Diving into Glass Read online

  There are parts of Central Park – particularly at the northern end – where the foliage and trees are almost as thick as a wilderness. If someone blindfolded you and dropped you down in the middle of that thicket, once you navigated your way out you’d be amazed to find busy city streets only a few hundred metres away.

  I pushed my way through scraggy bushes until I came across a huge tree felled by a recent storm and sat down on it. My track pants clung to my thighs and, when I stood up some minutes later, there was a large darkened wet patch where I’d been sitting. I hadn’t just peed my pants a little bit.

  I always listened to the same soundtrack when I ran and my iPod was strapped to my arm, ear pods in my ears. My flip-phone was in my pocket, but I was too embarrassed and too upset to call anyone. I wasn’t even sure I’d be able to make myself understood through my heaving and tears. What would I say, anyway? None of it made any sense.

  Eventually I pulled myself together enough to tie my sweatshirt around my waist to hide the wet patch between my legs and made my way out of the park. The great thing about New York City is that there’s too much going on and too many people for anyone to notice much. Even so, I walked as fast as I could up Malcolm X Boulevard, my eyes down to the footpath, hoping I wouldn’t see anyone I knew.

  I undressed as soon as I got home, threw my clothes in the washer, put the plug in the bath, turned on the shower and sat in the tub clutching my knees to my chest while water, as hot as I could stand it, pummelled my shoulders. The dark cloud of realisation that there was no turning back from this moment bore down on me.

  When the bathtub was filled with water up to my chest, I turned off the shower, put my head under the water and screamed as loud as I could.

  Eventually my breathing returned to a steady rhythm, but I was still bewildered. Not only could I not understand what was happening, I was devastated by the idea that such a thing – whatever it was – could be happening to me.

  I wasn’t Athena, the ancient goddess of victory and wisdom, I was a snivelling Job, sitting in a bathtub demanding, ‘Why me?’

  I’d done everything I had been taught as dutifully as I knew how. I’d made a mantra of putting aside fear. The more frightening the task, the more strongly I believed it needed to be done. I rarely complained. I had leapt so many times, and the net had appeared so many times, that I relied on it without question. I had courted neither security nor stability, had made few demands on others, had kept myself free, and yet an hour earlier I had been looking down at my piss-soaked, numb legs, barely able to breathe.

  What happened to my father’s promise? Sitting in the tub in my apartment, I realised he had not protected me from anything. How could he? Promises like that can’t be made. Even from the most well-meaning and protective parent. There are no superheroes waiting in the wings. We’re on our own in life and fate will always deal exactly the cards it wishes, no matter the will or love of any human being. And yet I had believed my father, thinking the risks I took would never have consequences, the shaky, thin limbs I climbed out on without caution would never snap. But all my self-reliance and adaptability had failed me.

  ‘Why me?’ If I was ever going to get past that question I had to stop running. I had to work out how to take back control of the rudder that had been so dramatically snatched from my hand. It was time to look back.

  Two

  My parents were married in January of 1960 – a month when temperatures soared to a state record of 50° Celsius. It was, as the guests muttered, sweat soaking their prim clothes, ‘stinking hot’.

  Despite the relentless pelt of the sun, the photos of my parents on their wedding day are beautiful. They look radiantly happy. My mother wore a half-length veil with a white damask dress cut tight at the waist and hemmed below the knee.

  My father looked distinguished in his black tuxedo despite needing to be pushed to the altar by his father. After the priest pronounced them husband and wife, my mother lifted her veil over her head herself and bent down to kiss her new husband. He kissed her back, and if either of them felt a hint of shame or embarrassment at having the traditional roles mixed up, no one saw it.

  I often think back to that moment, and the many more like it I witnessed standing beside him, when he showed no sign of weakness or embarrassment. I might have been burning up with humiliation just by association, but he never wavered. I won’t ever know whether he was a very good actor and underneath the facade of bravado and confidence he was really shaking in his boots, or if he truly believed he was just like everyone else and it was no big deal, despite the stares and whispers. He presented himself to the world with the confidence of a six-foot-two able-bodied man’s man.

  I called my grandmother on my mother’s side Muttee. To her friends she was Tommy, although her real name was Ivy. Muttee made no mention of my father in her account of my parents’ wedding day. In her self-published memoir The Humble Folk, which came out when she was eighty-nine, she recounted, ‘I cooked each day for a week before the wedding. I also made Jill’s three-tiered wedding cake. It was beautifully iced in a pale pink colour with tiny pink roses, tulle and ribbon in a very small basket on top of the cake.’ A lot of detail; not a single mention of the groom.

  All my mother’s nursing friends were there and they were young women who knew how to have a good time. There was the same amount of drinking, dancing, bawdy speeches and good humour as at any wedding.

  For many years that was how my parents lived. As though they were no different to anyone else. They flung style and bonhomie around like wedding bouquets. No one could tell how hard things were because the face they presented to the world was that of any young newlywed couple: deliriously happy, with a world of opportunity ahead of them. Perhaps others saw it differently. I know Muttee certainly did.

  Many years later I discovered that, moments before my mother walked down the aisle, Muttee leaned in to her daughter’s ear and gave her definitive verdict on my parents’ wedding: ‘I’d be happier if you were marrying a dog.’

  My mother was the older sister to three brothers. She grew up in the small South Australian beach town of Tumby Bay, in the Spencer Gulf on the Eyre Peninsula. It was dry, tumbleweed land of brush and high skies.

  As a girl, my mother wore her blonde hair in two long, plaited pigtails. Her name was Kathleen back then, but a neighbour called her Dooley Pegs and it stuck. Her father, Brink, turned the nickname into the rhyme ‘Dooley Pegs, pickled eggs, lolly legs’.

  ‘Nothing but the best for our Dooley Pegs,’ he used to say.

  Muttee said she was a ‘precocious’ child. In The Humble Folk, she described her as ‘quick as lightning’ and ‘always into something’, which was genteel code for my mother being smart, naughty and strong-willed.

  I’m not exactly sure how old she was when she developed a habit of biting other children – perhaps she was five or six. She only bit the nice ones. By her own admission, she wanted to know how these good little boys and girls tasted.

  Already she knew she was different from others, and somehow knew that difference ran deep – as deep as the taste of a person. After numerous attempts to make her stop taking her incisors to the flesh of other little boys and girls, and complaints from their parents, Muttee grabbed her daughter’s arm firmly and warned her, ‘I will tie you up.’

  Muttee was not one for hollow threats and after the next offence my mother found herself in the backyard, chained to a post and with the dog’s collar around her neck. Despite Brink’s protests, Muttee left my mother in the sun long enough to break her biting habit.

  Brink was a well-liked stock and station agent who eventually bought his own farm. He set chickens on it. There were tragedies along the way as he learned the life of the land, but once he got the hang of it, he did well enough.

  But chicken farming wasn’t my mother’s dream. Her favourite thing was going to the local country dances. She loved waiting for the sound of the engine purr of a dusty beat-up ute pulling up to her house,
announcing the handsome son of one of the local farmers, and from there they’d drive to the church hall and shimmy away.

  My mother often came home with the Best Dressed trophy. Muttee was a very skilled seamstress and made all the ball gowns my mother wore. She fidgeted when Muttee made her stand on an old wooden box to measure and fit the expensive taffeta and shot silk material to my mother’s slender body. The annoyance of the fitting was far surpassed by the delight of the dance.

  She was a teenager when Muttee took her out of school and ordered her to start work at the local sewing factory. My mother left school but refused the factory. She had bigger plans than to be bent over a whirling Singer sewing machine all day with a hundred other poor, uneducated girls. Nursing, she thought, would use her mind as well as earn her an income and independence. She began planning her move to the city.

  Three

  My father’s parents lived outside Strathalbyn, a small town on the south coast of South Australia, in an old settlers’ house made of local stone. Their home consisted of three low-ceilinged rooms, whose mud floors were polished smooth and hard by my grandmother’s incessant sweeping and the footfalls of the family of four. Outside the flywire doors and windows were 440 acres of drought-prone land where they farmed wheat, peas, hay, barley, flax and sheep, with most of their meagre income coming from chickens and a small herd of dairy cows.

  My grandmother kept track of the comings and goings on their property in a small leather-bound diary. At the end of each day she sat at the kitchen table entering the price of stock, money they’d received for crops and other routine farm matters. Only occasionally did she comment on anything personal.

  The entry for 28 December 1936, written in blue ink from a fountain pen, recorded the birth of her second child, my father. ‘Baby boy born. Hot today.’ My father’s birth was noted with as much fuss as the arrival of a new calf in the back paddock.

  My father, Richard, was a quiet boy. He was born a farmer’s son, but could never get acclimatised. He escaped his environment, made the best of his harsh rural life, by steeping himself in books. In the pages of a beaten-up Boy’s Own adventure novel he could travel wherever he wanted.

  His older brother, Jim, often found him skiving off from farm chores, lying down in a dried-out creek bed at the edge of their property, reading novels or comics. He’d quickly read every book in his school’s library and looked forward to a monthly trip to visit family friends, not to enjoy their children’s company or to take an outing, but so he could borrow the latest edition of Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopædia.

  My ancestors on my father’s side were free settlers, which meant they’d come to Australia of their own accord, not as convicts. They were enticed to this strange, far-off place, sixteen years after South Australia was first colonised, by the promise of a new start.

  In 1837, an advertisement appeared in London’s Exeter Hall encouraging people to emigrate to South Australia with the promise:

  This is the country for a small capitalist, with sober and industrious habits: his family, which in England is often times an encumbrance, will be a fortune here; and he will attain a rank in society, which in England is rarely attainable.

  Another commented on the prospects of those willing to make the treacherous journey across the seas:

  In Adelaide, all the comforts and luxuries of life may be attained; and an individual who is pining in the cold-catching and uncertain climate of Great Britain – struggling to keep up the necessary appearances of fashionable life, and to be a ‘somebody’, upon a very limited income – may be changing his abode to the genial climate of South Australia, live like a little prince and become a ‘somebody’, with the same amount of income upon which he could barely exist in England.

  My father’s ancestors bought the promise, packed their modest belongings in large trunks and set sail, clinging to the belief that this colony would offer them the best of the Empire, without the poverty and injustice.

  When my father wasn’t reading, he would lie in his small cot bed at night with the light off and imagine the adventures of his great-great-grandfather, Captain Jamieson. He had been a private contractor who transported convicts from England to the penal colonies of Van Diemen’s Land or New South Wales. Captain Jamieson received a flat rate per registered ton of cargo, along with an allowance of 14 pence per convict per lunar month. It was in his interest that the human cargo arrived in good health, but even so, others with the same incentive didn’t boast as good a record as Jamieson.

  It was 1852 when Captain Jamieson decided to pack up his home in Aberdeen to start a new life for himself. With his third wife and ten of his twenty children aboard the 100-ton wooden schooner Rosebud, Captain Jamieson, now a passenger, set sail with his large flock to try their luck in Adelaide.

  Despite the harsh realities of beginning anew in a rugged, dry climate in a fledgling settlement at the bottom of the world, the family thrived. Half a century later my grandfather’s father was headmaster of a large school in the then highly prosperous mining town of Moonta.

  The town’s name comes from ‘Moontera’, which means ‘impenetrable scrub’ in the language of the area’s Narungga people. Below the thick bracken, in the hard, dry land underneath, lay rich veins of copper. Despite the inhospitable setting, it was a prestigious posting where he presided over the welfare of 3000 children.

  Given my grandfather’s circumstances – the son of an esteemed headmaster with a good posting – it seemed likely that he was set for a life in academia or some other professional field. But as it did for so many of his generation, World War I changed the trajectory of his life.

  My grandfather was a very athletic seventeen-year-old when he enlisted along with some 400 000 Australian men, at a time when the country’s population was less than five million. Shortly after, he travelled halfway across the world to the battlefields of Europe.

  He was a dispatch runner, a human courier who ran messages across no-man’s-land and behind enemy lines, one of the war’s most treacherous assignments. For three years he navigated his way through the mud, rats and corpses of battlefields on the Western Front, including at the last campaign of Ypres, one of the war’s final and most bloody clashes.

  My grandfather never spoke to me about the war despite my incessant questioning. Standing with his back so close to the gas heater I thought the legs of his pants might catch on fire, he told me war wasn’t to be glorified with stories. He was always in front of that heater; it seemed my grandfather could never get warm enough.

  While my grandfather remained silent on the subject, my father fuelled my curiosity by recounting the story of my grandfather’s escape from the infamous Red Baron. I never tired of hearing it.

  ‘One day,’ he used to tell me from his wheelchair, speaking in his most serious voice, ‘your grandfather was running a message through a large open field of no-man’s-land, when a small biplane came thundering down upon him. Grandfather looked up and could clearly see he was being lined up in the crosshairs of the pilot’s machine gun, which hung out over the side of the plane. Your grandfather thought, “This is it.”’

  My father always paused for effect at this point in the story and I felt sick to my stomach even though I knew the ending.

  ‘He waited for a stream of bullets to rain down upon him. But the little plane just kept coming towards him until it got so close Grandfather threw himself down on the muddy ground. He could feel a whoosh of hot air run across his body and the engine’s roar was loud in his ears, but the plane’s shadow rushed over him. When he lifted his head and got to his knees, he realised he’d been let go by the infamous Red Baron, who flew away without firing a single shot.’

  My grandfather never knew whether the Baron had taken pity on him, alone in the middle of that open field, or simply run out of ammunition. I wanted to believe that the Baron made a decision not to kill my grandfather. So I didn’t like it when my father finished off the story with details of how, not long after t
hat incident, just before the war’s end the Red Baron was shot down and died.

  I knew the Baron was no angel, but it didn’t seem right that the man who’d spared my grandfather’s life could not have been spared himself. I used to imagine scenarios of the two of them meeting after the war, discovering they’d ‘met’ previously. What different interpretations they’d have of that encounter – one my grandfather never forgot but one the Baron likely dismissed the moment he lifted up and flew away. Moments can be like that. Significant for one person, utterly forgettable to the other.

  There’s still a long way to go in rehabilitating veterans with PTSD, but back in Grandfather’s day there wasn’t any help at all. I never saw signs of distress or trauma in him, but my father, all through his youth, woke to the screams of my grandfather’s nightmares.

  My grandfather may not have wanted to talk about the war, but my father was hell-bent on drilling our family history into me and my brother. I thought Grandfather was bald from old age, but my father told me his hair fell out when he was twenty from exposure to mustard gas. After the war, he only ever had a thin strip of light-coloured wisps curving from his nape to his temple. His pate was so shiny it looked like someone had painted it with varnish.

  My grandfather couldn’t settle after he returned home from the war; he got a job at the local bank but quit after a few months – he couldn’t stand to be indoors after all the open air of those battlefields. Shortly after, he set sail for Siam, where he invested in a tin mine that went bust not long after he sank all his money into it. He returned home broke but with a white gibbon called Mickey, which he gave to the local zoo.