You start to cry. The last crying of childhood. You weep, and weep, cannot stop.
You have never done anything like this before. You can pull apart two bush dogs in a fight and shoot a rabbit and crack a whip but cannot explain why you are doing this; it just feels like a giant hand is dragging a piece of jagged, broken glass down the underbelly of your life, splitting you open and all the tears, of all the years, are finally out. Everyone comes up to you: your father, your brand-new stepmother, your grandmother. But the floodgates are opened and cannot be shut. You sense this is horribly unfair on Anne and are ashamed of it but can’t stop.
Because your father is lost to you from this point.
And you know that no matter how much she tries, your stepmother politely tolerates you and nothing else; she doesn’t want any of your enormous swamping ready love, actually; she doesn’t want the encumbrance of it in her life. Your stepmother, who over the years will perfect the art of emotional terrorism; an adult upon a child. Who despatches you, from the age of eleven, into an affronted loneliness within the new family she creates. A loneliness vast and raw, horizonless.
The obscenity of that.
Lesson 24
The house-mother! What a beautiful, comprehensive word it is. How suggestive of all that is wise and kindly, comfortable and good.
You learn to live warily under the same roof. You learn that your presence is a source of distress to your stepmother – she is a good Catholic girl and is ashamed her new husband is not a cleanskin, wants to pretend to the world her husband is not twenty years older than her and never had a former life. She gave up her job in a petrol station at twenty, at the first whiff of matrimony and never worked again. Gave it all up to enter the longed-for world of vibrant tranquillity and status called marriage – and no grubby, gobby child is going to mar that. She is a typical valley girl – early school-leaver, thick set, the expectation that soon they’ll be with child – married or not. The much-anticipated baby doesn’t come, doesn’t come, even though the readiness for motherhood is oozing from her and your father grunts at one point, from under the F.J., to stop asking about it, it’ll happen in good time, ‘zip it’.
Your father is now called Ted, not his nickname – Eddie – that everyone has always called him; his colleagues, his mates, your mother, even you. She insists. Everything from his past is gradually turfed out, the carpet your mum chose, wallpaper, crockery. Photos disappear into obscure drawers, not only of your mum but of you and him together until suddenly, you notice, there are none in the house.
‘Don’t you dare take her for a drive, Ted. It’s my time, not hers.’
Yet it is only when you are alone with your father, in the car, that his fingertips find your earlobe and his voice softens and he whispers, ‘You’re still my China, aren’t you?’ as if it is the last time he will be able to tell you this and gravely you must hold it in your heart, you must never forget it; he has stolen this chance and it may not happen again. In the car, just the two of you, with his secret voice he never dares give you the gift of when his new wife is present. His life is now held hostage by her and it is only when he is away, in the car, that he is free – his old self.
You can taste your stepmother’s spirit and are disheartened by it. She has the focus and insecurity and determination of the second wife, to make this marriage work. She crashes into your equilibrium. Living with her is like being trapped in sleeplessness; she sucks the oxygen from your world.
She never teaches you what your father wanted, all that woman stuff he could not articulate. Your father never asks. He assumes everything is alright. You do not tell him. Your whole relationship is built on inarticulacy, it would not feel right to suddenly blurt. You are learning silence and watchfulness and the solace of a pen that speaks when you cannot, as an explosive combination is being brewed: frustration, anger, boundless curiosity – and enormous innocence.
Lesson 25
When I go from home to home and see the sort of rule or misrule there, the countless evil influences, physical and spiritual, against which children have to struggle, I declare I often have to wonder that in the rising generation there should be any good men and women
Your bedroom is now the verandah at the back of the house with a roll-down canvas flap at night. It is not far away enough. You are no longer a part of the main house. It has not been done by pushing you out, it has been done by removal, by erasing everything that was secure and known in your past life. All the roaring absences now; the hidden photographs, the taken-down curtains, the painted-over marks of your mother’s on the kitchen door, as you stood up, grew tall, and then they stopped. Aged three years and eight months. The whole interior has become a ghost house to you; holding its breath for someone who will never come back. You still see it – searingly – as what it was. Not what it is now.
When it thunders in your back room you drop to the ground with your belly to the floorboards and hear the house talk through the rumbling in your skin. You smell the earth opening out to the rain, opening wide, drinking it up, wider and wider the ground opens out, every pore of it, and you smile and breathe it in deep.
No respite, but the bush.
Lesson 26
Every family is a little kingdom in itself: the members and followers of which are often as hard to manage as any of the turbulent governments whose discords convulse our world
By a shaded cleft of a creek you make a bush hut out of broken branches – widow makers, they’re known as locally – and great brooms of leaves; your home away from home, just for you. You love the cool smell of the water on the rock, the rich rust of the wet stone, the startling green of the ferns sucking from the restless stream. You love the clutter of vibrant life drawn to this secret tranquillity, the frogs, lizards, birds, wallabies if you’re very still. The land beyond it is bleached pale, the colour of the sheep that feed from it, but you’d never know within this.
You stay out later and later in your sanctuary. Are intrigued the first time you come home – after dinner, but before your father has returned from his shift – to see the worry lines creasing your stepmother’s face. It is the first time you have seen concern on her, with anything to do with you.
You learn, in that instant, the authority of removal.
You stay away longer and longer.
Then one day, after a big rain, the mosquitoes come. You need something to keep them away. There is only one thing in your world that is a length of fine netting, and you know exactly what room to find it in.
Lesson 27
Never expect in the child a degree of perfection which one rarely finds even in a grown person
You never enter your father’s bedroom anymore. He no longer brushes your hair on a Sunday night, no one does. And the room is not his now, in any way; it’s been prettied up. It feels alien, forbidden, scrubbed; sanctified by something unknowable. But in it, now, is the only thing of hers you will ever want.
She is away, visiting her mother. When she is gone it is as if the house breathes out, with a sigh – your whole world unfurls and you can move freely in it. You won’t have long. You scrabble through her cupboard and rigidly ordered drawers; God, an entire life spent making things neat, what a waste. You find what you’re looking for in a leather suitcase under the bed.
A carefully folded veil, under a circle of dried