Single Mum – RAPHAELA ANGELOU

“Smile!” Murta called. She took the boy’s picture with a Box Brownie. They fidgeted with the bow ties. The lads were clothed in tuxedos on the occasion of a ball. Their charisma could light up the Harbour Bridge, the moon and stars combined. Her three little sons loved these young men. Murta was comforted that they would mentor her boys…

She had been seven months pregnant with her fourth when her husband called her inside. He wanted to talk. His slacks swished as he walked to and fro, his hair smoothed into place with Bryl Cream. “I have enlisted,” he said gruffly. “They will need medics.” Murta’s heart sank. Rex, Robert and Clint had signed up too. He coaxed her to have the baby induced. He demanded to meet his child. He held the boy to his face, and grunted in approval.

‘Darwin is under attack! Get the hell out of Bowen! Do whatever you can to make it to Sydney,” his cable read. Murta grabbed her keys, her four boys, and drove like hell. She wondered if the sky was going to fall, the world end. The dirt roads were horrific, and the newborn wailed. She cut a path through cane fields and rampant bush. She exchanged her jewellery for fuel. She arrived home to Sydney, and sank to the green axeminster carpet. She prayed it might swallow her. Clint and Robert had been killed, and Rex was badly injured. Murta wept and stroked the picture of the boys on the mantle. Ma Ma arranged to have a stained glass window erected in their church. It featured Sir Galahad in his armor, his face that of a young man, unbroken, unyielding, perfect.

A letter arrived from Murta’s husband in 1945. It was sticky, and stained from tobacco. He was leaving her for another woman. She wore silk stockings and applied French perfume from a crystal decanter. The boys were not to see their father again. He died in QLD, a decorated politician. Murta never said a bad word about the man. She has relished her autonomy; enjoyed her own company, though on occasion, lamented the death of romance.

The war had made accommodation scarce. She was vying for a granny flat with another lady. The woman noticed the softly-spoken boys assembled in a line behind the fey. “You take it love, you need it more than I,” she smiled at Murta. Murta found work off Broadway, training as a secretary at an export house. She remained there until the late 1970’s.

Rex hobbled, his hip shattered in the war. He and his wife had been Murta’s dear friends until their death’s in the early millennium. Rex would help the homeless in a soup kitchen connected to the church. He used to pause at the stained glass window, tracing the outline of Sir Galahad.

Murta loved tequila, tiramisu, honey, chocolate and steaming-hot coffee. When you sauntered back home at a hundred years of age, it was still a shock. I expected that you might live forever. Thankyou for your adventurous spirit (which saw you misbehave to such an extent that your father sent you on a boat to England). Your adventurous spirit saw you learn to drive, and with a friend, make your way to Scotland as a teenager! The brave Knight and fair maiden ventured deep into the ocean. The folks that have been invigorated with the spray of their concern rest on the sand. Rex, Robert and Clint hold hands with Murta. They are plunged into the lupine liquid, and the ocean carries them away.

I met Murta in 1999, and she became one of my dearest friends, up to her death in 2005 at 100 years of age. Every night she would pray that I might have a child. She would say, “you are always smiling and look happy, darling, but I see the sadness in your eyes when you think nobody’s looking.” I laughed and told her she way too perceptive. This is her story.

MURTA

In 1905 an iridescent fey shed her gossamer wings and slid into a world of hand-wringing and sleep draughts. As she took her first breath, her mother took her last. “I have birthed a numinous creature, and its enough,” her mother sighed. “Its more than enough.” Murta’s tiny hand firmly gripped her mother’s wedding band.

As her life progressed, pastoral scenes and snatches of bliss made life seem a useful pastime. Tendrils of honey tumbled down her slight shoulders. Her eyes were Wedgewood blue, as though crazy-lace agates had been prepared for instalment. Pulverized Herkimer diamonds were scattered around her iris. Murta tremulously held her step-sister in her plush pink hands. Seven months of incubation hadn’t been enough and the babe left this world, despite Murta’s pleadings. She comforted Ma Ma (her stepmother), and wrapped her sister in a peach bunny rug,placing her in the icebox until the official farewell.

In time, Ma Ma delivered a little boy. Murta anxiously watched over Clint throughout the eventide, the silence broken by the redwood repeater in the hall. She stroked his cheek with her little finger,the summer evening engorged with floral aromas piped into the rhythmic breeze. Ma Ma admired the children from the veranda as she gripped the iron lacework. Murta was teaching Clint to ride his pony. She loved her little brother, a blessed gift from another woman.

Murta’s head was turned as a young socialite. Douglas Fairbanks had nothing on this young doctor. Mesmerized, Murta hurried when he called, his voice carrying her to Bowen in far Nth Queensland. She was impetuous, imbibing at parties thrown in the roaring twenties; climbing iron fences, dashing to the water’s edge. Wild, wilful, a dedicated suffragette. She caught a glimpse of herself as she polished a Venetian mirror. She smiled, recalling her box of secrets, fringed with satin ribbons.

She smuggled an orphaned joey onto a train in Brisbane and coaxed him to eat a little cereal. Murta proudly offered him to Clint. She watched from the veranda, rubbing her pendulous belly, her first child growing beneath her skin. She watched Clint, his hair falling over his absythne eyes. He and his best friend, Rex, played with the ‘roo and it bounded after them as a dog might. Robert, a sixteen year old chum, straggled after them. He admired Clint’s torrid, isatiable love affair with life.

(To be Continued)…