Writers' Group Therapy

Writers’ Group Therapy.

I wrote about the day my mother vanished because Mr Timms who ran the group said to write about something true.

My mother was a woman of habit. When I walked in the door after school, she was always at the kitchen table. She was always just finishing up making a plate of cheese and gherkin sandwiches for me. She would look up as I walked in and say, without a smile, “I wasn’t expecting you yet. You can pour your own cordial”. Of course, she was expecting me. Our routine never varied. Until the day it did, the day it vanished and never returned.

My mother was a pretty lady, with softly curling, dark hair that she complained was “fly away hair” or else “unruly, impossible” while she dabbed it into place with her pointy fingertips. She wore dresses that showed off her shape without showing off her bare skin. She wore shoes with pointed toes and little pointed heels that I couldn’t walk in when I tried.

Father was rarely home back then. He worked on the railways and he was away day and night. When he was home I had to be especially quite because he would be sleeping. The day that my mother went missing I didn’t know how to call my Father. I didn’t know the number for his boss, or anyone that might be able to call him.

I came home from school, with the sun burning the back of my neck. It was early December, and everyone said we were in for a hot summer. My hair was already going golden on the tips from being out in the sun. I pulled the screen door open and let it slam closed behind me. The main door was open, which I didn’t think about at all. Why did my mother leave the front door open on such a hot day? The police would ask me that, over and over. I didn’t have an answer for them. I headed straight for the fridge and a cold drink of lime cordial, but I froze in my tracks at the kitchen door. My mother was not at the table. She was not there. I called out to her lazily. She must be near. In the bathroom or in her bedroom, out at the laundry at the most extreme. I progressed to the fridge and poured myself a tall frosty glass of icy cold lime cordial, and downed it standing at the sink. My mother still wasn’t back. Where could she be?

I walked through the house calling out, “Mum, I’m home!” I walked out the back door and down the two steps to the dusty back yard even though I could see from the doorway that she was not out at the clothesline, and the open laundry, in a tin lean-to on my left was empty. I walked back through the house. Maybe she had had to run to the post office at the last minute. I returned to the kitchen and made my own sandwich. It was better when she made it. I waited, expectantly. Then I got bored with waiting and I wandered into the TV room. I flicked over to cartoons and watched that for a while. Where could she be?

Then I thought, what if she fell and broke her ankle or something, and the neighbour had to take her to the hospital? So, I ran next door, angry with myself for not thinking of it sooner, and knocked quite loudly on my neighbour’s door. Mrs Griffins shuffled to the door in house slippers.

“Rudy?” she seemed puzzled to see me at her door.

“Mrs Griffins, do you know where my mother is?”

“Isn’t she home?” Mrs Griffins asked, not very brightly.

“No,” I said, “and I don’t know where she could be.”

“I don’t know, Honey,” Mrs Griffins said. She seemed to think for a while, then she said, “You’d better come in and wait for her here.”

“How will she know I’m here?” I asked.

“You run home now and write a note for her, saying you’re just next door with me until she comes to pick you up, okay? And bring back your school bag so you can do your homework while you’re waiting!” Mrs Griffins had thought of everything. When I came back with my school bag Mrs Griffins had made me Vegemite and Cheese sandwiches and poured me a glass of lemon cordial. I didn’t think it would be polite to tell her I didn’t like lemon, so I drank it anyway. The sandwiches were good. The note I had written for my mother was decorated with little flowers and butterflies. I wanted her to know that I wasn’t angry with her for being away. I knew something important must have come up, I just didn’t know what.

Darkness comes late in summer. It was around dark that Mrs Griffins decided she would check my house, just in case. In case of what I didn’t know, but I let her go alone because I was watching a movie by then. When she came back, she said she was going to pop out to the phone box in the street and just make a quick call. I barely listened to her. I didn’t know what sorts of things Mrs Griffins might do. She might pop out to make a phone call around dark every night.

Soon she was back and seemed a bit agitated, but again, what would I know? Not long after that, though, I noticed the reflections of flashing blue and red lights in the windows. I ran outside to see what was going on, and Mrs Griffins ran after me. She grabbed me by both shoulders before I reached the street and held me there with her. There were police already out of the police car, shining torches, looking at my house, and then looking at Mrs Griffins and me. Mrs Griffins waited for an officer to walk right up before she spoke.

“It was me that called,” she said. “This here is Rudy, from next door.” She shook my shoulders a little bit but I didn’t know Mrs Griffins’ cues so I didn’t know if that meant I should speak or be silent or what, so I did nothing. She went right on, “Rudy’s mother isn’t home, which is not like her at all.”

“Mum is always home when I get home from school,” I sounded breathless even to myself. “I don’t know where she is.”

The police searched our house, and the yard with torches, though there was not much to see out there. They searched Mrs Griffins house and yard too, though they asked her first, which was only good manners. When they left, they asked if I was right to stay with Mrs Griffins until my mother returned, and to Mrs Griffins they said they would be in contact in the morning, but she should let them know if my mother turned up before then. Of course, she would turn up! What did they think?

However, my mother never did turn up. Her disappearance was declared a major crime some months later when someone reported a car and a sighting, but I never knew anything much about that. It was kept secret so it wouldn’t spoil the investigation. My mother’s vanishing is still an unsolved mystery.

I joined a writers’ group because my therapist thought it might help me to express my thoughts and feelings. I don’t think it’s helping yet. When we had our first short true story written Mr Timms said to swap our pages with the person sitting next to us. Then we had to read out each other’s true stories. I read out Margie’s true story about a kitten she rescued from a storm. She called the kitten Storm Boy and he was a fat five-year-old cat now. Margie then read out my story.

When she got to the end, where my mother remains forever missing, she was crying, and several other people in our writers’ group were also dabbing at tears. I watched them, tearless. My mother has been a mystery for forty years. Despite what my therapist thinks, I think I might be all cried out.

               I had grown up with my father, who had taken a job as a groundsman that meant he could be home after work. I got home from school long before him, so I made the sandwiches, and my father liked coffee not cordial, so I learned to make that. Our house was filled with a sense of waiting. She would come home, surely, she would! But she never did.

               The writers’ group look sideways at me, looking for my emotional response, but I don’t have one for them. The way the story ends is not a surprise to me. There were some sniffles and tissues got tucked into sleeves and pockets, and then Mr Timms said it was Trudy’s turn to read the story in her hand, which was written by Graham who was sitting at her side. Trudy cleared her throat and composed herself for a moment, and then she read Graham’s story of when he crashed his first car into a tree. It’s a good story and has a happy ending because Graham isn’t hurt, which I could tell everybody liked. I thought my story is one that shouldn’t be told because I can’t give it a happy ending to please the readers.