Disagreements could be caught between Bert’s rectangular vegetable patches. Sharp disagreements that jarred with mocking laughter. Forceful disputes were yelled. Words without context were shouted “Shot”, “Blast”, “YOU don’t know”, “That Bastard.” Arguments erupted which led to our prompt departure. Our mother would call us in from the yard to “come right now”. We hurried past the timber table, laden with dirty dishes. My father’s dark, silent mood hovered overhead in the Grey Vauxhall as we travelled to our home.
The reason why Aunt Kate never spoke to or visited her brother Luke after his twenty first birthday party, remained sealed within her. Her family didn’t know why, and she never said. There were guesses and notions that ran around in cycles until many suppositions were exhausted. Then, at age sixty-one, Aunt Kate took the reason to her grave. At her funeral, Luke was asked why his sister never spoke with him, Luke said he didn’t know. That’s what he said.
On Sunday afternoons, after my family’s roast lamb dinner had been cleared away and the greasy pans and plates washed and dried, I was free to go to the back garden shed that sheltered my sky-blue Malvern Star bike. I was free to go on long, rambling bike rides through the quiet suburb of Sandringham. As I peddled away, I could hear from my home the resonating tune of Fur Elise being played slowly, to soothe the uneasy soul of my father.
In my neighbourhood there were many fathers, uncles, brothers, all harbouring unspoken but loud voices rumbling in their heads, mixed up with images of gruesome battles and exploding bombs, images I never saw or had described to me. Ordinary occurrences such as the sudden crying of a baby, an unexpected garden sprinkler spraying over a fence, or a loud car horn pressed in annoyance, were among the catalysts for terrifying emotional outbursts.
Although the smells and sounds of a brutal war had passed, men lived and breathed with locked-in memories of soldiers’ pain. Fears stewed inside their minds and hearts, never to be permitted being voiced aloud. Horrors were allowed to fester into nightmares. Internal combats remained devoid of explanations or rationalisation, they left to culminate in fits of rage, heart attacks, then death. Everything boxed into coffins, then taken to their graves.
Once free from home, I liked to ride my bike through narrow nightman’s lanes behind houses, heavy sandy paths to the beach, and then up a snaking hill to the local cemetery. There I would ride between graves on narrow crumbling black, asphalt paths, thoughtful in my own awareness of what was stowed below the hundreds of flat grey slabs. I knew there were rotting coffins with decaying bodies and skeletons inside. Their bones would be old and ivory coloured and scored with fine black veins, resembling the keys on my sister’s piano.
It was a still and mostly quiet graveyard. It was generally devoid of bright colours except a few spikey green pine trees and occasional fresh bunches of red roses laid against headstones. I would try to avoid kneeling mourners, they were easily startled by a boy peddling past, disturbing their grief-laden memories. I wondered if they knew the stories buried below, stories vaulted in dark perpetuity unable to be vocalised by crumbling jawbones.
