First Draft (A continuation of my little experiment)

 

A couple of years after everyone went missing and was found again, the whole family moved into town. They loaded up the car – there must have been a car by then, before the Vanguard and after the truck. The three children squeezed together in the back, two boys and the girl, uncomfortable, but comforted by their proximity. Their father drove the corrugated dirt road into town, straight to the stone house with the verandahs all around and the ceiling fans suspended from high pressed tin ceilings.

She would have been about four by then. Her mother still kept her in a cot. They moved it onto the verandah for the cool, and at the end, above her head, hung the red chickens that her grandmother had made and sent from Perth. She loved those chickens, and her grandmother who brushed her hair to make it shine when she came to stay, but was only five when her mother sat her on her knee and told her that her grandmother had died. She remembers crying, has conserved the memory of the sharpness and depth of grief, feeling it fully and then letting it go. She fancies that she observes it like a scientist, that first grief, the intensity of feeling that a child can have, but really, it's gone.  The memory of her grandmother has been caught and pinned like an insect.  It has been drained of life. From time to time it is taken out and coveted, slid out on its tray, put back again, and then neglected. As the time has passed, its wings have fallen off. Perhaps it no longer serves its purpose. Life itself is good enough. Generations have lived and died in their a good-enough lives. A good enough life with a good enough mother and a good enough father. Her better than good enough grandmother was soon gone, leaving behind the red chickens, some birds and animals made from painted sea shells, and the miniature picture books that she had sent to them.

She would not be back. They were in another house by then. Time grows large for the child who places attention on everything new. Space and time is influenced by the landscape. The more it contains, the bigger it seems. To the child, hungry for learning, everything is significant and patterns are not fully formed. A new landscape beckoned. Back then, moving was fun. The love moved with them in any case. It didn’t seem too soon to have moved again.

Her father was an itinerant worker prospecting for gold, getting some work on stations, working at the power house. He was tall, thin, strong with naturally olive skin further darkened by the sun. She saw him anew when she looked back on the photographs of him as a young man.   Who was he, this man? He was not young when she was born - already in his forties, and the rheumatoid arthritis that he'd contracted in his twenties had already begun to take hold. He became visibly disabled, and people pitied him and thought he would die before them, but he didn’t. He kept a young spirit, right to the end, and lived until he was nearly ninety, in pain, and in defiance of his pain.  He loved to laugh. There must have been moments of joy. He might have lived long because there had been unfinished business.  Perhaps he couldn’t allow himself to die.  He lived on, until he could live on no more, finally allowing himself to drift away once the family was able to let him go. Those other men mostly died before him, the healthier, well-meaning men who visited and sat on the end of his hospital bed.

They were all younger once, living a life. Her father. She remembers her mother crying after they argued because he was going away again. She hated him for part of that day, because he made her mother cry. Now when her mother looks back on her life with him she says that they had a happy marriage. She says she still misses him, and that her own father was wrong when he advised her against the marriage, because the man she loved was twelve years older and divorced. She’s glad she didn’t marry her first fiance even though he was her own age and had plenty of money, because she'd felt trapped and found his mother domineering. Fate played a hand she thinks, although the content of that hand she has never revealed. Later when this first man's wife had died, and her own husband, this first one turned up on her doorstep. Her mother was already eighty by then, maybe more. He hadn’t seen her since she was twenty. “You’ve changed,” he said. “You used to be a slim little thing. What happened to you?”

"What happened to you?" she said.

(c) Iris Lavell 2013