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Back Bad Art Mother Save as PDF
Chapters (14)
  1. Cover
  2. About the author
  3. Title page
  4. Dedications
  5. BOOK LAUNCH
  6. PART 1 FOOD IS A SOLID FACT
  7. PART 2 CREATIVE BONES
  8. PART 3 SNOW WHITE IN THE FOREST WITH THE APPLE
  9. PART 4 MONASTERY MAIDEN
  10. PART 5 SABOTAGE
  11. PART 6 THE POEMS OF VEDA GRAY
  12. Australian poet Gwen Harwood
  13. Acknowledgements
  14. Wakefield Press

And they were all silent, and horrified, and all they could hear was me screaming in the arms of the man I didn’t know who kept calling me son but wasn’t my father.

Mr Parish finally collected me. I don’t know why. Was Papa talking to the police? Was he putting his hand through his hair and feeling sick and talking to the police? And you? Were you at work that night, Ornella? Were you on the ward, changing someone’s drip, wheeling a body to the morgue?

Mr Parish collected me. On and on and on went the road, the car moulding itself over the bumps and tick-tick-ticking at the intersections, and when it at last came to a halt, almost touching the mud-wall at the top of the driveway, the ignition turned off, and I was carried, like a sack, like an enormous dead human sack, to my bed where the sheets were cold but my body, clenched into a comma, managed still to warm me.

PART 6 THE POEMS OF VEDA GRAY

You could get a cheap place by yourself in the eighties in St Kilda, live alone and pay your bills, even if you were poor, which I wasn’t. I didn’t have to rent like other people my age. I could have bought whatever I wanted. But my requirements were modest. I bought a two-bedroom flat in St Kilda. It’s now worth over a million.

What would Mother have thought of that?

When Mr Parish died, he left everything to me. Mrs Parish wanted nothing. I travelled to Osaka a few times and she put me up in her tiny apartment with its simple floors and walls and decorations. Her life was good, she was content.

Mr Parish’s estate was significant. I don’t imagine all his money came from poetry—maybe it came from various chairs he occupied, positions on boards, family inheritances he’d received, I don’t know how that world works.

I could’ve rejected Mr Parish after what happened with Mother, but I didn’t. He wasn’t a bad man. After Mother died, I continued to stay with him on weekends, I helped him build fences and we sometimes put flowers on the grave of Paddy Cow, though a wild woolly grass had grown up there, and it wasn’t necessary: she was wrapped well enough in her carpet.