On the rainy morning last winter when Mum was dying, her medical condition brought on hallucinations, and in a sad, faraway voice she pleaded to be taken out on to the veranda so she could look at the light. It was one of the last things she said. The hospital had no veranda. Who knows which veranda she meant. She had lived in many different houses with verandas. After she died, I sat with her, stroking the skin of her right arm where it was savagely bruised from a fall the night before.
Mum loved warm weather. I love the crisp air and diffusive light of winter. We were different enough that it’s not a stretch to call her summer and me winter. We found it hard to get along and never truly resolved our differences. But at times I think we created a place to meet and share a quiet mutual acceptance, an in-between space not unlike a veranda.
Going through photographs in the days before her funeral, I sought out a picture of Mum taking a moment in the sun, sitting in a deck chair in front of the veranda of the weatherboard house on the main street of a small town in north-western Victoria where we lived through the late 70s and early 80s, a town racked by drought more often than it wasn’t.
She’s not looking at the camera, or at me, 12 years old, holding the Kodak Brownie camera I’d been given for Christmas. Mum is smiling and reaching out to the joey we’d taken in to rear after its mother was killed on the road and the joey rescued from the pouch.
I’d been walking around the yard, snapping pictures that would be developed down the street at the chemist when I finished the film.
My father was the local butcher, up before dawn in the mornings to unload beasts from a truck, yet also renowned for being compassionate, someone who’d be willing to take home a joey that needed looking after. It was Mum who cared for and bottle-fed the joey, though. The joey stayed close to her, too close at times. One night I woke to her protests as the joey climbed into her bed and curled up over her face. “Fancy, a bloody kangaroo in your bed!” she said in the morning.
I like that it was me who took this picture, now murky-toned, square, with rounded edges. It’s material evidence of an instant. When my child-self witnessed her looking happy, even joyful. I see her shaggy perm and can almost smell the green apple shampoo. I take in the terry-towelling dress with shoulder straps, the comfortable outfit she went to on hot days at the weekend. On weekdays, she’d wear her dark-blue shop dress with the front zipper, working at the counter of the butcher shop and coming home afterwards to prepare tea.
If I imagine looking behind the camera, there I am, also wearing terry-towelling, shorts and a matching top that Mum’s bought for me. My feet are bare, never mind the scorching concrete and the spiky grass of our front lawn, concealing the sole-piercing prickles of bindi-eyes.
Mum’s life was hard when I took the photograph. It’d been hard all along. I’d like to say it became easier and more consistently joyful. But it didn’t. I saw happiness in her face many times in later years, mostly when she was around her grandchildren or meeting up with the women-friends who stayed nearby for all her adult life. However, trauma and hardship, with all sorts of sharp and harsh textures, never ended for Mum.
She and I didn’t grow closer over time. If anything, our differences became more marked. Yet we could sit down together and enjoy hot drinks (hers coffee, mine tea) and a lemon slice she’d made because she knew I liked it, or pastries I’d bought, eclairs or pink meringues, her old favourites, and we’d talk, sometimes for hours, as long as the subject matter didn’t go anywhere too prickly.
She’d go silent if that happened, and if it was bad enough, she’d snap at me and then I’d go silent. The space we shared may not sound like much, and it was far from all we had between us, but I take solace in recalling the small portal of togetherness where for the most part we could sit and be content as mother and daughter.
Some people say Mum and I looked alike. I’ve never been able to see it. Yet in that space, maybe we could see ourselves in each other for a while.
The weather’s warming up. I’m taking the days gently as I approach my first summer since she died. With Mum gone, the season will surely take on new qualities of light and dark.
Indigo Perry is the author of Darkfall and Midnight Water