The Blooming Of Alison Brennan

Chapter 3

I didn’t tell her even half of it.

I didn’t tell her about Grandpa, about how I hadn’t seen him for four years because of the fight he had with Mum last time he came to our house. It was at the end of Grade Six. It was a Saturday, and he turned up without telling them. When he saw the house, he went crazy.

He yelled at Mum. ‘What’s wrong with you, Bernadette? How can you live like this? What about Alison’s safety?’

That was the first time I realised that our house was dangerous, as well as dirty and smelly.

‘One dropped match and it could all go up,’ Grandpa bellowed.

I thought about running away to hide in the high weeds in the backyard, but it was like I was nailed to the floor. Grandpa was very tall and scary.

Mum just stood there, twisting her hands, fiddling with her hair. You could tell she was terrified.

Grandpa seemed really puzzled. ‘I don’t understand it, Bernadette,’ he said more softly. It was like he was talking to a naughty child caught playing in the mud. ‘I can see how it might happen with that useless blighter you live with, but you weren’t brought up like this.’

I didn’t understand it then. All I knew was that Mum and Dad would never let anyone into the house.

But I now knew that they needed help, not yelling. They didn’t know how to be any other way.

I didn’t know how, but Grandpa had found out that Mum and Dad hadn’t enrolled me in a secondary school. That was why he came over. It wouldn’t have occurred to them that they had to make calls, visit the schools in the area, and make a choice. All the other kids had been talking for months about where they’d go. The parents talked about it all the time too, standing at the school gate, competing with each other.

‘Oh, Melanie’s going to Mc Robb, you know. Yes, she’s so bright; they offered her a place right away.’

Or ‘Christopher is going to Scotch of course; all the boys in the family go there.’

But Mum and Dad never saw any other parents. It was just the three of us, a little human triangle, hidden away in our dirty house.

Grandpa went ballistic when he found out that I wasn’t enrolled anywhere. ‘I’ll have to find her a school, I suppose. It’s far too late for any of the decent Catholic girls schools. We’ll have to take what we can get now.’

That’s how I ended up at this big co-ed college on St Kilda Road. Grandpa knew the Principal. Apparently he was the son of one of the judges Grandpa worked with before he retired.

Anyway, that particular day he took Mum and me to a motel. I didn’t know where Dad was; he disappeared when Grandpa started yelling. Grandpa got cleaners into the house to shovel out the rubbish. He sent a plumber to fix the blocked shower and kitchen sink, and a handyman to put the cupboard doors back on. He got a gardening company to throw out the rubbish in the front and back yards and to cut down the weeds.

On the Monday he enrolled me in school and took me to get my uniform, books and stationery. He hardly said anything during all of this. His face looked really angry, but when he dropped me at home he kissed me and told me to ring him about anything, any time that I wanted. Then he went away without saying goodbye to Mum and Dad, and we hadn’t seen him since.

That was four years ago.

It was good in the house for a month or two, then the rubbish started to pile up again.

During my meeting with Mrs Goodall, she asked me to write a list of places I could go to, to study. And she said that she was going to arrange for me to use the school library at weekends.

Writing the list made me think of Grandpa. He told me I could phone him, but I never had. It would seem like I was taking sides with him against Mum and Dad. But I kept remembering the house at Golden Beach. It was his holiday house, although he lived there now since he retired. I used to go there a lot when I was in primary school. He’d pick me up in his big car and we’d always get hamburgers along the way.

The house was like a huge box on stilts. You climbed steep steps at the back, and when you walked in all you could see was ocean. Grandpa never drew curtains or blinds. The light or the dark just came right in. I used to love standing at the big front window watching the waves march in like soldiers in a battle, and then falling over as if it was all a big joke. Grandpa told me that if I was a bird and flew directly across that ocean I would come to Tasmania. Sometimes at home I would imagine that I was that bird, and that I could fly for days over the ocean to land in a new place, clean and green and sunny.

I hadn’t been to Grandpa’s house since he had that fight with Mum.

Mrs Goodall wanted us to meet once a week. She said we would work out some ‘strategies’ and make sure that there were ‘appropriate’ places for me to study. She used all this counsellor-type language.

She also asked me to talk to Mum and Dad about respecting my ‘private space’ in my bedroom. She said that I would have to be firm with them, but I had a right to have a tidy, neat place where I could study.

She wanted me to tell Mum and Dad that they couldn’t put any more of their stuff in my room, and to ask them for help in moving out the rubbish that was already there. She asked me if I felt comfortable talking to Mum and Dad about it, and I said not really, but I’d do it. I was going to do it before I met her next time.

At the end of our meeting, she asked me how I felt. I could feel that my eyes were puffy from crying, but what I liked about her was that she wasn’t all clammy and motherly, putting her arms around you, and getting too close. She just pushed the box of tissues towards me and listened. That was the best thing — she listened.

How did I feel about telling her?

I said that I was relieved, and that was true, but I didn’t tell her that something inside me was shrivelling up in horror, now that I had told her our family’s worst, deepest secret.