For a Girl Read online

  My brothers and I developed an outstanding collection of comics and other kids would visit us just to read them. As we grew older, all our friends hung around our house. Mum made toasted sandwiches in the old style, using a frypan and a ton of butter, and accepted a broad range of behaviours. One of Andrew’s friends wrote me after we’d met up in middle age to say he’d had cause to reflect on his life and the handful of people who’d been kind. My mother was first among them, he said.

  Mum had married Dad when they were both journalists at The Courier-Mail. It was the society wedding of the season, Margy told me. Mum had already finished her BA and a Diploma in Journalism at the university. Dad had dropped out. Mum was paid less than Dad, and quit work late in her pregnancy with Ian and never went back.

  I have two photographs of my mother. The first was taken when she was small, perhaps a year old, and it is in a plain wooden frame on my wall. She is sitting on a table against a nondescript background dressed in nothing but a nappy. Black curls surround her face. Her hands are busy.

  Her eyes welcome the world. She is smiling, not at the photographer, but at something else she can see beyond the frame.

  In the second photograph, which is in our family’s album, she is wearing her university graduation gown. She is still smiling but her smile is smaller, manufactured. Her eyes would not welcome the world. She has learned something. She is wiser but would not trust you, not really.

  I look at these two photographs of my mother and wish I could have changed whatever it was that took her smile from her. I have hazarded a guess, as many adult daughters have had to do, because that generation never told their secrets. Loyal to whoever was requiring her silence, Mum never in her lifetime, nor in her journals left for me, spoke of what had knocked her from happiness to unhappiness. But something had.

  That was the second part of what Tolstoy said. Happy families might be all the same, but unhappy families are all unhappy in their own way.

  I have worried you’ll think poorly of me on a number of counts—you have plenty to choose from—but I hope from the outset you will try to understand my mother. Your other mother has been so different from mine, different also from the mother I am to Otis.

  I can see the questions your other mother might ask about my mother. What was my mother doing when she should have been banning her children from drawing on walls? Why was she letting us read nothing but comics? Why didn’t she stop what happened from happening?

  She’s your grandmother, my mother, and I want you to think well of her. I love her very much. As for keeping what happened from happening, I don’t know what my mother could have done to protect me. I only know she would have done it if she could.

  Byron

  TODAY WHEN I SWAM THE bay a perfect rainbow made an arc from Mount Warning to the pine trees where my swim finishes. The sea was as bouncy as Tigger and I took the rainbow for a good omen. During the day I had the sensation of gentle rocking as if I were still of the sea. Late in the afternoon another perfect rainbow, or the same one, ran across the sky in front of our veranda. You could argue that those rainbows were put there for me.

  This week we are staying in a cottage on a farm above Byron Bay in northern New South Wales. We stay here every Easter. David goes to Bluesfest, and Otis and I visit the beach early in the morning before the crowds arrive. Sometimes we find remnants of the night before: bottles, a fire pit, occasionally sleeping people who do not wake up even when the sun is high in the sky.

  When I can, I swim from The Pass at one end of the scallop bay where there’s a sheltered cove and a shaded beach. While I’m in the water, Otis, now five, builds in the sand with David or makes face paint out of the different-coloured rocks. The first time we brought him here, that year I pinched him in the stroller clip, he ran around and around in circles at full pelt, so taken by the marvel that is a beach.

  I go into the water, dodge the dive boats and surfers to get out beyond the break, and swim an easy kilometre, with the tide, to the surf club. Sometimes there are big waves to negotiate. Sometimes it is calm and I go out through the rocks and around the point where we see dolphins and occasionally whales from the lookout. After the swim, I walk back to The Pass and we eat toast with avocado and Vegemite and boiled eggs for breakfast.

  Swimming in the sea has much to teach me. Last year I saw a shark. It’s possible I channelled the shark, having been obsessed with them ever since I started sea swimming twenty years ago. My shark may have started its day at Lennox Head, coming when I started my shark thoughts for that day.

  Otis, who has a book about sea creatures, used to try to help me with my fear. Sharks don’t really like the taste of humans, he told me. They only take one bite because they think you might be a seal. He appraised me carefully. ‘Maybe don’t wear those black togs,’ he said. Leaning in conspiratorially, he added, ‘And definitely do not swim breaststroke.’

  David read a Guardian article suggesting you make yourself vertical in the water, as a shark won’t be able to get a purchase on you to bite. If you’ve been attacked, you should make yourself vertical then punch the shark when it comes back around.

  I could imagine treading water despite a leg wound bleeding me out from that big artery, but the idea of punching a shark was beyond me, even in my wildest imagination. And I am a novelist, so my imagination should be wilder than average.

  The morning I saw the shark, I had swum out on my own, before the gaggle of swimmers who walk along the beach together at eight each morning. The water was clear. I’d seen two turtles when I swam over the rocks at Clarkes Beach. A voice in my head, some preconscious visual response unit in my brain, said, ‘You’re going to see a shark and it will be all right.’ Before I could get the word No! that was forming in my head out through my mouth, there was the shark, below me and to the right, bigger than me, the biggest creature I have ever seen in the water.

  I swam for shore as fast as I could, without kicking so as not to arouse interest. I ran back to The Pass without stopping. I wanted to live.

  I wanted to live.

  This holiday, we are becoming a family again. We are not a normal family but I think we are starting to be happy.

  In your other mother’s first letter to me, written when you were around six years of age, she said, ‘I want to tell you about your beautiful daughter Ruth, whom we call Miranda.’

  I wonder how long she worked on that sentence, for it is wise and generous and cannot have come easily.

  Aye, Dugald

  WHEN I FIRST VISITED SCOTLAND in my late twenties, I expected to be welcomed home. I knew from my mother, who was enamoured of my father’s French–Scottish ancestry, that the MacColls ran the place. My father was the eighth Dugald in his line. When we learned the ‘Skye Boat Song’ at school, I knew my own ancestors had played a part in this rich history. One of the Dugalds had been in the boat guarding Bonnie Prince Charlie as he fled the invading English to the Isle of Skye, my mother said (although if you google it, Dugald the guard doesn’t come up straightaway). The MacColls were poets whose names and verses rolled off their Highland tongues.

  Imagine my shock to learn not only that the MacColls weren’t running the place but that no one I met in Scotland was named MacColl. We didn’t even have a Tartan in the coffee table book at the B&B we stayed in. But how beautiful was my country anyway, with its mountains and lakes and majesty; how much I felt I’d come home after all. Walter Scott said it right: ‘Breathes there the man with soul so dead, Who never to himself hath said, This is my own, my native land!’

  My father was very clever, but he didn’t like us kids much, a truth it took me some years to accept. It’s possible it wasn’t personal—he disliked most people—and I do think he may have disliked me less than he disliked my brothers, although it’s equally possible I’ve imagined that.

  On his weekends off, Dad did the garden in the afternoon and then drank beer and smoked cigarettes while he listened to Johnny Cash: ‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s All
Right’ and ‘I Walk the Line’, or even ‘The Long Black Veil’. His humour, which my mother later described as ‘adult’, was often hard to understand. He would ask, ‘How old are you?’ Seven, you’d say. ‘Do you want to live to be eight?’ Yes. ‘Then shut up.’ At one time I think I may have believed you could be killed for talking, which was not an easy cross to bear when you liked to talk more than just about anything.

  Dad was oddly against the Cuisenaire rod system used to teach mathematics when I started school, in which colour-coded bars of different lengths are used to demonstrate addition and subtraction. He went to see my teacher. ‘She knows that black plus white is tan, but if I ask her to add seven plus one, she looks at me blankly.’ The teacher nodded sagely. ‘All in good time,’ she said, ‘all in good time.’ My maths never improved.

  I’d sometimes make myself stay awake until Dad came home from work at midnight or one in the morning and we’d talk. I don’t remember much about the conversations, just that he noticed me and spoke to me. One night when I was nine I cooked him an Irish stew while I waited. I knew he liked the mixed herbs so I put in the whole jar—not right at the start, but bit by bit until I saw there was none left. It wasn’t a failure of Cuisenaire to help me understand the amount required, just an inability to recognise that a little of a good thing doesn’t mean a lot will be better. When Dad arrived home, he sat down and ate the stew and said it was delicious. He put so much pepper in his potato—Deb powdered mash—that it was charcoal grey on his plate, so perhaps a bottle of mixed herbs was about right.

  Dad set high standards. Once, when we were looking at a report card where I’d done well, an average of six on a seven-point scale, he focused on the subject I’d been rated a five in. I asked, ‘What would you do if I got straight sevens?’ There was no hesitation in his reply: ‘I’d tell you to get eights.’

  If people visited our house, Dad would go into his bedroom to hide until they left. It was a great joke among us kids—Dad has his paper bag over his head today so he doesn’t have to be anybody. If he was caught before he got away to the bedroom, he was good company and people always liked him. That was the odd thing. Once, when a visitor made it through the front door before Dad could reach the bedroom, he went out into the backyard instead. He managed to get my attention through a window. I had to sneak out with his beer and cigarettes.

  He told me once that his own father had done the same, shunned visitors, hidden if someone came to the house. My grandfather was André Dugald—André from his French mother—the older of two sons by seven years. The younger son, René Michel, was preferred by their father, who was Dugald Sutherland, DSM, an art critic and keeper of the Tate Gallery in London in the early twentieth century. The Dugald before Dugald Sutherland was a Scottish Presbyterian minister at the fire and brimstone end. I don’t know the Dugalds who preceded the reverend, but feel certain we’re never more than six Dugalds of separation from Bonnie Prince Charlie.

  Before he’d turned twenty, my grandfather had served as an officer in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders in World War I. After the war, he worked in Malaya before emigrating to Australia on the toss of a coin (America was heads). In his thirties, he married my grandmother and refused any financial or other help his family offered. His letters home—DSM’s personal papers are held in the University of Glasgow Library—are full of self-recrimination. In one, he mentions a sketch DSM has sent him and makes the point that he knows nothing about art and will not make a fool of himself by pretending to know anything. This kind of self-deprecation might have been standard with the Dugalds, but what surprised me about my grandfather’s letters was the sweet love he expressed for his son, my father. He says he wants to provide the best for his son—Pip, they call him—says he can’t believe how bright Pip is, what a marvellous boy he is turning out to be.

  The letters were written before my grandfather went away to his second war. He enlisted in the Australian Army in World War II, lying about his age as he was over thirty-nine by then. I think he might have gone to earn money. He served in Egypt and came back suffering from what I assume was post-traumatic stress disorder. He was in a special hospital for some months. There are no letters to England from then on.

  Among my father’s personal papers there are only a few photographs. My favourite is one of him at two or three years of age in shorts and a woollen coat—a gorgeous, cuddly child by any account. He’s in the left of the frame, running along a sandy shore full-pelt. Although the shot is low-contrast grey, you can see the energy in his limbs, an energy I never saw in the man. On the other side of the shot is his father, crouched down, arms open, waiting to receive his son in a hug. It is so full of love, this photograph, on both sides.

  In another photograph, my father looks about ten. He’s dressed for a party in a pirate suit. His father would still have been away at war. He has a cutlass at his side, an authentic hat, a vest and ragged pants. I don’t know who took the photograph, my grandmother most likely, but the look on my father’s face is one of quiet disdain. He is saying, ‘I hate this stupid suit, I hate you taking a photograph, I hate my life.’

  In the university library in Glasgow, there is a letter from my father, written when he was eleven, to his grandfather, DSM. He says he bought a cricket ball from a boy in his class and his dog Tim is highly excited. That afternoon, he has been across the road where a new house is being built to play tag with his friends. He is trying to make model aeroplanes but he is not much good at it.

  Reading the letter made me realise my father was once a boy with a boy’s sensibility. Like all of us, he was a product of his circumstances. His father’s absences, first at war and after the war, suffering the effects, were not something he signed up for. Neither was his role among the Dugalds. I don’t intend to excuse him—there is probably no excuse for disliking your children—but he didn’t sign up for the life he had. None of us do.

  My father was not flawless. He was a talented writer from a young age. He came to drink. He drank a lot. In brown swimming trunks, he looked more vulnerable than you could ever imagine a full-grown man might look. As I say, I never really understood him, although he was once the second most important person in my life. I would certainly wish him well in his next.

  Heroes

  I READ SUPERHERO COMICS ALMOST exclusively when I was growing up. I liked the orphans best. There was Dick Grayson, whose parents had been shot by robbers, taken in as Bruce Wayne’s ward to become Batman’s Robin. My favourite was Kal-El, jettisoned as a baby from the exploding planet Krypton, landing on Earth to be adopted by the childless Ma and Pa Kent, growing up to be Superman. I still sleep the way Superman flies, left arm straight up and under the pillow, left leg straight, right arm and leg bent. A physiotherapist told me it’s bad for my back.

  Growing up on comics, I believed that goodness would prevail, even once I started interacting with the education system, where goodness is sometimes well disguised. In comics, there is never a chance that villains will win. When Superman turns up, he triumphs unless there’s Kryptonite involved, and even in his weakness, Superman is strong.

  With a head full of superheroes, I began early to fashion heroes for myself from the grown-ups in my life. When I was four, there was our next-door neighbour John, a sales rep for Edgell. John used to get us promotional material to play with: huge cut-out stands of children eating peas and cardboard boxes with pictures on them.

  One afternoon, I was sitting on the back steps. I was sobbing. John saw me from his side veranda and came down to see what the matter was.

  ‘My brothers are loved more than me,’ I told John between sobs. ‘Ian because he is the oldest, Andrew because he is the tough one and Lachlan because he’s the youngest.’

  I expected John would share my devastation, offer commiseration. But he only smiled kindly and said, ‘But, sweetie, you’re the only girl. They love you for that.’

  It was like the sun coming out from behind a cloud, this realisation. I’m the only gi
rl. Of course I’m special. Toddling upstairs with this new knowledge, feeling like I’d won some race.

  In year seven at Our Lady of the Rosary, when I was eleven, I found a new hero. After Mass one morning, the brothers stopped to talk with my class. I met Brother Bob, a tall slight man in his twenties with lamb-chop sidelevers. He smiled at me. I made a joke about his black suit. I made him laugh.

  I became a regular attendee at morning Mass. My mother couldn’t believe it when I asked her to drop me to school early. After Mass, Brother Bob would stop and talk to me—not about anything in particular, certainly nothing religious, but we’d talk and then he and the other brothers would go back to their college. He might have wondered what to do about this funny little girl who started turning up at Mass every morning. Perhaps he liked the attention. Perhaps I annoyed him.

  I decided to play a joke. The twelve brothers from Xavier College always came to Mass in their minibus. I spent a whole weekend making a big gold ‘Just Married’ sign. On the Monday morning, the morning Brother Bob always came to Mass, I tied it to the back of the brothers’ bus while they were in church. I thought Brother Bob would find this funny. He didn’t much like some of the older brothers with their strict rules. He’d know who put the sign on their bus and he’d think this was a good joke. I didn’t go to Mass that morning. I hid down at the school and watched them drive off with my sign on the back of their bus.

  I don’t know how long it took them to discover the sign, how long it was on the back of their bus. But someone told Mother de Montfort, the school principal.