Sawdust (8 page)

I think the difference between Aunty Bev and others is that she never really looked into my face.
Even when she was looking there, she was really looking into my heart. She saw only goodness and dished it back from her own heart.

Even if she did see in my eyes, in my hair, on my lips, what was really there, the secrets, the deception, the hidden truths, she spooned back with her heart in heaps and knolls. It was as though, intuitively, she was making up for it. The damage. The scratches and dents people around me did not even know was happening.

Aunty Bev and Uncle Max were Dad’s aunt and uncle, and all my life I think what saved me was having people like them around, people who counter-balanced the darkness, the iniquity, who showed me that what I saw as light and life and a part of the everyday, was really dark and dank compared with the open windows, the lit Christmas tree that potentially stood beside it.

Dad’s Mum’s older sister, in some ways Aunty Bev even looked like Dad. She had the same square jaw and prominent cheekbones, but unlike Dad, although she was nearly twice his age, her hazel eyes glowed and her features were soft as snow.

There was nothing at all accusing on her pallid skin. Her hands were always so warm and calm. Unforgettably so. They comforted me, they held me, and always they radiated with heat against my skin. They say cold hands mean a warm heart. It is not so. Warm hands mean a warm heart and cold hands, like Dad’s, and come to think of it, like Mum’s, mean a cold heart. I know. I have experienced them.

This did not mean Aunty Bev could not be stern. A no-nonsense woman, she was upright and firm, but this was the point, she was also playful. I learnt how to behave around her and I was amply rewarded with rays of warm colours and enchantment.

I loved being around her – in ways that were different to those men and their drunken fun and musical whooping. I knew I could fall backwards and she’d always be there. I did not have to do anything for her.

Her feelings were genuine and sincere, but then again at that time so did I think Dad’s mates’ were. But unlike them, Aunty Bev talked constantly to me. I can’t even remember about what, but with her short wavy-brown hair that was peppered with specks of grey and with her eyes that shone, it was always like a Noisy Minor twittering away next to me.
Pipipipipee, pipipipipee, pee, pee
,
her voice was a steady song – and unlike the others she couldn’t give a damn if I did pee her bed, but because I felt safe and calm there, I never did. I just loved the sound of her voice.

It was probably my one bit of luck. When Mum and Dad needed us to be looked after in school holidays, I’d be taken to sleep over at Aunty Bev and Uncle Max rather than any of the other relatives. My older brother Jim, on the other hand, usually went to my Aunt Dulcie, Dad’s older sister. The younger two, Marge and Sam, would be kept at home.

While it was good for Mum to have me and Jim off her hands, the truth was she didn’t much like having us around in any event. In me, she saw too much of Dad, and this thing that she saw would only grow worse as I grew older.

‘Wake up to yourself!’ she would scream over and over at me. Like I knew what it was I was meant to be waking up into. Like she had shown me another self I could be. Like she had given me directions. The only things I saw in front of me at home were inside out. And no one gave any real pointers. So it was a great relief whenever I could get out of her sight.

Aunty Bev... she would take me to a hall in Gladstone where they played Hoy. It was a game like Bingo – only the idea was to match all the cards on your sheet to the cards the dealer turned over. And when all their cards came up, the ladies playing the game would call out ‘Hoy!’ to show they had finished.

When Aunt Bev’s cards came up, she always shouted it with a smile that stretched across the hall and then looked into my eyes like
I
had won. I remember her winning all these cans of fruit and vegetables and jams and I would feel so proud as we walked out of the hall with our packages of goods.

At other times, I would follow her around at home as she fed the chooks or hung up the washing in her backyard. Unlike Mum, she’d let me help with her constant baking and cooking. And in the background, Uncle Max, a man with full and ruddy, freshly shaved cheeks and an almost bald-looking head of spiky white hair, would always be pottering around the house.

I remember always hearing tinkering and hammering from somewhere in or under their old wooden Queenslander that was right in the middle of Gladstone. To me, old as they appeared, they were people who were at ease with life, who always looked at home in their own skin, people fresh in their age. They were anchored and it made me feel calm and wanted. It was like having a long warm shower whenever I went there. It was reviving and cleansing and reassuring.

And yet... and yet... I never found I could ever confide in Aunty Bev. More like, it was probably that I was too scared. There was absolutely no one I ever wanted to tell about anything
.
I couldn’t. I could hardly comprehend my own life.

What hurt me more than anything was the constant cold that drifted through the doors at home, the voices that were raised, the isolation and the uncertainty. Removed from that, it was the closeness, the touching by Aunty Bev, that was such longed-for relief, but still I did not have it in me to tell her about home.

The evenness that I experienced at her and Uncle Max’s place was enough for me; it gave me hope. It was like walking into the sun after a shuddering storm.

I remember the lawn at Aunty Bev’s. Actually, I could never forget that lawn. Compared to our stony, dry, wispy-grassed acreage with Dad’s dead old trucks, spare parts and bits of metal and machinery strewn all over the place, their lawn, sitting below the lofty gaze of their Queenslander, was like a bowling green. Only it was even softer, more like a velvet trampoline.

I loved to roll on it. The garden sloped down to the road and I loved to roll and roll all the way down it. Just me on that lawn, rolling, watching the grass and the sky and the clouds wrap around me.

The alternative to go to when Mum and Dad needed to get rid of me and Jim during school holidays, was Aunty Dulcie, Dad’s older sister. She also lived in Gladstone, was much younger and more modern than Aunty Bev, but I didn’t like going there at all. She was a real boss in boots. Even when she was being nice she didn’t have a patch on the cosy feel of Aunty Bev.

I recall Dad saying how “hen-picked” her husband Len was and that Len was a better man than him for putting up with her. Like Aunty Bev, though, Aunty Dulcie was straight up the line – unfortunately with her it was a cold and spiky line. Step out of that line – which she drew any way she liked in the moment – and she let you have it.

She slapped me more than once and I’m sure Jim got it a few times too. A gossipy sort of person, always having a go at others, I recall being at her place once when she was telling a friend how she had done some or other particular thing and how she had said this and that.

Only it was not the way I remembered the particular thing happening. Being keen to be part of the grown up conversation, I piped up and said, ‘But that’s not what you said to Uncle Dave... You said...’

Well, one-two not even three, just like that, she sprung up from her chair and slapped my face. ‘Don’t you ever talk like that again!’ She slapped me so hard I found it difficult to talk in her company ever again.

On one occasion, I also peed the bed. She glared at me next morning with a loathing and distaste like I was worse than a baby or rather a baby animal. I was already about six, and the way she looked at me made me feel less than six weeks. Then, of course, she slapped my face. I can’t say I hated her, but I certainly didn’t like her and never quite forgave her for that.

The slaps from Aunty Dulcie reminded me of home. Whenever Dad or Mum gave me a hiding the pee would just come trickling down my legs. I wished it would never happen but it did.

‘You’re disgusting. Go clean yourself up!’ Mum would grunt after giving me a slap across the legs or a punch in the chest. And both Mum and Dad, sometimes together, sometimes individually, would glare at me like I was a dirty, grubby little girl who had no control over her privates. Dad should know.

But not only that, Mum would refuse to wash my underwear. It was like I had a disease, like every time I peed myself it showed there was something radically and insanely wrong with me. Whatever I did, whatever mental acrobatics I tried to perform, I could not cure it.

I was a girl without control. I would never have control. The way Mum looked at me, it had to be true.

So, I felt more than blessed when more often than not it was my older brother Jim who would be dropped off at Aunty Dulcie’s and me who would go to my steady-hearted and very, very warm-handed Aunty Bev.

When I went to Aunty Bev it was like the entire world was a different planet. She was forever hugging me and telling me that my thicket of dirty brown hair that bushed out like an overgrown Roman helmet on my head, was the most beautiful mop of hair she’d ever known. She would brush my hair, over and over, and I felt like I was a prize-winning doll.

‘Annie Get Your Gun,’ she called me, something I liked. It sounded intimate and grown up. I enjoyed the sound of it, even though it wasn’t until I was much older, an adult, that I realised she was calling me that because of the uncontrollable mop on my head and the similarities with the famous Annie Oakley of American musical fame.

What’s more, at nights, unlike at home, Aunty Bev and Uncle Max would allow me to sit with them around the dining room table in the large kitchen where we’d talk and laugh and watch TV.

They had a real modern gas stove, which was so completely different to our big, wood-burning, smelly combustion stove. Aunty Bev would also give me ginger nut biscuits and make me cups of Milo on powdered milk. I loved spooning out the creamy lumps that formed on the top and which were covered in chocolate.

It was so refreshing with Aunty Bev and Uncle Max and everything was so positive at their place. Seen through a child’s eyes, there was no yukkiness that clung like dusty cobwebs to the skin; I often wished I never had to go home.

There could be good times at our place too.
Even with Mum and Dad. Christmas at our place on the acreage at Anondale was like that sometimes. It wasn’t that we received huge presents or toys, it was just that everyone was so free and easy, so balmily jolly and full of high spirits, and not even drunk.

I remember one time we had all these big tents in our back paddock, well it seemed like a lot of big tents to small eyes, and there were lots of people because Dad had all his family over.

On the property there were acres of watermelons that we grew, and we kids were told to run off and choose the largest one we could find. Dad chopped it in half and then cut it into huge slices and we ran around in the hot sun like dots of dry dust blowing about the place, pink juice running freely down our faces and fingers and arms.

Hot and grubby from the watermelon eating, out came the water-hose and we ran around in our togs, having water fights. I guess Mum thought at least we were getting clean, and on account of that didn’t mind. The hose-water shimmered in the sunlight and it was good to feel free, just to whirl in the sun and eat and drink and play with no demands.

Dad’s family were also pretty sober, so these occasions never went overboard, and I guess Dad, under their watchful eye, didn’t want to show them the rough side of our existence either.

Dad’s brothers, unlike Dad, were very much gentlemen. Maybe it was because they had a different dad? Dad’s Dad, the one who died in the War, had a reputation for having a fiery, quick-sparking temper. He also, apparently, had a bent for the plonk. The sort of bloke you didn’t mess with. Just like Dad.

Dad’s grandma, who brought him up, Grandma Cecily Flanagan would also be there on those occasions. Grandma, as we called her, could be quite loving too. She and her son, Uncle Col lived in this large, standout Queenslander, not very far away from us.

It was the house everyone from all around could see on the banks of the Nebo River. The house may have been old and ramshackle, but it always felt convivial, well, compared to ours, and I could always remember there being other people there: aunts and uncles, friends and workers; and we would all sit around the long wooden table in the kitchen near the stove having cups of tea.

She and Uncle Col were hardworking people, farming people, as they say; they grew pumpkins and peas and beans and other vegetables for sale to the market. There was no slouching with them. They would always be out in the fields doing their work, coming in for smoko, a good quick chat and a cup or two of tea, and then back out into the fields.

Not a huggy type, Grandma Cecily Flanagan would also never push us kids away, and it has to be said we felt completely safe with her and Uncle Col. She always wore a grey bun on her head and we kids didn’t know how long her hair really was – until one night she undid it and we saw these thin reedy wisps falling right down to her bum.

I also remember she kept a chamber pot under her bed, which seemed terribly old fashioned and a mystery to me.
Yukky
, it used to pass through my head. Her head also was a wonder. I think she had Parkinson’s disease or something, because it always shook. But at the time, I guessed that’s what happened when you grew old.

Dad adored her, and he used to tell us high-drama stories that occurred at Grandma’s place, like the time he had this enormous boil on his nose and he was experimenting with making gunpowder. The gunpowder blew up in his face, nearly making him blind, but it burst the boil. So from bad came good.

And that – even maybe as a result of that small story – is what I have always thought about life. As bad as things get, life is never all doom. From even the worst explosions comes some good. In my past, there were the good times mixed in with the dark and inexplicable ones, but always in the black corners of life I managed to find spots of light.

And yet... knowing what I did, I had to ask myself: How did they come from the same family – Dad and Grandma Cecily Flanagan? Was there something more than met the eye? Did it all just start with Dad, or his mum, Grandma Glad? Or did it start with Dad’s Dad who no one ever knew? There was gossip, always plenty of gossip, but no one ever spoke. The only stories Dad ever told us were the ones about his Dad, the hero, who took a bullet for the Commonwealth in Singapore.

I guess the important thing at that age was that being at Grandma’s place and having Christmas days there or at our place, were the good times, the good memories... the things that made me realise how, even in the bleakness of my own immediate family, life could be worthwhile.

Both my uncles, Dad’s half-brothers, used to play guitar and sing beautifully; it was another way to feel connected with everyone and there was a sense of belonging. They were also sober, and the fun was always clean.

But inevitably reality would swoop like an enormous black crow or come pecking like an angry magpie right into the back of my head. Christmas would end, the sober cheer would fizzle, the rellies would go, and with all the arguments and fights Mum and Dad used to have, I had to wonder how life could ever be so good.

In many ways, the only release at home was the “touching”. On the one hand it was a release, and on the other, it never stopped. Neither from Dad nor from his mates. In the gloom of the fights at home, the hoary uncertainty, it was at least a love I got.

I wished those Christmas days would never end. The sun stood still in the sky, the hose-water cooled us down from the extreme, moist heat, and the day rolled into the night with such ease I could not think where all the problems could possibly come from.