Slumped in her seat behind me, Rachel’s deep, extended breaths were getting louder and longer. Finally:
‘This is all really interesting, Helen,’ she ground out. ‘But why can’t we just focus on what actually happened? I’m listening to the tapes; I’m just coming through the Weimar Republic and the bad shit is starting to happen. Why are we looking at the naked chick instead of talking about the SS?’
‘Good question,’ Helen said, in a tone that imbued the comments with more respect than they in fact contained. ‘What does everyone think?’
‘I’m not asking everyone,’ Rachel interjected. ‘I’m asking you. You decide what we do in this class, so you tell me why we spend all our freakin time learning about stories that never happened.’
‘Maybe she doesn’t decide,’ I said. ‘Maybe someone else does.’
‘Whoever determines our syllabus—’ Helen came in, only to be cut off.
‘Syllabus! You cannot be fucking serious!’
I was beginning to wonder if Rachel hadn’t taken the better part of the knock last night; if it hadn’t unleashed some kind of reaction in her brain. Helen made a valiant effort, sidestepping the swipes and entering into an earnest spiel about why we retell stories, how we use them for different ends, what they mean to us, ‘What they tell us about what it feels like to be a human being living in the world.’
What it feels like to be a human being living in the world. Through it Rachel sat staring ahead and I braced for her to blow. I was even tempted to try to head her off, but I didn’t, and I’m glad I didn’t. I think I was right about the knock: she was opening up like a flower. I wish I had her actual words in transcript form—like the evidence in the proceedings—so I could read and re-read rather than recollect and piece together. It started as a ramble; she flicked between images without telling us which one she was talking about. In no particular order they were each dismissed with the same kind of brush—‘the vagina goddess’, ‘nonsense stories’, ‘bullshit science’. And though none of the images from other lessons were there, it was as though she had them right in front of her, flicking though them all and playing back our discussions—discussions for which she had appeared to be present only in body. Her tirade indicated that not only had she taken them in, but she could now recount them in extraordinary detail. In a hushed silence, we listened. All of us: the sisters, the boys, the teacher.
‘The stories just mean what you want them to mean, what you tell us they mean…You package them up as survival tips.’
She reeled them off in dot points, talking way too fast, the story and the message, counting on her fingers like she’d been learning them for a test. ‘The psycho prince who got locked up in the rice chest: control your bad energies. But use your good power: the bird that saves his mother from the snakes. Mutation is survival, change is growth: that disgusting thing on the poor guy’s head; the god who turned to water when the sailors pinned him down…you hold on and don’t let go. If you use enough force for enough time and cling together and form your swarmer cells—only then will you be saved.’ And a last line that was all her own: ‘And so the wicked perish.’
Rachel had not simply zoned out, slept, entered a catatonic state. She had taken in every word. And somewhere in there I suspected were coded clues to her own untold story. To finish, she banged the table a couple of times with a flat hand. ‘You want to know what I think, what I think about your stories?’
Helen: ‘I want you to feel free to talk about anything you want.’
‘Feel free?’ Finally her voice was rising. ‘I don’t feel free. We are not free. We are here. Your stories are group therapy for the mental kids and that’s all they are. You pick and choose and add bits or take them away depending on who’s spinning out. There is nothing very subtle about it. And the music? Follow the instrument, listen in closely…It’s not music, it’s sedation. Helen, I like you all right but you are no teacher.’
You might have thought the teacher would be offended by some of this. Not Helen. At this point she started clapping, as though her pupil had just answered the million-dollar question.
Rachel dismissed this and turned to the rest of us: ‘I told you before, this isn’t class. We’re not students. She wants to know what it feels like to be us—how this feels?’
I didn’t see it coming. Just as I was starting to get comfortable with the ‘us and them’, lining myself up with the sniggers from the back row, she spun around to me, just me, and pointed her finger right into my face. ‘You. You want to know so much? You want me to tell you what happened?’
When I didn’t answer she held her hand up. I could see that it was shaking.
‘I can tell you all of it if you like. Is that what you want?’
She was looking not into my eyes but at the bruise on my forehead. When she spoke again it was (fractionally) gentler.
‘You can’t just sneak into someone’s room and steal it.’
I nodded like a puppet—I know. I know—I didn’t say anything; I couldn’t.
She stood up and walked out of the class.
The night before, when I climbed back to my feet, I found Rachel lying in her bed again, just as she was when I’d first entered, splayed into a shape not unlike a swastika. Had it not been for the bulging pain in my head, I might have wondered if what had happened—her ghostly rise and approach, my advance, the terrible cracking of skulls—had happened at all; if it hadn’t been some strange hallucination brought on by an explosion of neurotransmitters. As it was, the pain was front and centre, or rather off-centre. By the morning it had formed into a deep blue half-moon above my left eyebrow, as clear as a crayon drawing.
‘That’s quite a bruise,’ Dr J commented as I entered his office. He leaned forward to take a closer look and, without enquiring about the cause of the injury or the identity of the assailant, he played the physician and satisfied himself I was not concussed. ‘Brave man,’ was all he said. Of course, he knew where I had been. Later I’d go hunting again for hidden cameras, but for now I welcomed the introduction of the subject of Rachel.
What preoccupied me was that he had never asked her what happened to her. No questions for Rachel, while he’d spent session after session getting me to move farm animal chess pieces around an imaginary fucking stage. I didn’t feel like he was living up to his side of the bargain. All morning I had been framing a way to mount a challenge, reminding myself we were playing to different rules. Open dialogue. Ask away…
I pulled the chess pieces from the shelf and stood them up on his desk. ‘Did you try it with her?’
He looked at the pieces and back at me.
‘Here is Foster Mum,’ I went on, ‘here is Foster Dad. And here is Rachel…Did you try that?’
‘No, I didn’t.’
‘Aren’t you people meant to have a method?’
He shook his head, clenched and unclenched his jaw. ‘I don’t know even what that question means.’
‘That is bullshit. And what the fuck is it with the videos on your computer? I saw them that night…the sites…’
‘Do you want to talk about that? Or do you want to talk about the difference between you and Rachel? Isn’t that what you want to know?’
I hesitated. He was getting the better of me, I could feel it, but I wanted to hear what he had to say. I waited.
‘The difference between you is that she won’t let anyone near it, whereas you, Daniel, you came in here and tore the place apart; you took me there yourself. There is a reason for that. There is something you want me to know. I don’t know what it is yet, but I am starting to see the shape of it. I think I am.’ He did that thing where his eyes drilled in and I did mine and blanked him out. ‘I am piecing it together. Your numbers, your faces…you are looking for patterns, Daniel. You are trying to make sense.’
Here he stopped and picked up the pieces and set them down side by side. ‘I want you to see your part in it,’ he moved the centre piece forward, and spoke softly: ‘And their par
t, her part. I want you to see it for what it was: a group of people making terrible mistakes, and a boy in the middle of it.’
He paused, holding his hands in front of him like he was cradling a ball, keeping it steady. The stretched brown skin, the broad span of his hands. He was seeking my permission, giving me the chance to leave.
I didn’t. I waited to see if he was getting close.
‘When the tenants have come and gone, Daniel,’ he finally said, ‘when it is just the boy and his mother. What happens then?’
That night a quarter moon sat low in the sky. It was warm under the stars and we unzipped our sleeping bags to form one big blanket that reached all the way to the planter boxes, giving us space to spread out. Tod wondered what a sight it would have been to witness Sophia’s primordial explosion and I set us the challenge of constructing her body parts out of the shadows of the nebulae cloud in the top right of our screen; for tonight’s viewing pleasure…I had just begun the commentary of my first efforts when we heard the steps behind us. Each of us turned.
Standing there, with wild bed hair haloed in the Milky Way, was Rachel.
Without a word, we shuffled around to clear a space and, in between Alex and me, she lay down on the ground. For the first hour she asked questions about the night sky, wanting us to share with her everything we knew, and when we ran out of things to tell, she took over.
Starting at a place she called the beginning, she told us her story.
Colonisation
In the navigation menu there is a section headed: Student Overview, Female.
The sisters appear first, Grace above Imogen. I click into Life Course, Key Events. Theirs are busy timelines. Between them I count four marriages, nine children, eleven career changes. Nil nervous breakdowns. They were just girls who got bored easily.
Next is Rachel V. In her thumbnail photo, she looks younger than the girl I remember, but it makes me stop to think of the child she was. Still, all these years later, I see the same look in her eyes, the look of a captured animal. Still, now, it is a face that means everything.
I scroll through the metrics and the indicators: maternal health, education, out-of-home care placements, marital (single), children (none).
By now there are a number of biographical sources, starting back with what she told us at the first of her midnight sessions through to the transcripts, and then of course all this, the notations and reports. There is the list of her causes and committees and commendations. As a friend and supporter, I stand in awe and say she spreads herself too thin; that no one can sustain this level of output.
I am dismissed. The Doctor was right in the proceedings, of course, about all of it. For every rung she climbs, the world is a better place. Those that speak of anger as a deficit have never seen Rachel at the helm.
The event itself appears in none of the written material. Nor is it my story to tell. But it appears now with the consent—or rather, at the insistence—of its subject.
‘You leave it out and what have you got? A story about a bunch of white kids.’
What I already knew at the time of the telling was that Rachel had moved from the edge of a small town to live in houses filled with strangers, then for a brief time back to the town again. Somewhere along the way she got hurt.
‘On my fifteenth birthday I was placed with a new family.’ Their name was Boland, and they were the last family she would ever be placed with. ‘If you can call them a family.’
To flesh out the details I found in the transcripts and the database: early testing indicated that while her reading level was below average, Rachel’s numeracy skills were off the scale—which was considered something of a miracle given her poor attendance at primary school. There was quite a bit about this in both her school and social-service records, notations of which ended up as footnotes in the digital files. It was this that landed her a scholarship at a selective high school and attracted the attention of the Bolands. Rachel summed it up nicely, describing herself as ‘show- and-tell for their church group—the hard-up black with a brain’. (Out-of-home-care placements was a hyperlink in her computer file. When you clicked it a cohort of 180 names appeared, each in their own row with columns of coded numbers.)
The Boland family were a white couple in their early fifties, Eileen and Joe, with an adult son called Leon. They lived on a small dairy farm on the outskirts of Sydney and had horses and chooks. Rachel missed her home town but liked the horses, and there was better food than the other places. ‘They didn’t keep a count of things.’
For the first few months, she adapted well and excelled in school. A report tendered to the inquiry included effusive quotes from both her teacher and form supervisor. She developed a good relationship with Eileen Boland and helped her with the horses. She told us a story about when Joe was away one time and a horse got caught up so bad on a barbed wire fence Eileen had to sedate the animal to get him free; it took three hours and the horse fell down and rolled right on top of Eileen, his whole leaden weight—nothing moving except his eyes spinning in their sockets, and his heart, Rachel could feel his heart pounding, racing, and finally she got him to budge enough to get Eileen free. If it wasn’t for Rachel, she would have been ‘cactus’—that is what Eileen said when she hugged her and for a full minute wouldn’t let go.
Eileen was supportive with Rachel’s schoolwork; she read the books on the English syllabus so that she could help with her essays. ‘No one had ever done anything like that for me before.’
The school was secular, non-denominational, and Joe and Eileen insisted she attend their local church each Sunday. ‘My aunty liked church too, but it was a different kind of church. This was one of those joints where the people in the pews get up out the front and talk shit.’ It was called the Ministry of Mercy. When Rachel started to arc up about going, Eileen and Joe relented, but the adult son, who was a senior member of the church, ‘kept pestering’. Leon was the one who attended her parent-teacher evening. There was no explanation for this.
During her brief evidence to the inquiry, counsel assisting referred to the reason she left the Bolands as the ‘catalyst’ for her offending and tried to draw her out on it.
COUNSEL: Could you tell us about that?
RACHEL V: No, I could not.
They went around in circles. The judge agreed she was an unhelpful witness but was reluctant to press any of it. It ‘seemed sensible’ to him that she was making every effort not to dredge up the past and to find a way to move on. ‘Let’s not hamper that process any more than we need to.’
One day six months into her stay with the Bolands, Rachel was helping Eileen hang out the washing. A magpie landed on the fence.
‘I told her that where I came from that meant something bad was coming, and she said that was rubbish talk and got all riled up. I said, “Calm your farm”; didn’t have to mean the same thing here, just where I came from. But she couldn’t see it that way. For Eileen, there was one truth in every place.’
In telling her story, Rachel kept stopping and starting, like she’d gone far enough, or she shouldn’t be telling it in the first place. While I was in two minds about her going on (I wanted to hear it, of course, but I had reservations about it being shared), Alex and Tod filled the silences with different ends in mind: Alex to assure her we could talk about something else (offering up segues into the impact of religious fanaticism in Latin America if she needed an out), and Tod to keep her to purpose, bringing her back with questions on benign detail (how many horses, how old was Leon).
When she sat up, we all sat up and that is how we stayed for the rest of it, cross-legged in a semi-circle.
Leon was single and childless and balding, ‘even his eyebrows. Like he’d been zapped’. He was Eileen’s child but it felt like he was in charge. He told her when the path needed sweeping and he went through her mail and decided what bills should be paid first. He was the one to bring it up again, the thing about the meaning of the magpie. More interested in it than he
had reason to be, he started asking Rachel questions about her family, how she grew up, what they believed.
‘I told him some things. I told him my aunty said there were people who can be in two places at once, for real, and that she got pinned down by spirits in her sleep, like a jolt of cold air through her bones. I told Leon I got that too. I shouldn’t have told him that; he twisted it all up.’
She went quiet, and Alex stepped in with a story about a thing called the Fundamentalism Index. It was pretty convoluted; suffice to say there was a hierarchy, with God (whichever one) on top and women and children at the bottom.
Tod chimed in to bring Rachel back. What did she mean—how did Leon twist it up?
‘You know what he asked?’ she said. ‘He asked if they were assaulting me. The spirits. I said, “How do you mean?” He said, “I mean sexually.” That is what he said he meant and I said of course bloody not, that is sicko stuff. That was Leon—his mind went to sick places. I should’ve got out of there then.’
When she told Eileen she had a bad feeling about Leon, Eileen said she would be okay, but Rachel could sense that even Eileen started to worry. She heard them fighting sometimes, Leon and his mother. He said Rachel should be home-schooled. He’d shout over Eileen, but she stayed in it.
‘That all changed with the sleepwalking.’
As her voice trailed off we could hear a dog barking in the distance and, closer to us, the goat was bleating again. A layer of cloud dimmed the sky. I couldn’t tell you what time it was. I’d lost any sense of it. I couldn’t tell you if I wanted her to go on or to stop. Somehow fear had crept into it as she edged forward, as the story started to reshape her and leave something permanent, unchangeable, and render my part irrelevant. Suddenly I was saying goodbye to the girl in the room with a secret history, unsure of who would be standing there in her place.
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