The Family Law (21 page)

Both Mum and Andrew claim not to remember the first incident, but I'm sure it happened. I certainly remember the screaming afterwards. Mum had come to school for a parent– teacher interview and told us to meet her at a certain time and place after our classes had finished. Andrew and I had forgotten the designated meeting spot –
next to the car? outside the classroom?
–
so we killed time by joining the after-school activity group in the basement of the sprawling campus. We didn't belong there, and Mum didn't even know it existed. We lost track of time. It was only when it became dark that we looked, panic-stricken, at a clock, and realised we were as good as dead.

The rest of the evening is a blur: my mother's murderously angry face upon finally finding us; her holding back tears as she led us back to the car; the engine starting and, with it, the screaming. She'd done laps around the campus calling for us, she said, loud enough to be heard, restrained enough not to sound insane. It would have been a difficult balance to strike. But in the car, she let fly with strangled howls, a curdled monologue of words and sobs that ceased to make any sense
.

In the back seat, Andrew and I stared at our laps. Mum had been angry with us before, but this time seemed different.

When she eventually calmed down, her catatonic tone of voice suggested we'd inflicted permanent damage.

‘Mum, we're okay,' I said quietly. ‘You worry too much.'

‘You'd be
worried
too,' Mum hollered, ‘if you thought someone you
loved
was … was—'

‘Dead,' we said. ‘Yes, Mum. We know.'

 

*

 

Years later, Andrew and I were both elected class captains and had to stay behind for an after-school meeting. Afterwards, we walked together to the car pick-up zone – a concrete slab with an arched metal rain shelter built above it – and sat there, expecting Mum. What we didn't know was that her plans had changed.

At home that afternoon, Mum had experienced something weird. Ever since she'd miscarried, she'd bled heavily every month, but this time was different, and she called her gynaecologist. There was a small window of opportunity for an appointment in the afternoon.

‘I can't pick up the boys,' she told Dad by phone, as she cleaned up the bathroom with towels and toilet paper. ‘It's like a
murder
scene here. I don't know what's
wrong
with me.'

‘Right,' Dad said, looking over paperwork. He had been swept up all day in meetings, drafting plans for a new project with land-dealers and developers, real-estate agents and investors. His brain was reaching full capacity.

‘I mean, every month is heavy, but this month is … You know what it's like? It's like someone's
stabbed
me,' she said. ‘Down
there
. Stabbed me right in the—'

‘Okay, okay.' Dad cut her off. ‘I'll pick up the boys. What time?'

But as soon as Dad hung up, he went back to his plans and promptly forgot about the phone call.

Hours passed. Andrew used a pay phone to call home until our combined spare change ran out. Mosquitoes appeared, and I was allergic. I knew my skin would swell up in pink, flat islands of itchiness on my legs, before scabbing over in marks that, Andrew joked, resembled AIDS lesions. Over in the rainforest, birds and unseen creatures started shrieking at the sun as it began to sink, casting everything in a dark orange glow. It would be pitch black in less than half an hour.

‘What do we do?' I asked. ‘What if something bad has happened?'

I started whimpering, and Andrew rolled his eyes.

‘What if Mum's … what if she's—'

‘Don't say it,' he said.

We started to walk, staying close to the road, following the same route Mum used to fetch us every day. The plan was to intercept her if she came, wave her down if we saw her car. Instead, unfamiliar cars honked their horns at us for being so close to the bitumen, their headlights blaring into our eyes, stunning us like wildlife. My backpack started to hurt. It felt like my spine and vital organs were being crushed. It was Year
8
, and I was still getting used to how heavy all the homework was.

‘This is killing me,' I said.

‘Stop being a baby,' Andrew said. ‘We're nearly there.'

We trudged on. More mosquitoes came out, biting me everywhere, even on the palms of my hand. We made a detour to Dad's restaurant, which was closer. When he saw us, Dad turned ghostly white.

At that very moment, we later learned, Mum had arrived at the school's pick-up zone. This time, because it was dark and there was no one around, there was no need for her to strike a balance between volume and restraint. She screamed like someone had been murdered.

Days later, driving to school again, we tried to calm Mum down, but she just shook her head in frustration. ‘You have no idea,' she said. ‘None of you have any idea, not even your Dad. And you'll never have any idea until you're a mother yourself.' In the backseat, I rolled my eyes.
Well, that's a little melodramatic
, I thought.

 

*

 

More than a decade later, after the children had all left home, Mum was living alone for the first time in her life. By this stage, the Sunshine Coast had transformed again and was enjoying its new incarnation as the number-one retirement destination in the country. Old people from all over Australia swarmed to the region, attracted by its calm beaches and single-level shopping centres, and bought into estates built on manmade rafts of land that jutted out into canals. It wasn't just a place where children disappeared and died anymore. No. Now it was a place where old people died too, quietly in their homes and without anyone noticing.

It was my youngest sister, Michelle, who called me, out of the blue, to tell me that Mum might be dead. She didn't say those words exactly – didn't actually use the word
dead –
but we both understood the subtext.

‘She's not picking up either phone,' Michelle said. ‘And I've been calling for hours.'

Maybe she was at the shops, I suggested. Doing some gardening. Taking a very, very long nap.

‘Usually, I'd think that too. Except I called her last night, and she didn't pick up then either. Then I called this morning, and I've called over ten times since then. Nothing.'

This wasn't like Mum. Immediately, my mind went back to the day before, and the last phone call I'd had with her. During the course of the conversation, she had stated the following things:

1
. We did not call her enough;

2
. She resented the fact we did not call her enough;

3
. No one returned her calls any more and she may as well be dead; and

4
. If she were to die, how would anyone know?

‘I don't like this email all the time,' she said. ‘Mummy wants to hear your
voices
. You can't hear your voices over the SMS.'

This went on for about half an hour. It wasn't exactly a pleasant conversation, and so, ironically, it didn't provide much incentive to stay on the line. Later I'd recognise that these outbursts came from a place of loneliness, but at the time the phone call struck me as an exercise in self-sabotage and passive aggression. It was infuriatingly brilliant: she'd phoned to complain that no one wanted to speak to her, knowing she'd aggravate me to the point where I'd cut the phone call short, all ultimately proving her point: that no one wanted to speak to her.
Well
played, Jenny
, I'd thought.
Well played
.

Recalling the conversation now, I started to sweat. Usually when I sweat, I don't smell much different from normal, but if I become nervous or frightened, my armpits begin to smell weirdly pungent and foul. From a biological perspective, I'd say it's a defence mechanism similar to a skunk's. If someone were to attack me in a dark alleyway, I would smell this way. Right now, it was defending me against accusations of murder.
What if I
were dead?
Mum had asked, and I realised this was the first time I'd really heard the question, processed it, and understood its implications.

We called Candy, the only sibling who lived within a twenty-kilometre radius of Mum. Again, we avoided the word ‘dead,' and instead asked her to check that Mum was ‘okay' – which, by extension, implied ‘alive.' Of all the siblings, Candy had the most fraught relationship with Mum, but she didn't hesitate for a second.

‘I'll do it,' she said. ‘But I don't have the keys. You'll have to tell me where the emergency ones are.'

I tried calling Mum again – on the landline, on the mobile – knowing it was futile. It didn't matter: I started to leave messages on her answering machines.
Hello!
Mum's voice said in her singsong girly tone, the one she adopted when she spoke English to strangers.
This is Jenny! Please leave a message and I call you BACK!
Have a nice day. BYE!
The staticky greeting made Mum sound like she was caught in a blizzard a thousand miles away, at the ends of the earth, some place where satellite reception was fading fast. I left messages –
Where are you? Are you dead? Why do you
even have a phone if you're not going to leave it on? –
and kept calling and calling and calling, the same way someone continues with CPR, long after they know the person is beyond resuscitation.

‘She's not here,' Candy said when she called back. ‘No one's home.'

That's when I started calling the hospitals, started thinking awful things.
She's slipped in the shower. She's electrocuted herself.
She choked on something simple – a piece of fruit, a raw nut, something
I could have knocked out of her in a second and now she's … she's—

All of the people on the hospital phone lines said the same ominous thing before transferring me to another line: ‘You'll want the emergency ward then.' But when I got through to the ERs, they all told me no one had been admitted under our mother's name, but that things like this happened all the time, and that I really shouldn't worry, because they were sure she'd be fine.

We couldn't do anything but wait, our phones in our hands. How could we know that she'd done all of this on purpose, to see whether her children cared enough? All we could do was prepare for the worst and hope for the best, trying to make our cries loud enough to be heard but restrained enough not to seem insane.

In the Mood

Singing in the choir was mandatory at my primary school. Every few months we would be marched past the oval, down the terraces and into the nursing home run by the local church. We would line up at the door in two single-file lines – one of boys, one of girls – bracing ourselves to be hit by a wall of odour: bleach, mothballs, powdered soup, a slight hint of faeces. When the doors opened, the sheer force of the smell would knock everyone backwards, making it difficult to breathe.

‘
Whoa
,' the boys said, putting up their hands.

‘Don't be
mean
,' the girls hissed back. ‘They can't help it.'

By
they
, the girls meant the forty or so senior citizens who'd been rounded up to watch us perform. When we were finally assembled in their common room to sing, our voices would be strained; it was difficult to hold a melody without inhaling. We'd start off with hymns, then follow up with ‘In the Mood,' a bouncy big-band number that called for dancing and movement. Considering how many people were wheelchair-bound or recovering from strokes, the choice struck me as somewhat cruel.

After we finished, only a handful of people clapped. Most of the elderly residents just stared into their laps. Men in their eighties spontaneously fell asleep in the middle of our hymns, their heads rolling back at such severe angles, it looked as if they'd broken their necks. We were surprised they didn't swallow their tongues.

Years later, in high school, the art students were asked to paint a mural in the same facility for a resident with a severe disability, who was described to us as ‘a danger to himself.' Part of the appeal of the task was that his room had padded walls, which sounded like something out of a Hollywood movie set in an asylum. But I was disappointed: the pads weren't marvels of medical design; instead, they were just old, single-spring mattresses pushed against the wall and held together by occy straps.

We pulled the mattresses down and painted the off-white walls with a montage of birds, trees and rainbows. After we'd been at work for a while, a nurse wheeled in the man who lived in the room.

‘So this is David!' the nurse said. ‘Say hello, David!'

David groaned politely and looked at the floor.

The first thing I noticed were his long toenails protruding from beneath the blanket.
Claws
, I immediately thought.
David
has claws.
But despite his gnarled features and the drooling, I remember thinking that if David had been treated to a salon-style haircut, a pedicure and a pair of Italian loafers, he would've been something close to handsome. But the only leather accessories on David that day were the series of buckles that acted as restraints. ‘David just wanted to tell you how much he appreciates the job you kids are doing. Doesn't this look wonderful, David? The colours are so …
bright
!'

She nudged David, and he reluctantly looked up at the walls. He scanned the mural-in-progress suspiciously with his one good eye, up and down. After a moment of silence, he started to groan. Soon he was thrashing against his buckles, but they held him in tightly. My art teacher – a pleasant British woman in overalls – straightened up in alarm and spread out her arms, as if to protect us. As David continued to moan and howl, I looked at our mural with all of its vivid, perky colours. If I were forced to look at it every day, I'd probably want to scream too, I realised. I felt bad for the guy.