Life As I Know It (4 page)

We got up early even if we were tired. A good night's sleep was never guaranteed at Home anyway. Squeezing so many bodies into a few rooms was a bit tricky and there were many combinations of
kids in the rooms over the years. Dad often just slept on a mattress on the floor. I would sleep with my dad when I was little, but as I got older I kind of felt it wasn't very cool so I tried to find somewhere else to sleep.

For a while Stevie and I shared a bed but Stevie used to make this noise when he was falling asleep that would always keep me up. I remember waking him up and asking, ‘Hey, Stevie, can you wait for me to go to sleep before you do.'

‘Yeah, no worries,' he said. Stevie always tried to be accommodating, but then he'd go straight back to sleep, so I'd have to put the pillow over my head to try to block out the noise. That would be when I started looking for someone else to sleep with.

‘Can I sleep here, Therese?'

‘No, you wriggle too much. Go ask Maree.'

‘Can I sleep here, Maree?'

‘All right, as long as you don't wriggle.'

‘Okay, I won't.'

‘Stop wriggling!'

‘Okay.' But the more I tried the harder it was to keep still.

‘That's it! If you wriggle one more time you're not sleeping in here.'

It was so hard not to move an inch—my nose was itchy, but I figured if I did it real quick she might not notice.

‘Right, that's it, you're not sleeping in here.'

‘I promise I won't move again.'

‘Okay, but this is the last time.'

I almost always found somewhere. If not, it was back in with Dad.

Apart from Michelle, my brothers and sisters called me ‘Stinky'. It was one of those names that evolved. They started calling me ‘Smelly Shelley', and then that became Stinky. Patrick still writes ‘S' in his trackwork logbook when I've ridden a horse for him.
Even in front of horse owners he'll still greet me with ‘Hi Stinky'! So nice of him—I always give him a withering thank-you-for-that look.

Patrick and Andrew slept in bunks in The Boys' Bedroom. I remember for a while they used to make me sing to them. I'd sit amid a huge pile of dirty clothes on the floor and they'd say, ‘Sing us a song.'

‘No, you'll laugh at me, you always do.'

‘Come on. Sing us a song. Sing us “Mary had a little lamb”.'

‘No, you'll laugh at me, I know you will.'

‘We promise not to laugh. We promise.'

I'd give up and sing: ‘Mary had a little lamb, little lamb, little lamb,' and they'd laugh their heads off.

When I was five I started at Our Lady Help of Christians Primary School at Wendouree, on the Miners Rest side of Ballarat. It was a small, friendly school run by the Sisters of Mercy. We did all the usual subjects, as well as read Bible stories, and learned some of the Bible verses off by heart. I really liked Sister Chris. She was very kind. After school, when we were waiting to be picked up, we would visit her in the presbytery and she always gave us some Maori biscuits or something else nice. Sometimes we'd send Stevie in first because we knew how much they adored him and they would always offer him afternoon tea.

On the day of your birthday the nuns would bake a cake. When I noticed that my birthday was going to fall during the September holidays I went to Sister Chris and announced, ‘It's my birthday today!' A cake was baked and brought in to my Grade 1 classroom. Later that day Cathy heard the story and piped up, ‘But it's not even Michelle's birthday.'

I learned a lot at Our Lady Help of Christians. I learned that the Melbourne Cup was very special because on that first Tuesday in November the nuns would wheel out the old TV and we'd get to
watch. When I was in prep in 1991, my brother Patrick had his first ride in the Cup. He was on Sunshine Sally. I was so proud but I was also so nervous for him. I prayed that everything would go well and he would run a great race.

Patrick led all the way down the straight the first time and was in front past the winning post. But they had to go around again and Sunshine Sally led into the straight but then ran last. I was excited he lasted in front for as long as he did. Sunshine Sally started at three hundred to one and I got $1 from the sweep off my teacher for him coming last. I could tell then how important the day was, how important the race was, and I suspect all that added to my dream of one day winning the Cup.

That year the Cup was won by Let's Elope. She was a mare trained by Bart Cummings and ridden by Steven King, who wore green and gold diagonal stripes with a white cap. We used to have our own races at home—often the Cox Plate but other famous races as well. Andrew and Patrick played the jockeys, usually Mick Dittman and Shane Dye. Stevie and I were the horses—I was always Let's Elope; Stevie was Durbridge or Canny Lad. Sometimes Cathy would play too and she was Empire Rose, because she was so much bigger than us, and Empire Rose was a big mare. We had to crawl around on all fours as the older kids held onto our shirts.

Stevie always used to take off at a full gallop and would conk out in the longer distance races. We would do two or three laps of the rockery, or four or five times up and down the lounge room. I'd sit just in behind Stevie and sprint past him at the end. We tried to coach Stevie but he never changed his strategy. He couldn't help himself. He was like a fiery horse that wanted to go flat out from the start. It did work for him in the shorter races because quite often I couldn't catch him.

We all treated Stevie exactly the same way as everyone else. If we were playing Monopoly or a card game we all played to
win. If anyone treated him differently he would notice and get annoyed. You could see it in his face. The smile he usually had would disappear and he'd look both angry and sad.

Dad was always teasing and playing jokes on us. For a long time Stevie had a stutter. Often I was the only one who could understand him and so I had to interpret for him. But Dad wouldn't have it.

‘What are you trying to say, Little Boy? Come on, spit it out.' Dad would even make a joke of Stevie's stutter.

‘Little Boy,' he'd say, ‘tell us one of those d-d-d-d-doggy stories.'

‘Ahh, Daaaad!' we all used to cry. Yet we didn't doubt Dad for a minute. We lived in a crazy home of unstated affection, where there was love in the dust.

I made many friends at Our Lady Help of Christians and one of my best friends was Emily Hall. Emily thought she had a big family and she was the youngest of four. Apart from school we'd sometimes see each other at Mass, although the Paynes went to Our Lady Help of Christians on a Sunday and the Halls would go on Saturday night.

Emily came out to our house occasionally for a sleepover. She was very much a town kid and she used to say that coming to our place was better than going to an amusement park. She'd stand there bewildered as Payne life unfolded around her. There'd be horses in our backyard having a pick on the grass, horses in the next yard, horses in the paddock, and the older kids going in all directions doing jobs—riding horses, moving horses, Dad yelling, kids giving it to each other.

Whenever Emily came over I would look after her. Find her a bed, make her bed, and make her meals. I reckon there was only ever one thing on the menu: boiled egg with salt and pepper and toast. We didn't invite too many friends over. I guess we were a bit embarrassed about our crazy life and there wasn't a lot of room to fit in another body.

One day I decided it would be good if Emily knew how to ride. We could ride together.

‘Come on, Em, I'll put you on him,' I said as I fetched a horse from the little yard.

‘Do you need to ask your dad?' Em asked.

‘Nah,' I said. ‘It'll be right.'

When Dad spotted me leading the horse he went off: ‘What are you doing, Little Girl? Get that horse back in the paddock.'

I think Em got a huge fright. Eventually she just got used to the arguing, and the way we would just not hold back on each other. It was the Payne way. You couldn't be too precious about it.

Feeding the household was quite a task. Maree usually looked after the shopping and Therese cooked in those early days. She learned how hard it was to feed a hungry tribe within budget. While other kids their age were reading
Dolly
and
Cosmo
and watching
Melrose Place
, my sisters would be at the supermarket, wracking their brains, trying to find something that everyone would like. That was the time when Therese brought home a dozen schnitzels, back when not a lot of meats were pre-prepared—I think they had some cheese in them. We loved them at first, but as has become family folklore, we had them every night for a fortnight so we soon turned off them.

Margie tried to impose some order on the chaos. She had that sort of a mind and she would do rosters of jobs. But more time was spent negotiating the roster than actually doing the work.

‘But I always have to do that,' I'd complain.

Keeping things clean and tidy was nearly impossible, but eventually we'd just have to make the effort—usually triggered by everyone going nuts because we couldn't find anything, especially shoes, which we would fling at each other when we were fighting.

Margie would have us cleaning up the different rooms: the kitchen, the bathroom, The Next Room, and The Little Passage.
The Next Room, which was the living, rumpus and dining all in one, was called this because it was the next room on from the kitchen. It was a hub of activity and it would get into a real state. It wasn't too hard to tidy up—you just shoved shoes back where they belonged, clothes in the laundry, and the rest of the stuff under the couches and out of the way.

The killer cleaning job was The Little Passage, which got its name because it was the little entry hall at the front door. It was always a mess because everyone would take their shoes and boots off as soon as we got in the door from being at school, sport or working. Ballarat is drizzly wet all winter and so The Little Passage was always a repository for mud and grass and whatever horses left around the place. It was the dud draw in the cleaning lottery.

I always thought the carpet in The Next Room was brown but Therese told me it was actually cream. One day she thought we needed to have it cleaned. A man came out and steam-cleaned it. Dad paid him out the front and they got chatting. That was very much my dad. When he and Therese came back inside there was a perfect trail of hoof prints on the beautiful cream carpet. One of the horses had come in the back door, completed a lap, and walked back out.

We had a lot of laughs but in a household of so many people, tension and upset are inevitable. But as willing as it got during the day, we were a family who went to sleep after having sorted stuff out. Yes, we all stood up for ourselves, spoke our minds and had no trouble defending our positions. And we all seemed to think volume was the key factor in settling arguments, so it could get loud. Sometimes a barney would break out. Sometimes the politics and alliances of the day would put the house at war.

Stevie and I were always allied, even though we had no power whatsoever. The oldest girls formed a group. Patrick would be off riding somewhere, so he was out of it, but the middle kids—Andrew,
Margie, Cathy—were a force to be reckoned with. They were off building cubby houses or exploring, and we always wanted to join them, but they rarely let us. I didn't think anyone should be excluded from anything. I thought so many things were unfair, and I didn't like it. Margie always says she knew when I thought something was unfair because I'd tell everyone to ‘get stuffed'.

I would spend a lot of time with Stevie and we were always finding a way to have fun. We used to play cards a lot—Patience or Spit, which was a really fast game. We also loved playing a game we called offices. It wasn't really a game but we just pretended we worked in an office, taking phone calls and writing stuff down quickly.

As unlikely as it might seem, I also spent a lot of time on my own. I used to lie on a bed and think. Or go out into the yard and think. I'd lie in the paddock with one of our horses, laying my head on it, patting it and playing with it. Just me and a horse and the universe.

A
FTER HIS LUCK
with Our Paddy Boy, the horse Dad had trained before I was born, Mum and Dad had the good sense to invest the money they'd won from racing. This is when they bought two small properties: our house on a one-acre block at Ballarat and what we called The 40-Acre Paddock, about a kilometre down the road next to the members' drive of the Ballarat Racecourse. It was where we did our horse training.

But Dad also needed to make enough money to put the rest of us through school. He was a horseman, a trainer, but he was also a farmer. When I was nearly seven Dad bought a 250-acre dairy farm at Rochester. He thought it looked ideal as another way to make an income. While the older kids remained at Home to look after the horses, Dad took us younger ones, Margie, Andrew, Cathy, Stevie and me, up to live and work on this property, which we came to call The Farm.

It felt so different to have the family divided between Home and The Farm. It was much quieter up there. I really missed Therese's motherly affection and care. Not that Therese has ever been known
for being openly affectionate. She's still an awkward hugger now, which we laugh about. But to me she was like a mum and I missed having her around.

Not long after we moved there, and feeling really terrible about everything and rather lost, I decided to run away. Off I went, down the dirt road we lived on and away from everyone. I didn't get far before I stopped and had a rest under a gum tree and thought about things. A few hours went by. No one noticed. No one came looking for me. So I had to go back home.

During those years we were back and forwards between The Farm and Home. One day when I was about seven Stevie and Dad and I were on yet another adventure. We were in the old truck taking horses up to The Farm. Not far out of Miners Rest Dad went to use the brakes but we didn't pull up.