Sawdust (20 page)

It was only my second night at my sister’s and Chris who was going to call each night to say goodnight to the girls, called with an ultimatum
: if I did not come back home immediately he would hang himself. Yes, hang himself. Do exactly what his father had attempted to do.

‘I have a rope around my neck,’ he said with the desperation of a long-suffering prisoner of war, ‘and if you don’t come home I’m going to kill myself.’

I saw in front of me the image of his hanging dad that had implanted itself in his every brain cell, and I knew well he suffered from depression. But it was the noose he was holding around my neck that right at that moment I resented. He was using it to squeeze us together. Only the more he squeezed, the further I wanted to drift from him.

To my mind, it had already come to a head. The storm clouds had already let their guts out. What he was doing only confirmed every riling feeling in my veins I had against him. But at the same time, I felt guilt, overwhelming guilt, like it was because of me that he was doing what he was doing, like I had let him down.

I was trapped; it pricked through every pore in my flesh and I could not shake it off. It only made me feel more resentful. Holding the phone, I put my foot down and refused to go.

The reality is, in my head, in my heart, I think well and truly in my soul, I had already parted from him. This threat had made sure of that. Only, on the other side of the line, his trembling voice was desperate and real; it was getting louder and more insistent. Still I refused. His voice lowered and he begged, even cried and howled, but I remained firm. I was not moving an inch.

In the end, he jumped in his own car and came to fetch me.

But rather than seeing in his heroic trek, love, passion and devotion, I detested him for it. The fact that I knew he needed help didn’t help me – or us – at all. And now he was at my sister’s doorstep, hundreds of kilometres from Bellbird Park, ready to whisk me away – or commit suicide. He was, in plain English, holding a knife to my heart. Not only that, he insisted that my sister look after the girls, that they remain behind, and I saw in his mood, in his determination, that he just wanted me to himself.

I had never left the girls by themselves anywhere before, other than when Marge stayed with Chris to look after Sarah while I was in hospital having Ruth, and he knew that. He could see in my balking eyes that I hated and despised him for his demand, but he just stood there, waiting for me like an expectant child, like he didn’t care.

His need – I could see it in those curving “temple” eyes of his – was greater than my not wanting to be parted from my girls. It was that stark.

Maybe I should have shouted and screamed and thrown a fit. But I wasn’t like that. When I looked at him, I saw every sinew in his muscles pressing me to obey or else. Like a chattel, I sometimes think of it like that, I agreed. I left my girls behind with my sister and went with him back to Bellbird Park.

I would never get over it, though. It may not have been quite obvious then but in my system there was something I needed to flush out, and everything but my mouth was saying it was him.

I remember when we finally got back home, Chris was trying really hard to reconnect with me but I just wanted to be left alone. I was missing my girls and deeply abhorred him for taking me away from them. I was so sad, so in a way lost, but in the end, as in all things, our life together continued and within a few weeks the girls were back with us...

It is a funny thing, even in a horrid, empty relationship, especially once we have children, have a mortgage hanging over our heads, time somehow passes, the grass grows and needs mowing, and life moves on.

I thought about the horror and emptiness of it every day. And I was reminded of it every morning and night as I saw that spousal face next to me. The nights were always the longest and the worst. But ultimately I had to get up every morning, get off my emotionally roller-coasting butt, and get on with it. I had to get the kids to school and preschool, help out at the school, do the washing, the washing up, make arrangements, go to my job, make sure I did more than my bit to supplement our never quite sufficient income. And so it passed. Time passes.

And no matter all my wondering how people can live in black holes, Chris, my old rusted knight and I, lived on.

To supplement our income, I continued with my day-care work, looking after other people’s children in my own home while they in turn went about their business. The truth be told, I wasn’t prepared to leave my children with anyone else while I went out to work, so working from home seemed the only solution to bringing in the much needed extra dollars.

For some of us anyway, the more our partners fall by the wayside, the more we put ourselves into our children, and this is what happened to me. I did not see anything wrong with it. Nothing. It is a mother’s calling. I was already devoted to our two girls, loved them like the day they were born, but without that partnership, without Chris really there, it was like everything became even more about the kids.

Through the hot, wretchedly humid days at our home in Bellbird Park, a kind of little miracle happened. There was this one little girl in my care whose name was Rebecca, and I don’t know what it was but with each day I saw her the more my heart wanted to encircle and embrace her.

Maybe it was that with her awkward little running body and bushy head of dark brown hair, she reminded me a little of that tiny girl from my past; that skimpy girl, free and loving and full of heart that I could have been? I don’t know. But I literally fell in love with her.

It actually pained to hand Rebecca back to her mother of an afternoon. Yes, I said pained. With Sarah by now in Year One and Ruth at preschool, I cherished this little bundle that did not even belong to me.

I don’t know if it was purely hormonal, or if perhaps like a miracle it was a “word” from the great mysterious forces in the universe, but the almost daily sight of this little girl, despite the black emptiness between Chris and I, was changing the way I saw things. I began to view Chris in a more positive light and soon I realised what I wanted, what I really wanted.

It took a while for it to dawn on me, but when it did, I felt immediately it was right: what I wanted was to have another child. Through that little girl Rebecca, almost desperately I was becoming maternal, clucky, chirpy, whatever you want to call it, but the obsession grew, and grew; I had to give birth to another one of my own.

Chris, who was not even so sure about having any more children after Sarah, and had only reluctantly agreed to becoming pregnant with Ruth (ironically his favourite now, I guess now that all the temper tantrums were over), was very sceptical again about this new urge in me.

But somehow, I think it was that paradoxical twist, that remembering how he did not under any circumstances want to have another baby after Sarah – because he did not believe he could love another child as much as he loved her – and then seeing the flowering of Ruth into his favourite, that made him eventually relent.

Perhaps it could happen again? Perhaps, better still, we would have a son? What soldier, what knight in shining armour, no matter how rusted and worn, does not want his own male progeny? His own little knight?

Chris agreed – and the strange thing was that through this little girl, Rebecca, this little girl who was my past and possibly my future – Chris and I stepped out of the shadows and began to love again. For a while it was like the dark brooding shadow over our house that burnt a strip of emptiness down the middle of our queen-size bed, was moving off and would never come back.

It returned to me the faith that even in the darkest of times the dawn can eventually make its way to your address. I pinned it down to that little girl. The great big force out there had sent her like a Moses-child to us, to rekindle, to re-spark, to give us another chance.

I fell back in love with Chris all over again. Here again was the man of my dreams, the one I “moonily”, “floatingly” thought of and missed so badly every day when I was working as a nanny for the Godbolts at Rodds Bay.

Life was starting again.

When I went to the doctor to test for pregnancy and the result came back positive
, I stood in the man’s office and cried. Just stood there and cried.

‘Is this what you want?’ he asked with a face offering a backstreet abortion, and between sobs I squealed back for everyone in the waiting room to hear: ‘Yes. Oh yes. This is exactly what I want.’

I was so happy that even as I was leaving the doctor’s rooms I continued to cry in front of everyone waiting there.

So seriously was the universe speaking to us, that Chris, my soldier, my knight, when he heard about my pregnancy, even opted out of the Air Force. I loved him for it. My heart raced and touched him because of it. He was my hero again.

Only... only... unbelievably, he wanted to go back to Gladstone. To Gladstone! I couldn’t understand it. The idiot, the fool, the wombat, what was he thinking? Taking me back to that messy, ramshackle, dirty, drought-drenched place of my worst nightmares, the last place on earth I wanted to go.

‘Are you sure this is what you want?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes.’

I don’t know, I don’t know. I guess I was pregnant, thinking differently, had this new chance at life and love, and relented. As bad as the thought of going back to Gladstone was, there was still something there; I had to admit it, there was still something in that hard soil, in the chaos of scrap metal and poisoned timber that positioned me there.

Another harsh truth: Dad was still there, running his sawmill – Dan Gallagher Enterprises – on that exact spot, Perenjora Dam Road, Anondale. In fact, during our time at Ipswich and Bellbird Park we would even go and visit from time to time.

Talk about life going on. Talk about sweeping dirt under carpets. Not just dirt but mounds of fetid, rotten, over ripe, smashed up, fermented slices of old pumpkin and watermelon under the carpet.

That’s the way it was with Dad, with my entire family. We’d go and visit – I’d keep a very, very careful eye on the kids – but nobody said anything. What had happened should not be repeated – not to anybody. Not even among ourselves.

Was the past really the past?

You would think so. Mum was there too, in the same region, living in Gladstone in a house with her new partner, Ray. And knowing it was impossible for me to sleep under the same roof with Dad again – something “intuited” rather than openly stated by anyone – we actually started out our existence in Gladstone living with Mum.

It was also a money thing. We were waiting for the sale of our house in Bellbird Park to eventuate and at the same time saving money to build a new house, our own brand new castle in Gladstone. We even had the plans drawn. And then they were redrawn.

That was the funny thing, each time we had plans drawn up, Chris would sit with them for a while and there would always be something he objected to and we would start all over again. He kept finding things he did not like about the plans, kept delaying signing off on anything.

Talk about a woman’s prerogative, I sure gave him his man’s prerogative, kept on giving and giving, until what? – we moved back out to Anondale. Yes, I had completely given in by then, willing to move back to Dad!

Well, it was not quite under the same roof, because it was all part of a new deal: Chris and I would buy the house and two acres of the property off Dad, and Dad – that thick wooden casing who once held the entire structure of the house together – would be relegated to the old shed, the original structure that was our abode on the property when Mum and Dad initially dragged us all to go and live there.

Talk about circles. Talk about living in a small, round world. Talk about going round in rings. Now I was taking my own daughters to live in that house where I grew up – or was it to that house where I was “ground down”?

My son Dean would be born there... The entire sin of humanity, Original Sin itself, the entire planet seemed to revolve around Gladstone and Perenjora Dam, around Anondale. A world without stars. A world without sky. A world of darkness and sins, of big black crows and beasts. And there I was going back forever. Going deep back in there...

The reality was Dan Gallagher Enterprises was struggling and Chris saw an opportunity to buy the house and property at a good price and help Dad out in the process. We even loaned Dad a further fifteen thousand dollars, which was written up by solicitors as a proper loan at a fixed interest, to be paid back in a reasonable amount of time. But this too
would become a bone of contention between Dad, Chris and I.

Dad had said he would be able to pay us back within three months, but as it turned out I finally agreed to a lesser part of what should have been the final amount – sixteen years later.

I suppose, from a purely pragmatic point of view, buying the house at the time made sense. My knight in shimmering armour – now more like my knight in scalded, sinful rags – was taking me back to my roots.

In the event, from the day we moved in, I refused to have Dad’s and Mum’s bedroom as our bedroom. Even though it was the only room in the house warm with carpets that still looked good – that’s where we stored our boxes.

I could not help but see Mum and Dad there, king and queen under that royal white veil. Could not help but see Dad laying me down on that bed, my legs wide open, my jaws echoing with theories of royal families and long lost tribes that loved and cavorted in their incestuously small, simple circles. Could not help but see Mum standing there, peering over Dad’s shoulder ready with a slap of denial to my face.

No, no, no, I could not bear to step into that room. Me, “the dirty little girl who had done such secretive things”.

I hated that house, hated it. And the first thing I did was paint the walls. Actually, Chris and I were the first to ever paint the house. Until we painted it, it had always been bare fibro and unpainted timber.

We painted the insides a whitish blue and the kitchen a fiery red and white so that it stood out like a British flag to the dam, to the highway, to the rail line, to ourselves, and so even the thick wooden beam near the kitchen that was so much like Dad in its solidity, looked different. Looked rustic, yet modern – nothing like Dan Gallagher.

We determined to make everything we could look new and like our own.

And in the background the trains chugged by and the cars whooshed forwards and backwards as in the days of my black past.