Joyous and Moonbeam (5 page)

Most of all, I miss my dad. I mean the real one, not this limited kind of plastic version that he's become. Yeah, he's still somewhere in my life, still living at home and saying stuff like, Have a good day, and, How was school? But it's rote recital. Flat and insincere, like someone just pressed a button on one of those annoying toys. Worst of all, he's bewildered. He never used to be – he was always pretty calm and controlled – but the Jamie-thing bewildered him and now the whole world seems to bewilder him, even though it's the same world it always has been, still screwy and callous and – it's like Bracks said, Well,
Ashleigh, you've got to choose where you step. The world is a tiptoe through the good and the not-so.

My dad is stuck in the not-so. Sometimes I think that he's like an actor playing a part that he's been doing for years, but suddenly he's forgotten his lines so he can't do it anymore.

Before Jamie, real-Dad used to take me up to the Sands for drag-netting. We used to pack food and clothes into the old Jeep and bump along back roads, singing along to the same dumb country music CD every time, choruses only – couldn't remember the rest, didn't want to, didn't really care. He'd always say to bring a friend but I never did because the Sands wasn't something that I wanted to share. We only went up to there a few times a year so it was precious and I wanted to keep the experience – keep him – all to myself.

These days the Jeep sits behind the garage like a sad, neglected old toad. Every so often Mum says, Might as well get rid of it. Dad shrugs and that's the end of it. Conversation Central, our place.

But the Sands … we used to stay at this shack that belonged to some mate of Dad's, long gone. It had rusty hinges on the doors and ripped fly-screens over the windows, and a big hessian-covered space out the back filled with crab-pots and plastic buckets and nets with orange buoys attached. The rooms in the shack smelled
like unwashed clothes and there were always gunky things in the fridge that we had to chuck out – milk that had turned to yellow sludge, leaky tomatoes with black holes and caved-in sides, and pieces of broccoli so covered with dark-brown fur that it looked like a family of tiny, stinky wombats. The beds were those old ones with painted steel frames, squeaky but soft in the middle so you'd jump in and sink. It was like falling into a giant doughnut. I loved it.

Mum never came to the shack – she's a five-star-hotel-plus-shopping-mall kind of holiday person – so it was just me and real-Dad and our daggy way of doing things. Our rituals, I suppose, to borrow from religion class. My favourite ritual was the Fried Egg Eating Competition. You had to carefully cut away the white edges, sliver by sliver, so that the whole yolk could eventually be lifted with a spoon into your mouth. The winner was the one who could take the most cuts without making the yolk bleed. Real-Dad was good but I got better because my fingers were smaller and I learned to be clever with the angles of the cuts.

If it was too windy for the beach we'd sit on the front verandah and take turns guessing the colour of the next car coming along the road. Any white car was an automatic draw. First to five correct guesses got to choose dessert that night.

My other favourite ritual was Crocodile, where we had a theme like Fruit And Vegetables or Sports And Games, and we had to think up words using the last letter of the previous word. The trick was to get lots of Es because there are plenty of words that end with E but hardly any that start with E. Real-Dad usually won Crocodile but I got better because I learned to choose sneaky themes like Female Clothing Brand Names or Ashleigh's Song Collection. He didn't seem to mind because it was our time, real-time, and that was all that mattered.

In front of the shack, across a thin strip of bitumen, was the sea. We'd go to sleep with the waves washing against the rock wall and then wake up in the morning and the tide had left a desert of flat, goopy-looking mud. Or we'd stay up and watch the moon rise over the edge of the world and change the ripples into strings of pearls, then real-Dad would get out his mate's telescope so we could see the moon and all the constellations. I never realised how weird the moon's surface was until we saw it in close-up, with its lumps and craters and strange shapes that we couldn't recognise or give names to.

No different to people, he once said. We're all made up of bits and pieces, some we know, some we don't. Real-Dad was like that, kind of wise and teachy but never in a forced way. If he had a new thought about the way things were in the world – whether it was our little world
or the bigger version, out there – he'd share it, softly and politely. Always politely. Listening to him was like … like tasting something at a restaurant and either loving it and craving more, or thinking, I wouldn't eat this myself – but I respect people who can and do.

I miss him so much.

The highlight was drag-netting on the incoming tide. Number one rule, keep legal-length whiting or flatties but nothing else. Enough for a feed, he'd say. That'll do nicely. Don't need to be greedy. Of course, this meant getting the other fish and creatures – crabs, sometimes even a small ray – out of the net and back into the sea. Real-Dad was funny about this. He'd happily catch, gut, fillet and eat whiting or flatties but other fish were off limits, particularly big fish. He once told me about a time when he'd gone out in a boat with some mates and they'd had this massive hit on a light line. Apparently a small fish had taken the bait then been swallowed by a huge cod which had managed to hook itself through the lip. He told me that his mates were stoked about capturing such a monster but he'd been sad because – and these are his words – the fish was old and she deserved respect. Respect for a fish? It was weird but I got it, I really did. That night his mates cut the cod into chunks and barbecued it. Dad refused to have any which his mates didn't like but he stuck to his guns, no doubt softly and politely,
because that was what he used to do.

Used to.

This is how it went: we'd get the net and its long plastic poles, bunch the net into wrist-to-elbow folds and walk down to the flats. The sand was full of shellgrit and tiny jigsaw cuts of coral, but because we'd go there early-morning or at dusk it was still cool and soft like margarine just out of the fridge. We'd walk into the water, me as anchor and real-Dad as the sweeper. My job was to wade out thigh-deep then walk my pole slowly backwards, along the tide-line, while real-Dad got deeper and quicker, unfolding the net as he went. On his command I'd slow to baby-steps and he'd sweep the net in a broad arc. When he was level with me we'd reverse into the shore, making sure that our poles stayed clicking along the sand as we dragged the net and its haul. Hungry seagulls would flap and squawk overhead and the waves would regularly gather the net in fistfuls, as if they were trying to reclaim their own.

Legal-length whiting or flatties were dropped into a bucket half-filled with seawater. Anything else was quickly rescued and returned to the sea. Often the small fish would have the net trapped in the grooves of their gills so real-Dad would part the strands with his fingers then use his other hand to gently push the fish forward, away from danger. Crabs could be fiddly and I wasn't allowed near
the rays. Real-Dad would use an old towel to clamp the base of the stinger, pick up the animal then carry it carefully to enough depth for it to flutter away.

It was simple and clean and gentle, exactly how real-Dad was, before he gave up and turned into nothingness. Before all that, he was the man who liked the ABC news and books by Elmore Leonard and
Pop Factory
, his favourite CD, made by a band he saw once in Tasmania. He was the man who showed me how to do algebra, made balloon-animals at my kiddy birthday parties and rode an elephant in the Thai jungle. He was the man who told me to wear purple because it was the colour of royalty, not only knew the words to ‘American Pie' but knew what they meant, and spent Saturday afternoons playing his lovely old sax in front of the footy, and Saturday nights making the best chicken korma ever. He was all those things and more, my real-Dad, and I can't believe that he's not like that anymore. I miss him so much, sometimes I think that he might even be –

No. Don't allow it. Bad thought. End now.

Joyous, My Special

This is my third letter and I hope these writings are helping you to understand how things came to be the way they are.

Moving to the city was very hard for you, I know, but what I wanted most of all was for you to gain some independence. Joyous, I have not been the best mother I could have been, despite trying, but some people are just better at it than others and I am one of the lesser ones. Motherhood is a skill and I haven't been strong enough, which doesn't mean that I don't love you because I do with
my utmost heart. It just means that I wasn't always able to support you in the best way possible. I still feel guilty about that, in particular where Sammy-K is concerned, so that was another reason why I wanted you to gain independence so that you could free yourself. It hasn't quite worked out in the way that I wanted and I blame myself for some of that.

We were filled with hope upon first arriving in the city and, as you know, for a long while, well, some months anyway, things went okay. Yes, it was hot and cooped up and on the small side and there was the matter of the no job and money going out at a rate of knots but we always felt there would be an opportunity or two just around the corner. Then the winter came and we had more costs, what with heating and coats and pieces to keep us going and not sick and Sammy-K being very frustrated at how his dreams weren't becoming real and taking it out on you, My Special. I know I should have done more to stop him, I know it deep in my soul of souls, but it just became part of our lives didn't it? The hitting became as much how we were as other things like watching TV and meals the same way every day.

This was my hardest time since the loss of my dear husband and the time, Joyous, when things changed for me and I gave away some hope and the spirit of Thomas Bowen finally left me so I was stranded, a bit like Tom
Hanks in the
Cast Away
movie. But not on an island, of course, I mean as a person with no thought of what to do or where to go. I was looking into the future and seeing little but this apartment and Sammy-K with his anger and drinking and you feeling let down by your bad mother so this is when I started to put on The Weight. It happened that winter without me really knowing and once it starts, Joyous, there is nothing stopping The Weight, it just increases day by day until you forget what you once looked like and just imagine this is how it must always have been. The Weight is not something that is just in your body, it sits on your mind like a stone that grows heavier and heavier and makes you feel depressed about not just you but pretty much everything. The Weight is a misery that makes each day a long and grey one. What made it worse was that Sammy-K didn't mind, he should have stopped me or helped but he didn't and once in the early days of The Weight he even said, I like a bit of beef on my woman. But this was no comfort and there has been many nights before and since the accident when Mamma woke with a start having been dreaming about Thomas Bowen passing by at the Kinsville church and seeing myself in the blue cotton dress and hat with flowers and seeing how skinny and pretty I was, how filled with hope and trust and the glow of the future. But that was before The Weight came so many years ago and unfortunately
it just keeps on coming no matter what I do, or at least staying the same and never going away. So, Joyous, I am so grateful for your lack of shame in me with The Weight being my great burden.

Since that winter it has always been my main hope, Joyous, that no Weight will hold you down, that you might fly to the beat of your own beautiful wings. What you must understand is that Mamma's life is set now and because of circumstances it is pretty messy with little prospect of change. Of course, looking back, we probably should have stayed on the farm and been true to ourselves but who was to know? It was all new and exciting, an opportunity, and looking back, my hopes were too high for what could happen. I was not thinking properly. Mamma has always been a dream person rather than a real person and this is my greatest fault. I know too that I misjudged Sammy-K and thought he might be more trustworthy than what he was. But as I've said before, it was better to tolerate him because he was in those days mainly beneficial, and all that Mamma had, outside of My Special Joyous, of course. Like I said in our chats, the thing with Sammy-K was his Fear. He was full of Fear. He had the Fear of what he wanted to be versus what he was and that hurt Sammy-K because the two were so separated, and so the drinking and so the accident. Looking back I can see now that I had The Weight and he had The
Fear and this made it hard for all of us.

The thing is too that cities are lonely places, Joyous, more lonely than islands or farms in spite of the people everywhere, because they all do for themselves and there is no spirit of being together or community. They are also noisy, busy places and this wears you down more than you realise. I have often thought that the only sounds we should hear are nature and music and silence, which you never get in the city but we did at the farm in Kinsville. Many is the time I have dreamed of going back but you just can't do that because it's impossible and silly to dream, as I have said and I have to keep reminding myself. Please remember this, Joyous, there is no going back, but lots of ways forward, lots of different ways which is real thinking. You just have to search for them, keep persisting and not blocking your mind which I think you might have done over the years and that is certainly my fault. I needed to be a better mother and teach you.

The point is that for Mamma the die is cast, as they say, but for Joyous things can still change and be better. I know that you haven't seen much different for a long time now, what with us and this place and Mr Santorini who has been so helpful, but that does not mean it can't be so. I wrote earlier that I wanted to see you gain independence and I still want that more than anything. But, Joyous, you will have to find it for yourself because Mamma can't
do it anymore. If you remember the family of ducks at the farm, sooner or later the little ones have to break free of their mother and make a life of their own, breathe in their own space. It's the same with all living things, including people. This is what I want you to think about, My Special, because I want to see you free and with the happiness that this can bring. Mamma can't get away now because The Weight holds me down like an anchor and there are also the Secrets, several of which I will tell later, but Joyous can, you can fly and you must for your sake and for mine too.

With all my love, Mamma