I Knew You'd Have Brown Eyes (12 page)

‘What are you doing here?’ he asked.

‘Oh, just looking after the health of your workers.’

‘Would you like to see around the plant?’

We donned hard hats and he gave me a brief introduction to mining, explaining how the crushing plant worked. At each workstation we stopped to talk. He not only knew people by name, he knew what their interests were.

‘How was the fishing on the weekend?’ he asked one man.

‘Did you go camping at Winchelsea Island?’ he asked another.

‘Weren’t you on leave, recently?’ he said to another.

I was impressed at how relaxed he was and how he put people at ease.

Trevor was organising a course on life management for some staff and he invited me to attend. It was partly psychology – setting and achieving goals – and partly health assessment. Not surprisingly, I scored well on the health section but the psychology part was a new dimension for me. We were challenged to set short-term and long-term life goals. I was thinking only of a day at a time, or at best to my next weekend. Long-term goals weren’t on my agenda. The course helped me focus and I was soon very clear about what I wanted: more education.

My relationship with the mining engineer wasn’t going anywhere and, despite my love for my job, I decided that I needed to leave this idyllic paradise and further my nursing studies.

Nursing was changing and hospital-trained nurses were able to do a two-year conversion course at university to obtain a Bachelor of Applied Science. I was ready. The two new courses offered in Australia were at La Trobe University in Melbourne and Curtin University in Perth. I was accepted into both courses, but chose Perth because Mark and Geraldine had moved there.

On my way to Perth I had a short stay in Brisbane with Mum. She had a job teaching at a TAFE college and was dating a man she’d met at a church gathering.

One day over breakfast she confronted me.

‘You promised me you would only go away for two years!’

‘I have to live my life, Mum,’ I told her.

I was twenty-nine. Did she expect me to stay at home with her forever?

Trevor was about to pass through Brisbane from Groote, on his way to a meeting in Melbourne. The week before he’d called to ask if I wanted to join him for lunch, during his layover. I asked Mum if she could take a message when he called with his flight details. Whenever I asked, she said no messages had been left for me.

Eventually, I rang Trevor, thinking it odd that he had not called and he said that he had.

‘Your mother told me you were away,’ he said.

Mum had briefly met Trevor when she visited me on Groote and she must have seen more than I did in our relationship. Granted it was unusual for a girl my age to have a friend who was married with four children, but I saw him as a mentor, a friend, a wise father figure. I shared his values. I had experienced too much in my life to be bothered by the normal boundaries of conventional friendships. And, besides, he lived on Groote and I was moving to Perth.

14

The move to Perth would change the course of my life. Mark and Geraldine, who were originally from Perth, had often told me how beautiful it was. They had returned there the year before I arrived and were living in a house in Scarborough with their baby boy.

‘You haven’t lived unless you’ve driven over the crest of West Coast Highway between Scarborough and Trigg beaches and seen the Indian Ocean,’ Mark said.

Perth was buzzing. It had just staged the America’s Cup off the shores of Fremantle and though I missed the event by a matter of weeks, there was still a lot of excitement in the air. Having saved enough money for a deposit, I bought a unit in Scarborough. I took a break from nursing and got a casual job as a waitress at Observation City Hotel. Alan Bond had built the hotel prior to the America’s Cup – every room had a view of the ocean. I bought a car, an old yellow Renault.

I had finally made it to university! It was just the challenge I’d been looking for. I loved studying and had no problems adapting to the work and deadlines. I was used to long hours on my feet, shifts and on-call work. I loved the limited daytime hours. My social life took a big dive, though. I didn’t have many friends in Perth and most of my fellow students had established relationships but I soon settled in.

Unexpectedly, Trevor came to live in Perth. He’d left Groote soon after I did and applied for a job in the Solomon Islands. When this did not eventuate, he found a Perth-based one. His marriage was coming to an end and his wife and children had moved back to their family home in Perth. He rented a unit in the city, by the Swan River. The project he was working on was in Queensland and he had to travel there to oversee the construction of a new mine. When he was in town we sometimes met for a walk or a jog and over time we started to see more and more of each other.

I looked forward to seeing him and when he was away we wrote to each other. He was becoming more than a friend. Sometimes we went out for dinner but mostly we enjoyed going for a run, having a beer afterwards and then cooking a meal. We made up elaborate stories that we would share over dinner. Trevor had read
The
Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy
by Douglas Adams, in which ‘the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything’ was 42. So we spent hours ruminating on what we called a 42: a swim at Scarborough Beach followed by a beer watching the sunset; a run around Kings Park followed by a picnic overlooking the Swan; a well-cooked meal with a bottle of red; watching the waves crashing on the shore; drinking champagne for breakfast. Eventually a 42 was Mary and Trevor with a rose garden and children running around as we pruned the roses. We talked about going on journeys together and it seemed to me that life with Trevor would be an adventure. I was carefree in his company and loving him was like coming home to a safe place.

At the same time, I worried about his children, and about our age difference. Had I caused his marriage break-up? I had a good friend who I met on Groote, Liz, and I looked to her for guidance. I wrote to her and told her about the growing relationship between Trevor and me, and that I had some reservations.

‘You’re a good person,’ she wrote back ‘and no-one breaks up a happy marriage. I know you well enough to know that you would not do anything to purposely hurt someone.’

Still I worried. I didn’t want to create harm or sadness. Things might be happy now, I thought, but what will they be like in ten or twenty years? The future is unknowable and yet I felt that together our love could overcome all obstacles.

One bright summer’s day, I was hurtling down the Mitchell Freeway on my way to university. I gazed over at Lake Monger and the black swans. I felt so happy. I was sick of trying to please everyone and always doing the right thing. Where had that got me? I wasn’t going to sit on the shelf and observe life. I was going to jump in and live it. Annie Lennox was singing on my car radio: ‘To run away from you is all that I could do’. But I didn’t want to run away. My doubts about a future with Trevor melted. That was my turning point. Over the coming months Trevor and I talked about his children and whether we thought we could make a life together. One day he asked me to marry him.

‘It’s time you blessed this world with some more brown-eyed babies, Mary.’

Of course I said yes.

That year, I heard on the news that more changes had been made to the adoption laws. I rang the Department of Children’s Services in Brisbane and was told that the law did not apply to me since my son was still only twelve. I was entitled to apply for ‘non-identifying’ information, however. I didn’t know anything about that. If someone had told me that when I was in hospital having Christopher, it went right over my head. But I immediately wrote a letter.

27.7.1987

Children’s Services (Adoption Section)

GPO Box 806

BRISBANE 4001

Dear Sir/Madam
,

On 16 June 1975 I gave birth to a baby boy at the Royal Women’s Hospital in Brisbane. I subsequently relinquished my child for adoption. The name I gave him was Christopher Anthony
.

I am writing to request any non-identifying information that you may legally be able to separate with, regarding the adoptive parents. I trust my child is in good hands but in the case that something has happened in the family to which he was allocated, I would want to be informed if that is possible
.

Thanking you

Two months later, according to the provisions of the
Adoption of Children Act (1964–1987)
, I received the non-identifying information, which amounted to the time of birth and weight, which I already knew, and some particulars of his adoptive parents – ages, occupation and religion, that they lived in the city (not named) and had another adopted daughter. It was good to have even that small amount of information.

The accompanying letter included an application form for the Adoption Contact Register and information that, if all three parties – the adopted person, adoptive parents and birth parents – were agreeable, a reunion was possible. I felt I was a step closer. I made my application and prepared to wait the six years until he was eighteen.

Mum was extremely unhappy about my relationship with Trevor. That Christmas her family, who mainly lived in and around Sydney, had a large gathering south of the city, at Ulladulla. The extended family rented caravans in a park, and Alexis and I joined Mum and my grandmother in their caravan for a few days to partake of the festivities. Mum refused to talk to me about Trevor and she was angry with Alexis, who was twenty-six, in a serious relationship and pregnant but not married. Alexis and I had our own room in the caravan and one night, when her baby was moving, I sat with her and felt her belly. We were so happy about her pregnancy and we talked about her plans to marry Don and what they would call their baby.

Mum called out to us, ‘Be quiet, your grandma’s trying to sleep!’

I realised that Mum was trying her best to hide Alexis’s pregnancy from her family because, I thought, she must be ashamed about her unmarried state. The next day I got her alone and confronted her.

‘Don’t you understand the pain I endured over the past thirteen years? How can you treat Alexis this way? She is having a baby, it’s a joyous event, and she’s not seventeen, she’s twenty-six!’

‘This has nothing to do with you, and I will treat Alexis how I like.’

On Christmas Day, Charlie joined us. The tension between Mum, Alexis and me was obvious. He suggested we go for a walk and talk things out. He pleaded with her.

‘Mum, what is it that is making you so unhappy?’

She couldn’t give him a reason and remained terse and angry, saying over and over that she was the mother and she reserved her right to be angry.

‘Angry about what, Mum?’ Charlie said.

But she couldn’t explain. And we were none the wiser. It’s hard to have a rational discussion with someone who can not or will not put into words what is bothering them.

‘Children are awful to their parents,’ she said. ‘You wait till you have some of your own. They only come good when they’re about thirty.’ I was almost there, but I knew that my age was unlikely to change things between us.

I was meant to meet a friend in Sydney that evening, but instead spent the night in tears. Later I called Trevor. I was distraught as I explained to him that the way she was treating Alexis took me back to my pregnancy and everything surrounding that. As I was talking to him I became so emotional that I vomited in the public phone box.

Mum remarried soon after that holiday. John was the man she’d met at her church. I was relieved, thinking that she would start to live her own life now and not those of her children. She was a person who could not tolerate being on her own for any length of time. I thought it was good that she had company.

Trevor and I flew to Brisbane for the wedding. It was his first introduction to my family. On the plane he said to me, ‘I’ve met the Duke of Edinburgh, and that went okay, so I guess I’ll pass your family’s scrutiny.’

I just wanted everyone to get along with each other. The wedding and visit passed without incident.

Trevor and I were married the following year. I was excited about the arrangements and planned it in detail. It was a small affair, thirty-five people. The event was complicated by the 1989 pilot strike, which had begun a month earlier. My family were determined to be there for my big day and they made a gigantic effort, which involved plane-hopping from Brisbane to Sydney to Adelaide to Perth and not knowing from one airport to the next if they were going to make it in time. My grandmother and Aunty Margaret caught a bus from Sydney to Perth. Mum seemed fine about the arrangements and even paid for the reception.

I was determined to have an unconventional wedding; my dress was a black silk print. We married in a garden and did not have a wedding cake. Trevor and I played a duet on flutes and gave speeches. I thought things were fine with Mum that day. I remembered her saying to me the night before Teresa got married, ‘It’s her day and it’s important that she’s happy.’ I assumed that is what she would feel about me on my wedding day. But like a bolt of lightning, she took me completely by surprise when she said instead, ‘Just pretend that everything is okay with us Mary.’

I was stunned out of my happy state. What had I done now? And whatever it was, why couldn’t she have waited for another day to confront me and let me enjoy my wedding day? Was it because I was marrying a divorcé and that made me an adulterer? Was it my black dress? Not getting married in a Catholic Church? Or was it because she was not seated at my table, where I had placed Trevor’s mother, his children, my grandmother and my aunt? I had seated her and John with my siblings, where I thought they would be more comfortable. It seemed to me that, no matter what I did, in the eyes of my mother it was never good enough. I never knew exactly what I was being accused of.

When I asked her what I had done, she shrugged her shoulders as if to say, ‘If you can’t work it out yourself, I’m not going to tell you.’

On my wedding night, I cried myself to sleep. Trevor was angry with Mum, and in later years when I tried to reconcile my relationship with her, he would say, ‘I can never forget how she treated you on our wedding day.’