Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: family feud

  • the boast of Christmas past

    Last year and the year before that and four years ago too we went down on the train to West Germany, to a tiny village lying under the skirts of the old woods. This is where my sweetheart was born. His father was born in the same house and to me the village, the house, the family symbolised most of what I’ve longed for all my life – the continuity and cosiness of grandmother living upstairs and now sleeping in the graveyard, the grooming visits, where we trimmed her candles and scattered flowers for her; the dog racing joyously through unbroken snow; the stacks of firewood and the window dense with flickering lights.

    I felt so welcomed the very first year, when he and I had known each other only six months; his mother was kind and his father jovial yet somehow forbidding and she had saved for me the tree to decorate, “because you are an artist.” I persuaded him to go down there early in the season so we could hang out in his family, since mine is so fraught; and on December 9, 2012, four years ago today, we woke up at the other end of our long train ride and opened the door on a perfect world. Here is what I wrote:

    Waking up in a tiny German village. It has snowed and the snow extends away across the fields. The woods stand shoulder to shoulder up the hill. Opening the door I can hear church bells howling like dogs, everything is beautiful because everything is covered in snow, a white democracy. The phrase forms in my mind and a series of sour images ensues: what is white about a democracy? Everything in Germany is tinctured with its history, the way everything in Australia cries out black stories. Nonetheless this fairytale landscape has a hold of my mind, I feel relaxed and browsing, last night by the candleglow Christmas market I found a bookshop displaying eleven different editions of the tales of the Brothers Grimm in its front window. Tiny sparrows dart at the small wooden house outside pecking at seeds. A fierce wind has sprung up from, apparently, the Arctic Circle and I close the door thankfully. Good morning, winter world.

    Then last year, a huge family shindig. I should put ‘family’ in inverted commas because part of the substance of the fight – the potatoes perhaps, if not the meat – was that I was not part of the family, being a newcomer; therefore he had no right to bring me into important family discussions.

    This important family discussion was about money, aren’t they all. Previous family visits had been laidback, shambolic, tilted round long evening board games and wine. Now something was brewing, but I couldn’t work out what. All week we’d been trying to work out why everybody seemed so tense. Then January second I stumbled out of bed and down the dark hallway to find my honey and his father locked in fiery argument.

    I sat down and took my partner’s hand. To be locked inside a fire is grievous indeed. I had never heard this family shouting before, though the father’s a bit of a bully: our very first visit I had called him out on his treatment of his son, when the man whistled for him to bring something; He’s not a dog, I said, and the old man said: Doch. (“Au contraire.”) This visit he had been mocking us for our failure to produce a child; the sister, a thistly blonde, was swollen with her third and we had lost our baby and been unable, thus far, to bring forth a living sibling. The proud grandfather sat with his injured foot up on an ottoman, making my partner’s dog beg for walnuts; his son said, please don’t spoil my dog, it is I who will have to live with him, and the father said: “Well. If I had a grandchild, I would be spoiling the child. But as there is no grandchild…”

    These coarse country people occur in my family as well. Ours also drink too much and hoard things and are suspicious of fresh food. All week we had been walking in on whispered conferences which urgently suspended and then remained hanging in the air, swinging like baubles. Now the underwater fire had burst forth. It was a question of inheritance. They had cooked up an arrangement which seemed to me bitterly unfair as well as financially unwise, and I said so.

    My own family finds me outspoken, too. It inconveniences them to the point of injury. When I flew home for my father’s funeral and suggested, in sentences very tentative and clothed in sticky tact, a less sentimental poem for the ceremony, my brother said flatly, “That’s not open for discussion, Cathoel.” I said, “But – ” and he ranted, “See! this is why I was saying it would be better if you didn’t come back – you’re just this person who comes in and changes everything.”

    “You don’t belong in this family,” he had also said, on another occasion, and when I retailed this story after Dad’s funeral to my friend she said, bracingly, “This is perfectly true, of course. The only difference is, he doesn’t realise that it’s a compliment.”

    “She doesn’t belong in this discussion,” the father said now: “because you two are not properly married.” Well, I told him, wounded and enraged. When your daughter got married – it was on two days’ notice and in the town hall, because they’d worked out at the last minute they would save eight thousand euros in tax by becoming officially a couple – I had to borrow a set of unwashed clothes from the bride, else I’d have had to go along in my overalls. It wasn’t exactly love’s young dream.

    Well, but you have no children, he blustered, so you don’t really belong. And thus silenced me with pain.

    I told him some home truths and he told me to shut up. We had never spoken to each other like this before. I got louder. So did the dad, but I suspect everyone is so used to his roaring and his barked commands that they barely noticed. Afterwards I was accused of having said things that were beyond the reach of my imperfect German vocabulary. I reminded the father that he had told me several times to halt den Schnabel, hold your muzzle. They were so outraged at my insurrection “under my roof, to me, as host! in my Own Home!” that they had no room left over to contemplate what might be due to a guest, a vulnerable guest trying to celebrate their daughter’s umpteenth glowing pregnancy, a person separated from her own family and far from home. When I first saw the daughter, clomping on her sore ankles and complaining about the weight, I had followed her outside and asked that we could hug each other. “I’m so happy for you. It’s just painful for me, kind of, because we tried so hard – but I’m happy for you. I just wanted to give you a hug, you and your belly, and try to get myself used to it.” She embraced me with tears in her eyes. Now all of that was forgotten. I had called the messy patriarch of this outlander tribe a bully, to his face. I had said, inspired by rage and a kind of foaming disgust at his harassment and meanness, Your son – is a real man. He has manhood. I have seen him do terrible things and then hold himself to account. I’ve seen him struggling to learn and to make changes in himself. You should respect him. You should treat him with respect.

    I think we can’t bear when a woman speaks out. When a woman questions things. How dare she, how could she, and who does she think she is. The day after the fight we caught the train home to Berlin. I went up to the father, sitting at the table with his arms folded, and put out my hand. After a moment, he took it. I said, thank you for your hospitality and for having us in your home. The next morning a phone call. And the word, Hausverbot. This means, I forbid you my house. It is kind of a ‘don’t ever darken my door.’ In German, my partner said, very serious. You would give Hausverbot to a repeatedly violent pub guest who started a knife fight and stabbed somebody. Or to someone who’d been stealing in your store.

    The son, of course (they assured him) was welcome. But do not bring that woman under our roof. I spent January dissolved in tears, before distaste began to displace the other pain. You don’t belong in this family. All year long the wound festered. My father died and I went home. I confided how I was dreading this Christmas, worse than all the Christmases before. Afterwards my mother, in a bout of generosity, offered to send us both to Morocco for a holiday to replace the painful season. In an ancient Islamic city we could forget about the festivities we’d not share. We could put aside the sore points like the pregnant sister who didn’t bother giving either of us a gift, and whose kangaroo skin rug we had lingered over for an hour in the ugg boots store, wanting to bring her something luscious and Australian and Scandinavian for her comfy home, stroking every skin to find which was the softest. They are soft like the tender belly fur of a little cat. A day later, when all the piles of gifts had been opened and I was putting mine away, I asked her: hey what did you give me? I can’t seem to find it. Oh, she said – I just never thought of it. This hurt, and I told her so; not that she has to give a gift, but that she didn’t think. Now somehow this long-ago frisson of discomfort has been revived and painted glossy and put in the front window. We, who brought an extravagant gift we could ill afford, are designated materialistic, and grasping. My outspokenness is insufferable. My partner is greedy, because he feels sad and hurt at being all but cut out of his parents’ will. Last week the father, tricked past his pride by the wife who pretended his son had called first, finally rang. “I lift the Hausverbot,” he said, grandly. “You are very welcome and I hope you’ll come to us. But please don’t come to Christmas – your sister and her husband wouldn’t like it.”

  • the other C word

    My dad has cancer. Our relationship has been so peculiar and, at times, so intolerably painful that my reaction to this news since we heard it a week ago has been mere confusion. He was told on Saturday that he had a “small, operable” prostate cancer. Today he had another barrage of tests and the surgeon called it “aggressive.” Another doctor has suggested it may have spread to the bone at the base of his spine. I feel strangely ashamed to be thinking of my own experience in this context. It feels like I can’t help it. My father’s own father died of suicide when Dad was only twelve. Dad never learned how to dad. A decade ago my brother, who mines coal, in a moment of unexpected empathy suddenly said, I think Mum and Dad didn’t know how to love you; I think you’ve never experienced unconditional love. I was so relieved by this clear explanation of just about everything I burst into giggles. It was here at their house that this conversation took place. I remember running up the stairs to check out this new theory, calling, Dad, Dad! What? he said, from his chair on the verandah overlooking the river trees. Dad I said, would you say your love for me was unconditional? Oh, yes, pet, said my father. Largely.

  • Aunt has found god

    Felt a little jangled this morning after accidentally intercepting a phone call from my Aunt Who Has Found God. The last time we spoke at length was several years back and she told me I was possessed by the devil. Looking for common ground, for neutrality, I asked her had they had any rain up there. My Aunt Who Has Found God said, barely a sprinkle. She said, the churches in Gympie are praying for rain, but the last time they prayed for rain they got floods! Ah, I said, yes it’s important to be specific hey? Oh yes, she said. Your Cousin Who Has Found God was saying to me the other day, Mum I said to The Lord, Lord, I just need to earn $130 a week. She says now I should’ve been more generous! Cos I found a job and guess how much I’m earning!

    I got off the phone. She just talks to him as though he was a person and he’s her only topic of conversation! My companion briskly ripped this thorn out of my paw. God bless him, even if there isn’t a god. I said: Gahhh I feel really weird! My Aunt Who Has Found God kind of freaked me out! And he said: Cathoel, these people are just programming themselves, to cope. Her authority is called ~ God. Yours and my authority, is called ~ Me. The only difference is these are external-authority-craving people, they need god, because they don’t believe in themselves. They don’t think they are higher beings.

     

  • brandy barter

    brandy barter

    I must have lived in Berlin too long because it’s screeching hot on a Sunday afternoon, I am exhausted, and somehow the idea has crept into my head that I would like to drink a martini. It won’t dislodge. Opening my parents’ liquor cabinet is a dispiriting experience. It is a small, oval, glass-panelled thing on turned legs and inside, it resembles a brown mouth half-filled with decayed molars. An uneven semi-circle of discoloured flasks: these are the bottles of something your old workmates gave you for Christmas and that no one enjoys enough to actually drink. Plus a bottle of cheap brandy from which I made the pudding butter five days ago. Outside, Brisbane sprawls on all sides, as far as the sea and the hills, suburban and stupefied by shimmering heat. I cannot accept that there isn’t some strange punk bar or pirate bar within a block’s walk, opening late and staying open even later, candles on the tables, dogs under them, where a charmingly incompetent twenty-five-year-old bartender will make me a martini that begins with him holding up a Cinzano bottle that is actually labelled ‘Martini’ and showing me, “It’s empty.” After that I will explain that you don’t need a bottle marked ‘Martini,’ you need gin. I wish I could buy a vile martini for three euros, or a sublime martini for four, and have the bartender bring his black leather wallet to my table afterwards and have to remember that when you pay, it is customary to tip, but advisable not to say “Danke” when you hand over a twenty-euro note: this means, in the German sense, “Nein, danke,” which means “keep the change,” and it took me almost all of an eighteen-month stint there to learn this.

    On Christmas Day I met for the first time in three years my uncle, with whom I had been having a feud. He lives across the road and is stubborn, a unhelpful family trait shared by us all. Our feud arose because three years ago I was staying with my folks a few months before moving to Melbourne. During that time I had set up a writing room in their dining room and pinned out the manuscript for my poetry book along the tongue and groove walls. It was a quiet, dim, and sacred space. The first song in my album was recorded there, on a single microphone propped by the couch. But for now it was just me in there every day, working, working. The walls were lined with shelves and high up above the rows of books lay three ugly old clocks, stained wood, with various pieces missing. I made a joke, apparently: we should sell these on Ebay. My uncle, who spent his childhood immersed in the story of these clocks, one of which had belonged to a great-uncle who died in the Great War, took me seriously. It had not occurred to me that such hideous objects might be of value to anyone. I was at my desk one afternoon when the door opened without a knock and my uncle strode in. He is a train driver. He was wearing hubcap shorts and a huge pair of dusty boots. Without a word he climbed onto my desk and started reaching down the clocks. I was milling at his feet, wringing my hands, saying Please get off my desk! Don’t stand on my stuff! That’s my work! If you want the clocks I will get them for you! My uncle took all three clocks in his arms and climbed down, grunting. He set off down the hall with the clocks anchored under his chin and me beside him being flicked aside like a fly. He confiscated the clocks and later told Mum it was in order to protect family heirlooms from being sold online. The idea that I could live in my parents’ house whilst secretly selling family treasures online was disgusting to me. I marched over to his house to demand he apologize. I could not accept that anyone could know me all my life and believe me capable of such selfishness. We had been mates since I was three or four – how could he not know that hey, she’s a royal pain but at least she is painfully, irritatingly honest? The feud simmered slowly for all the years I was away. No one had been sure whether to invite this lonely uncle to Christmas lunch or whether to leave well enough alone. Christmas morning everybody cooked. My sister-out-law made a magnificent salmon and wrapped it in foil, my brother cut up foothills of potatoes, we worked out that we had almost one whole joint of meat or fish for every adult at the table. I made a pavlova and a Christmas pudding and followed the most labour-intensive recipe for custard I had ever seen. It required the milk to be slowly heated to a simmer and then allowed to cool. Halfway through it said, “Now transfer custard to a clean saucepan.” I made the brandy butter. Then I went to the phone. I rang my uncle. “It’s Cathoel. Are you coming over soon? Because I have a problem and I need your help.

    “My problem is that I made the brandy butter and it’s got so much brandy in it that it literally won’t absorb any more. There’s actually a puddle of brandy sitting in the top of the butter. Everyone’s telling me I’ve wrecked it and I need you because you are the only person in the world who can come over and tell me ‘this needs more brandy.’” My uncle said, “You need back-up.” “Exactly,” I said. “I’ll need to make myself beautiful,” he said. “I’ll need to have a bath.” I said, “Don’t get too beautiful. The rest of us have settled for only moderately attractive, so don’t be too long.” When he came in the door half an hour later he handed me a drinking straw. “Is this for slurping up the excess brandy off the top?” I asked. “Yes,” he said. Then he took a spoonful of my brandy butter and said, wonderfully, “It’s perfect.”