The Blooming Of Alison Brennan

Chapter 4

The old man’s a bully.

The old man’s a bully.He terrorised Bernadette, made it obvious that she wasn’t the daughter he’d hoped for. She was always withdrawn; she hid behind our mum. But it was the year I was at Melbourne University, when I was nineteen and she was twenty-one, that the agoraphobia took over.

She went out less and less, and eventually refused to go anywhere unless Mum went with her. She hid in her room, in that big, cold house. She read, wrote in her diary, watched soap operas on television, shuffled around doing chores, and collected junk. She seemed to have decided that that was going to be her life, and for years she clung to Mum as a stranded sailor might cling to an upturned boat. Then Mum died and Harry rescued her, or so it must have seemed to Bernie.

By fourteen years of age, I knew that I was gay, but nothing coerced me to reveal that to ‘the Judge’ — our dad. It was strange that I couldn’t admit such a basic fact about myself, but back then it was still a stigma, and in a Catholic family like mine, it was considered a serious sin. It would have been hard for anyone who didn’t grow up in that house to understand how deeply Catholic it was. Even my name, Leo, came from the Judge’s favourite Pope, Leo XIII, champion of workers’ rights and unions, but also defender of the right to private property and free enterprise. Old Leo was the Judge’s hero.

I couldn’t talk about being gay at school either. It was a bastion of Catholic conservatism, and the priests and other boys had names for boys like me. So I played football and cricket, and I laughed at fag jokes. Sometimes at lunchtime, I escaped into the art studio and took down the heavy books of paintings from their high shelf. I pored over the colours and shapes, lost myself in the harsh landscapes, the gentle watercolours, the dreamlike impressionists. I was mesmerised by the greens, greys and blues of outback Australia, and the swirling shapes and colours of the abstracts. Recalling those magical paintings helped me to sleep at night.

Art was considered fine until the end of Year Ten, when the Judge decreed that I was to study serious subjects that would help me to get into Law. It was an article of faith that I would follow him into Melbourne University, and not go to one of those modern, ‘lefty newcomers’ that he scorned. I wanted to be a good son. Bernie had disappointed him, so he focused his authority on me. I let him; indeed I craved his approval. The smallest nod of his head in recognition of some achievement could keep me going for days.

I separated myself from Mum. I couldn’t admit how much I wanted and needed her. She brought hot chocolate to my room every night and always hesitated to leave, wanting to talk, but I brushed her off.

‘Everything alright, darling?’

‘Yes, Mum, everything’s fine.’

Then she’d kiss me. She’d tell me that she loved me, and despite the wall I’d built between us, I waited nightly for her declaration.

So I excelled academically, captained the senior football team in my final year, pretended I was interested in girls, and late at night drifted to sleep to dreams of soft-limbed boys from school.

I went to Melbourne University, intent on taking a path through the city’s best law firms, and securing a seat on the bench, replicating my father’s life. I was too caught up in it all to see that it couldn’t last.

One day, stepping into the shower, preparing to put on my armour for another day, I was hit by a tidal wave of darkness and futility. My defences crumbled in an instant. I couldn’t turn on the tap, couldn’t do anything except fall against the wall and slide to the floor.

I curled into a foetal position, reduced to helplessness. I sobbed quietly at first, and then I lost my cultivated control. The sobbing became a howl, and the howl became a scream. I banged my head on the floor, didn’t care what happened, how much noise I made. I didn’t know if I was there for hours or minutes. All I knew was that I was looking into a fathomless darkness that I couldn’t escape. In a perverse way, I wanted it to reach up its slimy tentacles and suck me in.

I was in hell.

The cleaner found me. She was a Filipina, much coveted for her skills by the matrons of Toorak, and given to expletive-laden scorn at their condescension. She covered my nakedness, cradled my head on her lap, and rocked me with lullaby words.

Summoned from one of her committees, Mum called an ambulance, and a Crisis Assessment Team took me to the Melbourne Clinic. I spent five months there, numb among other sedated shadows. I was cared for by a white-haired psychiatrist, a death camp tattoo just visible on his forearm. With infinite compassion he took my psyche apart, as one might disassemble a child’s toy, and put it back into something recognisable and authentic.

The Judge visited me periodically in the clinic, but always had to leave quickly; he was very uncomfortable while there. Mum came often. We would sit in the sun, or in the corner of the library, not always talking. Towards the end, when I was almost ready to leave, we would go to Victoria Street for a bowl of noodles.

That was when we found each other again.

One day, over a pot of tea in a tiny Vietnamese restaurant, I finally told her that I was gay. I watched her eyes. No change.

She picked up my hand from the plastic tablecloth and kissed it. That was all. She knew and she didn’t care.

The Judge offered me money to convalesce in Europe. He thought that once I was over my foolish breakdown, I would resume my destined path — as if I could pick it up like a suitcase I had put down for an hour or so. But there was no going back. I took a quarter of the money he offered and lost myself in India, another displaced white man in cheap drawstring pants, ragged T-shirt and dirty sandals.

I merged into India’s scurrying, surging masses. I lived in hovels, or in a corner of someone’s room, and I ate rice and dhal from street stalls. When Mum sent money for my birthday, I bought my first real camera, strapping it to my body when I slept and when I pushed through the streaming crowds. The camera was my passport to a longed for life of the imagination.

From Mumbai, I travelled north by train and photographed sari-clad women emerging with radiant faces from the sacred waters of the Ganges. During the mad exuberance of the Holi festival, I filled my viewfinder with images of joyous Hindus covered in multi-coloured powders. At the Golden Temple Pond in Amritsar, my camera captured the moment that the morning sun turned the holy waters bronze, as a turbaned Sikh bathed lost in meditation. As my guru and guide, I adopted Krishna the god of youth, music, courage and love and had his child-like image tattooed on my chest.

I learnt to take photographs by watching and waiting — waiting for the exact play of light on water, for the very moment a smile broke across a child’s face, for the instant the setting sun dropped behind a mountain. In a mosque in Mumbai at the end of Ramadan, I photographed rows of Muslim men bent over in prayer. Their straight lines of reverence, their discipline, and their indifference to distractions, filled me with wonder. I had never experienced such enthrallment with the entity I had been taught to call God.

With each photograph my happiness grew, and little by little I became visible to myself again.

Eventually, I was ready to go home. I wanted to see Mum and to tell my story, my real story, to the Judge. I didn’t return to the Toorak mansion, but lived in a shabbily comfortable share house in Camberwell while I found my life. I began my photography business tentatively, doing favours for relatives of friends, taking snaps of chocolate-stained little faces at children’s birthday parties. Whenever I could, I roamed city streets with my camera, documenting graffiti before it disappeared, trying to expose the beauty of grungy lanes and the juxtaposition of skyscrapers with bluestone cobbles. I would go to the beach or into the bush to practise with my camera, mastering the art of watching and waiting.

When one of my photos — red and gold autumn leaves in the Dandenong hills — won a prize at a local gallery, I began to call myself a photographer.

Trent and I fell in love by accident. He was the bulky, bearded best man at a friend’s wedding and I was the fidgety photographer, bothering everyone for a spontaneous shot. We thought we were as different as two people could be, but long after the bridal pair had left to a round of tipsy cheers, we talked, as waiters cleared around us.

Our love was a comfortable, ordinary thing. We rode our bikes by the Yarra, hiked in the country, me lugging my camera, argued about football, and ate at small, local restaurants. We knitted out lives together like two sleeves of one of those thick, warm jumpers you threw on against the Melbourne nights.

When we knew that we wanted to be together forever, and we moved into our rented cottage in Port Melbourne, the cottage we eventually bought, I knew it was time to put some organisation into my business. My website said it all.

LB Photography: Every imaginable celebration: weddings, divorces, christenings, birthdays, bar and bat mitzvahs, anniversaries, graduations; I cover them all, anywhere, at any time. I will help you to make your occasion joyous and memorable.

LB Photography: Every imaginable celebration: weddings, divorces, christenings, birthdays, bar and bat mitzvahs, anniversaries, graduations; I cover them all, anywhere, at any time. I will help you to make your occasion joyous and memorable.At the Esplanade market on St Kilda’s foreshore, I sold my other photographs, those I took in the bush, or in the city streets, or trudging across sand dunes to the beach. I was always sending my photos to outback and travel magazines, hoping for a commission that would take me away into the Australian landscape, where my camera could record its colours and moods, and where I could again feel the freedom I felt in India.

I knew I was like the Judge. I was tall like him, and I had the thick, blond hair that he had when he was younger. I talked like him, with the same vocal timbre and inflections, and used the same kind of vocabulary. But I hoped I was kinder and less hasty to judge others, just as Mum was.

I rang the Judge every Sunday to check on him. I was going to insist on my existence. I visited Bernie, dragged myself into that stinking house and tried to make her talk to me.

It was me who told the Judge that they hadn’t enrolled Alison in a secondary school. Someone had to. Bernie wouldn’t leave the house, and poor dull Harry didn’t know what to do.

I thought about Alison all the time; I adored her. Whenever I could, I extricated her from that frightful house and brought her here for one of Trent’s pastas or roasts. We talked about everything — except her parents. She was intensely loyal.

It was probably time that we drove down to see the Judge, although he was rude to Trent last time we went. He mellowed when he saw the bottle of merlot Trent had brought. The old hypocrite! Chester dug up one of his tomato plants.

‘Get that bloody dog out of my garden,’ he bellowed.

Chester was a Jack Russell. They had to dig — it was a moral obligation.

So we planned to go there at Easter, even knowing that the Judge wouldn’t be happy to see us.