Mum

An excerpt from an unpublished memoir, The Year of Everything by Erica Murdoch.

That night, I sat by the riverbank with Em. She slapped at the mosquitoes buzzing around her ankles. A fish jumped in the middle of the river, and a mopoke hooted its mournful cry. Our hurricane lamp was a beacon for moths. Our warm champagne tasted silky smooth and sweet in the darkness as we toasted in 1985.

Out on the horizon, where there was a patch of dark blue on the black, a car light twinkled. That was the outside world and I didn’t want to be part of that. Better to be out here amid the salt bush plains and red dirt. We pulled out the lilos, lay on our backs and watched the shift and turn of the night sky.

Three hundred miles to the south, my father held my mother’s hand as she slipped further into a coma. They were at a bush nursing hospital in Gippsland. Perhaps having a dying wife and mother impacted our decision-making process. Was it lunacy that I went on a camping trip with a friend? My mother was dying and was not expected to last the week.

As always, we were all in denial.

Perhaps it was to make everything seem normal in a bleak situation.

Protect the only child at all costs.

Around 2 am on New Year’s Day, as the night sky reached its darkest, a shooting star streaked across the horizon. Later, I would remember and wonder if that was Mum going out with a bang and a sharp twist of light. It seems impossible to think that she could just slip away. Later, when I tried to drill down with my father, he said he didn’t know what time she had died, as he wasn’t there either. He said the nurses had told him to go home, which he had done and taken a sleeping pill. A fine duo we made, not even to manage a deathbed vigil.

Em and I packed up camp early; I spent the trip home gazing out of the window and remembering trips up and down the same road with my mother. The three of us squashed into a ute with both windows down to catch the breeze. My father would sing, Mum would roll her eyes and then pretend to be asleep. 

We rolled through Echuca on the long trip south. Em stops to go to the toilet. This was the town where we had once camped at the Shell Service Station, as Dad was too tired to drive any further. He set up our camp beds next to the petrol pumps.. I heard my mother cry herself to sleep as I dozed off to the stench of petrol fumes. I thought it an adventure, not realising that her weeping was anything to be worried about. So many questions. Did we have no money? Why didn’t my mother drive? Why didn’t we go to a campground?

My mother was bright yellow those last few weeks –  the colour of turmeric. Those weeks were a haze

She’d come home to die after weeks of in and out and back and forth in a yellow brick hospital. The building is as yellow as her.

She had been in a private room, her yellow face propped up on stark white pillows. A pile of books sat on the bedside table. The Natural Juice Diet lay on top of the Gawler Diet and a book about UFOs and a weirdly titled, Jesus Died in Kashmir.

‘I’ll die tomorrow if you don’t take me home,’ she snapped at my father. He, as clueless as I, agreed. She was always the most capable of the three of us.

I, on the other hand, was not so keen that she come home. Her being in the hospital kept her illness at bay. I refused to say cancer, but then again, no one had said the word to me either. The daily trip to the hospital to sit and be silent as she handed over her bright yellow, stained undies and asked me to wash them. ‘I’d do the same for you, love,’ she said. There was the soft sound of the TV. The news was full of the 1984 election, and a bald rock star was standing for the Senate as part of the NDP.

‘I want to vote in the election. I’ll be home for that,’ Mum said

I was 21 and clueless, with my bum up high and my head buried so deep in the dirt.

No one said cancer. No one said she was sick. Until she started to turn yellow.

She got her wish and came home. To us, my father, me, and Louise, a stray tortoiseshell kitten.

There was a flow of visitors. Her sister and husband from Sydney. Her friend Joan, who spent time in the kitchen cooking up scones and slices and a witch’s brew that looked as if it contained gum leaf pods and cloves. It’s a tonic she would explain to anyone listening. The sister in-laws from my father’s side had whispered conversations in the narrow passageway and looked at me in pity.

The house was full of people, or so it seemed. It was loud and cluttered with strange food smells and the washing machine was always on. A mass of people in a revolving door. Like visiting a baby, except it’s visits to a dying woman and gawking at the two idiots left behind. 

Everyone was positive except for her friend, Mary. Little, fiesty and Irish, Mary came over and caught me outside. ‘How much longer do you think your mother has?’ she said as tears flowed down her cheeks. The only one who would say that. ‘I can’t do without her,’ Mary said, as she sat under the frangipani tree in the garden. ‘Your mother was my first friend in Australia.’

There was a queue for the polling booth on Election Day. The yard smelled of hot dogs and fairy floss. Students wearing bright yellow No Uranium Mine badges gave out How to Vote cards, which were stuffed in the bin. Ours was a blue ribbon Liberal seat held by Billy Snedden. On my father’s arm, she shuffled up to cast her vote. She tried to grip the pencil in her claw-like fingers, and the pencil dropped to the floor. She frowned.

‘I’ll get it, Mum,’ I bent down, red with shame and my eyes pricking. A little boy stared.

‘Why is that lady that colour?” he asks his father.

If Mum had been able to answer him, she would have said, ‘I’m a biscuit made of flour.’

I gave her the pencil and she tried to grip. I took the pencil, marked up her ballot paper and showed it to her.

She nods. ‘Let’s go.’

More visitors head for Mum’s room. Mary would plant herself outside the door, keeping away some visitors and shooing out others when she felt their time was up. In between, she would sit outside the door and weep. She would bring around casseroles in orange and green enamel dishes and order us to eat. The three of us would sit in the dining room, Mary not eating, but sipping on a large gin and tonic.

Despite the prognosis, the yellowing skin, the visitors speaking in hushed voices, the stench in the sickroom and the look in my mother’s eyes, I still didn’t get it. If I didn’t talk about it was not real. There was a conspiracy of silence. Perhaps, in one of the more lucid moments, Mum had ordered that my life was to continue as normal. I was not to be asked to stay home. I was not to be drawn into discussions about care or nursing or aftermaths. I was to remain untroubled by the illness. Perhaps she didn’t want the fear in her eyes to be reflected back to mine. The most she ever asked me to do was to wash her undies.

And everyone was complicit – including me. No one said, I’m sorry your mother is dying. Life was normal in the pre-Christmas run-up. Did my parents talk, and wonder if she would make it till Christmas? What was her care plan? Where were the doctor’s visits and the palliative care nurses? This is all blank. The three of us at home on Christmas day. I cooked an enormous turkey that none of us ate. No one told me not to. Didn’t I notice that my mother wasn’t eating?

At some point, here and the timeline is blurred. Mum became very unwell in the middle of the night. She moaned and cried. I cowered in my room, too terrified to come out. The light of the ambulance flashed on my wall. I heard footsteps and voices, and then my father tapped on my door. ‘They’re taking mum to the hospital, stay here.’

I cowered under my blankets, not knowing which hospital. It was just me and the cat alone in the house. She was one of the many strays that had come through our house. I cuddled her for company that night.

Did I get up and go to work the next morning? Probably.

What happened next? Did we as a family talk about this incident? Probably not.

One night, the cat was crying in the laundry. We had left her locked in there. Her meowing woke me, and I went to see what was wrong. Mum was in the laundry before me. In her dressing gown with bare feet and a pink nightie. She was holding the cat and stroking it. The cat’s cries stopped. She nestled in my mother’s arms. Mum looked down at the little face and rubbed her behind the ears. I wanted to be that cat. I wanted to be held by my mother. I wanted her to stroke my hair and tell me that everything would be okay. But this time Mum couldn’t. She looked up, and her cheeks were wet. ‘I had to come.’ Mum smiled at me. ‘She’s a sweet little thing.’ Outside, it was beginning to get light.

‘Picaninny daylight,’ said Mum.

The cat licked my mother’s hand.

‘How about she sleeps on your bed?’ I suggested.

I tucked Mum and the cat into bed. The little tortoiseshell yawned and fell asleep, Mum’s hand resting on her back.