My mother trusted me, or so she even convinced herself, though why she should, I cannot understand. There was little evidence for my trustworthiness.
I was the child who stole sweets from the shop my parents once owned in Healesville, crept inside the store attached to where we lived. A single room, with glass fronted cabinets, and shelves loaded with boxes of cereal, biscuits and tins of beans, spam, and spaghetti and all the stuff that was quick and easy to consume.
There was a tall fridge in one corner filled with soft drink and milk and shelves below the counters stocking loose stuff like sugar and flour. Cleaning agents, soap powder, cakes of body soap and deodorant.
When my younger sister and I were home alone, I led her astray while the others had gone to Mass.
In the shop we filled our pockets with chocolate coated liquorice bullets, a handful of long-lasting aniseed balls, red, green, and yellow snakes one for each finger and a fistful of Smarties, all stuffed into our pockets. Then skulked to our bedroom and gorged ourselves till we heard the family car pull up in the driveway.
The sound of the hand brake ripped into position, and we threw the leftovers out the window. A stupid move because one of my brothers found them there and dobbed on us. The first of my episodes of stealing.
On the second, a few years later when I must have been ten, my mother, refused to believe I was the child whom the milk bar man reported stealing lollies from his counter. More upmarket sweets, this time: chocolate bars and flakes, Violet Crumbles and entire blocks of Cadbury chocolate. These I scoffed alone while walking the nearby streets of Camberwell.
Still my mother trusted me, even when she had every reason not to. I was her namesake and something in the name led her to believe I was like her, good and holy, determined only ever to do the right thing.
Not so for me, though I could never tell her as much and given she did not want to know, it was easy for me to sneak out the back door at night a decade later after I had fallen in love with my first ever proper boyfriend.
Seven years older than me, he rented an apartment in Highett a couple of kilometres from where we then lived, and I snuck out at twilight before total darkness had descended.
My mother believed I was studying after I said ‘Goodnight. I’m off to my books.’ She never checked on us, my sister and me, before taking herself to bed. Or so I wanted to believe.
My father does not feature in this story. He was there in the background but for once I did not pay him any heed, and most of the night he was sleeping.
I made my way through the back streets of Cheltenham past the school, church, and factories onto the Nepean highway where my boyfriend lived. I spent the night in his arms. Or so I like to say, but you cannot trust me either.
I imagine we slept in the same bed after the usual peremptory sex, but I lacked experience, and he lacked the finesse of other men I came to know later over the years. But it was fun to behave in ways my mother despised. Breaking the laws of chastity until marriage, not letting her in on my secret.
As soon as early light crept into the sky, I pecked my sleeping boyfriend on the cheek and snuck through his front door back onto the gently glowing street. There were hardly any cars to accompany me on my long walk home.
Slipping beyond the back door at my home a door we never locked, I tiptoed up the hallway to my bedroom. Terrified that my mother, usually the first up, might suddenly appear. But she did not. Into my bedroom where my younger sister slept. I could trust her then to keep my secret. She opened her eyes and raised herself briefly to take one look at me then slipped back under her blankets for more sleep. I dragged on my nightie and crawled under the blankets.
My mother once told us the story of how during the Second World War when Nazis came to her parent’s home to check on the presence of able bodied men, such as her then young husband and brother, whom they wanted to enlist into their army, the two men hid in the roof cavity while the soldiers went from room to room feeling the sheets on beds to check whether they had been occupied recently.
My mother could have checked my sheets. They were ice cold when she snuck her head around our door to say good morning.
‘Time to get up,’ she said. ‘I hope you slept well.’
Something in the tone of her voice, or in my own knowledge of my night away left me wondering, did my mother know I had spent the entire night away with a man?
She never let on, and I never filled her in on my secret. To me ample proof, she could not trust me.
You sweep ideas from the floor like so much left-over rubbish.
As part of training, we made weekend trips interstate and met with other candidates in Sydney and from Adelaide. We flew to Sydney on the Saturday morning and arrived home late Sunday.
On one such return my husband met me at the airport bustling with weekend returnees, each shop bright and shining like the cosmetics counter at Myer. It’s a joke in my family. I do like travel, to go too far from home for too long but the smell and bustle of airports thrills me with an indescribable longing. It is enough for me to drive to the airport and hang about with people who are queuing up to leave or to wait in the arrivals lounge for international travellers and watch as weary people emerge through the sliding doors of customs loaded with cases and pushing heavy trolleys and scanning the crowd for a loved one or anyone they might recognise to ferry them home.
It’s always home I imagine, though many people arrive here for holidays. The holidays makers are obvious and don’t attract my attention the way family reunions release tears from the back of my eyes.
It must have to do with those early visits to Essendon airport when I was a child. The silver plane taxied onto the tarmac, and we watched from inside as travellers straggled along the tarmac. Among them my grandfather, my aunt and her new husband, her children. Another uncle who had spent years first in the Belgian Congo then in Indonesia on rubber plantations. They arrived in Australia for six weeks once every few years and created an atmosphere of such joy, especially for my mother.
I associated their arrival with aeroplanes and airports. Equally the day they left and returned home and my mother’s abjection, especially when her father flew off that last time, and she knew she would never see him again.
Airports are like this, replete with human triumphs of connection and despair. The despair that comes of loss and disconnection.
We had been to Sydney for a weekend of seminars and while there my husband rang to tell me one of our colleagues told us her husband had reported her children had picked up lice at school.
In the arrivals lounge people milled around. Her daughter ran to hug her, but she pushed her aside. How heartless to treat her daughter as though she had leprosy and could not be touched.
A week later we discovered our daughters also had lice. A common enough occurrence in the transition between winter and summer and its reverse. The nit nurse arrived at school to check the heads of girls to make sure each child’s parents complied with the protocol of nit removal.
Kp7, a foul-smelling petroleum-based lotion to fumigate the head, left on for ten minutes, a good rinse out then the arduous comb through with a fine-tooth metal nit comb. Under a bright light to avoid missing any.
We hated the process, parents, and children alike, but it became routine. One I described to my analyst Mrs Milanova in a session the following week. It was a Monday after a weekend of nit removal which I told her about in detail.
The next day I came and saw she had put an extra pillowcase on top of the pillow where I usually rested my head.
I was incensed. Didn’t she know I had treated my hair and my husband’s hair along with our children’s as we were advised? Didn’t she know my husband had checked my hair and I his to be sure neither had nits? Didn’t she know I was vigilant and continually assessing the state of my daughters’ hair to be sure they were free of nits? And here she was treating me as though I might have them.
‘It’s a precaution,’ she said, after I objected to the extra pillowcase. And I knew she was thinking of the others, the ones who came before and after me and I hated her for it. I hated them for it. I wanted to be the only one, or at least not to be reminded so blatantly that I was the infected one, the one she needed to protect others from.
In retrospect I can see the overreaction of my feelings. But my sensitivity to anything coming my way from Mrs Milanova’s words or hands left me prone to fits of shame so vast, you could fill a room. Nits were nothing.