fragment 5 (milk, hair, bones, blood)

At school, the boys sang songs.

“Milk, lemonade, chocolate! Milk, lemonade, chocolate!”

As they sang, they pointed to parts of their anatomy.

“Milk!” they shouted, and pointed to their chests.

“Lemonade!” they pointed to their groins.

“Chocolate!” they pointed to their bums.

I understood the lemonade and the chocolate, but the milk I did not understand at all. How did they keep milk in their chests?

I saw a woman with a very small baby sitting in a car. She had her blouse open and the baby was attached to her right breast. I could see the mouth of the child moving. I stared until the woman must have felt me looking at her, and she smiled.

“Susan! It’s very rude to stare like that,” my mother said to me, pulling on my arm.

I turned to look back. The woman had the baby over her shoulder, and was gently, ever so gently, patting his or her back.

“Mummy, what was that lady doing?”

“Feeding her baby.”

“How?”

“I can’t explain it to you now. Wait until we get home.”

“But you’ll forget. Please tell me now.”

“I haven’t got time now. Stop pestering. I’m in a hurry.”

When we got home, I pestered her more.

“How did that lady feed her baby, Mummy?”

“She has milk in her breasts. The baby sucks the milk out.”

“Where did the milk come from?”

“The baby’s mother makes it.”

“How?”

My mother sighed. “Why don’t you look it up in your encyclopedia?”

“Did you feed me like that?” I asked the two mounds under my mother’s jumper.

“No, I didn’t. Not every mother does.”

“Why not?”

“Some ladies can’t, for all sorts of reasons. Sometimes it hurts too much, or they get sick, or the baby’s sick.”

“Why didn’t you feed me like that, Mummy? Did you get sick?”

She paused for a breath. “Yes. I was sick, dear.” She didn’t look at me.

For many years my parents’ bedroom contained a double bed, a dressing table with mirror, a wardrobe and two bedside tables. And a chair in front of the dressing table for Mum to sit on to do her hair. She would put it in curlers after she had washed it, and walk around the house with a headscarf on. She was always horrified to see women outside, in public, with curlers in their hair.

“Look at her!” she would say. “She looks like a fishwife with those frightful things on her head. She could at least stay indoors. What’s the point in doing your hair at all if you’re going to go around looking like that?”

She had fixed ideas about these things. Hair was one, but dress was another. Men looked best in a suit and tie, and women in something tailored, or a dress. A fitted dress like the Queen wore. I’m not being facetious. She really did like what the Queen wore, but then my Mum liked the Queen, full stop.

My father didn’t have much hair left, even then, so he didn’t need to sit in front of the mirror. He was handsome, my Dad, even in old age, and other women would ‘make eyes at him’. This amused my mother no end.

“Look at her, making eyes at your father! She should try living with him,” she would say in a whisper.

When I was going through my religious phase, just before puberty, I used to pray that the hair under my armpits would disappear. I tried to keep my arms attached to the sides of my body at all times, but that meant the teachers would wonder aloud why I never put my hand up to answer questions in class.

And doing jazz ballet was excrutiating, because the boys would watch and I could hear them saying to each other Look she’s got hairy armpits!

I remember when I was six, at night I used to look at my wardrobe and it would loom out at me, become suddenly huge and threatening, and then everything in the room would do the same, and I would be surrounded by these enormous everyday objects turned into monsters. Or one of my hands would feel bigger than normal, and I would wiggle the fingers and clench my hand into a fist, but it felt like it had turned into a potato or a big sponge mitt.

The other extreme would be that a piece of furniture would disappear into the distance, become tiny and insignificant, but everything else would remain the same.

There I would be, lying in bed, with my furniture turning against me, warping and weaving before my eyes in the dim light coming through the window, unable to do anything except hide underneath the bedclothes and close my eyes.

Then the skeletons would come. Jaws agape, laughing at my fear, chasing me through the house until I resorted to diving under the bed in a futile attempt to escape their clanking forms. The dreams always seemed to end with me cowering with the dust balls, looking at a laughing skull as bony fingers delicately held up the bedspread to peer at me. Nothing else happened. Fear was the main character in these dreams, but I didn’t know that then.

I came home one day from school and there was blood on my bicycle seat. I looked at my thighs and there was more blood, and then I noticed my underpants were blossoming a red rose.

My mother took me aside. I was eleven, and she was shocked.

“I was seventeen when I got my first period! It must be this hot climate. Brings girls on earlier.”

She showed me how to dress up in this pad and chastity belt, and I wondered what exactly was happening to me every month.

“Don’t wash your hair or have a shower while you have your period, Susan. You might get a chill,” was the first advice from my mother. “Sex can be quite exciting,” was the second.

I was not sure what sex had to do with this messy uncomfortable thing that embarrassed me so regularly, but now I realise how much I owe my mother for telling me even that small gem.

fragment 4

It was a twenty-two foot long Viscount caravan, with an annex and a portable toilet. There were two bedrooms, mine at the front with four bunk beds, and my parents’ at the other end with a double bed and narrow wardrobe. In the middle was the kitchen, with a small fridge (everything was small, scaled-down) and a stove, and a u-shaped seating area with a laminated table in the middle.

We lived in this metal home on the Gold Coast in the late 1970s. The caravan park at Broadbeach had an invasion of large moths in the ablution block, and I was scared of them. Having a shower was not so bad, because they didn’t like the rushing water, but in the toilets they just sat around, waiting for you.

Those grey and white winged creatures seemed like malevolent things that would do me harm. Beating their wings against me, leaving their scrufulous dust on my skin. I would let out a little scream if I managed to get into the toilet and sit down, only to be set upon by a group of them. Not a recipe for good bowel health.

I had a bicycle, and I rode around the ‘streets’ of the park, sometimes for hours. The other residents were a mixture of longtimers, like us, and holidayers. There were other kids, but I didn’t make many friends. Two other younger girls went tadpoling with me one day, but their father found us and turned red with anger. He didn’t say anything to me, just shouted at his daughters.

Two young women once walked through the caravan park wearing only tiny bikinis with g-string bottoms, and high-heeled shoes. I watched them through the front window of our van, and watched the expressions of the other people who passed them. The men turned back to stare, the old women shook their heads.

My mother must have been mortified to be living in a caravan. She was ashamed to live in the old house at Wynnum North, the one at the crossroads between the monastery, the rubbish dump, the oil refinery at Fisherman’s Island, and Nazareth House. But it was a palace compared to the van.

And I remember her speaking of it with affection. Both my parents often spoke of vehicles and other big inanimate objects with love and sympathy, as if they were living. Sometimes I think they found them easier to deal with, less likely to contradict than humans. They once owned a large motor boat called Cressida, and sailed around the English Channel. There were dozens of cars. Strangely though my mother did not drive once we settled in Australia. She said she found it too busy, too dangerous.

My school was across the road from the caravan park, but I would often ride my bicycle anyway. I loved that school, at Palm Beach. The principal was a gentle old man who treated kids with humour and kindness. I fell in love with a boy in my class, which made grade seven my favourite year. He knew I existed, and was very tolerant.

One of our teachers had long red hair and milky white skin. She took the girls for a regular talk about how to respect yourself and keep yourself looking neat and tidy. We always expected that the next talk would be about ‘it’, but it was a long time coming. I can’t even remember whether ‘it’ ever did come, so the talk could have been a disappointment.

There was a boy in our class, a little older than the rest of us, who had long white hair like a rockstar and a chunky body. He was suspended from the school after assaulting a girl in the school grounds. He supposedly pulled her pants down, but I really wasn’t sure what else he did. Someone said he tried to rape her, but what did that mean? I barely knew what any of that meant. I didn’t know who the girl was, and she left the school. The boy came back eventually, and nothing more was said. I could have done with that talk from the teacher, I was so naive.

The milky white skinned teacher then had her hair cut to a bob, and we saw her crying in the classroom one morning, before we were all let in.

Is she crying because her hair is short? someone asked.

Don’t be stupid. It doesn’t hurt to have your hair cut.

We all peered in, wondering.

fragment 3

I wasn't driving this time. I was sitting in the back, behind my father, and Craig was at the wheel. We had made so many trips down to the Gold Coast, our little red car was gradually (or not so gradually) giving up.

Bits of rubber were peeling off, windows jammed, doors wouldn't open from the inside, the air conditioning stopped working. It had been a good small car, one that my parents had bought us ten years previously, because they were concerned about me without one.

My parents had loved cars. I have dozens of photographs of them posing with their automobiles. The big brown Valiant (that my mother blamed Malcolm Fraser for them having to sell, supposedly because he said petrol prices were to escalate), the pert petrol-blue Hillman, the black sporty-looking one from the 1940s, the Morris Minor.

But Craig and I had no car in the early 1990s, and so my parents convinced me to let them buy me one. I wasn't comfortable about it. My father could be generous, but he made sure you felt obligated. But I gave in, and was grateful for the small red second-hand Ford Laser.

And after my mother died, we wore it out completely travelling up and down the highway between Brisbane and the Gold Coast, helping my father, taking him to doctors and hospitals, and keeping him company.

But this time, when I was sitting in the back seat, as Craig motored the three of us down to Currumbin to eat fish and chips by the water, we were talking about something I no longer remember (but wish I did) and my father casually said, 'Oh that Shakespeare, he's over-rated you know.'

There was a pause. Craig threaded his arm between the front seats and squeezed my knee, as I bit my lip.

'Really, Dad,' I said, as I looked at the back of his head, wispy strands of white-grey hair heartbreakingly clinging to his ancient scalp.

Never again will a single story be told as though it's the only one. -John Berger