There was a period of time when my mother lived at this caravan park with Teddy, the Jack Russell Terrier I grew up with. You drove in straight off some two-lane country road to a herd of discoloured trailers and demountables on the bank of a floodable river.
The small billboard welcoming you to the park promised “affordable cabins” and a “waterfront location”, which is about as comprehensive a statement as saying that wolves have soft fur and social skills. Beyond the billboard was a canopy of ghoulish trees straight out of a season of True Detective, and the accommodation options beneath felt so eerily devoid of life if not for the mud-splattered cars parked beside them. There weren’t any personal effects outside or aesthetic alterations, just the occasional ashtray or stolen milk crate.
For an extra $40 a week, you could get a cabin with its own toilet and shower, saving you a walk across the park to the demountable housing the reception desk. It was easy to tell which cabins had bathrooms by the wheels and steel frames that elevated them off the tall grass, rather than the hurried stacks of misshapen bricks provided to the even less financially fortunate. I only visited Teddy and my mother there once when I was 10 or 11. It could’ve just been an overnight stay or a whole weekend visit, but I only (barely) remember a single night.
I was lying on the floor of the “bedroom”, gripping my Walkman with both hands and desperately pretending to be asleep – or, if I was lucky, actually fall asleep – do away with the night and be saved by the advent of tomorrow. My mother was looking for something. Calmly at first, but every repeated search of the same handbag or kitchen cupboard was like another rock thrown at a hornet’s nest. The buzzing in her head perverted her concern to urgency, and then her urgency to mania.
Sidney Norris with his beloved Jack Russell, Teddy. Source: Supplied
I turned my Walkman up as loud as I could handle it, but I could still hear her obsessive mutterings moving through the space. I didn’t have Pearl Jam to protect me, or Funkadelic, or System of a Down. For some reason, I was listening to a Ben Lee album of all things. I didn’t even like his music that much, but it was the only line of defence I had against being present in that caravan. Teddy was always such a pillar of comfort in moments like that but he was outside, sleeping in my mother’s car. She told me he liked it there.
Eventually, she pulled me up off the ground and told me we needed to go to the police to report that someone had stolen her medication. We couldn’t drive there, though, because her car hadn’t been registered for who knows how long, so we walked.
I remember walking for a long time. Longer than what would be considered reasonable in the dead of night at the behest of my mother’s paranoia. Looking it up now, Google Maps is telling me that the nearest police station was an hour and sixteen minutes away by foot. I don’t remember if we got there. I don’t even know if we were ever heading there to begin with. The last thing I recall is my mother’s moonlit silhouette walking down the middle of the highway, arms twisting into purposeful shapes above her head as if she was marshalling an aircraft that only she could see.
The last thing I recall is my mother’s moonlit silhouette walking down the middle of the highway, arms twisting into purposeful shapes above her head as if she was marshalling an aircraft that only she could see
There’s a certain amount of context needed whenever I go to talk about my childhood. It’s annoying more than upsetting at this point. I feel like I need to carry around a book of footnotes and end every anecdote with a verbal asterisk.
A few years prior to that night, my mother had descended into some sort of semi-functional psychosis. I’ve never been privy to the exact reason why, whether it be the drugs or the divorce or some insurmountable collection of stressors, but it left her unpredictable and often completely at odds with my reality.
She would talk without pause in the absence of an audience. She would dance without music. She would have me help her self-harm in order to fulfil some invented need. She would write letters to the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities in Cairo in the hope of obtaining a sample of Nefertiti’s blood to appease the alien siblings she was set to marry. I know how that sounds and I don’t mean to be flippant about it – these are just the kind of footnotes that help me translate my formative years.
That night was an example of how she would often take me places against my will. National parks, cemeteries, prisons. Anywhere she thought we needed to be, according to whoever was speaking to her that day. Sometimes she wouldn’t need to force me at all. I was such a fearful kid that as soon as I heard the particular tone and aural texture of her keys jingling, it triggered some kind of Pavlovian response that compelled me to join her, especially if I knew she was taking Teddy with her.
I definitely didn’t want to go with her that night. I wish I could remember how it ended. I wish I could remember how a lot of those nights ended. My memory’s kind of like the Notes app on a film student’s iPhone – just an ever-scrolling list of engaging premises with no resolutions. It can be a comforting notion if I choose to look at it that way. My brain was looking out for me when no one else was, but it couldn’t protect me from everything.
I remember exactly where I was when my mother called me and told me that Teddy had been killed. I had just spent the afternoon watching a high school girlfriend’s netball game. I left alone and as I was walking between the petrol pumps of a nearby service station, my phone rang. My mother was in tears, saying that someone had firebombed her car overnight.
The photo of Teddy that the author has kept in his wallet for years. Source: Supplied
It wasn’t clear if the arsonist knew that Teddy was sleeping inside at the time or if they were just looking to cause some property damage. Was it random? Was it personal? Had my mother’s medication actually been stolen the night I was with her at the caravan park and she inadvertently kick-started a crescendo of retaliations? She didn’t elaborate much on the reason for Teddy’s death, whether known or hypothesised, rather choosing to explain that it was the smoke that killed him, not the fire. I felt strangely reassured by that.
Occasionally an objective truth gets stuck in my teeth and I try to feel some level of sympathy for her
Though I’m sceptical of the details, I’ve never blamed my mother for Teddy’s death. There have been too many other thoughts and feelings to contend with over the years regarding her illness. Occasionally an objective truth gets stuck in my teeth and I try to feel some level of sympathy for her. I’m her only child after all, and I can clearly see now the consequences she’s paid for her madness. The guilt that destroys her and the desperation she has to be a mother. My mother. I can see all of it and yet, I will never be her saviour.
You tend to hope that these kinds of stories end with some form of forgiveness or reconciliation, but my path of healing has led me to a place of comfort through distance. I feel her effects on me every day as it is. Whenever my partner’s voice raises to a certain volume in public, one that is completely normal and reasonable, I shut down. Instantly, I’m teleported to some highway McDonald’s where I’m hurriedly trying to place an order as my mother’s irritated mumbling slowly turns into aimless screaming. Whenever I misplace something or forget what I was doing, I spiral into an urgent reassurance of my own sanity. I can’t explain how supremely unideal that is when you have a memory as tattered as mine.
Even when it comes to something like spirituality, I envy those who are able to embrace it because as hard as I try, anything that isn’t observable is just another product of my mother. And now my partner is talking about us getting a dog. What if he runs away? What if he gets hurt? What if he suffocates in the boot of some derelict SUV?
Every day is another cross-examination of the reality I grew up in and the reality that is. I don’t say that to be dismissive of my experiences – they are as real to me as the laptop I’m writing this on – but rather to highlight the dangers of complacency should I forget which reality is which. Self-loathing, depression, feelings of worthlessness and suicidal ideation – they are a reality born from my experiences, akin to a cocoon that has no intention of letting me out. And I spent a long time waiting for my metamorphosis in that cocoon. Some kind of transformation that would relieve me of my ugliness.
I spent a long time waiting for my metamorphosis in that cocoon. Some kind of transformation that would relieve me of my ugliness
After a while, those thoughts that I was enclosed within convinced me that my metamorphosis was in death. That’s where I’d escape all the rotting silk and find whatever wings I could. But that didn’t go to plan, obviously. There were some people in my life at the time who cracked open that cocoon for me – pulled me out of my reality and into theirs.
I thought that in order for me to feel better, I needed so many things to change. Different parents, a different past. I needed to feel as though everybody on earth loved me. I needed to transform from a caterpillar into a butterfly. But when I went through my rehabilitation, I found out that there were other realities I could live in. Ones that didn’t demand so much change. Ones that freed me from blame. Ones where I was allowed to love and be loved in return, but not by the world, just by one person who felt like the world. Of course, my cocoon keeps trying to re-spin itself around me. I assume it always will. Though I see myself now as less like a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis and more like a cicada that has to break out of the same hardening shell every summer.
My mother and I didn’t talk about Teddy again until recently. I realised that I had never asked her what had happened to his body after the incident. Did she take him to a vet? Did she bury him somewhere? Again, a strange reassurance washed over me when she told me that she put him in a small suitcase and floated him down the Hawkesbury. I don’t think I’ll ever know for sure if that’s the entire truth of Teddy’s final days, but if it is, I hope he floated somewhere nice. Maybe some affluent family found him washed up near Barrenjoey Lighthouse and they buried him in a plot of luxurious, Northern Beaches soil. That kind of reality works for me.
Three entrants’ stories were joint highly commended prize-winners of the 2022 SBS Emerging Writers’ Competition. This story is by Sidney Norris.
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