The Happiness Glass Read online

  Angeline swivelled plaintive eyes after her departing mistress, while on the other side of the road two women passed by, one of them with a miniature poodle on a lead.

  Lily waved at them. “Do you know who owns this little one?” she cried, eager to divert Gina to the search for the dog’s rightful owner.

  The women crossed over, and Angeline lunged forward.

  “BJ, behave!”

  She and Gina were surrounded by white poodles of every size.

  “There’s a house further along where a little white dog sits in the window,” said BJ’s owner. “This looks like the dog.”

  “Someone will be heartbroken,” said her companion.

  Lily glanced at Gina’s flushed face, and away.

  Angeline’s mistress returned. “I’ve found a lead but I had a little trouble with the collar.”

  Angeline swooned towards the woman, as she produced a piece of twine and tied it around the dog’s neck. He licked her hand in gratitude as she clipped on a lead, the familiar snick of a clip giving him a moment of reassurance.

  Gina set him down on the footpath, and BJ leaned forward to nuzzle.

  “I’ll take him along and see if anyone’s in,” said BJ’s owner, and Lily sagged with relief as Gina relinquished the dog to the two women.

  “Tom, I want to come back.” There, she had said it.

  “Are you sure?” Somehow her husband kept his grip on sanity, even in extreme circumstances.

  “You sound as if you don’t care.”

  “I miss you, but I don’t want you to be miserable and–”

  “I’m so lonely without you. It’s taken all the pleasure out of being here.”

  “How’s Gina?”

  “Oh, having a great time.”

  “Well, maybe–”

  “It’s not enough. I know that now.”

  At the other end of the telephone, Tom sighed. Was it relief? Exasperation? Without seeing his face, she couldn’t tell. In her mind he was far away, sealed behind glass, waving the folded newspaper from the observation lounge at the airport. Every time he raised his arm she wanted to scream.

  “I won’t go back! You can’t make me,” Gina was gearing up for a struggle.

  “But I heard you tell Dad you wanted to go home–”

  “I meant I wanted to see him, I didn’t mean I wanted to go back! I’m happy here. I’m saving up for a really good body board from the surf shop.” Gina shook her hair, as if that settled matters.

  Lily stared helplessly at her daughter, this child to whom she had longed to hand over her own sun-soaked childhood. At what expense had she wrenched back the past, and now Gina, grasping it firmly, had made it her own.

  In the hammock, swinging in dappled shade, she made a careful list. Souvenir de la Malmaison (named for the Empress Josephine, another exile). The incense rose and the beautiful damasks; Hebe’s Lip (creamy white, tipped with red) and Quatre Saisons (oldest of the repeat flowerers). She sucked the pencil and closed her eyes. The ropes of the hammock creaked as she gazed up beyond the leaves and the greenish purple globes of the ripening figs, to the jigsaw of blue sky. This was a dream list of roses for a garden she could, if she returned to the Northern Hemisphere, nurture as carefully as she had nurtured the memory of childhood.

  She took out the letter she had written to Tom. It was strange to think that in a week this same envelope would drop into a letterbox on the other side of the world, and that Tom would place his hand where hers was now and gaze at the rolling stems and loops of her handwriting. Lily folded the list, slid it in beside the letter and sealed the flap, held it for a moment against her dry lips.

  Cradled by the hammock, suspended in warm air, her eyes closed as she made the gradual drift into that dreamy state which was neither sleeping nor waking but was more restful than either. In this drowsy stillness, if she was lucky, she would find the entrance to that long thin country on the edge of sleep which was the only neutral territory she could possess, her only true home ground.

  She waited for Beth and Jam. It was a rare lunch date, perhaps the only time the three of them had ever met in a restaurant. A stranger, smiling broadly, cut a path towards her between the crowded tables, and for a moment Lily didn’t recognise her brother. Jam dropped into a chair and turned towards her a face that was the mirror of her childhood, with everything that had happened since scribbled lightly on top.

  Over chicken salad she said how much she envied people who resisted the bait of travel, who had the ability to stay put and be content.

  “Those of us who stay away too long are cursed always to arrive like strangers.”

  “Is it really very different there?” Jam had always been curious about foreign parts, though not curious enough to leave Australia.

  “As different as Mars.”

  “Any chance of a permanent return to earth?” Beth asked.

  Lily looked away from Jam’s patient gaze, which so resembled their mother’s.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Is Tom really against it?”

  “When he came here, he couldn’t settle.”

  Jam didn’t press for details.

  “The trouble is,” said Lily, “I can’t leave, and I can’t stay. I’m an exile in both places.”

  “Surely there’s some way,” Beth said.

  “I wish!”

  It was her sister who spotted the picture in the card rack at Dymocks. “Look, this is you, Lily,” Beth said.

  Lily leaned over her shoulder. It was a reproduction of The Drover’s Wife by Drysdale. In the foreground stood a woman, monumental, solitary, with her back to the drought-stricken landscape in which, in the distance, a tiny covered wagon waited. In a peculiar way, it did resemble her. The woman gazed impassively at the viewer; in her left hand she held a bag – it was impossible to know whether she was leaving the wagon or returning to it.

  Lily paid for the card. As ever, when preparing to leave, she snatched at things she could take with her, as if with planning and careful packing she could squeeze the whole of Australia into her suitcase.

  After lunch she kissed Beth goodbye and stepped out into the honeyed afternoon. High up, the sky was an endless blue gauze freeway streaming away in all directions. Above her head birds fluttered, while in her grandmother’s garden ripe figs fell soundlessly into the long grass.

  FOUR

  Kissing It Better

  It was in the newspaper, a story about a South American city where the authorities tidied up ahead of an international summit by shooting numbers of street children. I am not even sure now where I read it, but I was just emerging from the tunnel of a gruelling and unsuccessful IVF treatment and decided on the spot to abandon the next round in favour of trying to save at least one child who was already in the world. It was one of those swerving moments in life when everything changes.

  Between the decision and the deed lay daunting quantities of paperwork and permissions, intensive language classes, and visits from social workers. But so ferocious was my energy, that within a year I was on a plane to Chile. In my hand luggage I carried an enormous Spanish dictionary and, pressed between its pages, a list of orphanages.

  There had been little time to consider the practicalities before departing, but flying in low over the snow-covered peaks of the Andes I had a dreamlike sense of being engaged in a bizarre and dangerous mission, like a spy, or an Interpol agent. The switch to Spanish added to the unreality, but the strangeness of being understood was an unexpected thrill that kept me afloat as I settled into a hotel and made the first calls.

  Within days I had slipped into a parallel universe where small children free-floated without mothers, where they were not bonded to carers, where they sank from sight in institutions, or bobbed along on the surface, surviving as best they could.

  It was September 1985, hot and sticky, and the city of Santiago wore a brooding and dishevelled air. Back in March an earthquake measuring 7.8 on the Richter scale had hit Central Chile, collapsi
ng buildings and ripping up the pavements, but the greatest signs of upheaval were political. Twelve years of General Pinochet’s dictatorship had forged a volatile society where running street battles erupted suddenly and were resolved by force, with water cannon, with teargas, and sometimes with bullets. Curfews and power cuts were common. Army jeeps rattled through the city’s streets at all hours and on Sunday afternoons the mothers of The Disappeared protested with placards.

  In the mornings I rose early, sipped cup after cup of weak tea and fiddled anxiously with my hair and clothing as I waited for a reasonable hour to telephone or to make the next visit. Pregnant women can dress as they please, but it was nerve-wracking to think I might be judged unfit to mother because of unruly hair or unpolished shoes. My days were spent knocking on doors. Some orphanages were staffed by stern-faced nuns. The others were state-run institutions in the charge of harassed social workers, desolate buildings that I fancied leaked sadness into the surrounding streets.

  Everywhere I was met with the same answer: yes, there were children, but none could be adopted. In a population without access to contraception, abortion, or social security, one social worker estimated there might be as many as ninety thousand children stuck in orphanages.

  “No more than one per cent will ever be adopted,” she said. “Some parents keep children in care as insurance, so that when they grow up they can come out and support them in their old age.”

  Small faces clustered at windows to watch as I arrived and departed. Standing on the pavement with my list, listening to their voices echoing around the playgrounds hidden behind high stone walls, it was a struggle not to feel discouraged. I was running out of doors to knock on when a contact turned up news of a baby girl in a city a couple of hours away up the coast.

  At first sight the port of Valparaiso was so beaten up by protest and broken by earthquakes that it was a test of courage just to step down from the bus. Stray dogs roamed the streets in great numbers, they slept anywhere, as if dead, and the speed and spin of the local Spanish made every conversation an ordeal. The faded splendour of Valparaiso grew on me over time, but back then my first thought was for the unknown child and my second was to leave as fast as possible.

  She was already eleven months old. Malnourished and with a shaved head, she was in a children’s hospital, a tiny ward filled with light, its windows facing out over steep hillsides where the earthquake had carved a trail of debris amongst ramshackle wooden houses. She had no visitors nor any belongings and had been in hospital about a week, sent there by the courts to be patched up before being moved on to an orphanage where she would pass her childhood. In the hope that she would make a favourable impression on me, the nurses had drenched her in baby cologne. Simond’s Golden Lotion. The scent raises hairs on the back of my neck today. But she had no need of perfume. Weary and vulnerable, with bandaged feet sticking out beneath the hem of a much-washed pink cotton dress, it only took one look from her enormous eyes and I was smitten. And yet our first meeting – conducted on hard chairs in the social worker’s office – was awkward. We were not alone and with curious eyes following every move, our first physical contact was restrained.

  What she had been through in the eleven months before I found her was a mystery I gave little thought to as I struggled to steer her adoption through the Chilean courts. Of course I knew she had suffered, there was the malnutrition to prove it. Less obvious was the inner damage, the deprivation of affection endured in the tough back streets where she had been born. The real clues, if I had picked up on them, were her silence and the shocking intensity of her gaze, the way she rocked herself to sleep, or reached for a bottle of milk with her feet: these were signs of her loneliness and despair. I later learned that babies of her age sit up, but she would topple and her legs could not support her weight, which showed she had spent most of her time on her back in a cot. But I was an inexperienced mother and these developmental hitches did not strike me as crucial. In my exuberance I believed that loving parents and a comfortable home would rescue her from all that had gone before.

  The weeks were filled with uncertainty and frustration. There was the infuriating incomprehension of other people and later, the terror that some slip of mine, of the law, or fate, would prevent me from rescuing a child with whom I was already bonding at a profound level. As the legal process ground forward there were moments of doubt during which I entertained wild thoughts of staying in Chile, far from my home, just to be near her. And as the hours we spent together totted up, she seemed to know that I belonged to her, too, so that each time I had to leave her we were both upset.

  I had bought her a teddy bear for company and she was clutching it on the morning I arrived bearing the court order that would release her from the children’s home where she spent her final days in care. I was too impatient to wait while the matron called a taxi and insisted on leaving at once. There were padlocks and chains to be undone and then we were standing on the pavement in watery sunlight, just the two of us for the first time. I ran with her in my arms, ran as fast as I could over the uneven cobbles of the street. Her tiny arms were clamped around my neck and as I ran – hugging the breath out of her – I whispered that from that moment on she would have two parents and all the love that she deserved and more.

  There followed a time of immense happiness as we watched her learn to smile and laugh, to gain the confidence to cry in the night because she knew someone would arrive with a cuddle. From not being able to sit up unaided she walked at fifteen months, tirelessly, up and down the hall in her new red shoes, her tiny hand tugging us along hour after hour. It was as though, having been captive for so long, she couldn’t get enough of movement.

  For a few years it was easy to believe that adoption made no difference, that if anything, it made our family special. Certainly we could not have loved her more if she had been our biological child, but gradually, as she moved out into the world, it became obvious that it did make a difference. It made her different, when what she wanted and needed was to be the same as other children. We tried to let her grow up knowing the truth so that it would never come as a shock. But it was when she came home from school in Year One and announced that she had argued with her teacher about coming from my tummy that I began to feel uneasy. Still tiny, she was already being forced to grapple with huge unwieldy facts of life that she could barely comprehend.

  And so it went on through the years of biology lessons and times when children were asked to take along a birth photograph for some class project. Suddenly I realised how much we didn’t know, simple truths that other parents and children took for granted, like her birth weight and the time of day she had been born. These details may seem unimportant against a background of deprivation, but they are the seeds of identity and every bit as vital as survival in their way.

  Later there were episodes of bullying at school. Gradually it took a toll. We spoke about it less at home and it was around that time that I admitted to myself that if I could be granted a miracle it would be that somehow she would become my biological child. Not for my sake but for hers, for the security and comfort it would bring her.

  Facts that children can absorb at seven or eight take on a different aspect at twelve and thirteen and when the first rejection came it was like an electric shock. We were shopping for shoes and there was a disagreement.

  “You’re not even my real mother!”

  Once it was out I saw that it had been buried there for years, a landmine waiting for one of us to stumble. I was shaking as I unlocked the car and we sat for a while in silence. Finally I told her I had been dreading this moment, but here we were and somehow we had both survived.

  We had kept in touch with other adoptive families and the news that filtered through of exaggerated teenage problems – drug and alcohol abuse, eating disorders, underachievement at school and violent behaviour at home – might have warned us. But we had brought up our daughter with full knowledge of her adoption and believed that we were home free
. Somehow we failed to realise that just at the moment when her origins had become distant and fuzzy to us, our bright child was struggling to assemble an identity. From her point of view, the raw material was missing and the clues she had to work with amounted to nothing more than scraps.

  A month before her sixteenth birthday, our daughter stepped off the school bus one afternoon, walked into the house and took to her bed sobbing. At first we thought it was a temporary upset, but when it continued through the weekend and into the following school week with no sign of abating, it began to look more serious. Friends and family didn’t understand what was happening; we barely understood it ourselves.

  “Why don’t you make her go to school?” they said. But her determination not to return was absolute and in any case, she was in no fit state. It was the beginning of a dark time for us.

  The atmosphere in the house changed overnight: it felt unsafe, as if some invisible malevolent spirit had taken up residence. This sense of danger was so acute that I could only sleep when my husband was awake to watch over her. It was winter and the nights were endless. During my sleepless vigils I began to wonder about her birth mother. We knew her name but not her age, nor the colour of her eyes or hair. Soon this unknown woman haunted me as she was haunting my daughter. In the early years I had acknowledged her with gratitude, but during those solitary nights my gratitude was transformed into fury. I totted up the damage our daughter had suffered as an infant, the disastrous lack of love and affection in the early months. I wept for hours on those nights and sometimes during the days, certain that if I had been the biological mother I would never have relinquished her. But all the weeping in the world could not help and what mattered was finding a way to foster a sense of wholeness in this much-loved child.

  Our GP referred us to a psychiatrist, who turned up at the house in drenching rain one Friday evening when our daughter was playing loud music and smashing things in her bedroom. She refused to talk to him. Instead, we did the talking, unravelling the weeks of anguish and despair while he sat nodding attentively on the sofa. As a last resort, we proposed to take her on a visit to Chile and the psychiatrist agreed it might help.