The Safest Place I Never Lived

The Safest Place I Never Lived

I always saw the mountain before I saw the hotel. That was how I knew I was nearly safe.

The Leap rose above the bush about twenty kilometres north of Mackay, enormous and smoky in the distance. Bare rock pushed through the trees near the top, while lantana, scrub and small shrubs crowded around its base. From the school bus window, it looked far too large to belong beside an ordinary road and an ordinary little pub.

I was about eight years old, in Grade 3 or 4. I had started school earlier than most children, so ages and grades have become tangled over the years. The mountain has not. I remember exactly how it felt when it appeared through the window.

Home was getting closer, although The Leap Hotel was not our home.

Mom and Pop Ravolli lived there. They were an older couple who ran the pub and lived in the private rooms out the back. They were not related to us, but we called them Mom and Pop. My parents were alcoholics, although I did not use that word at eight. I only knew that after work, they went to the hotel and stayed until closing.

So the school bus dropped us there.

My oldest sister was often somewhere else by then. She was older and had become what adults called a runaway kid, as though children simply woke up one morning and decided that being missing sounded fun. My middle sister was usually sullen and tired. She often climbed into one of our parents' cars, curled up and slept. She slept a lot as a child. I believe she still does.

I went inside.

The bar smelt of beer, cigarette smoke and body odour. It was always noisy. Darts struck the board with dull little thuds. Pool balls cracked against one another. Men laughed too loudly, chairs scraped, glasses landed heavily on the bar, and the cigarette smoke hung over everything. Mum and Dad played darts and pool with the others.

There was a machine that gave out lucky tickets. The men would hand the tickets to me and ask me to open them, then I would check the board to see whether they had won a cash prize. For a little while, I became important. Grown men waited for me to tell them whether they were lucky.

Some of them watched me too closely. They touched me as I passed or ran their fingers through my hair, which was growing longer by then. I did not have the language to explain why it made me uncomfortable. My body knew before I did. I would stiffen and look for somewhere else to stand.

Mom Ravolli noticed.

She had grey hair, big round glasses and a slight stoop. She wrung her hands often, rubbing them together as though she were trying to warm them even in the North Queensland heat. Her voice had a sing song rhythm with a deeper note beneath it.

She never made a scene. She simply appeared beside me and found a reason for me to go out the back.

Perhaps she needed help in the kitchen. Perhaps there was something on the television. Perhaps Max needed company. The reason did not matter. She had seen me, and suddenly I had somewhere else to be.

Out the back, she would give us something to eat. Sometimes it was stew with dumplings. Sometimes she made toasted sandwiches or fresh sandwiches like the ones she prepared for people at the pub. She knew we did not eat properly and were often left to fend for ourselves. She had seen the bruises on me. She had seen the sadness too.

She did not ask me to explain either of them.

She fed me.

Before the food, there was often a raspberry lemonade and a Chomp bar. To this day, I cannot think about that combination without seeing the dim bar, hearing the pool balls and feeling relief arrive in two small servings, one cold and fizzy, the other covered in chocolate.

The strange thing about safety is that children rarely call it safety. Sometimes it is a raspberry lemonade sweating on a hotel bar. Sometimes it is a Chomp bar pushed towards you without being asked. Sometimes it is an older woman who has noticed your bruises but saves your dignity by asking whether you are hungry. Sometimes it is the warm neck of a German Shepherd who holds still while you wrap both arms around him and remember how breathing works.

Max was the older German Shepherd. I think that was his name, although the name sits more softly in my memory than the dog himself. I remember how he felt. I remember wrapping my arms around him and feeling something inside me settle.

Bonnie was easier to remember because Bonnie frightened me.

She was a young Doberman with pointed ears and the serious posture of a soldier. She stood to attention and watched people constantly. Bonnie was the guard dog. At eight, I thought Max was kind and Bonnie was scary. It did not occur to me that they might have been doing the same job in different ways. Max made a frightened child feel safe. Bonnie made sure everybody knew she was watching.

Sometimes I stayed in Mom and Pop's living quarters. There was a kitchen, a bathroom and toilet, a bedroom and a lounge room. Occasionally I showered there. I watched The Banana Splits or The Goodies on Mom's television while the pub carried on through the wall. Pop usually stayed in the bar. Mom moved between the customers and the kitchen, wringing her hands, rubbing them together and keeping track of children who were not hers.

Other afternoons, I sat on the old verandah and did my homework. I usually wore shorts and a shirt to school. Sometimes I wore an old blue uniform, but I only had one and did not wear it often. Shoes were occasional.

The verandah chair always wobbled. I learned to write with one foot pressed against the floor to steady it, my exercise book balanced on my knees and the afternoon breeze trying to turn the pages. My backpack might be beside the car, near the pub door or dropped wherever I had grown tired of dragging it. Max often lay behind me. Bonnie stood nearby, alert to every vehicle and stranger.

Right next door was The Leap corner store. It was a highset building and people lived in it. Through the front door were groceries, soft drinks, ice creams, chips, bread, milk and newspapers. There were a few magazines and lollies behind the counter.

Mum would sometimes push fifty cents into one of our hands and tell us to buy a litre of milk to take home. We would trudge up the stairs, dragging our backpacks if we had remembered to bring them.

At the time, I thought we simply needed milk. As I grew older, I wondered whether Mum also wanted to get me out of the smoky, noisy bar. Fifty cents bought a litre of milk, but it also bought me a few minutes of clean air.

When the verandah could no longer hold me, I went towards the mountain.

We had been told never to climb The Leap. We were taught to respect it. We did not litter, damage anything or say cruel things about what had happened there. I could not have climbed it even if I had wanted to. By the time I reached the bottom and made my way around the rocky ground, pushing past lantana and peering through overgrowth into caves and beneath the overhangs, the light had already begun to fade.

Sometimes Max came with me.

The mountain was huge from below. From a distance it had always looked smoky, but at its base it became rock, shadow, tangled growth and small dark spaces leading somewhere I could not see. I would look towards the top and try to understand the story we had been told.

An Aboriginal woman had been chased by soldiers. She had reached the edge carrying her baby and jumped rather than be captured. The details changed depending on who told the story, but the terror at the centre of it did not.

I was only eight. I understood being frightened of the people behind you. I could not understand how frightened a woman must have been before the edge of a mountain felt safer.

I never treated the mountain as mine to conquer. I inspected what I could reach, looked into the caves and wondered about everything the rocks had witnessed. One afternoon I stayed out too long. Darkness began gathering beneath the shrubs, and then I saw a snake.

That ended my career as a mountain explorer for the day.

I hurried back towards the pub, with Max beside me if it was one of the days he had followed. The mountain watched me leave. It had never asked me to come closer.

By dark, I was always back at the hotel.

Sometimes Mom let me watch television until one of my parents finally decided to go home. Sometimes Mum did not stay at the pub. She collected us and drove us home so we could feed the animals, do the washing and finish our chores.

We had a lot of animals. There were poddy calves, Billy the horse, ducks, chickens, pigs, cats and puppies. They needed food regardless of how tired we were or how long the adults had been at the bar. We fed them, did the washing, fought with one another, showered, and watched Mum clean up a little and cook something.

Our house had no carpet. At first, my bed was an internal door resting on besser blocks with a mattress, sheets and a blanket on top. We did not have lounge chairs, only an old mattress to sit on.

But we had the best pool table, dartboard and stereo in the whole area. We had plenty of cars too.

It was not that money never came into our house. It just rarely found its way to the children. My parents did not have the right priorities.

On the nights when it became clear Mum and Dad were not going home, Carol sometimes took us to her house. She worked with Mum and had dark hair, a Mediterranean complexion, big teeth and a stunning smile. She was very kind. She had two children, Jacqui and Brendan, and a husband I only saw once or twice. I think his name was John.

Carol was the same age as my parents, but she still gave them a talking to. She had the rare adult ability to see that something was wrong and behave as though children should not have to solve it themselves.

Memory does not keep time neatly. My perfect twenty four hours at The Leap is made from many afternoons, meals, trips to the shop, wobbly chairs and nights when I did not know who would take me home. Perhaps that is cheating. I do not think so.

If I could have one day there again, I would not spend it drinking at the bar or posing beneath the mountain. I would arrive on the school bus just as The Leap appeared through the window. I would take the raspberry lemonade and Chomp bar from Mom. I would check the lucky tickets, then escape out the back before any wandering hands found my hair.

I would eat stew and dumplings. I would watch something ridiculous on television. I would do my homework on the wobbly chair and feel the breeze turn the pages. Then I would put both arms around Max.

I would thank Mom Ravolli, although eight year old me would not have known what to thank her for.

No official history is likely to record the toasted sandwiches she made or the way she ushered a child out of a room without embarrassing her. There may be no register describing how she wrung her hands, or how she saw the bruises and fed me instead of demanding answers I could not give.

But I was there. I remember.

Sometimes that is how kindness survives.

I have not returned to The Leap since I was fourteen or fifteen. I have seen photographs of the hotel. It still looks much the same, but now a huge statue of an Aboriginal woman holding her baby stands out the front.

I understand that somebody probably intended it to honour her and share what happened. I understand that tourists stop there. But, shit, I find it horrible. There is something awful about turning a woman's final terror into a giant roadside attraction in front of a pub. I prefer the mountain as I remember it, enormous and smoky in the distance, silent about what it had witnessed.

When I was thirty, my friend Sammie became a barmaid at The Leap Hotel. By then, I had worked at the Mirani Hotel for about two years as its duty manager and gaming manager. I would remain there for seven years altogether. I even got married out the back.

Sammie came to my pub. I never went to hers.

It was strange, perhaps, that I could build so much of my adult life around one hotel while refusing to step inside another. But the Mirani Hotel held the people and the memories I had chosen. The Leap held memories that had chosen me.

If I were given twenty four hours there now, I still do not think I would go back.

I would spend them here instead, remembering the mountain before the monument, the verandah before the photographs, and Mom Ravolli before history forgot her.

I would remember Max lying behind my chair, remember Bonnie protecting, although one night she lost her life to a bullet when Mom and Pop were robbed. There's no record of this, unless you find it on microfilm in a library somewhere. But us older people, the Gen Xers do.

I would remember that the chair always wobbled.

And I would remember that, for a little while each afternoon, I was nearly safe.