Ricochet Baby (21 page)

Why have I spoken so little of my mother? I’ve told you what she looked like, and the things she did, but, actually, I haven’t much idea about the kind of person she is. She is so elusive, with her erratic charm, her sudden black moods, that I find it
impossible
to pin down her nature in a way I can describe. Her past feels dark and impenetable. One night, a few years ago, we were
watching
television together at the farm when the Pope was visiting the country. Pictures appeared on the screen of sick people being taken to see him at an outdoor rally. A woman was wheeled out in a bed, her gaunt expression like a death mask, her eyes staring into space. The camera lights were trained on her scraggy neck and her thin pathetic arms struggled to lift themselves in acknowledgement of a blessing. It made me feel ill to watch, but my mother suddenly sat forward in her chair, focusing all her attention on the woman.

‘My God,’ she said, ‘That’s Nellie Civil meeting the Pope. Fancy.’ She used the remote to flick the image off the screen.

‘Who was Nellie Civil?’ I enquired.

‘Oh, a nobody. I mean, like a nobody. I went to school with her. She used to walk backwards round corners so she wouldn’t meet strangers.’

‘Down the West Coast?’

‘I can’t remember,’ she said, because she had been drinking. I have never been to the West Coast, but I did go to church for a long time. I have more than a passing knowledge of the Pope’s ways.

When I was small, before our return to the farm, my mother took us children to church, wherever we were staying at the time. The boys kept an eye on me while she went up to the communion rail and bobbed before the altar, and sometimes, depending on how strict a church it was, I would be allowed to run and dip my hands in the baptismal font and splash water over myself. My father
didn’t
seem to mind, but then I don’t recall him minding anything in those days.

It was after we came back that everything changed. There was a tension in the air when Sunday came around. My mother couldn’t avoid the relatives who lived all about us. They called to visit, their faces stiff with disapproval at everything she did, but this new mother of mine, so determined to do what she wanted, in return for going back, never missed church. She got in the car and drove down the road. I suppose it got to my father, torn between her and his sisters.

When we got to church, she would act very devout, sitting up near the front and not taking her eyes off Father Bird during the sermon, or Alec McNulty while he belted out the hymns. It was a sound that made you want to tap your toes rather than incline yourself to God. His eyes sparkled when we sang and his shoulders moved up and down. He often smiled in our direction; my mother
had a soaring soprano voice, one of those that others use as an instrument to follow.

My brothers, who had both practised the faith until then, were also torn apart over this. But they were teenagers; they shrugged it off and, before long, they stayed home. Soon Michael left the Widerup, went to boarding school and never really came back to the farm. He found friends, and often stayed with them through the breaks. His visits home, since then, have been rare. Bernard elected to stay at school in Walnut, and I guess that would have suited my father; Bernard had to work hard enough to make up for Michael.

My mother began to help with work around the church, doing flowers, that kind of thing. She had started taking a night class in floral art, driving into town one evening a week.

The day was drawing near for my First Communion. I should have taken it earlier, but with all the shifts we’d made I was behind with my religious instruction. I was very mystical and spiritual, the way little girls are. At the convent school I went to, we used to sing ‘O Mary, we crown you with blossoms today, Queen of the Angels, Queen of the May’, for the May procession, marching around with angelic expressions on our faces. I thought a lot about the Virgin Mary.

But my day never happened. At dinner, one evening, my mother said she thought perhaps I should leave it for a year. I couldn’t believe she would say this to me.

‘I’m not sure that you’re ready, Roberta,’ she said, sitting and patching a sheet in a virtuous way. My father was reading the
newspaper
. I saw the pages become still.

The material for the white dress had been bought. I began to scream with rage and frustration. ‘I don’t care what Dad wants,’ I shouted.

‘It’s nothing to do with me,’ said my father.

‘Yes it is, it is. You always growl at Mum for going to church.’

‘Well, I haven’t growled this time,’ my father said.

‘It’s true, darling,’ said my mother. ‘It’s not your Dad’s fault. Father Bird and I have decided it would be better if we took our time over this decision.’

‘I’m not going to church any more,’ I raged at her.

‘Well dear, we’ll have to see about that.’ Only there was a look of satisfaction in her eyes which I didn’t understand at the time. I
can see it now that I’m grown up. This was what she wanted from me. My father folded his paper and went outside into the dusk of evening. I saw him walking towards the paddocks, not looking back. My mother went to the window and watched him for a moment.

I don’t remember any abatement of the cries which echoed from their bedroom in the weeks that followed. But it astonishes me that she imagined my father would not work it out. I suppose this is what lovers are like when they are so obsessed by their
passion
that they think can get away with anything.

One Friday, that summer, my father was away, as he always was; that’s the day farmers go to town to do their business. You could bank on him being gone for several hours.

It was the school holidays. Bernard and I were hanging around the house, his chores finished until evening. My mother had worked in the garden all morning, and had just taken a shower; a cloud of perfume seemed to billow around her. ‘Would you like to take my car and go for a drive with Roberta?’ she said to Bernard, with a lovely big smile. Bernard was fourteen at the time, and practising to get his licence the day he turned fifteen. He was big for his age — he’d just begun to shave fluff off his face — but he went bright red with pleasure when she made him this offer, even though I could see that having me along took the shine off it.

So we set off, Bernard and I, driving towards nowhere in
particular
, although my mother had given us money for ice creams when we got to the store. We were thinking of driving out to the coast. Before we had gone very far, though, the car’s engine began to splutter and miss.

‘We’re going to have to turn back,’ he said. I saw that he was frightened. There would have been a penalty if we’d been caught. I imagine he was worrying that we would break down and have to be rescued, and then it would come out, ending his hopes for a licence.

The house, when we returned, was very quiet. My mother was nowhere to be seen. Bernard went around calling.

‘I suppose she can’t be very far away D’you want to make some lunch?’

‘No thanks, I might go for a walk.’ I didn’t feel hungry at all, just uneasy.

‘Don’t go too far away,’ he said, cast in the role of reluctant baby-sitter. He sat down in front of the television; there wasn’t much on in the daytime then, but he found a panel of women
giving
advice to people with problems and settled himself in to watch.

By the river, I saw my mother and Alec McNulty. There were buttercups out by the river, and sun shining through the willow branches. My mother was naked, lying back in the grass with light falling about her, so that her cream skin glowed gold-yellow Alec McNulty’s fingers trickled over her breasts, and the look on her face was pure exultation, closer to ecstasy than anything I had seen in church. She lay back in the grass, her hands behind her head, her knees pulled up, while he continued to stroke intimate places, first where you could see, and then so his fingers disappeared inside her. She kept her hands away, as if to prolong what he was doing, as if, were she to touch him, he might stop. Her spine arched over and again.

Alec did stop after a little while, saying something with which she agreed, and she seemed to spread herself even wider on the grass, while he slid his shorts down over his backside. I thought his face looked like that of a giant bullfrog, his throat working, as he lowered himself on to her. She reached up then and touched his face, as if it were beloved to her. I watched her shuddering pleasure in him, and heard her voice, harsh and unmusical. I thought that she, too, looked like a frog, a little buttery-coloured frog.

E
VERYTHING IN THE
house changed, now that I knew my mother loved somebody else. And although I didn’t know exactly what for, I was waiting. Everybody would have known, one of the men would have told him, perhaps one of the brothers-in-law. I can see the scene, four or five men leaning on the rails at the saleyard, prodding the rumps of the beasts in the pen.

‘Flighty creature,’ one of them might have said. ‘Drives the boys wild. How’s the missus, Glass? Settling in, is she?’ All the time needling the animal so that it jostled the other cattle. ‘Causes a bit of trouble when she’s put to the bull, if you ask me.’

And my father, his face flaming would have understood the crude shorthand. Then one of the older men would have taken him aside. ‘Take no notice, lad, you’re the only one who knows whether your hearth’s clean or not.’ This was how they talked.

I sit there, looking at the scene for myself, inspecting it.

‘You don’t have to go on with this,’ says Dr Q.

I start, feeling guilty, seeing how tired he is today. I had
forgotten
his fall, his paleness.

‘Unless you want to,’ he says, and smiles at me. His concern has been for me, rather than himself. I am exhausted, too, but it feels as if we’re in a relay race that has to be completed.

‘There’s not much more.’

W
E WAITED IN
the hotel for my mother to come. She was supposed to be meeting us there after shopping in the city. My aunts and uncles were there, at the end of a market day in Walnut. The
dining
room in the Walnut Hotel is exactly the same now as it was then, lined with maroon and gold embossed wallpaper.

Dinner was served on the ringing of a brass bell. There were no menus and no orders were taken; we all lined up to be served or went without. The chef stood and carved the meat off the legs of lamb, the haunches of beef and pork. The vegetables lay in four large stainless-steel dishes alongside. Dessert was pavlova and fruit salads arranged on a separate wagon.

‘We’d better begin,’ said Auntie Kaye. She had developed leather pouches under her eyes this last year or so, perhaps from all the cigarettes she smoked. She helped herself to two slices of beef, three of pork, one of lamb, all four vegetables, brown gravy and horseradish sauce. We held back.

‘She’ll be here soon,’ said my father, with stubborn patience.

‘The child’s starving,’ said my aunt, looking at me.

‘Yes, all right. Go on, Roberta,’ said my father, ‘help yourself.’ But he didn’t take any for himself.

When I had finished what was on my plate, he urged, ‘Go on, have some more, it’s a treat. Hurry up, before your mother comes.’ All the while, he kept glancing at his watch.

But she didn’t come. She was upstairs, with Alec McNulty, up the crumbling stucco-lined staircase, in a room with cheap
crumpled
turquoise curtains and orange-checked blankets, and she’d forgotten what time it was. My father saw Alec trying to slide out the side door of the Walnut Hotel’s Barracuda Restaurant, and the next moment, he was bolting up the stairs.

I see it over and again. I think she’s putting on lipstick when he comes into the bathroom. The towels are fresh on the rail and the clean glasses still wrapped in their paper. She wears the stain of
Alec McNulty unwashed upon her skin. They walk down the
staircase
, his fingers on her wrist, and the piano player is playing ‘Drunk with Love’. I remember this last part very clearly. The rest is something I see when I am in old seedy hotels, like the kind of places I worked in, and the boarding house where I went after I’d said goodbye to Nathan.

If you weren’t part of it, you could say there was an element of farce about the end of my mother’s affair — in one door and out the other, all those frozen moments that can still pull a laugh. But if you’re in it, it’s all pain. They brawled their way through months of shouting and pleading.

‘You may stay if you wish,’ he told her one morning, his voice cold.

Did she have a choice about leaving? I suppose so, but if she did, she didn’t take it. I guess some women want to taste variety without its consequences. I’m sure the outcome was more than she had bargained for. And I think there was more to it than simply my father’s discovery of her treachery; there was his grief too, his look of having been totally abandoned. Yes, I am partial to my father, though I am not blind to his weaknesses.

The outward signs of their fury stopped quite suddenly. Late one night I heard her screaming but he was silent; after a while, I understood that she and I were alone in the house. Later, she came into my room and lay down on the bed where Aunt Dorothy had been and soon she slept. I smelled the harsh odour of straight liquor.

When I speak of her prince of darkness, you may say that he had operated in exceptionally broad daylight, but what I mean is that a darkness entered her soul. Perhaps it was already there, just waiting for its moment. She became an alcoholic as soon as she began to drink. I read somewhere that alcohol is linked to the memory of sexual violence. Now, I suppose that would have come from Alec McNulty Wouldn’t it, Dr Q?

But strangely, they continued with a violence of their own. Michael came home for a time that year, and then he left, more or less for good. Sometimes I think that it’s their lust that drove Michael away, beyond reach, and also, that it’s what’s held Bernard there, mesmerised, as if by two snakes devouring each other. I think Bernard was looking for someone like my mother, a saintly, Catholic woman who turned into a whore, but of course, Orla
would never be like that.