Unfinished Woman by Robyn Davidson

Author:Robyn Davidson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Thirteen

I was about eight when my mother first went away. By then I was taller than any of the girls my age at school, and an early pubescence was sending messengers ahead warning of its imminent arrival. I don’t remember being conscious of where she had gone, or why. I felt no anxiety over the separation that I recall. Rather the opposite. Gil had come to stay, and that would mean freedom.

There was to be a fancy-dress ball. Dressing-up had always been a significant part of childhood life. Whether it was my mother’s ball gowns, relegated, like the previous life they signified, to a wooden chest on the sleep-out, or whether it was the outfits she made for fancy-dress occasions, or whether it was the make-believe get-ups my sister and I wore in the ‘blizzards’ of tropical Queensland, the theatrical was always there, as natural to us as the prosaic reality it dramatised. I seemed, usually, to have been a fairy, and there is a photograph of me at Stanley Park, posed as such, under a gum tree. My sister has been Britannia, a Gypsy queen wearing bangles and reading palms, and, most stunning of all, she has been Night. That dress was long, flowing and made of layers of black tulle. I was allowed in for the fittings. A crescent moon and silver stars were stitched into the tulle, and she held a celestial wand. I can’t remember what was in her hair – a crown, I suppose. She was simply the most magnificent being I had ever seen. When I requested to go as a bride, even my mother thought this a bit unimaginative, but conceded to my conventional vanities. So I went in white ‘bridal gown’ with a bouquet and veil and was very happy, both with myself and with my glamorous sister. Night and day.

But who was there now to dress me up? My sister in boarding school. My mother, somewhere, but not here. My father down the paddocks. And Gil in her slacks and manly felt hat.

Gil hauled out the ‘Alice Blue’ gown, made for me before my growth spurt. It was crushed, the hoops were bent, the forget-me-nots crumpled. The bodice was now so tight I couldn’t do it up, and a big safety pin had to be used. The hem had risen to my calves. I stood in front of the long mirror, in tears, and said I didn’t want to go.

‘Oh, don’t be so silly. You look perfectly fine.’ My mother would have understood immediately the impossibility of showing up in an ‘Alice Blue’ gown that was humiliatingly wrong in every way and with which I had to wear lace-ups because I had grown out of my court shoes. But my mother had gone away, leaving a gap, and Gil, the substitute, only made the gap more deeply felt. It was only then it dawned on me that something had gone badly wrong.

My mother was in a psychiatric hospital in Brisbane, for the first in a series of electroshock treatments.

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