Читать книгу The Styx - Patricia Holland - Страница 22

My father drove me home after my custody hearing. A ten-hour drive, speeding on a cloud of cigarette smoke and fast food. A couple of hours into the trip he rang my mother.

“I can’t stop her screaming. Do something will you. Say something. You are so manipulative. You’ve brainwashed her. I’m her father. Tell her she’s going home with me. Tell her she belongs with me now. Tell her she has to, that’s how it is. Tell her to be happy. With me. Now.”

At first my mother was granted fortnightly access. “Supervised.”

“Three hours on the second Saturday, and three and a half on the adjacent Sunday. No overnight stays,” the access order said. Too risky. Too unstable, it implied.

To supervise, my father chose a woman both he and my mother knew. My mother’s mother wasn’t to be trusted: too weak and under her power. His mother couldn’t face it: too weak and under his power.

He chose a social worker, an ex-girlfriend of Psycho Silas’s. The previous girlfriend of a previous boyfriend of my mother’s. She had never liked my mother. She always avoided looking into my mother’s eyes. My eyes, too. During these access visits, my mother looked like a labrador trying to please. The other woman plumped in the power of the rejected.

The social worker ex-girlfriend of Silas’s called the shots of when and where we met, and my mother complied. Anything, anywhere, anytime.

The social worker ex-girlfriend of Silas’s judged the trinkets my mother brought me. She judged the conversations my mother had with me (pretty one-sided obviously).

The social worker ex-girlfriend of Silas’s wrote it all down—professional value judgments for the court.

The social worker ex-girlfriend of Silas’s judged my grandmother’s love of her daughter and granddaughter. This fortnightly visit was my grandmother, Lila’s, only contact with me too. Supervised.

My mother graduated to fortnightly overnight weekend visits. Supervised of course, and this time by a friend of hers from way back.

The novelty had worn off. The social worker ex-girlfriend of Silas’s was getting sick of spending her weekends watching my mother. The new regime was supervised by a friend from my mother’s teenage days—Martha, a welfare worker and part-time artist. My mother and she had drifted apart, but stayed connected through their past.

My father knew Martha’s drinking habits. He knew her dope-smoking habits. Martha was a suitable supervisor, my father’s affidavit said, and the judge had ordered it be so.

My mother was allowed to speak to me twice a week for no more than five minutes each time on the phone. Those two calls had to also cover any family member of hers. If my grandmother rang, that was one of my mother’s phone calls gone. Often I knew my mother had rung, that she was on the end of the phone talking, but my father didn’t even bother to put it to my ear. Many of these times I was too far away to hear what she said, but I knew what she was saying.

“You forgot me,” my silence screamed down the phone at her. “You forgot me!”

If my mother rang five minutes early, “You’re too early,” my father would say. “Ring back on time,” he’d say and the phone would slam.

He was his happiest at these times.

If my mother rang five minutes late, “You’re too late,” he’d say. “Ring on time.” The phone would slam with glee.

The conceited confidence of victory. Judged fit. Endorsed.

After she left Styx River, my mother found work in North Queensland. During their marriage, she had wanted to finish the six months left of her studies and become a journalist. My father had poo-poohed the idea. “What do you need a degree for,” he’d scoff. After all he didn’t have one, he’d be really saying.

“I suppose you think you’ll get a job with Fairfax,” my father’s crony Dodgy Dominic had sneered at my mother straight after the court case. He begrudged the small amount of maintenance money set by the judge. “Yes, a life in the sticks is definitely the credential for great things.” He said this just out of range of my father’s hearing.

For Rural Press, however, my mother’s rural knowledge was credential enough. She became the next in a series of try-too-hard exploitees sent from Brisbane with a car, camera and notebook to North Queensland, and an expectation to file too many far-flung stories and too many pictures every week. My father’d try to hide her published stories from me, but when he forgot, sometimes I’d see her picture as a photo byline on the front cover of Country Life.

One allocated-phone-contact-night, when my mother was travel­ling for a story, she rang too early. I was in my wheelchair, right next to the phone when my father answered it. Mum was driving up the Atherton range from north of Innisfail, where public phones were scarce. She rang at the bottom of the range. It was five fifty-six pm.

“You’re too early,” he said. His slam of the phone stabbed through my mother’s ear, through my mother’s heart.

She drove so fast up that road, she later told me. It was raining and her tears blinded her around the ridiculously tight bends twirling the mountain. She couldn’t drive faster. Gravel became ball-bearings impossible to see in the dark. Impossible to disregard. The guardrails were only meant as guides, not second chances. It was further than she realised to the next phone. She was never going to make it. Halfway up, still no phones, nowhere to pull over at all. Then a caravan park motel glowed at the next bend. Gravel delivered her to the “Enquiries” door.

“Please, please can I use your phone, it’s urgent,” she said. They looked shocked. She looked like a crazy woman, a desperate woman.

“It’s past six. You’re too late.” He slammed the phone down again. It was six oh-three pm.

A few months later, it was my fortnightly weekend with my mother and opening night of Martha’s art exhibition. The affidavit stipulated pick-up time was ten am Saturday at McDonalds in Leichhardt. My father had dictated the pick-up and handover times and location. It needed to fit in with the operations of the cattle station, the judge had said. My father was always scrupulously rigid with these times. He never allowed me to leave his car before ten am, even if he arrived early and my mother was there waiting. He’d sit in his car, smoking a cigarette with his country music blaring, waiting for that ten am to arrive.

Leichhardt is almost fifty kilometres away from Lilian Bay, where Martha lived, and on this occasion because of her art exhibition, it had been tight time-wise and headspace-wise for her. But Martha was generous.

“Of course I will supervise the handover,” she said.

My father and I stayed at Lancer’s Savoy Hotel in Leichhardt on the Friday night. The cattle trucks had been late picking up cattle from Styx River, and we drove into town straight after, arriving well after dark. Soon after we arrived in Leichhardt, my father’s stock agent rang him.

“Maaaayyyyt, we’ve got some Indonesians interested in a few more heifers. Doesn’t matter if they’re pregnant, but they have to be greys and no black tails, no white faces. Definitely no brindles. They want two-fifty and they’ve got good money. Can you get them in by lunchtime?”

My father rang my mother the next morning at seven-thirty am.

“You can have her now, I have to get back,” he said.

He was snappy and of course my mother had no idea of what was going on.

“But we’re at the gallery still hanging pictures,” I overheard my mother say. “We were working on ten o’clock.” She was never good with change.

“Well do you want her or not?” my father said. “What sort of mother are you? You’ve got till eight fifteen to get here.”

My mother’s voice was panicked, desperate to comply. Scared he’d use it to say: “Bad luck, you’re too late.”

But he had weekend plans that didn’t involve any adhesions.

“Can I come by myself?” my mother asked. Her voice was quiet.

“As long as you don’t tell anyone,” he said. “I don’t want to see this in an affidavit or anything.”