Moving Among Strangers (2 page)

2

S
isters are known for their intense and often discordant relationships, and in my family nothing was in moderation. We always went to extremes, whether it was politics, love, hate, rage or sibling rivalry. Of the two of us, my sister was the more virtuous. She worked harder and longer hours, leafleted for the Greens, knitted cardigans for newborns, hand-fed baby magpies and lived a life of celibacy. I, on the other hand, was inherently lazy, neglected my chooks and had deceived my last husband to have an affair with a younger man from my yoga class. Cathy was a wonderful cook; she followed the recipe to the letter. I didn't own a recipe book; I made things up as I went along. Cathy was a meticulous researcher for a current affairs program; her desk was in order, her information in neat alphabetical files. She was always talking about the stories she was working on – torture of the Basque people in Spain, the psychiatric ailments of staff in Australian detention centres. She wanted to do stories, she said, that would change things – improve the world,
make a difference
. I, on the other hand, just wanted to tell stories for the sake of the story. She believed this was very indulgent, and she was probably right. And yet, we were also uncannily alike, as only sisters can be. In the end, as our mother lay dying, we could barely look at each other; partly, I suspect, because one cannot bear too much reflection of the self.

*

Growing up I had adored and worshipped my beautiful big sister with long blond hair; if only I could be like her! I wore her clothes, listened to her music, followed her wherever she went and copied everything she did. I especially wanted to be a rebel just like her.

My older sister was notoriously rebellious – six years older than me – I always looked up to her. Expelled from school, she was sent to boarding school, then became a runaway and took acid. She even had her own little business making tie-died T-shirts, which she sold at the flea markets – a pretty, blond hippy drop-out with a boyfriend who also had hair down to his waist, sang the blues and screen-printed radical posters at Sydney University's swarming centre of insurrection: the Tin Sheds. Man, was my sister cool. I had a lot to live up to by the time I got to high school.

During my first year at Gymea High I soon realised that I would never achieve my sister's legendary standing. She was a way better rebel than me – more effective, more articulate. I couldn't get expelled even when I tried; I had to walk out in a huff at lunchtime one day. And even then, no one noticed.

Now I realise that we were both trying to be like our father. Our father was the best rebel of all. As a child, I sometimes went to the university during the school holidays and I could see that my father wasn't like anyone else there. All the other men wore ties and leather shoes. My father wore denim shorts and thongs. All the other men brushed their hair before they came to work. My father's unkempt wisps stuck out at all angles from his balding scalp. He didn't care about superficial things like neat haircuts. He cared about the Vietnam War and the Vietnamese peasants, and humanity. I noticed that the other people at the university looked at him oddly because he acted more like a student than a lecturer – but that only proved to me how special he really was.

Many years later when I got my first job at a university, I couldn't understand why the students just walked in and out of class willy-nilly and sat up the back in couples whispering or texting while I was trying to give a lecture. Then I had a revelation: it was because I had no authority. I had no authority because I didn't believe in authority. I didn't believe in authority because I had been brought up to believe that being authoritarian was bad. But after that first semester I changed. I confiscated phones and disallowed eating and drinking in class. I became ‘Scary Carey'. But I didn't care.
I
was the teacher of my students. I wasn't trying to be their friend, much less their lover. My father, on the other hand, had had something of a reputation. Perhaps we can blame it on the times – free love, along with the sixties, came late to Australia.

But this was why my sister began to resent our father: because of his infidelity. Later, the resentment turned to hatred. And then, much later, after he died, the hatred turned on the person who most resembled our faithless father, and that was me.

3

The night my mother died I was in St Stephen's Hall in Church Street with my son, watching him throwing clubs with the Newtown Jugglers. I loved the juggling club because everyone was so oddly and intensely devoted. During the day, jugglers were IT specialists and software nerds; by night they were fanatics who spent hours perfecting rhythms and routines that involved hoops, clubs, batons and balls of every colour, shape and size. This wasn't a hobby, it was a vocation. Sometimes they practised in pairs or teams of four, five and six; at other times alone, often falling into a kind of self-induced hypnosis that involved the body and the mind in perfect unison. Until a ball dropped or a baton bounced or the unicycle slipped.

‘And then I dropped,' I heard them say. Or, ‘I can do twenty-four before I drop.' Keeping your balls in the air, up, buoyant and fluid, defying gravity, was the aim. The drop point was the extent of a person's ability. Yet, because they always fell, because everyone dropped all the time, the jugglers didn't see it as a failure. Juggling was the least competitive sport I'd ever witnessed and I loved everything about it: the people, the props, the apparent pointlessness of it all. And for my son, who like me had never been interested in team sports, juggling was the perfect activity.

The night my mother died I knew that my brother and sister and one of the nurses were in her house. What I didn't know was that all three of them were sitting in the lounge room, while my mother died alone in the bedroom. Perhaps that's how she wanted it. My favourite palliative nurse had told me how some people wait until everyone has gone so they can die in peace; that some people didn't want witnesses, that dying, like sex, was a private thing.

I could have chosen not to go to the juggling club that night. I knew my mother was near the end. Her breathing had turned into a rasping death rattle and her appearance was of someone already dead. The nurse had told me the last sense to leave a dying body was hearing, so I had sat by her bedside and read T.S. Eliot's
Four Quartets.
Just in case.

My brother rang me on the mobile as I was getting into the car outside St Stephen's Hall.

‘She's gone,' he said.

I called my daughter and was relieved when she didn't answer. She would have a more peaceful night without knowing. Then I looked at my watch.

It was twenty minutes past nine.

4

19 APRIL 2009

Dear Gabrielle,

Thank you very much for your card. I was very sad to hear that Joan is so ill. We knew each other such a long time – I think since my age was in single figures, when she was nursing at Geraldton before she married Alex – and later on, when I was a schoolboy and undergraduate, her letters from London were like a window on the world. I can still tell you who her favourite ballerina was (Elaine Tyfield) and how she met Alex again (accidentally on a park bench). Do give her my fond regards.

It seems appropriate for you to read ‘For One Dying', as ‘Ap' (my great-aunt, for whom it was written) knew Joan well and was fond of her.

With all good wishes to you both,

Mick Randolph Stow

By the time this card arrived, my mother had been dead for four days. She had died in her own bed, which was her wish, but it had not been the ‘perfect end' that Stow had wished for his aunt. I knew we'd done our best to relieve her suffering but my mother had not been granted a quiet night. And when one has accompanied a person through her dying, it is difficult not to spend the following days, months, years, wondering how one might have done it better.

I gazed at Stow's writing, the neatly inscribed sentences in black ink.

… when I was a schoolboy and undergraduate, her letters from London were like a window on the world
…

Why did my mother correspond with a young man, an adolescent, thirteen years her junior, who wasn't even a relation? And where were her letters now?

I realised I had never known my mother to go to the ballet. She had not mentioned ballerinas even when I'd been to ballet lessons as a child. What was this life she had lived, when she had been such a ballet regular that she had developed a ‘favourite ballerina'? And who was Elaine Tyfield?

Most mysteriously of all, however, were the words about my father, ‘and how she met Alex again (accidentally on a park bench
).
' Again? Accidentally? On which park bench?

Stow knew more about my mother, and perhaps my family, than I did. Writing back with our sad news, I enclosed the memorial bookmark we had designed for her funeral, printed with his poem ‘For One Dying' and a copy of my book
Waiting Room
, which had been launched five days before she died.

*

My mother was extremely secretive and not a natural storyteller. Although she did occasionally tell stories about growing up on a vineyard in the Swan Valley of Western Australia, they were very few and, I see now, heavily edited. One of the rare stories she told and retold about Randolph Stow was from his days as a schoolboy at Guildford Grammar School, on the Swan River not far from ‘Oakover', her home in Middle Swan.

‘I'll never forget,' she'd say, ‘how he swam across the river one afternoon, holding his school clothes high in one hand.' Apparently Stow had stripped down to his underwear and then paddled, one-handed, across the muddy water, so he could visit Joan and her family.

I've never quite understood why he seemed to be such a regular visitor, or how the families were con-nected, but my mother gave me the impression that during his time as a boarder at Guildford, Stow was virtually adopted by the Fergusons. So I simply explained it to myself by imagining he must have felt very alone, being so far from his home in Geraldton, and that the Fergusons were somehow acquainted with the Stows in the way that all the old established families of Western Australia seemed to know each other. While Stow was still at high school, my mother left her home in the Swan Valley. She wasn't going far by West Australian standards – three hundred miles north to work at the Geraldton Hospital – but at least it was somewhere new and a kind of freedom. And so, as the Fergusons had hosted young Randolph during his years as a boarder at Guildford, while my mother lived in Geraldton that hospitality was returned. She stayed in the nurses' quarters (now a supermarket car park) but was a frequent visitor to the Stow and Sewell families, and became particularly fond of Stow's great-aunt Suthie, nicknamed Ap. Aunt Ap was the model for Aunt Kay in
The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea
and the dedicatee of the poem ‘For One Dying'
.
Of all the women who surrounded Stow growing up, Ap was the most important and influential. It was she who read him the Border ballads, recited Lord Randall, who sang to him in Gaelic and taught him to love all things Scottish. ‘Above all others,' according to Roger Averill, Stow's authorised biographer, ‘she lavished time and attention on the young Stow and encouraged his interests and talents.'

*

A week or so later a blue, old-fashioned airmail envelope
arrived with a white address sticker on the front:
J.R. Stow
, 28 King's Head Street, Harwich, Essex CO12 3EE
. It was on beautiful high-quality paper, complete with letterhead.

10 MAY 2009

Dear Gabrielle,

Many thanks for letting me know of Joan's sad but expected passing, and for the copy of
Waiting Room
which I much admired. It is very sobering reading for someone of my age; but your behaviour, and that of your sister and brother, and Joan herself, was, in the end, heartening to read about. Joan wrote to me the Christmas after the operation, or perhaps it was two Christmases later, after she had been in Western Australia, and mentioned by the way that she had been operated on for a brain tumour, sounding surprised and rather elated (I think there was an exclamation mark after ‘brain tumour').

This quintessentially writerly inclusion of the detail of an exclamation mark was of immense solace to me. And Stow's reading of my mother's tone as one of elation rather than regret was a great relief. Convincing my mother to undergo the operation had been difficult and I was criticised. So when only a few years later she was diagnosed with another cancer, I was filled with doubt; why hadn't we obeyed her wishes the first time, instead of manipulating her into surgery? Should we have let her just choose her own exit strategy, the one of least resistance? Can there be any right way to choose between radical intervention and passive inaction?

After my father had died suddenly and violently twenty-five years ago, I was certain that we had been far too passive. Like Stow, my father, who had also grown up in Geraldton, suffered from a similar ingrained, if well-hidden, melancholy that eventually led him to a place so dark he could never return. But if someone had just had the courage to intervene, to force him to a medical or mental health practitioner, he might still be here today, perhaps celebrating his ninetieth birthday, enjoying his grandchildren. If only he had been convinced to take a course of anti-depressants, he might have made it through his dark night.

At the time I received Stow's letter I was suffering from what psychologists call ‘a severe grief reaction' but what might have been more correctly described as a complete nervous breakdown. Although my mother's death was, as Stow described, ‘expected', I had
nevertheless fallen into a state of intense bereavement. I couldn't
think; I couldn't work, I couldn't sleep, I couldn't eat. My weight dropped to forty-four kilograms. Friends thrust tins of Sustagen at me, the same powdered energy food I had mixed up just weeks before for my skeletal mother. People in deep grief can sometimes mimic the illness or symptoms of the loved one recently lost, and I wondered if I was slowly starving myself to death. Yet, even with that awareness, I couldn't bring myself to eat.

The letter continued:

In 1963, when I was back in Australia for a year as a lecturer at UWA, I went for a drive with a student, Peter Holland (since a famous face on WA television, I believe) and called at Oakover. Your grandparents were out, but we hung about for some time, drinking in the wonderful tranquillity and beauty of the place. Peter was ecstatic, never having been anywhere like it, perhaps he remembers it still. The overarching oak tree, and the huge olive trees from which Italians used to harvest the fruit for oil were there as you described them. On the back lawn, I learnt from your grandmother how to sun-dry my own grandmother's figs. On one of my weekends from school, I took a bus from the Sandalford side of the Swan and swam across, holding my clothes and weekend bag over my head with one arm.

At last! My mother's favourite story had been confirmed! Even better, I could imagine the schoolboy Stow, under my grandmother's supervision, helping to arrange the figs on the drying racks behind Oakover – that special fruit that had meant so much to my mother, that symbolised the earthy goodness of
Western Australia, the fruit she missed so much when she came to Sydney, and Stow must have missed even more when he settled in England.

We were the only kids at school who took dried figs for lunch. Our mother bought them in rounds, imported from Turkey. Clearly these were strange, exotic, grown-up fruit – rare and expensive – but I had no idea that my mother had grown up amid season after season of abundant fig crops as well as grape harvests.

What surprised me most was how far the connections stretched back. Stow's maternal grandfather, George Sewell, had been schooled with my great uncle Douglas Ferguson.

My grandfather's name was George Ernest Sewell. (Men called him George, women Ernest.) [He] and Douglas Ferguson of Houghton were devoted friends, in the Victorian manner of Tennyson and Hallam. My grandmother remembered visiting Douglas after he'd been ill and said: ‘I never saw two men who so loved each other; they were quite funny.'

Later on in life, when both men had established themselves as farmers, George used Douglas's farm at Moora as a resting place for sheep on the long walk from Guildford to Geraldton. (Moora, I realised later, is also where Rick and Rob take a rest during their droving trip in
The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea
.)

*

Once, on a trip to Western Australia, my father had brought home reproductions of old black-and-white portraits. The faces of those men, women and children in their staged photographs had thrilled me to at last see what my clan looked like. But there were no names on the backs, no dates, no details. And no explanatory anecdotes from my father, who was too busy with his university work and with his anti-Vietnam war activism to pass the stories on even if he'd had the inclination. They lie still in a pile in my desk drawer – dozens of unnamed strangers who are in some way related to me. And now here was Stow, writing from the other side of the world, with real, solid information – not only about the Fergusons, but also the Carey side as well.

He wrote finally:

This has turned into quite a long essay, so I will end it by saying thanks again for your book and what is in it, and I'm very glad to have this memoir of a dear old friend.

With all good wishes

Sincerely,

Mick Randolph Stow

For some reason I didn't notice the phone number at the bottom of the page. It is now one of my great regrets that I never attempted to call.