The Road from Coorain (17 page)

I was awakened by a loud knocking at the front door, after what seemed like a night of sleep but was in reality only a few hours. I was accustomed to slipping down to open the door for my brothers, who sometimes forgot a key, or had had too lively a party to open the door with ease. My mother always slept on her good ear and was unwakeable, so banging at the door did not alert her to the hours her sons kept. This night, expecting Barry, I found a young policeman standing nervously in front of me. He asked first for my father, then for my mother. When I said I wouldn’t wake her until I knew what was the matter, he took a sheet of paper from his pocket and read in a monotone. “I regret to inform you that at approximately 11:40 p.m., there was an accident to the vehicle in which Robert Ker was a passenger. He was thrown from the vehicle, suffered severe head injuries, and
was taken to Penrith Hospital. He died there at 1:53 a.m., having never recovered consciousness. You may learn further details about the accident from the Parramatta police at this number. His body is at Penrith Hospital, and you are asked to make arrangements to remove it as soon as possible in the morning.” He handed me the piece of paper, avoided my eyes, and asked if I needed further help. “No,” I said, “I think I’ll wait a little while before I tell my mother.”

After he left, I was overcome by the need to do my grieving privately for a while. I wanted to sit alone and take it in. I also knew it would be a long time before my mother slept peacefully again, and thought she would need her rest for what was awaiting her tomorrow. I sat in the dark in the living room, thinking very clearly. This time I knew no effort at committing a loved face or voice to memory could arrest the passage of time. There would be a time when I couldn’t recall his voice and his laugh at will. I might live on a large part of my life without the laughter and the joy he brought into it. As I took in the facts and imagined the battered thatch of golden hair, I felt a sharp physical loss, as though my own body were mutilated. I was literally glad to have time to take in his death alone. It meant that in my incestuous way I could hold on a little longer to something about him which for the moment was mine alone. He had been like the sun in my universe, and most of my aspirations at school and in my daily life had centered on winning his approval. Now there were not just my father’s wishes to be carried out in his absence, but Bob’s too. I realized I would always be trying to live out his life for him.

As the cold night wore on, I began to gather my wits and worry about Barry. I hadn’t heard him come in, and I dreaded the thought of giving this news to my mother alone. Finally, looking at the time, I understood that he must have come in hours ago. I stumbled frantically into his room to waken him and whisper the news. Downstairs, we sat together again, waiting out the night, just as we had waited out the day of our father’s death together. As the first light came, it struck me like a blow that the sun would
soon rise on a world without Bob. With the light we stirred ourselves and agreed upon a plan. As soon as dawn arrived, Barry would go out to a phone box and call our uncle. He would then borrow a neighbor’s car, collect our uncle, and bring him to our house in time to help tell my mother. There need be no waiting then. They could set out at once for the hospital and the police. While Barry went to make his phone call, I crept about the kitchen to make us hot tea. When he returned we drank it, our teeth chattering against the cups from cold and shock. After he left I settled in to wait, watching the sun rise, staring at the new day in frozen sorrow. We had thought there could be no greater grief than the loss of our father, but there was and it was upon us. I knew with foreboding how it would affect our mother.

Barry and our wonderful, reliable uncle arrived almost before it seemed possible that they could be at the door. I gave them hot tea while we talked in low voices, each of us putting off the time when she must be told. Finally he went upstairs. There was a long silence. Then he returned despondently, saying, “I hope I never have to do something so hard again. She’ll be down soon. Treat her gently. She’s in shock.”

Shortly my mother appeared, dressed and ready to leave. She looked like a character in a fairy story on whom a sudden spell had been cast. She said in an incredulous voice to no one in particular, “But he was my
first
baby.” We nodded and then they set out.

A
FTER MY BROTHER
Bob’s death, it seemed as though I had lost the capacity for emotional responses. Daily life was in black and white, like a badly made film. My trancelike state excluded music, feeling, color, desire. Although on the surface I was doing well, I was actually going through each day like an automaton. I was vice-captain of my class at school and I mastered intellectual tasks with the same ease as in the past, but they gave little pleasure. I knew that I would win several academic prizes at the end of the year, but they didn’t seem to matter very much. I gave up athletic competition because during the practice hours after school I was haunted by the knowledge of my mother, alone at home. I often came in to find her just sitting gazing into space.

I never touched the keys of a piano again, nor could I listen to music. When I heard something Bob had played or that we had listened to together I could not manage the feelings of grief that swept over me. Just as with our departure from Coorain, my consciousness had retreated to a great distance. It was hard to bring it back to earth unless I was concentrating every energy on some difficult intellectual effort. I came to love my hours of homework because when I finally sat down alone in my room with my books, I could get my mind and body together again, and escape the discomfort of watching the world from the other
side of some transparent but impenetrable window. At school I laughed when people told jokes and listened to the detailed descriptions offered by my classmates of the dresses to be worn at dances, or tales about the sweetheart of the moment, but I could not really participate. When we went to the theater, I sat physically in the stalls but was emotionally somewhere up with the lighting tracks and girders of the building. Well-meaning family friends tried to jolly me along, but it was no use.

Each weekend my brother and I would feign interest in some expedition or diversion so we could get our mother out of the house, talking to people, seeing scenery, doing anything but sitting alone, or attending the séances which had become her obsessive interest. If we were sad, she was distraught. I often wondered if it would be better to rend one’s garments and tear one’s hair to express grief. My mother was quiet, but frozen.

My brother and I had to contend with the fact that our anxiety-crazed mother now confidently expected that our lives would also be cut short by accidental death. A missed train or a miscalculation about how long an errand or a weekend trip to the school library would take brought us home to a trembling, white-faced woman who had been steeling herself for the inevitable disaster. We learned to exaggerate how long the simplest journey would take, and ourselves swung between sharing her foreboding and laughing nervously about it to one another. The fates had conspired to bring about the turn of events which brought her urge to control her children into exquisite harmony with her protean anxieties. It took great efforts of will on my brother’s part to resist her determination to control his every movement and keep us both close to home. For my part, I was too depressed to resist the demand to account for every moment, and too listless to care whether I was pressured to come home or not. Eventually, I even went compliantly to the meetings of the small society for psychic research which was my mother’s only distraction.

The society was a rich blend of eccentrics. The flavor of the two rooms where it held its meetings was as distinctive as the aroma
of a strong blend of very smoky tea; it was a blend of intellectual pretension mixed with suppressed longing. All conversations at the society followed a predictable pattern. A seeker for information would address questions to a long-standing initiate. Descriptions of psychic phenomena would follow, table rapping, predictions of the future, extraordinary instances of telepathy. At the conclusion of the conversation, the knowing person would roll his or her eyes expressively, implying that there was more to be learned for those so inclined. Newcomers would cluster earnestly about such figures of authority seeking enlightenment. Meetings would usually number twelve to fifteen people, women predominating. Some showed the hesitancy of the perpetually marginal. Others exuded confidence, wore colorful clothes, and generally behaved as if in the possession of important knowledge they were about to reveal to a waiting world. They modeled themselves on Madame Blavatsky and collected disciples. The few men were usually autodidacts, walking compendiums of unrelated information, opinionated, bossily talkative, and devotees of pseudo-scientific jargon. They talked rapidly of astral phenomena, the third eye, automatic writing, and a strange gadget called a planchette board which figured heavily in communication with the “other” world.

At the back of the room, we always found a group clustered around the medium, usually a person of startling ordinariness, who was treated with a mixture of deference and fervid curiosity. A few of the society’s members were genuinely bereft like my mother. For some, the quest to know the world beyond this life was a quest for a deeper reality which lurked below the surface of things. For others, the long catalogues of experiments in mind reading or telepathy offered a sense of power. They
knew
things other people were too foolish to recognize or understand.

Although I went along with my mother whenever she asked for my company, I had acquired habits of skepticism from my schooling and found it difficult not to crawl around looking for the mechanisms which had elevated the table, or to postulate
other explanations for the examples of telepathy always volunteered to end the meetings. I did not like the picture of reality which animated the true believers. It was one perfectly calculated to feed the anxieties of the gullible. Beneath and beyond the world of the senses seethed a world of spirit influences, causal factors in human affairs which were capricious, uncontrollable, and unmistakably nonmoral. While people discussed the dangers of malign spiritual influences, they also believed in a foreordained future which could be deciphered by those with “second sight.”

The group catered to the worst of my mother’s fears. Anyone could see that she was worried about the safety of her remaining children, something she undoubtedly communicated many times to her circle of fellow psychic researchers. After séances she would come home to report dire predictions about the future. There was one frantic occasion when her mentors had told her that we must not travel this weekend for there were bad influences afoot. Barry, imperturbable, set out for his planned weekend in the country with friends, confident that time and repeated proof of error would convince her of the folly of her anxieties. In this he never succeeded. For her, it was easier to muse about some unceasing supernatural war of good and evil than to accept the futility and meaninglessness of the accidental. Because she lived in a moral world of black and white which contained no grey shades of ambiguity or self-doubt, the idea of an unceasing war between good and evil suited her temperament.

Soon I detected troublesome signs that my mother’s friends in the society were beginning to call on her for financial help; would she contribute to enable some valued medium to get medical treatment for an ailing child? Would she help a valued expert in telepathy travel in search of a cure for back problems? The fates provided a comic deliverance before I needed to argue with her about these escalating requests. Help came in the form of the errant libido of one of the seedier male members of the society, who, to my fifteen-year-old astonishment, fell to caressing my knee amorously during the darkness of a Saturday afternoon
séance. My announcement of this turn of events caused my mother to take a harder look at her new circle of acquaintances. We attended no more meetings and the books on psychic research disappeared from my mother’s bedside table. But she ceased seeing other adults and relied more than ever on our company.

Like me, my brother Barry found it hard to develop a sense of purpose after Bob’s death. He went faithfully to car rallies, but the smell of racing fuel and the scream of tires didn’t have the same savor. He too lost the capacity to enjoy music. His work experience was no corrective. He moved from one job to another in search of something he could not define. The search led from journalism to an agency which dealt in British sports cars, to an automobile service center, where, along with standard maintenance, the owner’s cars were “hotted up” for road racing. The quest was evident, but the journey had no clear direction.

Just as we became incapable of really enjoying luxury, our economic fortunes soared. Coorain’s sheep flourished during a series of good seasons. Their wool was quickly sold at what seemed astronomical prices to clothe the armies being raised for the Korean War. To cap those high returns, the British government finally repaid Australia’s woolgrowers for the wool supplied below cost throughout 1939–1945. We were no longer just comfortable. We were positively prosperous.