When Rachel was little she got out of bed and walked straight out the front door and all the way to the river.
‘I’ve always walked in my sleep,’ she said. ‘My aunty worried I’d end up drowning myself, but no one ever tried to put a meaning on it. Leon did. Leon put a meaning on everything. His meaning. Same as Eileen, same meaning for everyone in every place.’
She didn’t say yet what the meaning was, just that an old man started coming to the house ‘who was always smiling but never really was’. He was from the church and they called him Father; she’d hear them in the kitchen whispering. ‘One day they asked me to sit down with them and Father said if I came back to church, God would help me there. I said I didn’t need help from God and he asked me why I thought that. I said I deal with my own God just fine. There were looks between them like I’d just fessed up to some bad thing.’
One night, Rachel was passing the kitchen and she saw Leon showing the old man a video on his phone. She could hear her own voice, but it was nothing she’d ever heard herself say.
‘Turned out he’d been waiting up at night to video me. I didn’t just walk, I talked as well. I didn’t know that until then…I tried to grab the phone out of his hand and he palmed me off and I lost my shit.’ She looked at me. ‘A bit like you do. I guess that was like a justification for them; gave them a reason. Leon said Father was going to start home-schooling me, and I refused, and then a week later…
‘I’d known a few people who’d done bad things, but I hadn’t really known a lot of bad people. That all changed when I stayed with the Bolands.’
No one spoke into the silence. There was no place for us in it. We waited. It was getting colder now but we copped it, stayed sitting up out of our sleeping bags.
‘I haven’t talked about it to anyone,’ she finally said. The clouds drifted across the sky now and gathered in affinity around the moon. ‘Something that no one knows—I thought I’d have a better chance of it not mattering at all.’ And to none of us in particular: ‘You ever think that?’
I answered. I said I had. I did. It was the first time I said anything since she’d sat down with us.
‘Yeah, well. Here is me trying it the other way, I guess. Here’s what happened.’
It was a Sunday, after breakfast. Rachel started feeling drowsy, nauseous. She went to lie down. Eileen came in and sat on her bed, looking like she had some bad news to tell her.
‘How do you feel?’ she asked.
‘I just want to sleep,’ Rachel said, and Eileen nodded; took hold of her hand. Joe came in behind her and when Eileen turned back to him he said, ‘It was for the best.’ He looked at Rachel and repeated the words. ‘It is for the best.’ His face was harder set than Eileen’s. Rachel assumed they were delivering the news that she couldn’t stay there anymore, and she felt some relief in that—in the idea that this chapter would be over; she’d leave Eileen and the horses and find herself another place. But that wasn’t it.
Joe sat down on the bed too. He didn’t take her hand, just nodded and said, ‘Father knows.’ He appeared then, at the door, Father; Leon behind him. Eileen and Joe got up like they were following orders, and it was the four of them standing around her bed, Leon in a white, collared shirt and Father with his cross around his neck. Before she tried to move, in that first moment, it just felt ridiculous, almost funny. I won’t go to their church so they are bringing the church to me. That is what she thought. But when she tried to tell them to go away her words were slurred; she tried to get up but she strained to lift her arms and legs. And it dawned on her that she wasn’t sick; she had been tranquilised, like the horse stuck on the fence. Inside the leaden body, her heart was leaping and pounding, louder, faster.
Joe tied her wrists, Leon the legs. To the bedposts.
Eileen cried.
Father laid his hands on her shoulders and her arms, then her stomach. He said she had been invaded by the enemy. He was not there to harm her, but to save her.
She found it within herself to release a sound, more counterattack than scream—more brain stem than limbic—low pitched and garbling, the reverberations sending her body into convulsion and expelling any last doubts in the room. Father knows. When he started up again, it was with Eileen standing right beside him, and he spoke not to Rachel, but to the demon inside her.
The three of us listened, as it dawned on us what we were listening to—offering up a chorus of whispered support, condemning the perpetrators—‘maniacs…top-of-the-range fucking lunatics…’ As the new Rachel took shape, growing bigger, and slowed it down. Careful and steady. Telling it like a story that needed to be told.
To commence the ritual of casting out, Joe passed Father a large silver bowl filled with water. Father dipped his fingers in the bowl and flicked her face with the water.
‘Tell us your name. Who are you?’
‘I’m Rachel.’
‘Tell us your name.’
‘Rachel.’
And so it went. The more she answered ‘Rachel’ the more he flicked water in her face and then down the entirety of her body until the sheets were drenched. When the bowl was empty he ordered Eileen to refill it.
‘I saw her at the door and I shouted out to her: “Don’t leave me.” They thought I meant the demon and it ignited this mad frenzy, all of ’em shouting: “He is lying to you. He is tricking you, that is what He does…”
‘I got my strength back around then and I remember hearing the horses arcing up and I was thrashing around and making sounds I’d never heard myself make before, from some place I didn’t know was in me.’
Leon was like an echo of Father, no matter how loud she got their voices flooded over hers; the more she thrashed the more water came, into her eyes and mouth.
‘There was long enough like that that I started to wonder if they weren’t right, if there wasn’t something in me, because I could feel my skin crawling and a weight in my chest—this hard thing rising up, with its own eyes, like everything I’d ever done and thought was inside it. That’s when I first had the thought, the thought they wanted me to have: it isn’t Rachel. That is what they’d been saying all along: they weren’t speaking to Rachel. Tell us your name—all their hate wasn’t for me, it was separate to me. Now I was willing it to be true. The only way I could stay alive was to be separate from it, and to help them drive it out. I don’t know what I said, but they thought it was another voice. They thought they were talking to it. There was this terror and joy in the room, clapping and crying, and they kept telling me to cough and spit. Spit him out…I did what they said and coughed and spat.
‘Leon kept shaking his head. “It is here. It is still here.”
‘Father nodded and cradled my head, a gentler voice: “We will release you.”
‘Joe passed him the knife, a little kitchen knife with a green handle that we used to peel carrots.
‘“We need everyone,” Father said, stern again.
‘Eileen came to the other hand—Leon and Joe took my legs. They all had their job, their part, and Father cut, three times on each side, I counted them but I didn’t feel much, just the blood trickle down my arms as he repeated the same lines over.
‘As wax melts before the fire, may you be driven from the living soul.
‘May the soul be redeemed by the blood of the lamb.
‘By the God who gave up his only Son and created man in the Father’s likeness.
‘May you tremble and flee…’
Rachel was bound in the room for seven hours. They threw water in her face but gave her nothing to drink. She blacked out several times. They had to retie her hands twice. Once when she came to she found they’d pulled up her shirt and Leon was standing with his hands over her stomach. She threw up.
‘All the way through I kept looking out to find Eileen, to make sure she was there. Near the end, she was standing behind them again. Her face white, her eyes closed. It was hard to make it out at first, what she was saying. “I am speaking to Rachel,�
� she whispered. “I love you, my girl.’’
‘And the saddest thing—the saddest thing of all—was I think she was telling the truth.’
With the end of her story—the chorus silenced, speechless, just the fog of our breath in the cold night air—she put her hands over her face, and cried.
The rest I’ve put together later. Bits and pieces over the years she has told me; details from the transcripts and digital files.
She couldn’t report it because she couldn’t speak of it. She left the house and never set foot in it again. She once wrote Eileen a letter, then burned it.
When they untied her she walked out the front door and kept walking. ‘I think they thought I’d come back.’ She had only the wet clothes she was wearing. It took her three days to get herself back to her home town. She slept on couches. A cousin said she’d keep her but the department wouldn’t approve the house because a window was broken and there were no locks on the doors. Another cousin stepped in but her criminal record didn’t pass the check.
‘They just kept coming back with reasons to refuse till everyone felt it. Everyone felt the shame. That is what they do. The cut marks on my arm, they assumed I’d done it to myself. I don’t know how they figured the rope marks got there.’
They put her in a home, and one of the other girls showed her how to break into people’s houses.
Camp
The night walks. There were pages of transcript on the night walks: how did a set of conditions exist such that vulnerable children were permitted to roam free through the bushland in the dark of night? (The adjective always pointing where they want to go: damaged, vulnerable, delinquent, dangerous.)
In permitting a question over objection, the judge determined that it ‘sat behind the broader question to be decided in the proceedings: whether the overall management and treatment of these children was appropriate and reasonable in the circumstances of their confinement’.
What struck me as I read this part of the transcript was not the question, but the last word. Confinement. The word was used intermittently throughout the proceedings and never corrected; but in many ways, I had never felt a greater sense of freedom. Nor have I since.
After she shared her story, we didn’t see Rachel again for three days. Helen K said she was ‘taking time out’. When I sat outside her door I didn’t hear a peep.
‘Don’t even think about it,’ Alex said; my nocturnal visits were by now common knowledge. ‘Go to bed, Dan.’
Forty-nine hours later, on the third night, she appeared in the courtyard. A fourth sleeping bag was ready for her, but after a few cursory answers to our questions (‘I slept’, ‘I feel good’, ‘Fine’) she was up and pacing, then stepping sideways with her back to the glass and angling her head up to the outer rim of the building.
‘If we can get out here,’ she said, then pointed up and over towards the bush, ‘why can’t we get out there?’
When she looked at me for the answer, my mind spun into action, and landed pretty quickly on a possible solution: the doors might already be unlocked. It was a system thing, the Doctor had said about access to the courtyard. If he had unlocked one door…
I left to investigate, strolled through to the external door in the waiting room, turned the handle, and opened it. (Dr J, in a series of answers on the point: it was his decision to open the courtyard but no, he had no hand in directing the system to work this way, nor could he explain the reason for it. He suspected there was someone who could, but it was not him.)
The next night we ventured out.
There was a thrill in it, the risk of detection, sneaking our way around the side of the building, out of the light into the safety of darkness. There was a thrill, and then terror. I hadn’t thought it through any further than getting out; I hadn’t prepared myself for the bush at night.
We stopped at the edge. A throaty rustling was coming from beyond. I stared into the maze of tunnels, dark between the trees, and felt something staring back.
Following the others, I stepped in and looked up in search of sky, a glimpse of yellow moon, only to see a canopy of dancing shadows. During the day was one thing, but now the darkness was an inky vortex of old fears that threatened to swallow me whole.
Unperturbed, Rachel moved forward. ‘Keep a skip in your step,’ she called back as she took off.
‘Fuck,’ Tod said. ‘We’ll lose her.’
He was the only one with a torch. (‘How did you get that?’ ‘I asked for it.’) He waved the beam all over the place but there was only the sound of her footsteps—fast, like an animal being pursued. When Alex and Tod took off too I tried to keep up, tripped over a tree root and reeled forward like a drunk, a sequence that repeated itself in a number of variations every time I heard a sound I didn’t like. When I reached the other side of the bush I fell to the ground, flat on my back—alone and in pain and adrift from my frontal lobe, hallucinogenic hormones taking hold as I imagined my goat nearby, morphing—more woolly ghoul than doe-eyed friend. It took everything in me to regather and get to my feet and push on to the waterhole, letting it rip as I hobbled over the rise: You didn’t think of fucking waiting. You had the only fucking torch. You left me in the fucking dark, you fucking pieces of shit.
Their collective response moved from a quizzical interest in the wound on my leg to a brisk no harm done, keep up next time—and Rachel: ‘You gotta learn to pick up your feet.’
At some point the anger ebbed enough for me to step back and take in the scene. Where among the trees there had been no moon to see, here it hovered centre stage, casting a golden light through the leaves of the willow tree and a tinge of moss green across the surface of the water. To the side of it, where on other days we had left our gear and gone our separate ways, the three of them now sat together, perched on rocks; giving me stick for having taken so long.
‘Come on, we waited,’ Rachel said, stripping down to her singlet and underwear and disappearing into the water.
One by one we followed, breaking into frantic strokes to beat the cold and wading in close together, a defensive line against whatever lurked below. Legs brushed against legs until someone kicked out, and then we all did, a medley of splashing, a free for all with mass dunking, more kicks and spitting water like kids in a backyard pool. Exhausted, we crawled up onto the bank and lay flat on the cold, muddy earth, panting to catch our breath, numb to the bone.
‘We should keep doing this,’ Alex said. ‘Coming back here.’
And we did. Every few nights we came back. We packed our bath towels and sleeping bags and trekked through the bush back to the waterhole; I went behind Rachel and got better at keeping up. Once we were dry we climbed into our sleeping bags at the water’s edge and gazed up at the stars or lay flat on our stomachs and fixed our eyes on the surface of the water to watch the world of insects—dragonflies dipping in and out, and water striders, hundreds of them, sculling across the surface like it was skin. If we kept quiet and still for long enough, once in a while we were visited—a wombat clambered around the trunk of the tree, a fox darted in and out of the bush. There were big ants and spiders and strange sounds but we weren’t bothered by any of it. When it rained we sat under the overhanging rock or beneath the branches of the willow; we knew the curves of each rock, which ones to sit on or lean against and which to avoid. We knew where to find the wombat hole and the spider webs. We were protected by this place. We were part of it. It was a sanctum, and it was ours.
On our third night-time visit Rachel talked about the feeling she had that she’d lived through everything before, as though what was happening now was a memory. Tod offered déjà vu as an explanation.
‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘but like all the time.’
I said it sounded as though something weird was going on in her brain, ‘like some kind of rejigging in your space-time continuum’.
She propped up on her elbow and stared down at me as if it was just me and her.
‘I had it at their place,’ she
said—I knew she meant the Bolands—‘the feeling that what was happening was a picture that had always been in my head—that everything was leading up to it. And then afterwards I had this sense I’d been right all along: this was it, this was my fight. I know, it sounds weird.’
I shook my head. ‘Not weird.’ At least not in the way she thought. What was weird, what was confounding to me, was that she was confronting what had happened to her (as she had been confronting it night after night in her room), assessing it from every angle—as a projection and as a memory—and wrestling it to the ground.
I didn’t know where to take it. She lay back down. I think she fell asleep. And then it came to me—my role, my purpose. This was Rachel, I reminded myself. She wants to bring me in. She wants my help.
I thought of my sessions with the Doctor, the stage. Doing what he asked, week to week, it was like drip torture for me, imagining my players and moving them around. But lying beside Rachel now, listening to her breathing, I found myself picturing the room, the four fuck-ups around her—two sitting on the bed, two standing back, and I placed them on the stage, how I imagined them (pasty, bland, ugly). The scene was malleable and I was forming it, positioning the players and directing the action. It was my version. The story was this: The girl is strong and the ropes loosen as she struggles. They are not quick enough to hold her down. She kicks out and Father is toppled to the floor. The others freeze. The woman begs forgiveness. It is not granted. The end.
Then, just briefly, there was my room, the flat—just a flash of it. There was a moment when I looked back at where I was, where they were, and for the first time, didn’t feel the need to scramble to the surface, to hold my breath and run.
It was Tod who started us talking about our tutorials. He asked me what I did in mine.
I told them how PW and I had worked our way from electrical currents to brainwaves, and more specifically mine. (As per contract, I omitted any reference to headsets and covert monitoring.)
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