Category: Life

The bottom drawer

My mother hid the tape recorder in the bottom drawer below the bookshelves.

‘This way we’ll be able to prove to him how bad he gets.’

I had been recording my father’s words for weeks. Night after night, I wrote down his crazy words after I had finished my homework at the kitchen table. I wrote his words on pink scraps of paper that I had peeled from my sister’s note pad and collected them together in the back of my Story of Art for safekeeping.

Unlike my mother who planned to play back my father’s words to him on Sunday morning after his binge, I decided to keep my scraps of paper until in adulthood, when I planned to get them into print so that all the world could hear what I had to endure along with my mother and sisters over all those years.

The bookshelves were top heavy with books mostly with Dutch titles, books my parents had brought with them from Holland when they came ten years earlier.

The books were out of date then but they were a way of staying connected to home, or so my mother told me, a way of remembering her culture in this awful country where men and women sat on opposite sides of the room at parties; the shops were all closed by six o’clock at night and on weekends; and there were no outdoor cafes where you could sip your coffee on the footpath and watch the passers by.

The idea of the tape recorder in the bottom drawer bothered me. What if my father heard it click into position. Not that he could over the hubbub of the television which was blaring all day on Saturdays.

Knowing we were spying on my father, gave me a sense of power I had not felt before.

It gave me a sense I was standing shoulder to shoulder with a group of people from the parish or whoever else my mother might tell, like spies hidden behind the wall paper of the lounge room listening to my father rant.

All afternoon, after opening his first botte of brandy, he slept and woke, woke and slept.

After that first long stretch of sleep in his chair I heard my father and saw his silhouette through the frosted glass door that led into the kitchen.

I was seated at my usual place at the kitchen table, my homework in front of me and learning the French declensions, trying to translate Virgil’s Aeneid into half decent English and reading about the wife of Bath in her Canterbury journeys.

All the while, I had an ear cocked to the door, ready for my father’s words.

I planned to keep up with the recorder with my pencil in hand, and my slips of paper at the ready, tucked into the back of my art book.

Not only did the recorder in the bottom drawer act as a shield, my schoolbooks all around me felt like a wall of other people’s ideas I had built to protect me from my father’s voice.

‘Where’s my dinner?’ my father said to my mother who just then walked into the lounge room in search of the newspaper.

‘It’s too early for dinner,’ my mother said. ‘But if you’re hungry I can get you something.’

My mother’s voice was steady but I sensed a tremble behind every word and imagined the recorder in the bottom drawer soaking in the sound.

‘You’re a stupid woman,’ my father said. ‘You never do anything. You and your bloody children.’

The rant ran into sentences and paragraphs enough to fill entire books. My mother said little and her words only inflamed my father’s rage.

We were at the tail end of summer, late February and school was beginning again with all the excitement of a new year.

I wondered what the nuns at school would make of my situation while I wrote as neatly as I could into the pages of my exercise book.

They could not see us. Nor could the tape recorder take in the full measure of my father’s madness as he began to take off his clothes.

He started with shoes and socks. Then peeled off his shirt. His chest looked hollow and thin, the ribs showing when I caught sight of him on his way to the toilet.

He came back naked and walked around the house, pink and menacing.

I imagined him then push up against me with full force so that I might feel the sticky weight of his arms and legs against mine.

What might he do with his penis?

I looked down to my schoolbooks to my wall of protection against this man and wished only that we not only had a record of his words, we also had a camera.

The frailty of friendship

When she sent me the email, I thought I could die. Her words so simple on the page were full of poison.

‘You were mistaken,’ she wrote, ‘to think I had not received your email. You were mistaken. I have simply chosen to ignore it.’

I sat at the keyboard frozen. I had tried to reach out across the gulf of oceans, across the gulf of skies, to make contact yet again, after two years of silence and all she wanted to say to me was ‘Go away’.

You’re not wanted in my life. You’re not welcome.

I had found the eggshell by the side of the road on the small strip of grass called the nature strip. Someone must have mowed it recently but they had not done a good enough job. Bits of grass sprouted at the edge by the gutter, like a badly cut hairdo. Long weeds stuck out from under the sprawling ti-tree in the middle. The ti-tree had grown in that straggly ungainly way of trees when they are close to the sea.

I found the shell on the grass between the ti-tree and the gutter. It was pale blue and speckled in green. Its edge was crusted with the egg yolk yellow of the embryo that once must have been tucked inside.

I do not know what made me pick it up. Some sense of its fragility, its beauty, its connection to the earth. Instinctively I took it to my nose. It smelt the way a stone smells when you breathe on it. It carried the smell of wind and rain, the grassy smell of a hot day after a heavy soak.

I stroked its smoothness. A tiny bit crumbled from the edge and fell to the ground. I would keep the shell, I decided then, as a souvenir of her.

A souvenir of the day I last saw her, the last time she held my hand.

‘You can’t just leave like that,’ I had said. ‘You can’t just go.’

‘I must,’ she said. ‘My mother is dying. But I’ll be back.’

That’s what she said then. She said it, I heard her words loud and clear. I heard her make the promise.

‘I’ll be back. Soon,’ she said. ‘I swear. Besides I have to be back for the next exhibition. I have too much at stake.’

At first she wrote me long loving letters, on purple notepaper in her fine spidery scrawl.

My mother is up and down, she wrote. She’s frail. Not long now.

I was understanding then.

What daughter could leave her mother to die alone? I was understanding then that I must be patient. I had cradled my eggshell in a piece of tissue paper in an old soapbox in the bottom of my study drawer.

From time to time I looked at it, as I look at it now. It was fading fast. The hard shell around the thin milky inner skin had come away. My half shell had become a quarter. Soon it would be fragments.

A year ago she sent a note and inside enclosed a card containing all the details of her mother’s life and death.

Her letters came fewer and further between, their content thinned to a list of her activities, those she had seen, what she had done.

No longer did she share with me the inner workings of her mind.

I thought of her often. Every time a new exhibition opened at the gallery, I wondered why she had not comeback to exhibit her work, why she had decided that Germany could offer so much more to her than here with me.

I looked up her name on the Internet, nestled in among the names of other print makers. I found her alongside the famous, Monique Gilbre, Antonia Boudin, and knew then I had lost her.

There was an email address at the foot of the page alongside her name and a copy of the details of her latest exhibition.

It would be easy to reach her.

Letters are slow, I thought.

Letters lose their passion, letters cannot convey the urgency of my need for her, but an email. A message now shot from the heart. A call that could cross the ether, that would bring her back to me, would bring a message back to me.

I waited a month, a month maybe two. But I did not hear.

What could this mean? It must be a wrong address, a changed address. The university where she worked had a website and again I found her name with a new address. I sent her another email, a last arrow into the darkness, my last call.

And then her reply.

I was mistaken to think she still cared.

Here now, I peel the eggshell from its tissue.

I crush it inside the hollow of my hand. I rub the powdered grit into the small of my hand, one hand on the other, rubbing and rubbing until all trace of the shell has gone, pulverised, like the image of my friend, then I press the delete button.