"We were just all of us on the raft of the table": of mothers and children
Funny how things leap out. You’re not thinking about them, or about that part of your life at all. You’re not dwelling. You’re just living, one day, another day and then – Bang. Some scene or other rises up like the crack of a rifle and there’s the rabbit killed. Remembering all at once the past you thought was put behind you, being a kid and frightened half the time. Is what comes back to me. The whole mess of it – institutions, foster homes. The going from one place to another, trying this thing, the next - but then, oh look, there was this one house, wasn’t there? And the woman in it... She seemed more than the rest of them to be like a real mother. Is what I’m getting at, and remember good and proper. Because, most of the places, the people... Well. You let yourself forget.
But Mam was a bit crazy and not trying to act like she wanted you to need her - is what made her different I guess. All of us thought she was pretty special. She gave us the look, you know: You’re my darling only, and had this word for us, that we were her shakies, all ship mates on some adventure or other. “Come here, me old shakies” she’d call out and we’d answer back, “Ah no, get off! Get out!”, but still we wanted to be close and she knew we did. It was our routine. There’d be six or seven of us living with her but she had the time for each of us in turn, as though we really were the only one. “Come here, you”, she’d be saying, after cooking or washing up or whatever, and we kids would come right back at her that we didn’t want to go and sit on her knee for a bit of quiet time and a chat but of course we did want to. We were young, I suppose, and not that tough. Little kids and pretty shaky alright, so Mam’s routines and her way of saying things... You don’t forget that stuff. Years have gone by and you’ve put it away so you won’t think about it, maybe, but even so. It jumps out.
That part of me, though, as I say – my life then and all the rest of it – is not who I am, I like to think. I’ve kids of my own by now, Donna’s from her first marriage, and she knows, my partner knows, where it’s at - calm as you like. We’ve been together seven years come this December, and steady, steady... A full ship on the sea, that’s Donna and me, and her never sliding this way or that. She’s an only and her parents are still alive. She’s got that, Donna has. We’ll go round there this Christmas like we’re always going around, the whole family out under the Macrocarpas on Christmas day and more food than you can imagine, all of us having a laugh. Because Donna’s parents... Well, even now you can just tell she’s still their special little girl.
And, sure, you might say there was something of that sort going on for the kids at Mam’s place all those years ago. You might. Six or seven of us but her house was big enough, and the foster people allowed it. That when someone moved on, or found a place back with their own family, the door would be opened up for the next in line. I can admit I liked it there. This was back before property took off and places like her’s well out of town were ten a penny and great for any kid. All that space around those kinds of houses then, before the developers got in with their subdivisions. There were the big gardens and the paddocks and what have you, like a world. That whole part of the country left to itself, you might say, and so much of it with the National Park outside your door and the mountain up ahead, all the sky. Of course I’d never want to go back to a city again.
So, yes, it was an easy set up and Mam was easy with us, is all there should have been to it. The way she made it seem as though we really were in a gang together, that we were her special crew. It was a pretty good way for a kid to live. She was generous about things getting wrecked and taught us about gardening, flowers. She had loads of cats. You could stay in the bath as long as you wanted, keep the bedside light on through the night if you needed it. And there were books, all kinds, and she never said oh this one, or no not that one. You could just read, whatever. Or watch telly. She didn’t mind about the stuff of rules, behaviour. And she was a great cook, always talking with us about what she was making and what we were going to have. Roasts and chips and pies and all kinds of puddings. She was easy with us that way as well, never making us eat what we didn’t like, only her own recipes, everything we wanted on our plate. That house of hers was mainly kitchen. Upstairs were bedrooms, the bathrooms - but her own room on the ground floor had once been a sitting room, maybe, so the whole place was set up as though it was for all of us, as though Mam had made it that way, as though she really had. And to be in that big old kitchen of hers with its bookshelves and the cooker that had a fire in it, sitting around, all of us, at this one enormous table...It felt safe. It did. Her “Come here, you” and our answer, “Ah, get off” but knowing she would gather us in even so, to be there at the table with her, to be close. We’d be hanging around, always hungry, wanting this and that, and Nan might be over there at the bench, cutting something up or mixing ingredients in a bowl, plums on the stove, or, sugar carrots, some kinds of preserves, whatever. She might be looking out the window talking back to us, the radio on. That room was where everything happened. And the table, that table of Nan’s in the middle of it all... It was like a raft. It was like living your life there.
At tea time we’d all be sitting down together at at that table and there was room enough, you could always move over and let someone else in. It seemed some kids were always there. One boy, much older than me, was forever drawing. Pictures of buildings, the insides of them. Churches. His papers were all piled up at one end and we didn’t have to clear them away. The girls over on the other side of him would be painting their nails and going through magazines: I like her, No I don’t like her. There’d be talking or not talking. Homework, doing that. Or not being able. You could do whatever you wanted. There was this girl I quite liked who wrote tiny poems on pieces of cardboard and made them into little boxes, and she’d be there, colouring and gluing, writing away. Mam didn’t make anyone stop whatever it was they were up to when it was time to eat, but we all did stop. Because she sat down then and we really were like her family, gathered around. Her saying to us, “Ok, here we all are, me old shakies”, and “Isn’t this nice? “ Like saying grace, kind of. Like my in-laws do. Only not the same because... I trusted the table. Even now, I find myself thinking about it, though I know I can’t trust it, and that none of this is really a sure memory of anything that went on for me back then, when I was a kid. Still, it was nice, like Mam said it was. To be there, sitting there. I thought so. Everyone came and went at that house, we kids came and went, and though I never really developed the habit, you might say, of intimacy, that old woman seemed to have made something that would hold us and that it would last. Her saying “Let’s have a good look at you, eh?”, in the midst of all the coming and going, and getting you up on her knee for a chat. I can remember exactly the feel of the big arms, the bony leg under the cotton dress, winter or summer, the man’s cardigan she wore if it was cold and me sitting up there against its dark wool. Making things seem so... Yeah. Nice. It was another of her words, in that phrase, “Isn’t this nice?” She would be speaking as though to herself, “What are going to do with you, eh?” saying. “You old shaky- quake?”, and she would put her fingers through my long hair and draw patterns into it, braiding, and with a soft brush making a style, even. “You going to calm down and relax or what?” she’d say to me. “There’s nothing to worry about. Nothing at all.” No wonder, no wonder, stupid, I thought I was part of her gang. We all did. I was allowed to wear trousers and have my shirt off all through the summer and Mam would still call me pretty. “You’re a special girl, Shirley” she used to say. “Don’t let anyone talk you out of it.”
But talk does talk, and that means it shifts and it changes. Mam’s own words did.
Bang, remember? A heart put out? Well that’s what happened there, alright. Because for sure and I know it, I have it in my history, those same sentences of Mam’s that let me in and held me close were also how everything got mucked up for me there, at that house - and I’ll never tell Donna, I won’t, about how that changed things for me. I couldn’t describe it. How, even though back then I might have liked to think otherwise – that there was a steady platform, a good floor to stand a table on – I know a great hole is there, in that kitchen, in Mam’s old red lino. It’s like a bulldozer’s come in. So there might have been all that braiding, and that “you’re special”? Special, nothing. You need to be able to hold onto what people say if their words are going to be any use to you and be something real. Descriptions of a life have to stay the same, see, or else they fall away - and I don’t have the first clue, me, about who I am, who I might be. Though I’ve tried to fix things, and some might say I do, making it up so nice with Donna and the kids and a job and all the rest of it, still I’ve learned not to trust words to have much in the way of truth about them. And I won’t tell Donna, I won’t. That just when I think I’m getting over any kind of remembering the past jumps out and I’m back in Mam’s kitchen again, falling straight through the floor of that same red lino, into the dark.
When that happens...Well. I leave Donna’s house then, I do. You might think I could avoid it, that I’d be busy enough not to want to be bothered but the hole opens up under my feet when I least expect it and I have to leave where I live then. I have to just leave it behind. With all kinds of thoughts coming trailing behind me – that I don’t owe Donna anything, that they’re her kids not mine... All of that kind of evil thinking pulling me away from everything I’ve built up, the life I’ve made with others who I care about. I just go off. I get in the car – and this could be any day or hour, before work, maybe, or in the middle of the day, once just after midnight and they were all out at a party... I just get in the car and I’m gone. I drive all the way up north, through that same old National Park, to arrive somewhere that’s, I guess, “in the vicinity” as they might say in the cop shows. In “that neck of the woods” for sure. Because though I never make driving round to find Mam’s old place part of the story, oh, I’m in the area, alright, I’m nearby. I book myself into some motel or other. I lock the door. I take stuff with me to make me sleep and I stay in bed then, for all the time I’m there. I stay in that place with the blinds closed and the door locked until I’m ready to come home.
And is it fear of being left behind or leaving that I’ve got? Frightened to be there, in that dark room, or of the house where I’ve come from? Frightened to be where my life is now, or back where it used to be? The motel means both, I reckon. That “You’re special, Shirley” ringing in my ears by now. Because... Special. That’s just another word, something anyone might say as easy as lie. Like Mam’s “Come here, shaky...” and being her shipmates and up on her knee for a talk and a cuddle. That whole story, it was none of it true. We were shaky alright, she got that part right, at least. A bunch of kids with no homes of their own, and forever coming, going. Shaky not the half of it, I might say - but still that old woman had us believing in what we had there, with her dinners and her tables, all her talk. Even now I find myself wanting to believe in it, even now. The sun coming in through the kitchen door when we sat down in summer, a fire in the Autumn and Winter and the lights on... Because who wouldn’t want to have that? To have it be part of who you are? Who wouldn’t?
But Mam had a kid of her own was what none of us ever knew - not until afterwards, I mean. It turned out she’d grown up years ago, this girl had, and moved far away and didn’t see anything of her mother – those reasons not my concern. Because why she wouldn’t want to return, or why her mother would never mention her own child... I can’t guess at it. I can’t care. Only that the old woman ended up hearing the full story, oh she heard alright, that her daughter had been sick and she’d been sick for ages, for months in one of the big hospitals down south, coming out for a bit but then having to go back in there. And all the time, through all of it, the operations and doctors and the treatments and the rest, she had never contacted her mother once, or told her anything. Someone had to come to the door, someone who knew her or knew someone who did, to tell her mother what had happened, some stranger, to tell a mother something she was never expecting. And sure, of I can understand how that must have hit hard. Getting that kind of news and from some person you’ve never seen before... It hits hard. Mam told us that, afterwards - trying to explain, I suppose, to make us feel better, saying she was sorry for how she’d been - but by then it was too late. The table had been overturned, so to speak, and I for one, wouldn’t sit down with her there again. I left her house quite soon after. I started acting up again, like I’d been before, all my old tricks. I made it impossible for me to stay. Because the hole in the floor... It gapes. And down into the bloody dark you go.
So it was that one minute an old woman’s got a houseful of other people’s kids sitting in her kitchen having their tea, having a great old time actually and imagining they could live this way forever, and the next it’s all over. Is the way life is, I reckon, and once the remembering has started up I’m back there re-living that one stupid night as though it might be the worse thing in my life and god knows it’s not the worst. But there it is, the scene of it, and playing out like a story that’s as unreliable as I am, the front doorbell going and Mam – and here I am still calling her that, “Mam” like she’s our mother, like she’s someone we might respect – she gets up from where she’s been sitting, “our Mam”, and she’s gone for a while. The rest of us are just carrying on, talking and having a laugh, having a bit of fun the way we always did, with jokes and all the rest of it and afterwards there’d be pudding and then clearing the plates away and getting out the chess or Monopoly or some of us were doing a bit of knitting, someone else saying, Put the kettle on, will you, where are the biscuits... Only the front door was a door no one ever used and she was gone for a while, our Mam was, so we should have known, shouldn’t we, while we were carrying on, making such a racket ourselves we couldn’t hear anything, be aware of anything, that something was up?
But we were just all of us on the raft of the table. And it seemed, for so long it seemed, as if nothing had happened to change that. Only the raft holding us, keeping us... As though it always would. It was a summer’s night, and nothing did seem to happen, did it? In my mind nothing did, and we are still safe, all of us, and on the raft and we will stay here together, a real family, you see, no time pressing in to take that away. Only to stay, stay in that moment, with all the other kids at Mam’s house and nothing happening around us to change it... Nothing...Until - after how long? It was a summer evening, remember, so hard to tell, light seemed to fill the room as though it would never leave but of course it would leave - Mam came back into the kitchen, she sat down at the table, and we must have stopped then, what we were doing, what we were talking about, we stopped. We did. We looked at her, like – what now? What’s happening? Only instead of her looking back at us, her gang there all together so she could call out to us and we could answer, instead of any of our routine, of her asking what it was that we might want or we might do now, or could think of or imagine, or what of anything, me darling shakies, might you need? What might you need? Instead of any of it she was quiet. She didn’t say a word. She didn’t even seem to notice we were there.
I remember the mighty stillness of it, that silence - none of her usual words to fill it, none of the things she would call out to us or ask or say that we would answer, “Ah, get off! Get out!” Only silence. Like the motel. That stop of time. That dark. A silence that lasted for – maybe a moment. Or a second. Or some moments. Hours. A lifetime. I don’t know. And then someone said – I said? – “Mam...?” And she turned, this woman, this mother who’d been looking after us for so long, who’d fed us and talked with us and had the time in her day for each of us, you know, each kid, and we loved her, we did, we loved her, she turned to face me, and slowly is how it seems, like coming into focus, looking at me but not saying “Come here” or “What are we going to do with you, eh, Shirley?” only instead looking at me as though she couldn’t understand why I would even speak to her, as though she didn’t know me at all. What I was doing there, sitting at her table, who was I, anyhow? And then she started looking around at all of us in turn, one after the other, as though she didn’t know who any of us were, any of us, this bunch of kids sitting at her table, who were we? Eh? Who? That was when all the safety of it, the table, the way it held us together, was gone. Only silence, the floor opening up. The gaping hole. And that anything could have been depended
on back there in that part of your strange life or now... Where the hell did that kind of thinking ever come from, eh old shaky? You belong in a motel, alright, with the door closed tight, sweetheart, if you think for a moment anything you might have or had once could be relied upon or needed. That a few words someone might say would be the whole story, that a sentence or two could have the power to make you feel safe and fixed in this world... You reckon you might have acquired that habit? To think the table was secure? That raft? Then you’re some kind of mucked up old fool you old shaky, alright. Words change, and you should know it. Words for comfort, words for joy... They shift and slide and they crack and go off like a gun. Turn into something else altogether and it doesn’t matter what you say afterwards to make up for it, to try and take back what you’ve said. Words change the way the world is, and they can do it in a heartbeat. You only have to open your mouth and speak
“Listen you kids, all of you ” Mam said that night, after the silence, after the stop of time in which everything that had gone on before was re-arranged and I would come to stop believing in the safety of anything that was said. “Get out” she said. She the one saying that to us, not us to her. Not, “Come here, you” and us answering “Ah, no, get off! Get out!” This time she was the one telling us, “Get out.” Everything was changed. “I can’t bear the sight of any you” she said then, and she picked up her plate and she threw it across the room. Then she reached over with one arm and swept all the stuff off the table straight onto the floor, the bread and the food and our water and her wine. “All this muck. All of you...” she said. “Out. I want you out. ” Her daughter was dead and now everything was broken. “Come here” could never return, to gather around. The plates were everywhere and smashed, and food and mess was all over the floor, but it was the words she’d spoken that were like a mighty storm that had overturned us, the glasses and forks and knives tossed on the sea as we ourselves were tossed and fallen and how do you climb back on again when the thing you’d been on is gone under? You don’t. You don’t climb on.
And so I have come to write about it here, of what happened to me at that woman’s house, how she spoke and how her speaking changed, and the bludgeoning of that, the damage - but I won’t tell the story to anyone, I won’t speak it out loud. How words told us kids that night, and in seconds, what we had until then not let ourselves know or else had made ourselves forget. That we weren’t ever part of Mam’s family, that all of it, the meals and the kitchen and everything lovely that went on in that woman’s house, for any of the children who ended up there, still none of it was any kind of real description. That night it was chicken stew with apricots. Sweetcorn. Gravy. It was the best kind of sticky yams and potatoes and dark sauce, and after, Nan had told us before, there’d be chocolate tart and ice cream, and a new board game she’d just bought for us to play... But those details, sentences, acts of care held close in their nouns and adjectives and their verbs... How surely, easily they get turned into nothing. Everything turning into nothing, then, and you don’t want to talk about that to anyone. You never will.
And of course I understand, I’ve thought it through. I’m smart enough. We weren’t hers. We were foster kids. And her own child was dead. I get that. How it must have made her crazy as it would make anyone crazy, learning the way she did that night from a stranger and all at once about what had happened to her girl... Of course I have empathy for that situation, I do, and can understand why it might have been the way it was. But it leaps out, what went on that one night, continuing to interfere with the way I see things, do things, believe. Reminding me that it ’s words, words, words that describe what you are in this world, old, shaky. They sound in the air. They create a direct hit. The table gets tipped and all the lovely things on it, they’re on the floor.
Next week's short story is from the superb new collection of short stories Kōhine by Colleen Maria Lenihan (Huia, $25).
