Book: Redemption - Part XIII - Chapter 11

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Trials and Tribulations

1981 - 1984

Steve didn’t want his father with us any more than I did, but he couldn’t summon the will to throw him out. His mother’s death had made it all too hard, as it had for me. After she died I found myself venting my frustration in long telephone calls to my aunts, Marie first and then Kathleen. As we didn't have a telephone at home it was nothing for me to spend an hour at a time in the phone box down the street. During one such call to Marie, Tamara went walkabout. For thirty minutes or so she had been coming in and out of the phone box to show me things she picked up until she wasn’t anymore. How long she had been gone before I noticed I couldn’t say? I was too caught up in my own woes to pay attention.

Wracked with guilt, I ran frantically up and down the road before running down to the beach, hoping against hope I would not find her floating face down in the water. I eventually found her sitting on the steps of the kindergarten with her elbows resting on her knees and her little hands supporting her head. She looked so sad because the kindy was closed and with Kristen at school, she had no one to play with. In spite of myself, I couldn’t help but smile. What was I going to do with this girl? The following year, when she was old enough to go to kindy, I was anxiously hovering around with the other mums when she scolded:  “Well! What are you waiting for? Go home!”

It was during this tumultuous time that I wrote the book mentioned in the preface. It had to have been the craziest thing I could have done, but of course, I know now it was a means of escape. I can’t even remember how long it took to write only that I stayed up till midnight most nights and got up before the sun. When I finished writing it by hand, I typed it up in the obligatory format on an old Remington I retrieved from Aunty Glady, the very same Remington Dad had bought me for high school. After Mum died I had too much on my mind to worry about what happened to this or that. It was only years later, that on noticing something familiar Glady would say: “Yes, it is the one you had. You can have it back if you want.”  It was from Glady that Peter got the box of family memorabilia he told me about in 1996. He had been talking about family history and after learning about the box tucked away in an old cupboard, he mentioned it to Glady.

My story was set in the nineteenth century and featured a ghostly character named Dan Wheeler, a dashing riverboat gambler who lived life on the edge. In death, he set out to right the wrongs of the past and bring the two central characters together. In the mid ‘90s, when sorting through a whole pile of stuff in cupboards I came across my copy of that manuscript. I gave it a cursory glance before tossing it out as just another path I never got to walk.

Between 1976 and 1980, we were living in a pressure cooker and we all knew something had to give. Steve’s father wasn’t violent or anything, not like he was when Steve was growing up. He was just on so many drugs he just existed. He was always just there, like a giant black blob of negativity. When the eruption came it was totally unexpected. I had no idea where I would go, or how I would manage with three children, but when I didn’t go I thought I must have changed my mind, even though it didn’t seem like I had. That same afternoon I waited for Steve outside the newsagency like I did every payday. From there, we paid bills, did some shopping and when we got home he told his father to go. That night he told me he knew I was going to leave when he left for work that morning but couldn’t break through the shroud. Yet, when he saw me standing outside that shop, when he hadn't expected to see me, he said the decision was easy.

By the end of 1980, everyone was on the receiving end of Che’s rage. I gave up counting the number of times Steve and Che got into staring contests. I thought it ludicrous but whenever I took Steve to task for staring down a two-year old he’d say he needed to take control early or he never would. Che was intelligent and curious, and although I was painfully aware he was also exceptionally active, I wasn’t then familiar with the term “hyperactive”. He rarely took a daytime nap, and when he did it was for less than an hour which left me little time to gather my senses let alone actually accomplish anything. My art was an early casualty. With the girls, I could leave a half-finished canvas on the table to pick up whenever I had the time knowing it would remain untouched. Until 2000, the last painting I did was of the hay barn on the farm at Nanango. I satisfied my creative urges by designing and making my children’s clothes. When Hobbytex paints became popular, I used them to add embroidery-like touches to their clothes before moving on to their sheets, bedspreads and curtains.

Kristen’s ninth birthday was the first time in years we celebrated as a family without the pall of Steve’s father hanging over us. But by then we had another problem to contend with. Che had developed into a dangerously destructive and aggressive little menace. Thankfully, he showed no pyromaniacal tendencies. Once up and about, it was anyone’s guess what he’d get into. Mornings, however, were relatively peaceful because he loved watching Sesame Street and Play School.

At bedtime, he liked me reading to him although his books on dinosaurs were more Palaeontologic than general information and his stories more Hardy Boys than Golden Books. News of ADHD was still years away, but an incident involving his playmate across the road led me to an organisation called Dynamo and an understanding of hyperactivity. Unfortunately, Dr Benjamin Feingold’s theory that artificial colours, flavours and preservatives, as well as natural salicylates found in some foods and drinks, are linked to hyperactivity was not supported by the general medical profession. I was even berated by my own doctor for “buying into quackery”. From my perspective, the proof was in the pudding. For the next decade and a half everything that went into our mouths was home-made or contained none of the good doctor’s nasties. The results were self-evident. Gone were the days of having heavy metal chairs hurled at me from across the room, or having him sneak up behind his sisters with a rock, or having him bash the little boy across the road with a Tonka truck. Before we got to that point, however, we had one more battle to win.

Che's favourites, milky tea and oranges, were forbidden because they contained salicylates. Not getting his morning cuppa led to ferocious tantrums, but his general behaviour had improved in just a few days so I persevered. Regrettably, I hadn’t thrown out the last oranges we had as Steve liked them. Unbeknown to me, Che managed to get into the fridge and took one. He then managed to take a plate from the cupboard and a knife from the cutlery drawer. Under the obscurity of the back ramp, he proceeded to cut his orange neatly into quarters before eating it. When he had finished he came upstairs to demand his morning TV shows. With Big Bird and his Muppet friends to entertain him I was able to get on with my morning chores and do a little weeding. Thus it was that out of the corner of my eye I saw the plate upon which he had left his freshly quartered orange skins and the knife. I hurried upstairs to remove the remaining oranges and check on Che. All seemed fine and remained fine until 2:15pm when I put him in his stroller to collect Tamara from kindy.

I had a street to cross so when I stopped to check for traffic he got out of his stroller and started walking back home. When he refused to come with me I grabbed him by the arm only to have his body go rigid, like it did whenever I took him in to see Dr Nasser. Unable to do anything else I dragged his screaming, writhing body up the grassy footpath and forced him into the stroller. By this stage, I was crying in frustration, not knowing what I would do when I got to the main road. By the time I reached the Crèche and Kindergarten it was after 3:30 and his teacher, Mrs Osmond, knowing something must have gone amiss, kept Tamara happy with a storybook. She was a extraordinary woman.

  

Later that afternoon I was in the kitchen facing the stove, stirring a pot continuously as stipulated by the recipe. Che took advantage of this little fact and got into the cupboard. First he opened the honey jar and spread it over the floor. Then he emptied a container of tealeaves onto the honey. After mixing the two he proceeded to paint my kitchen cupboards, walls and floor. Steve, who was on his way home from work, said he said he could hear me screaming all the way down the road. His response was to pick Che up by one arm, give him a few solid whacks on his bottom and escort him to his room, closing the door behind him. He ordered me not to go in, no matter what happened, no matter what I heard – or didn’t hear.

When thirty minutes of ear-splitting screams suddenly gave way to an eerie calm, I stood outside his door fearing the worst. Steve made me sit down and refused to listen to my pleas. “You go in there and it’s over!” he said. “Do you understand?” I waited as the minutes ticked by agonisingly slowly before all hell broke loose. It sounded like he was literally ripping his room to pieces, and he was. The heart-breaking sound of pitiful sobbing eventually replaced the tempest until silence finally descended upon the house as fatigue overcame him and he fell asleep.

In the morning the devastation I found was beyond comprehension. He had wrenched solid timber doors from his old ‘kitchen dresser’ cupboard and his wooden divan bed may as well have been made from cardboard. His pillow and sheets had been shredded and everything else he could tear, rip, break or otherwise destroy was. But something else had happened too. The rage inside him subsided. Or at least we thought it had. In the years that followed, he was a vastly different child, one who seemed content to sit quietly in the background and menace no one. His fear of separation, however, became more acute.

Six months after we moved to Geebung I joined a ladies’ tennis group whose ages ranged from thirty to sixty-six. In my youth, I had been quite a good player with Dad as my coach and I won trophies in fixture matches played at the old Milton Lawn Tennis Centre. When I took my place on the court I wasn’t prepared for Che’s reaction. I had wheeled his stroller right up to the fence so he could see me, all the while reassuring him I wasn’t going anywhere, but it made no difference. No one could concentrate on their tennis so I left the court. The following week, the same thing happened. On the third week, after putting his stroller inside the court, he quietened down and allowed us to play in peace. This fascinated the others, especially the older ladies who had never seen anything like it before. After getting over our fears he might be struck by a wayward ball, we settled into the game, and that’s the way it stayed until he started school.

His first day at kindy was no different. I honestly thought he would be fine because he was familiar with the place and the teachers, and he knew a lot of the other children. I was wrong. I was walking towards the gate when he came out with a rugby tackle that would have made Wally Lewis proud. Whatever happened to him in a past life had clearly left a deeply embedded fear of being alone.

With the passage of time my interest in reincarnation fell by the wayside as I dealt with the day-to-day realities of my son’s current lifetime. Everything was hard, but shopping was a nightmare. I had to read every ingredient listed on every product and compare numbers assigned to different additives to a list of such numbers I got from Dynamo before I could put anything in my trolley. Meals had to be made from scratch using only natural ingredients from the ‘allowed’ list. I dealt with frequent rebellions but it was a different story at Christmas time. Then my children were the envy of the neighbourhood because they had “fete lollies”.

In 1983, I started yet another diet. I had been battling the bulge for most of my life although there were times when I was happy with my body. The first time was in 1969. The girls at the hostel nicknamed me “Calorie” because I religiously recorded every morsel that went into my mouth. By the time I met Steve, I had such a tiny waist I could wear some of my wilder creations and get away with them. It was a very different story in 1983. I kept telling myself that after three children I could not expect to have the waist of a nineteen year-old but I still tried. Then, one day I was given a bag of clothing. In it were two items I was determined to fit into. Both were pantsuits. Both were Size 8. I was Size 14.

To take my focus from food I wrote a short story which, like the earlier novel, had a supernatural theme. Something was trying to get my attention, but I wasn’t listening, just as I wasn’t listening to people who told me I was getting too thin. After conquering the denim pantsuit, I turned my attention to the other, a soft beige suit reminiscent of a racing car driver’s outfit. Even when it fitted me I still saw myself as fat when I examined my reflection in the glass-paned front door at night, the only near full-length mirror I had. Shortly afterwards, I visited an old friend from my days at Cribb Island. The first thing Lorraine said to me when I stepped from the train was not “Hi, Mary. It’s lovely to see you again.’ It was “Holy Shit, Mary! You’re skinnier than Michelle!” Michelle was the thinnest of the group I associated with at Cribby. I told her she was crazy. The moment of truth didn't come until two months later when I saw my reflection in a real full length mirror. My first thought was Gee, she’s skinny. Then it hit me. That's me! Then I realised that woman was me! I understand the concept of anorexia nervosa now but at the time, I had no idea I was borderline anorexia, or that it had anything to do with control. 

Tamara and me 1983

In 1984, Che started school at the same time as his friends because his Mrs Osmond had written to the school’s principal urging that he be accepted. He's far too intelligent to be held back, she wrote. He needed the stimulation school would offer regardless of his situation. My concern that he would be ostracised for being different never eventuated. His delayed speech did have an adverse affect on his reading and writing, but no one knew what box to put him in. His remedial teacher said he didn’t need her assistance and would “sort himself out when he was ready”.

Then came the day I was summoned to the school. I found my little boy trembling uncontrollably at the pool’s edge. His teacher said she thought she had seen it all but she had no explanation for this. There had been no warning because he had been looking forward to his first swimming lesson, something I could vouch for. He bounced around the house for a week beforehand, putting on and taking off his togs. All I could do was hold him, comfort him, reassure him it would be alright, that he wouldn’t have to get into the pool if he didn’t want to. He did in time, but it took years before he was confident enough to swim, and only then because he wanted a boogie board. So much about my son’s every day life overshadowed the events of that day which was why I was surprised to hear Ann-Ann say in 1996: “How does you son feel about water?”

Later that year, I decided to learn Che's namesake’s real name. I knew the “Che” in Che Guevara was a nickname. It came from the Argentinean use of the word “che” to denote “man” or “hey, man”. The word was used extensively during the revolutionary years to imply “The Man”. So it was that Ernesto Rafael Guevara de la Serna became known as El Che, and later, just Che. Ernesto … Ernest … Dad. I just closed the book and walked away. It was all the proof I needed.