Sawdust (9 page)

Mum’s family were quite different...
Aside from Uncle Barney, Mum’s older brother who did that unforgettable thing in the back of the ute, the most memorable person on her side of the family was her own Mum. We called her Nana, but she was actually Nana Milly Murphy. I loved her, but I tell you what, to be perfectly honest, she was drunk a lot of the time. The truth was Nana loved her beer as much as did Mum’s Dad, our Grandad Phil.

Grandad Phil only had one leg and he used to get around on crutches. I’m sure it was not so pleasant for Nana, but as a day of drinking would get on, and the sun began to set, so, more often than not, they would begin to fight.

From soft-sounding niggly words, their voices would grow to grunts and taunts, and before anyone knew it, Grandad was grabbing for one of his crutches and beating Nana with it.

To us kids it was a laugh, but I’m sure to Nana, it really got her goat up, or so to speak. I think it actually made her feel quite humiliated. To be fair, although there were these negative moments between them, they were never rough-handed or unkind to us kids. They were in the true sense of the word, real characters.

It happened quite a few times that Nana and Grandad would come up from Bundaberg, where they lived, and stay with us for a while. They would stay in the little flatlet Dad had built downstairs.

I remember once they came upstairs – it must have been a summer weekend because the sun was streaming into the lounge – and there were records playing. As the day and the beer and the plonk wore on, everyone began to dance. Nana loved Bing Crosby and Mum loved Dean Martin and the crooners like Frank Sinatra. Bing Crosby was playing at the time, and we kids as well as Nana were dancing and skipping around like the floor was one huge trampoline.

Because we were hopping up and down so much the needle inevitably jumped and the record scratched. It didn’t take a lot to get Nana and Mum fired up – and the jumping, scratching record did just that.

Mum was standing in one corner of the room – a slim woman once again at this time – and Nana, even tinier than Mum’s five-foot, with skin so wrinkly her face was like the leg of an aged elephant, only much thinner and more gaunt of course, was standing puffing at the other end of the room.

They were facing off, stepping closer and closer to one another.

A wet fag as usual dangled from Nana’s lips and a drink wobbled in her hand. With rounded shoulders she was trudging forwards as though emerging from some dark alley in a Dickens novel. She was screaming at Mum for ruining her record, and Mum was screaming back: ‘Why the hell don’t you stop jumping like a bloody kangaroo if you don’t want the record to scratch!’

Chewing on her cigarette, Nana puffed a cloud of grey smoke into the air: ‘What the hell does it matter to you anyway, Julie? It’s
my
record!’ Her voice sounded just like a parrot squawking. Only louder. It always sounded like that, like something was stuck in the back of her throat, only it sounded even more so when she was drunk or angry. Now she was both.

I think Mum must have bought the record as a gift for Nana, because the next thing Mum was lifting the record and throwing it like a Frisbee across the room at Nana, howling: ‘I gave you that record for Christmas and you don’t even care...’

That was followed, as they continued to close in on one another, with a parade of spitting and cursing. Finally, nose to nose, a fountain of tears flooding from both old and not so old pairs of red eyes, they clashed with swinging arms. A second later they crashed in a bear-hug to the floor, where they thrashed and flailed about some more. It looked like a circus, and we kids could not help but continue to spring around and laugh.

This time the episode ended in amusement for us children, and even the scratching mamma bears on the floor seemed to manage to sort something out. But it wasn’t always like that. On many occasions, rather than laughing, I remember feeling uneasy and unsettled at the anger, at the sheer extremity of it. It amazed me that there could be such resentment between a mother and her daughter. And mostly, like the record, it wasn’t even over that much.

Something inside me would freeze during these episodes, and I could not help but think, Where does it come from? Such bitterness and rage? One minute everyone having a good time and the next, this cursing and fighting and almost irredeemable ire.

Dad, towering over everyone, was no different. In fact, he seemed to set the example. From sitting there playing his musical instruments and singing like he was on top of the universe, the next moment he could be as angry as the devil. And not just at the people around him but at the world.

He would stand up and rant whatever came to his mouth, but often it would be things like: ‘The War took my father. Those bloody fuckin Japs! I would’ve knocked them bloody over. I would’ve killed all those bloody bastards.’ Just like that it would happen. Like he was hallucinating or something.

It left me feeling cold, numb and confused.

But back to Nana, I loved her, such a character, but I guess that was easier said when I didn’t have to be brought up by her or Grandad Phil, like Mum was.

Unlike Dad’s Mum – Grandma Glad – who always called me ‘love’, as in “Come and give your Grandma a hug, love,” Nana Milly Murphy would always call me ‘dahl’.

‘What ya doin, dahl?’ was the way Nana spoke. And then she’d say to me, ‘Deb, have ya got yesself a fella, dahl?’

‘Naaa,’ I’d say shyly.

‘Well... ya need t’ get yourself an old one,’ she’d look at me, shoulders curving, skin wrinkling, smoke blaring out of the sides of her nose, ‘... an make sure his rich, one foot in the grave, an then kick im in there.’ And then she would laugh.

She eventually divorced Grandad when she was sixty-five. ‘I’m not putting up with that old bastard any longer,’ she declared. And that was that.

The truth was, much as I liked Nana, I’m surprised, thinking of her, that Mum never drank. But she didn’t. I suppose I had to at least be thankful for that. Things could have been worse, far, far worse.

Although they owned the property in Anondale, on Perenjora Dam Road, the reality was Mum and Dad were paying off a substantial mortgage
and the arguments between them about money and where it was all going to come from, only increased. We kids also walked around feeling continually hungry. There were no snack foods to speak of, Mum’s biscuits or jam drops were a rare exception and we always felt when dinner came around we were lucky to be eating.

On the other hand, it has to be said, while breakfasts and lunches could be pretty scanty – lunch was more often than not bread dipped into hot Bonox followed by a mug of billy tea – we never missed a meal. One had to be a little amazed, with all the work Mum did with all of us kids around and with all the fighting and general disorganisation that seemed to define our house, that she managed to have something on the table for us at all.

Cups of tea were like our snack food. Even from a young age, the tea Mum and Dad gave us was so strong we could stick a spoon up in it. Coffee, on the other hand, was considered an adult drink, bad for us, and we were never allowed to have it.

More than anything, I remember Dad was always out working. Even most weekends he’d be out there doing something, ploughing or planting, harvesting or busy with his saws and timber cutting. If we were always hungry, he was like a ravenous beast by the time dinner came around. And he expected his food, especially his dinner – pre-salted and peppered by Mum – to be ready and served up to him as he sat down.

Mum made sure there was always enough salt on Dad’s food not just so that he could taste it but so that there could be no doubt there was enough to start a salt mine. And then he added some! Every night he would keep urging us kids: ‘Put salt on your food. It’s good for you. Your bodies need salt.’

I’m amazed we survived, but hungrily we ate and salted our food, one eye on what we were doing and the other on Dad shovelling mounds of meat and vegies into his ravenous lips. Hiding leftovers, or food we didn’t like, was an impossibility. Not under Dad’s eagle gaze. It would be suicidal.

Always taken together as a family, mealtimes were the complete opposite of Christmas time, and although we all, for better or worse, looked forward to our dinner, we didn’t look forward to sitting at the table. Inevitably, Dad would groan to Mum about where the money was coming from, and if he wasn’t doing that he would be shouting at us to finish everything on our plates.

At times, his mood was so bleak we used to literally shiver in our boots. On a bad day, he could suddenly lash out with a slap across the cheeks or over the back of our heads, and we soon learnt it was better to keep clear, remain silent, eat all our food, and at all costs, obey.

I remember once being out in the paddock by the tractor and seeing Jim act a bit brave in his mischievous way when Dad called him to move away from the thing. Defiantly, he just giggled and continued to stand there. Dad asked him again, and again Jim just stood and giggled.

‘OK then, you little bastard,’ Dad fired up, his face dark and swelling with blood. He grabbed a hammer from nearby, held it shaking in the air like an Indian warrior, and we kids, seeing the mad glaze in Dad’s eyes, were sure it was going to be the end of our poor brother Jim.

As it happened, when the blow came, the hammer just missed Jim’s head, but it slammed into the tractor mudguard, so hard and furiously that it left a massive dent in the machine. Jim, quivering, moved away from the vehicle. I actually don’t think Dad meant to hit Jim, but he sure had a way of making it look like he did.

Also, by the time we got to the Perenjora Dam Road property, Dad was slaughtering our own cattle, or “beasts”. So there were times when the food was even quite rich and tasty and full of meaty protein. But as the meat was stretched further and further through the days, so the stews it was added to would become more and more perilous until our meals had that vomitable blend of soft vegetables and grains, especially incorporating barley and pumpkin, which I hated.

‘You kids finish your frigging dinner. You’re not leaving this bleeding table until you do!’

Dad would growl the words as I felt the food coming up to the top of my throat, threatening to explode back onto my plate.
Which, of course, would have only made everything worse.

Salt. Salt. Salt
.
Thank heavens for salt – and Dad’s absolute, unflinchingly strong belief in it. Because without salt, most of my food would have come straight back up onto my plate.

‘Put some salt on your hand, Deb, and just lick it off,’ he would say to me of the condiment now considered by medical experts as a killer. And to this day, I still add salt to everything.

On occasion, we did get a real treat for dinner. My favourite, I cringe a bit now, was when Dad used to go out and shoot the little wood ducks that gathered at our two dams, and we would have them for dinner.

When they weren’t being eaten, the little ducks were wonderful to watch. We kids would spend hours observing them swimming and waddling around our dams like the very small geese they resembled.

Strong flavoured, I’m afraid they were “good tucker” in those days, and because of their small size we would pretty much each get a whole duck to ourselves. The wood ducks didn’t stand a chance against Dad’s shooting skills. They would have heard him coming a mile away, mumbling things to himself like, ‘You don’t ever mess with Dan Gallagher.’ And hearing that they should have run for their lives.

But on those nights when we had the wood ducks for dinner, Dad was a hero.

Another meal that I used to love was cabbage stew. It was made up of cabbage, onions and chunks of meat, boiled up and served with rice. There is not a lot I like to emulate in my parents, but this is one of the things. Cabbage stew. It was a cheap, easy meal, made with our own cabbages and meat from our own beasts. I loved it and love it still.

But back at the ranch, such as it was, the fights continued, only they were growing worse. When Dad didn’t like his food he would simply shove it back at Mum until she returned with something better tasting.

The whole house, even in mid-summer, would freeze on those nights. There were some foods he refused to eat, and threw them back at her – yes, right over the table. But we kids were never allowed to turn our noses up to anything.

‘Don’t you ever put tomato sauce on my dinner again,’ he would rage at Mum. ‘I’m not putting up with that bloody fucking rubbish!’

Dad would swear like a storm trooper. Everything was effing this and effing that. And many, many other words too.

I remember once being out in the paddock with my younger sister Marge. We were pulling out some crops from the ground, just generally of a weekend helping Mum and Dad. Only Marge couldn’t get one of the plants she was tugging at out of the ground and my innocent little sister
,
doing her best to emulate Dad, yelled as loud as she could: ‘Come out, you cunt!’

You can imagine.

‘Get up here now!’ Dad screamed like the earth was caving in at his feet, and an instant flogging was dished out for the dirty word. We kids knew not to swear. Goodness, no. We weren’t even allowed the word “damn” in our house. Like everything else in our house, only Dad was allowed to say what he liked and in the language he liked.

The Ten Commandments –
and more
– applied to everybody and everything but him. There were two standards in our house, and the one we had to obey, was Dad’s.

To this day I find it hard to swear and there is one word that rankles more than any other, it is that word c-u-n-t. I find it totally debasing of women. I remember once my daughter Sarah coming home from school, she was only nine, and she repeated that word.

‘Do you know what it means?’ I instantly sprung at her, probably overreacting. She shook her head. ‘It’s a disgusting word for vagina. That’s what it is! It’s a word
men
use!’ And then seeing her eyes close to crying, I softened and explained, ‘That’s exactly how we women should
not
see ourselves. The most sacred part of us, like a dirty, demeaning swear word.’

Still standing there a bit white, blinking her eyes, I am sure the message got through.

Funnily enough, Mum never swore, or very rarely, only when she was extra, extra furious. I guess it wasn’t considered ladylike in the day – or Dad didn’t allow it. But that was another thing I had to be grateful for. Imagine if they both swore like Dad. Our home would have been like a slop-house.

There were other kinds of arguments too in the house now. They could fight over just about anything, but now Dad was beginning to accuse Mum of things. Of fancying other men, of having affairs. He was also becoming violent.

I was about ten when we heard Mum arriving home one day, skidding the car to a halt on the gravel outside the front of the house. All of us kids ran outside to see what was going on. We found Mum, plump as a watermelon once again, hauling herself out of her car, puffing and shouting: ‘C’mon hurry, hurry. Get upstairs! Your father’s coming!’

We all ran inside the house and up the internal stairs, only to hear Dad a split second later, in his truck, skidding up behind Mum’s parked car. It was almost incredible that the loud screeching of tyres wasn’t followed by a bang. We could smell his fury burning in the rubber on the stones.

Behind us, we heard Dad’s heavy worker boots bounding up the stairs. I have no idea where Mum was by this time, but the four of us kids were standing huddled together, shuddering with fear. We saw Dad’s big square head appearing and suddenly Mum was running across the lounge and Dad was chasing after her.

He was spitting fire: ‘What the fuck were you doing with that fella? D’you think I never saw you with that cunt? Don’t think ya gonna fucking get away with this!’

Mum, her neck thick and bloating red, was turning around as best she could, screaming back: ‘I wasn’t doing anything wrong. I wasn’t doing anything wrong.’

She was running to the phone, I don’t know, probably to call the police, to get some help, but as she picked up the phone, Dad, in one of his quick army style manoeuvres, had the cord wrapped around her throat and was squeezing it. Mum was standing there shrieking and puffing. She was unable to move, unable to gasp breath. Her face looked so red it was beginning to turn blue.

The four of us kids were standing in front of them like white ghosts; we did not have to say it to each other, we thought this was the end of Mum. Perhaps us too? Dad, all six foot and three inches of his lanky, iron body was shaking with rage and thunder. It looked like he was going to choke Mum to death right there in front of us and then come for us.

Just when we thought she had taken her last pant of air, we watched as he breathed out heavily and sharply and suddenly, unexpectedly, let go of her. Instead, he leapt across the lounge to his gun cupboard.

Inside the cupboard, you could see even from where we were standing, he had any one of about twenty guns to choose from. It flicked in our minds, this was even worse than the strangulation was going to be. Our hearts were racing again. We saw bullets in our heads and guts. No one was going to escape.

Unable to take our eyes off him, we held our breath and watched. He was standing in front of the cupboard with the slow determination of a cowboy. And like that cowboy he took his time in choosing his weapon. When he turned around we saw he had chosen his carbine.

It seemed strange, because of all his guns he always kept the carbine in pieces – each piece wrapped in cloth like some sacred metal scroll.

Even more slowly now, a cowboy reconnoitring and planning his high-noon strategy, meticulously, he put the gun together, one piece at a time. He did it with the purpose of a world champion chess player, breathing deeply, thinking every step of the way, and out of the corners of our eyes we watched as Mum’s body shook and sweated.

She was free from the telephone cord now, but she was standing dead still, like she could be a spear of metal stuck into the floor. Her eyes, dark and dry, stared back at Dad with the certainty of death.

Finally, screwing the stock into the barrel, he began yowling: ‘I’m gonna kill you! I’m gonna fucking kill you, Julie! You’ll never do anything like that again!’

Sam, my little brother, couldn’t take it any longer. He broke from us and ran up to Dad. He was clutching at Dad’s knees. ‘Dad, Dad. Please, please! Don’t! Please don’t kill Mum!’

Foam firing from his lips, his eyes spinning like a wild boar, Dad looked down at Sam hovering around him, and we thought that was the end of Sam. Moments later, something in Dad’s entire being froze over. It was like a beer out of the freezer meeting fresh air and suddenly going to ice; it seemed to crack something in him.

He breathed in as though about to squeeze the trigger, only instead of pulling the trigger or even bludgeoning Sam with the gun, as we expected he was going to do, Dad took the gun and placed it, his prized possession, carefully on the lounge floor.

He pushed Sam aside like he was an annoying fly and stepped up to Mum. He grabbed her by the top of her dress and shook her. They were both screaming and shouting at one another, and all of us kids, as though one, ran for our lives.

We ran to the outside patio, which had a waist-high railing but no security rails. The boys instantly half jumped and half slithered down the long, two-storey-high posts and scurried into the backyard. But Marge and I, unable to make the jump so easily, were still slowly climbing down the posts when we heard Dad breathing just above us.

We were so frightened that we were ready to jump, but as we did so, we felt Dad’s big hands around our hair. He literally had us both by the locks of our hair and was heaving us up like an elevator back onto the patio.

Once back up, still holding us tightly by the hair, he dragged us across the floorboards back into the house.

We believed we were going to be gathered together and die with Mum. It was the only thought shooting across our foreheads. Our eyes crying with a kind of sharp, serrated pain, he launched at Mum with a vocal tirade, and Mum, as though beyond afraid, somehow launched back with her own tirade. The shouting and howling and Mum’s tears were so loud that anyone outside would have thought the wood from the house was splintering to pieces.