Probably the lowest point in my mother’s life was the year we spent in Africa. My father took a job flying for East African Airways, and my mother and I followed him. We left Sarah behind at teacher’s college and Eliot in his first year of a cadetship at the ABC. It would be another adventure, Dad told us, and my mother must have believed him. Either that, or she was unable to deny him this last roll of the dice. Dad was getting on by then. Younger pilots were coming through the ranks and work was getting harder to find, especially the old-school style of flying that Dad favoured.
I didn’t mind. I was in high school by then, and bored witless. Canberra felt like a desert to me, so devoid of life, you wondered some days if half the population had died in the night. I figured anywhere must be better. And Nairobi was better in many ways, at least for me. I went to a better school, I made brighter friends, I stopped hiding my love of learning. But in other ways it was a backward step. My father was unhappy almost from the start. In what was by now a familiar scenario, he started out with high hopes.
‘This is the dream job,’ he said, puffing on a celebratory cigar. ‘The planes are the planes I love to fly, the routes are challenging, I get paid to travel. What’s not to like?’
And then everything started to unravel. I never knew exactly why, although inept management was often mentioned as the chief culprit. It seemed as if the politics of race complicated everything: were the white pilots ever going to train black Africans to fly planes, if that meant putting themselves out of a job?
‘It’s mayhem,’ my father said. ‘There are fist fights in the cockpit.’
His mood deteriorated rapidly. His temper flared. Home became a battleground, not that it was much of a home to begin with—a little, grey stone pile built to resemble a castle gatehouse. I helped Mum lock us in there each night, with our rented furniture and our handful of plates and saucepans, and hoped the thieves would leave us alone, because according to the neighbours they were everywhere.
To be honest, I feared Dad more than I feared the robbers. He appeared to be spinning out of control. He would go away for a couple of days and come back exhausted, irascible, liable to strike out at the slightest provocation. Sometimes he would be sulking at home for a week at a time, which seemed odd to Mum.
‘Are you in any trouble?’ she said.
‘Nothing I can’t handle, thank you very much.’
Mum suggested to him that he quit his job and take us home.
‘That’s so typical of you,’ he said. ‘Cut and run.’
‘But you’re so unhappy.’
‘What you mean is that you’re unhappy.’ He made it sound like a criminal offence.
At night I would hear him shouting at her, trotting out all the old accusations. He had a list of grievances against her that went back to the day they were married, or so it seemed to me.
‘I’m sorry I ever met you,’ he told her. ‘It’s been downhill ever since.’
‘Perhaps we should end it then.’
‘What do you mean, end it?’
‘Divorce,’ said Mum. ‘If that’s what you want.’
I knew then that things had hit rock bottom. Divorce wasn’t something my mother had ever talked about. This was before it became common, when divorced women still seemed lewd and disreputable. And Mum had yet to read that electrifying call to arms, The Female Eunuch.
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said my father.
Eventually my mother could take no more.
‘We’re going,’ she told my father. ‘You come later when you’ve sorted things out here.’
He took us on a farewell trip to the safari park outside Nairobi. We drove around for a few hours spotting giraffes and zebras. A troop of baboons held us up, demanding food, climbing onto the bonnet and staring us down through the windscreen, until they grew bored and loped away, casting contemptuous backward glances. As we returned to the park’s entrance we stopped to walk around the enclosures where they kept injured or sick animals. I’d never seen a rhinoceros at close quarters before. I stood staring at the animal’s enormous bulk, impressed by how harmless it appeared, for a creature so heavily armoured.
‘Don’t be fooled,’ said my father. ‘You’re seeing him on a good day.’
He might have been talking about himself.
He was on his best behaviour after that, helping Mum to pack and make arrangements, checking that all our flight connections were confirmed. At the airport he turned sentimental.
‘So it won’t be the Three Musketeers anymore,’ he said, hugging first Mum and then me. ‘All for one and one for all.’
‘You don’t have to stay,’ said Mum.
‘I was thinking I might go to England after I finish up here,’ he said. ‘See if I can find something there.’
‘Well, you always know where to find me.’
Dry-eyed, she kissed him on the cheek and picked up her bags to go.
‘I’ll write,’ I said, suddenly feeling sorry for him. He had brought so much trouble down on his head for so many years. He looked broken, bowed, worn out. His eyes were full of tears.
‘I should bloody well hope so.’
It was a long flight home. The first stop was Karachi, where we had a lengthy wait, and the second Bangkok, where we arrived in a state beyond exhaustion, to discover that our Qantas connection to Sydney had not been booked and we were not on the flight. I’d never seen Mum in such a state of rage. She demanded to speak to the Qantas supervisor. When he arrived, all teeth and smiles, she launched into a history of Qantas, how her father had been a founding investor, how her uncle Frank had been the company’s first booking agent in Longreach.
‘Look him up,’ she said. ‘Frank Cory. Stock and station agent and editor of the Longreach Leader.’
The Qantas man listened with feigned interest, then took our tickets and passports and scurried away to see what favours he could call in.
‘I’m begging you,’ Mum called after his retreating figure. She didn’t care who heard. ‘We have tickets, for Christ’s sake. We paid thousands for them.’
‘You’re shouting,’ I told her.
‘I don’t care. We have to get home.’
She was right. We did have to get home. Not getting home was inconceivable.
An hour later, the supervisor reappeared and gave us the thumbs up. My mother fell at his feet.
‘You’re my saviour,’ she said, laughing and crying at the same time.
On the plane, she recovered enough to waylay a steward and order champagne.
‘We’ll be serving complimentary drinks straight after takeoff,’ he told her in his Australian twang.
My mother gazed at his boyish bronzed mask of a face. ‘Would you just say that again,’ she said.
He did as she asked.
‘Thank you.’
She turned to me and smiled. ‘We made it,’ she said.
Mum changed after that. Something had been resolved. There would be no more uprootings, no more abrupt departures. She had reached the end of the line. Now all she wanted to do was settle down. She counted herself lucky to still have her teaching job and her house. She too was getting older, starting to see her options shrinking, beginning to regret how much she’d squandered in her efforts to placate my father for so many years.
He came home, of course, as she knew he would—jobless, angry, spent—and notched up Africa as another grand adventure gone terribly wrong. He moved into the back room, the smallest room in the house, the one we called the guest room, while my mother stayed in the main bedroom and slept in the double bed alone. Back in Fiji, when I’d first seen what desire looks like, I had never imagined it could so easily mutate into its opposite, which in my parents’ case was a sort of barely contained contempt. I had imagined desire to be unquenchable, but now I realised that it began and ended just like everything else.