God's Callgirl (9 page)

I was ambitious and in a few months had collected what might be the marbles equivalent of the district bank—a whole heavy-denier nylon stockingful of them, bulging obscenely. I didn’t think it was obscene, however; not until I held up the loot for my mama to see. I was brimming with pride. Her eyes bulged with matching pride, or so I thought for one fleeting second. But no, it was with horror.

‘Carla!’ she said hoarsely, suddenly short of breath. ‘That is pride! God punishes people who are full of pride. Pride is a sin!’

My mind was as wide open as my eyes at that moment, defenceless against the deeply hypnotic suggestion my mama planted there. I received this Catholic morality as the truth, and it threatened to for ever disconnect me from the will to compete.

My reaction was immediate and heroic. I walked to the middle of the street and, while everyone was watching, emptied the sinfully won marbles onto the cobblestones. The neighbourhood kids had no qualms about pushing each other aside to pick up the marbles and stuff them away, I noticed. Something inside me felt betrayed and the self-righteousness was galling. Now I was really confused. I was already struggling with so much; I added this new neurosis to the growing heap and changed course. I would value poverty, just like Jesus, who didn’t even have a pillow to sleep on, as my mama and teachers told me. They forgot to add that in those days people had adequate substitutes for pillows, and in any case, Jesus hardly needed money when he had a group of adoring women to minister unto him wherever he went. The women simply picked up the tab. But no one taught me that
this
was the holiest of lifestyles.

MY PAPA WAS
an outdoors man, a lover of nature, a grower of plants. He showed me the cobwebs glistening with a thousand diamonds in the early-morning summer sun. He took me for long walks through a forest on a huge private property not far away, to see the magic mushrooms—the ones with the polka dots—and taught me to listen to the wind and the birds as if he were an old American Indian.

Life outdoors was simply good. In our spacious backyard he taught me about worms, compost, the nasty beetles that eat potatoes, and friendly beetles like the ladybird. He showed me how to grow marigolds, pansies and sweet william, and how to collect their seeds. I wasn’t so interested in the vegetables, except for the potatoes, because they were grown in the large communal plot a brisk walk away from our house. It was a large patch of earth next to the fields of barley, oats, turnips and kale that the farmers grew mainly for their cattle.

Potato-planting with my papa in the communal field meant a day in the wind and fresh air. Together, Papa and I made a furrow with our spades, paced out the distance between each spud, thudded in the all-important seed potato, heeled it down and then made the next furrow by covering the first one with soil. His Virgo nature was always full of the wonder of growing things. Plants to him were the miracles that sustained his faith in the existence of God. Science was no explanation at all; God had endowed the seed with the intelligence of what it would become. It was God, he said, who had given tiny seeds the wonderful power to recognise seasons and respond to temperature, water, nutrients and sunlight. My papa could make shoes, tables, toys, anything he put his mind to. But only God, he said, could make a flower.

Potato-planting day usually included the excitement of kite-flying. There was plenty of wind in this part of
Holland, flat and unbroken by trees and houses. My papa was a supremely practical and inventive man with a boyish sense of fun. Until the day he died he took pleasure in the windvanes he made for himself and for countless others. In the early days, the vanes would whirr cheerfully and noisily as they strained in the wind. Later, he used plastic components that were quieter and increased the lifespan of the vanes. He made numerous kites—big ones that would stay up in the sky for days and nights on end, and little ones that we could learn to make ourselves, decorating the tails with all sorts of ribbons and ties.

An aunt on my mama’s side once made the mistake of asking me who I liked better, my mama or my papa? This was a hard question and I screwed up my face. My aunt watched me closely; why was she staring so hard at me? I felt uncomfortable, but I asked myself who had been more fun that morning and said, ‘Papa!’ She scowled and left me suddenly, and it was plain that I had given the wrong answer. But my papa was always fun when he was out of the house. I even forgave him—though he never asked my forgiveness—for throwing me into the canal one summer’s day to force me to learn how to swim. Before I went under, he dived in and told me to hang onto his shoulders as we headed for shore. I never did become a brilliant swimmer.

Life was pretty good, except for the underlying dreadfulness that came whenever Dr Jekyll became Mr Hyde. It was the way my papa flew off the handle. Once he threw a hammer at my youngest brother, barely missing his head. He pummelled his hands on my head if I contradicted or challenged him. He wouldn’t stop until I threatened to black out, or somebody called for Mama.

It was the way he was so suspicious of my brother Adrian when he came home with some paper money in his hand,
claiming he had found it. My papa did not believe him. He took his eight-year-old son into the living room and beat him with a leather belt every time he maintained that he had found the money. The angry questioning and the belting went on for hours.

My two front teeth were broken by my father in an accident that need never have happened. One day, when I was ten, I didn’t want to eat my porridge. Normally I was fond of the stiff mixture my father almost invariably made for breakfast, which we covered with hot milk and brown sugar. But that day I had no appetite and declined, immediately causing a confrontation with him. He took it as a personal insult to his cooking and a challenge to his authority. Hotly, he ordered me to eat it. I still refused, trying to be polite. ‘I don’t feel like it today, Pa.’ I was constipated and knew instinctively that I needed to fast.

‘Eat it or I’ll put your face in it!’ he threatened even more furiously.

Like an idiot I warmed to this unjust, ridiculous challenge. With the plate of porridge in front of me on the table, I called his bluff. My father then proved that he was able to carry out his threat. He grabbed my neck from behind and, with his terrible strength, pushed my face so hard into the porridge that the thick white plate broke, and my two front teeth with it. Blood from my ruptured lips and gums mixed with the porridge. My mother moaned, ‘Oh, John!’ and was on the verge of tears. Then they both wiped my face and hair and clothes and sent me off to school.

IT MIGHT HAVE
been my guardian angels who saved me from myself over the years. At times when I couldn’t have cared less, or was too far removed to be aware, I believe that
they stepped in firmly. It was probably due to them that I was saved from a foolish action when I was eleven, after attracting a sexually marauding man in the park we often visited. At the entrance there was a cement statue of Our Lady, seated with her child on her lap. She always had flowers on her knee or in her arms, clandestinely picked from the park and placed there by children whose legs were strong enough to climb up onto her lap. There was also a lake in the park where I went on my bicycle to catch tadpoles. The lake was popular with families.

I first sensed the presence of the man when I felt his gaze on me like an invading energy. I had grown attuned to lustful energy and his attention felt familiar; it frightened, yet excited me with its mystery. Instead of running away I was drawn to it like a moth to a flame. I turned around and smiled at the man lounging on the grass. He invited me to sit next to him, to show him the tadpoles, tell him my name. All the while I smelled him, smelled danger, saw the glint in his eyes, and yet took no notice. He asked me to come back the next day at mid-morning (when the likelihood of other people being there would be very small, I vaguely realised) and I agreed.

I turned up the next morning, not so much because I wanted to but because I felt that I had to keep my word. He wasn’t there at the agreed time. I was stood up and felt ridiculous, not realising how lucky I really was. I hurried back home, feeling relieved and let down at the same time—and, of course, ashamed. The man had come to his senses, I thought, but I had not. I hardly ever had a kind thought for myself, not in those days, not in those years; not for decades.

LIFE IN A NEW COUNTRY

WE WERE ABOUT
to leave the whole Dutch scene, the snow and ice flowers, Saint Nicholas and the coal shed—and all my dolls. My mother had inherited some money after her father’s death, and she was going to spend it on getting us out of there.

In the summer of 1950 my father made the wooden boxes that would carry our furniture and possessions over the ocean. Regulations allocated us a certain size and some things had to be sacrificed. My parents did not have the heart to tell me that none of my dolls were going to be included. After all, I was nearly twelve.

We boasted to our friends about the adventures to come, and promised to write. Our friends were impressed. I had no idea then of the homesickness I would endure in the first year of my arrival in a country so far away, yearning for the places I would never return to. In my dreams, I would haunt the familiar streets and alleyways, smell the pussy willow and the daffodils so dear to me, scent the snow in the keen air, see the lush green leaves of the plane trees, and gaze at the wondrous candles of the horse chestnut’s flowers. I would even hover over the house with the tar-roof coal shed that had been our home, and the place of so much sorrow. My heart ached to be there again; I had left it all too blithely.

A lumbering old troopship took six glorious weeks to carry us to Sydney. I had never seen the ocean before, and my pre-pubescent soul blossomed with the romance that ships are renowned for. It was in the air all around us.

We docked at Port Said, in Egypt. There, below the porthole of the cabin I shared with several other girls, I happened to spot a bronzed Egyptian god, stripped to the waist, who was working rather listlessly in the midday heat on the deck of the oil supply tanker that had bunkered next to our ship. The unsuspecting god was surprised by a piece of paper attached to a length of white sewing thread fluttering about his head. He looked up and smiled, and risked his life (I thought) in retrieving it.

‘I like you,’ said the ingenuous message, in my best English. The bronzed idol with the pitch-black hair and matching eyes flashed a beautiful smile. He searched for a pencil and, wonder of wonders, wrote a reply on the back of my tiny missive. I pulled up my little piece of windblown romance and read the heart-stopping message: ‘I love you too.’ For a girl who was used to being clipped over the ears for wanting to stay up to watch the movies, that was a glorious moment, a sort of vindication. I thought I must be at least a little bit attractive for such a magnificent human being to accept my message of admiration, and return it with such unhesitating kindness. I hunched over the edge of the porthole and smiled my thanks. He seemed pleased, and went back to work.

The ship’s lunch bell rang. Romantic feelings struggled briefly with my tummy’s desire for a fill of the ship’s delicious food. I ran back fifteen minutes later, but my Egyptian and the tanker had left, as if it had all been a dream. But I had the piece of paper as proof and kept it as a treasure, showing it to no one.

That friendly exchange was the highlight of my journey, more memorable than my twelfth birthday on board ship, or even the moment we first alighted on Australian soil.

Our ship docked at Fremantle on a Sunday morning and stayed in port for the day. It was November and the flies were out in force. We had known flies in Holland but they didn’t come in persistent pesky hordes like this!

Stepping onto Australian land had a certain magical feel; it was so new, so different—alien, but friendly. A sweetness hung in the air, in spite of the heat. The streets of Fremantle were deserted; there wasn’t one Australian in sight. Empty paper bags drifted and shuffled along the dusty and heat-shimmering bitumen streets—a sight I had never seen in my clean, cobblestoned country.

We returned to our boat and travelled on to Sydney as planned. After a long wait at the station, caused by a train workers’ strike, we boarded a steam train that was to take us to the migrant camp beyond the Blue Mountains.

The train strained its way up the mountain ranges, and as it curved its long body around the steel tracks, I caught sight of its chimney stack. It was on fire! Flames shot out into the sky. I looked around my cabin to see if anyone else had spotted this and might be ready, like myself, to jump. I was used to the trains of home, feeling my face warm-wetted and sooted from the steam. Never had a chimney stack spewed flames! But no one seemed to care in the slightest and at last I flopped back on the seat, glad that I hadn’t made the awful mistake of giving the alarm.

We spent six weeks in the migrant camp while our father looked for work. Life there had its hardships, especially for the adults, totally unused as they were to bare floorboards that had to be wet-mopped daily to keep off the dust; tin roofs with no insulation; rows of thunderboxes separated by jute
curtains; public shower areas; and flies in the communal kitchen. We children, however, took most things in our stride, even as first-class adventures, except for the appalling smell of the toilets and the accompanying flies, and the open showers, which we were told to avoid if there were any adults there. Only once did I catch sight of a naked woman in the showers. Her breasts were most interesting and shocking to me, having none as yet myself—though I was aware of a strange stirring in my nipples that made them feel electric when I pressed them against cool glass. Needless to say, I felt wicked doing that and guilt-flustered by my furtive sensuality.

I went to six o’clock Mass every morning, catching the silhouettes of the magnificent Australian grasses in the gentle early light as I walked the distance up a hill. I was stunned by the beauty of what I saw, and heard, and felt. Great spiderwebs glistened in the morning sun. Magpies carolled—the song made me so happy. I had come to a place that was naturally bright. It was distinctly different from the dark reeking centuries of pain and awfulness that belonged to Europe. I felt light, like an angel in heaven. I picked bunches of pale straw-coloured grasses as if they were precious flowers, for my mother to put in the hut. Somebody laughed at me for picking the weeds, but thankfully my mother did not. She put them in an empty jam jar for a vase.