by Geena Leigh
Then I heard my sister singing as she walked down the hall behind the bathroom door. She was getting louder. Dad pulled up his pyjama pants and walked out of the bathroom. I stood there, frozen. I climbed back into the lukewarm bath and submerged my body again to wash the smell of Dad off me. Then I got out, put the damp towel back around me and ran to my room.
I stopped having baths after that, and only took showers. Dad then devised a hilarious joke (to him only), which was to fill a plastic container with cold water, open the shower door and douse me. He would stand there laughing and staring at my body. It might have been a joke if it had happened only once, but doing it almost every time I was in the shower was weird. I would try to cover my body with my arms and yell, ‘Get out! Get out!’ He would retaliate with ‘Prude!’ or ‘Frigid bitch!’ I didn’t know what those words meant, but I knew they didn’t sound nice.
The only way I could get him to leave the room was by screaming at the highest pitch possible. When he left, my tears would be hidden by the shower droplets. After he’d done that a few times, I would first find out where he was in the house or wait until he was busy doing something, and then take an incredibly quick shower.
•
It was around this time that Aidan started school, and with all five kids out of the house, my mother became bored out of her mind. We needed the second wage, so Dad let her work. She began caring for elderly people at a nursing home. She would straighten her uniform in the mirror, pin on her name badge and look so proud of herself. She looked very important. Mum got me a job there too. I felt close to Mum and enjoyed the time we got to spend alone together. I pulled the weeds out of the garden and was then ‘promoted’ to wash the dishes a few nights after school. It wasn’t really the money that made me work; I was just very happy not to be at home. When I wasn’t working, I would still walk up to the nursing home, meet Mum after school and we would walk home together.
‘She left early,’ one of the nurses told me this particular overcast Tuesday afternoon. I thought about how unusual this was as I wandered home on my own.
Then, I saw her walk out of a house. A man was holding her hand. He kissed her on the stairs as she was leaving. I’d never seen her be kissed like that before, and I couldn’t help but stare. When she made her way to the footpath she saw me, and her face grew red.
‘Why were you with that man, Mum?’ I asked.
‘We’re late. Let’s go. How was school?’ she replied, deferring my question.
‘School was good, but I was throwing rocks at a sign and hit a girl in the face by accident. She was crying and I don’t think she wants to be my friend anymore,’ I told her.
‘That’s nice, dear. Have you got much homework?’ she asked. How was hitting a girl in the face with a rock nice? Why was she asking me if I had any homework?
‘Nope,’ I lied.
I wondered what she was doing with the man. Was he her boyfriend? It seemed that lots of people I knew had boyfriends now. Keryn and Ana got theirs at the same time. They were twelve and the guys were seventeen. The guys both rode motorbikes and all of the girls at school thought it was really cool. I thought the motorbikes were smelly and noisy, much like the boys were. One day we all went to Keryn’s place while her mum was at work. The guys brought one of their mates over and introduced him to me. Keryn and Ana went off to the bedrooms with their boyfriends and left me alone with the guy. He patted the sofa next to him and said, ‘Come and sit with me.’ He was looking at me the way Dad looked at me sometimes.
‘No thanks,’ I said as I heard some squealing and giggles coming from both of the bedrooms.
‘Come on, we could have some fun,’ the guy said. My stomach was knotted and I felt sick.
I got up and walked out onto the deck, then stood on the railing and jumped out onto a nearby branch of a magnificent kauri. After a while, my girlfriends came onto the balcony and were a little bemused by me sitting up in the tree. I climbed down and noticed that the guys had left. The girls’ faces were flushed, their clothes were crumpled and they looked sheepish. There was a vrrrooomm vrrrooomm blaaaaaaaam blaaaaaaaam eeeeeeeeeeeee eee eee eeeeeeeeeeeee as the Kawasakis sped off down the winding street.
Keryn and Ana told me they had had sex, that their boyfriends put their ‘things’ inside them and they felt so womanly now. I felt a little embarrassed that I was climbing trees and they were having sex, but it certainly didn’t make me want one of those ‘things’ inside me.
No-one was home when I arrived, so I watched After School with Olly Ohlson so I didn’t have to think about it anymore. As well as being embarrassed I was confused about Mum and the man. I wondered what was going to happen with Dad now. I answered the phone and took a message for my older brother, leaving a note saying, ‘Wayne rang and I think Mum is having an affair’. Sometimes it was easier to write things down, instead of talking about them. I fixed myself a peanut butter sandwich and went back to the TV.
Gradually everyone came home. My brother picked up the message. ‘What does this mean?’ he asked, holding the note up close in front of my face. I told him what I had seen.
I was surprised at my older brother’s reaction. He was twenty years old and was hardly ever home, which I thought meant that he didn’t really care about us. ‘Which man? Which house?’ he asked. He shook me and I started to cry. ‘Take me to the house now!’ he yelled.
At that moment, Mum came home with Aiden. My brother yelled at her like Dad did, so I took Aiden to his room and handed him Pac-Man. Dad came home a little later, and I ran to my room. The house now filled with yelling and swearing. It seemed to go on and on. ‘He’s a man who doesn’t call me names! He buys me flowers!’ said Mum. Mum knew that Dad would leave her if she ever cheated on him. He would’ve been too humiliated and angry to ever forgive her.
The yelling stopped as she walked out the door, slamming it behind her. Dad came into my room. I was sitting on my bed. He slapped my legs out of the way and pulled out from under my bed the large tartan suitcase that we took whenever we visited Nana and Grandad. I followed him into Aiden’s room and watched as he began to pack his suits and Aiden’s games and clothes. ‘Get your coat and put your shoes on,’ he told Aiden as he continued to pack.
Aiden was upset and confused, but he did what Dad said. He was still new at lacing his own shoes. He always got stuck after he crossed the bunny ears to form an X in the air. ‘Hurry up!’ my father yelled. I looped the bottom bunny ear around the top lace and Aiden smiled. My father finished packing Aiden’s things and threaded the backpack through his arms.
‘Where are you taking him?’ I asked.
‘We’re going back to Australia. Say goodbye to your brother,’ Dad said.
I suddenly felt panicked, and I held on to Aiden’s jacket and wouldn’t let him go. ‘You can’t take him!’
‘Do your coat up!’ Dad ordered Aiden. I wouldn’t let Aiden do up the zip.
‘You can’t take him!’ I said, bursting into tears. ‘You can’t look after him. You’ll be at work. I’ll look after him. I can cook you bacon and eggs!’ I said, pleading with him to take me too.
Dad loved bacon and eggs, and he knew he couldn’t leave a six-year-old alone when he was at the pub all night. ‘Okay. Get your coat.’
I ran to my room and threw my favourite books and some clothes into my schoolbag. All the while my mind raced in confusion. What was I doing? This was my one chance to get away from him. But, I told myself, my mother barely knew I existed and at least Dad paid attention to me—even though I hated him. I couldn’t leave Aiden alone with him. Desperately, I tried to convince myself. He didn’t put his penis inside me—he only put his fingers in. He didn’t break my leg or anything—they were just bruises. He wasn’t really that bad a father.
I was buttoning my coat over my pyjamas when Dad dashed past my doorway with Aiden in tow. I started to scream and ran after them, seizing Aiden’s much smaller hand. Dad bundled us into the car. Usually Dad would yell ‘Bastard!’ or
‘Arsehole!’ to the other drivers on the road, but this time he was silent.
We left the car in the car park at the airport. ‘Wait here,’ Dad said, pointing to a row of white plastic chairs that were joined together. We sat on them while he went to get the tickets. Still I was confused, nervous, unsure. Was he going to get me one? Maybe he’d found out that I tipped his beer down the sink and he wasn’t going to get a ticket for me. I counted three pieces of cardboard in his hand as he walked back from the counter. Was one for me? Was the other one the receipt? I couldn’t tell. Was he going to leave me there?
‘Okay, let’s go,’ he said. I clutched Aiden’s hand a little tighter, relieved but also frightened. Dad hurried us to the departure gate. We were running to keep up with his long strides and then waited with all the other people in the lounge. This was the first time I had ever seen Dad early for something. I needed to go to the bathroom yet daren’t let go of Aiden’s hand. I still couldn’t quite believe what was happening.
•
I thought of my friends and wished that I could say goodbye to them. I knew I’d probably never see them again. I was sick of making new friends and then leaving them behind—what was the point of trying to make new friends anymore? I was just going to have to leave them again next time we moved. I sat in the window seat, next to Aiden, and we both cried all the way to Brisbane. We’d never lived there before; maybe Dad thought we could start fresh there.
Aiden and I didn’t see our mum, brother or sisters for a year. ‘Your mother doesn’t love you,’ Dad often told us. ‘She has a new family now. If she loved you, she’d come and see you.’
‘Don’t listen to him,’ I told Aiden. ‘Mum loves us very much. We’ll see her again soon.’
Was that even true? I pretended it was. Did she even know where we were? Probably not. I didn’t even know where we were half the time, moving from motel to motel, and then from rented flat to rented flat all over Brisbane. Dad got us two new cats as pets, but I never bothered bonding with them. I knew we’d just end up getting rid of them soon enough.
Dad stopped coming in to say my prayers and tuck me in. I was thankful, but I wondered if I had done something wrong. Maybe the weeping patches of skin on my body were too ugly. Maybe I was too old for him now, or maybe he just couldn’t be bothered anymore. He seemed to drink himself into oblivion less often too.
Dad put Aiden and me into local schools. One Monday morning I was in the quad, catching up on what everyone had done over the weekend and what happened on last night’s episode of Family Ties when I heard my father’s voice. He was coming closer, moving through the hundreds of school kids. ‘Geena! Geena! You forgot your lunch!’ He was unshaven, in his dressing gown and slippers waving a brown paper bag in the air.
At first I tried to blend in with all the other navy skirts, white blouses and maroon striped ties, but then I saw that he was enjoying this. So, I walked straight up to him, with my head held high, and kissed him on the cheek: ‘Thanks, Dad!’
I was placed in the ‘vegie’ class for maths. I went to every class, did all my homework and even stayed back after school, asking the teacher questions to try to understand what the heck was going on. Nevertheless, questions such as, ‘To cut one shelf 24 centimetres long and two shelves 65 centimetres long from a single board, how long must the board be?’ or ‘Convert these fractions into ones with the same denominator 3/16 + 8/12’ made as much sense to me as mtrujdbakkgfnthyfcbhghgdjsj oo oo. The teacher ended up passing me, either because he felt sorry for me, or because he admired my persistence, or simply because he didn’t want to futilely explain the same formulas over and over to me the following term after school each day. It didn’t matter to me—I was happy to have passed!
My other classes made more sense to me, and I passed all of them. I made some new friends, too, which made me happy. I missed my mum and my brother and sisters—I found myself thinking about them a lot, but it always made me sad, so I tried not to think of them too often. I distracted myself by playing with Aiden and listening to music. Dad often surprised me with concert tickets that he got for free from his work at the radio station. He could never be bothered to go, so I took classmates to see Michael Jackson, Boy George and other big acts.
6
Homeless, age 15
Aiden and I were now settled in Brisbane. I’d walk him to school on the way to my own school and pick him up on the way home. Despite my thoughts when we left Wellington, I began to make some friends and get involved with some school activities. I helped paint some props for the school drama club. When they put on Macbeth, I helped move props on and off the stage in between the scenes. Even after watching about ten dress rehearsals, I never did quite understand what the play was about but at the end of the show when the lead actor asked everyone, ‘Where can we have the cast party?’ I said to him, ‘My father’s out of town, we just live up the road.’ He looked at me quizzically—I don’t think he even knew who I was—but he replied ‘Great!’
Everyone followed me to Dad’s place. I got too drunk too quickly and passed out within the hour. The next thing I saw was Dad—he must have caught the early flight from New Zealand—waking me up at eleven the next morning to take me on a tour of the house, showing me all the damage that the partygoers had inflicted. It looked like they had performed a séance—there were melted candles all over my father’s precious oval mahogany table. His liquor cabinet had been emptied. ‘I’m sorry, Dad—I had no idea.’ I expected him to yell at me his usual ‘You treat this place like a hotel!’ and slap me about the head, but he was very calm. This made me even more concerned about what he was going to do next. Someone had thrown the cat-litter tray and the dining-room chairs into the pool. When he saw that, he called my mother to come and pick me up.
After the separation, my mother lived for a time in Wellington with the man who had kissed her on the steps. But after about a year they had both moved to Australia and now lived near us in Brisbane. Her boyfriend and I didn’t get along, so Mum and I didn’t see each other very much initially. Up until a couple of weeks prior, Aiden had been living with Dad and me, but then he moved in with Mum and her boyfriend. My older brother lived in London at this stage, and my sisters were flatting separately back in New Zealand.
Mum and her boyfriend drove over to speak to us, by which time Dad was washing his car. ‘I don’t want her!’ yelled my father as he dipped the large yellow sponge in the bucket and then plopped it on his car, the suds trickling down the bonnet.
‘I don’t want her either!’ my mother yelled back. This loud outburst was unusual for her. Her boyfriend put his arm around her shoulder.
Their words were hurtful, but they made me mad more than anything. Like a typical rebellious fifteen-year-old, I declared with surprising volume: ‘Well—I want me!’ and pushed past them all. I had no idea where I was going, but I made such a dramatic exit that I couldn’t just turn around and go back inside the house. It was unlikely that my father would have let me in anyway.
I was wearing jeans, sneakers and a T-shirt. I had my purse in my back pocket, which had $30 cash in it, as well as my ATM card. I knew I had about $100 in my bank account.
I walked to nearby Bristol Park and sat on the swing for a while, then climbed to the top of the jungle gym and sat under the red plastic roof, seething. Fuck them! I thought, I don’t need them. They don’t want me—that’s okay, someone else will. And I vowed that until I found someone else who did, I would rely only on myself.
When the shadows fell across the park, I curled up on the wooden slats on the jungle gym and fell asleep, still feeling frightfully hung-over and wondering how my father did this to himself every day. When my father was at work the next day I tried to sneak back into the house to get some clothes, but my key wouldn’t fit in the lock. Initially I thought my key was broken. Dad usually left some windows open, but now they were all locked. He had made it clear that I was no longer welcome.
I tried not to focus on the pain of not be
ing wanted by either of my parents; I knew I simply had to handle it and take care of myself. The park became my home for the next few weeks. On one of those days I turned sixteen. I didn’t even know which day.
When my lack of bathing became intolerable, I jumped over the fence of a house that had a pool in the backyard, praying that they didn’t also have a dog. I had a swim and used one of their towels and stole clothes from their clothes line. The clothes were too baggy and looked like they belonged to a boy, but at least they smelled fresh. After that, whenever I found clean clothes on a clothes line, I’d get changed in the yard and leave my dirty clothes on the grass.
The one time I begged for money in the street it was humiliating. A man gave me $5 and I used it to pay the $1 entry at the local public pool, so I could take a warm shower. For the next few months I rotated between sleeping at Bristol Park, on a wooden bench at a local primary school or on couches at different friends’ places. I stopped going to school. My uniform and books were at my father’s house. I was more interested in figuring out how to get food or a blanket than in figuring out how to do maths equations.
When it was cold or rained, it was hard to sleep. I went to the Salvation Army and the Uniting Church, and they gave me some bus tickets and food vouchers that could be used as currency in the supermarket. During the day I would ride the bus into Fortitude Valley and go to a soup kitchen for free lunches between midday and 2 p.m. On Sunday nights the Hare Krishna centre on Elizabeth Street in the city would give out free hot food and apple juice (after recipients sat through a lecture about joining them). I ended up seeing a few familiar faces at both places for meals.
Most of my friends were still in school or working. Some of them didn’t do either. We hung out at the mall or the rollerskating rink or just wandered around the streets. One afternoon two guys who were a few years older than me knew I had nowhere to go and took me under their wing. They showed me where to get vegetables that were only slightly spoiled from a dumpster at a local fruit and vegetable market. We began to rummage through it. The smell was unbearable. I wondered what I would do with a bunch of potatoes anyway; I didn’t have any pots and pans, or a stove to cook them on. The storekeeper came out waving his hands in the air and we ran away. I wasn’t concerned about getting in trouble; I was more concerned about being recognised and humiliated for going through a rubbish bin for food. After running away (with my pride left behind with the rotten potatoes) I sat on the street curb to catch my breath while I waited for the guys to catch up.