White Dust - How asbestos killed my Dad

There have been so many families affected by the terrible asbestos debacle, brought on when the manufacturing company James Hardy ignored their responsibilites in the pursuit of profit, making and selling their poisonous building material for more than a generation, even though executives knew of the dangers.

Australia in my childhood was full of the stuff, and even now new cases of asbestos related diseases are found every day. At least these days some people are receiving a little money in the name of justice, but nothing will ever compensate for the damage that was done.

This is the story of our family and asbestos ...

EVEN DURING MIDSUMMER a sea breeze used to riffle its way through the back yard. It rustled the heads of lettuce and the row on row of green and red beetroot tops which had so recently fought their way through the sandy soil to a new existence in the open air.

Her childhood at 52 Bondilla Road was as benign as the climate, although the little girl didn’t think so at times.

The vegetable garden was the work of both her parents. The father dug the soil, extracting the old tree roots from the loam, and made doubly sure of its purity by passing it through a sieve to extract any wayward bits of rock. He raked that soil until the bed was perfect, and then the mother took over, transplanting seedlings from the boxes where she had sprouted them. She pressed those tiny plants home, ensuring that every row was ramrod straight and NEAT.

The little girl and her sister learned the work ethic at an early age. Their job was to manipulate the hand pump at the garden well, taking turns until the bucket beneath the pump nozzle was half full.

They would then each get on one side of the handle and struggle their way, water slopping, and bucket occasionally knocking their shins, until they got to the new bed to spill the contents as carefully as they could into the spaces between the plants. She would have been eight at the time, and her sister six.

‘Five buckets today girls,’ the mother would say.

They were working people who thought of themselves as ‘middle class’. Her Dad was a ‘builder’ in those days, having worked his way up from ‘carpenter’. ‘Builder’ meant he employed two men to fashion the little fibro cement cottages which littered that small seaside town. ‘Carpenter’ was for when he worked with his own father, the little girl’s grandfather, learning the trade.

The carpenter’s apron seemed a part of him. A wide pocket for nails and a long thin one for the rule, and he’d sometimes hook a hammer to a leather belt at his waist.

To the girl, this was a bit like a cowboy’s holster, and she remembered the handle swaying against her Dad’s well-shaped bottom.

He was handsome as a young man. Not tall, but with a strong body developed by constant physical work and tennis and cricket, and he had a sun beaten complexion. She never saw him in a hat.

The father was never still, and always complaining. When he wasn’t complaining, he was sullen. He ground his teeth in concentration, and the incessant tension stiffened his entire body.

He didn’t even like food. It was as though the act of sitting at the table brought unwelcome bile to his throat, making it hard to swallow. More often than not he’d peck at a few morsels and then he’d push the plate away saying ‘I’m not hungry’.

Because he was middle class, he read Frank Packer’s Daily Telegraph, voted for Bob Menzies and was always condemning the unions.

He never swore. That was something you just didn’t do. Church was out, but he worked for charity and was a member of the Masonic Lodge, but didn’t reach high office as his own father had.

Like her Grandfather though, he believed children should be seen and not heard, and paid attention to the girls mainly by imposing discipline with his tongue. He never hit them, but his haranguing was so sharp and belittling that it was worse than the cane the mother used to wield around their legs on occasions, though she did this more in threat than anger.

He’d be charming to all of the women up and down the street, helping them fix an old electric jug here or nail up a recalcitrant fence paling there, but when he got home he became morose. It seemed impossible for him to express any gentle emotions.

To the little girl he was a feeling more than a presence: she would knot up inside when he was around, and even in her later years the smell of old tobacco, sawdust and fibro cement dust brought prickles to the back of her neck.

If her father’s building job was within walking distance, the little girls would be asked to take a billy filled with scalding tea and pieces of new cake wrapped in grease proof paper for his morning snack. The walk always seemed an eternity.

They’d hold the billy between them, the wire handle biting into their skin. Taking care to keep it balanced so the hot liquid wouldn’t escape, they’d travel maybe a hundred yards or so, in fear they could slip and burn themselves. Then they’d set the billy down, adjust their grips and walk some more.

It was like a three-legged race in which one mistake could bring the whole crashing to disaster. The hot air from the container wafted around their legs, menacing. Sometimes one girl would lose the rhythm, and the evil hot billy would sway, nipping the other’s leg with a scorching sting. They always made it safely, but the dread never diminished.

Sometimes when a house was finished the whole family would work to clean up the mess: pick up the chunky bits of left over wood, the bent nails, and sweep up the sawdust and the white powder from the fibro sheets. They would throw it all into the father’s little Ford wagon and he’d take it off to the dump.

For years she pleaded with him to make her a book case, but it never happened. Instead, her few prized volumes lay in anonymity at the bottom of her wardrobe.

But she’d still gain his interest whenever she had academic success at school and his small eyes lit up when she brought home a book prize for coming top in the class. ‘Well, we have a stewed ant,’ he said. She got the message that he was proud of her.

Mostly, though, she and her sister were just scared of him, and did what they could to stay out of his way.

The back yard was a great place for games of cowboys and Indians when their boy cousins came to visit. Hopalong Cassidy and Roy Rogers would jump around the tank stands and hide behind shrubs, dive in and out of the workshop (when their Dad wasn’t there), and generally shoot things up.

There was a day when the little girl didn’t notice the piece of galvanised iron piping left sticking out of the ground as part of new extensions to the house, and tripped and sprawled full length. Even now, if she ran her finger over her shin, she could still feel the deadness where the wound healed long ago. The deadness was in an area the shape of a half moon left there after the doctor inserted nine stitches.

She sobbed and dripped blood all the way along the path to the surgery, up the steps and onto the waiting room linoleum. Her father’s ultimatum got them straight to the doctor who sat with her, cringing, on the examination table. The surgery was dark with heavy furniture and paneled walls, and there were glass cases filled with evil looking medical instruments and specimens of diseased appendices and tonsils. She hated the smells of chloroform and disinfectants, and the bottles filled her with fear.

The starched sheet underneath her crackled as the doctor smiled, belying his intentions. He peered against the light at the sharp end of a syringe, and suddenly plunged it into her skin. She got a surprise more than anything: it didn’t hurt terribly much. But then he got some white cloth and began dabbing at her wound.

The sting was horrible. She tried to close her eyes, but she was fascinated with what was going on. She glimpsed bone and raw flesh and there were spots of blood on the sheet now too. Then the doctor had a needle and a thick thread a bit like her mum used to darn socks, but stiffer somehow. He began sewing her up, just like the socks. He pulled together the two sides of the hole in her leg with one relentless stitch after another.

‘Not much longer now,’ he said.

It was the worst darning job she’d ever seen. The black stitches didn’t even match the creamy pink of her skin. Would she spend her life darned up like that? She decided she couldn’t look any more.

When she did open her eyes again there was an imposing looking bandage on her leg, and she was able to walk importantly out of the surgery, in front of all of the other patients.

Altogether, it was a singular day – she was the centre of her father’s caring attention, and there had been anxiety in his eyes. Anxiety for her.

The garden had a secret. The little girl was small indeed, and greatly impressed, when her father buried an entire Indian motor bike and sidecar very deeply in the left hand corner of the yard, beyond the clothesline. It lies there still in its unmarked grave, hidden by kikuyu grass.

Until the poor old engine gave up the ghost the whole family traveled around on that rig for years. She remembered her mother clinging to the pillion seat behind her father, with her sister packed tightly beside her in the sidecar, swamped by the slipstream and the deafening noise from the engine.

A couple of years later her father divided up the yard with a picket fence, leaving a large space at the back. He’d been shooting out west with his mates, and she trembled at the idea of guns. This time he came home with a skinny little kangaroo wrapped in a towel – her Dad had shot its mother and found the joey in her pouch. He brought it home for them as a pet, and to keep the kikuyu down. The girl cried into her pillow that night.

In daylight hours Joey lived in her mother’s apron pocket, and gradually grew fat on milk she fed him through an eyedropper. Graduation day came when the picket fence was complete, and Joey was expected to live full time in the back yard. By this time he was still all legs, but able to hop around and munch grass. However, with his relentless growth, their love for Joey became tinged with fear. The mother would let herself through the gate in the picket fence to put washing on the line.

Thrilled to see his ‘Mum’, Joey would charge, aiming at her ‘pouch’ – the large pocket in her apron. Things got sticky when he was big enough to knock her over, and stickier still when he became so big he could leap the picket fence at a single bound and range the local streets.

One night Joey got out and didn’t return, and she saw her parents exchange a guilty look. Joey, she guessed, had shared the fate of his mother.

The little girl’s mother’s laundry copper was another source of childhood horror. It lived at one end of an outbuilding in the back yard, alongside two cement tubs that were fitted with a mangle.

As a family they would sometimes go prawning, taking scoop nets down to the local lake. The cool crystal water swirled around their bare toes and in the lamplight the prawns flashed as they swam into the traps. On a good night they’d fill a kerosene tin, and she was mesmerised as the green crustaceans squirmed and writhed, like so many big maggots with legs.

Her father would build a funeral pyre under the copper, by then filled with water. When it bubbled and fumed, fitting for a scene with the witches of Macbeth, he’d upend the tin into the cauldron and the prawns thrashed and flailed in the heat until they became still, and turned pink.

She hated seeing this torture but, pragmatically, she helped them eat the sacrifice only a few minutes later, on fresh bread and butter. The sweet-salt flesh of the prawns and the scrunch of the crusty bread were just too delectable.

Next to the tubs, the father built a small aviary, where they kept canaries. Yellow canaries that sang and lay speckled eggs that produced scrawny featherless chicks with huge beaks. Beaks that consumed mashed boiled egg and crushed arrowroot biscuits, and later, special seed the girls bought at the grocery shop down the street.

They were in for a surprise when the second nest of birds hatched out, and one turned out quite different from the rest. This chick had brown feathers and looked for all the world like a sparrow; probably a throw-back of some sort.

The little guy was doomed from the start though, because horror stalked him too. One morning they found his lifeless body in the bottom of the cage, torn half way through the bird wire. A cat must have got into the laundry during the night .

The main part of the laundry outbuilding in the back yard was the father’s workshop where he prefabricated kitchen cupboards and other portable parts of his houses.

She hated being around him when he worked as he was always full of tension and created a stifling atmosphere. He didn’t yell; just exuded anxiety and stress. Her problem was that he always liked to have a ‘mate’ nearby. It was as though he was afraid of being alone, and so it fell to the mother and the girls to stand by when he worked at home. This meant they fetched and carried small things for him: ‘Pass that hammer for me.’ or ‘Hold this still will you?’

She still remembers the tobacco smell and the flying white dust, and the taut muscles in his face as he sawed and hammered. Even then, his hands were gnarled and misshapen where he’d occasionally blundered with his tools. He must have driven home hundreds of thousand of nails in his time.

The ‘holding still’ often meant putting her meager weight on a piece of fibro cement sheet in an effort to keep it motionless while he split it with a special cutter. They all inevitably left these sessions covered in white. This was the same dust that was an integral part of her Dad when he came home from work at night.

His hair and his clothing were always drenched in the stuff. This was the dust that lay all over the floors in the unfinished houses, and coated the walls and the window sills. It contained asbestos, and today they know it as a courier of death.

The white powder from the fibro building sheets always surrounded them, but they rarely gave it a thought. They didn’t even consider it when the mother developed what the doctors called ‘emphysema’, although she’d never smoked. Nor when she and her sister both became asthmatics.

They did think about it many years later when the father became very ill. Scientific evidence about this white dust was at last being made public, and memories flooded back when they diagnosed lung cancer.

For the first time ever her father slowed down. He had time to think, and he began to talk about his life. He was dying in a nursing home when he and his daughter shared their one and only deeply personal conversation.

On that day he allowed her in. He talked about her mother and his parents. And how his father raised him as a child.

‘Boys were men before they were boys. They had to be,’ he said ‘If a man didn’t have flamin’ blisters on his hands he was a loafer. If his wife worked he was a sponger on his wife.’

Her grandfather embedded the lessons with floggings, he said. With a sulky strap eighteen inches long and half an inch thick. And at other times with his fists.

Her father adjusted his hearing aid.

‘A man had to keep his head up. Play a man’s role …’

He was trying to put his life into perspective. She looked at him closely, probably for the first time in many years. His face criss-crossed with lines like tracks through bushland, battered by years in the sun, the eyes lifeless with sad memories and his body shrunken by age and illness. Not a figure to incite fear.

He was powerless and distressing, so now she dared to cross the barrier which had lain between them for so long, and asked occasional questions.

‘I was the only boy and I copped the lot. I wasn’t allowed to look cross-eyed at my sisters. To him they were little godesses …’

The two of them had been talking like this for an hour: a long time for a dying man.

There was a rattle of cups outside in the hall, and she looked at her watch. Time to leave for the plane. How lives slip by …

She never saw her Dad again.

His death had taken a long time, and it was often painful. The medical people tried to persuade him and his children to take the central roles in a legal test case against the fibro manufacturer. Her father would be examined and interviewed and there would be a bedside court hearing … There would be an autopsy too, because they couldn’t prove absolutely the cause of his illness until after death.

A win would mean big money, they said, and it would pave the way for other sufferers to obtain just compensation.

His children couldn’t think of anything more horrible for a dying man than having to deal with barristers and courts. They didn’t want him prodded and verbally pushed around. The idea of a postmortem horrified them. They rejected the requests.

So her Dad died poor, and in peace. He’d suffered enough.

© June Saville 2008. Not to be reproduced without express written permission of the author.

Has asbestos or other industrial products touched your family? Tell me in a comment ...

HIDDEN MEANINGS - Married to a Bi-Sexual?

This is the story of woman who has no idea that her husband is bi-sexual. Gradually the truth dawns upon her ...

There are two voices here, in parallel monologues.

IN 25 YEARS OF MARRIAGE I never once saw her naked. We conceived our children huddled under a sheet, with her nightgown held just so, and she locked the bathroom door whenever she took a shower.

She dressed as the nuns taught her to. In layers. With as much as possible hidden from view at any given moment. A work of art, the way she did that. In a way it was sexy, having to guess the sum of all the individual parts I glimpsed over the years. An occasional nipple. The soft skin between her breasts. The vision of brown fluff as I entered her.

I can’t even swear to it that she really ever had an orgasm, although I did try with her. Time and again. She didn’t seem all that interested, but I wanted to witness the explosion of her emotions for the first time. All that penned up sexual energy … The release would have been a mighty sight to behold.

So I caressed her softness, and worked at her button whenever I got the chance. But it seemed worse than useless. She never seemed to get a release. And more often than not she was as bitchy as hell all next day.

So, even while she lived, I mostly pursued my own path to satisfaction …

It was steamy, the night he first came to her room. An enclosing, fierce tropical heat. Sweat
seeped from the pores of her skin into the gossamer stuff of her negligee, and little droplets of it clung to her cheeks. She hadn’t known he was coming.

‘It’s so hot,’ she said.

‘Yes, it is,’ he agreed, and sat on the day bed in the corner. ‘So very hot.’

‘A wine?’ And she brought the clear crystal glass to him, and took hers to the deep chair across the room.

‘It was special, last night. The dinner ... You ...’

She said nothing, and sipped pensively.

‘I haven’t been with a woman for so long. Nor even sat with one since she died. My wife. Since she died …’

He raised his glass. There. On the daybed. His sienna eyes pierced the space between them; his silver-grey hair glinted in a shaft of bright light.

She sat in the chair. Occasionally moving to him to pour more wine.

And when she did, a shaft of light, perhaps the same one, penetrated her thin gown. It penetrated her gown, and threw her body into relief. When this happened, he could sense the silkiness of her. Sense more than see, the curves of her. Almost see. But not quite. Sense the erectness of her. The roundness of her. Almost see. But not quite.

They spoke for ages. Desultory. In fits and starts. Spoke. Touching here and there on the past, the present, the future. Touching. Almost touching. But not quite.

And then: ‘Will you do something for me? Do something very special?’

She looked towards him. Wondering.

‘Will you? Will you show me you? All of you?’

His entire being asked. Sought her consent.

‘Please?’

Her body had already agreed to his petition. Everything about her poised to meet his need. His need so apparent, so urgent. She nodded.

Nodded and placed the glass on the small table beside her chair. And she rose to stand in the shaft of light. To stand there, and accede to his necessity.

How to pin down the past, in order to understand the now … To make sense of the half truths, and the contradictions. To apply the filter of reason to the mix of happenings so that one might rid one’s view of contamination by passion and idealism and trust.

To remember the beginning. The comfort of having each day planned on your behalf. The enjoyed laziness of not having to think. Such a contrast to competition in the larger world. Lulled. Lulled into inaction. Lulled into a trap which tightens oh so gently. So gently that soon it surrounds and engulfs you, leaving you incapable, ineffectual … without value.

His first wife was supposed to be ‘a lovely person’. A talented cook, good at flower arranging, sewing, interior design. All those traditional wifely things.

But in recent times her friends cast little gems of information about. How hard she worked. Always at his beck and call. How she would choose some dress or other at a local store, but couldn’t pay for it until he’d inspected it and given the go ahead. Her distress when he insisted the children go off to boarding school at an early age. Her loneliness when they had gone.

I put women on a pedestal, to live there untouched by the filth in life. I guard a woman and protect her so that she may go on nurturing and caring. A woman is the mother of my children, so I look after her. Cater for her every whim and fancy.

Men deal with the rubbish.

Even my young second wife … We’ll have no children. Or dogs or cats for that matter. That’s our deal. But I will protect her. Protect her from life at large. In return, I bed her. She’s good in bed. A new age woman, unafraid of impropriety. Exciting. Abandoned and exciting.

Around the time I met this second one I worried quite a lot. Whether I was doing the right thing ... what people would think. In some ways, whether I could keep up with her. She was pretty bookish. An independent sort of person too. I wondered whether this was the way to go at all really. There were so many options …

She’s no madonna. My first wife was my madonna. This one is an exhilarating pastime. An alibi as well. A legal wife removes suspicion. Provides unmitigated respectability.

In the rainforest one day, not long after they met, she glimpsed a deep and private moment. He was walking a few metres ahead beneath the thick green canopy when he came to a sparkling trickle of a stream. The waters tinkled over round coloured pebbles.

His frame seemed to lose its strength as he came to that stream, and he sank, slowly, to his knees, to his knees at the edge of the crystal water, and bent forward as though to taste the coolness of it.

But she was wrong, for the sound of his wrenching sobs gushed from him as the water stain spread, unnoticed, on his dampened shirt. His head on his arms, there in the shallow water, he sobbed deeply and painfully. A private agony, flooding from a hidden spring.

After thirty-two years of being there, his wife was gone. His wife and the mother of his children. It hadn’t been the same without a dependable woman to call his own, a woman who was known and respected by everyone in the town. You didn’t get the same respect, as a single man …

And now, with someone new, especially so quickly, they looked at him sideways. A bit shocked. No, it wasn’t the same without her.

Watching nearby, his second wife walked away. Excluded. Excluded and numb. What was the source of this agony? The memory of his first wife, she supposed. He was entitled to his privacy, of course, but would she ever truly know him? Would he ever cry for her?

He seemed so caring, so considerate of my every caprice. He’d plan each day for me. Plan my day ahead for me. With suggestions and arrangements and quiet insistence. Until I found I simply fitted into the mold he prepared. Which, incidentally, also served him well.

We didn’t fight, each day was peaceful, and he seemed quite happy. We were the ideal husband and wife. I cooked and cleaned for him. Wrote business letters for him. Dropped my career for him. Looked good by his side. Made birthday cakes for his grandchildren. Enjoyed our intimate moments. I loved him.

My trust secured my complacency.

Sex can be a tyrant …

Women seem relatively uncomplicated about it, in my experience. My madonna … Sex passed her by. She didn’t seem to feel much at all. A block of stone in bed. Unbent enough to be agreeable, that’s all. Let him have his way …

The new one. She’s different. She enjoys a bit of rough and tumble. She’s really something. It’s exciting to play with her. Bring her on just when I want. And withhold satisfaction too. To see her reaction. And maybe punish her a bit for bad behaviour …

Sex. It rules from day one. We were a big family … four girls and five boys, and there was always some hanky panky or other. The farm was our education. Animals leave nothing to the imagination, and here was an avid scholar.

I was a big boy. And attractive. Big for my age. So there were plenty of opportunities. I could have whatever I wanted. The trouble was, I suppose, I didn’t really know what I did want. So I dithered around not doing much, keeping myself to myself most of the time. I think I was shy.

We had paying guests at the house when I was about eleven, and there was a knot hole in the wall near the linen cupboard. It was easy to prise a bit bigger hole in the gnarled wood. Enough to see into the bathroom beyond, and I crouched there, and after time I could have passed almost any exam you could throw at me. It’s amazing what bathrooms are used for.

My graduation came that very year, and my tutor was a woman I’d been watching through the knot hole for about a week. One morning I was there, mesmerised by another subject. A man on the other side of the wall. She caught me watching.

The changing expressions on her face were something to behold ... amusement turning to realisation, turning to grasp of opportunities presented, and finally, to lust.

She didn’t do anything just then. But next day I was throwing stones into the creek down the back of the farm, as was my wont, when she walked by, casual-like. She sat down in the long grass, and patted a spot beside her. Inviting me to join her. Inviting me to touch her. Inviting me to undo her buttons. Inviting me to explore her hills and valleys. Inviting me to undress. Inviting me to slip my finger inside her pants. Inviting me …

That was a blowout. The memory stayed with me at school where I concentrated even less than usual. And the nuns thrashed me for inattention, not understanding that I was living my experience all over again, surprised and tremulous at what had happened. There, sitting in the fifth class desk, thinking about it.

He was such a mixture. Always just out of my reach. The essence of him just out of my reach. Always. There was always something. Something unexplainable. Curious and inexplicable.

With him I felt secure and insecure, loved and hated, central and marginalised, needed and repelled, manipulated, used, cherished, cheated, beguiled, passionate and plundered.

He was charming, stimulating, insincere, perfidious, affectionate, disingenuous, generous, mean, mocking, secretive, bewitching, enigmatic, evasive, loveable, charismatic, a sham.

And he drank too much.

I loved him.

Bits and pieces can be crucial. They confirm memories. Without them parts of your life slip away.

I know I’m sentimental, and I don’t see any harm in that. But he did. He resented my sentimentality, and discouraged it. Belittled me for it.

Sometimes there is a sense of loss. Loss for my mother’s silk scarf. For the pieces of rough opal my father gave me. For the marquisette ring of my first love. For the Pete Seeger platter from the sixties. My school badge with the prefect bar swinging beneath the motto. A nostalgic collection of lace handkerchiefs.

Some of my favourite small pieces went missing at times, and I believed they had been stolen. But really, there was no monetary value in any of them, so I must have been mistaken.

Money’s important. It’s power and freedom. It’s necessity. Money. To have and to hold. Strength. Authority. A buttress against invasion. A baton to wield.

She’s different. Mawkish and sentimental. Money comes and goes with her. No problem. But little useless things turn her on. She touches and looks, and tears can come to her eyes. Over the smallest item.

It was a real temptation, just occasionally, to spirit away something or other, and watch her reaction. No harm in that …

I developed asthma the summer after we were married. A struggle for breath. A nervous tingle and creep through my being and a tight band around my chest.

His children came to visit. Often. An invasion of the house which was never my personal space. They were pleasant enough at first. But they spoke together of underground things. They spoke sentences with two meanings, with forked tongues. Their memories rekindled in malice to confront me. Secrets hinted at, to alienate this stranger who stole their mother’s place.

And he never took my part. Just made excuses for them, and passed me my asthma puffer …

When I was a boy we would go to town for supplies and I’d run down to the railway yards while my mother did the shopping. Maybe I’d meet a couple of mates on the way, and by this time we knew what we’d find among the tangle of steel tracks and creaking trucks. We’d find this bloke. Old to us. He’d give us sixpence if we’d stand there and watch him jerk off. A bargain eh?

Not much later I earned two bob for other duties …

Experiences with the bloke down the tracks didn’t go astray a year or two later when I went off to the Brothers. It was an agricultural boarding college and because I wasn’t the greatest with the academics, I mostly ended up looking after the stables and milking the cows. It was in the soft hay that I did my time.

My apprenticeship there began when this new brother caught me whispering at Saturday afternoon mass, and he dragged me by my ear all the way down the hall to his office, and he made me take off my knickers. My knickers and my underpants, and made me stand there, bollicky, right in front of him, shirt hitched up, showing everything below my navel.

He kept me there for a full five minutes while he stared at me, unmoving. With a sort of a leer on his face. Finally he growled: ‘you’re for it son; bend over.’ And he grabbed the wide leather belt hanging ready on the wall behind him and, grunting to improve his technique, brought that thing down on my bum in six agonising sweeps. I bit my lip to stop screaming.

A bit later on that evening I was down checking the horses when this same brother sidled up behind me, and put his hand on my shoulder. He had that leer on his face again, but it seemed he wanted to be a bit more kindly, for he said: ‘You do a good job in this stable son.’

Anyway, he chatted for a while and twenty minutes later I found myself on my back in the hay with his face on my pecker showing me what he could do. Then he asked me if I could manage any better on him. It was weird. My knees really shook when he suggested it. But I had a go and didn’t feel too bad about it. Not too bad at all.

Strange, eh? I mean. A brother!

Sometimes you’d wonder what went on in his head. There would be hints. Clues, but nothing definite. I sometimes felt there was something hidden about him, something very private and not altogether in my interest. But for the most part I’d toss aside uneasy thoughts and get on with life.

He did some strange things which, in retrospect, and if my suspicions were correct, would give a peculiar slant to his character.

For instance, when I was vacuuming the carpet, I’d discover a single coin under a chair where he normally didn’t sit. As though he was testing me. As though he could confirm by the presence or absence of the coin whether I’d cleaned under the chair that week. Did I do the housework thoroughly? It happened too regularly to be an accident, so in the end I’d leave the coin where it was and damn him for his attempt at control.

Then there was the cupboard in the hall which he named as his own. He told me he kept some things there which he wished to keep private. That seemed fair enough, so I respected his request and left it alone. Except for dusting. And it was then that I noticed he’d placed, ever-so-carefully, a thin strand of cotton just-so in the runner of the sliding door of the cupboard. Nice to be trusted …

He told me how he’d read once about domestic servants who wanted to steal something from their masters. The idea was to continually rearrange items in the house, each time moving the target article just a little. Maybe from a shelf to a cupboard to a shelf to another room. Then, when it was likely to be out of sight out of mind, the item would be filched – right out of the house.

He mentioned this in passing a couple of times over the years. And I noticed he was always re-organising cupboards and shifting things from one room to another.

I’d been married about ten years to her when it occurred to me she was probably approaching menopause. The thought sent prickles up the back of my neck. She didn’t seem to have any of the symptoms they talk about. You know … depression and illness and such.

But I couldn’t get it out of my mind, and it started to affect my feelings towards her. I like full, ripe fruit. I could not stand the prospect of anything shriveling up. Suddenly she didn’t seem so attractive, and I started to encourage her to do things without me. She enrolled in art classes … that sort of thing. And I was able to spend more time in my own way.

The beach near our place had always been a magnet to me. I suppose I’d been a bit of a voyeur for years, enjoying the passing parade. I loved to watch the young people in their
g-strings: succulent fruit, ripe for the picking. The boys really turned me on.

Now, I decided, I would not try to hide from myself why I was there. I would indulge my feelings more often, dwelling on the impulses within my body as it celebrated this beauty. I would enjoy the quickening, the tingling in my swollen crotch, the breath which came faster now …

It was time.

A couple of years ago things seemed to change for us. He wasn’t so attentive. Suggested I take art classes, and he gave me time to myself. Mind you, there’d always been business trips for a week or so at a time … Anyway, now he didn’t seem to be so intense, and in some ways I felt free.

There was time too for thinking, thinking and remembering … remembering little things.
Like when he left a motel receipt in one of his suit pockets. Made out to him, but acknowledging payment for a room and breakfast for two. I thought it may have been his brother ... company on a business trip.

One day I came home from art class and as I drove up the hill to our home he drove down and there was a young boy of about fifteen in the car with him. A blonde boy with curly hair, with him in the car. I hadn’t seen the boy before and wondered why he was there. I forgot to ask …

He had an unusual mannerism. When he was uptight, and didn’t realise people were watching, his hand would stiffen and he’d wave it at his side. Effeminate? Almost. But not quite.

I was raking over memories, dissecting a relationship. A search for meanings. For meaning and hidden meanings. Did I really understand our marriage? Was he the man of my dreams after all? Was this all an abomination? Something unimaginable? After all?

I began to feel more unsettled each day, but I needed to comprehend some truths.

Ah… Life is such a smorgasboard. Select an experience here, another there. Taste, select, accept, reject.

I needed a wife, but she was an experiment too. How it would be with a young, vibrant modern woman. Comparing. And controlling. The opportunity for another experience. A new buzz. It can be fun to see women dangle at the end of your string …

I still want her around. She’s a good cook, and people seem to like her … that doesn’t do me any harm. But she can do her own thing and I’ll do mine. Times are different and I don’t care any more. No more double life. No more loss of real freedom.

Time to get on with life in all its possibilities.

Mourning him. As though he’d died. I am an empty vessel, somehow betrayed and cheated. Without knowing how or why.

I combed through his papers and pockets. Looking for answers. Somehow knowing of his betrayal. Knowing through a sixth sense, of his betrayal. He had been absent so often of late, hadn’t he?

It was time for me to know. To put aside the feelings of apprehension.

And so when I noticed the video tape thrust to the back of his drawer, I took it up and, without pausing, slid it into the slot of the VCR, and pressed ‘play’.


© June Saville 2009 All rights reserved. No to to be reproduced without the express written permission of the author.

Please leave a comment about how you feel about this piece. I understand that marriages of this type are not so uncommon. Have you heard of anyone with this type of experience? Does it help to bring these subjects into open discussion in the community?

Mr and Mrs Y - A Short Story

'Mr and Mrs Y' is another of the stories I posted earlier on Journeys - here to prompt my bloggy mates to look more deeply among my posts. There are lots of different stories here, including my novel 'Paternity'.

Just look for the past links on the side bar - individual chapter links for 'Paternity' and behind the archive dates for the other stories. Please leave a comment telling what you think ...

THE OLD COUPLE made a perfect capital ‘Y’ shape as they walked together around the corner and up the hill.

You see, they each had severe curvature of the spine, as though in sympathy with one another. Problem was their spines bent sideways, sending their heads at the top of the ‘Y’ away from their partner, by a good 45 degrees. The man bent right and the woman bent to the left.

From the hips down they walked very closely, often holding gnarled hands.

From hips up their curvatures seemed to create a distance that shouldn’t have been there.

I saw this man and woman on most mornings. They spoke constantly and with animation that I’d more often noted in youths smitten by love. Their old bodies sometimes shook with laughter, but to fully share the joke, glancing sideways and into each others eyes as they walked, would have been impossible.

I looked forward to my regular meandering, and I looked forward to spotting Mr and Mrs Y. My imagination ran riot when I saw them, building stories in my mind.

How difficult would this strange impairment be in their everyday lives?

They say people in a couple tend to grow alike over the years, but this was so unusual as to be almost ridiculous.

They were both as thin as sticks, testament to a life of exercise and dietary good sense.

He always wore those very short shorts made of some synthetic stuff that never wears out. The kind that men wore twenty years ago.

His shirt was always crisply ironed and I never saw him wear a hat.

On the other hand his wife demonstrated an acute awareness of the power of the Australian sun. Her skin was nowhere visible except around her eyes and mouth.

The wide brim hat was made of some sort of cotton and flapped as she walked. His pants were full length and again cotton, and a light blouse covered her arms right down to the wrists where a pair of cotton gloves took over. The style of her attire never changed.

This hill was abrupt and my breath became laboured, but Mr and Mrs Y were still drawing away from me. They were very fit, although apparently in their late seventies.

As the road steepened and the view became more broad, I glanced sideways to judge the clouds banking on the horizon to the south west. They were tall and threatening: black with even a tinge of green.

In our summer this could herald fierce thunder storms and very occasionally hail with lumps of ice that may be as large as ping pong balls. I’d fired my computer to the weather site before clapping on my own hat for the walk, so I knew today would be unsettled …

But clouds in this direction tended to remain to the west and move along the ridge of mountains to plague towns further north. My walk would not be interrupted today.

Our path passed through tree lined streets and gardens where children played and puppies yapped.

I was sweating.

We passed a row of grevillea bushes alive with noisy green and red lorikeets fighting over the tastiest seeds.

These birds are arrogant little beggars who love nothing more than a lazy feed of honey and bread left out by an unwary householder. There were a couple of problems with that – the sweetness tended to produce sickness in the birds, for one.

I encountered problem two myself when I began feeding a bird that visited my garden. Within a week I had thirty of the creatures swooping and careering among the native bushes.

I knew I had done the wrong thing when the local paper warned against the practice for the birds’ sake, and I withdrew my largess.

Regardless, for weeks afterwards lorikeets tapped fiercely at my kitchen window insisting on being fed!

The old couple had turned right into a quiet street and I continued on my own way.

There weren’t many people so much in love at that age I mused.

My head was busy imagining a fiery courtship and a huge wedding for them when a fat white rabbit dashed across the road followed closely by a young girl trying to recapture her pet.

The girl had long fair hair and wore a dress with a frothy wide skirt.

Alice in Wonderland …

On my walks I sometimes took a turn into a cul-de-sac that contained some of my favourite gardens.

Today there was a shock. My house of roses looked abandoned with unpruned bushes languid and choked with weeds. Gone the riot of colour and perfume.

Where was the family? There was a good six months worth of weeds in the garden now. What had happened?

I skipped to avoid a dog poo on the footpath and turned towards home.

*

Even in between walks I often thought about Mr and Mrs Y.

A friend of mine was a member of the local RSL Club where they had a good band and ballroom dancing on Friday afternoons. Lots of oldies turned up and my friend said she’d often seen Mr and Mrs Y among the crowd.

How on earth could they dance together I thought? I was used to seeing them walking with their heads wide apart.

I’d also wondered in my imagination how they got on in their more private and personal moments of physical contact (you’d know by now that curiosity and imagination are my middle names).

One afternoon I was sitting at my computer desk with pen and a fresh piece of white paper, and found myself doodling.

Mr and Mrs Y appeared before me, taking on the character of the stick figures that children draw.

My pen tripped along, producing Mr Y’s skinny legs and Mrs Y’s hat.

There they were: a perfect second last letter of the alphabet.

Then I looked again and the right hand side of my brain came into play: the side of lateral thinking and creativity.

With a flash and an ah-hah, I realised that my fears for the Ys was unfounded. Face to face – for dancing and in love making - they’d be fine!

*

Does anyone else know a couple who, through the years, have growth alike in some way? Tell me in a comment ...

©June Saville 2008. Not to be reproduced without express written permission of the author.

FRIENDS FOR A TIME - Love in a Nursing Home

THE GINGER CAT languishes in the best chair on the nursing home verandah, purrs loudly and occasionally preens himself.

A ray of sun plays on his fur, making it shine, and trickles onto the paved verandah floor and over to the garden bed of brilliant pink azaleas and maiden hair fern. A locust hums in the gum tree in the centre of the lawn. It is an idyllic day.

Inside the building, the sun shines only occasionally. Where it does, it lights the wide expanse of highly polished corridors, the neat counterpains on the beds, and brings a sparkle and a flash to the fish pond in the large television room.

There is a squinch of rubber soles on linoleum, and the tap tap tapping of a stick as a young nurse guides an old man down the hall and onto the verandah. She watches as he sighs into the second best chair on the verandah, next to the cat. She pats a rug around his knees, adjusts the shawl lying on the shoulders of an elderly woman sitting in the third best chair, alongside the man, and leaves them.

At the same time, the man and the woman turn towards each other and smile. He leans over and strokes the cat. The three are very comfortable together.

Mr Reynolds is a godsend. He is such a gentle man, and so full of interesting conversation. My days now seem to revolve around our times on the verandah, for he has changed my life. With him, I feel so warm.

The man and the woman are both quite small, shrunken with age. Their bodies respond slowly now, but their eyes are bright and flit over the details of their landscape. Their expressions change in unison, and with the conversation: sometimes twinkling over a story, or growing still with a thought from the past.

I have lived here for twelve months now, and a mixed up time it has been for me. I felt a freedom when I was first shown my very own room. Suddenly I had a space of my own. Always until then someone else had made the running for me. Mostly it was my husband who set the pace, sometimes with my welfare in mind, but mainly for his own reasons. In his self-centred way he made all the decisions, and didn’t ask what I thought. It was the same when the children left home. Nothing really changed.

He was a person who swept all before him. Yes, he was efficient. And capable. But he never seemed to have time to spare for little things. He was just a spinning top. I looked after the children and the house, but he put his stamp on everything. Everything was his creation, not mine. I was always an extension of another’s life.

He died suddenly and of course there was a void. Take a huge personality like his out of the equation and there has to be loneliness. I lived with my daughter for a while, but I felt I was in the way, and when my chest got worse I had the excuse I wanted to get a place of my own. Even though by then it had to be a room only, with 24-hour care.

So I really enjoyed my new room, putting my bits and pieces around, and ordering curtains and bedspread to match, just to my liking. It was pleasant to have quiet times too, when I knew no-one would interrupt, or be demanding.

There are always nurses, of course, but they’re nice here, and very insightful when it comes to seeing that you want some time to yourself.

There is a clatter of teacups and a rattle of a trolley coming down the hall. The two old people stir in expectation of a cup of tea, and a scone with jam and cream. Today they are remembering their childhood. Spinning stories of school time, of Christmas, and holidays. Of parents and siblings. Of joys and sadness. Their faces shine with involvement and appreciation. The tea is always hot and strong, and peps you up so the conversation keeps on rolling.

The solicitous tea lady and her cups have rattled down the hall again. There is the sound of muffled crying in the bedroom across the way, and the voice of a nurse reassuring a bewildered new resident. Cooking smells give away the secret of tonight’s menu: baked lamb. A cleaner swishes a mop, and clanks a bucket.

A loud insistent voice shatters the calm, and a pudgy woman in a flannelette nightgown with bare feet and curlers in her hair rushes past. ‘That patient should have been discharged yesterday. We need his bed!’ she yells at the top of her voice, and indicates a man sitting at the far end of the verandah. He is oblivious to the fuss, and continues staring into the distance. The woman is the former matron of the local hospital.

The couple near the cat watch on. Then they laugh. They have seen this sad circus before.

Well I suppose I enjoyed my solitude for perhaps a month, when I began to feel the need for some company. The occupational therapist suggested a game of Scrabble in the television room. That really appealed to me, for I love word games. But I found that the other residents and I parted company when it came to the game itself. The therapist tried valiantly, but it seemed that I was the only person in the room capable of putting a couple of letters together.

It was a shock to learn that most of the residents were afflicted mentally in some way. Many of them had dementia, it seemed, or had simply let themselves slow down. Their faculties certainly left a lot to be desired.

That discovery left me a very lonely woman. Except for the nurses, I was in an intellectual desert. Of course, the staff members didn’t have much time for long conversations, although they did what they could.

Three months after I arrived there was a young man in a wheelchair. He had car injuries but he was still very alert, and he was a real gentleman with all the old people, however vague they seemed to be. There was no-where else for him to go at the time, and he and I became quite friendly even though we were poles apart in so many ways. I did enjoy our conversations. Lucky for him, and sad for me, he got a place in a rehab centre just a few weeks later. That meant I was alone again, sitting here on the verandah with only the cat for company. I did miss him. Terribly.

The elderly couple ease themselves from their chairs now, and make their way to a sunnier corner of the verandah. The man is tap tapping with his stick; the woman holds the shawl tightly around her shoulders. At this spot, near a display stand of pot plants, the nursing home gardener has set out a watering can and a small container of implements. The man and the woman take turns watering the pots which are a riot of annuals. They loosen the earth around the plants and scatter fertiliser granules. It is their private garden.

Mr Reynolds arrived three months ago. At the first opportunity, my favourite nursing sister brought him around to the verandah where I was sitting, and introduced us. I could see immediately that he was such a nice man. He had suffered a bad heart attack – his third – and he was left in a very frail condition.

His brain was quite intact, though. We hit it off immediately, and we have been sharing our days ever since.

The shadows are lengthening a little, and a middle aged woman makes her way along the verandah, and finds the couple at their garden. She is the man’s only daughter, and it is obvious that she enjoys her father’s company, and is glad of his friendship with the woman. She has come straight from work and stays only a short while. She has family responsibilities at home.

I think I’m in love. It might seem ridiculous at our age, but why shouldn’t it be so? Does love have to mean an overwhelming urge for sex? Why can’t it be a comfortable feeling. A sharing and a happiness? Can’t that be love?

The sun rises and it sets at the nursing home. Some days are bright, and some wet and cool. The private garden is in full bloom, and commented upon by staff and visitors. The lady and the man share the limelight, and enjoy their flowers. They are blooming themselves.

I am feeling more happy within myself than I have been for many years. It is so wonderful to share one’s days ... Mr Reynolds and I have so many common interests. Comfortable is the word. Perhaps it is our time in life to some extent, for there is no need for competition. No need to impress. Simply a shared requirement for peace and companionship.

The piano tinkles softly in the television room. A community volunteer is playing ‘The Rose of Tralee’, and a dozen residents sit in a row of ergonomic easy chairs, memories stirring.

Today there is a chill breeze on the verandah and clouds are scudding across the sky. The annuals in the private garden are almost spent, and the gardener has taken away some of the pots. The lady and the man draw their winter woollies closer, and amble into the television room where someone has set a log fire not far from the piano. It has only been weeks since they met, and yet it has been a lifetime.

Mr Reynolds isn’t well. They took him to hospital for a check up a week ago yesterday. I asked the nurse to tell him not to worry about the garden. I would look after it while he is away.

The lady wandered over to the cat lying there, as usual, on its chair. She bent painfully, and stroked the soft ginger head. She smiled and spoke quietly to the animal, as though in reassurance. Then she sat down in her own chair, with the second best seat empty between them. The lady looked at the empty chair and then out towards the garden, unseeing.

Ants were swarming on the poppy seeds in the nearby sprouting troughs. A knife thin breeze edged its way onto the verandah, and the cat stirred and stretched itself before gliding towards the warmth inside. The lady remained still.

Day after day she sat on her chair. Only occasionally she moved – mostly to scratch with a garden fork around the last of the petunias. The grey sky lingered, and a fine rain brought a liquid shine to the leaves of the poinsettia grove. Each morning and afternoon a staff member placed a cup of tea and a scone on a small table beside her chair, but on each occasion the liquid grew cold and the scone developed a hard crust in the crisp air.

The doctor came to see me this morning. He came especially. Especially … to tell me that Mr Reynolds had died in his sleep. Mercifully, he went quickly, the doctor said. It was another heart attack, but this time stronger, and lethal.

I feared this. Inside myself, I feared this …

It is so horrible. Poor Mr Reynolds …

What shall I do now? What can I do?

He was such a nice man. A gentle man. I keep imagining I can still hear the tap of his walking stick on the linoleum ...

The young nurse squinches along the hallway to deliver a bowl of fruit to B Wing. There is a whiff of urine, overcome by a disinfectant smell. The notice boards on the wall speak about a bus trip to town and a visit from a local choir, and there is a display of brightly coloured drawings from the primary school. The woman in the water bed in Room 6 is restless, and in pain. A chaplain speaks to the matron about next Sunday’s church service, and Mrs Jeffries has her hair set.

On the verandah, the lady with the shawl dabs a tear with the corner of her lace handkerchief. She then moves from her customary position to the second best chair, next to the cat.

© June Saville 2008. Not to be reproduced without express written permission of the author.

Has this story brought back memories for you? Do you think 'it's never too late' so far as love is concerned? Let me know in a comment ...