Sawdust (17 page)

Chris Pyke was my knight in shining armour.
He was almost four years older than me and already out there working in the “real world”, and I felt like he had come to rescue me. That he was such a knight and wore such shining armour would soon be tested.

One night at the Godbolts, we did what we shouldn’t have. We broke the golden rule. We both fell asleep in the caravan, me tightly wound in Chris’s wiry, sun-kissed arms, and we slept in.

That morning Nigel Godbolt came out to the caravan to see where I was. Nigel knocked on the door to see why I hadn’t surfaced for breakfast, and when we didn’t respond, it must have been evident even to him that Chris was in there with me.

Only my knight in shining armour didn’t stay around to argue the point, or even to apologise. Instead, he dressed his lean surfer-boy frame into his clothes – quicker than Mick Jagger could shout Jumping Jack Flash – and as soon as Nigel moved off from the door he was out of there.

My knight had abandoned me. I should have seen the tarnish on the silver then, but I was young, willing love, and “forgiving” could have been my middle name.

In essence, I didn’t mind being caught. I was, I suppose, a big girl now who had done things. And it was no secret Chris and I were sleeping together. What disappointed me, as I suppose it did the Godbolts, was that I had broken their rule. To that extent, I had let them down.

Nigel Godbolt, as I found out, did not take the episode lightly. A much older man than his muscularly-thin and taller, Italian looking wife – I would say about in his mid to late thirties while she was in her mid to late twenties – he could be quite stern.

He walked away from the caravan and from a distance called out to me as I poked my head out of a crack in the caravan door: ‘Get up here. Get up here
now
… we need to speak to you in the kitchen.’

With Chris having done a runner, I was left alone in the caravan, slowly getting dressed, scared and crying, thinking how I had upset these people who were so good to me.

I walked into the kitchen like a little child, my mouth and throat so dry I thought I was not going to be able to breathe let alone speak. I was scared in a way that reminded me of when Mum or Dad called me before one of their hellish inquisitions. I stood there shivering, ready for a beating.

‘Sorry,’ I spluttered quickly, trying to ward off the damage. ‘Really. We didn’t mean to fall asleep. We weren’t doing anything.’

‘I don’t need to know what you were doing,’ Nigel’s coke-bottle spectacles considered my chin. ‘We gave you a rule and you’ve broken it. That’s what disturbs us.’

Disturbs us
,
I remember it going through my head.
Disturbs us
,
that’s all? He was speaking so calmly, so politely in his firmness, it was obvious I wasn’t going to get a belting after all. It was so different to Mum and Dad. I looked across at the Godbolts and saw two human beings facing something they themselves weren’t quite sure how to deal with.

Nerdy and ridiculous –
a wuss
,
Dad would have said – Nigel Godbolt continued to look at me with his binocular eyes, and in both of them what I saw was a sternness that did not come with that dark black line of anger that I was used to. There was something comforting in the way they considered me. It was almost reassuring.

‘We feel responsible for you, you know?’ Nigel Godbolt eventually pressed with a small tongue that looked like no more than a red smartie in his round face. ‘We know you and Chris are close, and that’s fine by us. We have never had a problem with that – but there’s another side to it... you know. Are you being safe...?’

The tears were welling in my eyes, realising the Godbolts’ concern, and I tamely nodded my head. Their language, their way of speaking, parents to a child, I had never experienced it in my life before.

By the end of it, Nigel Godbolt simply brought his massive nose fairly close up to my face, and with his thick glasses, said, ‘As long as you’re here we’re responsible for you. You should know that. That’s all. We’re not here to judge or condemn. Just please obey the rules.’

I breathed out.

‘And one more thing. Where’s Chris now?’

I blinked up. This was it. The backslap, where the real trouble started. Chris would never be allowed back on the property.

I breathed in, not sure if I should say anything. Eventually I stammered truthfully: ‘He’s probably waiting in his car.’

‘Well, tell him to come on in and have some breakfast with us. He’s probably damned hungry by now.’

And that was that. I ran out to get Chris and we all ate breakfast together. Human beings. Or, was that exceptional human beings? For me, at the time, yes, definitely exceptional. At last I had found a good example of what real parenting could be.

In return, the Godbolts got a good nanny. At any rate, I like to think so. I loved their little boy, Jay, and their other boy, Eli when he arrived in the world.

Alysha Godbolt used to joke that it was because of me that Jay was walking at seven months old. They were proud of their boy – but they brought it down to me. And I was proud of that. There was not much I had achieved in life. But I had done that. I loved working there, and I like to imagine from the way they treated me their children have grown into two – there was a daughter later – so, three magnificent human beings.

At one point in my employment at the Godbolts, Alysha
sat me down with grey apprehension in her eyes. Always so blue like solid marbles, her eyes looked concerned. She asked me what I wanted for my future. I shook my head, dull-faced.
No one had ever asked me that question in my life.

A nurse by profession, Alysha only worked on the property now, but she had that caring of a woman dressed in all-white, and with the concern of a mother she made me sit down at the kitchen table and together we brainstormed all the possibilities.

Taking into account my education, or rather lack of it, finally we came down to a position that might be good for me: a nurse’s aide. But she did not leave it there. Sitting with me, she helped me through the really arduous task of writing letters of application to numerous hospitals and nursing centres around the state. We even wrote a couple of letters to nursing centres in Sydney.

‘I can’t do that,’ I pleaded to her. ‘I can’t leave here. It’s so big, Sydney. What’ll I do there? All by myself?’

‘You’ll do what you do here. Of course you can go there. You can go anywhere, Debbie. You’re just as capable as anybody.’ She looked at me with the certainty of a woman kneading dough. ‘You’ve got everything a young girl needs. You are now showing more confidence and I know you have the ability. You’ll get along. Wherever you end up.’

I smiled, nervous as hell, and went ahead with the applications anyway. In the end, though, with only a Year 11 to my name, I recall getting less than a handful of replies. All of them said the same: there were no positions available.

Was I despondent? Of course. But to me, what was really important was the time
she, they
,
the Godbolts, took with me. It was like having parents, maybe even an older brother and sister for the first time.

In the end, without a future in the world, life went on as normal at the Godbolts. I carried on cleaning and helping in the kitchen and caring for their children.

What I didn’t know was there was yet another – Mum-induced – incident to come.

I was in the bathroom, keenly as normal wiping the grouting in the tiles, when the phone rang.
I raced out to the kitchen to get it.

It was Mum. But strangely, with no hello, no anything.

All she said to me was: ‘Get Alysha!’ I just stood there, trying to think, only to hear her squawking voice shout again into my ear: ‘For heaven’s sake, Debbie, get Alysha! Now!’

I went to get Alysha, and put her on the phone. I stood there curious, hearing: ‘No, Julie, no, she’s fine.’ A moment later she was putting her hand over the receiver, waving her short crop of hair, commanding me, ‘Deb, just go to the bathroom. Go finish what you’re doing there.’

I left the room.

But I did not go far. I stopped around the corner in the passageway and pricked my ears like radar.

They picked up: ‘Well, Julie, I don’t know. I really don’t know what you’re saying. She is a bit dreamy, I suppose. Or floaty, if you like. But it’s always struck me it’s because she misses Chris. You know, they’re very close. Yes, it’s like she wants to be with him all the time. Every time he leaves on a Sunday, it’s like she’s pining for him. I probably wasn’t so different at her age, you know.’ Then I heard Alysha as though stiffening her mouth into a large “O”: ‘No, Julie, no, I have never seen anything like that. Really. Never. Nothing at all. I honestly don’t think so.’

I didn’t usually bite my nails, but I was behind that wall biting them now, muttering to myself, ‘What...? What the bloody hell?’ I could tell from Alysha’s voice, from her surprised replies, that she was defending me as best she could from an accusing, irate voice on the other end of the line. In some ways I was even glad Mum’s voice was rattling through the phone into her ear rather than mine. I would already be crying, I know it, already falling in a heap.

Then the phone clunked down and I quickly ran back to the bathroom and my cleaning.

Alysha stepped into the doorway. With her firm, compact body and her – to me – noticeably firm breasts that to a young girl were “to die for”, it was like those breasts were pointing right into me. She stood there for a few moments like that, in silence, the silence of an ancient Roman sculpture.

Compelled to speak, I felt my voice rasping, ‘What was that about? What did Mum want?’

‘We’ll have to talk tonight, okay? Later…?’ She tapped her face, it was drawn and flustered. ‘I’ve got to get back to the horses now.’ And then she turned like a solid concrete statue.

My heart was pumping like all the valves in there were suddenly leaking. I had not the faintest idea what the call could be about – short of a death or injury in the family. Or something else very sordid, something in our family that no one wanted me to know about. That the world would die of shame from. Inside my chest there was a feeling of anger – and guilt, and I could not help but think, multiple times: ‘What’s Mum got the shits in for me now?’

That night, not during dinner but afterwards, when everything was cleaned up and put away, on the promise that I could watch a commercial TV channel, I was called in to sit with the Godbolts in their living room.

Although often invited to do so, I seldom watched TV with them – mainly because they only watched shows that had little or absolutely no interest for me. All they wanted to watch was that boring ABC stuff, which was not on my playlist right then. If anything, I preferred to have my nose in a book.

As it turned out, and to my disappointment, they did not, or forgot to change channels to any of the commercial channels. So, instead of the ones I was expecting to watch, like
The Great Temptation
or
The Box
or
Blankety Blanks
, I had to stay tuned with them to the ABC. On the screen was some documentary that looked so boring I would have fallen asleep after five minutes had it not been for my racing heart.

I was still well aware they wanted to talk to me. And I knew it was about that call. My heart was crashing on stone and there was this lumpy clot in my throat. I stared forward at the TV set, and then suddenly, it seemed like hours after their show had started, almost out of the blue, Nigel Godbolt lifted his nose as though it were a heavy paperweight – which it almost was – and started telling Alysha and I in a slow and steady voice this story of driving to Brisbane once.

‘I was driving along, a little bit tired,’ he breathed very calmly, ‘and after awhile I picked up this guy hitch-hiking on the side of the road. He had quite long hair, down to his shoulders, you know, a bit of a hippy...’ He sucked in some air on that small red tongue of his and then breathed out as though allowing the air to run through his thick goggles. He went on, ‘You’ve got to help people, you know. It doesn’t matter who they are. Everyone can do with a hand.’ He breathed in again, this time a bit roughly, prickly. ‘Anyway, after a bit of chitchat in the car, this fellow starts talking to me about something else. In fact, to be frank, he was offering me this stuff… God’s weed… ‘

Nigel was staring down at me, and I interrupted him, ‘What? What’s that? What’s God’s weed?’

‘You don’t know what God’s weed is?’

My heart wasn’t racing or pounding any longer, it was zooming. Whatever Nigel Godbolt was talking about sounded deeply contrived and suspicious. I began to think now, it was like he was trying to catch me out, test me, but I had never in my life heard of this “God’s weed” stuff. I was shaking my head – and he was looking at me like I should have heard of it.

‘You know, it’s what some people use... you know, smoke... when they want to get high. You know, marijuana…?’

‘Ooohhh,’ I breathed. I had at least heard of that. Yes, of course I had. Without saying it then, I immediately thought of a couple of Chris’s friends who I knew even smoked it.

‘Well, have you ever had any?’ Nigel finally asked flatly, glancing through his spectacles, the retinae of his eyes all of a sudden like wild suns staring through these tremendously thick magnifying glasses into me.

‘God no, of course I haven’t.’ I shifted backwards in my chair.

I actually was quite affronted. Not only had I never smoked marijuana, I had no desire to, even though I had been around it when it was being smoked. Like Chris’s brothers and his surfie friends. But not Chris, well, not anymore; he was dead-set against it and even warned me never to get into it. There was something going on. I knew it; it was beginning to feel like an interrogation. I should have known, I should have bloody known.

‘So, you mean you’ve never even tried it?’ Nigel’s fiery eyes behind the huge magnifying glasses, pressed. ‘You mean you’ve never even wanted to try a bit when others have smoked it? God’s weed... marijuana?’ He must have only seen in front of him a shaking head, because he persisted, ‘So… Chris and his friends have never asked you to try it? I mean, they must smoke it themselves? They go surfing, don’t they? It’s quite popular these days.’

I was scared now. Chris may have run away the time we overslept in the caravan – my knight in grand armour – but I was no “dobber”. Never. Not on anyone or to anyone. That was one thing Dad and Mum had brought us up never to do. Our secrets were always
our
secrets. Well, except for the small matter of that court case that brought no relief anyway. But I certainly wasn’t going to dob on Chris or his friends. Chris, if anything, had always said to me, ‘Don’t ever touch it. It’s evil that stuff. It’s bad for you.’

‘So, you’ve never smoked it?’ Nigel went on, his thick glasses and little eyes gauging me like a detective.

I looked back at him, still shaking my head, and noticed something. He was actually not looking at me angrily or even accusingly; his look was rather more inquisitive.

I saw something then in Nigel Godbolt: he was a man who first got to the truth before jumping in and dishing out conclusions – or punishments. I respected that in him. Unlike Mum. Or Dad. I realised then what I was doing, in my fear I was reacting to them, Mum and Dad, not to the man who sat in front of me. Nigel Godbolt with his Asterix but honest nose.

I eventually exhaled, ‘Chris has told me about marijuana, but he always says it’s bad for you. You know. He’s very anti it.’

‘The reason I’m asking all this stuff,’ Nigel spoke very slowly and evenly now, ‘is because Mum thinks you’re into drugs.’ He must have seen the wild, stunned look in my eyes, my head shaking as though I was going to faint, because the next thing he said to me was: ‘You know what? I don’t think you are smoking drugs. I don’t think so at all.’

Thick gushes of oxygen were whooping out of me. I felt dizzy, relieved, confounded, but more than anything behind all that schoolgirl gawping and quivering, I felt ashamed and angry. Ashamed that it was Mum, my mum who without even trying to communicate with me, thought I was off my tree, “floating on drugs”. And angry as hell because she had gone straight to the Godbolts, and her suspicions had been channelled not into my ears but into Alysha’s. Like I didn’t exist.

It was true that I did “moon” and “float” about a bit, but as Alysha Godbolt had said: it was about missing Chris, about growing up, about being in love, about listening to the group Bread and crying to their sad, soft-rock love songs like “Hooked on You” and “If” while pining away for my beau…

But drugs... no. It didn’t even occur to me. Ask me about sex... yes, sex, sex, sex, especially bad sex... and I would have to admit it, and say yes, of course yes! Why didn’t Mum ask about that? Ask about it in the way she was asking about marijuana –
God’s weed
– instead of bringing me into her trust and then belting the Christ out of me when I told her the truth?

Nigel Godbolt, even-handed, even-tempered Nigel, launched into a lecture then... about drugs, about what they can do to you, how they play with your brain and mess with your thinking... but I could see that through it all he was just being a responsible adult, being a man responsible to someone’s else’s child. Being, in effect, a dad.

I should say this of the Godbolts: although they were not touchy-feely types, they were more than just ample mirrors to a future I was uncertain of. They were like well looked after windows, clean, straight up, clear and assured; they freely let the light shine in while I fought against the brown, wind-blotches outside. From their example, I learned maturity was about keeping the windows clean. About Windexing away the secrets.

Mum never spoke to me about that phone call... I only heard later, a fair bit later, that she had discussed “my problem” with my sister and even informed a policeman friend of hers... But what her attitude typified was this: a thoroughly broken relationship between a mother and daughter. A mother who did not trust her child, a mother who did not even attempt to communicate with her own daughter. Who got others to do her dirty work for her – like the Godbolts, the police, the courts.

It rang through my head that visit to the police station in Gladstone we did not even know was going to happen until the very last minute – because, essentially, she was a coward. Mum was terrified and weak. She did not know how to speak to or approach us or look us in the eye and have a decent conversation with us.

Definitely not me. And yet I cannot help in my way but feel sorry for her as she phones me every weekend in her old age now and pleads her love to me. I know she is merely trying to make up for the past, the hurts, the injuries, the insensitivities, the cowardice. I know that. But it is confusing. Still confusing as ever.

At sixteen, willing now to rebel, as if to prove her right, I did go ahead and try it: God’s weed. With Chris’s friends. But even I had higher expectations than it turned out. In the event, I coughed my eyes out like that first time I tried cigarettes – everyone laughed – and nothing happened.

The only high I got was from lack of oxygen and the deep whooping from the back of my nose and throat. The big high that they all used to get off on – and talk about incessantly – just didn’t happen for me. I was spared that, at least that one injustice I was spared. The potential for addiction.

A few months later, with the help of the Godbolts, I did finally gain a more or less meaningful job – in a nursing home looking after old people. And... I moved back in with Mum. Yes, Mum. It was convenient. The location of my new work was nearby Mum in Burrum Sound and I could be close to Chris again, could see him every day.

Despite living with Mum again, and despite a surprising equilibrium we found in our relationship, what saved me was love. This new love of my life, Chris Pyke.

We were both young and enthusiastic and got away – out of the house – whenever we could. Mostly we went camping with his friends who spent whole weekends down at Agnes Waters on white empty beaches that appeared as infinitely long and assured as our love.

Chris’s friends were always looking for a wave and a bit of fun, and yes, smoking God’s weed. They also drank and snorted what have you.

We all used to sit around listening to music on an old battery-operated cassette player and would sing along by a fire. We also sat and lay in the hot sun, sat and lay much more than we should have by today’s “slip-slop-slap” standards, and had sex, yes, lots of sex.

We were at that age when we were old enough to think we knew what we were doing. And that was half the fun... just believing in ourselves, having faith in ourselves out there in the hot-hot sun and swimming and surfing through large, unending waves. We were, in plain English, having a good time, enjoying ourselves, and for once in my life I actually felt like I was in control, like I had some power over my life.

I remember once, during a sudden wind on the beach, just as the sun was setting, one of the tents came down, and we all watched expecting someone to come running out of it shouting for help, yelling what the ef was going on. But instead of any bodies springing out of the tent, we watched as the now floppy nylon clung to a strange looking configuration of curves.

Set against the dying sun, the massive insect that seemed to reside inside the nylon, bobbed crazily up and down. We had no choice but to sit and watch with curious interest.