Sawdust (18 page)

And then slowly we realised what was going on. And in the end all we could do was laugh and laugh and just laugh some more, realising it was not one insect in there but two – both of them intent on finishing what insects do. Replenishing the earth.

Those were some of the best memories of my life. So giddy, so absolutely liberating; I felt free and in charge of my own head.

Could it last? The moon hovered white and pasty above.

We believed in one another, Chris Pyke my shiny knight and I.
We were in love and we knew it because we could laugh and play and make love together at the same time. He was always there for me. Well, most of the time – if one remembers that little incident of the caravan.

And then one day, like all men, he asked that question: ‘Why did you let your father touch you?’ And I should have known. I should have known then. Rather than seeking understanding, he was... I don’t know, not quite angry but annoyed and mystified. Like other men. Like the rest of them.

‘I don’t know. I don’t know why,’ I replied, needing to think. Asking myself:
Why?... Why now? Just like this, out of the blue?
I felt like I was being judged all over again. Not just judged but accused. Life, love, mateship, nothing but nothing would ever let it go. He was no different to Brad, my first male friend, just a fella, just another fella who always thought the girl was somehow weak or just plain deviant or wrong – maybe even the coaxer, the temptress.

Yes, the temptress and teaser, like men never did anything wrong, never broke things, were only ever led by all these serpentine Eves in their magnificent Gardens of Eden to do ill.

Dad was right, in his way right again – no one would ever understand. But what they wouldn’t understand, just like him, is what
he
did,
he
did. It is a strange and immature thing, but it seems to me when some men grow up with an idea about women, about girls, the opposite sex, or get an idea about them put into their heads, it is like trying to cut through metal to change their thinking.

But in the end, Chris, like Brad, I guess out of expediency, perhaps out of love, I hope out of love, turned away from it, turned the other cheek. That is not to say that he forgave, or ever really understood, but that he stuck by me. Or was that
with
me? I don’t know, I really don’t, but he stayed the course, the long, long course, through thick and thin. Just plenty, plenty thick. Much more than I could have expected.

Who is to know these things? Who is to know what is below the shiny plating that men on white horses wear? You see the signs but you ignore them. You are a human being, needy, wishful of acceptance. But you find out in the end. It just takes time. So much time. It is slow. It can be gruelling. But I was used to gruel. I could stand it for long, long periods of time.

Chris joined the defence forces – the Royal Australian Air Force – in September 1979. He was sent to Edinburgh, South Australia, and I went to live in Brisbane with his relatives, so that I could feel closer to him while, for three months, he undertook his basic training.

At the end of that year he was posted to Melbourne, to do his radio technical training, later to be called avionics, at Laverton Base, and so I followed him there too. We lived together during that time, until July 1981 when Chris was posted to Newcastle, and of course I followed him there too.

It was obvious Chris and I were made for one another, and on January 2, 1982 we married in a chapel at Sandgate, near Brisbane. I was nineteen.

Exactly three days later, Chris was transferred again – this time to Malaysia. Talk about a honeymoon. Yes, exotic, it was exotic all right, in a different sort of way, because RAAF wives were at that time not allowed to work. Only have children.

One exciting thing about Malaysia was that my Grandad, Dad’s father’s grave was nearby, at the Kranji War Cemetery in Singapore. We went there for a visit once, and I found it. Not only did I find it, I unexpectedly found the whole experience very moving and kind of surreal.

Looking down at that white headstone with the ANZAC emblem on it I felt both dizzy and kind of elevated, knowing this man, my biological grandfather, died for something he believed in. He gave his soul to our way of life... the lucky country we live in today. And he did it despite Dad. With no thought to how he would turn out.

There it stood, that white headstone, and I saw it with my own two eyes – set against a yellow, buttery sun that looked like a bullet would never cross the air below. And yet so many died there. So many. It was something Dad would never do. See that heroic tomb. Never in his entire life would he see it except in that way he always saw things, by living and seeing inside me.

I am completely sure he must have seen it through my eyes as I lay my retinae on Grandad’s well-scrubbed but gallant tomb and thought of Dad drunkenly bayoneting and karate-kicking all those Jap bastards who killed his dad and changed his life forever. I wished that day I’d had the chance to know this man. This man – an Aussie hero – who gave seed to my dad. Perhaps the war could have come earlier and I would have been spared?

Because I couldn’t work in a paid job in Malaysia, I became a Red Cross volunteer and played sport. I loved the team interaction of playing in the netball and softball teams. I also won the ladies dart competition. Being involved in these things was good because I at least got to mix with other RAAF wives and other expats and saw a bit of the Malaysian world outside, a world which otherwise would have been denied me.

What wasn’t so good about this time was that the year we arrived turned out to be the year Aunty Bev died. I received a letter from Mum telling me the news. For once she communicated to me. That day, that night, was a sheer nightmare.

I walked about sad and crying, mourning from deep inside my gut for the woman I loved so much and who suddenly drifted away because of Dad’s misdeeds. And while this was going on, while Aunty Bev with her warm hands and cool eyes that never judged and only ever saw into the best parts of me, was fresh in her tomb, Chris, my shining RAAF husband was changing out of his Air Force blue, readying himself to go out with his pals on a boys’ night out.

‘What’s your problem?’ my knight shimmered, turning to me, his skin smoothly shaven, his moustache still drooping but now immaculately clipped.

Yeah, what was my problem? How long could a person mourn? An hour? Two hours? When I tried to tell him, he just fobbed me off. I was here and she was thousands of miles away. Plus I hadn’t seen Aunty Bev in years. That was true. That was the absolute truth. Other things were true too.

What, for example, did he know about those hands? Those hands which had warmed my skin, which had rushed like warm water through my brain in a world darkening with stones on all sides around me? What did he know about that smile? Those eyes, those grandmotherly eyes that looked not into my eyes but always into my heart? Those eyes that saw only the good in there? That breathed oxygen into a human soul?

Chris looked down at me with what I can only describe as an invisible upper lip that sat as cruel as a common pirate below that little moustache of his. His mouth gazed with a hidden tongue so bitter it sunk into my chest with the sting of a caning.

In front of his morose, puzzled face I felt I could not mourn. In front of him, Aunty Bev did not exist. He had better things to do. The boys – as boys do – were waiting. They would not wait for long. They would go on without him. I stared after him, seeing the back of his paisley shirt going through the front door. My knight, my knight in wild shining armour was at my side but was no longer at my side.

There was worse to come. I did not know it would happen so soon that my knight’s horse would fall over.

That night when he got home, I knew, I could smell it through his alcohol breath, I could see it on his still festering lips, the quickly dehydrating colour of his mouth, that he had been with another woman. I could just see it; nay, I could feel it. A woman knows these things even though men cannot figure out how. I didn’t scream or shout. Just looked him in the eye, questioning, silently.

As I lay beside him, that full and white Malaysian moonlight shining through our windows onto our faces, I asked why.
Why
?
He said he didn’t do anything, but I knew he was lying. So I fell asleep with tears trickling silently down my face, wondering why. I was a good wife; I loved him with all my heart. I was so hurt and knew I loved him still. Obviously, it crossed my mind, I wasn’t giving him everything he needed. I suffered in silence and couldn’t bear to tell anyone what he had done; I had failed him, not lived up to expectations.

The very next day, close friends of ours, the Robertsons came to pick me and Chris up, to take us into George Town, Penang, to set up bank accounts. Jan Robertson, especially, could see that I was very upset, but I just did not feel I could share my agony or grief. I did not want to share it, not so much for my own protection or because of shame but because I did not want the Robertsons to look at Chris differently. I think I was defending him. I must have been.

Over the coming months, I tried to find out more from Chris, I just needed him to be honest with me, not that I ever considered leaving him, not a hope in hell, I loved him too much for that. But like a true man, like a true military man, he kept his silence. His indelible code of giving out only his name, rank and number.

But I found out, eventually I found out – three years later, after three whole years, when we got back to Australia he finally admitted it. After three years!

The trouble was, by then, I knew it wasn’t the first time – I also knew it wouldn’t be the last time. It was a normal RAAF night out with the boys, part of the runway, so to speak – playing up on your wife. Or did they think of it rather as simply “playing without your wife”? She would understand. Yes, yes, of course, what reasonable wife wouldn’t?

I wasn’t one of those “reasonable” wives. I didn’t like it, it hurt like hell. It turned out, it hurt like crazy. But I never spoke of it to other RAAF wives. I never spoke of it to them even though they all talked about the “poor wives” whose husbands used to go, regularly, to Hat Yai, a town in southern
Thailand, close to the Malaysian border… to enjoy their time off.

These wives who were sympathetic towards others, to so many other moral causes, said it was normal, but I did not like it, no, no, I did not like it. I could not understand, could never quite make the leap in my head, why the men needed to be with other women.

Betrayal was a word that kept jumping into my head. Betrayal, even in my marriage, seemed to be my friend. Only it seemed so soon, so soon after we had pledged our vows to be with one another and no other.

I suppose, in retrospect now, what affected me most on that night was Chris had not allowed me to mourn. Chris Pyke, my husband, my lover, my friend, my knight in shining armour, had not been at my side to serve me like the true soldier he was meant to be. Didn’t even care – was only interested in serving himself and his military buddies. Was only interested in getting it off with some unknown exotic dancer or whatever else offered itself to his hungry lap. Yes, a night out with the boys from the base was so much more important than an angel. Than the death of Aunty Bev, the only woman in the entire world who had touched his lover’s soul.

There was another thing that upset me about my husband’s betrayal – something else that really, really got to me. It was not that he had put his proud soldierly male penis like a machine gun into another women, it was that his tongue, his male tongue that had touched mine, was kissing this exotic other. Some young so and so he had only just met.
Kissing
her.

The lips... the mouth, so sacred to me. Just ask Mr Grove, who I offered my tongue to for nothing. For a birthday greeting. Just ask Dad, who used my lips like a common girlfriend, my lips that had saved my sister from the evil in her path.

He knew – Chris should have known what it meant to me. The honesty that resided in there. In the mouth. On the edges of the tongue. The knight’s shiny armour hadn’t just become tarnished; it was beginning, so soon, piece by piece, to fall off.

In the end, and despite everything, it was not all bad in Malaysia. In fact, there were still some good times, even fulfilling moments of deep love between Chris and me, well, as deep as they could get knowing what I knew now. One of those times, one of those moments, was in Phuket, Thailand. While on holiday there, I fell pregnant.

It may be a normal part of the sway – and nature – of life. Especially for married couples. But for me becoming pregnant was like a silver-lined dream. It was the gold I had dreamed of since I was four years old and tried to lift teeny little Aunty Beatrice – Mum’s Mum’s baby girl – from the cot and nearly got beaten for it.

It was a dream ever since Dad and his mates held and caressed me and showed me what a cute little girl I could be. I wanted my own. I wanted my own family. My own tribe. I wanted something normal and non-creepy in my life. Something I could cherish and grow... if only I could... and this, this was it.

Through children, through my own child, I could achieve that. Maybe. No, yes, not maybe, I could. I had more confidence in that act of becoming pregnant than I had in anything in my entire life.

As though a confirmation of my vision, it was at this time that I won the Ladies Dart competition. The vision ahead was as clear to me as that bull on the dartboard.

My dream. Just like in those romantic books I read all the time, this was it
– my dream coming true to be a mother.

With pregnancy it all came racing before me, that need to live and love and cradle. To hold in my arms my own. To show I was better, to show I was better than my own mother, to show I could be the best mother on the planet. Only I
really, really
wanted to be that. The best mother on earth.

I know, I know, who doesn’t say that? But it was a passion with me, like a job one loves, a musical instrument one holds and caresses out of sheer devotion. I really and truly wanted to show I could be a parent and a mother – something more than a mere biblical stick figure causing chaos because the Lord hath handed us down His seed and said go forth and multiply.

I wanted to multiply, I did, but I wanted it to be with love and show it could be real. I wanted children I could love, children who, maybe, with a bit of luck, would one day love me back.

Sarah eventually came – four weeks after my twenty-first birthday. My mother and my sister Marge came to visit around this time, my sister arrived with her toddler son, Samuel, and already pregnant with her second child.

Though younger than me, I did not deny her. Did not want to take any attention away from her. I just wanted my own. It didn’t matter what I looked like. I was so big, so round, so fat – like Mum at her worst. Like Mum in her plastic astronaut weight-loss suit. I had put on 20.5 kilograms.

Even the doctors were concerned. Ironically –
Dad, if you’re listening
– they put me on a salt
-
free
diet. Maybe it was to annul all the bad genes? To annul all that could have passed through my over-salted blood into my own? I don’t know for sure. But I believe it was because of the fluid I was retaining, giving me such a bloated look. I honestly didn’t care what I looked like, only that I was carrying my own child at last.

It didn’t matter to me one iota either whether I was having a boy or girl, I just wanted a baby. I really didn’t know all that much about birth or pregnancy, but I read a lot of books and followed the months of my little one’s arrival. I believed in myself, in my impending motherhood, and all I wanted was to physically see this child who resided so heavily in me. Who had resided in me since I was four.

In the end, Sarah delayed not for days but weeks her presence in the world. Her reluctance to pop out came much at the frustration and chagrin of Mum who was only in Malaysia for a five-week holiday and thought I would come on early, if anything.

So frustrated did Mum become that she and my knight Chris put me on this exercise bike and made me pedal and pedal and pedal, in the hopes of bringing on labour.

But it wasn’t happening – nothing was happening. The only thing that happened instead was my sister being rushed into hospital – the “hostie”, as the RAAF hospital was called – in what appeared to be a possible miscarriage.

The day after this drama was taking place, Chris, Mum and I, along with my little nephew, Samuel, went out for dinner. I’m not sure why, maybe a pre-celebration thing, or sheer frustration, but we “chowed” ourselves fatter than fat on chilli crabs, which was one of my favourite local dishes.

The date was April 11 and earlier that day I had had my doctor’s check-up. He said if no labour came on soon, I was to go into hospital the day after the next to have myself induced.

The next morning, the morning after our night of feasting on chilli crabs, I awoke feeling deeply bloated and uncomfortable, and went to the toilet. I went in the hopes of having a bowel motion to settle things.

Wiping myself, I saw a thin smear of blood, and not sure what was happening, I panicked but laughed, telling Mum, who after all had had four of us: ‘Hey Mum, I think I’m peeing chilli crabs?’

It certainly was possible, the amount we had eaten, and it certainly was the right colour. She laughed too. And then I explained the bloated feeling and the pain of it – and, I suppose, after four children she was on the money when she made the statement that somehow never sounds like a cliché, ‘I think you’re going into labour.’

Marge, who had just returned from care at the hostie, foetus still safely tucked in her belly, but totally incapacitated, agreed, ‘Yeah, Debbie, I think this is it.’ She pressed a square smile.

I bit my nails and held my tummy tight. It felt bad but not urgent. I was in no way afraid, so felt no need to go rushing to the hospital. It was like I had waited so long for this, and if it was finally starting to happen it was better to be cautiously patient than over-optimistically anxious.

I chose to wait at home for a while. It was eight in the morning, there was time. There always seemed to be time in the mornings – the whole day ahead, when you didn’t really have to go anywhere.

At eleven am, the pains were coming on about ten to fifteen minutes apart, like real labour, like I was told to expect, and finally I phoned the hospital. They said I should come in – immediately. This was it. It was going to happen. I was going to –
Please God. Pleeeease
…
– see my first.

They offered me an ambulance, but I refused knowing Mum and Marge would not be allowed to travel with me. It was good to have family, any family. I wanted them to be with me. This was
my
moment.

So, the only way was by car. Marge, because of that near miscarriage, was out of action, and well, to be frank, could one really trust Mum? So, guess who was going to be the driver?

We all climbed into the car, my sister, immovable as she was, her son too young to know the difference, Mum, overweight and almost immovable as well, and me, massive tummy and all, behind the wheel, making myself as comfortable as I could.

Everybody finally at ease in their seats, I turned the key. It wouldn’t start. A bead of sweat fell on my forehead; I tried again. Same thing. And then I tried again and again with the same result. In the end, we had to crank it. Yes, you heard right. We had to crank it.

The car was a really old Morris Minor, and Mum, with no choice as the only “fit” one amongst us, in all her overflowing plumpness, had to get out of the car and crank it. Only, huffing and sweating, much as she tried, she couldn’t get the motor to turn.

So, with Marge sitting frowning and disabled in the backseat, and Samuel too young to do anything, there I found myself again, out on the street this time, looking like a Dr Who TARDIS with this massively obese parcel stuck in the middle of it, taking deep breaths and puffing with contractions as I cranked the car, ready to give birth to Mary Magdalene.

Mum’s final revenge? Dad’s final intrusion? Who knows? In all seriousness, it was a reiteration for me that we all have to live with what we have. That is to say, as I learnt in those anxious moments of cranking the old Morris, we have to start from where we start. There is no other choice. And then, if necessary, we just have to get out of the car and goddamn crank the engine for ourselves if we need to.

There’s no use sitting there and bagging or blaming God or anyone else for it. It’s just the way it is. If you want to know how really bad it can get – go and read a romance novel!

And so there I was, not quite feeling blessed or happy at that precise moment, fat as a TARDIS, madly cranking this old jalopy like I should have had my togs or gym gear on and been working out on the treadmill.

Holding my back at times, crying silently with the oncoming bursts of Mary Magdalene inside me, while I shifted and rotated the twisted steel shaft with the enthusiasm of a weightlifter, it was like the car didn’t want a bar of it. No matter what I did, nothing worked. The car was uncrankable.

There was no other choice – we had to go to Plan B. Luckily Chris and I lived on the flat bit of what after a few metres became a downward sloping road, and so the cranking became the only other thing it could be – pushing. Only with Marge the way she was, and me having to drive, Mum was the only one with the strength to push the old hunk of metal so that we could get it ready for its descent.

She tried, I’ll give it to her, Mum tried. But it was no use. So, bloated like that TARDIS and puffing even heavier now with contractions, I had to help Mum. I did this by pushing from the side of the car. Passers-by probably thought it was one hell of an advert for the circus coming to town, but there we were, fat as a barrel mother and puffing, TARDIS-sized daughter pushing this old heap to the crest of the hill.

Somehow we managed it. We inched the car to the beginning of the downward slope and got the car off to a good start. Barely hanging onto the door now, half way down the hill I just managed to jump into the old scrapheap, and not to overpraise my incredible driving skills, I was able to clutch start the battered thing and hold it there like some badly rusted old show-ride.

I revved and revved and revved until Mum, sweating like a KO’d boxer, caught up with the car and managed to jump in, squeezing her barrel-flesh into the front passenger seat.

I guess she was used to a few clutch-starts in her life, Mum. Just nobody wanted it to be right then. That was the other thing about the car, the brakes weren’t working. The brakes were as good as not there. So the whole way down the hill – and all the way to the hostie – I had to keep the car revving with clutch and accelerator, and using the handbrake.

If there was one thing that worked well on the car, thank God, it was the handbrake. And well, there was also my immense driving talents – thanks to Dad. Finally, finally... a lesson from Dad had borne fruit.

There was still a ferry-ride to come, which was part of the journey from Penang Island to the hospital at Butterworth on the mainland, and I was by now in a great deal of pain.

But we got there, too, finally we got to the ferry. But even on the ferry I had to keep the car revving lest we had to push again.

So there I sat on the Penang ferry, surrounded by my invalid sister and near invalid mother, still wildly revving a now dead-still car, my contractions increasing to about five minutes apart. It was hard to think Mary Magdalene would ever be born safe – or sane.