Serenade for a Small Family Read online

  Cabaret, and Helen Reddy.

  Mum had married Dad when she was nineteen. (She only

  had one boyfriend before Dad—Michael. They probably

  didn’t even have sex. Amazing.) She struggled with a going-

  crazy feeling when she was full-time with us four kids, until

  she realised it was just because she was smart and creative,

  and she needed stimulation. Dad was busy studying medicine

  and then working as a radiologist. When their intellectual

  neighbour, who talked and drank with friends late into the

  evenings, asked Mum, ‘Why do you keep having them?’,

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  she was thrown. She was raised by Catholic nuns, and she

  told me she just didn’t know she had other choices. Dad

  used to come home and practise classical guitar and ‘The

  Old Grey Goose is Dead’, and Mum wanted to kill him

  because she was so desperate for adult company.

  In photos of them travelling around Europe with three

  of us kids in a van in the 1970s, Mum and Dad are hip and

  good-looking. Mum was beautiful when she was young, but

  didn’t know it. She still is, and she still doesn’t. (The artist

  Mirka Mora said that not knowing she was beautiful when

  she was young was one of her regrets. I tell myself to believe

  I’m beautiful now in case I am, so I won’t be sorry later.)

  Mum didn’t get to art school until she was thirty. First,

  she had to go to school at nights to get her HSC; when she

  did that, she was the first to arrive and the last to leave. She

  would have a celebratory gin and tonic with her best friend,

  Kathy Golski, before she got there. School, for mum, was

  heaven. Art school was Utopia.

  Mum still has to do the sign of the cross to work out

  which hand is her right one. If you’re in the car with her

  and you say, ‘Turn right here, Mum’, she takes her hand off

  the steering wheel to whip it into an abbreviated crucifix.

  And she still can’t tell the time on a clock with hands, and if

  you use twenty-four-hour time, she counts backwards with

  her fingers to work out what you mean. She does have a

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  brilliant mind and she’s super intuitive; she’s just not great

  with telling the time, or telling left from right.

  In 1952, Mum’s mum and dad, Oma and Opa (that’s

  Dutch for grandmother and grandfather), had taken five

  days to fly from Holland to Australia with their three kids.

  They never looked back. They left Holland because it was

  a mess after five years under German occupation, and they

  thought the Russians were coming to take over where the

  Germans had left off. They stopped over in Cairo, Calcutta,

  Penang (an emergency landing), Singapore, Darwin and

  finally Sydney. Their house—walls, ceiling, everything—

  was dismantled and came over in a wooden crate by boat

  a few months later. Opa later attached that crate to the side

  of the house itself for Oma’s mum, Poet (pronounced like

  the word ‘put’), to live in. The whole set-up was elegant

  and Dutch, with Persian rugs, lamps and antiques.

  ‘They were middle-class Dutch,’ says Mum when I ask

  her about it. ‘Not your average kaaskop . . .’ ( Kaaskop is

  Dutch for ‘ cheesehead’.)

  Oma had grown up in a small Dutch village, but she

  wasn’t fazed by the move. That’s Oma—cool. Mum was

  five and she was very fazed—she screamed with bad ear pain

  throughout the journey, and when she started school she was

  taunted because of her accent. Mum had never seen nuns

  before and, to her, they were menacing in their head-to-toe

  black and white habits. When they tried to tear her from

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  her little brother Robert on their first day in a new school,

  she was protective and terrified and tried hard to hang on.

  Opa’s mum had fifteen kids. (Fifteen! I would rather

  be shot!) She wore big black dresses down to the ground

  and was nicknamed ‘Zwarte Gevaar’, which means ‘Black

  Danger’. The neighbours thought the kids had numbers for

  names because they ate meals in shifts and were called inside

  like this: ‘One to seven—your lunch is ready!’

  Opa worked as a director for YKK Zippers, and Mum

  and Dad’s friend Zoran named him ‘Lord of the Flies’. He

  was musical, and played jazz piano by ear, so Oma says

  I get my musicality from him. By the time he was my

  grandfather, he had thinning slicked-back hair, and wore

  glasses and smoked a pipe. He tickled us kids hard, digging

  his fingers into our ribs until we said grenade (pronounced

  ‘henada’ and meaning ‘have mercy’—a Dutch tradition from

  my mum’s side), and even then he only stopped sometimes.

  I didn’t like it.

  Some of Opa’s relatives came to Australia too. Opa’s

  cousin got a job selling fridges and his siblings teased him

  because he couldn’t say ‘refrigerator’.

  ‘Hey, Yon,’ they said. ‘What are you selling?’ Just to

  hear him try.

  They adapted the local lingo: ‘Pass me the fucking salt,’

  they said, thinking it was the normal way to talk at the

  dinner table.

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  Oma is tall and elegant. She buys clothes in op shops

  and finds stuff that looks great on her—leopard-skin tops and

  dark blue fitted jeans. She has long legs, a sharp nose and,

  when she picks something up from the f loor, she bends

  forward from her hips. She’s eighty-three and she still plays

  tennis. Oma didn’t want to be alone after Opa died. Baden

  is her boyfriend now, and they go on expensive cruises

  around the world. ‘ Hy is een australier maar hy is heel aardig,’

  she says shamelessly, which means: ‘He’s a real Australian

  but he’s nice.’ She says ‘cruise’ with a throaty Dutch ‘r’

  sound, which Mum imitates antagonistically.

  ‘Om’s blowing my inheritance, dammit!’ says Mum. ‘My

  friends’ mums are quietly nearing the ends of their lives in

  hospital beds, but the only thing that’s going to take my

  mum out is a pirate!’

  ‘I would like a pirate,’ was Oma’s wistful response.

  When I was eleven, we moved from affluent Mosman

  to Exeter in the Southern Highlands and I was made school

  captain of the tiny local public school. There were fewer

  rules than at the posh city school; there were no uniforms

  and no one fitted in, so we all did. I relaxed and hung upside

  down on the monkey bars as I nursed my secret crush on

  our bow-legged Yugoslavian school principal.

  Miss Watson, who drove the school bus, had a very

  pursed mouth and straight, shoulder-length grey hair. I

  appreciated her calm and caring ways, and took it upon

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  myself to acknowledge her good work. We were in the

  middle of school assembly when I raised my hand into the

  air and asked if I could s
ay something. My heart pounded

  as I stood up from the sea of cross-legged boys and girls,

  their faces all turned towards me, and said, ‘I just wanted

  to thank Miss Watson for doing such a good job and for all

  her concern.’ Afterwards, sitting back down and pummelling

  my hands together under my jumper, I felt I had done an

  important thing.

  Dad set up a radiology practice in Bowral and employed

  a farm manager, Martin, who rarely spoke, giving grunts

  for answers. He had white hair and looked a bit like his

  pink-eyed bull terrier, though I couldn’t say why. His wife

  was warm and pretty, with a frizz of long hair and a clean

  house. Sometimes they’d babysit us at their place. ‘Tea’s

  ready!’ Rita would say, resting slices of white bread beside

  peas and carrots. White bread—what a treat!

  Before school I’d round up the cows to check which ones

  were ovulating, so they could be artificially inseminated.

  It was called ‘checking the cyclers’. They were the ones

  jumping up on the bums of other cows. Standing on the

  pedals of my motorbike, with messy-bed hair, wearing a

  fake-fur coat, my nightie and gumboots, I hooned around

  them. ‘Heeeet op! Moooove it op! C’mon! C’mon! C’mon!’

  Sometimes, on a weekend, Sarah and I would innocently

  whip nearly hatching eggs out from under chooks’ bums

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  to sell them, along with bags of cow poo, at a stall beside

  the main road, doing handstands while we waited for cars

  to come.

  I had a short, round horse called Pabby, who had a thick

  white mane that stuck up all the way down his neck. His

  previous owners were Italian, and claimed to have brought

  him up on spaghetti and meatballs; looking at his barrel-

  shaped girth, you could believe it. He had to trot fast to

  keep up with other horses because he didn’t like to canter.

  It wasn’t a gracious or sexy look—I couldn’t rise in the

  saddle to a trot that fast—but we covered a lot of ground

  and he never threw me off.

  When I finished primary school, I was sent to another

  exclusive girls’ school. (While I was at Frensham, I won

  a Latin competition and I will never forget it—my friend

  came out crimson before me; when the panel of sober,

  scholarly judges had offered her the option of standing

  or sitting on the chair to read to them in Latin she had

  misunderstood and opted to stand on the chair. I still feel

  for her and it still makes me laugh.) Then, while Dad

  was taking Stefan on a BMW motorbike road trip across

  Germany, Mum took Sofie and me away from Frensham’s

  predictable world—‘Where the Moët ends, the chardonnay

  begins,’ says Benny—to explore Rajasthan, in the north

  of India, and ride camels across the Thar Desert for two

  weeks. I was thirteen. India is Mum’s idea of heaven. We

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  rode side saddle, and loosened our hips to move with the

  camels’ lollopy walk and the clompy three-pointer way

  they got up and got down. Somehow I rode alone while

  the rest of the group shared double saddles with our camel

  drivers, with whom I fell deeply and hotly in love, as did

  other women on the trek—for their handsome faces and

  smooth brown skin beneath stunning orange turbans, their

  sexy moustaches and their silence, and the irresistible way

  they ignored us completely.

  Mum says everyone else in the group was up at the crack

  of dawn each morning, cleaning up and packing away their

  tents, but Sofie and I, absorbed in ourselves and our messy

  adolescent thoughts and feelings, lay curled in our sleeping

  bags until the very last minute.

  I remember looking into a piece of cracked mirror after

  ten days in the desert and liking my face. I’m real y pretty!

  I thought.

  But in our family there was a warped dynamic and its

  effects were poison. To me, it seemed that Dad did not

  distribute his attention equally between us kids, which left

  me feeling achingly small and inadequate.

  I blamed myself entirely, vowing to rise up and be

  great somehow, whatever that meant. I went days at a

  time without food, and then binged until it hurt. I studied

  stupidly hard at school for short stints, and then threw it in

  each time I realised that getting it perfect would still not

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  be enough—not big enough, not impressive enough. The

  pressure, the pressure. My school reports said: ‘Ingrid is not

  making the most of her great potential.’

  Mum and Dad split for real when I was fourteen, and it

  was every man for himself. Stefan and Sofie had left home

  by then, but Alex and I went to Canberra with Mum, and

  moved in next door to Mum’s friend Kathy. I went to an

  alternative college, where I didn’t know anyone. I didn’t

  like my clothes and I didn’t fit in anywhere. I had a bad

  perm and braces, and I was still mad at myself. At home

  Alex was shattered and Mum was depressed—so lost that

  she was spinning in circles in her head.

  Six months later, I wanted to leave home. ‘Over my

  dead body!’ said Mum. ‘You’re not sixteen yet!’ But I was

  determined, so I heaved a suitcase onto a Sydney-bound

  train and ran away.

  I moved into a small apartment in Surry Hills, with

  an old lift that creaked and jolted as it rode up and down

  through the night. Dad paid my rent. I waitressed. I took

  speed and ecstasy and smoked joints. The first night I

  dropped acid, a prostitute threw herself off the roof of my

  apartment block. As the sun came up, I could not take

  my eyes off the wide bloodstain on the concrete below my

  kitchen window, and was overwhelmed by a bleak feeling

  of futility.

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  I rang Sofie, who came over to rescue and chastise me:

  ‘You shouldn’t take drugs, Ingrid!’ I shielded my eyes from

  the bright sun as she gripped my upper arm and dragged

  me across the road to her place. She tucked me into her

  bed and made me melted cheese on toast—I hallucinated

  that it was rising and falling, rising and falling. That night

  I returned to my apartment and sat with my knees up in its

  stained floral armchair, staring at the silent phone handset

  on the coffee table beside me, wishing Mum or Dad would

  call and insist I come home. But they didn’t. Fuckit. Fuckit,

  I thought. I wandered into the kitchen, surprised by how

  many dirty dishes one person could create.

  For three years my clothesline was draped solely in

  black, and chunks of plaster fell from the walls of my

  rented rooms in share houses up and down Bourke Street

  in inner-city Sydney. When I lived opposite a refuge for

  homeless alcoholic men in Woolloomooloo, Mum helped

  me hang my red silk sheets over my bedroom window for

  curtains
, and drape 1950s dresses on coat hangers on my

  walls for atmosphere. I liked it that way. Mum’s boyfriend

  at the time refused to leave his red Porsche parked out the

  front. Mum laughed and said, Bugger him.

  When I was eighteen, I went to East Sydney Tech to

  finish studying for my Higher School Certificate. I was

  still lost and stoned but, when the time came, I caught a

  bus to Randwick High School and managed to sit through

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  my exams, desperately out of place amid rows of uniformed

  school students. I passed. Just.

  Hooking up with other musicians while Ben was working

  was a way for me to settle in to life in Alice.

  After hearing about my music background at our so-called

  Songwriters’ Gathering, Karlie invited me to work with

  her on a music program for kids on a community in the

  Pitjantjatjara Lands in South Australia. After hours on the

  road, we arrived at the foot of a mountain. Looking for the

  address we had been given, we drove down streets strewn

  with rubbish and a scattering of skinny strung-out dogs

  under a blaring sun. A guy with a wild wasted look in his

  bloodshot eyes pointed out directions, holding a petrol can

  over his nose and mouth with his free hand.

  The door to our house was ajar. As we walked in, petrol

  fumes hit us hard and I pulled the neck of my t-shirt up over

  my nose. Young voices called to each other—‘Whitefella!

  Whitefella!’—as they ran into the furthest room of the

  house. Taps were running and the fridge door hung wide

  open. There was spilt paint on the floors and food mashed

  into the bench tops. My heart pounded as we turned and left.

  We were given somewhere else to stay, and sat with

  doors and curtains closed while I battered Karlie with my

  rambling thoughts and wrangled with culture shock.

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  ‘They’re just kids! I mean . . . they’re sniffing petrol!’ I

  sat forward with my head in my hands. This place felt so

  foreign—I might as well have been in another country. We

  were committed to being here for two weeks and my head

  spun. ‘Their voices . . . they sounded so young . . .’

  ‘It’s okay, you’ll get used to it,’ said Karlie. ‘We’ve got

  this house now. This place is good.’

  ‘That house was so . . . I mean, it was trashed! And that

  guy . . . just holding a can of petrol over his nose while he