Sawdust by Deborah Kay Page A

whole house, even in mid-summer, would freeze on those nights. There were some foods he refused to eat, and threw them back at her – yes, right over the table. But we kids were never allowed to turn our noses up to anything.
    ‘Don’t you ever put tomato sauce on my dinner again,’ he would rage at Mum. ‘I’m not putting up with that bloody fucking rubbish!’
    Dad would swear like a storm trooper. Everything was effing this and effing that. And many, many other words too.
    I remember once being out in the paddock with my younger sister Marge. We were pulling out some crops from the ground, just generally of a weekend helping Mum and Dad. Only Marge couldn’t get one of the plants she was tugging at out of the ground and my innocent little sister , doing her best to emulate Dad, yelled as loud as she could: ‘Come out, you cunt!’
    You can imagine.
    ‘Get up here now!’ Dad screamed like the earth was caving in at his feet, and an instant flogging was dished out for the dirty word. We kids knew not to swear. Goodness, no. We weren’t even allowed the word “damn” in our house. Like everything else in our house, only Dad was allowed to say what he liked and in the language he liked.
    The Ten Commandments – and more – applied to everybody and everything but him. There were two standards in our house, and the one we had to obey, was Dad’s.
    To this day I find it hard to swear and there is one word that rankles more than any other, it is that word c-u-n-t. I find it totally debasing of women. I remember once my daughter Sarah coming home from school, she was only nine, and she repeated that word.
    ‘Do you know what it means?’ I instantly sprung at her, probably overreacting. She shook her head. ‘It’s a disgusting word for vagina. That’s what it is! It’s a word men use!’ And then seeing her eyes close to crying, I softened and explained, ‘That’s exactly how we women should not see ourselves. The most sacred part of us, like a dirty, demeaning swear word.’
    Still standing there a bit white, blinking her eyes, I am sure the message got through.
    Funnily enough, Mum never swore, or very rarely, only when she was extra, extra furious. I guess it wasn’t considered ladylike in the day – or Dad didn’t allow it. But that was another thing I had to be grateful for. Imagine if they both swore like Dad. Our home would have been like a slop-house.
    There were other kinds of arguments too in the house now. They could fight over just about anything, but now Dad was beginning to accuse Mum of things. Of fancying other men, of having affairs. He was also becoming violent.
    I was about ten when we heard Mum arriving home one day, skidding the car to a halt on the gravel outside the front of the house. All of us kids ran outside to see what was going on. We found Mum, plump as a watermelon once again, hauling herself out of her car, puffing and shouting: ‘C’mon hurry, hurry. Get upstairs! Your father’s coming!’
    We all ran inside the house and up the internal stairs, only to hear Dad a split second later, in his truck, skidding up behind Mum’s parked car. It was almost incredible that the loud screeching of tyres wasn’t followed by a bang. We could smell his fury burning in the rubber on the stones.
    Behind us, we heard Dad’s heavy worker boots bounding up the stairs. I have no idea where Mum was by this time, but the four of us kids were standing huddled together, shuddering with fear. We saw Dad’s big square head appearing and suddenly Mum was running across the lounge and Dad was chasing after her.
    He was spitting fire: ‘What the fuck were you doing with that fella? D’you think I never saw you with that cunt? Don’t think ya gonna fucking get away with this!’
    Mum, her neck thick and bloating red, was turning around as best she could, screaming back: ‘I wasn’t doing anything wrong. I wasn’t doing anything wrong.’
    She was running to the phone, I don’t know,