Maggie MacKellar - When It Rains: A Memoir

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Also by Maggie MacKellar
Core of My Heart, My Country
Strangers in a Foreign Land

Title Page

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including printing, photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968 ), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Random House Australia. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the authors and publishers rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
When It Rains: A Memoir
ePub ISBN 9781742741062
Kindle ISBN 9781742741079
A Vintage bookPublished by Random House Australia Pty LtdLevel 3, 100 Pacific Highway, North Sydney NSW 2060 www.randomhouse.com.au First published by Vintage in 2010 Copyright Maggie MacKellar 2010 The moral right of the author has been asserted. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968 ), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Random House Australia. Addresses for companies within the Random House Group can be found at www.randomhouse.com.au/offices Extracts from Simone de Beauvoirs A Very Easy Death Simone de Beauvoir, 1969, 1997. Reproduced by kind permission of Editions Gallimard, Paris and the Estate of Simone de Beauvoir c/o Rosica Colin Ltd, London. National Library of AustraliaCataloguing-in-Publication EntryMacKellar, Maggie, 1973When it rains: a memoir.ISBN 9781741669602 (pbk.)MacKellar, Maggie, 1973College teachers Australia Biography.Widows Australia Biography.Loss (Psychology).Bereavement.Adjustment (Psychology).Life-change events Australia.378.120994092Typeset in 12/17 Sabon by Midland Typesetters, AustraliaPrinted in Australia by Griffi n Press, an accredited ISO AS/NZS 14001:2004 Environmental Management System printer Copyright Return Return often and take me,
beloved sensation, return and take me
when the memory of the body awakens,
and an old desire runs again through the blood;
when the lips and the skin remember,
and the hands feel as if they touch again.
Return often and take me at night,
When the lips and the skin remember...
Constantine P. Cavafy (1912)For A. and C.

Table of Contents

IM STANDING AT THE END OF LANE FOUR at the Cudal memorial pool. Its just after lunch on club championship day and the kids are about to swim their butterfly races. The pool pulses with the sounds of summer, and in the distance the trees and rocks on the town common shimmer in the heat. Im timekeeping. I have been all morning. Im surprisingly good at it. Over the antiquated PA system, participants for the Fathers Race are called. This is not a revelation, Ive known about it since Thursday. Im prepared for it Ive warned the kids that its happening and offered to swim in it. They laughed: a mother in the Fathers Race! In front of me, four kids line up for the fifty-metre butterfly. The starter says, Take your marks, he presses the button and the kids hurl themselves up the pool. I watch as they turn at the twenty-five-metre mark and, arms madly circling, head back for a close finish. I glance at my stopwatch out of interest it looks like a fast race but I havent pressed the button. Im sure I pressed the button, yet the screen is blank. Its four years since he died. I knew there was going to be a race for fathers today. Id carefully schooled my heart against his beating absence. Yet in an instant Im stripped and the present is sucked away. Ive come to see that sorrow moves in endless circularity, yet always manages to shock in the most ordinary moments. Standing by the pool and looking at the blank screen of the stopwatch, I feel again the lurch and pull of that place where past and present collide. The hard ground radiates heat and I cannot escape the chasms in the earth. I slip in between as the rushing horror swallows me once more. Just over two years ago, I packed the kids in the car, put my furniture in storage, took a leave of absence from Sydney University, left my house on the Northern Beaches of the city and returned to the farm in Central Western New South Wales where Id grown up. It felt like the riskiest thing in the world to turn my back on a secure wage, and yet the only possible solution to the difficult juggle of single motherhood and a career. I told myself I was coming for just a moment, a break, a few months in the country to allow me to catch my breath. It would be a short pause in my career, a time with my kids when we didnt have to worry about schedules, child care, late nights marking essays or writing lectures. I could put a bit of the country into them, give them a love of open spaces, imbue them with an independence that the cloistered city life steals from childhood. It would be a time when I would regain control of my emotions, catch up on some sleep, impose some sort of discipline on my increasingly out-of-control two-year-old son and ground my ethereal seven-year-old daughter in something solid and real. I wrote to my uncle and aunt to ask if they would have us to stay for three months in the cottage at the bottom of the garden. By way of reply, they drove their ute 350 kilometres over the mountains to collect everything that wouldnt fit in the back of my car. Standing on the side of the road, we surveyed the scattered belongings spread along the footpath. Bikes, boxes of books, pot plants, some kitchen essentials, a babys cot, a high chair, a fridge and a rocking horse all piled into a tottering load for the trip. Kids rode bikes up and down the street. A young, handsome couple pushed their new baby in a pram worth more than my uncles ute to the park at the end of the street. Teenagers walked between my possessions on their way down the hill, surfboards under their arms. This was a nice street in a nice suburb filled with nice people. Lapping at my feet was the debris of my life. Yet, when I look back now, all I can hear is the poet Anne Carsons warning: Sometimes a journey makes itself essential. I couldnt tell you the exact moment I knew I had to go home to the farm, but once the thought embedded itself, it was like a grass seed. At first I ignored it, then it was in so deep the irritation was all-consuming. Quite simply, after coping for so long, I couldnt cope for another day. I had to leave that city street, pack my small family into the car, travel over the mountains and hope for some redemption on the other side.
My body, suddenly, carries two stories of loss. Im heavy with them, made cumbersome and slow. One is easy for people to recognise. My mother died of cancer. I watched her age twenty-five years in eight weeks. In the night, when she was already a long way away, I would climb onto her bed, curl my body round hers and shake with the intensity of my desire for her not to go. I want my mother and I rage that she was taken from me. Yet, amid this devastation, there was companionship. People know what to say when your mother dies. They instinctively feel your loss, recognise their own fear in the marks on your face, the tremor in your voice, the dark lake of your eye. People know about cancer they know it kills, they know someone it has killed. They fear it may kill them. People know and in their knowing you are not so alone. My other story marks me as different. It is more silent and more savage, it is not pure and no one knows how to approach it. Not even me. This I also carry in my body, but its hidden deep below the surface. It is a subterranean river. It haunts my dreams with a hollow, hoary roar. In the daylight I hear its echo in the emptiness of my laughter. Somewhere I lost my husband. He slipped away from me in a whirl of fear and confusion. I tried to hold on, but he was too heavy and the water was too strong. There are so many ways to tell his story. Each has its own particular truth. Each is difficult to contain, slippery in meaning, in time. After he died, I sought clarity by writing in strict chronological order the events that led to his death. I took each day, sketched its beginning and end, recalled each mood, read into every silence some sort of message. I wanted to trace the trajectory of his breakdown, to look for clues about spaces into which I could have stepped and saved him. I wanted his past to speak to me. As I wrote, what emerged was not clarity, nor understanding, nor peace; what was left was a chaotic scrawl filled with pain and, looking back, an inevitable end. So which strand of truth deserves to be told first? My closest companion of eleven years, father of my five-year-old daughter and an unborn son, died with intent. He was in hospital, in a supposed safe ward, a place he couldnt voluntarily leave. He was in a session with a doctor and his parents; he walked out of this session, scaled a twelve-foot wall, ran to a cliff and placed himself in an impossible position from which to be saved. In the end, despite the efforts of rescue workers, he fell to his death. This was not a new thing; this was something he had attempted before in the preceding few months. And yet this was such a new thing that I, his wife of more than a decade, still cannot quite accept it was my husband at the centre of an inevitable drama played out upon a cliff top in the wind and rain of a squally July afternoon. WHEN I CAME BACK TO THIS COUNTRY, I lay down. Dust covered me, grasses dipped seeded heads and whispered their secrets, ants marched their pattern across my skin. My wounds give off their own light. I glint and shimmer, pinned upon the ground. Pressed between earth and sky, I think, be careful, dont say home, dont say safe, dont say anything. Fragments rise up. Words in straggling sentences trail their half meanings through the air. I find myself straining to hear, to capture a trace, a sense of where the words would take me if I allowed myself to follow. When we were young, my husband and I spent three months kayaking and climbing in the Alaskan wilderness. We then spent another three months living in a tiny shack outside a small town. Lucerne flats, no electricity, no running water, no car, no phone, no one knowing where we were somewhere in Alaska, somewhere in the year 1996. I was twenty-three years old, unexpectedly pregnant, unemployed and happy. He was chopping wood, carting water, cooking dinner, running the ten-mile round trip into town for milk, happy. Wed walk in the evenings, through lucerne that waved at our waists, and talk of the future, of study, of life with a small child. Our time in the mountains was a shape-altering experience. We lived in fear of falling off the edge, of drowning in icy seas, of being swept away by swollen rivers, and over the three months I gradually got to know my body its boundaries, its needs and, perhaps most challengingly, its insignificance. I stood on top of a forest on a windswept tundra and watched as a mountain of rock simply fell away. There was no warning, no wind, no clap of thunder, just one moment a mountain, the next not. I was humbled and appalled. The land, the ground I stood on, warned me and I didnt listen. When we came back inside, that is we returned to a place of settlement buildings, shops, homes I realised that I understood my body differently. I now knew I could command it to go beyond what Id thought possible to paddle harder, walk further, climb higher all in extreme weather conditions. My body was stripped of surplus, it wasnt carrying anything more than it needed to survive and when I asked it to make a leap, to place a hand or foot in a particular place, it just did it. Before this Id enjoyed my body, had fun with sport, with love, but Id never taken it seriously like I took my mind; Id taken it for granted. The unplanned pregnancy scared me at first. Climbing with the beginnings of a new life within me made me acutely aware of my femaleness, my vulnerability, but mysteriously it also strengthened my determination. After Alaska I looked on my body with a little bit of awe. When we returned, I stood on the earth differently, I felt connected to subtle changes in wind direction, in temperature, in light. I reacted to the space around me almost without thinking. My body had become a powerful thing. Now, after these two deaths and a birth, I once again occupy a foreign place, but I cant feel anything through my body. I roll over in bed and the movement is ponderous. I know how my breasts fitted perfectly in his hand; now they are some shape I dont recognise. Next page