Rose Boys, page 5
Tutored by Robert’s girlfriend Terry Yewers, I was also smoking off-stage. I had begun wearing scarves. Once, in Surfers Paradise, I was wearing a red piratical one when a street artist drew my portrait. Showing it to my father later, I pointed out the scarf, explaining that it hid my long neck. Quite correctly he criticised me for my vanity—a rare reprimand.
My friendship with Barbara was precious. Soon after she returned to Australia I wrote in my journal, ‘Now I have met a person with whom I can forget my very wretchedness’. I was fifteen. Barbara was interested, opinionated and persuasive. As A. sagely observed, in her company one always felt compelled to modify one’s thinking to suit hers. A little sheepishly, I confessed to Barbara that I had renounced socialism for anarchism.
Barbara introduced me to Pellegrini’s, arthouse cinemas and the right bookshops. When Marie was away performing (like my mother she was a singer) Barbara and I often went to the movies. She took me to Five Easy Pieces and I held my breath during the fucking scene. I badly needed her to see my personal favourite, Visconti’s Death in Venice, and saw it with her for the fourth time. When I wrote my first piece of fiction, a woeful story called ‘Father to Son’, she read it sympathetically and showed it to a visiting Englishman, the first writer I had ever met, with the exception of Lou Richards, the title of whose autobiography, Boots and All, remains one of my all-time favourites.
Our talks, our endless talks, strike me now as curious and challenging. When I was sixteen Barbara predicted that neither of us would ever be happily married because we were too easily bored. She mocked me for wanting to go to university merely to satisfy my parents. She had graduated in other schools of life. When I told her that I would like to go back and live in Wangaratta, she laughed and said, ‘You don’t know where you’re going’. I fumed at times, but I always went back. We stayed up late one night talking about our families and all the ambivalence therein. We agreed that Robert was overly dependent upon my father. Barbara said that I had a harder time than most because of my family situation, and predicted that I would cause my parents anguish, just as my larrikin brother was doing.
Introverted adolescents are easily flattered by such forebodings.
With my mother, we went to the football and the cricket—any contest, really, in which ‘the boys’ were appearing. I was proud of my glamorous and extended family and wondered what people made of it. At Victoria Park we sat with the players’ wives and committee members in a kind of chook pen in the Ryder Stand. Collingwood, though still flagless, never lost at home, so those Saturdays were always fun—absurd and fanatical. When my father switched from Collingwood to Footscray and my mother, exhausted by football politics, decided to stay at home on Saturdays, I travelled to the unfamiliar western suburbs with Marie and Barbara in their white Volkswagen. Squashed in the back, I was hypnotised by the week’s gossip and by the cloud of cigarette smoke.
Both sisters adored Robert. We were all there that sunny day in 1971 when Collingwood won the cricket premiership at the Albert Park Oval. When Robert and the other players appeared on the picturesque balcony Mum urged me to join the throng. She said it mightn’t happen again. But I stayed on the grass with the ladies, listening to their talk. I felt sure there would be countless victories in the future. We left the revellers and saw Sunday Bloody Sunday, which elevated me to a new peak of sophistication: two men kissing in a hallway, instant coffee made directly from a tap, cigarette ash ground into the carpet.
On 14 February 1974—St Valentine’s Day—Mum and I drove to Wangaratta. We were on our own except for the dachshund, Sammy, which travelled in the back, staring disapprovingly at haystacks and livestock. Being an innate nostalgist, I always wanted to hear about our original move to Wangaratta, back in 1955. I couldn’t remember it, having been an infant at the time. Vague memories of putrid swaggies trudging along the Hume Highway were probably seeded much later, or dreamt. My mother, driving in her cautious way, reminisced. She told me she had dreaded the prospect of leaving Melbourne. Having left Tongala, with its ambiguous childhood memories, she probably disliked the thought of going back to the country. An astute woman, all too familiar with the intrigue and acrimony that beset football clubs, she must have known what awaited them in the recently polarised town, half of whose inhabitants duly shunned their sports store, funded as it was by the interlopers, the Wang Rovers.
Mum was also a creature of the city. Postwar Melbourne was a vibrant place for someone like Elsie. As a young woman she had performed in countless theatres and moved in a large, stimulating circle. During the day she worked as a stenographer near the Victoria Market. Then she married into a gregarious sporting milieu. She frequented the legendary Rivoli and Mario’s Restaurant. The last thing she desired was the claustrophobia of a small town, with a co-op for fashions and biannual visits from the Elizabethan Theatre Trust to look forward to (‘Rigoletto in Myrtleford’, as the old joke went).
But one thing solaced Mum as she set off for Wangaratta in 1955. She loved radio, then in its halcyon days. Radio was universal and inviolable. Even in Wangaratta she would be able to listen to her beloved ‘Nicky’ and his sidekick, Graham Kennedy. When she began to miss her old world she would be able to listen to a concert or serial or news broadcast. Elsie, whom I later dubbed ‘Reuters’ Rose, was addicted to the news. An hour without a bulletin was hollow, unfulfilled.
The first thing Mum did when she reached Wangaratta was to unpack the ‘wireless’ and switch it on. Silence and static greeted her. She had forgotten about the Great Dividing Range. There were no Melbourne radio stations: no ‘Nicky’, no Graham, no Jack Davey. The only station she could pick up was 3NE, the local one. It had just acquired a copy of ‘The Black Hills of Dakota’ to go with its other Doris Day records. It played them all day.
My mother sat on the kitchen floor and wept.
*
When we reached Wangaratta on St Valentine’s Day, listening to the radio, of course, we went straight to the Challmans’ house. Uncle Hughie, discharged from hospital, seemed cheerful, if weak. We sat in the kitchen drinking tea and eating Auntie Chall’s immemorial Melting Moments. I always loved returning to Wangaratta. I loved being back in Auntie Chall’s kitchen where the Roses and the Challmans had spent so many evenings together. I loved hearing about old friends, including a passing reference to a boy called Ross, the first boy I ever kissed. I loved the familiar dark cool of the Challmans’ house, with its floral carpet and porcelain figurines and seductive Sammy Davis Junior and Judy Garland records, which Marie had added. I wished that she and Barbara were with us.
Throughout the day old friends kept arriving to say hello. I didn’t recognise all of them. They knew me, though, and teased me about my height. They asked fondly about Dad and Robert. Within a few days some of them would be writing to us, using a different tone: those old, refractory phrases. We discussed a recent murder near Wangaratta. Murders are always gripping in country towns. This one was too stupid, too gratuitous, to be forgotten. It had happened a few summers ago. A fourteen-year-old girl—Ella was her name—was walking her Alsatian beside the Hume Highway one morning. Her family had stopped for a drink on their way north. Ella was mature for her age, blonde, leggy and attractive. A local, driving along the highway, spotted her, was ‘reminded’ of his estranged wife and shot her with his rifle. She died beside the road.
Mum and I remembered it well. We knew Ella. Her family, recent immigrants from Scandinavia, had lived near us in Lemana Crescent. I recalled the police arriving on Christmas morning to ask Dad a few questions. I had met Ella once or twice. Not long before her murder she had knocked on our door and politely warned my parents that she was organising a Christmas party. I was far too awed by Ella’s beauty to speak to her. I was similarly dazzled by her handsome brother, Erik, and by the way his name was spelt. Both of them had the sort of classic good looks that always rendered me speechless with shyness. After the murder the family remained secluded, but now and then, around dusk, I saw Erik walking the Alsatian, profoundly sombre.
The insanity of Ella’s murder riveted us in the cakey kitchen. Later Mum and I asked about friends, shopkeepers, the Wang Rovers. I kept looking at the high, exposed cabinet. Installed by some local carpenter, this rose to the ceiling and was full of Auntie Chall’s impressive collection of teasets and dinner services—one for every occasion. It was like a mini-museum, florid and frangible. The cabinet was leaning over as mesmerisingly as ever. Ever since I was a boy I had been privately waiting for it to collapse. No one else commented on its Pisan tilt, so I said nothing. It was the slowest disaster in history.
Gingerly I removed some plates from the perilous tower. I have no idea what we ate for dinner, but Uncle Hughie no doubt spurned dessert and called for The Tasty Cheese. This aromatic rite had always fascinated me as a child, inured to processed cheddar. I thought Uncle Hughie sophisticated to the point of tetchiness.
Evidently people were tired and we all went to bed ‘at about 11’.
Sammy woke me around two in the morning, wanting to be let in. Sammy was a highly intuitive dog, with a pedigree as long as a Remington ribbon, as Henry James said of his dachshund. Soon after—I didn’t hear the telephone ring—Auntie Chall came into the room and said, ‘Peter, you’ve got to get up. Robert’s had an accident. You’ve got to go home.’ Her voice was grave. She had never sounded like that before. I felt sure Robert was dead. It had happened, after all, the horror we are always half expecting in life. Now we had to hurry to its side.
Instantly there was terrible activity in the dark house. My mother was already up, dressing. She too had been awake when the call came. Perhaps it was the heat that woke her. But she had felt an odd premonition before leaving Melbourne. She had gone into Robert’s old bedroom and looked at some mementoes. It occurred to her that if anything happened to me she would have ample memorabilia—all my silly cards and poems—but that if Robert were to die she wouldn’t have anything to remember him by.
We packed our things, not speaking to each other. Weirdly, I washed my face. Mum told me to hurry up and we went out into the night. There was no light in the small garage at the end of the drive and Mum became frightened. I didn’t know how to drive then (and would delay learning for another decade because of what happened), so Elsie, a nervous motorist at the best of times, had to drive back to Melbourne. We squeezed into Dad’s big powerful lime-green Ford. Reversing down the narrow drive we hit the wall twice. Uncle Hughie, in his dressing gown, had to scamper out of the way. Then we had to get out and clean the windscreen, which was encrusted with insects. We all moved around in silence, saying nothing. Finally, jerkily, Mum and I set off.
It was still hot. Locusts were everywhere. All night they rushed at us, smothering us. My mouth was dry. Mum wept occasionally but mostly we talked about the surprising volume of traffic on the Hume Highway and the suicidal locusts. Tacitly, we knew we had to maintain some sort of conversation. Mum sensed that I was nervous about her driving. Knowing that Robert might already be dead, she said to me, ‘It’s all right, I won’t lose another son’.
We ticked off the familiar towns along the way: Glenrowan, Benalla, Euroa, Seymour. The bypasses we all take for granted hadn’t been built yet, so we drove down the empty, flickering main streets. Away from the towns, the semitrailer drivers, as if knowing we were in a hurry, kept indicating to my mother when it was safe to overtake. Elsie had rarely overtaken anyone in her life. On the few occasions when she had, after much deliberation, overtaken a slowcoach, Robert and I, sitting in the back, would congratulate her and we would all breathe a sigh of relief.
My mother had been told to go straight to the Austin Hospital in Heidelberg. I was too callow to know what that might signify, though I did wonder why Robert had been moved from Bacchus Marsh, where the accident had happened, to the Austin. But Elsie knew where she was going, and why.
It was 4.30 a.m. when we arrived. As we neared the ugly hospital on the hill I decided that if Robert was dead I wanted to deliver the eulogy, possibly a strange wish for a young brother.
We left Sammy, oddly quiet, in the car and went to Casualty, where a pleasant nurse directed us further up the hill to Ward Seven. When we reached the waiting room Uncle Kevin was there to greet us. Terry or someone must have rung him, in Dad’s absence. I was relieved by Kevin’s facial expression. I knew immediately that Robert was still alive. But Kevin looked startled when the doctor, duly alerted, came out and spoke to us. Kevin’s prominent jaw was quivering. He was obviously deeply shocked. The doctor introduced himself as David Burke, head of the spinal injuries unit. I seemed to be having trouble hearing or comprehending what was being said. Then my mother broke down and the doctor began consoling her. Kevin, a pragmatic man just like my father, said, ‘He’s all right in himself’—a phrase that would always fascinate me, one for the philosophers. Kevin told us that Robert had taken the news exceptionally bravely. Then I heard the words that Robert would never walk again, and I too started crying. I slumped on a bench away from the others. Mum remembers me sliding along the bench and cowering in a corner with my face averted. Fat unavailing tears fell on the polished floor.
But then my mother shocked me. ‘It would have been better if he’d died,’ she said. For the first time in my life I snapped at her. ‘That’s a terrible thing to say,’ I reprimanded her. She looked at me benignly and said nothing. I was eighteen. I had no sons of my own. I had never nursed anyone. I had never been nursed. I had no idea what quadriplegia meant. I couldn’t even spell it.
We never mentioned it again.
In the years that followed we all wished they had broken the news to us differently. Mum, as we would learn, had reason to. If only they had had more time or better resources. If only they had prepared us a little, sat us down, taken us into a private room, given us a drink after the journey. Mum had been driving all night. Almost forgotten in the crisis was the fact that she had had major surgery six weeks earlier and was still recovering.
Yet there were reasons for Dr Burke’s sense of urgency and candour, however confronting. Apart from the fact that his main responsibility was not our equilibrium but keeping my brother alive (for Robert’s survival was by no means assured that night), Dr Burke and many of his peers believed that directness was preferable to evasions or euphemisms. The relatively new director of the spinal injuries unit, then in his mid-thirties, had trained in Britain with a pioneering surgeon in the field who insisted on being frank with patients and their families, even at the outset. Dr Burke had previously worked in America where he was disturbed by the misleading promises made by some neurosurgeons, and by the dismay of quadriplegics and their families months later when they failed to regain the use of their limbs. He thought this deeply irresponsible. So Dr Burke was frank with Robert when he was admitted to the Austin, just as he was forthright with us.
When I visited Dr Burke in July 2000, he admitted that this policy was not without its critics. ‘It’s a bit controversial still,’ he told me.
We were sitting in a small office near the reception desk at Ivanhoe Manor in Melbourne, where he helps road accident victims cope with quadriplegia and head injuries. I had sat outside for a few minutes, waiting to renew my acquaintance with Dr Burke, whom I hadn’t seen since 1974 and by whom I had always been somewhat intimidated. The reception desk was clearly the busiest part of the hospital. It was almost five in the afternoon, always a hectic time in a hospital. Dinner was being served and patients put to bed. I watched a boy of eighteen or nineteen trying to use a public telephone, assisted by an aide, all his movements twisted, uncontrollable. I kept thinking about him during my interview with Dr Burke as sounds of laughter, coins being changed, patients chided or placated, penetrated the thin walls. I thought of Robert, who had spent more than half his life in institutions of this kind: frenetic, rackety, always vaguely hysterical.
Dr Burke elaborated: ‘There are people who feel you shouldn’t give people that sort of bad news straight off. I always believed, and it was taught to me by my predecessor, that it was more important to be honest with patients and with the relatives right from the start. Tell them the truth, as much as you can, but deliver it in a kind way, without being too blunt. But don’t give them false hopes.’
I presumed that Robert, being the sort of laconic person he was, would have welcomed the truth. Dr Burke generalised in response: ‘You don’t necessarily give them the whole story first up. You’ve got to tailor it to suit individuals a bit. With some relatives you just know they’re not ready to hear anything very much that first time. But you don’t tell them untruths, you don’t make false promises, and you don’t tell them something you know is just not true—because you’ll get found out and then you lose them forever.’
Cautiously I said that those interviews—imparting the terrible news to patients once or twice a week—must have been difficult, notwithstanding professional experience and exigencies. He must have done it hundreds, even thousands, of times. I wondered where Dr Burke was when he got the news in February 1974. He too must have been rung up that night, called away from dinner or the theatre or the Lancet, to be confronted by ‘just another of our crashes’, more maimed promise in the sixty-second bed, never empty for long. The director of the unit was always notified first.
