Holier Than Thou (6 page)

7

For my living memory, and to this very day, Paddy will enter a room and move, as if drawn by an invisible string, to our mother. As a toddler, he’d squeal with delight and lurch over to her. At eighteen he sauntered, but it was the same dance. His arms would go around her waist, or if she was seated and he approached from behind, his arm would snake around the front of her neck and squeeze her shoulder. She’d unconsciously put her hands on his arms and absentmindedly rub his skin. He’d often look up at me with a shit-stirring smile during this effortless embrace.
You’ll never know what this is like
, is what he communicates to me with this smile. Little bastard.

‘Hols,’ Tim said, when I tried to explain it to him, ‘he probably smiles at you in that moment to . . . to
include
you in the love-in.’

‘No way.’

‘Your mum loves you.’

‘I know Mum loves me! It’s not about love. It’s about attachment. About the absence of a physical relationship.’

‘Are adults supposed to have a physical relationship with their parents?’ said Tim doubtfully.

‘She and I
never
had one.’

Everyone, including my mother, including me, felt so damn sorry for Paddy when he was a boy. He had a dream run for his first five years, then he had an ailing dad, then an officially very sick dad, then a dying dad, and at age nine, a dead dad. And a sad mum.

We all bought him stuff and tried to compensate, so I think he wasn’t too badly off when all is said and done. But he was such a pale-faced little urchin, with large eyes and skinny, gangly limbs, people’s hearts hurt when they looked at him. I must have presented more robustly, because puberty was behind me and I gave the air of being quite able to cope with the series of curve balls. And I suppose I could.

But looking back, Paddy’s primary attachment figure was Mum, and he was never in danger of losing her. He could always beat a retreat to the safe harbour of her arms. Those arms were never my refuge. Me and Dad though, we were together a lot. Almost from the beginning. I never luxuried in his arms quite the way Paddy did in Mum’s, but we were pretty tight, and he was consistently available. After he died, I slowly registered that without him, my own place within the family was uncertain. The balance was off.

Poor Mum. I still don’t have the full story of my birth, but I think I’ve worked most of it out. She fell pregnant with me in London, where Dad was finishing his MA and they shared a flat with Sarah and Graeme. Literally fell that is – they were at a crowded music festival and my mum felt dizzy and keeled over. Graeme was standing next to her, caught her in time and shouted for my father. Soon after that she worked out she was pregnant and they made plans to come back to Australia before the pregnancy got to the ‘no-fly’ zone. My god, the photos of them from London. So young and so good-looking. It’s weird looking at pictures of your parents when they were young and fancy-free. By the time you really register what your parents look like, their life force has already been decimated by sleep deprivati Seepd loon, they have poured their youth and vigour into keeping you alive.There’s a photo of my mum and dad standing at Shakespeare’s grave, a chilly wintry day, both of them wearing long overcoats.They are not embracing, which somehow makes them look even closer. Not a wrinkle or a grey hair on either of them. A vitality, a tautness of skin and a plumpness of cells.

I’m not sure whether they planned to have me, but either way it was back Down Under, and the next photos of them were not until I was about two or three years old. They look very different. The mighty had fallen.

Poor Mum. I was born seven weeks early and had to go into the glass-box nursery, but I don’t even think that was the worst of it. I think she was sick, very sick, the whole pregnancy, and it was an effort even to hold me in until thirty-three weeks’ gestation. When I was born, she had already been in hospital for weeks, and afterwards she was in intensive care herself for a couple more weeks.
Complications,
she said. She didn’t get to see me or hold me for that whole time. She wasn’t well enough to get out of bed, and either I was too sick to be wheeled up to her ward or it just wasn’t a priority for the hospital staff to get us together. In the third week she asked and asked to go down and see me, but they said she wasn’t well enough to go down to the nursery by herself and they couldn’t spare a staff member to take her. So she got herself out of bed and promptly collapsed on the floor of her room, at which point a wheelchair was brought and she was wheeled down to the nursery and brought to a halt in front of one of the glass boxes.

‘You were so small,’ my mum said to me once, ‘it was frightening.’

‘Did you go and visit me in the nursery, Dad?’ I asked, more than once.

‘Of course I did,’ he always replied.

‘Did you hold me?’

‘Well . . . ’ he hedged. I glared.

‘Well, you were so small and hooked up to tubes and things, I wasn’t allowed to hold you. And then you got this terrible sore on your tiny little excuse for a bottom, and they had to position you sort of crouching face-down in your crib, and I was too scared to hold you without hurting you.’

‘So that’s a no.’

‘I held you plenty when you got well. I wore you in a sling. For months.’ I always thought my dad had a calming heartbeat. All through my childhood I would put my ear against his chest if it happened to be close by, to hear that reassuring thud, and smell the calming smell of his Dadness.

Eventually Mum was discharged, and I stayed in the special care nursery at the hospital for another fortnight. She would almost never answer questions about this period so I don’t know what happened. Maybe she got depressed. It was the middle of semester for my dad so he was lecturing at the university most weekdays. The one thing she did disclose though was that she forgot my name. One day she rang the nursery to enquire after me and said, ‘Hello it’s Mrs Yarkov. How is . . . ?’ And for the life of her she could not remember that they had named me Ho Sd n day shelly. She said she burst into tears and threw the pills in the bin.

‘What pills?’ I asked.

‘They’d given me some pills . . . to take home from hospital. To calm me down.’

‘But Mum, why did you need calming down?’

Anyhoo, at some point obviously I came home, but there are no baby photos. Which is odd, I’ve since learned, for a first baby. First babies are usually photographed excessively. Maybe I looked too much like a skinned rabbit at first, but eventually I got podgy. I only know this much from a photo in one of Sarah’s albums, of Graeme and my father sitting with me on a rug in their back yard. Mum wasn’t in the photo.

My grandma took care of me a lot when I was pre-preschool. I remember the fishpond in her backyard, and that once I fell into it.Then, when I started preschool, my dad dropped me off and picked me up most days. I think Mum was back at work, tutoring, or was she lecturing by that point too? He used to arrive with my trike and I would ride home beside his tall, loping legs. When I got tired he would carry me on one of his arms and hold the trike in his other hand. He was so strong. I have to make myself remember that, and not just the shrinking form with morphine and haloperidol pumping straight into a vein.

At the end of my kindy year, Mum and Dad said that there was a baby in Mum’s tummy and soon I would have a little brother or sister. Which sounded kind of cool, I guess.

In the Easter holidays of Grade One, they took me away for a holiday, just the three of us, down south somewhere. There was a pool at the motel, I remember it well. Mum and Dad taking turns holding my arms as I kicked and flailed around in the water, with my back bubble strapped firmly around my torso. Standing on the pool’s edge and jumping into my dad’s open arms. I wanted to do the same to Mum, but I couldn’t because of her ginormous belly.

Mum and Paddy had a dream run. He was born while I was at school, and Dad took me in to the maternity hospital that afternoon. I clutched his hand and trotted beside him, through an enormous multi-storey car park, into a tall building, up in a lift and along a very long corridor. At the end of the corridor, we found my mum sitting in a chair next to her hospital bed, with a baby clasped to her bare chest. The baby wore only a nappy and was peacefully asleep with its arms, face and torso plastered onto Mum’s skin. She smiled a big smile, gave me a kiss and introduced me to baby brother, Patrick.

‘He’s so tiny,’ I said, taking in the purpley-red legs and feet that stuck out from the hospital-issue cloth nappy.

‘Actually, he’s a whopper as far as babies go,’ Mum said, unable to wipe the smile off her face. ‘Four kilos!’

Dad kissed her forehead and then baby Patrick’s downy head.

She and Patrick only stayed in hospital that night and the night after.When I arrived home from school on the third day, there was a baby capsule in the hall and Mum was sitting on couch, pinned under the baby who had taken to breastfeeding like a duck t Slikdayo water. She beamed at me. It was good to see her so happy. Tired but happy.

There are albums and albums of photos of Paddy. Paddy and Mum, Paddy and Dad, and all four of us together. One of them I’ve had framed and next to my bed since shortly after Dad’s death. It’s of the four of us on the bench in our back yard – Paddy a bonny one-year-old squirming happily on Mum’s knee, me standing on the bench with one arm around Dad’s neck and clutching Percy, my toy puppy, with the other. Dad has his arm around me. We are all smiling, but Dad and I are smiling into the camera, while Mum and Paddy are smiling at something or someone off-camera.

At Befftown I shared my cubicle cluster with a girl called Kristy, a psychologist, who was only there three days a week. She returned from maternity leave when her baby was about eight months old. She had dark circles etched deep under her eyes and generally looked as though something was sucking the life from her. She was nice, but her affect was just kind of munted. From lack of sleep I gathered. And she was so thin. But with enormous breasts full of milk. At lunch time she sprinted up to the Health Service day-care centre to give the baby her breastfeed, so I have no idea when she actually ate her own lunch. Never, from the look of her thin limbs and sharp shoulders. In between clients, she sat at her desk rubbing her eyes and trying to complete her file notes. Once she fell asleep during a staff education session. Her head actually hit the desk with a thwack. Poor Kristy, she was so embarrassed. Nick and I thought it was funny. Johanna glared, and Tessa shot Johanna a pleading look.

At 4:55 p.m. Kristy’s affect changed. She started to cast longing looks at the framed photo of her baby girl that sat on her desk, she got this soft smile playing around her lips and her whole body perked up with a new energy.

‘Almost time to get my girl!’ she’d beam. And I couldn’t help but smile back at her. Come five o’clock she was outta there, with that strange look of radiance superimposed on top of exhaustion that my mum had when Paddy was a baby. I think she had to stop herself from breaking into a run, as if she was running to a lover after a war. In fact, I bet that once she was out of the office, she did run.

On one of the rare occasions that Nick and I had left work on time to walk up to the train station, we passed the centre and saw Kristy emerge from the security doors carrying her baby, snuffling into the baby’s soft little neck, while struggling with handbag, backpack, a sippy cup and soft toys, and both of them making little noises of passionate reunion.

‘Do you want babies?’ I asked Nick abruptly.

‘No,’ he replied, without missing a beat. ‘I say the cycle of fucked-up parenting in my family stops with me.’

‘Oh, come on. Your mum did the best she could,’ I said testily. I’ve ended up as Nick’s mum’s defender, much as I was Liam’s mum’s defender.

‘I don’t know why we call them “single mums”,’ I continued. ‘We should call them “The Ones Who Stayed”.’

‘My mum
took
me from my dad,’ Nick interj S; Nighected sharply.

‘And why do you think she did that? For kicks? For her health? Because she thought it would be fun to raise a child all on her own? Is that what you think? You are so unforgiving of your mum. And . . . I swear I don’t even know what it is you won’t forgive her for.’

Nick exhaled, looking something between peeved and plain old angry. ‘And you,
Hollier-than-thou
? Do you want babies?’

‘Er . . . yeah. Yes.’

‘With Captain Tim?’

‘That would make the most sense. Yes.’

‘Have you talked about it?’

‘Not in as many words.’

‘Maybe he doesn’t want them.’

‘Maybe you are being Deputy Downer.’

He shoved his hands in his pockets and didn’t return eye contact when I sought it.

‘We talk about it in a joking way . . . ’ I volunteered. ‘We say things like,
if we have a baby with his lips and my eyes it would be a freakin’ supermodel
. That sort of thing.’

‘You do have beautiful eyes.’

We reached the turnstiles of the train station and inserted our tickets in unison into barriers next to one another.

‘What makes you think you wouldn’t go gooey over a baby if you had one?’ I pressed him, as we descended the stairs.

‘I just . . . I dunno, maybe I would. Maybe I could see my way to having kids if I was with the right person.’ He looked at me tensely. ‘But . . . I’ve tried to give up smoking so many times.’

‘Yes, well that
is
a filthy habit. Have you tried the nicotine patches?’

‘Not cigarettes.’

‘What, pot?’ I said, surprised.

‘Yep.’

I had noticed a bong on the coffee table when Nick showed me his flat. I had assumed it was just an occasional thing, or that it was his flatmate Terry’s. Nick always seems so switched on. So un-stoned. Didn’t he?

‘Really? How much?’ I pressed.

‘Enough so that . . . I just have a vision of the mother of my child saying “Shush . . . don’t talk to Daddy until he’s had his morning bong.”’

‘That’s fucked up.’