Sawdust (19 page)

It was about two in the afternoon when we finally – and God knows how – safely reached the RAAF Base Hospital at Butterworth
. I had done it with my foot on the pedal all the way. I felt a bit like Mum that day she was racing into the drive to beat Dad into the house before he could catch her, but I had made it to the hospital and could now flee the car just before everything ended in a heap.

At precisely 10.28 that night, with Chris my renewed knight in reinstated armour at my side, and having had exactly what I did not want in my push for a natural birth, an epidural because of the extreme pain, Sarah came spinning out into the world. I say spinning, because, well, they had to spin and drag her out with forceps in the end – and everything in my head and upper body felt like they were swimming and rotating with her.

But I have to say, the negatives aside, it was amazing. The most astounding episode in my life. Well, let me put that into perspective. She was bloody and purple and I was a little shocked and afraid when I saw that tiny squashed face. At the same time, separating her crimped and bedazzled expression from all that muck and gunk that comes with childbirth, and which I had somehow forgotten about, and she looked beautiful. Absolutely the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

Mire and bile, sludge and gall aside, I know how they say you love your child in that moment of first sight as she comes pouring out of the womb, well it’s true. I felt it like a wave. Like love was oxygen speeding from my eyes into her heartbeat. And vice versa: I could feel her miniscule heartbeat on my tongue. We were both tapping absolutely in tune.

I wanted to cry I was so overcome. That little pattering heartbeat of hers, that little purple body struggling for breath, writhing and hanging in the air waiting to be laid on my stomach, her lips somehow already groping for Mama’s breasts.

They took her away from me after a short while, to clean her up, and despite the presence of Chris and Marge and Mum, I sat up and then fell back over because of the epidural. I had no control over my body. Life was showing me its ways again. Like at home. One minute everyone laughing and singing and having a grand old time, and the next everyone falling over, Dad kicking me and everyone else in the backside, including all the Japs in the world for what they did to his dad.

The sanctity of life. The privilege to bring new life into the world. It is sacred. It is still sacrosanct to me. It would be the same for each one of my children to follow – Ruth two years later and Dean five and a half after that.

But at that time, in those first few days, weeks, months, although I did not know much about child-rearing, it came to me as the most perfectly natural thing – despite the occasional pains of breastfeeding and a baby crying with heat rash because of the unrelenting Malaysian humidity.

In the end, after the first few harrowing days following Sarah’s harsh birth, she was such a delight, she even started sleeping through at a mere 10 days old... giving me some peace, my little sparkle of light. In fact I used to call her “Sparkle” – because of her striking, luminous blue eyes. Motherhood for me was exactly as I expected it, the most extraordinary thing in the world; I felt privileged in an absolutely human way to finally do something right.

I often wondered if it was ever like that to Mum. How fatherhood felt to Dad. It is hard to imagine. Sometimes, even through the tears, I look back at them, and see them, Mum and Dad, in the same way I saw Chris and myself in those first anxious, astonishing moments of giving birth. I see them smiling, relieved, happy in a way they never expected to be.

And then I see Dad inspecting my body like an amateur doctor, like a grubby woodchopper, to make sure I was a girl. That the sawdust was his. That he had his human flesh to sever. And I see Mum, the smile fading, finally disappearing completely, becoming a weight on the world. In front of her, bin-load after bin-load of grey washing hanging on a thin line, the sun beating down on her back until the soil is hard like rock.

I also knew in my heart I would never trust Chris with our newborn child, or with our children to come. He was a man. He had shown what kind of man. The fear was too great. I knew he could never, would never do what my father had done, but I guess that was how deep it went, my experience, the fear, the absolute fear… of the so-called love between a father and a child.

After having Sarah, she came everywhere with me; there was no way I was letting my cherished daughter out of my sight. During my sporting days in Malaysia, our maid or
amah
, whose name was Penata, would be in tow, to take care of her while I was on the field or on the court playing. But always Sarah was there, somewhere near enough for me to see.

With Sarah safely in my arms, I felt I had something no one could ever take away from me. Except perhaps the hand of that great, inexplicable force that meanders through the universe. I understood that. I also understood its kindness.

By the time our second daughter, Ruth, came along – May ‘85
– Chris was stationed at Australia’s well-known Amberley Air Force Base and we were living in Leichhardt, Ipswich. We even soon moved and bought our own home in Bellbird Park, a fresh, newly developing suburb with lots of space and open areas

Initially, we were so excited to be back in Australia, our marriage once again purring along like an old tabby cat, sort of all furry and cosy... well, it seemed that way to me at any rate. Chris was his fun-loving self and it all seemed so positive.

Ruth’s birth soon after also reminded me and made me believe in that miracle of life again. Well, in her case, for a short while. She started out with colic, but that seemed to quickly settle until she actually slept right through the night. Then at about six weeks her colic developed into reflux and projectile vomiting and maybe I should have seen it then, as Chris and I nearly climbed the walls with frustration, there was more to come.

But we somehow lived through that phase, and for most of the rest of that year our new baby was a very contented girl, often sleeping right through and enjoying her food and playing with her big sister, Sarah.

Then came her first birthday. And our little Ruth became a difficult child. There was no other way to put it: suddenly there was screaming and tantrums and fits of obstinacy that were almost too difficult to bear.

In retrospect, I think the reason for her trying ways was quite simply the fact that I’d started looking after other people’s children. Doing it too soon – when Ruth was only six months old. She must have sensed there was just not enough time to spend with her like I was able to do with Sarah at the same age. She demanded attention.

I know, blaming myself again. Well, once again it was my fault, my responsibility, wasn’t it? In this case, I have no doubt. I had a child, I had wanted another child desperately, and there I was taking on the childcare of other people’s children.

On the other hand, there was also a mortgage hanging over our heads, electricity, food, clothing and other bills, and very little money. The reality was Chris was at base most of the day and sometimes even at night he was out working in a second job as an electrician, at Rosewood, near Ipswich. The result: I was doing it almost all on my own. I don’t want to make excuses, so I have to confess: I felt responsible.
And terrible.

The problems with Ruth continued, it seemed forever. From age one to three, which included the mythological “terrible twos”, which I can say very confidently now are no myth at all, it went on and on. It wasn’t until her third birthday that she returned, almost like a miracle, to her happy, joyful little self.

From that time, almost as though the sun had come out of the sky for the first time in the history of planet Earth, things eased out. Ruth became a pleasure again, my lovable, adorable child. I’m not sure how exactly it happened, but it happened. I am sure there is some psychological/scientific/sociological/paediatric explanation, but for me at the time I was just rain-away happy it happened.

For Chris, however, it seemed too late. For him, a screaming, crying, obnoxious child combined with the constant nagging to somehow squeeze out extra money, made life too difficult. And even when Ruth returned to normal, it would remain that way for him.

More and more, he was becoming bleak. And doing his own thing. More and more, I was beginning to know, on a deeper level, what I already knew – Chris was a depressive. With our new baby-rearing burdens combined with his moods, Malaysia was beginning to seem like paradise.

The elation, the softly whispered words, the laughter were slithering away from us, and in their place a cold and difficult to comprehend vacuum was beginning to suck out all the energy between us.

Chris could sink so low at times that he would hardly talk to anyone for days. I know I should have felt sorry for him – and I did – only he would never even want to open his mouth and tell me what was going on inside. Not even a clue. I had to surmise it. Had to conjure it out of the chilled air from the stories I had heard along the way about his own harsh upbringing. About his dad literally hanging from the bowing rafters. About his older brother Phillip who, in the nick of time, cut their dad down from the ceiling.

But in the day-to-day reality, without being willing to open up about anything, Chris became more and more difficult to live with. I think I could safely say, in his moods, he was more difficult to live with than my child Ruth in her most horrible moments of reflux and tantrum throwing.

Like a child, he demanded things, demanded attention, had sex without saying anything, without whispering a word, merely staring at me with an almost uncaring resentment at how difficult and hollow life had become.

By the time Ruth was about eighteen months old it became too much to bear. We were going to split up. I am not sure what held us together, other than the fact that the RAAFies, the guys and girls at the base, might say something, might think badly of us, might point fingers and say that Chris had failed, couldn’t even keep his marriage together.

Chris could not stand the thought of that, of others pointing fingers at him as though he had messed up. From my perspective, feeling the emotions of what he was feeling as well as having to consider my own needs, I couldn’t bear the thought of taking the girls from him; I felt I didn’t have a right to do that... to rip our family apart.

I also, at all costs, it played on my mind like a plague, like a dark, rotted cheese, did not want our girls growing up in a dysfunctional family like mine or Chris’s was. He did not want that either.

So we held it together – like glue without the sticky substance. Like cheap ineffectual adhesive that has already gone dry and no longer bonds. It was around this time Chris’ brother, Aidan, moved in and lived with us, so our house wasn’t just for us anymore. Aidan’s girlfriend also stayed over most of the week. Then about a year later, my brother Sam and his partner Annie and their baby girl moved in as well. I could hardly imagine it myself – I was just like Dad. Like “have-a-chat, come and stay at our place” Dan Gallagher.

I cannot say I didn’t enjoy it. I obviously enjoyed the company, especially at dinnertime when we all sat around the table chatting and sharing the day’s events. But in the end, I can only say it made me think it must have been much easier for Dad inviting the world to stay over than it could ever have been for Mum.

As the so-called “stay-at-home” mum, I had to do everyone’s washing, all the cooking, all the cleaning, most of the looking after the kids, as well as looking after other people’s kids.

The only thing I did not do – at my firm insistence – was Annie’s baby’s nappies. Annie also kept to herself, while privacy, time to myself, time even to be with my own husband, what was that? All I saw on my brow was fog and sweat and people, big and small, spinning around my eyes.

Yes, Mum, I understand that part a little more now; it couldn’t have been easy. Actually, I was desperately tired most of the time. I needed something else. I needed more than to just wake, work, and breathe.

Enter Josh Kelly.

Yes, enter Josh Kelly, and I have a confession to make. I had an affair.
I did exactly what I said Chris had ever harmed our relationship by doing. Don’t ask me where I found the time, but somehow I did. Everything was splintering and fracturing around me, and in the cracks, in the little peepholes of light between, spilled Josh Kelly.

A little like Chris in the early days, he was another saviour. Someone I could talk and chat to and that I felt understood by. He was unruffled and even tempered and seemed to take the time to listen to the day-to-day stuff. That was important to me, especially since the fact was Chris was no longer there for me.

We, Chris and I, that is, never even fought – because we did not want the kids hearing us yelling at one another. We were literally scared out of our boots to have the kids see us like our own parents, caterwauling and yowling at one another like jungle animals fighting over dead prey. We did not want that. That much we knew about each other. That we did not want to set that kind of example. But even on quiet terms, in good moments, we hardly spoke anymore.

The reality was we didn’t argue or raise our voices when we needed to because there was simply no communication. We were unhappy, unhappy with each other, so, so unhappy, and it was there – loudly and clearly – for all to see. Only for us it existed silently within our heads, within our bones, in the anxiety of our body language. In all these ways we were fighting with one another – like robots violently bumping and pushing against one another all day long, we were a long, silent noise.

Exacerbated by Chris’s depression, his moods, by the comings and goings of visitors, by working out how we were going to pay for things, and maybe worst of all, by Chris continuing with his boys’ nights out, there was nothing left between us.

Feeling exonerated by circumstance, I did what I shouldn’t have done.

I had known Josh Kelly since I was sixteen and his family were like family to me. His father was in the same timber-cutting business as my father. In fact, his older brother and his wife were to become one of Chris’s and my closest and best friends, and are Dean, my son’s godparents. Chris and I are godparents to one of their three children.

And so all I know is that at that time, when I was going through all this turmoil and trying to break through to Chris, Josh was kind to me. He was sincere and considerate. At any rate, he was definitely more understanding than any man I had met until then. Well, except perhaps for Mr Dreamboat Doherty, my schoolteacher. But at that time Josh Kelly was the tree-stump, the maturity, the emotional fixture I needed.

He also had a beautiful voice and would sing directly to me when we would go to watch him perform at local venues or even at parties that we held at our house. One song in particular he would sing to me was Chris de Burgh’s “Lady in Red”. Not only that but at these public events he would let my daughter Sarah sit up on his knee and he would sing Billy Ocean’s “Suddenly” with her.

He was so good with both my girls and they loved him in return. Maybe, maybe, I like to think so, he is the reason Sarah has a great love of music today.

Josh Kelly represented the absolute opposite of my marriage, the absolute opposite of everything in my relationship with my once knight in shining armour, and yes, yes, we went that extra distance together. It was love, I am sure; I am sure it was love.

But I had caused it to happen, I was a woman, I had the maturity, the presence of mind. Even worse than with Dad, I was a mother and a fully responsible human being now. I could make or deny these decisions. And in this case I had chosen to go ahead. To go all the way. To enjoy and lap up the moment.

To that extent, in the final analysis, I suppose I was as bad as my husband, maybe even worse, because Josh, unlike Chris’s girls, was no “floozy“. He wasn’t just the result of a girls’ night out, a bit of alcohol-driven fun; he meant something to me. Not only that, he was a friend of both Chris and I and regularly stayed in our home. I guess that’s how we found the time, he stayed in our home. Another visitor!

If I can be kind to myself for just one second, here’s the heart of the matter: Josh was single at the time and if Chris, my husband was not around, I could have married him. I could have easily sworn my vows to Josh Kelly, a man who stepped back into my life like a responsive anchor to hold me calm and still at just the right time.

On the other hand, that I could have sworn vows to him was easy to say, even to think in retrospect, because at that time it really, really was at gravel end between Chris and me. Even having sex with Chris, my once lover and friend, had become a duty. It was an echo with no voice, I just had to lie back and literally think of my flower garden. I could do it no other way.

As a point of fact, as a young teenage girl I would love to sit and look at the water lilies growing in the dams on our property at Anondale... I always had a sense of peace looking at them. And through my life I often think of those beautiful singular white flowers with their bright yellow centres and the glossy green leaves and remind myself of the “exotic quietness” they gave me during those stressful times. When Chris and I were making love, it was those floating lilies I thought of.

People can judge me now, as they did then, throw the Ten Commandments at me, but what happened between Josh and me was an affair that I could feel burning through the stomach and peeling in the chest. I am at least sure of that. The intensity of it. It happened only once, that is the truth, and it happened when our hearts leaked over and were unable to say no any longer. It did not happen again, though the feelings, I have to be completely honest, remained.

Josh even, at one stage, said he would help set me up in a place of my own and be there for me, but still I didn’t have the heart to take the girls away from Chris. So I made the decision to stay married to Chris, but went as far as to tell Josh that he was one of my biggest sacrifices in life. It may have been a bigger sacrifice than I could have imagined.

Like the tide beneath a wave, Josh and I continued to feel that ripping pull for one another for years to come but we never repeated our unfaithful act. Eventually, Josh fell in love with Clare, a girl who was a barmaid at the Acacia Ridge Hotel, at the other end of town, where he sang more often now.

I was truly happy for him. I remember thinking, even though I was married, how I had to let him go and just suck it up. I believed he deserved to make a new life with someone that was free, that was available to him. Someone who was not such an entangled mess.

And as these things happen, we all became great friends, Chris, myself, Josh and his new wife, Clare. Occasionally, I would even look after Justin, Clare’s little boy from a previous marriage. He was the same age as Ruth and they got on like a dream.

Josh and Clare even asked Chris and me to be part of their “wedding party”, but there are some things in life I have to decline. I just could not stand up beside them on that sacred platform; it was still too raw and painful for me, seeing him marry someone else.

Chris and I did, however, go to the wedding. It was a fine and bright ceremony, but I cried so much that day. So much. I explained it away by saying that weddings always did that to me.

Tears dripping through his own musical green eyes, Josh even told me at the end of that day, his new wife only metres away, that he would always love me. I guess it was love. I guess it was. Despite my infidelity, despite my self-flagellation, at least I can carry that around in my shameful bush of locks.

But it had all become too much for me... Chris, visitors, lovers, boys’ nights out, everything had become like the weight on bare flesh of a rough and itchy blanket in the summer.

I had to get away, even if only for a short while. Even I knew that. So, I took the children and went for a two-week break from everyone and everything. I went up to my sister Marge’s place in Burrum Sound.

Only even that short break would turn into something darker than I could have ever imagined.