I wear glasses, we all do and they’re not always rose coloured. Mine can’t be seen through, by others that is, although they’ll try... and perhaps they’ll find a similar pair. I don’t have an eye sight problem. My glasses are incorporeal, abstract, they cover my eyes, colour them and sometimes they are broken.

My mum always said my brother saw things in black and white. When she spoke those words they were clear to me. I knew what she meant at that time yet I know what she means now and both of my knowings are different from each other.

My glasses have evolved, developed over time and it’s wrong to say I only have one pair. I have many, like clothing I wear them, see through them and then I can change them, redress to fit the occasion. Opaque one moment, wide in periphery or sometimes narrow. They can be reflective or they can be all consuming, like a black hole.

Chameleon-like my glasses can change in colour so that I may see things according to the way my peers see things, so that we have a shared view and I am accepted as one of the group. The versatility assisting me to shift roles appropriately, mother, daughter, friend, boss or student. My specs can be dark, murky, and unclear, they can be sterile, emotion free. They can be moulded and formed like clay and they can be wrought with emotion, tangled, strangled.

I thought there was something wrong with my brother, that he could not see the grey area that Mum had spoken of.

I see through adult glasses now, most of the time anyway, and I know now there was nothing wrong with my brother’s glasses then, because all children see things in concrete form and don’t understand the flexibility with which the world can be viewed.

“I should have brought my picnic mat,” I said to Louise, my sister, as I scanned a message on my phone. “It’s Mum. She says she’s leaving Cliff.” We swapped glances, eyes wide in surprise. I saw Louise’s smile as I felt my own. Her phone had beeped shortly after mine with the same message.

“That’s excellent,” she said.

Louise was wearing her purple comfort jacket today, warm polar fleece with ribbed cuffs. It was her home jacket, she’d put it on after work to lounge around as though it allowed her to put work away, she wore it making dinner or when watching a movie.

“What?” Louise eyed me with interest her, brow furrowed.

“You never wear this out.” I removed my hand from her arm where I’d fingered the ribbing of her sleeve.

“Yes I do... When we go camping I wear it.”

I nodded, “Yes, only then.” I studied her, “Things will get better.”

“I know.”

Louise’s favourite colour is purple and when I’d given her a canvas I’d painted of her Blackness meowing, majestically poised against a purple and red backdrop we remarked over the beauty of those colours together.

My sister is an intuitive person; she takes a selection of vitamins for her health; and believes in the healing qualities of herbs, gems and meditation.

When she talks about people it is done in a very careful way, clothed in kindness, understanding and recognition of the individual. She is a nurturing person and I decided that her natural specs for the world are shaded in those qualities. I imagine them as the purple view.

“What have you got in your sandwiches today?” she asked.

“Salami and cheese, they’re so yum.” My eyes closed for a moment. My cheeks rounded with food. “What did you bring?”

“I still don’t have an appetite.” A scowl marked her face like war paint.

“Hmm...”

“What?”

I shook my head.

“I have been eating,” Louise nudged me away with her stare.

I took the hint, “I think this is the best thing Mum’s done in a long time, leaving Cliff I mean.” I felt my body relax back into its previous slouch as Louise’s eyes withdrew their talons and dropped to the grass.

Four years ago Mum got married again. Cliff was not the man she’d dreamed of marrying. He was not like any man she would have chosen. Or anybody else would have chosen for that matter, though he had been married before. That wife had died some time ago. I imagine there was an overwhelming sense of relief for her passing through that white light.

“I’m lonely and I know I’ll never have a good looking man, I’m not pretty enough. You know what I mean,” Mum’s voice had been loud, her inflection rising, insistent. She’d lost her patience. That wasn’t hard for Mum. Merely looking in her direction could cause a loss of patience.

Anyway, I didn’t know what she meant. To me she’d always been pretty. As a child I’d thought of her as the most beautiful person in the world. I tried to look through her glasses as we talked but hers were foggy. They were always foggy.

“I wonder if Mum will be lonely again when Cliff moves out,” I mused. “You’re not there anymore.” My sandwich finished now I searched around my bag for a napkin and a piece of fruit. I offered Louise one of each, refusal given in the wave of her hand.

“I’m glad I’m on my own now. It was hard moving at the time but it’s worth it now.”

“Well, if you ask me she was always hard to live with anyway,” I said. I wasn’t sure if the same were true for Louise but then I think Mum saw us both differently. I was the frosty and independent one.

Louise lived with Mum for quite some time so when mum had remarried the three lived together. I don’t like being around Mum very much. She was and still is upset and angry most of the time. Cliff held the target now. Her and my relationship improved. It was Cliff’s turn to witness the daily crying and fits of temper.

He was a man in constant pain with a penchant for spending and an inability to wear any other glasses but his own. He did not feel other’s pain. I had no real empathy for Cliff when Mum yelled at him and treated him like shit, I might have for someone else but Cliff lived by a set of rules most others baulked at so it felt as though he deserved her anger and emotionality.

It was impossible going in the car with Mum and Cliff. It didn’t matter what specs Cliff wore from day to day. They were all the colour of road rage and Mum couldn’t get him to take them off or throw them away. So he would yell at other drivers, she would yell at him and I would cover my ears. My glasses took on a murky, narrow view, illusory even with a strong sense of tunnelled vision. And when I looked at Cliff from my position in the back seat I imagined little daggers hurtling toward the back of his head.

I packed my lunch wrappers neatly into my cooler bag. I rubbed my left hand up and down, watching the blonde hairs stand up and flick back. “I think it is a mile stone for Mum to have gained some control over her life.”

“Me too,” Louise said, “I wonder when he’ll be moving out.”

“I wonder if it really is even over. Last time she sent a message like this they stayed together.”

Louise didn’t like Cliff either, “He’s a control freak!” she’d said to me shortly after he’d moved in.

“Really?”

“Now that he lives with us he phones me when I’m out to tell me I’ve left the wire screen door unlocked. That’s true I said to him because there are so many window and door locks and they’re all keyed differently,” her hands extended out toward me, palms up, exposed as though she were providing to me her honesty on a plate. “It‘s become too hard to remember which key does what and what door I did or didn’t lock. But, I said to him, did you realise you left the stove on, Cliff? You could have burned the house down. Did I? He said. What an idiot.”She finished.

“So what did you want to tell me?” I knew she’d be off shortly.

She handed me a folded A4, “What’s this?”

“I didn’t know how to tell you so instead I’ve written this letter.”

I eyed the paper then pushed it back in her direction. “What’s it say?”

“Read it.”

“I don’t want to,” I jabbed the air in front of her with the paper. She didn’t take it.

“You’ve lost your job?” I hazarded a guess.

“No,” her rebuff barely perceptible, earrings rocking ever so gently back and forth. My eyes exploring her eyes, their shape and aperture, creases, muscle texture, tightness.

She recognised my confusion. “It about a man.”

My head rotated enough so that I watched Louise from my right eye, offering her my ear as though I hadn’t heard correctly. She sat still now, her eyes reading, deciphering, searching me.

“Adam?” I offered, thinking of a guy she’d met recently. They’d dated briefly before he disappeared no explanation offered. He seemed nice and she’d mourned him for twice the period she’d known him. Amusement became warmth filling my chest, curling my lips.

“Shane,” she said carefully.

“What about him?” I studied her. She watched me. “You didn’t get back with him?”

“At first it was just a sex thing so I didn’t bother to tell you.”

My hand shot out, forming a partition between Louise and I. Disbelief a side to side movement of my head. My chest then seemed to take on weight, a mass bearing down that formed into a sharp rough stone taking the place of my stomach. My throat constricted slightly, a noiseless slow heave took over elongating my neck as though the rock, my stomach, were climbing my throat. I swallowed slowly, managing a deep breath as though I’d just surfaced from deep water.

“Don’t. I don’t want to know.”

Shane was a man Louise had loved once. It lasted many years. On one occasion she and Shane had had an argument. They’d had many arguments but she’d told me about this one early on, when she was still allowed to discuss their relationship with me. It was on the way home from a night club about half way she’d said. His views were definite. He wore red glasses, she wore purple. There had been yelling and name calling. He stopped the car and instructed her to exit. She did as she was told and his friends watched on from the back seat, quietly through their own blurred goggles.

She’d walked home in the dark, heels in hand, pride on her shoulder, alcohol in her veins. That might have been one of the times; perhaps the first time he’d told her to collect her things from his house and leave. Her items still fit in a box then, when she wasn’t officially living there.

They say your life rushes before your eyes at your moment of death. I wasn’t dying but the pictures came, the memories, flashing before my eyes. I remembered clearly the times she’d talked to me about those arguments.

“I know that I should get a pair of red glasses,” she said to me summarising her position, “my purple ones are not working as they should be.”

“No. I’ve always liked the purple on you,” I’d said.

“Yes, I do too.” She shook off her beliefs as one does a chill. “I mean I did too.”

I’d studied her, my glasses were the shade of intuition that day. She’d added, “Everybody has their own ways and I need to understand that.”

My eyebrows had risen, jumped. They did somersaults but it made no difference. They could have grown legs and walked away side by side, a squadron of two, full military uniform down my face, over the hills of my lips, sliding from my chin and still it would have had no effect.

“True,” I’d said, “but do you suppose he might need to wear your purple ones for a while?”

“No.” Her eyes were wide with astonishment. “No, he says mine are broken.”

It wasn’t long after Cliff had moved into Mum’s that Louise became so unhappy there. She was sick of his controlling ways, his begging for this or that, even having a say in what was her and Mum’s territory.

“I’m thinking about moving out,” she had said to me, “anything would be better than living with him.”

“But where would you go?”

“I’m thinking of moving in with Shane.” She looked at the ground, at her clothing, brushing some lint from herself. She looked off into the distance. Our eyes did not make contact.

“That should be a lot better,” I couldn’t hide the sing song in my voice.

“What?” now she looked directly at me.

“I thought your reason for moving was to avoid living with a control freak.”

“It is.” Louise’s face was firm, statuesque.

“How’s your smoking going?” I asked Louise as we collected up our things and began a slow pace toward her car.

“Good, I’m not having any during the week. Normally that is. A few months ago it was different because I had been spending a bit of time with Adam. I found myself so nervous around him and was drinking and smoking far more than normal.”

“Yes, I remember that. It’s such a shame you feel so much anxiety about men and relationships now.”

“I know...” In the past she would have added “Shane’s ruined me for all men.” She wasn’t saying that now.

“Shane has promised me he’s changed now.”

“How? Has he done counselling?”

“No. But his previous few girlfriends have been a nightmare for him. He now realises how easy things were with me. He realises now that all people are different and things don’t have to be his way.”

“So he’s not actually done any work to change himself? When was the last time he hit somebody?”

“I don’t know”

“Well how do you know he’s changed then?”

“Because he told me. He begged me to take him back. He swears he’ll be different this time."

All the years they were together were to be a casual arrangement as in no commitment from him, however, came with a monogamous clause. Interpretation being: no arm touching, friendly hugs or chatty banter between herself and his friends.

“Well, what if it is your friend who tries to hug me or who puts his hand on my arm?” she’d asked him.

“No,” he’d say, “still your responsibility, you should tell them not to.”

“But it’s rude. I feel like I would hurt their feelings. Can’t you say something to them?”

“No. It wouldn’t look right. I’d only look like a jealous tosser. You have to say it. You have to control it.”

When she told me this I didn’t see the logic and I let her know, but she’d advised me that she’d come to her senses and realised now that all people are different and she needed to try hard to see things through his lenses, hers being a little smudged, needed a bit of maintenance.

My thoughts went back to a holiday I went on with Louise and Shane. She’d been with him for about three years by then. We went to Apollo Bay; lovely place nestled along the Great Ocean Road, Otway’s behind, ocean in front, stunning coastal views. It was a three or four hour drive from where we lived and as such we stopped along the way for a bite to eat. My sister and Shane decided where they wanted to eat, he’d led the way. I picked a different place because I was after a healthier option and we planned to sit outside in a shared dining area.

After they ordered and sat to eat, I was still waiting in line and by the time I’d sat to eat they’d finished. My sister and I were chatting away and Shane sat fidgeting, staring at my food, glancing about and then studying his watch.

The small wrinkle in between his eyebrows seemed to grow a little longer and a little deeper. Nothing in and of itself, but when combined with the narrowing of his eyes, the rhythmic movement of his jaw muscle as he slowly clenched and unclenched his teeth. The way his hands moved, fingers drumming a soft, insistent beat on the table top and the occasional folding of his fingers into a neat fist and then gentle opening, unfolding and laying of his hand upon the table, caused me infuriating discomfort.

That meal set the tone for the five day trip. I actually came home early, on day four. It was a culmination of events such as his turning the television on and increasing the volume when I, in the same room as he, was listening to a CD. The idea of turning my music up to drown out the volume of the television was so appealing I had to bite my fingers for a few moments to get through the urge.

He was aghast and indignant upon discovering me cooking poached eggs and bacon on the second morning. He’d pulled out his food schedule and shown my sister that he’d planned scrambled eggs for every morning. I waited until his back faced us and mouthed slowly, exaggerating every movement, “food schedule?” My silent vowels stretched and poured out of my mouth like treacle.

My sister continued to emphasise the importance of wearing Shane’s specs as often as she could though she knew that her purple ones were her natural and automatic preference. Unfortunately, it turned out it was the colour of his glasses she and I disagreed upon. Where I saw a red, fiery sort of colour and a decidedly short sighted and monocular view, tunnelled even with the end result being a reflection of its wearer, she saw something else. She couldn’t explain its qualities because for her they changed all the time. His view to her seemed a reflexive, varied and reactive view. A view that was unpredictable yet belonged to a person who was definite and stable and controlled. Superior came to my mind, I’m not sure if it visited hers but I was suffocated by it.

She didn’t like my view of his view or my view of her view of his view. Our glasses became muddied and unclear upon discussion of each other’s glasses and she asked me not to share my view of either of their views about his view with her any further. She would have no more of it and neither would he for that matter.

He’d insisted she stop using her friends and family as a sound board for their problems, that their issues had nothing to do with me or anyone else and needed to be kept between them. After all, he’d said, who liked to be discussed when they weren’t around. This statement, by some incredible means, actually rang true for Louise. Shane discovered a pattern. It seemed that Louise, after talking to me, had an unpleasant tendency to bring up previous arguments with him, adding her new evidence and well thought out constructs, working their problems in her hand, twisting, turning, analysing and deconstructing.

A damn nuisance for him really. He’d insisted often enough that she use his glasses at all times. Her questioning only lead to the type of anger that saw him snatching her glasses, twisting them in his strong hands, squishing them and then wrenching them apart, into two pieces and throwing them to the floor. He’s spit at them and stomp on them for good measure.

Before our trip to Apollo Bay, when she’d told me that she wasn’t going to live at home with Mum anymore she’d said she didn’t know how anybody could put up with Cliff. I agreed with her whole heartedly on the matter. Her preferred glasses, the purple ones that she sneakily put back together when Shane wasn’t around, the ones made up of calming therapies, relaxation and vitamin B seemed to change in tone, thickness and durability when she spoke of Cliff. Her view of him was bleak. A depressing sort of grey when considered in reference to Mum but took on hues of orange and some sparkly flares when she imagined having to deal with him directly. She didn’t like his controlling ways and would tolerate them no more. The business with the eternal maze of keys to get in and out of the house, the myriad routines involving when she could cook dinner or watch television or use the bathroom. Not to her taste at all, she didn’t know how Mum put up with it.

Back then, after returning from the awful holiday, she seemed so much happier being away from Mum and Cliff. I wondered sometimes though about her anxiety levels, I’d noticed lately her quick movements and shaking hands, her asthma was playing up she had told me. She was relying on her reliever so much more because of the new living space with Shane and his cat. She said a few times she needed to give coffee away for a little while as it wasn’t helping her nerves.

Also, she said she was having trouble sleeping so she was exercising more to combat the insomnia and to encourage the production and release of her body’s natural endorphins. There was a day here or there where she reported anxiety so strong she couldn’t think or eat and she was so full of irritation she could barely speak to her colleagues without burning them with her acidic words. She was thinking about having an assessment with a psychiatrist. Shane encouraged it because he believed her thought patterns were strange, that her brain didn’t think like a normal person’s. She wished she knew what was so wrong with her lately.

Then there was the issue of clothes. I shook my head, confusion again worn on a chain around my neck. She didn’t have enough clothes to wear since she’d moved into Shane’s and money was tight given the new expenses upon moving out of Mum’s.

It was a while later when she’d told me excitedly that Shane had bought himself a new washing machine, one of those press button ones, all electric and it was larger.

“Won’t a larger machine cause more problems for you? I mean you already don’t have enough clothing, how will you get by?” I said

She shook her head, “No, Shane’s had a ban on mid week washing for some time now. Says it’s a waste of water.”

“Don’t you find that a bit restrictive, reminds me a bit of Cliff.”

“Not at all! Nothing at all alike. Cliff is a control freak and the thing is his demands aren’t even logical, there’s something wrong with him.”

I nodded a sort of slow nod, my lips wanting to press together and wrinkle up but the attached feeling suggested a non-believing sort of ‘are you crazy’ quality. I fought the puckering urge and relaxed my lips, edging them up a little on both sides. I sped up my nodding a little too; that would make my smile more believable.

My friend Melanie at work had been going through a terrible divorce lately. Recently he’d thrown several full stubbies of Vic Bitter at her. The incident took place in the garage, attached to the house. Thankfully his glasses were quite distorted causing a lack of symmetry, a stretching of proportions and poorly executed motor skills due to his drunkenness. His sober throwing abilities, quite respectable as they were, were expected by him at this current moment. He did not allow for his inebriated state. This resulted in a premature show of jauntiness, a celebration of his success prior to his actual victory that stretched beyond the failed throws a moment too long before realisation had set in and his face became a snarl.

Upon separation Melanie found he was begging her to stay, calling her at work and pleading at her front door to be let in. Neighbours, who’d come to see what all the noise was about, had been attacked, their door pulled from its hinges one night when he’d tried so ardently to talk her round.

“Please, I’ll change. I won’t drink anymore I promise. Anything, I’ll go to counselling, whatever you want. Just let me come home.”

She moved to her mother’s for a while in the hope he wouldn’t know where she was. It hadn’t worked though. He had let himself into her mother’s house and attacked her, pushing her over a chair with his hand encircled tightly around her neck. She phoned me for assistance, begging me not to call the police, just to come over and help. I agreed in order to get her off the phone. The moment we’d hung up I phoned triple zero to ensure police got there before I did. I mean how was I going to calm the situation? She thanked me afterward.

My sister was disgusted when I told her. “What an arsehole. How did Melanie stay with him for so long?”

Indeed, how did she? “She apologised to me recently, you know. Said she’d been lying to me for ages about things he’d done.”

“Really, like what?”

“Well, all the times she’d said his wallet had gone missing, been stolen out of his car, he’d actually gone and blown the money at the pokies or bought drugs or alcohol.”

“It’s amazing the secrets that can be kept,” my sister said, shaking her head.

“She said he’d hurt her a lot of times but she knew she’d look stupid for not leaving and didn’t want to be judged so she lied about it. It didn’t surprise me at all, I know women lie about that kind of thing and I always wondered why she stayed when she hated him so much. It turns out she was just too lazy to move, her words. Too much work she said and where would she go. Personally, I think it was depression.”

My thoughts went back to an email I’d sent to Mum the day I found out she had sold their motel for half the amount they’d purchased it for a year before. They’d also broken the lease agreement on the building they rented for their two dollar shop and moved all the merchandise into their family home. Mum was broke slowly having to sell off her three rental properties in Tassie and cashing in on her shares.

“It’s not his fault.” She’d flared, protecting him after she’d read my scathing email imploring her to leave the good for nothing, money spending fiend. Bristled, she said she was taking a break from me.

“Why can’t she see it?” my sister asked then.

“She sees things through a different set of glasses to us.” Resigned and deflated, I shrugged. Then furrowing my brow “What’s that in your hand bag?” I nosed the air in the direction of her bag.

“Oh, this is the cat bowl I was telling you about. Shane didn’t like it. He told me to take it back.”

“But that’s the small purple one you told me you liked so much when you found it.” She shrugged, resigned and deflated as well. “He wants to be there when I buy the next one.” Louise had just moved her cat from Mum’s to Shane’s house.

“It was awful you know.”

“What?” Louise asked.

“Being your support during your first relationship with Shane.” My face open, relaxed yet pleading understanding, “You wanted to talk to me, to tell me stuff about Shane but you were afraid you couldn’t control my responses. You didn’t want me to say anything bad about him even when you described horrendous situations to me. You told me you didn’t want to hear anymore about him if it was negative. Then in the same conversation you recognised your situation, once even showing me that pamphlet you’d got about domestic violence.”

Louise nodded, “I know. But it’s different this time. I’m stronger, I don’t feel desperate like I did then and he is the vulnerable one now. You need to trust me.”

“I can’t trust any woman living in domestic violence or family abuse situations. A person like that may be honest in every other aspect in their life and yet still lie in order to protect their abuser. Perpetrators are extremely manipulative, it doesn’t matter how strong you are, they are dangerous and will find a way slowly, very slowly to bring down your self esteem until you are vulnerable and they've got you where they want you.”

“I won’t let it happen this time.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Well I don’t know what to say. It feels like you’re asking me to break it off with him.”

“I don’t believe he has changed.”

“I’m just having some fun right now.”

“You will be hurt. We all will be”

Louise stared at me silently.

“I need to take a break from you. You’re not the person I thought you were. You have plenty of friends so I know you have support and that’s really important to me because you’ll need it, but it won’t be from me.”

I left her then, getting into my car and driving off. I watched her as I went. She stood, looking after me as I disappeared down the road. I watched her watching me through the rear view mirror. I knew she was watching me with her purple glasses. Mine were steamed up, blurry, foggy. Tears blocked my clarity but I wiped them away.

Impressum

Tag der Veröffentlichung: 10.01.2010

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