ALL STORMS OR CRYING MA-MA TO THE MOON

By Lesley Singh

The husband is the adventurous type; the sort to take sudden turns.

We are driving along the New England Tableland from Warwick north but instead of continuing on double-lane highway all the way to Brisbane, he turns off, making the dust on the ribbon of dirt fly. The car descends into the Brisbane Valley through terrain where trees fight rocks. What is this place? we wonder. At last there is a sign near a village: Ma Ma Creek.

What a great name! I have to put it into a story. I'll have to invent an entirely new story so I can use this name with its powerful resonances of comfort and loss. I kiss my husband like a happy child. 'Ma Ma,' I breathe, turning the words over with my tongue. Travelling through the darkening day with the man I love and a Good Idea in my brain.

Back in my home town of Maleny in the Sunshine Coast hinterland - over 100 kilometres north-east from Ma Ma Creek as the crow flies - I attend a meeting. It is 1991 and Robyn Sheahan from the newly-established Queensland Writers' Centre is coming from Brisbane to address us - some of the so-called 'regional writers of south-east Queensland.' She is ill and doesn't arrive but the meeting goes ahead with optimistic talk of a new era. Across the room I notice a handsome, somewhat rugged-looking man in his forties wearing an interesting jumper. Great colours. The jumper attracts me (as does the man). He writes poetry, he tells us. I think it would be an imperative act of poetry for someone to have an affair with him. I note the woman sitting beside him. From time to time, they lean their heads together to confer. Is she the owner of the loving hands which created the garment for him? Hmn.

Another scene. A woman waits at the Brisbane International Airport. Her child is small, perched upright in her arms and looking around with bright lantern eyes. He leans against her embrace, intent on the doors which open and release travellers. He is waiting for Daddy. And there he is, this Daddy, coming towards them, smiling hugely, his own eyes wide with pleasure. He has been to New Zealand to attend to the sale of a gold mine in which he has an interest. Two weeks ago he was farewelled and now they have come to collect him.

Clear of Customs, suitcase in hand, Daddy beams and scoops up the laughing child in his arms. An exquisite moment of love, except for one thing: he has not looked at the mother at all. She does not understand this, but the moment passes and a connection is made - she is hugged and they are a family; moving figures in a tide of reunions, flowing out of the airport into the business of everyday life.

As she drives him home, the mother is doing something interesting with her doubts about her happiness with this man. She says soothingly to herself: love is not excessive or obsessive ... how lovely for the child to receive the primary focus, this is what a stable, mature relationship is about ... whereas she is really burying her instinct that all is not well between them.

When they arrive home he unpacks presents, a taste of the providence they expect to enjoy when the sale of the gold mine is complete. There are some flashy rock samples, a duty-free bottle of whisky, and a hand-knitted jumper from a craft shop. The jumper is cream, hand-spun wool with a yoke of flowers in shades of mauve. Lichen, says the hand-written label, has been used to make the colour purple. A beautiful, loving gift.

For me.

All is well, I tell myself. All is well.


The three elements described above - Ma Ma Creek, the rugged-looking man at the writers' meeting, and the jumper from the South Island of New Zealand - form a tripod over which I concoct my brew. I have a grant from Arts Queensland to complete a short story collection, and the one I set in the environs of Ma Ma Creek in the Brisbane Valley pleases me the most. It is about a woman called Bess who knits her husband Jim a jumper, not from a pattern but from her instincts. He wears his wild-coloured jumper (coloured from dyes extracted from eucalyptus leaves) to a meeting of poets, where Leila, a young woman new to town, is attracted to him. Leila, though young, is already afflicted with great loss and Jim becomes caught up in her needs. It is a story of hope.

Place, central character, conflict - or are the elements more archetypal than that? Are they simply: man, woman, desire? (There is another, more secret, ingredient in all my writing brews - the background muse of nearly all my writing efforts - my crutch, my aphrodisiac, my 'nightcap' - the illicit drug, marijuana.) No matter, the story is written. It is about 4000 words in length. I like it.

For most of that year, 1992, it is an amazing effort to write at all. I am alone with a small child. My eldest son is having some time with his father in the U.K. and my husband is working in Far North Queensland in a gold exploration team. He is home for brief visits and is mostly a voice on a telephone receiver or the writer of a fax message. I have no extended family living near me who could call to see me or offer to help. There is a woman I pay to come and play with the child twice a week and a community kindergarten which he attends for a few hours on other days. I don't get anyone to help with the housework or the garden because of the expense. We are saving. The New Zealand gold mine deal went terribly wrong and instead of making us rich, we lost money. To me, the loss seems great, but the husband who thinks in millions of dollars, says this is to be expected in business and you have to put the experience behind you. I know precious little about business but I know about making sacrifices, so I put the losses behind me and do my own housework.

On one of the husband's rare visits, we attend an exhibition at Impact Art in Maleny, a gallery of contemporary art run by artist friends. We are very taken with a beautiful painting. The husband is not only adventurous but generous, and buys it. The artist, Kathryn Brimblecombe-Fox, is a mother and an artist living in Goondiwindi in south-west Queensland. 'Magic Lady' is hung in my writing room. The husband goes back to work.

By the year's end - mothering, writing, gardening, working, working - I am exhausted. I long for my partner. Luckily the geological work is due to finish and after completing some reports at the head office of the company in Sydney, the husband returns. He arrives in the middle of the night swearing about the hire car. He doesn't look at the wife but accuses her of being demanding. Of ruining his job prospects. She blurts out, 'But what's happened to all the money?' Earlier that day she has checked with the bank and despite the year's work, the balance of their account shows there is nothing much there. He explodes. The 'good wife' puts his explosion down to work stress and the long drive but when they have sex he is brutal and uncaring. He is obnoxious for weeks.

All this is happening to me. I feel so unhappy with my life I arrange to see a therapist. My husband thinks this is a good idea. Clearly his wife has problems. From childhood. Making her quite irrational.

I make trips to West End in Brisbane and pay the therapist to listen to me talk and cry. For the first time in my life I sense that someone is hearing what I am saying. She doesn't contradict me or call me a fool. Her therapeutic methodology is to ask questions or to extend my words through simile. 'It's as if ...' she says, and this prompts me to explore the situation further. And so I tell her about my struggles. One of them is the struggle to create. One afternoon after therapy I go to the Sitting Duck Cafe. It is run by West End anarchists. The food is ghastly and the big chic upstairs room is bereft of customers. It is a space conducive to thinking so I sit and think about my Ma Ma Creek story. I realise it is shallow because I have skirted around the question of whether my character Jim, the man in the wild-coloured jumper, actually has affairs with any of the women who want him in their lives. In the Sitting Duck Cafe, after therapy, I realize he does have a passionate affair with Leila, the troubled young poet. I write notes for several hours then I catch the train home to Maleny.

In therapy I mostly talk about my mother, but then I discover that my husband is having an affair. He met a woman while working on his geological report in Sydney. He tells me he is in love. It is obvious he is in love. It is also obvious that he feels no love for me at all. I am flabbergasted, devastated. Where did it go? How could it go? Why? Why? Who is she? Who is she? The lover is described as being fun-loving, vivacious, undemanding. They met in a pub on New Year's Eve. She is a social worker from an Italian family of greengrocers. Every year the family business gives out free calendars to customers. For the New Year of 1993, the calendar has a picture of a prospector panning for gold. I am expected to see this as they do - an omen for their love.

He is restless and besotted and he drives off. He says it is to see about another gold mine in which we have invested. He takes our small son. He keeps driving. He installs our son who is four in the Sydney bedroom of his lover. When he comes back he tells me he has said goodbye to her.

I no longer believe him. I want to, but he is lying about everything. The lies are like so many snakes in a basket, overflowing and I am trapped in a world where I see the snakes and he says they are not there and that I am mad. He has not said goodbye to the woman. The truth is that he has been having affairs ever since our son was born and long before that - before we'd even met. Ever since becoming sexually active he has been deceptive. During the course of our time together, every time he's been away, he sought an affair. Later he tells me about some of these conquests. One, for example, occurred during the business trip to New Zealand. (A one-night stand with a woman from the pub at Hokitika. Which explained why he could not meet my eyes at the airport). It's as if the hand-made jumper he gave me when he returned - the jumper which inspired the Ma Ma Creek story in the first place - carried with it the vibration of infidelity and this insinuated itself, wove itself, into my life and art.

I beg him to tell me the whole truth about his affairs but whenever he attempts it, I go quite insane. Sometimes I swear disgustingly; sometimes I scream and shriek. I want to kill myself. I am overwhelmed with violent thoughts against myself, against the women he has been involved with, against him. (I do not tell a single friend about my troubles.)

It is also a very erotic time. We smoke dope and drink wine or whisky and have passionate sex. The characters from my story, Jim and Bess and Leila, preoccupy us. When he declares, 'Women are the flowers of the species,' I scribble it down and integrate it into my work. As time goes on, the Sydney woman recedes in importance. (She discovers that he is married. She gets a new lover. I never know what happened between my husband and her. I am not told a thing.) I know it is over when, halfway through the year, my husband designs a slogan for my computer screen. The screen-saver message scrolls across reassuringly: Jim Comes To His Senses.


When I first wrung the truth about the Italian woman from him, I could not eat. Whatever I placed in my mouth I spat out. I told this to the therapist. 'It's as if,' she says, taking this revelation into the course of our therapeutic conversation, 'you cannot swallow the fact of your husband's infidelity.' I feared the end of the session when I would have to descend the steps from her room to the whirl of Saturday morning shoppers - in a crowd, yet so alone with my gnawing and impossible hunger. 'I cannot eat. What can I do?' I pleaded. 'What can I do?' Her face registered a look of uncertainty then she circumvented her carefully maintained discipline of 'as if' prompts and questions.

'Drink things,' she instructed.

I drank milk, then sipped soup, then, as more days passed and he had not left me, I ate again. The therapist saved my life.


All this time I continued to expand the Ma Ma Creek story. It becomes a novella, working title, 'All Storms.' It is swayed by events in my life, particularly my thoughts about fidelity, but there are other influences too, such as Buddhism, Goddess worship, Taoism and the I-Ching. Writing is a giddying, debilitating factor in my life (like another drug I am mixing in) but it also gives me a focus. I play at undermining the eternal triangle - two women, one man - by giving Clare, an older woman, the power to intervene. The female figure of Kathryn Brimblecombe-Fox's 'Magic Lady,' has a similar essence. Clare and the 'Magic Lady' calm me. They are imagined beings yet they sustain me.

I also work on the relationship. (I work on that, more than anything.) I love him. I have a child with him. He says he is in the grip of forces from childhood. We start a therapy course for couples in abusive relationships. He says he wants to be a family man and a good husband. I believe he will overcome.

We have run out of money so I must stop seeing my therapist. It's premature but I am high on the victory I have had over the Other Woman. It's a scar that can heal, I say. We manage to find someone to mind our young one and are released for a rare weekend. We travel to the locality of Ma Ma Creek: I want to see if I have the ambience right. We stay overnight at a country pub. I notice how comfortable he is in the bar, drinking. This is what he does when working away. He misses it, he tells me, when he's at home. We stay there for a couple of hours. I'd rather be reading but this is what marriage is all about – giving to the relationship. Suddenly I am alert: he is making eyes at the barmaid. He denies it. I am instantly on the verge of hysteria. He agrees to leave the bar before closing and downs the glass. Upstairs it is not romantic: soon he is snoring from too much beer.

The next day we walk around looking at landscape. We smoke dope together under some eucalypts. Visit pubs in Gatton. I take notes. I am 'up' again. (I think.)

Sometime that year I turn forty. When life begins.


The next year, 1994, I complete my first manuscript- novella and short stories. My husband helps me print it out and it is sent to an editor who has promised to publish it. After some months I see her at a social gathering at the Queensland Writers' Centre. On her way past me, holding a glass of white wine aloof, she says it is not wanted.

Rejection. For that one needs strength but emotionally I am a battered wife. My sense of betrayal by the publisher is enormous. One night I think of the creator of the 'Magic Lady.' A phrase or sentence might inspire Kathryn as her work inspired me. I retrieve the novella from the proverbial bottom drawer and send it to her. Then I buckle down and begin research on the novel I've decided to write. I'm alive again.


Miracle! Kathryn starts sending me photos of new paintings which spring from her reading of my words. Fifty works on paper later, my husband and I go to visit. It is now June of 1995. Paintings with titles like - embrace, enchantment, a serious poet, phallic forest - cover her studio walls. We talk of our marginalisation - as women, as mothers, as regional practitioners - and stubbornly make plans for a collaborative Installation exploring text and image. After visiting Kathryn, I re-read the novella. It shocks me. The editor was right: it isn't good enough to publish. The whole narrative method, the whole structure just doesn't work. How could I ever have made such an error of judgment? I apply the same critical eye to of the stories. Then rewrite. Fix. 'Would you like to see it now?' I ask the editor who once rang me with the line: Send everything quickly. We'll publish it later this year. 'No,' she says.

Meanwhile, what of that old scar caused by the husband's falling in love, way back? It must be fading fast by now, a distant memory of pain that plays up sometimes in the wet? The husband has not been able to leave the scar alone. He doesn't tenderly care for it. Several times he has taken up a sharp little knife and cut into it. Not a whole new deep gash like the Sydney effort but it's as if he is a vampire who has learned to fed on the blood of my pain. And he has become hungry again. This time there's no trip away - there's a drunken visit in the middle of the night to a woman on the other side of town. He will not apologise. He needs someone to talk to because living with a woman artist is incredibly - impossibly - difficult. He is adamant there is nothing to apologise for. The cards come tumbling down or, to return to a metaphor from Bess's creative efforts at Ma Ma Creek, the jumper unravels. I find I can no longer live with a Vampire. It is starting to kill me.

We have Christmas in agony; we stumble through into the New Year of 1996. Although he doesn't wish to leave, neither does he wish to change or apologise. Only when I am prepared to get the police to escort him off the premises, does he go. I'm doing something else that's radical. Following a deep, inner instinct I stop smoking dope.

Kathryn is invited to stage her Installation, 'Knitting Time', in September at the White Box Gallery during the 1996 Brisbane Festival before it opens. I sit alone in the white-walled gallery where Kathryn has hung her works and some of my words. Eucalyptus leaves are strewn on the floor and their late evening aroma brings a deep peace. I am surrounded by works I helped inspire, an experience humbling and empowering. At the opening people ask, 'Where can I buy the book?' 'You can't,' I answer serenely. 'Can't get a publisher.' Playing the persecuted writer to the hilt.

My husband is not there. The novella was so much part of us both, but he has made his choice - the woman on the other side of town - and I have made mine. (No triangle. Thank-you.) Very few friends come along. When couples break up, people steer clear. After the show, Kathryn gives me a painting called 'Adventurous Journey.' It's her interpretation of my sassy character Leila. 'You'll be alright,' she says.


I congratulate myself for having the courage to end things, but wonder: why is there so much grief? I begin my new book but there are days when I achieve nothing. What preoccupies me is how love can deteriorate into a repulsive situation. I wrestle and wrestle with the past, trying to find what tore us up so often. In 'Rinse the Blood Off My Toga,' the spoof of Shakespeare's play Julius Caesar created by 1960s comedy team Wayne & Schuster, Flavius Maximus, private eye, tries to work out why so many Romans, starting with Big Julie himself, are being bumped off. Suddenly it dawns - whenever there's a stiff, Brutus is always there. 'Suddenly I looked up,' says Flavius Maximus, 'and there was Brutus.'

What was always present in our marriage crises was alcohol and dope. Epiphany. 'We're a couple of washed-up Bohemians,' I tell him. 'You might be washed-up. I'm not,' he replies.


Today the road from the New England Highway via Ma Ma Creek is bitumenised. It has been discovered by interstate truckers as a short-cut from Sydney to Brisbane. I like driving on it: it's part of my dreaming, peopled by my ghosts. In 'All Storms' Bess and Jim stay together but I have my doubts. If Jim keeps on drinking and smoking dope they won't last long, I mutter to myself darkly. They've got Buckley's. As for my old hope that I live in a new era for Queensland writers, I'll leave others to talk that one up - I'm too busy working on survival to lift my head to declare a new age. But today there are some certainties: I have a beautiful novella (okay, so no-one wants to publish novellas); I have come through pain (okay, so it revisits sometimes and part of me is always crying Ma-Ma to the moon); I have begun a new life without alcohol and marijuana. (There's a whole population living without intoxicants - would you believe it?) The serene 'Magic Lady' blesses me and the sassy young woman of 'Adventurous Journey' encourages me to go on. I understand that it is impossible to force my will on a situation. I have to accept everything. Everything. Anyway, I have a novel to write.

Lesley Singh completed a novel about Lasseter and was awarded an MA in Creative Writing from the School of English, Media Studies and Art History at The University of Queensland in 2001. The 'All Storms' collaboration between the writer and the painter awaits further exposure.