https://www.austlit.edu.au/austlit/page/A33588?mainTabTemplate=agentWorksBy&from=0&count=1000

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   How strange it was. It fell on me out of a clear blue sky. The weather was incredibly beautiful. but the craziness still fell on me like a bomb. And the fall out was considerable.  Worst of all it was a memorial weekend, a memorial being held to remember the date of our mother’s death – it would be Sunday 17^th August 2025. Twenty years to the day after her death.   I called it the Mumorial.  It was all caused by the sister I thought of as the Rogue Sister.  The one who had been a heroin addict and a drug dealer and ended up in jail just as our mother was dying in hospital. The final insult after putting her through years of hell – stealing money out of her account, blackmailing her into paying her electricity bill because she had spent the money on drugs. She also had two little daughters and they were used to get more money out of their grandmother. We stood on the sidelines and held our tongues. Any criticism of the Rogue  Sister was met with a flurry of defences and whataboutisms from our mother. We shielded her as much as we could from what we knew. That the Rogue Sister was a police informant, that she once sent her seven-year-old daughter into a pub with a backpack full of drugs to deliver. She couldn’t do it herself because the police were watching her. Her whole life was transactional. Everyone existed to dance to her tune and service her survival. Everyone, including her children. Their fathers were used as long as they were useful. One of them even married her. The fact that he fathered a child and truly loved her did him no good at all. Once she wanted him gone, he was gone. She wasn’t faithful in any case. Sometimes she paid for drugs with her body. When she came home with her jeans inside out, she told him, ‘Can’t you see the funny side?’ Unsurprisingly, he couldn’t. But he hung in there. He loved her.

    The Mumorial weekend began on Saturday the 16^th with lunch at The Kingfisher, one of our mother’s favourite restaurants. All was fine. The weather was beautiful. As members of a unique tribe – eleven children, nine girls and two boys- we were always most at ease and most ourselves when we were together. Our father had died a year before our mother. They were together for sixty years. Without him, life really made no sense to her. So, she got cancer. Crazy, really, because it started as an ulcer, which would have been easily curable with anti biotics, but it went untreated because she was in a fog of grief and not paying attention. It was only when she started bringing her food back up that she went to the doctor and tests were done. The prognosis was grim: advanced stomach cancer. Advanced, but not advanced enough to spare her many months of suffering even though they removed a large part of her stomach. So that was the basis of the weekend get together: a chance to remember an amazing human being we all loved. We lined up for the group photo with the usual sniping, ‘Shorties to the front’ even though none of us was particularly tall. Smile. Click. After lunch we went to the cemetery to lay flowers on our mother and father’s twin grave. Side by side as they had always been for sixty years. That night we went for dinner to a hotel where we knew the food was good and plentiful and they had a good band. I wore my black jacket with a fake fur collar (I would never have a real one, too much of an animal lover for that) and my silver pleated skirt, glistening in the light outside the hotel and even more as I made my way inside. Lots of wine. Lots of laughs and memories of our mother and father and our wild, tribal upbringing. Irish Australian, Catholic upbringing. We had a good night. But later I realized it was only because the Rogue Sister wasn’t there. She wouldn’t be arriving until tomorrow so the turbulent weather that followed her everywhere she went, wasn’t there. Afterwards we stood out in the street in the cold, under the moon and under a streetlight. Reluctant to end the night.  Full of wine and good cheer. All smiles and jokes and laughter. There was no presentiment. No prophetic feeling of doom.

   We were an overeducated bunch: eleven degrees between us, including one for our mother who went back to study as a mature age student on the strength of her musical training as a singer and pianist.  Some of us had two degrees, some only one: only three of us had none. One of us even had a law degree. I almost avoided Bloody Sunday. The accountant sister, Francine, asked me at lunch was I going to be there on Sunday for another lunch at the Chocolate Café out in the country, another of our mother’s favourite places.

‘I don’t think so,’ I said. But she got that look on her face. The one that told me I was out of step. That I wasn’t a team player.

‘But Sunday is the date that Mum died,’ she said. She insisted I should be there.

‘I’ll think about it,’ I told her, thinking I wouldn’t go.

But there was more beautiful weather on Sunday morning. I decided to go. 

Greg, my husband, laughed at me. ‘You’re addicted to family drama’ he said.

‘You don’t understand’ I told him with a baffled grin.  How right he was. He dropped me at the Chocolate Café and got out of Dodge. He always felt like a trapped animal around my family, even though they liked him and approved of him. My mother once told me I had the best husband but I hadn’t told him. He would only have smiled and said nothing.  I wanted to drink wine to get through it, so there wouldn’t be a scene, so I didn’t drive. Of course, in my usual vague way I didn’t factor in that the Rogue Sister would be there. Even she had a degree, obtained after she got out of prison. A degree in criminology of all things. But I can’t say I was concerned when she turned up larger than life in a purple dress. I didn’t pay her much attention. This would be my downfall.

   We had lunch at a very long table under a beautiful, shady tree. There was coffee, wine and delicious food and waitstaff all in black. I didn’t  notice the Rogue Sister glaring at me. I wasn’t on edge as I sipped my wine. I was feeling very mellow and possibly a bit remote from what was going on around me. That’s why when I asked the artist sister, Mary, if I could get a lift to the cemetery -where they were going next- with her and her husband Rory it never occurred to me that the Rogue Sister would be in their car. But she was. As we drove along, Mary asked a simple but loaded question: ‘Is Mark dead yet?’ (referring to Tara, the other artist sister’s ex husband, a wife basher and terrorizer of his own children).

I said, ‘Who cares?’

The Rogue Sister was on this like an attack dog. ‘Well’ she huffed, ‘his children would care. He’s still their father,’ she said sanctimoniously.

There was history here. Tara and the Rogue Sister had shared a house after Tara divorced the wife basher. I felt a switch flip in my head but I had never truly understood the meaning of ‘flipping out’. That was about to change.  Knowing the Rogue Sister’s shocking record as a parent I saw red.

‘I don’t care if he’s dead. I hope he is, I hate him,’ I said, feeling reckless and riled in equal measure.

‘You ignored me all day,’ the Rogue Sister snarled suddenly, as smoothly as a knife slipping into someone’s belly. ‘You never said a word to me.’

I took a breath and then exhaled. It was like loading a gun. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘Maybe if you hadn’t sent a message to Tara telling her she was a gutless bitch I wouldn’t want to ignore you.’

She flew into a flustered rage and denied ever sending her any such message. She goes back through her phone trying to prove the message doesn’t exist. But it’s no good. I’ve got her bang to rights. We both know she sent that message. Then she gets a defiant look on her face.

‘Well’, she smirks, ‘she is a gutless bitch’.

Mary and the Rogue Sister laugh. This is a theme they’ve explored many times in private when no one was around to hear it.  I feel intense rage and protectiveness for my little sister.  

   It was downhill all the way from there. The Rogue goes into a long catalogue of Tara’s past sins: ‘She moved in with me and single-white-femaled me. She ran off and abandoned her children.’ She neglects to add that she left the children with their father, a man the Rogue wanted to give the award of father of the year to a few minutes before, even though he was a wife basher and a psychological terrorist.  ‘She was having sex with every man she could get her hands on.’ ‘The only reason Cliff  (lover number 2) was with her was that she did his degree for him.’

‘But,’ I said, stumbling into the territory of reason and logic, ‘wasn’t his degree in applied science. What would Tara know about that? And they were together for 26 years. How long did it take him to do his degree?’ I snorted.

Her eyes kind of swiveled and she went pale. ‘You patronizing bitch,’ she said with a complete lack of passion. It was as if she was talking about the weather.

‘Well, they’re reasonable questions,’ I said.

‘Oh of course. You’re full of reasonable questions,’ she yelled, all coolness abandoned. This went back a long way. All the way back to the 90s when Tara left the wife basher and divorced him and even with three kids in tow, soon found herself in dangerous waters. And in at least two men’s beds that I knew of. Not the rabid promiscuity the Rogue was pushing but more that she wanted love and needed protection. She had married the wife basher at eighteen and she was a virgin at the time, so she was not the tough nut that the Rogue was. This was the era where she went to a party and went to the outside toilet to pee. A man followed her and soon she was pinned up against the wall and he was trying to rape her. Lover number one, David, came to her rescue, dragged her attacker out of the toilet and as she later described it, ‘Beat the shit out of him’. Her life was crazy in those days but she wasn’t a heroin addict. She wasn’t a police snitch and paying for drugs with her body the way the Rogue was.

‘She ran off to Melbourne with Cliff and he beat her up,’ the Rogue was saying.

‘No, he didn’t. Stop lying, I said. ‘The reason you’re so obsessed with Cliff is because you tried to get him into bed and he said no.’

‘That never happened,’ she yelled.

‘Oh shut up’, I yelled back. ‘We all know what happened.’

‘Shut up,’ she snarled.

‘You shut up,’ I roared.

At this point Rory turned the radio up, loud. Preferring muzak to listening to two mad women. As well he might.

   ‘Stop the car,’ I shouted to Rory over the blaring radio. ‘Let me out.’

‘You’re so crazy you’d walk back to town, would you?’ the Rogue sneered.

‘I’ve got a husband. I’ll call him and he’ll come and pick me up. You don’t have one,’ I sniped.

‘My husband died,’ she said, trying to sound as if she cared.  She had kicked him out years before. He was never with another woman that we knew of. He never recovered, poor sod.

Rory didn’t stop the car. I don’t know if he even heard me.

Mary said, ‘I’m going to Officeworks to get a white pen.’

I had no idea what she needed a white pen for but the car would be stopping, so salvation was in reach. As soon as the car stopped at Officeworks I got out and followed Mary. She went into Officeworks and came back with the mysterious white pen.

‘I’m calling Greg. He’ll come and pick me up,’ I told her.

‘You’re not going to the cemetery?’ she asked me.

‘I’d rather die than get back in the car with that cunt,’ I said calmly, but firmly.

Mary was furious.  She took off at speed, calling over her shoulder, ‘You’re selfish.’

I leaned against the wall of Officeworks in my blue dress with red heart motifs and my best red winter coat. A burst of red against the white wall. I remembered Plath’s poem Poppies in October. I was the woman Whose red heart blooms through her coat so astoundingly.

Now my name would be mud. They would be on the phone and on messenger lambasting me day and night. But I had given her particular brand of evil a name. It was an obscene name but I thought it was the right one.

Greg turned up. ‘What happened?’ he said with a resigned smile.

‘I’ll tell you. But not now. I’m still too upset.’

‘Whatever it is, it’ll blow over,’ he laughed.

‘No,’ I said, and I was very serious. ‘Not this time. Nothing’s ever going to be the same again.’

‘Christ. What happened?’

‘I don’t want to talk about it just now. Let it go,’ I mumbled.

And so we drove for a while,  in silence.  Sunday Bloody Sunday, I thought. Carnage. Hate. Love. Loss. And the past bleeding into the present, as red as my red coat. He would never understand. You had to have spent winters in that freezing house. You had to have shared beds with siblings and gone to mass every Sunday in your one good dress to understand. You had to have been your mother’s favourite and been hated for it to understand. And then I remembered another line from Plath’s poem: Oh my God what am I…Am I the evil one? But I look at my life and realize that my only addiction has been to virtue and that I’m considered a bit of a Goody Two Shoes by all of my siblings. The four-letter word I spat out all the more shocking, because I said it. Well, good. Let them be shocked. Let them hate me. Let them talk. I would make a virtue out of necessity if I had to and go to ground for a few months. They had all done far worse things than use a four-letter word. I knew their sins. All those trips to church on Sunday hadn’t helped.  Especially since my mother would go to Mass and then come home and tear everyone she had seen in church to shreds. I realized this blow up had been coming for a while. Maybe most of my adult life and nothing I did or said would change it now.

‘Was there a fight?’ Greg said changing lanes with his usual precision. ‘A bad one?’

‘Yes, there was. It was horrible,’ I said feeling depression settle around me like a cloak.

‘Never mind. It’s all swings and roundabouts, isn’t it?’ Greg said, patting my arm.

I took his hand and kissed it and accepted the safety net he had put under me. He always pulled me back from the brink with his folklore wisdom. He didn’t have a degree but he had a tradesman’s instinct for what worked and what didn’t.  Soon, I knew, the messages would start. The bullying would start, the shaming.  But I would weather the storm.  I was a sturdy craft built for dangerous waters.