Holier Than Thou

Holier Than Thou by Laura Buzo Page B

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Authors: Laura Buzo
Tags: General Fiction, JUV000000, book
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agitation. My mum was getting more and more buggered. She insisted on continuing to sleep with Dad in the double bed, and he tossed and raved through the night. I could hear him from down the hall, but I still managed to drop off to sleep occasionally. I don’t know how, or if, my mother slept at all.
    One concrete thing that changed was that I no longer handed in homework or assignments. I just didn’t have time. I went to class, listened, learned, went to rehearsal, came home, helped my mother. Everyone else handed in their homework, laid their assignments on the teacher’s desk or made vociferous excuses as to why they had not done so. Not me. I walked straight out and was never questioned. Instead, the teachers would shoot me tightlipped glances of sympathy. Mum or Ingrid or someone must have rung the school and told them to go easy on the little trooper.
    One afternoon, Dad was sort of dozing, waking to sa C waandy crazy things and then dozing again. I sat next to him in the rocking chair and Mum was putting away some clothes in their built-in.
    ‘Will it take us long to get there?’ he asked my mother.
    ‘Where?’ She closed the wardrobe door.
    ‘To Broken Hill. I hope there’s a pool.’
    Dad had moved to Broken Hill with his family when he was nine and his father got a job in a mine there. They lived there for two years.
    He dozed again, and then looked up very suddenly, quite lucid.
    ‘When is my next chemo?’ he asked.
    My tummy churned and I sat stock still.
    ‘Um . . . well, darling . . .’ Mum sat down next to him on the bed.
    ‘Or radio? Am I getting marked up again for more radiotherapy?’
    ‘No darling.You’re not well enough for any of that right now.’
    He took this in.
    ‘When . . . ?’ he looked amazed. ‘When did it get this bad?’
    Mum burst into terrible tears.
    He looked at her, not quite sure what he was looking at.
    6

    I sat on the train platform at 7:20 a.m. one temperate Thursday. Sometimes I decided to have an alcohol-free day to give my liver a break (with varying degrees of success). Recently I had decided to occasionally have a iPod-free commute, so I didn’t forget about the sounds of the world, even the horrible ones.
    On the train to work a few months previously I’d noticed that every single person in my carriage had headphones on. They are so handy for blocking out the sounds, and the presence, of the ubercrazy, or the pack of thirteen-year-old girls. But then I got to thinking about the . . . well, the alienation of us modern types and how much effort we put into sealing ourselves off, thanks to those little gadgets. And dammit sometimes I was going to make myself sit on that platform and listen to the ke-chang ke-chang of the train wheels passing over the sleepers, the compression brakes of semi-trailers hauling freight through suburbia, the international jet planes bringing home weary travellers to passionate embraces at Kingsford Smith Airport, the automated audio messages from City Rail telling me that my train has been cancelled or delayed, the crazy guy screaming back to his phantoms in Arabic, the group of junior high school boys who I wanted to dare, to double dare , to compose a sentence, any sentence, without using the words ‘fuck’, ‘cunt’ or ‘bra’. They couldn’t do it, for love nor money.
    My dad wrote and taught about alienation in our modern incarnation of capitalism, ab F waant="out community building and social capital. He taught in the School of Social Work at my uni actually, although long before my time there. So a lot of my lecturers, and the older social workers I have encountered in the field, all get excited when they work out that I am John Yarkov’s daughter. And they feel sorry for me of course. Sorry for my loss. I must have been so young, they work out.
    I was at the platform early because I’d woken at 5 a.m., and couldn’t go back to sleep. So I thought I might as well get on in before the day’s shenanigans started up

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