Dying Read online

  ‘Geez, did you ever see such a useless bunch?’ he’d say. ‘Have to get you out cutting fence posts for a day or two. Then you’ll know you’re born.’

  We did go out with him some days, setting off in the truck to check a dam or repair a pump somewhere. Jenny would load us up with smoko: lumps of fruit cake, tins full of scones, tea for the billy. On the way, Ranald would talk about the weather or the price of beef, and his fears about the state of the nation. He was a fierce conservative, afraid of the communists, the unions, the Catholics, and he was convinced that the Chinese were intent on sweeping down from the north when nobody was looking. But he was not averse to a debate, and when my mother challenged his views he happily sparred with her as if it was a sport. He was also a lover of poetry and would recite Burns and Tennyson as he worked away sawing timber, or mending gates, his mellifluous voice echoing in the emptiness all around him. It made my mother cry to listen, which was why he did it, I was certain.

  ‘You should never have gone away,’ he told her. ‘You should have married a good solid bloke from round here and been a plain country wife.’

  ‘And gone mad, just like Ril did,’ said my mother.

  Ril was my grandmother. Back on the verandah, Jenny and Mum talked as much about her as they did about my father, often likening one to the other, as if they were part of the same problem, the suggestion being that my mother had married a man who reminded her of her own mother, and had paid the price. The image I formed of my grandmother, as I listened to them talk, was of a beautiful, haughty, irascible woman, incompetent as a mother, unhappy as a wife, beset by an unrelenting restlessness that saw her crack once or twice under the pressure of it all. Most notoriously, I learned, she had suffered a breakdown during the war and had spent some months in a clinic in Brisbane trying to get better. The cause was pretty clear: a son in the navy somewhere in the Pacific, my mother nursing in Townsville at an army hospital, my mother’s other sister Judy already married at seventeen, and Jenny away at boarding school, no men to help out on the property, her husband out working alone from dawn till dusk, with all the attendant risks. He had come home one evening to find her packing her suitcases at random, stuffing everything she owned into them, the rooms turned upside down.

  My father’s nervous breakdown had been less dramatic. I was just old enough to remember him taking to his bed and refusing to get up for days and days. Perhaps I took him up a sandwich occasionally, leaving it on the bedside table for him to eat when he woke up. I seem to remember him always asleep, his hair unwashed, his jowls covered in dark stubble, his sheets stale. Jenny, who was visiting us in Sydney at the time, recalled him sending messages to my mother via a piece of string lowered from his bedroom window to the kitchen below.

  ‘He’d tie a note on the end,’ she told me, ‘requesting a cup of tea and a biscuit.’

  My mother laughed bitterly.

  ‘I made him an appointment to see a psychiatrist,’ she said, ‘but he refused to go.’

  I was fascinated by these problem relatives, my grandmother with her restlessness, and my father with his inability to stay in one place, until his nerves frayed so much he couldn’t move. I couldn’t help wondering how much of them might be in me, and whether cracking under pressure might be a family trait. I also wondered at the source of their fragility, whether it was an inborn hypersensitivity to things, or bred of a justifiable rage at the conditions under which they were forced to live. One of my mother’s theories was that they were both people with enormous untapped potential, who had missed out on a proper education and therefore felt they could never catch up.

  ‘Interesting that neither of them finished school,’ she said, explaining that my grandmother had been expelled from her Toowoomba boarding school in her final year, and that my father had been thrown out of home and school at the age of fifteen.

  ‘The war saved him,’ she said. ‘He lied his way into the air force and never looked back.’

  As for my grandmother, she married at eighteen and had four children in the space of ten years. ‘Out here,’ said Mum, gesturing at the empty landscape beyond the fence, ‘with no one to talk to. No wonder she went nuts.’

  At some point during our visit, my mother’s brother Peter and his wife Jan would telephone with an invitation to visit Beaconsfield for the day. In some ways this was the highlight of the trip, because Beaconsfield was the family home, the place where my mother and her brother and sisters had grown up. And yet we never stayed there. We only ever went for lunch.

  ‘What’s the bet she feeds us in the kitchen,’ said Mum, as we set out on one of these excursions. ‘Off paper plates.’

  I gathered there was no love lost between my mother and her sister-in-law. In a plot worthy of Jane Austen, Peter, as the only son, had inherited Beaconsfield outright, thus dispossessing his sisters of any claim to the place, other than a sentimental one. In this, according to Mum, he was enthusiastically aided and abetted by Jan, who had taken the extra step of suggesting that my grandmother was no longer welcome in her own home.

  ‘That’s why Ril took that round the world cruise,’ said my mother. ‘She had nowhere else to go. And then she came to stay with us in Ceduna.’

  I had only the vaguest recollection of Ceduna, on the South Australian coast. We had moved there briefly when I was four, when Dad landed a job with the Royal Flying Doctor Service. But I did remember the miniature tea set my grandmother had brought me from Hong Kong, and the dress with the gathering at the bodice that scratched in the desert heat. And I had seen the photograph of her descending regally from a DC3, her hair tied in a scarf, her eyes hidden behind enormous sunglasses, her sadness wafting around her like a private cloud.

  ‘Poor Mum,’ said my mother. ‘She spent her days sitting on the sand staring out to sea. I don’t think I’d ever seen anyone so lost.’

  Exile, I decided. That must be the explanation for my mother’s grief. First her own exile from home, going way back to childhood, when she was sent to school in faraway Brisbane at the age of eight, but then later the spectacle of her mother’s banishment from the place where she had lived all of her adult life. And if I cared to go even further back, which other women would I find, displaced, banished, abandoned? Ril’s mother for instance, whom I knew only from stories, holed up in a rambling house in Longreach where she waited hand and foot on Ril’s bachelor brother Frank, in an effort, I imagine, to keep him close. Grandma Cory was the one who was old enough, when my mother knew her as a child, to recall spear attacks on the local squatters and the deadly retributions that followed. Perhaps that was the original grief of anyone who came from out there, from those towns; it was the grief for the exterminated, the poisoned, the diseased and dispossessed. Perhaps no amount of forgetting could fully expunge the memory of the original conquest, the primal crime, gone forever unpunished, because there was nobody left to bear witness or tell the tale.

  I thought about that as we drove over to Beaconsfield on one of our lunch dates. I must have been in high school by then, and growing aware of my country’s hidden history. It struck me that only two Aborigines had ever featured in my mother’s stories of her childhood. One a young, nameless domestic servant who had been sent from a mission to work for Ril shortly after her marriage to Norman. The girl had taken fright and run away. The other an old man known only as Bill, who had worked for Norman for many years as a stockman and general roustabout. My mother had a picture of Bill posing for the photo beside a pony, with her sitting up on the saddle behind, aged three or four.

  ‘He was devoted to Dad,’ she said. ‘Every morning he’d sit outside the study door until Dad came out and gave him his jobs. And then one day he was gone. Vanished.’

  The way she told these stories, Bill and the housemaid were more like apparitions than real people, ghosts returning briefly from some other world to lay claim on their country, only to disappear all over again, too distressed to stay.

  The landscape changes somewhere between Barcaldin
e and Longreach. The trees disappear, the soil changes from ochre to bleached bone. Seen in a drought it can look like a moonscape, just a barren plain, but after rain it can turn into an ocean of grass. I gathered that Beaconsfield was better country than Delta, though I couldn’t tell, knowing nothing of the exigencies of grazing. All I saw, turning onto the Beaconsfield road, was more featureless nothingness. Not so for my mother, who knew every inch of the road from years of travelling up and down it as a child. She remembered where it took a turn towards the dry creek bed, where it rose again to give you your first glimpse of the homestead, where it passed by the tombstone of the cowboy who had been struck dead on the spot by lightning over half a century ago. She was excited to be travelling the road again. I could tell by the way she sat forward in her seat and pointed out what was up ahead.

  ‘That’s where Dad bogged the car bringing me back from the train after I’d finished school. On the way home I said I wanted to go on to university. Waste of time. Full of communists, he said. We had to leave the car and walk the rest of the way, arguing.’

  There it was again. My mother’s exile. She went to university in the end, somehow persuading her father to give her permission, and that marked her out, for the rest of her life, as dangerously over-educated, full of ideas that were foreign to her family. It made them afraid of her.

  She gave a little cheer as the homestead appeared up ahead. It was conspicuously grander than Delta, although of the same basic design. A huge canopy of green tin over a sprawling structure that seemed without back or front, having expanded over the years out from the centre. A lush garden shaded the house on all sides, oasis-like in the middle of the scorched plain all around. Peter and Jan appeared on the garden path and waved in a gesture of welcome. They didn’t look at all mean in the way I’d heard them described, just proprietorial, which was enough to rankle Mum.

  ‘I’m surprised they don’t charge us an entry fee,’ she said.

  Peter put his arm around his wife’s shoulder in a protective gesture and they advanced together through the gate to be there when the car pulled up.

  ‘Welcome to Beaconsfield,’ he said, as if to a group of strangers, after which there was embracing and handholding, none of it especially warm. It was a contrast to Ranald who almost lifted you off the ground when he met you, held you to his barrel chest so you could take in the working man smell of him.

  ‘Come in, come in,’ said Jan. ‘Let us show you around.’

  The tour was for my mother’s sake, to show off all of the changes that had taken place since her last visit. Rooms had been added, or joined together, or opened up, made more formal or more casual, redecorated according to Jan’s taste. As I followed the group around I could see my mother growing more and more irritated, as if the whole exercise was a slap in the face. Peter had a way of referring to ‘my mother’ and ‘my father’, a slip she found so exasperating she corrected him more than once.

  ‘Our mother,’ she said. ‘Our father.’

  But he took no notice. He was too busy showing off the formal dining room, which was furnished, according to my mother, with pieces she remembered from her childhood: the same long burnished table with the same solid chairs, the same sideboard heaving with silverware and china she recalled using as a girl. Peter wanted to let her know where the state governor had sat on his last visit, and which federal ministers had sat beside him, but my mother couldn’t have cared less.

  ‘This is where Ril used to sit,’ she told me, ‘whisky in hand. She had a way of rubbing her little finger against her ring finger, I remember. It was a sign she was about to blow up.’

  She sat in the chair and showed me the gesture, holding her head in the way her mother had. I had seen enough photographs of Ril to recognise the lift of the chin, the imperious stare.

  ‘She faced your father down the length of this table once,’ she told me, ‘and demanded to know when he was going to give up adventuring and get a proper job.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘I shall avoid it as long as humanly possible.’

  ‘That’s why they got on so well,’ said Jenny. ‘She didn’t frighten him.’

  According to legend, my father had thoroughly charmed my grandmother, the same way he charmed everyone else. He played the dashing aviator, flying in once in a while for a surprise visit in a friend’s plane, alighting on the Beaconsfield airstrip wearing jodhpurs and suede boots, tweaking the ends of his air force moustache, and dazzling all and sundry with his villainous smile.

  ‘Errol Flynn, we called him,’ said Jenny.

  ‘The boots were too much for Dad,’ said my mother. ‘He thought suede was code for queer. He even took me aside one night to caution me.’

  ‘Shall we have lunch now?’ said Jan, discomforted by the turn of the conversation. I sensed that she found my mother unsettling, and not entirely respectable, that Mum’s visits were an ordeal to be endured rather than an occasion for celebration.

  As Mum had predicted, we ate lunch in the kitchen, crammed into a corner breakfast nook where Jan had set out a salad and a plate of sandwiches on a small Formica table. The talk was mainly about rain and the lack of it, and about the fortunes of friends and neighbours who were doing it tough. My mother recognised some of the names and joined in, catching up on news of clans she had known of since girlhood, friends who had stayed behind when she left, and made their lives in the bush, while she was busy inventing an entirely different life elsewhere. Soon she grew restless at the table and excused herself.

  ‘I just want to take a wander on my own,’ she said.

  Later I found her lying flat on her back on the bare floorboards of the hallway that bisected the house straight down the middle, or had done before all of the additions and modifications had changed things around. At first I thought she had collapsed there.

  ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘I couldn’t take any more of that incestuous gossip,’ she said. ‘Have you noticed how they never ask any questions about us? It’s like nothing exists beyond the boundary fence.’

  I sat down beside her on the cool boards.

  ‘Ril used to lie here on summer afternoons,’ she said, ‘to catch whatever breeze there was. She wouldn’t speak, only to tell the nanny to keep us away.’

  I was reminded of my father’s sulks, sometimes lasting two or three days, when he wouldn’t say a word to anyone. I knew the fear this kind of silence can induce. You are convinced that it is your fault, that your very existence is a provocation. At least that was the case with Dad. He never hid the fact that he resented family life and found the demands of fatherhood intolerable. I gathered Ril had been the same, saddled with four children before she was fully grown herself, appalled at the sacrifice of her youth, and of any kind of autonomy, financial or emotional. No wonder my mother harboured so much grief. She must have imbibed it from birth, sucked it in with the very air. And here she was, back at the source, filling herself up with it again, as she lay sprawled on the floor in the spot where her mother had sulked and gone silent on all those blistering afternoons.

  ‘Time to go,’ she said, hauling herself up to her feet. ‘I’ve seen enough.’

  Peter and Jan could barely disguise their relief as we readied to leave. They herded us to the gate and beamed as we piled into the car.

  ‘Give my love to Ranald,’ they said, feigning politeness. I had the impression they had private reservations about Ranald as well as about my mother, regarding them both as disreputable, if for different reasons.

  ‘She’ll be back inside in a minute,’ said Mum, ‘mopping the kitchen floor to get rid of all our crumbs.’

  As we came to the dry creek she asked Jenny to pull over and stop the car.

  ‘This is where the old dump was,’ she said.

  I followed her around as she poked in the rubbish with a stick. It was slim pickings, but she unearthed a few old medicine bottles made of coloured glass and a couple of blue and white fragments of china encrusted in dir
t.

  ‘There were Chinese market gardeners here when I was small,’ she told me, ‘and one or two Chinese cooks.’

  More ghosts, I thought, more apparitions floating into the picture, then vanishing again. This time they had left a faint trail, a few shards of a rice bowl, a piece of a picture painted on a plate, depicting a tiny boat on a lake and part of a bridge.

  Back in the car, she repeated the oft-told story of the Chinese cook my grandmother had sacked just after she first moved to Beaconsfield as a new bride.

  ‘The cook had been working here for years,’ she said, ‘with all the men, when the house was just a shed and the kitchen was a lean-to on the side. She caught him dropping cigarette ash into the stew and told him he could pack his things and go.’

  ‘No me go, Missy,’ Jenny intervened, delivering the familiar punch line. ‘You go.’

  They both laughed at the thought of their eighteen-year-old mother trying to exert her non-existent authority over the staff, although I sensed an underlying sadness to this story, too. Jenny knew what it was like to be the sole woman in a household of men. No matter how kind they were—and my grandfather was by all accounts very kind—it must have been unspeakably lonely for my grandmother, and there must have been times when she was afraid. And what about the cook, lost out here, so far from anywhere he might have called home, his fate in the hands of a teenage girl.

  We stopped again, just before the boundary gate of Beaconsfield, so that my mother could get out and fill one of her medicine bottles with soil. I watched her walk a few yards to where the dirt was fine and sandy. She went down on her haunches and scooped up a handful or two until she had enough.