Of Ashes and Rivers that Run to the Sea (6 page)

Despite my parent's disagreeable ways, life with them wasn't all bad because they had books. Lots of them. And although I had never seen books before I arrived there, they captured my soul from the very first moment I opened one. Julie had all the favourites like Rupert Bear, Paddington Bear and Winnie the Pooh, so I started with those. Not being able to read wasn't a problem – each page I turned was still a new and exciting discovery.

After I'd had my fill of Julie's books, I moved on to the bookshelves in the lounge room, and this is where my mind was blown wide open. Strange animals and flowers, flags of the world, a whale swimming serenely in an ocean of intense blue far above the shape of a tiny boat – I just couldn't get enough. And the books without pictures were just as fascinating. If I looked hard enough
the squiggles became patterns that repeated themselves in various ways and combinations, and these patterns were repeated in other books too. When we went to bed we were allowed to read for half an hour before the light went out and my choice was always a book with no pictures. When our father would sneak into my bedroom in the night I thought of those patterns and they entertained me while he was entertaining himself.

At the age of four I had the great fortune to go to a playgroup of about ten kids at the home of a woman called Mrs Roberts. She had the usual sandpit and cubby-house and other toys, but she also had a heap of kids' books and she read a story to us every day. This was the first time I'd associated books with the spoken word because at home we had to look at our books in silence as our mother believed that children should be seen and not heard. But Mrs Roberts wasn't like our mother and she was very happy to point out to me the association between the squiggles and speech. This was such a defining new discovery in my life that I still remember an almost audible click when it sank into my brain.

After the joys of playgroup came school, which was even better. Here I learnt how words were put together, and the crazy rules of the English language, and after that reading just happened. I opened up a book one day and realised that I could read, and after that the world became a bigger and better place.

I think our mother suffered from depression. Apart from her bad temper she hated Julie and I doing things that would disturb her cocoon of silence, and the noise that topped the list was farting. It provoked a terrible sense of outrage in her and an inquisition to determine the offender (even if it was obvious) was always her immediate response. I think this was done to shame the miscreant into desisting from giving a repeat performance. This was a bit of a joke as our mother was the worse one of all when it came to farting, her twenty-one gun salutes were a regular feature of our day. After the offender was named it was an immediate toilet jail sentence where Julie or I would be made to sit on the loo until we produced solid evidence to prove her theory that farting was the anal equivalent of the oven timer going off after a cake had been baked.
The perpetrator of a noisy fart could of course be identified fairly quickly but it was the silent killers that always gave her the most angst while we did our best to avoid detection. I was the victim of many wrong accusations as I couldn't pull off an innocent face like Julie.

The toilet was one of those old clunkers with the cistern up on the wall for a gravity-fed flush and a chain to release the water. To pass the time I would count the links in the chain and rearrange them into groups of twos, threes, fours etc., with the odd ones being placed either in the middle as a miscellaneous group or between the other groups to separate them. I practised my times-tables on this chain but could never confess to my teachers how I'd become so good at them for fear they would think badly of me for spending so much time in the toilet. I would also unroll the toilet paper and roll it up again to see how carefully I could do it, and look for insects to catch such as flies and beetles to let out through the gap at the bottom of the door. I liked to make up stories in my head as well and the next time I was back doing toilet detention I would add some more to the plot.

Although I did get up and move around, I did so at my own peril as I never knew when my mother would sneak up and fling open the door to see what I was up to and then castigate me if I was not positioned on the loo waiting to be relieved of my burden. But sitting on the toilet for so long wasn't easy as my arse was too small
for the seat and it would hang into the bowl while I leant forward to counterbalance myself so I wouldn't end up in the water. This put pressure on the backs of my knees which became quite sore after a while. On a few occasions I was rudely awoken when she found me asleep bent in half in the toilet. I was also found curled up on the floor. She suggested once that I put my time in the toilet to good use and pray which I thought wasn't a bad idea. But when my prayers to have a quick crap went unanswered I gave up on the power of God to help me out and hoped for a good old miracle instead. If I did manage to provide our mother with the object of her desire I had to fetch her so she could inspect it before flushing it away.

Mealtimes were never a means of escaping from the toilet as our mother thoughtfully put my food aside until my digestive tract had complied with her wishes, but if I ended up being unproductive I would be sent to bed with an empty stomach to remind me of how lucky I was compared to the starving kids in Africa. I could never work this one out.

But with every rotten situation if you look hard enough you'll find a good side and it was while stuck in toilet hell that my mental gymnastics forged new creative pathways in my brain. I could memorise entire story plots that never needed to be written down, I became a whizz at maths and spelling, I built mental images of Lego towns brick by brick, I could identify different birds outside the window
by their songs. So although my incarceration was literally a pain in the arse, I can now see that it was time well spent as I acquired all manner of skills that I would probably never have otherwise.

Our mother had her own unique way of looking at the world. She had a lot of opinions that didn't make sense to me but I just learnt to nod my head and go along with them. Like her habit of trying to make me eat white chocolate. She had the belief that because I was brown I had to eat white chocolate but because the rest of the family were white they ate brown chocolate. I hated both types of chocolate, in fact I hated sweet things and this was something that she could never fathom. I got around this tricky issue by pretending to be a good Christian and donating my chocolate to friends at school.

She also had a habit of trying to curl Julie's straight hair with rag curlers and force my curly hair into straight tresses by brushing it while it was wet and slathering it with anti-frizz gunk. Neither worked and although she obviously
got some enjoyment from pulling our hair around, it did nothing to improve our looks or tempers. I loved how my hair would defy her and spring back into place causing her no end of anguish and how Julie's would flop as soon as she took the rags out.

Our mother was adamant that there were no such things as ghosts, but Sister Damien had some very different ideas about that and had explained to the class that there was a thing called the Holy Trinity and it was made up of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. When I told our mother about this ghost that went to mass every Sunday she took her usual stance and condemned the idea outright. Although our mother was usually pretty good at convincing me of things with the pink fairy wand, for the first time I found myself doubting her and believing Sister Damien instead. After all she was a bride of Christ and her lines of communication to the holy beings such as God or Jesus or angels would have been a bit stronger than those of our mother, no matter how much time she spent on her knees. When I asked Sister what this Holy Ghost looked like she said she didn't know, so it was certainly a welcome surprise when I was sitting at the doctor's surgery waiting for Julie and our mother to come out of their appointment that there in my magazine was a picture of a whole bunch of ghosts. They were wearing sheets over themselves just like Casper the Friendly Ghost and there was a burning cross behind them like the Archangel Gabriel with his
flaming sword or trumpet, or whatever it was. I ripped out the page and wasted no time in showing it to Sister when I got to school the next day. No one can take a photo of the Holy Ghost, she said dismissively as she unfolded the page and had a good look. Her face twitched a bit while I fidgeted on the spot in anticipation, a habit that galled our mother but one I had great trouble controlling for some reason. Sister was usually good at letting you down gently so I was shocked when she said these weren't ghosts, they were bad men who killed black people. They were called the Ku Klux Klan.

And so began a time in my life when fear was not a temporary and passing condition dependent on the whims and moods of my parents, but an all-consuming one. After Sister's revelation I would find myself scanning the streets for the Ku Klux Klan as we drove somewhere or went into shops. Picnics and school excursions became a nightmare as I constantly scrutinised my surroundings for men dressed in sheets. Then one night when I woke up in fright to our father's hand going up my nightie I realised that I didn't have to be afraid of the Ku Klux Klan lurking somewhere out there in the big world because I had enough fear to contend with in my own house.

Although I enjoyed some of the stories of the Bible, like Adam and Eve getting turfed out of the Garden of Eden or the three wise men bearing gifts, there were some that didn't make any sense and these only served to increase my doubts about the Catholic faith. Stories like Jesus walking on water and turning water into wine just didn't seem possible. And what made them even harder to accept was that the image of Jesus I had in my head had at some point become synonymous with the dad of my friends Denise and Karen. Denise and Karen lived across the road with their mum and their dad, who worked at a television studio, would sometimes visit. He was skinny with long black hair and beard, and a face that looked like a piece of creased-up paper. His hands shook incessantly especially when he was trying to light a cigarette, and his eyes were dark and
looked like empty holes in his head. He was always jittery which Denise and Karen's mum said was because he drank too much. Our mother said Denise and Karen's mum drank too much too, but in my opinion she was nowhere as bad as he was. If I was playing inside with the girls when he arrived I always knew it was him because he revved the car up the driveway and I could hear the clink of wine bottles when he came in the front door. He never turned up without wine, which he and the girls' mum would then get stuck into if she let him kiss her when he arrived, or he would drink alone if she was in a bad mood and didn't kiss him. When he left he would swerve all over the road and their mum would say he was playing the fool. I know now that he would have been blind-drunk. Sometimes he would yell at their mum and other times he would be crying and on his knees in front of her like he was praying. When he wasn't doing that he would be spewing and Denise and Karen's mum would send them over the road to our place so they wouldn't see their father making a tit of himself. Whenever Sister or Father mentioned Jesus of Nazareth in church or in our class I would always picture Denise and Karen's dad wandering around preaching in white robes or walking on water with one cigarette in his hand and a glass of wine in the other. I could never get that image out of my head.

Religion was not an easy concept for me to accept because of the many anomalies it presented, such as God
being the father of Jesus. If Joseph was the father as well where he did fit in? And who was the Holy Ghost – as a ghost he would have had to have been a human once. And how did Jesus walk on water or had the witnesses to this phenomenon been drinking too much of the wine that he'd cleverly changed from water? When I asked Sister about all these things she would tell me that I had to have faith but somehow it just never worked for me.

The end of the school year was always an exciting time when we made Christmas decorations and did our school plays, but my favourite event was the poster competition. Each kid would draw a poster that celebrated the birth of Jesus. The winning class entry got a big box of Maltesers to share and the overall winner got a Bible. Neither prize particularly excited me but the thought of showing off my drawing talents got me all fired up as I was convinced that I would win. We were allowed to take our pieces of cardboard home for the weekend to work on them. Julie had the best set of colouring pencils so I made sure that I didn't get her upset so I could use the vast range of colours she had at her disposal. I had decided I would give my prize to our mother, as anything I could do to curry favour with her had to be a good thing.

On the Monday morning we lined up in our class groups and Father who was the judge walked along looking at them with a grave expression. As he and a nun got closer to me I had a massive attack of butterflies in my stomach.
When I got too excited I would throw up which pissed our mother off, especially if I did it on my clothes before a party. But I held the contents of my stomach in and then they reached me and I stood there proudly waiting for their verdict. Father and the nun looked at each other for a few moments and then at me. For a hundredth of a second I took that pause as a yes, I'd won, but then Sister's eyes clouded over and her mouth crinkled into an ugly shape and hard words like ‘bold' and ‘wicked' came flying out like stones being thrown into my face. I was ordered to stand at the front and show everyone my poster with ‘Happy Birthday Jesus' written in lovely red letters across the top and balloons and streamers and piles of presents with bows. There was a birthday cake with candles and food and drinks. From my position at the front I could see everyone else's posters – nativity scenes and wise men on camels and proud Marys and Josephs looking at their newborn son. It was unfortunate that there was no room for imagination in this stuffy school but still I went home that day thinking that mine was the best poster.