Facing the Sun Read online

  For more information about the Caretaker Trilogy,

  including the paperback editions, please visit:

  www.vividpublishing.com.au/facingthesun

  Copyright © 2018 Helena Phillips

  ISBN: 978-1-925846-10-2 (ebook edition)

  Published by Vivid Publishing

  P.O. Box 948, Fremantle

  Western Australia 6959

  www.vividpublishing.com.au

  eBook conversion and distribution by Fontaine Publishing Group, Australia

  www.fontaine.com.au

  Version 1.0. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, printing, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.

  Also by Helena Phillips

  Fiction

  The Caretakers Trilogy

  Book One: Reluctant Activists Vivid Publishing (2016)

  Eleven Hundred Sand Dunes Vivid Publishing (2016)

  Non Fiction

  The art and science of Stuffing Up your life Vivid Publishing (2012)

  The Place in Between: living and relating with passion

  Vivid Publishing (2011)

  For all those who have suffered the pain of being regarded as different and therefore, outsiders.

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  I acknowledge the Gunai Kurnai people on whose land I write, and pay my respects to their elders, past, present and future. My reading of Karen Langdon’s Jackson’s Track, the story of indigenous Australians carving out a traditional community for themselves in West Gippsland, and in doing so, being insulted, denigrated and torn from their homes because of white tyranny, impacted my psyche deeply, and I longed to speak out in protest. Australians must never make the mistake of believing that racism is a thing of the past. It certainly is not.

  I apologise to the people and tribes of outback Australia for not directly acknowledging you in this story. I have done this to avoid mistakenly writing about aspects of life, beliefs and culture about which I know too little. The characters in this tale are entirely fictional, but it is my hope that the references to lifestyles and values are close enough to be acceptable within the overall framework of reality.

  My special thanks to Marlene Drysdale and her team at the Monash School of Rural Health for attempting to educate me on indigenous affairs, and to those indigenous workers around Gippsland who contributed to my understanding, such as it is, when I asked for their assistance with educating medical students about indigenous health.

  And my thanks to all the LGBTQI people with whom I have worked over the decades as a psychologist. Each shared their story with me. All have been patient with my efforts to understand what it is like to be made to feel different at your deepest core. I am saddened by the most recent example of this struggle we had with embracing diversity when we Australians decided to vote on Marriage Equality, thus increasing the distance between us. Peter, I hope you read this book with some enjoyment and appreciation of my attempts to write something about which I can know very little.

  I leave you all with this comment from my Year 12 Australian history teacher, Sr. Gabrielle, in response to an essay. “A gallant attempt to write something about which you know nothing!”

  Of course, once again I heartily thank you, Jason Swiney, and the team at Vivid Publishing for your expertise, patience and many helpful suggestions without which I would have been lost. Emily Ireson, your capacity to bring my ideas to life in picture form, has been exciting and without it this trilogy would not be the same. I appreciate the many hours of work it takes to create such covers. And to my brother, Damian, thank you for your input into the Blurb, one of the most difficult pieces of any published work; in my opinion!

  Prologue

  Gabriella

  At sixteen, I fell in love with an Iranian photographer because he had the most beautiful face imaginable with smooth, brown, polished skin, and deep eyes leading to a soul (I knew then) was made especially for me. He had a pair of lips I kissed continuously for about two years before giving up on that and forming the resolution to travel to Iran and search him out. At the time, this made perfect sense to me, despite the fact that he’d been born in the late 1800s.

  This road I’m on had seemed promising. Travelling usually presents an opportunity to change my thought processes. Anything different, any possibility outside of home should have helped. But as the kilometers pass, so does any hope of lifting my mood. My destination had been Phillip Island, but, abruptly, the impulse to swing off the highway ten kilometers before reaching it seems far more promising. It quickly relinquishes any right to the title, becoming a wandering gravel, and then dirt, track! Signs promising a town, or at the very least, a village, have been clearly misinformed. When it, ends at a T-junction and I’m confronted with a dirty patch of sand and water attempting to swallow clumps of trees whole, I groan. There is not the slightest hope of relief to be found here. Any sensible person would return to the Highway and continue on to the Island.

  Instead, sea breezes and leg stretches appeal, so I set off towards the Island on foot, walking briskly and lecturing myself about my lack of gratitude and general spirit of resentment. I have a great deal to be thankful for, even if it makes not the slightest difference to my black mood hanging like smoke in a bushfire; a pall of heavy air. I am one of the few fortunate people on this planet to have everything I need (and want!). I adjust my thinking to include only Australia, and of Australia, only the southern part of Victoria. Even then it’s too much guilt.

  Since the kids had left on their trip, this flood of depression has taken hold and continuously dumps guilt on me until I’m ready to scream, which I do occasionally, when one of the girls is particularly in my face. They are only trying to cheer me up, but sometimes they have too much cheerfulness for anyone’s mental health.

  It has been many years since I’ve felt so hopelessly miserable. Part of me knows this is ridiculous, allowing the past to swamp me again, but there doesn’t appear to be much choice. No matter how hard I try to make all the usual pleasures work, there it is lurking in the background, pictures, snatches of conversation, the endless ache of a love which will never return.

  Stretches of muddy sand give way to beach which is slightly closer to my idea of a good place for walking. Out across the water, solid land sits slumped in a dejected heap, with nothing to recommend it. Who would voluntarily choose to buy in this area? Nevertheless, it matches my mood. The point I’ve been heading for gives way to another stretch of dirty sand where the water laps too close to the farming land on my left; and is only slightly relieved by a stand of t-tree. Its low branches make a fairyland for children to explore; or in my case, a safe place to wee. Pulling up my jeans, I set off again for the next point. What I am searching for is a sense of arriving somewhere worth being. It never comes. Each point gives way to an exact replica of the curve of beach I’ve just vacated, followed by another and another, with no relief.

  Turning back attracts me about as much as the endless points ahead. You can’t turn back. No matter how much you want to change the course of your life and return to happier times, it doesn’t work. Depression is as unwelcome as returning to a concentration camp. Locked in, with no hope of escape, it had once been three years of intense hopelessness. It just wasn’t possible to go through that again.

  Sandro is only away for a few weeks, and, quite recently, he’d been returned to me from death. I’d been able to hope and hold firm, sitting all those hours and days at his hospital bed. Now he is travelling in the desert, you’d think he was dead the way I am carrying on. You have to keep giving up your children. I miss Bridey too, but in a different way. Gradually, as the sun rises through the grey light at the dawn of a dull day, my thoughts turn to reality. The past is gone, and this is not the same at all. They are only memories.

  My parents had been furious when they’d heard of my pregnancy. Disgusted with me. But they’d been prepared to look after me, and the child, if I’d returned to Italy and left Sohrab behind in Iran. That had been like being offered a beheading, rather than the electric chair. It was difficult then to understand how they could reject me, but later, after having had children for many years, it became total disbelief. How can any parent reject one of their children, let alone one in trouble and needing support? Of course, the fact is it wouldn’t have worked anyway because Sohrab would never have given up his country and family to live with mine. He would have been constantly fighting with them. Even after ten years, and being blessed with being allowed to see their grandchild and attempt a relationship with him, my parents couldn’t allow Sandro to be himself. When they visit us in Australia, he makes himself scarce, and who can blame him? They could never have accepted his father with all his foreign ways.

  I was almost nineteen when the call to travel to exotic places became a possibility. As an art student, I’d been captivated by Antoin Sevruigan
’s photographs of Persia; well, already captivated by Antoin himself as a young man and desperate to get inside him in any way possible. The beautiful face with its soul filled, poetic eyes called to me in my dreams for months before I announced to my parents that their eldest child would not be attending the wedding of some distant cousin next month, because she would be travelling in the Far East, instead. Their instantaneous and enduring resistance battled for weeks with my determination, and they had no hope of containing me – never have had. They’d pegged me quite early as the difficult, rebellious child who wouldn’t fit in the way the other three had always submitted. Perhaps, they believed, if they let me go this time, I would return to them a more settled Italian woman ready for their input on possible men to guide and shape my life. They had several Masses and Novenas said for me before I left, and I threw the rosary beads, thrust onto me at the airport, into the nearest bin. Many years later, I wondered if God had punished me for that sacrilege and wished for a long time that I could get them back. The rosary beads. What I would have done with them if it had been possible is still a mystery. Some sort of talisman I suppose to finger when I was desperate.

  The journey was lonely at times, but the freedom overwhelmed all minor problems, and not having to answer to fifty relatives every week of my life was pure bliss. I could meet and relate to whoever I wanted and stay as long or as little as I liked. Well, that was how it was at the beginning. The first two months, I wandered through countries with exotic names and mind blowing culture. It felt exactly like being in heaven. Turkmenistan gave way to Afghanistan, beginning at the Caspian Sea, then my wanderings through Azerbaijan led to meeting people I had only dreamed of in novels and art work and films. Surprisingly, although I travelled alone, I never met danger until I met Sohrab in Teheran. You take the wonder of the world when you travel and just expect it to continue feeding you all the joys and goodness of life, never imagining one meeting could change the whole course of your future.

  At the beginning, it was the most exciting experience I have ever had. He was the man of my dreams. Totally beautiful to look at, he immediately fell in love with me, and life became a fairyland, something like becoming the princess in Arabian Nights. He was not only beautiful and charming, but he had a deep soul which I found extremely attractive, and we shared his passionate beliefs about what was best for his country. We had conceived Sandro before I discovered he was lying low after a political escapade during which he’d supported a group to lay siege on the American Embassy. He was twenty and had been caught up with a group of men and women who firmly believed the Americans were bringing Iran to its knees. As with many young political enthusiasts, the world seemed different once the event was over, and the consequences began to take shape. For us they were huge and lifelong. We decided to immigrate to Australia and begin again in a new country. It turned out they would take Sandro, and me, but not Sohrab. Life in Iran was too dangerous for us. Sohrab was determined he could find a way around the difficulty. He couldn’t!

  “Turn your face to the sun and the shadows fall always behind you.”

  Maori saying

  One

  Darkness in the desert has its good and bad points. The sudden and complete blackout tends to be disconcerting for anybody not expecting it. The tallest of the three boys strode along the dark street at a determined, yet erratic, pace suggesting important business while the others, faster but uncertain in the shadows, followed at a quick trot. The brief opportunity before the clouds moved and the stars sprinkling across the night sky would betray them to passersby loomed large in Adam’s mind, while nothing in the shadows disturbed his intense focus. He seemed almost unaware of his companions, dismissing their odd flinches and squeaks when the scrub to either side of the road revealed abundant night life in tiny shivers and disturbing rustles. People were unlikely, rarely out late at night on this side of the streets of Birdsville, but dark spirits and unknown creatures of the imagination fully occupied the minds of the twelve year old boy and his fourteen year old brother. Adam led them down the street towards the abandoned house where their booze had been stashed. Tonight his mind was on the strange sensations he’d been having in his legs during the afternoon and how desperate he was to be rid of them. He’d tried several ways over the past months, but all his efforts seemed to intensify rather than diminish their effects; although alcohol blotted it out temporarily. The house was set back into bushes, and it took a nudge from one his companions to prevent him missing the driveway. In the light of the torch, he could just make out the door set into the wooden frame but not enough detail to see the lock. The two boys with him faced the road, standing at the foot of the few steps and keeping a sharp eye out for intruders while he struggled to pick the lock unnoticed. One muttered anxious encouragement over his shoulder while the other lit a smoke kicking at the dirty sand with his bare feet, the hair falling over his face blinding him to everything but excitement. Adam hadn’t been in Birdsville since June. Without him around excitement was at a low ebb.

  Both boys jumped and turned sharply at the sound of breaking glass. The inadequate light went out, the walls of the house fading instantly into impenetrable deep grey shadows against the desert dust, and Adam seemed to have disappeared. Using their hands to guide their feet the two boys kept close to the front wall of the house as they worked their way past the veranda towards the first corner, rough scrubby weed growing against the wall scratching at faces and impeding progress. It was the bite of glass into bare feet which pulled them up, shrieking involuntarily as lowering a second foot to relieve the first only aggravated the situation. One made the dire mistake of sitting to pull a shard of glass from his foot and let out a yell as glass penetrated his shorts.

  From inside the house Adam shushed at them impatiently. Darkness made it impossible for him to see anything, and he couldn’t risk exiting via the hole, once a window, with only thongs. His hands were bleeding from where he’d lifted himself into the room. He’d chosen the side window because it was hidden from the road by bushes. Breaking it with the torch had been impulsive and stupid to say the least, but god it had felt good to smash something really hard and feel it collapse under his hands. If the other two hadn’t been outside he would have continued attacking the glass with his measly weapon until he’d powdered every last piece. Now, he needed to think. Feeling for his phone brought him up short. In his mind’s eye, he could see it on the window ledge of the front porch where he’d put it down to leave his hands free for the lock, forgetting the pockets in his shorts. He felt for the lock of the front door in the dark but couldn’t turn it, or see any detail to work out what the problem was. Someone must have changed the locks, which meant their stash had probably been found. They needed to make an abrupt getaway, besides which the beer would have been hot anyway. Why hadn’t he thought of that? The whole adventure was lame. All adventures these days were hollow leading nowhere and bringing dim satisfaction and certainly little relief from the worry. Now, he’d just made everything worse. Dad would definitely find out because, although the stupid old house was never used, everyone knew everything in Birdsville, and, by breakfast, Dad would be after him. You couldn’t even run away. He’d spent night after night trying to think of a plan to escape from his life, but no one would accept an offer of giving a child a ride to Adelaide, or anywhere really, without knowing the story behind the escape. Truckies knew their work depended on being trusted by the locals. No-one would serve a cold beer to a driver who had made off with someone’s son. Dad was going to kill him for this. At least then the problem would be gone. But no! Slow torture was more Dad’s style. A clout or two followed by endless nagging insistence on his every step being done Dad’s way; and now Mum would take his side as well. Despite the despair, he made his way to the back door and picked his way around the house to the front going for his phone before tackling the glass strewn side of the house. He could hear the two boys muttering, wailing, moaning and wished with all his heart that they would just shut up and wait until he found some light. The porch jumped out at him as he slammed his whole body into the pillar holding it up. Finding the phone was a blind man’s nightmare until he realised he’d put it on the step of the doorway and not on the window ledge.