Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS WRITER
Prompt No 1 – I can barely remember my childhood. It was a time of books and hiding. A lot of fear, a lot of coping. My first flash of consciousness: sitting on my potty at the bottom of a dark flight of stairs, while my parents argued in the kitchen. Shouting. Angry. This was not to be an unusual occurrence. Looking through a door which was a window of light, two people screaming.
Prompt No 2 – It’s hard to explain why two people stay together when they provoke each other so much. Mum said she almost left Dad twice, each time with me in tow. Talked out of it by her sister. It wasn’t the done thing, of course, back in that day, but I wish she had. What I learned about marriage and relationships was not how to break our and be free, but how to endure. How to stay regardless. I don’t tend to leave. I stay and will things to get better. There was a deal though, Mum signed up for adventure. At the end of the second world war in London there was not a lot going on. Rationing, a broken country trying to rebuild, it was entirely pants. I think Dad probably did love mum, in his way, but mum I suspect hopped on for the ride. A colonial life in a panoply of countries. Africa, Kenya, Singapore, Malaysia, always a drawer of different currency from exotic climes, a rand, a Canadian dollar, a 5000 Kyat note from Myanmar. As a child I was fascinated and envious.
Prompt No 3. “Next minute”, Mum said, “He’d be shouting at me. We’re at a dinner party for dignitaries in Kenya, and then I disagreed with him about something. He looked at me like I was dirt, and said ‘When I say ‘shovel shit’, you jump on the shovel”.
Prompt No 4. I had no idea what to do with mum’s story. I left home like a bullet when I was 18, in Perth, getting away from the egg-shell home atmosphere, leaving mum to deal with dad on her own. It was the 1980s, and Rubics cubes were all the fashion. They reminded me of their relationship, frustrating and unsolveable.
Prompt No 5. Until finally, when mum was dying, I had a revelation. It’s not my fault or responsibility. She was so much happier after dad died, after 61 years of marriage, but ultimately it was up to her. It was her bargain. Dad could be an arsehole, but he delivered on adventure. They lived a life, a great life. Sometimes she complained, “I never saw myself dying in Australia”, but I’d point out to her, “This is what happens to old colonials, they die in a far-flung corner of the British Empire”. She chose her life. She stayed. Not, as Joan Rivers would say, my aisle.
Prompt No 6. What was that sound? Mum’s death rattle was wet and vile, for certain her lungs were liquefying in a stew of their own tissues. I could hardly stand to be in the room. But I stayed, mostly, actually on the phone in the toilet to my cousin Debbie at the moment she passed. They say that people hang on until their loved ones leave before they die. Going to the loo, in the end, must have been enough of a window. She was a brilliant human, Norah, sticking with life with her fingernails, sucking the marrow from what she had. Did not want to go. I didn’t want her to go either. But then that’s what I learned from her. Endurance. How to stay regardless. And I didn’t leave.
Some lessons have to be learned the hard way.