McGinnis - KMPieces of Blue

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PENGUIN BOOKS

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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London, WC2R 0RL , England

First published by Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 1999
This edition published by Penguin Group (Australia), 2008

18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 9

Text copyright Kerry McGinnis 1999

The moral right of the author has been asserted

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

penguin.com.au

ISBN: 978-1-74228-037-0

The day she died I called my mother wicked. I was six, big enough to lift baby Patrick as he tottered, crying, across the green kitchen linoleum. I jogged him in my arms, feeling the cold of his wet nappy, nuzzling my nose into his soft neck. He opened his mouth and roared. He was hungry.

Birdie. I pointed to the calendar. Pretty birdie! But he went on sobbing for his mother.

Wicked old Mummys not up yet, I said. Well tell Dad.

But Dad was at the Gladstone hospital watching her die, and it was Mrs Patterson from next door who changed Patricks nappy and heated his milk, then got breakfast for the rest of us.

Has the new baby come yet? Sian asked. The question, which astonished Judith and me (Are we getting another one?) seemed to confuse our neighbour.

I dont know, dear. Youd better ask your dad only not today, eh? You can come over to my place later to play, and choose your own lunches too.

Is today special? I was puzzled. We only do that on special days. But Mrs Patterson started clattering the crockery together and didnt answer.

It was a week before we learned that both the new baby and our mother had died. They were very sick, Dad said at first, so we couldnt see them. Instead, he told us, wed pack the caravan because we were all going to visit Gran and Grampy in Adelaide.

This was a great adventure. We ran willingly from room to room, collecting books and shoes and favourite toys, while Dad, in desperation, defaced the vans various cupboards with painted signs: Pants, Singlets, Socks. His fingers were too big for Patricks buttons, his grief too numbing to remember which of us had the red shoes, or that I couldnt plait my own hair. We were too young to help him Patrick only two and Judith five, I was six and Sian, the eldest, eight.

In the car he told us baldly, gripping the wheel while the white guide posts with their magic eyes that lit up at night, flashed past.

Your mothers not sick, he said. Shes gone to Heaven with the baby. You know what that means, dont you? Youll never see her again.

Shes not at Grans? Judith voiced our bewilderment. We had settled it among ourselves that she would be waiting there when we arrived.

Shes gone, Dad said. The car swerved and slowed. Horrified, we heard him sob, then he thrust the door open and lurched away. We sat frozen, listening. It had never occurred to us that Grown-ups cried. Heaven must be a terrible place to have this effect on Dad.

In the back seat Patrick slept, cushioned by pillows and rugs, while Sian, Judith and I, terrified into silence, stared ahead through the windscreen.

Dad was wiping his face when he returned. Our eyes, stretched wide, swung to him as if pulled by a single string. Well, he tried to smile. Its all right now. Everything will be all right youll see. We wont talk about her again.

Perhaps he didnt mean it as a taboo but we took it that way, and from then on everything to do with our mother vanished from our conversations. Judith, gabbling the post-meal ritual of Mummy, may I leave the table?, was told to say Dad instead. And my red and green rosebud dress, made from remnants of a pattern my mother had sewn for herself, disappeared. By the time we reached our destination the name we must never speak was locked inside us as if she had been ten years, rather than ten days, dead.

Every year until I was nine, we spent the holidays in Adelaide at Gran and Grampys place, at Flora Street, St Peters. They were my mothers parents, and lived in an old stone house with a grape arbour shading its morning side and the branches of an almond tree moving above the woodshed at the back.

Everything at Grans was different: the papered walls; the florid, rose-patterned thunder-mugs under the beds, the chip heater roaring like a captive dragon in the bathroom. I loved the beautiful bottled fruits in the store cupboard queenly containers of red cherries, purple plums and peach halves nested together like spoons. I loved the red and gold tea caddy with the picture of the King, and the colourful rag cushions on the horsehair sofa under the window. It was a homely but exciting house, cluttered with a lifetimes possessions and very different from our own. I loved every part of it except the dark passage connecting the front rooms to the kitchen. I always ran its length to bed with a prickling nape and shoulders hunched against unseen horrors in the dark.

My early memories were filled with vignettes of Flora Street; of noisy arrivals there, of laughter and cake in the kitchen followed by interrupted games with my siblings, and sleepy departures under streetlights like hazy yellow moons. The almond tree frothing its blossom over one such picture and, in the very next, me sitting with Grampy on the wash-house steps, cracking nuts with a broken stick.

Then a space without pictures until the new ones started on that terrible day the year I was six, in 1951, when Dad stopped the car before the old house and, carrying baby Patrick, herded the rest of us through the gate and up the steps to the opening door. I heard Grans surprised cry, Why, its Mac! and ever after I would remember the way her glance skipped over us to the empty car, and hear her sharp question, Wheres Anne?