My family and other animus

By Jeffrey James

For the young James Jeffrey, the day his parents split was like the splitting of the atom. Life took on a seismic instability filled with madness and strain and vendetta and daftness and acts of love, both beautiful and misguided. Yet, what could have been a calamitous upbringing turned instead into an education. For better or worse, his family handed out lessons that would guide him through life, into marriage, and eventually parenthood. My Family and Other Animus is an ode to his family.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Apr 2, 2018
• ISBN: 9780522872774

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PART   I

I within these four shaking walls

1

when the boat comes in

ON A BRIGHT WINTER’S day in 1976 just before I turned four, I arrived in Australia with my family. That we came on a ship was something Dad would eventually concede was a strategic error, because it afforded Mum a good, lingering look at Sydney Harbour.

Four long weeks after we’d left England—my British father with some regrets, my Hungarian mother like a donor organ that had refused to take—we all gazed upon this glittering fantasy of water and metropolis like the wonderland it was.

A short time later, we were bundled into a car and whisked a few hours up the road to the country town that was home to Dad’s new coal-mining job, which had sponsored us.

Mum may have fled three of her demons (Hungary’s communism, England’s rain, her first husband’s existence), but she soon found a new one: screaming boredom in what, following Chekhov’s school of diplomacy when it came to provincial centres that had let down one of his characters, I will refer to as the town of S.

Mum had seen that harbour and it haunted her dreams. A new campaign got under way—shorter and even more intense than the one that had driven us from Europe—and within eight months we moved to Sydney.

A couple of months shy of the fortieth anniversary of that arrival, Mum was back at the Overseas Passenger Terminal at Circular Quay for the first time, smoking her way through so many cigarettes she had a halo of ash around her like the dust skirts around the craters on the moon.

My brother, Laszlo, who’d volunteered to take her on a South Pacific cruise, watched in wonder.

‘You are only allowed to smoke in special places on the ship,’ Mum explained in a tone that expertly combined fear, outrage and indignity. ‘And if they catch you smoking somewhere else, they fine you 250 bucks.’ She said the ‘250 bucks’ in English, though thanks to her accent, the bucks came out sounding like ‘box’.

‘And worse, it is 250 American box!’ Behind us, the ship towered, a daunting expanse of glass and refrigerator white.

‘She’s a big tub,’ Laszlo observed. Certainly bigger than the Australis, which had brought us here in 1976. I looked it up a couple of years back and found that the ship we’d travelled on had been launched by then US First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt as the SS America, carried more troops and refugees than any other civilian ship during World War II, and eventually relaxed into a career lugging immigrants from Britain to Australia. Now it is a wreck in the Canary Islands, a storm having spared it from a retirement as a floating hotel in Phuket.

More passengers were arriving, some with more oomph than others. A black stretch Hummer disgorged one load of festive young folk. A van pulled in behind, its driver sliding back a door that revealed walls festooned with black shagpile carpet and a luridly pulsating constellation of LED lights, its sound system almost powerful enough to cause ripples in the cerebral fluid of bystanders. Among those who popped out was a bloke with a shiny, goldfish-patterned suit and the requisite swagger.

Laszlo mildly expressed uncertainty about the demographic he was about to spend nine days at sea with. But Mum’s attention was elsewhere. As the crowd of her fellow ocean-goers steadily swelled, she pointed at one of her bags.

‘Guess what I have in there,’ she demanded, lighting up a fresh cigarette.

‘What?’ my brother and I asked. Given Mum’s history of ill-fated attempts to smuggle stuff into Australia (salami and cucumber seeds, to name just a couple), we were instantly apprehensive. She took a hearty drag, then spelled out the comically large amount of cash she was lugging.

‘Jesus, Mum, I knew the minibar was expensive …’ Laszlo wheezed.

Whereupon Mum corrected herself and named an even larger sum. ‘It is to buy an apartment in Hungary.’

Laszlo: ‘We’re sailing to Noumea, not up the [colourful adjective] Danube!’

‘Pfft,’ Mum said. ‘It is safer with me.’

The ship headed out into the harbour early in the evening. Unlike that bright day in 1976, the sky was the sort of low, grey, seeping affair Mum had once hoped she’d left in England for good. But her mood was festive.

‘She’s having a ball,’ Laszlo texted me as Australia sank out of view behind them. She’d found the designated smoking spot.

2

the best way to a man’s heart

ONE OF THE STANDARD ingredients of courtship’s early stages is the ‘Oh, my family’s a bit weird’ conversation. It tends to be a steadily escalating exchange in which various eccentricities are produced as evidence for a jury of one person, before the most clearly deranged twig in the family tree is brought forth for inspection.

It was no different for me and Bel, and we both made our separate cases as to why our own tribe should be considered the further from the norm.

As I listened to Bel, I couldn’t help but think, ‘Amateur’. And yet she was not quite swayed by my argument.

Actions speak louder than words, so I took her to meet my family. As amusing as the first encounter was (Mum railing out of the blue against adopted kids, me then pretending Bel was adopted), it was one of the following encounters that won the day.

It was a family lunch at Mum’s, deep in Sydney’s Sutherland Shire. Mum did not care for the bush nor the animals dwelling within it, but for reasons less than entirely fathomable she had opted to live in a suburb bookended by two national parks.

What Bel wasn’t quite aware of as we arrived was that simmering unseen in the background were years and years of tensions between Mum and my big sister, Eszter, over the favouritism that had been shown to Laszlo. It was a subject that found Mum seesawing between denial and a candour that was both bracing and refreshing. A couple of years later, at a big dinner in Hungary, Mum announced to the table, ‘I am so happy because my favourite son arrives tomorrow!’

I was at the table, Laszlo was not. People were horrified on my behalf, but what can you do? Besides, being the favourite comes with its own burdens. And, as lunch that day went on to demonstrate, not being favourite comes with unexpected upswings.

Mum did seem a little distracted as she served up the first course—soup divided into lake-like portions—but that wasn’t so out of the ordinary. Then she left the table, only to reappear at Eszter’s side with a wild light in her eyes and a bulging envelope in her hands.

Without any further fanfare, or at least a bit of verbal softening up, she cried, ‘This is to make everything right’. Then she plonked the envelope in front of Eszter, where it lay round and swollen with cash, roughly the size of a guinea pig.

Eszter was agog, but possibly not as much as Bel. As I watched her jaw enter a sort of holding pattern, I knew one thing was certain: victory was mine.

The only bugger about the whole thing was that the bar was set high so early on. The next time we all dined together, Bel sat down with an air of wonder and trepidation. But the wildest thing that happened was merely the third course. Having fed us roughly a gallon of soup that looked like it had had half the cast of Babe drowned in it, followed by a main that featured the star, Mum brought forth the grand finale.

‘Instead of dessert, I have made a surprise,’ she announced, looking at us all expectantly. She lowered it onto the table and there before us a duck lay gently steaming, its legs akimbo, a spiced sphere bulging out of its rear. It looked like it had been killed with a cannonball of stuffing fired at point-blank range.

‘I hope you are all hungry,’ she hinted brightly and wielded her knife.

I was eight-and-a-half years old the first time I saw a knife raised in anger. It was hard to know what to pay more attention to in the moment: the light glinting off the blade, or the bulging pallor of the knuckles around the handle. The hand of which the knuckles formed a vital part was in turn attached to an olive-skinned arm, deep into middle age but suddenly and impressively brawny with rage. And attached to the arm was the rest of the woman, who’d suddenly realised my mother was stealing her husband.

Unless you speak Hungarian, it’s difficult to convey the particular intensity with which her anger was articulated, the culturally and linguistically specific way in which her soul Krakatoa-ed all over that southern Sydney living room. But the short version is that it included an offer to cut out her husband’s still-beating heart and package it for Mum to take home; an adulterer’s doggie bag, if you will.

Up until that moment, I’d never suspected that a suburban barbecue/pool party could go wrong, let alone that wrong. Mind you, I also hadn’t suspected the possibility that marriages were one of those things that could end.

Despite the impressive and growing body of evidence my parents had been building over the years—shouting matches, slammed doors, mysterious absences, the ironically festive ding of wedding rings ricocheting off walls—it wasn’t something I’d really thought about. Loveless as it had become, my parents’ marriage was something that was simply there, and probably eternal—like the sky, and the weird smell in the Kombi.

So the moment Edit materialised from the kitchen armed with a carving knife, my mind experienced a moment of clarity. I wasn’t alone. I still remember the wall of faces around me spanning the spectrum from consternation to amazement, not least among the kids. It was a Hungarian crowd, but most of the youngsters had been born in Australia.

Typical of many migrant communities, there was a split between those who’d been taught their parents’ language and those who hadn’t. I had been taught Hungarian, so I was grateful on some level that this event wasn’t a mystery that would require interpretation after the dust had settled.

But as I looked at the other kids’ faces, I understood something else clearly: that knife, with a little help from the body language, transcended the language barrier. It was as though SBS’s yellow subtitles had magically appeared beneath Edit’s face—her eyes filled with a terrible light, her mouth jagged with decibels—and formed the words, ‘I’ll cut out his fucking heart for you!’

More than anything, even the night shortly afterwards when Mum and Dad’s marriage had its pyrotechnic finale, this was the moment in which my old world ended and a new, chaotic one rose in its place. In the days, weeks, months and years to follow, life would take on a seismic instability so filled with madness and strain and vendetta and daftness and acts of love both beautiful and misguided that, decades later, I rarely go a week without thinking about it all.

Children are resilient, they like to say. It was tougher on my little sister, Olivia, who was only five. Laszlo and Eszter were nine and ten years older and were relatively clear of the blast.

How much so didn’t become clear until one little truth bomb got dropped along the way: Eszter and Laszlo were our half-siblings. Back in the days when I used to quiz Mum and Dad about how soon after they got married my brother and big sister were born, they always sidestepped it with a nimble elegance that wasn’t usually part of the program. Now all the secrets were being rolled out, the separation of the family under way with the bitter energy of civil war. The penny would eventually drop for me that Eszter and Laszlo had already been through this. Not only were they veterans, they had a father who was not mine, one who still lived in Hungary with a new family of his own. One day he would hear from his first children again, the breaking of a silence that stretched eighteen years, and they would meet again in that town where all their lives had started.

In the long run, this new knowledge didn’t change a jot the way I saw my older siblings. But at the time, it was deeply disorientating, one more among the cornucopia of punches I was trying hard to roll with—give or take.

There was one sustaining thought. I was just old enough to understand that while my parents’ love for each other was almost as long-vanished as the seas of Mars, their love for Olivia and me was perfectly intact.

Best of all, it was a school in its own right. Somehow, amid the shambles of the work-in-no-progress that was their relationship, Mum and Dad constituted an important if messy learning curve. Like all of us ultimately will be (to some extent at least), they were teachers in the school of humanity’s ups and downs, and they provided a solid mix of lessons on what to do and, just as importantly, what not to do.

What else can you do but live and learn?

And maybe take a few notes for good measure along the way.

I was bright red the night Mum and Dad separated—custodian of a good, old-school sunburn that made me aware of my own skin in a way I hadn’t thought possible. As the bigger drama unfurled, it felt like it had been stretched tight and held over glowing coals. Every time I moved, I was torn between the terrible excitement of the pain, and curiosity as to whether my skin would split open like the shell on a cicada nymph.

In my eight-year-old mind, quite a lot of life was viewed through the prism of the cicada’s life cycle. As the trees erupted each summer with their metallic braying, I’d grown curious about these creatures all but invisible among the eucalyptus leaves, avalanching their decibels upon us.

During the spring, the nymphs emerged from their subterranean childhoods and dotted trees and fences with constellations of their empty shells. Each one was like a little brown ghost, at once ferocious and comical, and so fragile that even the smallest hand plucking one from a sun-bleached paling risked accidentally pulverising it.

As I collected the shells, I slowly but surely became obsessed. ‘Yes, he’s very fond of anything that moves,’ Dad would explain as I expertly cornered another victim and bored them rigid with a full appreciation of the natural wonder that is the cicada.

Among my victims were my Dad’s mother and his sister, Liz. My grandmother was from Nottingham (and very proudly so), but answered to ‘Nagyi’, the Hungarian for granny. When her title was being work-shopped early on, she cast aside ‘grandma’ as a poor fit, and ‘granny’ as making her sound too old. And ‘nana’ was just so far beyond the pale she wrinkled her nose. Given her antipathy to Mum and her pronounced lack of interest in matters Magyar, ‘Nagyi’ was a surprising choice. But it stuck.

Liz and Nagyi happened to be visiting at the time my parents hit splitsville, but in the days before the cold war turned hot we’d spent time together in the bush, where the cicadas were going at it with particular gusto.

‘They are rather noisy,’ Nagyi had observed. ‘What are they?’

I didn’t need any further invitation and I spilled forth with the full director’s cut. Half an hour later, Nagyi was signalling to be rescued.

So yes, cicadas flitted across my mind as my skin sizzled into my awareness that evening. It was Australia Day and Eszter had taken me and Olivia to the beach for the afternoon and, well, we weren’t so aware of melanomas back then. Hell, they still sold cigarette-shaped lollies called ‘Fags’ to kids in those days, so the concept of skin-cancer awareness had a few years of time-biding before it was going to get a look in.

It had been a beautiful day, and Cronulla beach was as innocuous a setting as you could want for what proved to be the last day of life as we knew it. We got home, the sun sank below the horizon—and then so did everything else.

What followed that night, an event that would live on in my brain for years afterwards under the unimaginatively blunt but accurate title ‘The Big Fight’, remains only in flashes of recollection.

At some point in the evening, everything exploded. The tensions that had been building between Mum and Dad since shortly after they were married—and for that matter, the tensions building between Mum and her in-laws—burst their frayed seams.

Liz and Nagyi were there, too, probably wishing they were being bored senseless by a young cicada obsessive instead.

The setting for the showdown was the kitchen, which, as rooms go, is surely the heart of any household. There, beneath the glare of the twin fluorescent tubes, surrounded by the sheen