Hell, Not Heaven

When I was a child, I often used to wish I came from some other family. This is not an uncommon feeling in kids, who can easily become convinced that other people’s families are better and more interesting than the one they’ve been born into. In my case, though, I used to wish mine was less interesting.

For a start, our parents were foreigners. And stiff-necked foreigners at that—we were exhorted never to forget we were French, we weren’t allowed to speak English at home, or at least not to our parents, and they had strict ideas about what children were allowed to do (they thought kids in Australia were allowed far too much freedom). And our turbulent family history with the larger-than-life, passionate and often scary characters who peopled it wasn’t just a matter of days-gone-by for us; it lived on down the generations in Grand Guignol melodramas that never seemed to stop. Not only were there plenty of skeletons in the family closets, but the closet doors were wide open and we could see the skeletons gibbering and dancing inside them. There were plenty of dark episodes in the family’s past, but they were no secret, either. People talked about them—endlessly, wearyingly turning over old wrongs, creating new ones.

My parents both had damaged childhoods, marked by violence; but Dad was particularly haunted by his relationship with his handsome, adventurous, cruel and ruthless father, and his beautiful, narcissistic mother. He tried to be a good father to us, but at times it was too much for him, and the memories came out in black, volcanic rages that spewed out unpredictably and terrifyingly. At such times we kids saw him as a monster; we bunched up together for protection and tried to shield those who most copped it, while Mum attempted to temper his fury and distract him into calming down.

At other times my father’s memories came out in his absolute determination to make us as happy as he hadn’t been, and he created magical moments for us at Christmas, on birthdays, on weekend evenings reading us plays, singing us songs, telling us stories. Then someone from his family would ring up, or we’d go and see them, and off it would go again, an endless cycle of passionate recriminations, crazy melodramas and tearful reconciliations.

It was scary. It was also exhausting. The quiet, observant, romantic child that I was shrank from all the noise and fury and escaped into books and dreams. And in wishing that I came from some other family (though I’d have sorely missed my brothers and sisters—I thought they might come with me too) I used to look at other kids in my class and envy them, imagining that they had perfect lives, perfect families living in havens of peace and happiness, far from the disordered, foreign, frightening passions of mine.

One of those kids I envied was Kathleen Stewart. In the last three years of primary school, she and I were at the same small Catholic school in the northern suburbs of Sydney, on the shores beside the Pacific Highway. I remember her clearly; not because she was a friend—though we were friendly enough, we weren’t in the same circle—but because I admired her. She seemed to me to be the epitome of what I would have liked to be. She was beautiful, deft, well-groomed, her plaits shining and smooth (mine were always coming out), her uniform neat and tidy and ironed (mine always managed to be wrinkled and my socks were always falling down). She had a lovely name that for me combined the charm of the mainstream with a touch of Highland romance (one of my favourite books at the time was Kidnapped). Her family seemed perfect, well-integrated, whereas mine would always awkwardly stick out.

Most galling of all, in sixth class Kathleen had been given the main role in the school production, The Wedding of the Painted Doll. I had desperately wanted the part of the Painted Doll—I went to drama classes after school and I fancied myself as an actress. But I got stuck with a part in the chorus—one of the many sidekick dolls. I knew why I hadn’t been given the part. In our teacher’s eyes I was wrong for it—too small, too dark, too untidy, too clumsy, too woggy. Kathleen was right because Kathleen was his pet. And she was his pet because she was beautiful. And perfect, because she came from the perfect family.

How terribly wrong I was I only learned many years later. I completely lost touch with the kids I went to primary school with, because in my first year of high school we changed suburbs and my new high school was fed from a different area of Sydney. But a few years ago, I realised that Kathleen and I had both grown up to be writers (she has written several novels and volumes of poetry). By coincidence, we even shared the same literary agent. And though we only contacted each other very briefly, once, I began to get an idea of what her life behind that perfect facade had really been like. I learned that its hidden horrors had sent her into a spiral of self-destructive behaviour, including drug addiction. But I didn’t realise all the full ramifications, until I read her extraordinary book The After Life.

Extraordinary, because it’s not just a harrowing portrayal of a child growing up in terror and confusion, haunted by a sense of worthlessness and despair; but because it’s told in such lovely, lucid prose. Kathleen recounts the horror stories and tragedies of her life—her terrifying childhood at the hands of a violent father and self-centred mother, unhappy school memories, rape as a teenager, drug addiction, unwise love affairs, her own suicide attempts and her father’s actual suicide—with fluid clarity and elegance and quite without self-pity, though never without feeling.

As I read I realised that the perfection I’d so envied was a cruel sham—a torture for a child who was expected not only to live up to some kind of ideal of outward physical perfection, but who was clearly made to feel that if she didn’t, she was worth nothing. Constantly told how lucky she was to be part of such a brilliant, cultured family, she was expected to ignore the madness that crouched at its heart. So terrified of her father as a little girl that she and her brother hardly dared breathe when he was around, in case they said or did something that would set off his rage, she learned later to “manage” him and the running of the household after her mother left him and he collapsed into a weeping, shivering, self-pitying wreck. And Kathleen learned that her mother, whom she’d thought her ally, was in fact colder and more hurtful even than her father could be—even more self-centred. She was alone.

Aloneness comes out strongly in this book. Reading it, I realised just how lucky I had been: that though I too was scared of Dad when I was a kid (and I could identify closely with the feeling in those episodes in The After Life, the helplessness and fear and bewilderment) we knew why he behaved as he did, even though we didn’t understand its full implications at the time. The dark family past wasn’t a secret for us. Things weren’t hidden. People didn’t pretend to be perfect. And we knew Dad and Mum really loved us, and each other (they’d found in each other the one person that could save them from the haunting of their childhoods) and that they tried to do their best to overcome their own memories and do well by us. And most especially, we knew we were not alone, because there was the close-knit phalanx of siblings, protecting each other, giving each other strength. All those things enabled us to get past the fear, enabled us to cope, and gave us courage. We also learned a sense of incandescent justice; a protectiveness towards our own children, and, indeed, all children—a fierce hatred of all cruelty towards them, which has never left us.

But Kathleen and her brother don’t seem to have had that sibling closeness. They were isolated from each other in their fear, and by the divide-and-rule policy of their mother. At school, as Kathleen tells it, she was more or less friendless—bullied in the early years, apart in the later years. I was really jolted by one chapter, in which she recounts a little about those years of primary school that we shared, and a particular teacher she calls “Mr Oaks”—the Wedding of the Painted Doll teacher.

I remember him well too. But my memories of him are innocent, despite his ignoring of my star potential. I remember him as a stooped man smelling of the old tweed jackets he wore, quite kind if stern, who let me borrow as many library books as I wanted from the glass-fronted bookshelves in the corridor outside our sixth-class room, and who used to give us gold stars for good work in our books (once you had ten, he gave you a voucher to buy a chocolate bar in the milkbar next door to the school). Kathleen’s Mr Oaks is a very different bird, erratic, openly humiliating and cruel to her despite her also being his pet, and verging dangerously on the sexually predatory. (Mr Oaks was apparently dismissed in disgrace two years later.) It is as if they were two different people—a signal example of how people can remember very different things about the same person or event.

By the end of high school, Kathleen was in love with a guy who introduced her to drugs. In drugs and each other the aloneness seemed to be breached for a while; but of course those were false relationships, leading her further and further into Hell, until at last she began to find her way bit by painful bit out of it and into the afterlife—the life she has made her own.

This is not a story of overcoming adversity with happiness at the end. It’s far too fine and subtle a book for that. There is never a sense that this person is not damaged, that the story of the poor, vulnerable, helpless child adrift in a cruel, violent, unloving, bewildering world is in any way redeemed by the fact that the adult Kathleen eventually finds a haven of peace and a reason for living in her writing. Pain, hatred, futility and despair are not currencies that can be easily converted into serenity, no matter what our culture, which is so uneasy with suffering, would like to believe.

This is not a book for everybody. Its story may be too terrible for some readers. It may be too close to the bone for others. But it is a brave book, unflinchingly brave. The courage that Kathleen displays, not only in struggling through to that haven, but also in writing a book which eschews the easy feel-good moral for the diabolical complexity of life, is admirable and very moving indeed.

Kathleen Stewart’s The After Life is published by Vintage, $34.95.
Sophie Masson’s latest novel is The Case of the Diamond Shadow (ABC Books). She wrote on the Underbelly television series in the July-August issue.