More Family

Our household consisted of Mum and Dad, Sebastian, me and Stephen. We were born two years apart starting two years after mum and Dad married in a civil ceremony followed by a big sit-down feast. I've seen the photos. Then there was Jason, a half-brother twelve years older than me.
Mum was pregnant with Jason when she married his father in a presbyterian church in Sydney. She was about twenty. Some years later her husband was put in jail for assault; a drunken brawl, she said. She visited him in Goulburn gaol. One time the husband of her sister offered to drive her there. One the way home he booked them into a motel. She became pregnant to him then had an abortion. Hearing this later in my life, it seemed that these were very radical behaviours for a christian woman in the 1930's. Mum had a habit of spilling her secrets.
After growing up and becoming a new person from psychotherapy, I came to the conclusion that some of Mum's truths were either toned down or tarted up depending on what was needed, to spotlight her in the rosiest of blameless glows. It wasn't her fault. Life had dealt her undeserved tragedy.
At some point she fled Sydney with Jason, divorced her husband and married my Dad.
Jason hovered spasmodically on the periphery of our lives. I do have fond memories of him. There are some good and not so good events involving Jason, like the time he bought me a book 'Born Free' and the single playing record of the same name for my birthday. I still have that book.
One evening he rang for his mate to pick up dim sims on his way over. The mate thought he had said 'Vincents' headache powders and turned up with them instead and no dim sims. I can still feel the disappointment. We rarely had treats.
Another time at Nana's he quizzed us as to whether we thought the clear liquid in the bottom of a lemonade bottle was water or lemonade. Stephen and I really wanted to drink it if it was lemonade. But it looked like water so we guessed water. Sebastian, two years older than me, guessed lemonade. He was right so Jason gave him the bottle, and much as we pleaded he would not share with us. The motto for our family could have been "Every man for himself."
For another of my birthdays Jason took to me the movies to see South Pacific. We sat in a pub across the road from the movie theatre on stools at the corner of the bar. He ordered red and then green 'fire engine' drinks for me until I couldn't fit another one in. He drank beer after beer for what seemed like hours on end. We left the pub and saw the movie and the memory of that evening is still treasured by me.
Jason was going to get engaged. He brought her to visit us. I loved her so much. I laybyed a small cruet set of cut glass on a silver tray with a basket handle; Salt, pepper and vinegar bottles of tall, rectangular shape. I paid it off little by little at the newsagency gift store we walked past sometimes on the way home from school.
By the time I gave it to her they were already in the process of breaking up. I remember her gracious, reserved smile thanking me for my gift.
Jason had gone to gaol for assault. Mum visited him in Maitland prison.
Much later in his life Jason married and divorced. He worked as a plant operator on mining sites in Queenstown, Tasmania, Mt Isa, Queensland, and Dampier, Western Australia. The defacto relationship he had ended. She left him. His drinking built upon itself over years until he ended up drinking a two litre cask of wine per day, by the time he moved back to Newcastle. Then the doctor told him to stop. It was too late for one foot and the other one had also started going gangrene. He died, aged sixty, an alone, childless, alcoholic, diabetic, amputee. RIP Jason.

Newcastle has the best beaches. As children, mainly under the age of ten, and cousins the same age we spent alot of time at the ocean baths of Merewether beach and in the surf or waist deep in rock pools. One cousin had a period pad under her swimmers. It sogged up so she pulled it out in pieces throwing them up onto the rock ledge surrounding the rock pool we were lazing in. Our shoulders and noses were always sunburnt and peeling. One of our tasks at the beach was to collect perewinkles which we would pluck from rocks at the unstable water line, bring home, boil up then dig out of the shell using a pin. Gritty and chewy with an unpleasant flavour, even dipped in vinegar is how I remember them.
The best times were when the Mums and sometimes the Dads would create a picnic in the cement pavillion. We'd run to them at the cement table where they would be talking then we would run back again to the water. Sometimes one of us would be stung by a blue bottle, or slip on the oyster covered rocks around the headland and run back stinging with welts, or bloodied and crying.
To this day I exhalt the sound of crashing, hissing surf, seagulls cawing and salt sea wind in my ears, blue sky and sparking sea, but mostly the firm crunch of apricot coloured sand on the broad beaches of Newcastle.