The Family String
For Roslyn Johnson.
Singular. Sparkling. Missed.
CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
COPYRIGHT PAGE
CHAPTER 1
It was me who heard Mum calling first. It was Saturday morning, so Mum had still been in bed when we’d headed for the tree house at the bottom of the garden.
‘Shhhh,’ I said to the other two. ‘We must have missed the first call.’
We had been singing ‘April Love’ by Pat Boone in the tree house loud enough to drown out a World War I warning claxon, never mind my mother calling from the back door. We froze, and I heard Caleb take in a deep breath so he could hold it until otherwise instructed. Ruthy quietly opened her notebook, pen ready.
‘What kind of day will it be, Dorcas?’ she whispered after a moment. ‘Can you tell yet?’
‘Caleb! Ruth! Dorcas! Where are you? I’m warning you. Don’t make me come down there to find you,’ we heard Mum shout, insistent.
I could just see her through the branches of the enormous old olive that held up our tree house in an upturned leafy hand. You had to see what she was wearing, as well as hear her voice, to be sure what kind of day it would be. She was standing in the doorframe in her stained pink candlewick dressing-gown, one of the two pockets torn and flapping sadly at her side, already looking tired at eight in the morning. Untamed auburn waves exploded around her pale face. My dad described her complexion as ‘peaches and cream’, but there was no sign of colour this morning. If it was a good day, she would have been wearing her gold quilted housecoat and her matching gold Jiffies. The cowlick at the crown of her head would already be forced into submission by a whoosh of Taft hairspray.
‘Cross,’ I said. ‘It’s a cross day, Ruthy.’
Ruthy immediately leaned over her book and wrote the date and the word ‘cross’ by it. She used a gum leaf as a bookmark and snapped it closed. Ruthy never questioned my assessment. As the oldest living at home, and now on the way to my twelfth birthday, I had the most experience of Mum’s moods, and was pretty much always right, particularly as it could be said I was often the cause of the bad ones. Besides, our older brother Daniel had anointed me as the mood-sayer before he left, and none of us disagreed with Daniel.
He was now boarding with a church family in New South Wales and doing God’s work with his local youth group. At seventeen, he wasn’t old enough yet to be a member of the Arranging Brethren of the Christadelphian Ecclesia, which was our church, and more important than almost any job, even school principal or the premier of South Australia. In his new youth group, he led a team of doorknockers on weekends, a merry band who cheerfully received each inevitable refusal to discuss the relevance of the Bible to their lives.
I often wondered why Jesus would choose 1969 to come back, given all the exciting times in history He could have chosen. If I were Jesus, I’d have returned in time to see the Knights of the Round Table, or the beheading of Anne Boleyn, or the opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Ruthy said He could see all these things anyway at the right hand of God in Heaven, but if I was Him, I’d rather be walking around with everyone else seeing them close up and eating ice-cream or a pie than watching from what must be a pretty big distance away, given not even scientists with powerful telescopes could spot Him where he lived.
Daniel had been gone since just before school started this year and we missed him sorely. Ruthy made notes in her notebook for him every night so she could tell him what was happening when he came home for a visit because she knew he wouldn’t want to miss anything. All three of us knew that you had to love your mum and dad the most of anyone, but we all agreed we secretly loved Daniel just as much. Ruthy wasn’t sure whether this was allowed. She looked it up in Dad’s Bible concordance, where you can try out topics to see if the scriptures have rules about them. She couldn’t spot anything that said loving your brother as much as your mum and dad was wrong, so we decided to stick with it.
‘How many cross days is that in a row now, Ruthy?’ asked Caleb.
Ruthy reopened her notebook and flicked through the pages, counting.
‘That’s fourteen cross days in a row,’ she said. ‘It’s not a record, but it’s getting up there. Before that she had eleven head days and one Jesus day, and before that it was twenty cross days one after the other.’
Caleb nodded, accepting and considering. Head days referred to terrible headaches that made her stay in bed all day until just before Dad came home from work. We all liked the Jesus days best, because they were the ones where Mum seemed happy and hummed hymns quite a bit.
Ruthy kept her notebooks in two Arnott’s Christmas Selection biscuit tins under a board in the floor of our tree house. She was on to her seventh book now and had saved up her pocket money so she always had at least one fresh one ready to go. She was about halfway through the current journal and she was hoping Mum and Dad would gift her a big pile of blank books for Christmas so she didn’t have to use her pocket money for them anymore. Then she could buy lolly teeth and sherbets at the local shop with us on Saturday mornings instead. I was sometimes prepared to share my teeth with her but only after I’d sucked them for a while first.
Caleb usually shared his lollies with her, but I didn’t because I wasn’t always friends with Ruthy, and besides, as Mum would say, you have to learn you can’t have everything you want in this world. Mum heard me say this to Ruthy one Friday night and smacked me for having a smart mouth. She said I didn’t share because I was greedy, not because it was my job to teach Ruthy anything. Teaching Ruthy was her job, she said, and not to forget it. Ruthy poked her tongue out at me behind Mum’s back, but I didn’t tell on her because I knew Mum would take her side.
Besides, I was still in the bad books for going down to the shop one night after school and buying ten cents’ worth of mixed lollies and putting them on the tick under Mum’s name. Mum was furious when she found out I’d charged them to her account and yelled at Mrs Abrahams in the shop as much as she yelled at me. I’d already eaten all the sweets though, so in a way it didn’t matter too much, except that Ruthy said she’d written a note about it in her book to tell Daniel, and that always made me feel sorry. I scratched the sores on my head more that night, and Mum had a cross day the next day when she saw bits of blood and scabs on my pillow in the morning.
I don’t know why I scratched my head. I did it a lot when I got into bed at night, and sometimes during the day. It often hurt, because I would take the top off scabs again and again just as they were healing up, but for some reason I just couldn’t stop it. Because of the blood and sores on the pillow, Mum returned to tying my hair in ringlet rags at night. I hated, hated, hated ringlet rags. She tied them so tight they hurt my head and made it difficult to go to sleep. The long, hard, hair-filled ropes kept getting in the way when I tried to get comfortable, and the knots she made to secure them stuck into my face. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, the kids at school teased me and called me Sausage Head, which made me mad as Hell, even though Mum says you shouldn’t say Hell like I do because I make it like a swear word. She said if I didn’t stop scratching the sores in my head, she would shave it like a collaborator during the war, and the whole family would be shamed. I didn’t actually mind that idea – hair was a bit of a nuisance really – but I knew to say so would make her madder than ever. She often said all she wanted when I was born was a pretty girly girl to dress and show off, and instead she got a tall, skinny tomboy with a scabby head and knock-knees.
Caleb was Mum’s first favourite (‘the light of my life’), Ruthy was the second favourite (‘my little writer’), Daniel was the third (‘my darling firstborn’), and I was the last (‘Miss Crabby’). We agreed we should still call me a favourite, because Mum loved me and I loved her, but we all knew I was at the end of the line.
To record our views about the order of Mum’s love, Caleb used six wooden beads he got from Mr Driver next door. Caleb nominated the best gold one as Mum and put her bead at the top of a piece of string that was thick enough to hold the beads exactly where he put them on the thread. The Dad bead, a silver one with little blue dots on it, was right next to the gold Mum bead, because they’d chosen each other and made vows in the sight of God at the Christadelphian Temple in Halifax Street.
Caleb left quite a bit of string after the Mum and Dad beads before positioning ours though, and when Mum and Dad did a lot of fighting and Mum threatened to go back to her mother in Scotland, and Dad said he’d happily drive her to the plane because she’d driven him to the madhouse, Caleb pushed the Dad bead further away from the top to reflect the current state of affairs.
Caleb’s bead was next after Dad’s. He chose a blue one because it was his preferred colour, and it had been his idea to put the family on the string. Ruthy’s bead was fairly close behind his and, because she was next loved, she got the next choice and selected a bright red bead with little white dots on it. That would have been the one I’d have chosen, because I was mad for anything with polka dots on it. Dad called me Dotty Dorcas once. I quite liked that name and thought it was a friendly kind of message between Dad and me.
Caleb chose the green bead for Daniel because we agreed boys should choose for boys if one was away. Daniel’s was a fair way down the string from Ruthy’s because, although he was Mum’s beloved firstborn, something had happened to result in him going away to board, and we sensed it pushed him well past Ruthy for the time being. All that was left for me was an orange bead, which is the colour I liked the least in the whole world. Mum says I shouldn’t say I don’t like orange because God made all the colours of the rainbow, but I was pretty sure it was not His favourite colour either. I didn’t even like orange polka dots, and that’s saying something.
We argued for a while about how far away my bead should be from Daniel’s bead on the string. Finally we decided it wasn’t at the very end of the string but it was a fair way away from Daniel’s. Caleb patted my hand kindly and reminded me that just being on the string at all meant I was still beloved of God and Mum. We left quite a lot of string after my bead to allow for movement down on those days where I scratched my scabs and committed other offences, so that even then I would still have a place.
We hung the string up in the tree house, with Mum’s gold bead proud at the top end, and mine hanging a bit sadly right near the bottom. We agreed Caleb could be in charge of moving the beads, but only after we had all discussed any change together first.
We heard Mum yell again. It was even louder this time. After a moment’s frozen response to hearing her call, we scrambled out of the tree house and walked across the thick, springy green couch lawn to the back door, which was up six grey cement steps to a little platform. We speed-walked in a line side by side, even though Caleb was a very good runner and could have easily beaten us there, but when Mum was cross, running was one of the things that could really set her off. We did not allow ourselves to be distracted by the flapping clothes on the line, which I normally felt a big need to yank as I walked past them, or by the magpie that threatened to swoop from the top of Dad’s shed, or by the swarm of bees that rushed past us buzzing a spring song in unison.
Once at the foot of the steps there was an unspoken agreement that I should go first because most things were my fault, and also because of the fourth-favourite situation. We all kept our heads down as we passed Mum into the kitchen, knowing we were in for a clip around the ears, and that it seemed to hurt less if you had your head down. Also, Ruthy said it looked as though we were more contrite, which she explained meant sorry, so it seemed like the best plan. Mum had her hands on her hips and was looking scowly, which I thought was a good word, but which my teacher Miss Thompson said wasn’t a word at all.
As expected, I got a clip, but she also pushed me into the kitchen as I passed her, and she yelled at me to stop pouting or the wind might change and I’d look sulky forever. She gave Ruthy just a little smack on the back as she passed, and she just touched Caleb on the head, so he got away with it as usual.
‘How many times do I have to tell you children there’s to be no playing until your jobs are done?’ she said. ‘It doesn’t matter what I say; I just waste my breath.’
She tried to stomp out of the kitchen across the worn green and cream checkerboard lino tiles, but Dad’s big floppy slippers slowed her down and softened the thuds. I let out a little giggle, but Ruthy grabbed my arm to warn me this was not a good idea, and I gulped the laugh down and hiccupped instead, just in time because Mum had turned to look at me. She left us to it, which was a relief because she usually stayed and yelled at us for a while, telling us we were going too slow or weren’t drying the dishes properly.
On bad days she would tell us she would take us to the children’s home in Klemzig. I had nightmares about it sometimes, even though when we passed the scary fenced perimeter of the home on the way to Sunday school one week, Dad laughed when I asked him if he’d been there. He told me it was the Peter’s ice-cream factory, not a children’s home, and not to worry.
Mum swung around the doorway for a last instruction. ‘And don’t use too much Sunlight in the dishwater, Dorcas, or I’ll take it out of your pocket money.’
It was my job to fill the sink ready to do the dishes. Caleb’s job was to take the dishes from the table to the sink, and to put away the cornflakes packet, sugar bowl and milk jug. Ruthy had the job of washing the dishes, which she did atop a little step Dad had made for her so she could reach. I liked washing, but Mum said there was more water on the floor than in the sink by the time I’d finished. My other jobs were to dry the dishes and put them away, and to sweep the floor and use the dustpan to put all the bits of fluff and flakes and dirt into the outside bin ‘without stopping to examine ever dirty particle, Dorcas’.