Sawdust (21 page)

Were we really able to change that house?
Or maybe more poignantly, how did I get along with Dad? Well, the answer to that question is I got along with Dad fine. Just fine. As long as he was never too close to my girls.

Dad, in a fatherly way, would try to hug me – and my bottom would stick out three miles. Also, on no account would I ever leave him alone with my children. Babysit? I wouldn’t even let the idea pass my forehead.

In actual fact I never allowed my father to stay in any of our homes, not even when my sister would try to convince me to have him sleep over. I just couldn’t bear the thought of him sleeping that close to my daughters.

Which makes me think of an incident while we were at the property – the strange but telling incident of the mung beans and the feeding of the sheep.

One day, while I was still heavily pregnant with Dean, without knowing anything at all about feeding sheep, Sarah and Ruth got it into their little heads that they knew all about it. In fact, they decided that Dad’s flock of about 15 sheep looked so desperately hungry that they opened up a big 20kg sack of mung beans for the purpose.

From the top of it, they started whooshing out the beans like they were building a mountain of food on the ground for the poor, starving animals.

The sheep were, so to speak, happy as Larry with their huge mid-morning hors d’oeuvre, but even I knew that less than a twentieth of what the girls had given them was more than enough to feed the entire flock for a week. In point of fact, it took a mere litre bottle of the beans to feed all of them of a morning. And here were the girls dolloping out an after-breakfast treat so huge it could kill them.

In feed terms, the beans were as filling as concrete; just a small amount would swell in the sheep’s belly and digest slowly through the day. And that would be more than enough to see them through a twenty-four hour cycle.

In the distance, the dust – earth and sawdust – gathering around him, I saw Dad’s tall, gangly body like an agitated emu bouncing toward us from his shed. And God, oh God, knowing Dad, knowing that brutal temper, I was so afraid I started shouting at the girls, yelling words I didn’t usually use with them, telling them they were ‘idiots’ and ‘stupid’ and should have known better and asked before they acted.

Dad arrived.

‘Jesus bloody Christ, what the fucking hell is going on here?’ Just as expected, he began roaring, seeing the sheep bleating and merrily eating at the mound of food around them. And then more urgently, his voice blew like a hurricane: ‘Pick up the bloody beans, for God’s fucking sake! Get the fucking, goddamned sheep out of here!’

Chris, my knight, who it has to be said very seldom touched the girls as a means of punishment, totally freaked out. Next to him stood Sarah, our eldest, and he let out a yell and then gave her such a hard smack across her backside that it sent her flying to that dirty, awful, dry soil.

Trembling together after that, Sarah and Ruth stared up at Dad, and everyone expected the sky to explode. In truth, we were all heaving, waiting for the inevitable: Dad to beat and kick the hell out of our kids, out of each and every one of us perhaps – just like he kicked the crap out of all those Jap soldiers, like he made Jacko Johns dance that night with his shotgun, like he nearly strangled Mum to death, like he nearly squeezed and shook the air out of me until there was none left.

Only something else happened. Suddenly the earth seemed to stop and calm, the sheep moved off, and the mung beans lay silent.

Dad shook his head at Chris: ‘What the ef d’you think you’re doing, mate? Just bugger off and leave the girls alone. For goodness sake, can’t you see they’re just kids? They don’t know what they’re doing!’ He pressed his teeth in that “mulling” bird way with his tongue.

Dad, Lord Protector, was on night watch again. Batman, our hero, the protector of darkness, of everyone, especially children. In a similar situation he would have beaten the living daylights out of us kids, but here he was displaying his full, bright, spinning wheel of human colours. Displaying his glorious chummy heart that was a shield to everyone but his own. The face we show the outside world, the worms that reside within.

I think the incident shook Chris more than it did me. But being me, and in the circumstance, I determined to persist and make the best of things. To scrape away the past. To sweep it as far from my mind as possible. Chris and I now even set about cleaning up the yard, that filthy rusting mess of overgrown weeds and useless, wiry trees.

In the end, the problem was Chris, once again it was Chris. His moods came back, slowly but surely they came back. And they were dark, at times so dark it was difficult even for me to see.

I’m not sure if it was in one of those moods, it must have been, but at a certain point Chris, who had been working as an electrician at the Nebo Smelter nearby, decided he was much better off re-joining the Air Force.

So, guess what? The week I was due to have my much-desired, wished and prayed for third baby, Chris was travelling back down to Brisbane to get himself reinstated into the RAAF.

As it turned out, he may have missed the birth of his son, but he was so happy to be back in the Air Force, so glad he hadn’t lost his sergeant ranking and that there was now a great possibility of being posted back to Amberley, that despite everything, despite it all, I had to be happy for him.

The highlight at this time, beyond anything, was the birth of Dean. It was quick but painful. I had to be cut twice – and without painkillers – to let out Dean’s broad shoulders.

But almost greater than my delight at giving birth was seeing the emotional high that heaved through Chris’s body when he knew he had a son. His own little knight.

I was so happy for him, so happy that I’d finally given him the son he desperately wanted. Happier for him than I was for myself, if that was possible. I just felt blessed to have my new baby, boy or girl. Almost more amazing to me was that I had one of the Grove girls as a ward sister. Talk about small world. Talk about full circles. I still tasted the shame of that kiss on my tongue. That birthday kiss planted in her father’s mouth.

But in the end, even Chris’s high with his little knight didn’t really matter – because his moods came back, continued to roll from his eyes, continued to gather like constantly darkening clouds.

The reality, the sad reality because it came despite the upsurge in our relationship with the initial pregnancy of Dean, was that the moods were always there now, forming and then clearing, but never quite clearing altogether.

With the constancy of those clouds, with their changing shades from grey to black to a kind of blotchy purple-green, our relationship was just a huge and damaging hailstorm waiting to happen. It hovered above us, always there, shaping and reshaping.

Luck was on my side. When Dean was four days old, we found out we were going to Melbourne. It was nowhere near Ipswich, like we had hoped, but at least we were going.

I guess I should have been over the moon we were leaving Anondale. Leaving Dad. Leaving that sordid, unenchanted world of memories. That House of Horrors. But next to me I had Chris. Chris and that purple-black cloud that was his head.

It sometimes briefly passes my mind that maybe Chris was in some way punishing me – by taking me back to Gladstone, to the mess that was my past. Perhaps he even wanted to see how I stood up to it, to Dad? To see if I was still so meek, so available? But in the end he saw he could not stand up to it either.

Knowing we were about to depart was like a triumph, like I had won something special. Like I had, in a way, beaten Dad – and Chris – at the same time. It brought back a memory. I was fifteen and at the time together with my first real boyfriend, Brad. Well, one day at about the time I was beginning to see Brad, Dad accused a school friend of mine of being a slut. Of smoking cigarettes and being a bad influence on me.

The girl was not there, nowhere near our house at the time, but I was so mad at Dad, madder at him than I would have been if he had said those things of me. Instinctively, I don’t know what got into me, I slapped him. Slapped him so hard it split open his lip.

I stared at him, my big Dad with his hard crow eyes and steel jowl, waiting for the retribution, waiting for him to knock my block from the one side of the room to the other. To strangle me. But in the end, breathing out and snorting like he was still capable of anything, he brought his big fist to my jaw – but just touched it, merely scraped the pores of my skin with it, and then humphed a second breath of sliding air and walked away.

As he turned, in an almost proud way, he looked back at me and said: ‘You have a bit of Gallagher in you after all.’

I was astounded, in the act of facing up to the beast I had vanquished it. At any rate gained some respect from it.

Man is a strange animal. If I had stood there trembling I am dead sure he would have truly knocked my block off, but seeing me stand there staring at him with some defiance, he did nothing. Just walked away. Praised me. I see it as a sign of an inherent cowardice: when there is weakness, Man, men, show no mercy.

Like the time I fought back and injured that girl, Dad had now stepped aside. If I had lost, if I had stood there shaking, I would have been seen as weak and almost certainly been trampled on.

I remember feeling after this incident a little bubble inflate in me. It blew out all shiny like the whole world could see it expanding in me. I was actually proud as hell.

Now, once again, Chris, in what was quickly becoming his very dishevelled armour, seeing that I could, if I wanted to, live near Dad, was whisking me away. My knight was becoming a real soldier again.

We spent that Christmas, me, Chris, the girls and our new baby Dean, after those intense few months in Gladstone and that badly bent and twisted Anondale house, in an upmarket, self-contained luxury apartment in inner Melbourne.

We were celebrating the Christmas of 1990, getting ready to set up our brand new lives reattached to the RAAF. At the same time, the rest of the world was beating its feet and making jungle sounds, planning the First Gulf War. Fear, the thought of wars looming, didn’t even cross our minds.

It was a good Christmas. Both the girls raced around the apartment, swam constantly in the luxury pool, and had lots of fun with their dad. Even baby Dean behaved and seemed to enjoy it as best a newborn can.

Soon after that Christmas we were placed in our new RAAF house in Clayton South. The date was January 2, 1991, the same day we were married, nine years earlier. It was a stinking hot day of forty-two degrees, so much for Melbourne’s cold weather. It would change our lives forever.

Bar that one upsurge in happiness, deciding Dean’s conception and becoming pregnant again,
which lasted a matter of months, it seemed Chris and I never really reconnected. We would have bursts of happiness and then the gloomy darkness would set in again; it was like a long drawn out boat ride on seas that refused to stop swelling and dropping. The sharing, which was there at times, would inevitably find its way behind a black rising wave and then sink down into a hollow and an energy-sapping vacuum would re-enter.

Little Rebecca’s “miracle”, was, I saw now, no more than about the birth of Dean, perhaps a moment of light for Chris and I, for the two of us together. But no more than that. A moment.

To me, it was becoming more and more apparent the longer we stayed in Melbourne, the less I felt for Chris. I wanted to disentangle. I was a stronger woman now, an idiot, yes, but no longer a fool at anyone’s beck and call. I had made up my mind, I was not going to let any man bribe me with suicide again.

The good thing is that by the time Chris and I got to Melbourne our girls were both at school age and I did what I think every parent – not just abuse victims – should do. I threw myself into their schooling. Whether it be husband or wife, I believe strongly – based on my own experience – at least one parent should always be “right in there”, at least in the first few years of a child’s life.

Despite my lack of education, despite my lack of experience, despite my lack of skills, I helped in the children’s classes, I helped in the tuckshop, I became an active member of the “mothers’ club”, I put both hands up to be on the school council, and when it came to it, without thinking I had any abilities whatsoever, I even put my hand up to be the note-taking secretary at school council meetings.

Yup, I know, know it only too well, that especially in the position as secretary at school meetings, I could have failed. I could so easily have made a complete and utter fool of myself. But at the time I thought what the hell, who cares, the worst that can happen is they can criticise me, call me stupid, a failure (so, what’s new?) and beg around for someone else to take my place.

But I discovered something at these meetings and other related school meetings: I had this uncanny knack at quick and accurate note taking. It is something I would never have discovered had I not put my hand up. Something I would never have known about if I had just kept my neck in my shoulders and called myself a victim, an uneducated dysfunctional, and stayed silent, doing nothing. I could easily have let others, the school system, do the work of bringing up my children for me.

This was not what I wanted. Life, my children’s lives and safety had become too precious for me, and in the event, having stuck my neck out, I actually discovered my experience also counted for something.

People were actually listening to me. Even relying on me. One day it would also start me on a course of further educating myself, but right then I was happy just to be directly involved in my children’s education and their growing up.

Not only my actions in being a part of the school community, but my note-taking became such a legend and so appreciated, that the principal would one day write in reference of me, lines to the effect:
Deborah Pyke has been an important and active member of our school community. She is a concise and word-perfect note-taker, a great contributor to her and other people’s children’s education. I have always maintained she needed a bed at the school – because she never left it. We do not know how we will ever fill all her voluntary positions.

That was probably the first open praise – in writing, in black and white – I had ever had in my life. I was already thirty, and I felt a lump in my throat when I read it.

When I think about it, it could have only come from what I always said, which may sound a little trite now, but at the risk of overstating, it is this: Read and learn about others, take note of their bruises and failings and their tragedies, and remember through it all there are always people much worse off than you.

Above all, don’t ever feel sorry for yourself. Rather go and read a romance story. It is true, trite or not, we have to get off our butts and do something. The idea of magic wands and knights in shining armour coming to rescue us, as I was slowly but absolutely discovering, has a much better place in movie theatres than it does in our lives.

Talking of which, my marriage was in pieces, almost a formal vacuum now – and yet, to be totally honest, neither Chris nor I wanted to face it. So, no progress there. Not only that, with all his moods and depression and expectations of me, I found out he had another woman on the side.

Back to square one.

I remember him saying that they were only “good friends”. But as we were all going to a RAAF function at the Comedy Club one night, he thought he should warn me to be aware of the talk as everyone in his section thought he was having an affair with her.

Once again my heart was in my throat – I knew intuitively what “good friends” really meant to him. I could see what he meant by “everybody talking”; I could see the lie quivering on his lips. Yes, his mouth was telling me, he, Chris Pyke, my knight, my mate, my lover, my husband, however hollow those terms may have become, had a real, live, girlfriend staying not that far away from us.

She would even give him a lift to and from work. He grew really annoyed one afternoon when Sarah and Ruth ran out the front of the house to greet him as he was being dropped home by her. They were jumping up and down and were running around, laughing and giggling.

They were shouting out to me: ‘Hey Mum, Daddy’s girlfriend has brought him home.’

As he came inside he became so cranky with the girls for “talking such rot” that he actually swore at them and told them, loud and roughly, to get to their rooms for being “so silly”. What he really meant was for demeaning him and showing him up. He who I had come back for. He who I had stayed with in order to rescue. It was me who was “so silly”.

Like that first instance of disloyalty, of denying me my day of mourning for Aunty Bev in Malaysia, I had a choice now: I could either curl up and accept it and go on living emptily, using the excuse of the children and the sanctity of marriage as the reason for my choice, or I could get up and do something to change it.

Unfortunately, it seemed, we had both lapsed into that great Australian, perhaps all-Anglo-Saxon cure: ignore it and it’ll eventually go away.

I know now that is a very dangerous thing. Taking it on the chin and saying nothing. Avoiding conflict because our children – or our neighbours – may hear us or think less of us if they do. I am not talking here about calling each other idiots and useless pieces of shit; I am talking about really having it out and raising voices when you need to, because there is reason to. Because it is better than holding it in until the heart and the liver and the spleen blow up like children’s inflatables and burst.

It’s something I know now and something I
should have
learnt from the Godbolts – if you talk and argue with thought, with mutual respect, it is possible to love and admonish at the same time.

I knew one thing: from the lessons I had learnt, from the lessons life kept dishing out to me, it was time to find a way through. I was a woman now, one who had learnt from ample experience and I had to do something.

In the end, I chose not a fiery path as I easily could have, but what I thought was a sensible way ahead. Nevertheless, it took courage. To be firm rather than fiery. I had to face up to Chris and let him know I was unhappy, that our marriage was not working, that we either had to do something about it or things might happen that would grow beyond both our control.

Eventually I convinced my knight – even he by now could see through that not so shimmery armour – that our marriage was in breakdown, that we had to at the least go and seek counselling.

It was probably the best thing I ever did in my life. In
our
lives.