Shortly after my mother and I moved into the house in Ashfield we were burgled. They had come into the room I was in right now, they had opened the wardrobe, they had taken out the photo albums and the boxes and all of her clothes, and they had thrown them on the floor. They didn’t destroy any of the photographs, only scattered them. Instead, the robbers stole the television, the stereo, my mother’s earrings, and my christening bracelet.
That night my mother had left work in the city, driven to pick me up from childcare, and then taken us home. I remember that it was dark. She opened the corrugated-iron gate to park the car in the fibro shed we had in the garden then. We came in through the back. I walked ahead of her while she locked the back gate, through the garden and up the three steps to the veranda. I noticed in the dark that the back door was smashed through. There’s broken glass, I said.
My mother pushed me back into the trees and told me to keep quiet. She crept into the house and I watched her move through the smashed-up rooms in her shoulder pads and high heels, looking and watching to see if whoever it was was still there. She squared her shoulders and kept her arms tight to her body. When she couldn’t find anybody in the house she called the police. It was cold in the garden beneath the gum tree in the dark. I was not allowed into the house to see what had been done.
After the burglary, I sensed for the first time that the new house might not be safe. In the week after the robbery my mother had iron bars placed on all the windows, she had motion-sensor alarms fitted in the bedrooms, and a security screen added to the glass back door so that there would be no more broken glass. We had to leave the lights on when we went out, so that a passerby would assume that somebody was home. But none of the measures she took to keep us safe made any difference when we came home alone at night. She held me behind her, ordered me to stand behind the rubber plant by the entryway, and she opened the door slowly. She disarmed the burglar alarm and entered the house on high alert. She would not turn on the lights until she was certain there was nobody there. Not until I was a teenager was I allowed to walk into the house ahead of my mother, or to stop standing behind the plant. And even then, she was never easy. When I came home late she could never sleep, and sometimes she would call, or text. Be careful, she would say. Practice some responsibility.
After the burglary my mother never slept deeply again. In the middle of the night she would often wake up, and I would find her half-dressed and peering through the slats of the plantation shutters into the street, looking for the prowler who had made the leaves rustle, the man with a knife edging up the side passage, the killer at the door.
Sometimes she was watching for a stranger. More often, I think now, she was waiting for my father.
I closed the pages of the album and opened the thinner folder at the bottom of the stack. As I pulled it onto my lap a large black-and-white image, maybe twenty-five centimeters wide, slid out of the pages.
The photograph showed a woman, very pale, with red hair, lying naked in a rich stretch of grass. The edges were white once, but yellow now. The photograph cut off just above the woman’s nipples. Her breasts fell gently to the sides of her ribs, like mine. She looked away from the camera, from the man who must have been standing directly over her, maybe lying on top of her, to take the picture. It was my mother, long before I had ever known her.
I had lived alone with my mother for years and seen her naked a thousand times, but it only occurred to me on looking at that photograph that I looked like her. Had her breasts. And her hair. And an intensity of expression that, looking at the photograph of her stretched out on the grass all those decades ago, I realized had rendered her wholly and utterly vulnerable.
These are the ways in which I resemble my mother: blue eyes, red curly hair, same smile, same shape of nose and breast and forearm and fingernail, same sensitivity to various citrus fruits. A tendency towards intense feeling. A propensity for shouting. Terrible singing voices. We liked red wine and watermelon and rice pudding with sultanas. We were both, very often, fearful. She liked mangos, but I couldn’t stand them. Every year at Christmas she bought a crate and ate them all herself. She was more cautious than I was. But it wasn’t like I was any less afraid than my mother. I was afraid after the burglary, just like she was. If I wasn’t interested in protection, it was because I didn’t then see myself as something worth protecting.
One evening, when my mother and I were living with my grandparents, I had stood at the bedroom window in the dark. I was waiting for the arc of car headlights to turn in from the cul-de-sac and progress up the slope to the house.
I did not like to be left alone.
I can’t remember how long I stood there in the dark, a tiny quivering figure of fury. I waited and waited, but the light didn’t inch down the driveway. And then I saw the scissors on my grandmother’s dressing table. The ones I was forbidden to touch. I took them in my hand, and stood at the bedroom window, snipping away at my curls as I waited. I could see myself reflected in the dark glass of the window, and it was immensely satisfying to see each strand of hair drop away as I cut it.
When I was done, a pile of curls lay in a mess all over the carpet.
And then the car headlights arced up the driveway. The door slammed. My mother entered the house. She progressed down the hallway. She turned the corner of the bedroom and she saw me standing at the window and she saw my hair, and she screamed. What have you done? As though I had killed somebody dear to her.
She snatched up the curls on the floor, and I had thought she was angry at me, I fully expected her to be angry, but the shock of the thing was when I realized that she wasn’t shaking from fury. Down on her knees, my mother had begun to cry.
I’m sorry, I said to her, down there on the carpet. It was an accident.
But it had not been an accident. I looked at my mother as she scooped up the hair from the carpet. Before she had gone out I had sat on the bed while she changed, asking her questions, watching her struggle into underwear, the lovely flesh mapped with the straps and seams.
She was soft.
You should not harm a thing as soft as she was.
A week later I was taken to a professional hairdresser and given a new, shorter haircut to neaten out the mess I had made. But my mother was distant, something had changed in her demeanor, and even though I was a child I sensed that she had absorbed what I had done and taken it personally.
A week after I cut my hair, she gave me a book, Safety First. She explained that it was very dangerous for me to use scissors. I should never have picked them up. I could have caused myself an injury. As though my use of scissors was the real problem. She led me through the pages of the ex-library book, pages that explained all the things I could use to protect myself in bright, 1980s illustrations. “Everyone needs to be safe,” the book began. “When you are safe, it means you are not in danger of being harmed.” Safety pads and helmets, beware of open flames, stop signs and traffic lights, stranger danger, lock the doors, listen to an adult and follow the rules. See, said my mother, this way nobody gets hurt.
It barely mattered. Safety first, or who got hurt, or why I had played with the scissors in the first place. It didn’t matter. The scotch had made me drunk. Wavering and weepy. I fetched the bottle from the living room and took it back to the bedroom and set it down on the floor. I took up the photograph of my half-naked mother again. I took up the photo of my former self in Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park. The tears began to leak out of my eyes. I let them come.