Читать книгу Goodbye Lullaby - Jan Murray - Страница 15

Miki turned on the hot water faucet and leant over the old enamel tub, welcoming the steamy mist rising up into her face.

As red droplets hit the water's surface like blood from a wound––a souvenir of the day's dusty journey across red plains––she thought about Rex down in Brisbane, about their phone call an hour ago. She should have confided in him, let him know what tonight really meant to her. He would have thought no less of her, not Rex, and she needed his strength tonight. Tonight she was flying solo, and scared.

Bernie was too worried about her, and unable to hide it, she thought, recalling the questioning looks and the way Bernie had hugged her and wanted to come south.

She thought about Bernie's story. She had no right to burden that poor soul with her misery, given what the bastards had done to Bernie. The woman had inner strengths and resources she wished she possessed. There was no bitterness in Bernie Blackburn, or at least none the woman let the world see. She was blessed to have such a friend. A mentor. That’s what Bernie was; her mentor, nudging her out of her melancholy. But not tonight, no Bernie tonight to help chase away the black dogs barking at her heels.

She wiped the grime from her face and walked across to the cabinet to lay out her toiletries on the bench top. The face that looked back at her from the cracked and water-damaged mirror accosted her, disgusted her. Bitter bile rose in her gut, choking her.

Head over the basin, she gagged and then heaved, dry wretching until the waves of peristalsis calmed and she straightened up, wiping the spew from her mouth with the back of her hand and staring into the mirror again, determined to interrogate the image staring back at her.

Caroline Patrick, the fraud. Making like a hero, on the run, fighting authority, pulling swifties on national television, rescuing these kids from the clutches of war. But where was her own son tonight? Who would be sitting with Dominic tonight as the barrel spun and his fate was decided? Who would be with her son to advise him if, God forbid, the worst happened and his number was called out? Not her, because she had given him away to strangers.

Tonight had been a long time coming. She stared until the mirror misted up and clouded her image. Before turning, she etched the number “38” hard onto the steamy surface, then, determined to fight her superstitions, forced herself to leave it there.

She undid her shirt and belt before stepping out of her dusty jungle fatigues and into the welcoming bath water, lowering her body down into it with more pleasure than she deserved, closing her eyes and giving in to the primordial bliss, the sheer joy of being suspended womb-like in warm water. Until self-hatred returned to ambush her emotions, she was determined to make the most of this moment of sweet oblivion.

Oblivion was elusive, however. Even with her head submerged, her brain refused to take a holiday. Minister for Defence they call it, she thought bitterly, her mind unable to back off from the events of this night; a lottery to send another quota of the nation's finest young men off to the terrible jungles of Vietnam. Minister for Warfare, more like it. War mongering old bastards, all of them. What were we defending? Were hoards of Vietnamese peasants invading our shores?

Minister for Defence! What a lie. She hated them with a passion. She might be worthless as a mother, but as a woman with nothing more to lose, she would go on fighting them with every last breath in her body. Bring it on. Whatever tonight's results, she would be there, helping to thwart their worst intentions.

Where was Jude, tonight? The Jude of old, of their school days?

She tasted the bile again and realized she hadn't eaten all day, nothing more than the few peanuts downstairs in the bar while they were fixing her room, installing a small TV for her. But the peanuts were on their way out to sea now, and the heartburn was back. The twisting and cramping in her gut was brought on by anxiety, or so the doctors told her when they could do nothing to alleviate the discomfort she constantly suffered. Self-inflicted, one GP down in Melbourne informed her, scolding her for not being able to control her subconscious mind and stop it from fretting over things she couldn’t alter.

She let more hot water run into the tub.

Where was her mother tonight? And her father? Did either parent ever think about her, talk about her, wonder how she had fared once they'd thrown her out in to the cold world like some Dickensian fallen female?

Not quite that dramatic, she checked herself, but not too far off the mark, recalling the lies and shame of those years, and the way her attempts to cozy up to them had fallen flat.

She reflected on the Patrick household's attitude towards her on that occasion a dozen or more years ago, remembering the weirdness, the embarrassment of the futile family get-together. So much for the Christmas spirit. A Christmas invitation accepted but never repeated. Too many hurtful memories had haunted the room for it to be anything else but hurtful. No amount of noisy bon-bon popping could conceal the silence of things not said that day, and no amount of her mother’s awful tinsel could conceal the gorilla sitting in the corner of that room.

Dominic. Their grandchild to whom they denied an existence

Too many things that couldn’t be said. Ghosts to be avoided. Nieces and nephews in her face, children cherished by their proud parents and doting grandparent. She had been able to stand only so much of the forced joviality before silently slipping out the front door and leaving it all behind. Leaving them to get on with being smug in their respectability. Life in Goodna had obviously gone on without her. At least Life as lived by the Patrick family. They had been spared the infamy of illegitimacy in 1951, the ruination of their good reputations. They had disowned her and got on with their lives.

And she had got on with hers, she reasoned, trying to calm the waves of bile determined to overtake her. Yes, she had got on with her life. For better or worse, give or take a malignant sadness that crept into her soul some days, sorrow dropping like thick fog to smother whatever small joy she might be experiencing, burying her under its weight for weeks, months. Yes, she had got on with her life but they had set the pattern of its moods when they'd sent her packing.

She slid further under the water. How might her life have turned out had her mother’s employer not forgotten to leave the envelope with the paltry wages in it on the sideboard that afternoon? Would she have turned out to be the kind of daughter who makes a parent proud? Could she have gone on to excel in her studies? Become an English teacher? Shined with her music? A concert pianist, perhaps? Daddy’s girl with her name in lights? Even one of those doting mothers in her parents' living room that Christmas Day.

Goodna had been far enough away from Nudgee to make her feel she was being sent into exile the day she was taken to the Home. Wrapped, stamped and posted off. No return address. Good riddance to bad rubbish. St Anthony’s Home for Unmarried Mothers. An institution run by the nuns for wayward girls, bad girls. Nudgee. Everyone knew what it stood for. Shorthand for sinfulness.

But wayward and sinful wasn’t how she'd felt. Not after Donald Manning. Not when Jude stuck her in the mustard bath. Not when taking confession. Not when saying her rosary. And certainly not when standing at the gates to the Home with her suitcase in her hand. Not at any of these times had she felt sinful. Or wayward.

Wayward. She had looked it up. The dictionary had it as meaning obstinate, rebellious, uncooperative, wild. And a lot more beside, but she was none of those things.

All she was, was scared. Terrified. Afraid of going into the unknown.

Entering the gates of the Home for the first time that day, she had experienced a deep sense of hopelessness, a sense of despair that was so visceral it had taken her breath away. The gates seemed too much like the ones at St Brendan’s Convent. They made her think about silly Jude acting the fool while she stood with her camera trying not to break into hysterics. She and Jude. Clowning. At that moment, as she entered St Anthony's gates, she realized her life would forever be divided by what had gone before and what would follow. It was this certainty that had taken her breath away. The reason for her heavy heart as she followed her mother through the gates of the place for wayward girls.

She sat up and reached for the soap and lathered her body, scrubbing vigorously with the flannel, aware the water was cooling again. She dribbled more hot water into the tub and lay back, resting her head against its old-fashioned curves.

She remembered everything about her first day at the Home. From the street, the place had looked impressive, a grand red brick and sandstone edifice surrounded by lawns and rose gardens. Impressive but not the kind of place a frightened sixteen-year-old schoolgirl would wish to call home. With her mother silent beside her they had passed the stone grotto on their way up to the oak doors, a Madonna and Child statue amid a bubbling water fountain. From the corner of her eye, she had seen her mother bless herself.

It was only when they reached the huge, intimidating oak doors at the end of the path, at the top of the grand steps, that the full horror of the day hit her. This was an institution, one for bad girls like her who needed locking up and taught a lesson. There would be no escape until her baby was born. And then what?

They were greeted and shown around the building by an elderly nun who introduced herself as Sister Mary-Xavier and who looked as if she were the oldest living creature on the planet, a mummified specimen dressed up to look real. The ancient one’s appearance reminded her of the Guinness Book of Records which she still had out from the school library. Should she ask her mother to return it or was her reputation so trashed now that St Brendan’s had written both her and the book off, anyway?

At the back of the Home they were shown a muddy playground area. Other inmates were pushing toddlers on swings and chasing after them on the lawn. Overblown bodies, girls in trouble like her. She was one of them. It was as if this Sister Mary-Xavier person were shoving her future in her face. Everything that had seemed so impossible to imagine up till this point was there in front of her.

The toddlers on the swings were babies no one wanted to adopt, Sister Mary-Xavier explained to her mother. They were either too old, not healthy enough or they were the wrong colour and so they were orphans who lived at the Home and were mothered by the pregnant inmates. From what was implied, it appeared that some of the pregnant girls had no homes to go to, either. She recalled leaning over at this point and brushing a fly off a little boy’s face marred by long candles of snot and yellow crust.

There was a kitchen garden at the back near the swings. She had left her mother and the old nun talking, and walked up and down between the vegetable rows, taking her time, aware her mother was impatient to be gone but taking a malicious delight in her mother’s discomfort.

It was the hardening towards her mother that was new and it worried her because she recognized it as yet one more kind of ending. The end of childish trust. A thing that had once been, but never would be again. This woman who had always been the closest human being in her world, the one supposed to love her forever and ever, had turned on her and was a stranger to her now.

She plucked a lettuce leaf and held it, noting that these lettuce were like the ones she and her father had sown last year. Royal Oakleaf was the name her father gave them. She passed under an old lemon tree heavy with ripe yellow fruit, guessing it was a Bearss variety. From Persia. Her Dad knew all about gardens and plant varieties. Their Bearss at home was probably older even than this one. She rubbed the skin of one of the lemons and relished the smell of the citrus oil on her hands, the way she and Jude liked to smell the citronella oil from the trees on the way to school. She guessed those trees would still be there when she got out but she doubted she would ever walk past them again. Or bother to rub the leaves on her hands if she did.

Her room, when the nun ushered her and her mother into it and stood back, was no more than a cell with a single iron-framed bed, a cupboard and small set of draws. And a holy picture above the bed, the one of Jesus with his hands out, showing his bleeding heart.

Although smaller than the bedroom she shared at home with her younger sisters, her cell was fine by her. She saw its possibilities. Her books could be stacked on top of the draws and that would give it a lived-in feeling. And at least it would be all hers. She had been expecting crowded dormitories full of strangers.

‘It’s small,’ said her mother that day, plopping herself down on the bed and looking around at the white plaster walls and the polished linoleum floor as if she had to decide whether or not to purchase the place rather than simply dump her eldest child in it.

Her mother was a plump woman with a scone face her father reckoned was typical of the Belfast breed, claiming the people from Belfast had facial features all squashed up together. He teased her mother about it, comparing Belfast girls to the girls from Galway who had Spanish and German blood in them. According to her father, all the Galway people were like him and her; tall with fine features, dark hair and blue eyes.

The loud crossover floral dress her mother had made for a niece’s wedding several years ago and kept for going-out occasions looked out of place in St Anthony's Home for Unmarried Mothers. Dulcie May Patrick had dressed to kill for the event, even though she would probably have preferred a trip to a leper colony. Her mother, considering the day to be a going-out occasion had teamed the pink of the floral dress with a set of long, knotted plastic beads from McWhirter’s department store, from where she had also purchased the flock nylon to sew the dress. Her mother must have decided the cork wedgies were also appropriate, she had thought as the nun ushered them both out of the room and down the corridor for further inspections.

She remembered how her mother had swooped on those horrid shoes in a little shop in Burleigh Heads. A souvenir from a summer’s camping trip on the Gold Coast. A lousy family holiday because it had rained for two weeks solid and her mother, before the ugly sandals purchase, had eaten a poisoned oyster and been rushed to hospital to have her stomach pumped.

And, thought Miki as she continued to lay back in the bath and relive the event, she had also hated those ugly thirty denier stockings. Reinforced heels and toes did not go with open-toed sandals. In fact, as she had stood by the door that day, assessing the woman perched on the edge of the single iron bed in that unforgettable cell, she had realized that she actually hated everything about Dulcie May Patrick.

‘Are the toilets clean, sister?’ her mother asked the elderly nun.

The communal bathroom facilities, when they were shown them, proved to be spotlessly clean and passed even her mother’s detailed inspection.

The common room where she was informed she could meet with no more than two visitors at a time on every second Saturday afternoon was pleasant enough with its big windows reaching all the way from the ceiling to the floor. The room had two old brown velveteen lounges and two other single seats, all with crocheted lace cloths to protect the arms. A large holy picture of mother and child dominated the wall opposite the windows and a statue of Mary and Baby Jesus also sat on the table in the centre of the room.

She recalled thinking that, along with these icons, and the grotto, it was proof of the irony of the Home––icons of an unmarried mother and her beloved child. Obviously the hypocrisy had escaped the good nuns who ran St Anthony's. And the mothers like Dulcie, who committed their daughters to their institution.

It was the piano across the other side of the large room which brought her some joy that day. The place that was to be her new home couldn’t be all bad if there were vegetable gardens, somewhere to rest her books, and Steinways.

She recalled she might even have been smiling as they left the common-room and were ushered past the amber glass hallway and into a big office to fill in the admission forms. Her prayers, of late, had been all about asking Mother Mary to help her accept what had happened and guide her through her troubles so that she wasn’t too different when she came out on the other side from the person she was when she went in. Veggie gardens, books and pianos were a start.

With the paperwork filled in and signed, she had accepted what passed for a kiss goodbye from her mother. It did not escape her that her mother was leaving without saying anything about when she would return. Was that because her mother was too embarrassed and wanted to get away as fast as possible? Who could say? They had hardly spoken at home these days.

Every word her mother uttered as she left her with Sister Mary-Xavier in the big office that day was a lie, and she'd hoped her mother would level with God on the way home on the train.

‘Royal Prince Alfred, sister,’ her mother announced from the doorway. 'RPA.' As if it were God’s truth. ‘You’ve gone down to Sydney, Caroline.’ Her mother looked directly at the religious woman. ‘Nursing at RPA. That’s what we're telling folk if they ask,’ she said, jamming her clutch purse firmly up under her arm as if there would be no argument. ‘It’s best that way,’ she added, casting one last cleaning woman’s critical eye around the big carpeted office before walking out.

Best for whom, she'd wanted to ask but hadn’t because she did not want to hear her mother telling the stranger any more lies. Did not want her talking about her father’s way of dealing with this thing, his weakness. No angry words like her mother’s rantings. Her mother’s treatment of her, she could deal with. It had been her father’s silence, his coldness, and his emotional abandonment of her that had broken her heart and made her realize how much she was losing.

And so, a pallid kiss, and the lie spoken in front of a nun was the sum total of their farewells that day.

She had watched her mother disappear through the office door, heard her click-clacking down the corridor. She understood she had just observed a woman relieved to have dumped her knocked-up daughter on the doorstep of St Anthony’s Home for Unmarried Mothers. And she knew, once out in the open again, her mother would not look back, but would hurry down the path on her clumsy cork-heeled wedgies from Burleigh Heads––past the hypocritical holy grotto––and jump on a train to Goodna where she would start spreading the word about her clever daughter being accepted for nursing at one of Australia’s finest teaching hospitals.

That would be all the world needed to know of their shame, until, one day, she would be expected to turn up at their front door with empty arms and perpetuate the lie.

The fact she had failed to do so was the reason the Christmas Day attempt at a reconciliation had been a fiasco. Did they ever ask themselves about their lost grandchild? Or like the universe itself, had they simply atomized him.

As for Jude, why even think about her, or where she might be tonight. Jude would not be aware of any birthday lottery or its significance. So much for their pact. Together, forever. Their son. No retreat. No surrender.

She gave a cynical laugh and slid down under the bathwater, holding her breath for an eternity.