Home (26 page)

Patricia had always been fond of the brooch because it had been their mother's. When Daisy had packed her bags to go and live with Marcel, she'd seen it amongst Patricia's things and taken it. Daisy never wore it, she did not even like it, but it was a piece of their mother that she, not Patricia, now had. Even though she knew her sister valued it, Daisy never gave it back. She thought of Patricia now, of the attempts to make her happy, how she would sew dresses for her and admire her looks.
There is no one now who will forgive me and love me despite my faults,
Daisy thought, clutching the brooch in her hand. She took it to Pasquale. “Here,” she said, handing it to him. He looked at it, puzzled. “Patricia would want to be buried with this. It was our mother's.” She pulled Pasquale's hand towards her and pressed the brooch into his fleshy palm.

27

1982

T
HE ONLY CONSOLATION, Bob thought to himself, was that Patricia did not know about Pasquale's infidelity before she died. “That would have killed her if her weak heart hadn't,” he said to Carole.

Patricia's death was the most painful loss that he had experienced in his life. There would be no more talks in her kitchen, no more goodbye hugs when she would squeeze him tightly. She had always been there for him — when he was in the home, when he was on shore leave, when he felt frustrated with Carole.

His connection to Daisy had been severed when her pregnancy was discovered. He had not known at the time of Patricia's funeral that Daisy had become Pasquale's mistress — only the timing of Rose's birth revealed the sins of the parents. That Daisy had so quickly taken over Patricia's home confirmed Bob's misgivings about his younger sister and he could not bring himself to speak to her. Her betrayal of Patricia was something Bob thought he had to punish her for.

Bob tormented himself over not having been more forthright with Patricia about the dangers of letting Daisy into her home. He should have taken the same firm line with his sister as he did with his wife.

Patricia left a void in his life that he was unable to come to terms with. He worked more, slept less, took on extra shifts at the airport, became increasingly irritable and ate irregularly. The more Carole tried to console him, the less he wanted her to help him. The anger inside him seemed always to be just below the surface. The world was turning against him — the people who cut him off in the traffic, the woman at the cash register who insisted on counting out one-cent pieces, the bank that failed to credit the last payment on his home loan. Each thing seemed intentionally directed at him, making his heart and head pound. When his anger subsided, it left a pain in his chest.

By the time Bob turned forty-five, the pain was relentless. It made him short of breath. It became so unbearable that he went to see a doctor who, concerned, ran some tests and ordered him to hospital for treatment of a suspected heart condition.

There, under the anaesthetic, an old dream returned to him.

The old man stood on the other side of the fire, beckoning to him with his hand.

Through the heat haze, he could see the man's dark features and the white paint in thick lines on his body. His hand was held out to Bob. Bob did not feel afraid. He wanted to cross the fire. The man spoke to him. “No matter which way you turn, there is something that you are not facing.”

New, experimental open-heart surgery saved Bob from the medical condition that had taken his mother and eldest sister. He awoke to the months of recuperation with the same restlessness he had felt since Patricia died, but now he seemed to have lost something of himself. He constantly wondered about Danny — what had happened to him, where he was now? Danny, who would not have known that Bob had married Carole and was a father of two, nor that Patricia had died.

When he was finally released from hospital, his thoughts were still on Danny. He kept thinking of their time in the home, and decided to go back and see it again. He had not been there since he and Patricia had collected a sullen Danny. Bob brought his family with him, wanting them to see where he had lived; he thought of the irony of being with his wife and children in this place where he had first come because he no longer had a family.

It was Christmas, so most of the children had been sent to distant relatives or foster homes; the place was empty. When he explained that he had once been a student there, the superintendent gave him a tour a round the dormatories and grounds.

He walked into the large ward where he and Danny had spent their first night. The ward looked clean, painted white, beds made expectantly for when the boys would return after the Christmas holidays. The room seemed smaller than he remembered it, almost cosy. He remembered how Danny and he had slept together in the same narrow bed for warmth and comfort, younger then than his own children were now. He looked down at his daughter. Never, he thought, would I have imagined then that I would be able to create something so remarkable as children — little Kingsley standing with his mother near the door, and Candice standing loyally beside him.

“This is where Uncle Danny and I slept when we first came here. I would sneak into his bed to keep him warm. Well, I guess it was also to console myself, I was so scared,” he said to her.

While many things had changed — no more chicken coops and no cows for milk — some things were exactly as they had been thirty years ago. He could see the toilet block still standing and he remembered that behind the bricks was the place where he had kissed Annabel Stewart. Even now he could remember how good it made him feel to have Annabel be his friend, and the desire to touch his lips to hers. It was the same feeling he had the first time Carole had agreed to go to a movie with him, something he had not felt since Patricia died.

Walking back to his car, Bob looked at what remained of the stone wall. He stared, imagining a row of young boys seated there, looking hopefully down the road. He wondered what happened to them — Annabel, Benny Miller, Thomas Riley, Charles Wainwright, and Frank Phillips. Did they have families? Were they still waiting for someone to come along? Or were they like him, somewhere in the middle?

On the drive home, with so many memories swimming around him, one in particular seemed to haunt him. He kept thinking back to the day when Danny had stormed off the cricket field, hissing “I hate you” as he passed him.

Bob had no leads on where Danny might have gone, did not even know who his friends were when he disappeared. He had been travelling a lot with the Navy then, but when he was in Sydney, Patricia would be so worried about Danny, fretting that he was going out late, not coming home. Just as Daisy had done before she ran away. And Danny always seemed to be on one of his wild sprees when Bob was visiting, as if he could not stand being in the same house as his brother. He remembered the punch to the stomach Danny had given him, winding him and leaving a bruise. He had never understood that anger in Danny. But, Bob reasoned now, Danny would be an adult, and those boyhood tensions would be far behind them both.

Bob thought the best way of finding Danny would be to start at the post office. Painstakingly he looked through the phone books of every Australian state and territory for listings under 'Brecht'. It was over thirty years since he last saw Danny, but it took him only an hour to look through the directories of the major cities. Bob found listings for 'D. Brecht' in Marrickville and Turramurra in Sydney, Subiaco in Perth, Toorak in Melbourne, and Townsville.

The first number was a David Brecht. The second number was a Darren. The Perth number was another David. The Melbourne number did not answer. The fifth number was answered by a woman.

“Is Danny Brecht there?”

“Hang on,” she said, and Bob could feel the sweat rising on his palms as he held the phone. “Honey, telephone.”

“Who is it?” Bob could hear a voice yelling. He felt a chill of familiarity.

“I don't know,” the woman said patiently.

“Hello?” the voice asked abruptly.

“It's your brother,” said Bob excitedly.

The line was silent.

“Danny, it's Bob. Your brother.”

“What do you want?”

“Well, nothing. I was just ringing because I was wondering what happened to you. Wanted to get in touch with you. I've married with two kids since I saw you. My hair has turned grey.” Bob gave a nervous laugh. “I — I thought you would like to know that Patricia passed away about a year ago.”

“Why didn't you call a year ago, then?” Danny said.

Bob could feel the antagonism in his brother's voice.
He still hates me,
he thought glumly.

“Look, I'll give you my number. If you're ever down this way and want to get in touch with me, give me a call. If you need anything, you know where I am. Just ring and ask.”

“Well,” said Danny after a pause, “there is something you could help me with. I'm a bit short. Could you lend me some money?”

Bob was quiet for a moment. He wrapped the telephone cord around his finger. “How much do you need?”

“Well, five hundred would tide me over.”

“Five hundred,” repeated Bob. It might as well have been five million. With the medical bills from his bypass surgery, his lowered income while he was on sickness benefits and the usual pressures of maintaining a mortgage and raising two children, he had no spare cash. In fact, he was in the worst shape financially that he'd been in since he joined the Navy.

“Look,” Bob said, “It's not a good time.” There was silence from the other end, so he added, “I will send you up something to help out, though.”

“Yeah, thanks,” said Danny curtly.

Bob felt hollow after his phone call, as though his healing heart was numb. Danny had all but told him that he didn't want Bob in his life, saw him only as a possible source of money. He sat down in front of the television, the cricket on but the sound down, and opened a can of beer. He stared at the screen but thought of the dream that had come to him since he had been a small boy.

In his youth, the dream used to frighten him and the figure on the other side of the fire seemed threatening. The dream was a nightmare. But over the years, he'd become familiar with the figure and, although he would not cross the fire, he felt simply unable to move rather than rigid with fear. Since he had the heart attack, he had wanted to cross the fire — the figure was almost familiar to him and offered him somewhere to be safe. And in the dream, the man now spoke to him. “No matter which way you turn, there is something you are not facing,” the old man had said to him. And that is how he felt, more so after the phone call to Danny. So he left Carole, Candice and Kingsley to go and find out what it was.

Carole was unable to get out of bed for the first few days after her husband packed a few bags and drove away — “To find myself,” he had said to her. When she finally raised herself from her bed and focused on her children, her disappointment and hurt started to brew into anger.

She hadn't realised how Patricia was the heart of their family until she passed away. Patricia had always assisted her in minding Candice and Kingsley, had been her confidante as she tried to navigate Bob's moods, one of the few friends that she had whom Bob approved of. With Patricia's passing, she'd lost her best friend. Bob had been too consumed with his own sense of loss to notice his wife's grief.

Carole studied the job section in the newspaper and soon found herself a position as a secretary at a real estate agency, answering phones and writing receipts. Because she had not been in the workforce for such a long time she could not find work that paid well. She looked at the self-confident young men who worked as real estate agents in the office. She frowned upon their lack of ethics and their rudeness to her and the other women. She thought, I could do a better job than them. So she signed up for a course to become a real estate agent.

The shift in their circumstance was hardest on her children, who had been used to pretty clothes and new games and toys. Kingsley was growing so fast he needed new clothes every six months, while Candice needed new clothes all the time to keep up with her friends. Saying 'no' to Candice was hard for Carole; to a fourteen-year-old it would seem like the end of the world not to have the latest fashions. It was at these times that her fury with Bob would rise for abandoning her, for leaving her, after all his promises, without adequate means to support herself.

While she was trying to get qualifications for a better job and continuing to work during the day, the housework would fall behind. She had to leave the children on their own from when they arrived home from school until she returned. The gate would be left open, the house a mess, the laundry left on the couches waiting to be folded, dinner needing to be cooked. Carole sighed. She remembered how, when she was first married, there had seemed to be too many hours in the day. Now, there were never enough and so much work that the house and garden were always an embarrassment.

She laughed inwardly to herself at what the wives of Bob's friends would think if they could see how she was living now. She could make the kids do more to help, she thought, but she'd made a deal with them that if they were doing their homework, they did not have to do housework. They were getting good reports from school despite the changes with their father gone. As she looked around the mess in her kitchen, she thought wryly to herself that her ingenious plan to keep her children excelling at school seemed to have backfired.

“Candice,” she told her daughter, “never trust a man who says 'Trust me'.”

When Christmas came and the children's lists of wants grew lengthy, she rang the Aboriginal Medical Service and asked for the name of a family in need, and how many children they had. She then had Kingsley and Candice ask the neighbours for donations of food and toys while she asked her colleagues from work to contribute. The children took their task seriously, going through their own belongings for items that could be given. Carole felt a swell of pride as Candice and Kingsley sat on either side of the hamper on the train as though guarding something valuable.

When they arrived at the tiny tenement house in Redfern, her children turned shy. The woman who opened the door was skinny with long black hair. There was a black bruise around her eye. There was no furniture in the house except a table and three small chairs. This gave Candice and Kingsley some pause for consideration of their own situation. They were quiet on the train ride home, while opening the presents Carole had bought them, and during the hot dinner they sat down to that night.

At these moments she hated Bob. This was his first Christmas away from his children, away from her. She hadn't understood when she married him how deep-seated his lack of self-esteem was. She would sometimes say to herself that if she had known, she never would have married him — except, she would quickly remind herself, she could never be sorry for having Candice and Kingsley.