look existed but I had seen images of the ‘whores’ of my father’s fantasy on the television and they were thin and wore thick black makeup around their eyes, with reddened lips, and they leaned against the walls of city buildings in wait. 

My mother never went into the city as far as I could tell, or certainly not alone. And she never waited. She had no time. Sure, she could slow down, but only to read the newspaper, or in later years, a book.  

My mother could not have been the things my father said she was. And her wishes were simple enough. Mostly she wanted a new house in which to live. A house they owned, not rented, like the one we inhabited in Wentworth Avenue. 

But even after her dream came true and the money from the sale of their first house in Greensborough came through, many years later and my father was able to buy a place in Cheltenham, a brand-new home, the fortunes of my mother’s life in adulthood did not improve. 

So, I reasoned, a happy childhood begets an unhappy adulthood. And by this simple childhood logic I deduced that an unhappy childhood, such as mine, should surely be met by a happy adulthood.

Now I know such simple divisions of happy and unhappy do not exist. Instead, wishes belong to the realms of luck.

They may, or may not, come true.