ELLE FICTION
Mothership by Michelle Wright.
WHEN I WAS LITTLE, MY MOTHER BOUGHT
A SPACESHIP that she set up in our driveway. The outside was silver and the inside was black. One summer afternoon, she packed up all our worldly goods and loaded them into the cargo bay. Our voyage began at the end of that summer just after I turned five. We boarded the vessel late in the night and I slept through the countdown and take-off. When we reached the outer atmosphere, the spaceship levelled off and banked to starboard. It took us 24 hours to complete our first orbit of the earth. That spaceship was the second place I lived in.
The captain of the spaceship was my mother, and the crew was me and my two NASA terrapins, Livingstone and Lester. They lived in a plastic tub with water and rocks in the back, with bags of lettuce leaves and cans of sardines that Mum and I fed them. Mum called us her “motley crew” and she called our vessel the “Mothership”.
I know I had an earthly home before I lived in the spaceship, because the day we left it is still there in my memory. The memory isn’t very much. It’s not like a video with moving images and sound. More like a photo taken with a flash that left an after-image in my mind. Or a few photos clicking one after the other, like those red plastic View-masters. There’s a moment of passing from shade to light. The light high up and blinding, probably the sun, and a lemonade icy pole dripping down my wrist. My father was there, lurking in the shade, just his arms in the sun with the bright light making the hairs look orange and long, thick fingers up in front of his face, shielding his eyes from the sun, or maybe from my mother’s gaze. I think he said something as he turned to leave. It might have been, “See ya, son,” but I didn’t really hear.
Then just a blank. And a jump to the memories of life in the spaceship. Me alone with Mum. Long days of muted sounds and slow, confined movements. Deep blue through the windows and millions of stars. The low groan of engines firing and clicking gently as they cooled.
My mother steered the spaceship towards the rising sun, always heading east. Each morning she woke me up at dawn. She angled the vessel into a safe dock and shut the jet rockets down. She swung her stiffened body into the back seat and slid behind me in my pillow nest. She stretched her thin, chocolate brown legs into the space between the front seats, and her wavy black hair brushed against my cheek like a cat’s tail. The air in the cabin was thick with a night of shallow breathing and she blew on my sweaty neck and made my spine shiver. We waited for the sun to appear over the rim of the blue marble earth and when it hit the windscreen it stung so much and was so beautiful that it made both of us squeeze our eyes up till they cried.
One morning after breakfast, Mum announced that we were coming back to earth. We’d touch down in a place whose name glowed with gold and warmth. Sunshine. There were grey painted houses and green metal fences lined up as we made our approach. The streets were flat and soaked in light. The buildings were all low. Beige and grey, like they were camouflaged. Even the trees that lined the streets were short and squat, keeping their heads down.
We landed in my grandmother’s backyard and were put into quarantine in a room next to the laundry at the back of the house. When my grandmother introduced herself to me, she said, “I’m not keen on Nanna or Grandma or anything like that.” I asked her what I should call her then. “I don’t know. Call me Mrs Mitchell for the moment.” She handed me a tennis ball. “Don’t play in the front yard. I’ve just put seedlings down. It’s bad enough the neighbours’ dogs trampling all over them.”
Every morning after breakfast I watched cartoons on TV, and every afternoon I played in my room at the back of the house. I invented a game where I sat on the floor with my feet up on the edge of the bed and rolled the tennis ball down my legs. If it didn’t fall off when it got to my knees, I scored a point. That room at my grandmother’s house was my third home.
My mum and I came and went from the house, and my grandmother hardly even said hello or goodbye. We ate our dinner with her while she watched the evening news on TV, but that was about the only time we saw her. She lived alone in the rest of the house and left us to ourselves. At first I thought she was my mum’s mother, but one day when we were lying on the bed, I asked my mum and she said, “No, of course she’s not. Does she look like me?” I’d never really thought that my mum looked different. I didn’t know who she would be different to. She just looked like my mum. Her skin was darker than mine, and I was darker than my dad and my grandma, but I hadn’t really thought much about it until then. “She’s your father’s mother,” she said. She looked up at the ceiling for a minute. “She’s doing us a favour by letting us stay here,” she said. “We should be grateful that she’s taken us in. She doesn’t have to.”
***** My grandmother’s backyard was brown and bare. By the fence was a concrete birdbath. No birds ever flew into the garden, so I used it as a playground for Lester and Livingstone. On the other side of the fence was a white and blue service station with half its scratchy red letters fallen off. When it was closed in the evenings, my mother took me there to the flat, empty concrete to teach me how to rollerskate. I spent half my time on the ground dribbling spit on my scraped knees and watching my mum. She was amazing. She twirled and jumped and looked like she was weightless. When I watched her, I heard music playing in my head.
On Fridays Mum got off work early. When she got home, she’d take me to Mr Vella’s milk bar. She’d have a strawberry milkshake that Mr Vella made himself and served in a tall metal tumbler with a paper straw. I’d have 50 cents to choose my own mixed lollies. I’d always buy just Mates. I liked the way the chocolate melted quickly, but you could keep the caramel on your tongue for ages till it flattened down to paper-thin.
On the weekends that my mum didn’t have to work, we’d walk through the big, cool concrete drain under the main road with its brick arch at one end and green-fringed water running along the middle. We’d follow the trail that ran alongside the creek, the water still and ragged, slinking past the reeds and rocks. I still had a thing for reptiles, but I’d moved past terrapins. I was obsessed with crocodiles. Mum would tell me that the creek flowed all the way to Brazil and that crocodiles the size of buses had been sighted in its depths. We walked along the banks for hours, like explorers in the Amazon, hands curled into binoculars in front of our eyes, straining at submerged logs and shadows far downstream.
One morning when summer was coming around again, my father, whose real name was Patrick, arrived to stay with us. His hands were not as big as I remembered, and his voice was soft and low. He talked to me like he talked to adults, with a solemn face, not asking me any questions and using words I didn’t understand. But sometimes he was silent and then my mother took me to the playground down the road and we lay down on the prickly grass. She’d tell me to shut one eye and we’d pinch the clouds between our fingers and breathe them in like steam.
On Christmas Day, Patrick woke me up in the middle of a dream. It was not quite light outside and my mother wasn’t in the room. He put his big hands under my armpits and propped me up against the bedhead. He pushed a soccer ball between my sleep-numb arms and kissed me on the forehead. That’s all I remember. I must have slid back into sleep and when I woke up for real on Christmas morning, he wasn’t in the house. My mum and grandma and I ate lunch on a card table in the backyard. My mum helped my grandmother put a tarp over the clothes hoist and we sat under its blue shade with a wet tea-towel on the slices of ham to keep them from drying out. After lunch we closed our eyes with our heads tipped back and sucked on frozen watermelon. No-one mentioned Patrick, so I left the soccer ball where I’d put it under the bed.
The next day was Boxing Day. I didn’t know that everyone called it that. I thought it was Mum’s name for it, because it was the day we packed all our things into boxes and moved out of my grandmother’s house and into a new one.
“We walked along the
banks like explorers in the Amazon, hands curled into binoculars”
That evening when we were sitting on the ground in our new kitchen unpacking the cardboard boxes, I asked my mother why my father wasn’t with us anymore. She said, “He’s gone to Antarctica. To live in a hut and count the polar bears.” She looked down at the linoleum and kept looking at it for ages. In front of the fridge it was lifting up and a little bit rotted away. The rest of it was grey with blue squares, but in front of the fridge it was brown.
“Not polar bears,” she said. “Emperor penguins.” She pushed herself up from the floor. “It’s emperor penguins that live in Antarctica.”
That was the last time my mother spoke about my father. I thought then that she didn’t want me to worry, thinking about him in that dangerous frozen place, so far away and on his own.
***** My sixth birthday was a Friday, the last Friday of January. Because my birthday is Australia Day, Mum had the day off work. She told me we were going on an expedition. We took three different trains to get to Stony Point to catch the ferry over to Cowes on Phillip Island. I was so excited to be out at sea that I peed in my shorts and I had to wear a towel like a skirt while Mum washed them in the bathroom sink on board and dried them in the sun on the wooden slatted seats. I don’t remember all the details of that day. I know it was hot and there were seagulls when we ate our fish and chips for lunch on the grass by the beach in Cowes.
Afterwards, we lay in the shallow water with our arms and legs floating in and out with the rippling waves, and just our faces sticking up to breathe. We stayed on the beach till late in the afternoon. Then we went to buy ice-creams and forgot that the ferry was about to leave. We had to run like crazy down the pier to catch it and Mum’s ice-cream fell off her cone. We just made it onto the ferry before they pulled up the plank, and we were panting and laughing and everybody was looking at us. Mum was bent over and she was trying to whisper in my ear. She was trying to say, “Now it’s my turn to piss my pants,” but she could hardly talk because she was laughing so much. When we calmed down, we shared my ice-cream and watched a pelican that was circling up above for ages. It’s the best birthday and Australia Day I’ve ever had.
Around that same time, the Commonwealth Games were happening. Mum and I watched all of the highlights on TV in the evenings and Mum said she would enrol me in swimming lessons so I could win five gold medals like that young girl, Hayley. She was so sure I was going to be a champion. She made a podium out of a kitchen stool, a chair and a cardboard box and lifted me up onto the stool and made me pretend to look at the Australian flag while she sang the national anthem. She never sang the real words, though. Always the fake ones with ostriches and sausages. And then I’d wave to the crowd and wipe away a pretend tear.
Then, one Monday, it was the start of the school year, and I was in Prep. The uniform was green and yellow like the Australian team’s. In the first week, the other boys wanted to know which footy team I went for. I didn’t know many of the teams, but one kid told me I should go for Collingwood because they were black and white, like me. I didn’t tell Mum he had said that. I just told the kid I already barracked for Richmond. There were lots of other kids who went for them, so I didn’t really have to pretend to have a reason.
A couple of weeks into first term, on a hot Melbourne February day, Nelson Mandela was freed from prison. Of course, I didn’t know who he was at the time. My mother did though and she said he was her hero. She cut his photo from the front page of the newspaper and stuck it on our fridge.
“Is that your dad?” I asked her when I got home from school that day.
She laughed and said, “I wish,” and then she told me all about the tall, dark man with his arm held high. The photo stayed there on the fridge for years, crowded in on all sides by my primary school drawings and final warning electric bills. I actually don’t think she ever took it down.
When I try to remember the big moments from my life, it feels like everything important happens in summer. I distinctly remember the day Nelson Mandela died. December 5, 2013. It was a Thursday. I’d spent the night sleeping on a banana lounge in the garage of a girl I’d met at the pub. I didn’t even know her name and she only let me crash there for the night because she was blind drunk and she said I reminded her of her dead brother. I was 27 years old. Almost 28. Mandela had spent my whole life in prison. And what had I done with my 27 years of freedom? I’d dropped out of school halfway through Year 11 and done some pretty stupid things. I’d held down a few jobs here and there. Worked in the mines over in Hedland and up in Weipa. Earned good money for about a year, but pissed most of it up against the wall. And then I got busted in a drug test at work and they put me on the next plane out of there. I didn’t have the heart to tell my mum. I told her I’d got a better offer down in Brisbane. After that I was unemployed for ages, sleeping rough, drinking heaps. And then I really hit a wall when I was about 24. Couldn’t even bring myself to talk to
Mum over the phone. I just sent her a card for her birthday and Christmas. That was it. For the last three years I’d been living between friends’ couches and the streets. I hadn’t seen my mum in over two years. That day the news of Mandela’s death came through was when I finally called her up. I told her how I remembered his photo from the newspaper article on the fridge. And suddenly we were both bawling our eyes out on the phone like it was my real grandfather that had died. We talked a bit more about how things had been for the two of us lately. She didn’t ask me any hard questions or expect me to give her any guarantees. She just said she’d be really happy if I came to live with her so we could spend some time together. Then before she hung up, almost as an afterthought, she told me she had cancer.
***** I turned 30 a week ago. It was a Monday. A day off for Australia Day. That was the day my mother died. It’s crazy how these things work out. I’ve heard that people often manage to hold on till significant milestones before they let themselves slip away. I don’t know if my mother was holding on, but it felt like maybe she was.
I was there at the hospital by her bed when she passed. She’d always been a small woman, but at the end, with all the weight she’d lost while she was ill, she looked like a little child. She was more or less conscious when I got there around lunchtime, half propped up with pillows, with an oxygen mask on her face. I talked to her, but her eyes kept closing and she was just saying random words and humming bits of a tune I didn’t recognise. I went to the cafeteria to get something to eat around six in the evening, and when I came back there was a nurse with her. Mum was lying down with her eyes closed and without the oxygen mask. The nurse told me that she wouldn’t be with us much longer. She said to keep talking to her, that she would still hear me right up until the end. I put my mouth close to her ear, but my mind was blank. I couldn’t think of anything. Her breaths were really weak and far apart and the nurse put her hand on my shoulder and said, “Talk to her. She can still hear you.” I didn’t know what to say. I just repeated, “I love you, Mum. I love you. Thanks for everything. Thanks for everything,” and then she stopped breathing altogether.
When I was leaving the hospital later in the night, the fireworks started up over the city. I caught a tram to Flinders Street and walked down to the banks of the Yarra River. I stood in the crowd, packed in tight with people’s shoulders pressing into my back and arms. It felt good not to be alone.
Mum’s funeral is today. She was only 48. I’d never thought about how young she was before. She didn’t seem to have an age. There are so many things that have come to mind since I woke up this morning. I have to give her eulogy this afternoon and all week I’ve been thinking about the years with her and not knowing what to say. I’m finally starting to think I might get my life together, and the thing that really kills me is that she won’t be here to see it. I’ve accumulated a shitload of regrets over the years, but that’s my biggest one.
All morning I’ve been wading through memories to tell the story of who my mother was. And it’s that year before I started school that keeps rising to the surface. The year we left my father and crossed the Nullarbor Plain in a clapped-out Datsun 120Y spaceship, with garbage bags of clothes filling up the footwells and blue cellophane stuck on the windows with hundreds of holes pricked with the pin from my mum’s Woolworths name-tag to make me a starry sky.
The time Mum worked two shitty jobs and still had the energy to take me on adventures through the Amazon. The year my father came back for Christmas, then disappeared forever. The year I won five gold medals and Nelson Mandela finally walked free. When I calculated her age, I realised that the summer I was turning six, she was not yet 24.
Yesterday I took the train out to Sunshine and went down to Mr Vella’s milk bar. There are Vietnamese people now behind the counter, but they still have the same lollies more or less. I asked for a dollar’s worth of Mates and walked to the playground at the end of our old street. I lay down on the grass and put one in my mouth. The chocolate melted quickly and then the caramel was so sickly sweet, it made the back of my throat itch and I coughed till my eyes were streaming with tears. I wiped them off and lay there for a while thinking about my mother. Not getting sentimental, just thinking about how strong she was. How she just made things happen. That’s the way it had to be. It’s thanks to her I never gave up hope. It’s thanks to her I know I have to give myself the time I’ll need to work things out. I know that an orbit of the earth can’t be rushed. I know about the time it takes to circle through the shade and back into the light. How the trick is to keep steering towards where the sun comes up over the horizon. Like you’re driving towards the edge of the earth. And knowing you can’t fall off. E
Michelle Wright is the author of Fine ($29.99, Allen & Unwin)
“It’s thanks to her I know about the time it takes to circle through the shade and back into the light”