Avalon

My father is on his knees, sculpting a woman’s body out of sand. Avalon in the off-season, and we are alone on the shore, huddled against the salt wind that blows in sharp across Port Phillip Bay. He works quietly, diligently, smoothing the rises and swells of the figure’s curves, and the form begins to take shape beneath his hands—a mermaid in my mother’s image. I gather Neptune’s pearls to loop around her neck, seaweed for her long dark hair and scallop shells to decorate her breasts. Above us, clouds purple in the afternoon, and the winter sun is like a wounded eye trying to blink open beneath a bruise.

I must have been four years old that winter, when my father reclaimed me from the place where I’d been living with my mother among a rotating cast of other female tenants, fellow itinerants. He took me south to a beach house in that town named after a mythical island. It was a long and difficult journey—my father didn’t drive and was afraid to fly, and so over two days we travelled there on a series of buses and trains. On the way, he told me the story of this other Avalon and the wounded king who had sailed there on a glass boat. A magical place, my father said, of recovery and renewal.

The beach house in our Avalon belonged to the parents of a friend of his, a woman who came from a big Catholic family of many brothers and sisters. Single beds lined the walls on each side of the children’s bedroom, like in a dormitory—there must have been eight of them, all with matching floral quilts. The house was only occupied in the summer months, so until then it could be ours for as long as we needed it.

This woman, I think, was in love with my father—though this was not the cause of my parents’ estrangement, which was not so easy to define and never adequately explained. He simply had that way about him—the way of a man made gentle by loss—and that sadness attracted women, making them believe they might be the one to solve it. And there are few more sympathetic figures to this world than that cut by a single father.

Those days come back to me with the smell of wet wool and brine. The grit in the wind, the sand that stuck to my stockings and the sleeves of my coat, the knitted cap pulled down low over my ears, give the memories a grainy, muffled quality, as if they are in low resolution. There are many gaps and silences, where the picture skips or the audio drops out.

A father and child climb a hill on a deserted street, past vacant plots of scrub, beachside weatherboards in red and blue. The child must run every few steps to keep up with her father’s stride; he takes her mittened hand in his own. She bobs her head from side to side as if to music only she can hear, until finally he lifts her to the great height of his shoulders. His lips move, but he has no words for what has happened to their family, why they are alone together at the beach at the wrong time of year, the whereabouts of her mother. So he does what he has always done to articulate pain and sorrow—he sings. Old songs, ones he remembers his mother playing in his own childhood. ‘Unchained Melody’, or something by Frank Sinatra.

To see a father and daughter alone together, the way we were—day in, day out, with no sign of a woman’s presence—was still a curiosity thirty years ago, and perhaps that’s why he took such care with my appearance, combing my hair into two tight plaits, shining my shoes, mending the hems of my dresses by hand whenever they came loose. He had been raised by his grandparents and that’s how he learned to care for a child—with warmth and tenderness but the slight remove of a generation—and I tend to picture him as much older than he was, when he was just forty the year I was born and that is not so uncommon now.

There was a feeling that we were waiting for life to resume its regular pattern that I now recognise as a part of the aftermath of disaster. The belief persists that if one only stays still, makes no sudden movements, the world will right itself again and correct its course. Until then, we didn’t want to stray too far from the life we had known in case we could never find our way back again. What we wanted was for time to hold still.

We didn’t want to stray too far from the life we had known in case we could never find our way back again.

We developed simple routines, made simple meals. My father believed in the benefits of walking in all weather—that it made one robust in body, mind and spirit—and so each morning, we made our way to the shops in town to buy bread, cheese and tomatoes, or roast chicken in a plastic bag. Sometimes, a custard tart from the Chinese bakery for a treat, or a warm parcel of hot chips sprinkled with vinegar and wrapped in butcher’s paper, which we ate on a bench overlooking the beach. Gulls gathered at our feet—they were so bold, the birds in those holiday towns, coming close enough that I could feel the brush of wings against my stockings. I was afraid of them. In the evenings, we tried to call my mother, though she rarely answered.

You miss her, don’t you? my father said one night. It was later, after we had spun the wheel of the old rotary telephone and listened to her line ring out again. We were side by side on one of the many single beds in my borrowed room. I was having trouble sleeping, as I often did as a child, and it had become a habit for my father to lie with me for a long time, telling me stories, until they became indistinguishable from my dreaming. They were mostly tales he remembered, old myths and legends of the kind my father liked, since my books were still at my mother’s and the shelves at the beach house held only guidebooks on Australian birds and yellowed crime fiction paperbacks, nothing suitable for children. That night, he told me the story of Pygmalion, the man who carved a woman out of stone and fell in love with his own creation.

Why don’t we make a sculpture of your mother on the beach, my father said. A mermaid, made out of sand? That way, she’ll know we’re thinking of her. People always know when you’re thinking of them. They can feel it.

It’ll be like building a snowman, he said. But of course, you’ve never seen snow, have you, Monkey? Well, there’ll be time for all that, you’ll see.

I think what my father was trying to tell me was that my life would be larger than this moment. That it would hold beauty and wonder I couldn’t yet imagine, and whatever loneliness or grief I was feeling would pass and, in the meantime, we could do this together, make something in the absence of what we had lost.

I know now that during the weeks I spent at the beach with my father, my mother was seeking her own Avalon. She was accepting the things she could not change, inviting a higher power into her heart, cataloguing the exact nature of her wrongs with a group of other women on plastic chairs inside a community hall over arrowroot biscuits and Styrofoam cups of pale, milky tea. They were all the same, these sobriety circles she visited on and off throughout my childhood, while I played in the garden or sat reading a book on the other side of the door. Though I could hardly hear what was said in those meetings, I came to find comfort in the hum of the women’s voices, the rhythms of their murmuring like a litany. I understood that the healing lay in telling stories, and that this exchange was important and mysterious and powerful. Perhaps this is why I feel compelled to tell this one now.

The life she was living was no life for a child—this is what my father had told her on the day he collected me from her porch. It was the kind of thing my mother’s mother might have said, had she still been alive, but we had buried her only months earlier after a swift and brutal illness had colonised her body. My mother now considered herself an orphan, her father long gone to another woman, another country. And so, seventeen years her senior, my father became the voice of authority in her life.

The idea, I think, was for my mother to have some time to get herself together, to find a job and a new place to live, something more stable. But how could she see it as anything other than an ultimatum? The conditions of my return to her a ransom of sorts, to be paid in plastic tokens inscribed with the Serenity Prayer.

One morning, we heard a car door slam out the front of the house and then through the window we could see her, wiping her boots on the mat. I remember feeling shy, the way I would be around a stranger.

Go on, go kiss your mother hello, my father said, ushering me gently in her direction.

She opened her arms and lifted me into a soft embrace. There was her familiar smell of cigarettes and tuberoses, her cheek smooth against my own and cooled by the winter air.

Didn’t you miss me? she asked. I pinched her hard on the wrist.

Ouch, she said, and laughed, putting me down on my feet again.

You didn’t say when you were coming, my father said. She isn’t packed.

I must have sensed it, the approach of that inevitable moment when once again we would part, because I took one of each of my parents’ hands and began to pull them in the direction of the ocean.

I think she wants to show you the beach, my father said.

Well, it has been a long drive, said my mother. I suppose we can leave later tonight.

On the beach, my parents walked ahead of me, their bodies bent towards each other against the wind. Neither of them looked suited to the surroundings—both of them long-haired, my father in his overcoat of English wool, my mother in black heeled boots and a long skirt covered in little flowers, a soft fur hat—and in this way, they seemed to belong together, the only two of their kind.

I must have sensed it, the approach of that inevitable moment when once again we would part.

Many years later, I would dream this scene, the three of us on a secluded beach. Dramatic rocky formations rising up from the coastline. I begin to climb them, and that’s when I realise that they’re not made of quartz or stone, but of salt. There are places of such wonder in the world. Stark white crests in the heart of the Tularosa Basin, dunes of gypsum in the desert. My father was right that life would show me many things, take me far from the towns and cities of my childhood, and yet I drag these memories with me wherever I go.

When my mother and I left Avalon, we drove for many hours, crossing the border into New South Wales. She was not going back, she said, not to my father or the place she grew up or the house where we’d lived as a family. Sometimes, she said, you just can’t. You understand that, don’t you? I think you do. I think you will.

In the backseat, I sat amongst piles of clothes, takeaway coffee cups. A loose stocking leg hung from the seat pocket on the driver’s side, and I tucked it back in.

Even now, many gaps and silences remain, where both memory and invention fail.

Once I grew old enough to hear it, I learned that the story my mother told at her meetings went something like this: after my father left with me, she was alone for the first time since my birth and could no longer sleep. Drinking helped until it didn’t, so she got in her car one night and began to drive. It was not her intention to follow us to Avalon, but to disappear. Thoughts flashed through her mind. A bridge, a lake, her yellow Bug airborne. She pulled over to the side of the road, smoked one cigarette and then another, and eventually the sun came up.

I see the scene the way she has always described it: sitting on the bonnet, watching the light break, waving on the passing cars that slowed down or flashed their lights to show that she was alright, there was no emergency, she was not broken down. Cigarettes, she liked to say, saved her life.

But that is just a story, with the warm, worn-in grooves of a tale often told.

Of all the unknowable things, all the ways I’ll never be able to step inside my mother’s life and walk around in it, I’ve wondered most about what really made her change her mind. If she couldn’t tell me what made her want to live, how could I trust that she would stay? There was too much ambiguity; too much relied on the whims of her nature. What I wanted was the blunt, bright clarity in the story of a miracle.