Sensual degrees of separation - Page 2
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 6: Our Global Face
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Jay Verney
Q: Why do we have cousins, Mum?
A: So you'll always remember how lucky you are to have your brother, precious.
QUITE A BIT OF WHAT I GATHERED ABOUT HOW THE WORLD WORKED from Maisie and from my own limited childhood observations had to do with the cousins I knew and certain other family members who drifted in and out of our house and our lives. They were exemplars, of something: chronic sunstroke from living too high up in our stilted houses? The criminal under-funding of our state's education system? The effects of consorting too often and indiscriminately at cattle saleyards with sad-faced, mad-eyed steers whose briskets ended up on our plates? Uncle Mick, for example, threw us out of our home, his home, for a few weeks back in the early 1960s. There was some dispute or other about Cate's care and the need for an extra pair of hands to help Mum occasionally. Cate was, after all, partially paralysed, and Mum, after all, had been her carer for 16 years altogether, on her own, with no assistance from her many other siblings. Initially, Mick refused to find the few guineas a week and we washed up in a flat near the railway station on the other, even poorer, side of town. That was my first inkling of Maisie's uncertainty principle. I didn't know then that my mother was the embodiment of Beckett's "I can't go on. I'll go on."
Uncle Mick was one of Maisie's siblings without children and therefore, according to her, without feeling, but there were several others, like her, who'd taken the risk, with varying results. I had a cousin with a "scar" on the brain, which meant she had "fits" occasionally, requiring hospitalisation. This was, I learned later, the way the family accounted for her very unhappy marriage to a man who worked in the GPO in Brisbane and before that, Sydney. He blamed her unhappiness – translation: severe, debilitating, endogenous depression – not on the problems within their relationship, but on where she'd come from: Rockhampton, the north, yokel central, which, in the scheme of things, wasn't so illogical for him. This husband was English and older than my cousin by a number of years. Brisbane was small and hot enough for him after London, never mind the melting visits to Capricornia, sweltering. He wore sandals and socks on the beach, and accessorised these with a knotted handkerchief on his balding head. He ground his teeth on a pipe wedged in the corner of his mouth. He had a handlebar moustache that grows larger in memory as I grow older. He was not one of us and he would never realise that the real north was the Far North, Cairns, the Cape. That was the exotic part of Queensland, of the country – closer to the Equator and more deeply affected by Torrid Zone influences. We were marginal to the Torrid. Things were more temperate in the central parts of the state, relatively speaking. Mild.
Southerners didn't seem to get that we'd fit right in below the Brisbane Line. We were just like them but they couldn't see that the true eccentrics lived up there, away, in a place that was actually hot.
Another cousin, Uncle Mick's favourite nephew, suffered from excruciating headaches in his teenage years and had had the misfortune to be born not wanting to be a butcher like his father and uncles and grandfather. His mother didn't like telephones, she was positively terrified of them, and she never thought it possible that if she took her son to a specialist in Brisbane, there might be a diagnosis and hope, God forbid, of a cure. If she was traumatised by telephones ringing and ringing, this woman of the bush, how could she not be terrified of cities and people? My cousin shot himself accidentally on purpose through the mouth one lonely day. His poor mother maintained the self-delusion (quite successfully, from all accounts) that her son slipped in the creek mud in his thongs, causing the rifle to flip at an awkward angle into his mouth and discharge. The rest of the family, if they ever talked about it – not often – conceded over time that the lad "just couldn't take it any more". Take what? I never got an answer and I was too young to remember anything about him. In one of his baby photos, he has very sad eyes, so I see now, with the benefit of hindsight.
A third cousin developed an obsessive-compulsive disorder over many years. At first, she picked real fluff off her clothes, but eventually, after being married to an Englishman for some years (yes, another Englishman), she took to fairly constantly picking off invisible fluff. Englishmen aside, I sometimes speculate on whether or not traumatic childhood incidents may have contributed to this cousin's anxiety. There was, for instance, the occasion when my brother cut the hair off all of her dolls and said, sincerely, that it would grow back, in time. There was the incident when he explained that he'd trained our dog, Toy – a small and lovable-looking but bitey mongrel – to attack my cousin on command, and that no one could predict when that command might come. Some may ask, what was wrong with my brother? There was, of course, the time when my cousin, then a teenager, was run down on her way to work by an off-duty ambulance driver on his way to work. She was comatose for two weeks and took months to relearn how to read and write, type and take shorthand. I used to help out by reading her the postcards she had sent home from her South Pacific holiday.
Q: What do you like most about Rockhampton?
A: Not being there.
THIS COMATOSE COUSIN WAS THE ONE WHO INSPIRED ME to take my first trip out of Queensland. She went to Fiji on a cruise ship when she was 17. The ship may have been the Oriana or the Arcadia, something like that. Posh, different. It was the first time any member of our family living in Central Queensland had travelled overseas, if you exclude our great– and great-great grandparents. In January of 1978, I exercised my adult right to travel as far as I could without actually leaving the family. I bought a wool blend coat on special from Woolworths in honour of the trip and flew to Melbourne to visit my godmother, Mum's sister, Aunty Dot, another childless one, and Uncle Alan, in exotic Essendon. Melbourne, after all, was on the cut-out, if not the cutting edge of the country (that would be the Emerald City, n'est pas?), and there were those other political and nuclear connections from the past.
So cold, so classy, so forbidding, so clothed, Melbourne, even in summer. And yet, so Australian, wasn't it? Whenever Aunty Dot came to Rocky, she brought with her the vapours and vibrations of the big city: trams, trains, markets, espresso coffee, perhaps a little garlic, speed walking, foreign accents and languages. At last, I'd taken myself to her and her gas-heated imitation fireplace, to the Moonee Ponds markets, to St Patrick's cathedral, to Queen Elizabeth's Royal Silver Jubilee Exhibition Train at Spencer Street Station, to the Victorian Arts Centre where I heard women speaking to each other in French (half-cousins?) as I selected postcards to send to Maisie and Jim in pokey little Rocky, to Uncle Alan's sister, Rita, in even more exotic Heidelberg, where she lived in a very small former Olympic Village brick cottage. Who might have stayed there? Which gold medallist? I had, I was certain, arrived at an appropriate level of sophistication and integration with my southern fellow citizens as I sat in Rita's teensy lounge room sipping tea and nibbling cake from her best Shelly china.
On the second Saturday of my visit, Uncle Alan introduced me to his next-door neighbour, whose wife's chronic sinusitis was permanently cured when she was dumped by a wave at Surfers Paradise one summer holiday years before. The things you learn about people. I made polite conversation with this man about his immaculate lawn and Uncle Alan's beloved rose trees and the anticipated wet weather (the neighbour had a cracked roof tile), but after a while I got the impression there was something about me that was troubling him. He asked me where I came from and when I said Rockhampton, Uncle Alan enlightened him with the further fact that it was the Rocky in Central Queensland where Dot was from. The neighbour's consternation and the look of, well, I could only describe it as a mixture of pity and confusion, had to do with the slowness of my speech, the fact that I barely opened my mouth when I spoke, and the consequent flatness of my vowels. Once he knew my provenance, once he'd pegged me as a northerner, the world was back in balance.
A couple of months after that trip, Maisie died suddenly and I found myself in a different Australia, the one of grief and loss, of true unpredictability, where there were always fires on the Berserker Range between Rocky and the Pacific, and where it was hard, for more than a while, to decide whether to be Icarus or Daedalus. For some reason, it seemed important at the time to bury Mum beneath a rose tree in the crematorium garden. I've seen it flower once in 26 years.
Several months ago, I attended a state reception for Melbourne-born but Queensland-raised Janette Turner Hospital. During her speech, Janette explained that, at a writers' event in Melbourne a few years ago, a man asked her where she was from. "I'm a Queenslander," she replied. "Ah," said the man, smiling, "God's own idiots." ♦