by Geena Leigh
‘You can run, girl!’ one of them said.
‘When I need to,’ I replied, feeling a little sad, knowing that I’d learned to run in order to avoid the flurry of my father’s fists and feet on my legs. After a session of laughter and jokes, we were still hungry. The guys broke into a car that was parked beside us. They foraged for coins and began to fill their pockets with anything of value. I just sat on the kerb, a little in shock, as they proceeded to go up and down the street breaking into all of the cars along the way. They might have been doing it to impress me. It kind of worked, because they came back with all this ‘loot’ and took me out for pizza.
Then it got a bit weird, as if all three of us were on a (tragic) date. I had no interest in them or any other boy, so I left mid-pizza and didn’t hang out with them again. Someone told me a few months later that the guys had rapidly progressed up the criminal ladder, from joyriding in stolen cars to breaking into people’s homes. They both ended up in prison after crashing a stolen car.
After overstaying my welcome on a fold-out bed at a girlfriend’s place, I confided in her mother that my parents wouldn’t let me live with them. The look on her face was a combination of compassion and bewilderment. Her look showed me that she had a pretty good idea of the trajectory of my life, compared with those of her straight-A daughters.
I never saw her daughter again after that night, but I am eternally grateful for what this mother did for me. She put together a list of organisations that found places for homeless young people to live in, and she set me up with an interview at the Youth Housing Project for 10 a.m. the following day. At the interview, they considered my case urgent and placed me in one of their halfway houses that afternoon.
It was a spacious four-bedroom house. It had a balcony fully enclosed with wrought iron bars. There were a couple of dead pot plants plonked near the front sliding door. I didn’t see the need for such impressive security when the windows along the side of the house were hanging off their hinges. Still, my room was fully furnished and even had a towel and some linen. We weren’t allowed to drink alcohol and we weren’t allowed to have boys over. I liked the no-boys rule, but we all ignored the no-drinking one. We only had to pay rent if we had any money and we could stay at the house as long as we needed to, until we got back on our feet.
There were three other teenage girls living in the house. As I moved in (which didn’t take very long, because I had no possessions), one of them welcomed me with a plastic cup full of vodka. ‘It’s called a halfway house because we’re usually halfway drunk or stoned,’ she told me and we both burst into laughter. She gave me a tour of the house and a run-down on why the other two were living there.
She told me that the girl with the dyed-red wavy hair was a raving alcoholic and had spent her eighteenth birthday earlier that week at Brisbane Royal Hospital having her stomach pumped from alcohol poisoning. The short stocky girl, with the fringe that was cut way too short, couldn’t live at home because her brother molested her.
‘So, why are you here?’ she asked.
I flicked my cigarette butt out the open kitchen window. ‘My father’s an arsehole.’
‘I’m here because I despise my parents,’ she declared.
Her mother turned up one afternoon and they quickly began to yell at each other on the front lawn. The girl ran into the house and began to hurl cushions, books and other personal objects at her mother from her bedroom window. She had a temper like my father. She waitressed at the local steakhouse and was hardly ever home, so it worked out fine.
I signed up for the Youth Allowance from Centrelink and was given an emergency payment. I went out and bought a new school uniform from the second-hand shop at Wavell State High and went back to class. ‘What are you doing here? Didn’t you leave school?’ the teacher asked. She sent me to the principal’s office, where I announced that I wanted to finish high school.
The principal shook her head. ‘You haven’t attended any classes for months. You’ve missed too much. You might be able to re-enrol next year and re-do Year 11.’ I walked home and took to the uniform with scissors, shredding it into pieces and tossing them into the wheelie bin.
Being educated was important to me. It was my basic human right and I was angry that this woman was denying me the opportunity. I couldn’t believe that one woman’s opinion meant that I couldn’t finish school there. The power she had over my future infuriated me. Regardless, I wasn’t going to let one person ruin my education. I vowed to find another way.
I got a full-time job at Kentucky Fried Chicken, which was only a fifteen-minute walk from my new home. It was great to have some money and my new flatmates were really happy that I’d moved in, because I would bring home all the chicken and coleslaw left over after each shift. The cook might have had a crush on me or maybe he was just kind, because whenever we were about to close, he cooked a new batch of chicken, which would have been impossible to sell before closing time and so it had to be discarded. I’m pretty sure I had consumed the maximum limit of growth hormones, fat and grease for any person’s lifetime by the time I turned seventeen.
A social worker from the Youth Housing Project came over every Friday to talk with us. They didn’t care whether or not we were home, which was good because I didn’t like talking about my feelings. I didn’t want to talk about my parents; I just wanted to get on with it. I learned to detach myself from my pain.
The one thing I allowed myself to feel sad about was Aiden; I hadn’t seen him in months. During my time at the halfway house my father had moved to Toowoomba, and every second weekend Aiden was shunted on Greyhound buses between my father’s house and my mother’s house in Brisbane. Aiden told me later he could play loud music at my mother’s, eat fast food and stay up late. At my father’s, he was a latch-key kid, left alone a lot, and my father would berate him for leaving even one crumb on the bench. Aiden chose to walk for almost an hour home from school with all his heavy schoolbooks in the rain, to avoid having to sit in the car for fifteen minutes with my father.
I kept in contact with Mum and she visited me at my housing project place at least once a month. We chatted on the phone in between visits. The next time I visited her, Aiden was also there. As soon as I saw him, my eyes welled up. He was seven years old now, and overweight, his eyes were vacant and his cheerful demeanour had been stripped away. I felt so guilty for not being there for him. I had many sleepless nights with my stomach churning, worrying if Dad bothered him too. I would ask him specific questions whenever I saw him but he would look at me like I was an alien. My father wasn’t into boys, and he never hurt Aiden in that way.
It made me feel special that my father only wanted to touch me. Sometimes any type of attention is better than no attention, so I endured his touches. As I was growing up I did get angry about the abuse I suffered, but I didn’t see the point in remaining angry or blaming him for the way things had turned out. I just wanted to move forward and figure out how to have a better life.
Somewhere along the way I decided that being touched and sexually intimate with someone made me feel special, even loved. And I wanted to feel loved more than anything, so in time I began to let a lot of men touch me. Instead of being promiscuous and meeting men in bars, I was to discover that I could get what I needed in a controlled environment—and for money.
Despite my concern for Aiden, when I moved into the halfway house I felt safe, could relax and just be myself. The plaques on my skin cleared up almost overnight. ‘Look at all the guys staring at you!’ a friend of mine pointed out as we walked through Queen Street Mall. For the first time, I looked around and noticed all these guys smiling at me. I had no idea how to respond to it. I started to make a lot of male friends.
Once a guy came up to me at McDonald’s and asked me out to the movies Friday evening. His friends teased me all the way as the group of us walked to the cinema. They were asking me if I was going to make out with the guy during the movie. But I just wanted to see the movie and I was s
o freaked out at the thought of that guy kissing me that I pretended to go to the restroom, snuck out the fire exit and ran all the way home.
When I got back home, I sat on the front steps watching the stars in the sky and smiled; I had somewhere to live, a job and perfect skin—the trifecta, as my father would say.
The attention from guys continued, but it made me feel quite confused. I didn’t understand why I needed a boyfriend. I just enjoyed feeling the sun warming my blemish-free skin. It was something so simple and yet something that I’d never had until then. I felt like I didn’t have to hide anymore.
I went back to Centrelink and asked about how I could finish high school. ‘What job do you want to do when you finish school?’ she asked.
‘Eh?’ I answered. I had never considered it.
She sent me to a job centre, where I took a test that would reveal the job to which I would be most suited. The results indicated I should aim to be a film director. I didn’t know if I really wanted to do that, but I did know that I didn’t want to serve chicken all my life. The woman at the job centre told me that I could study film at university, but first I would have to get my high school certificate. She said that I could still work at KFC and go to night school, so the following day I enrolled at a secondary college that ran night classes.
I was excited about my future. I always believed that education would give me more options in life. This was the first time anyone had ever spoken to me about my career options and asked me what I would like to do for work. I hadn’t thought about it before. I felt like my world was opening up and that I had possibilities for my future.
I would take a bus and a train after work to get to class. I was the youngest person there. The others didn’t particularly want to go to university; they were studying for fun. I didn’t understand why anyone would learn Logic or Economics for fun. I didn’t particularly enjoy the classes, but I enjoyed the sense that I was achieving something and making progress, and that finishing school was going to open doors for me.
The other students at night school were much older and I didn’t have much in common with them, so I got back in touch with some friends from my old high school. Sex was a common topic for them to talk about. I was curious about having sex, yet had no real urge or desire to do it. I found that a lot of boys were asking me out, but when I realised they were looking for more than friendship I pulled back from them.
All my flatmates and friends were having sex and I wanted to see what all the fuss was about, or maybe I just wanted to fit in. I asked one of my male friends if he wanted to have sex with me. He was seventeen, tall and had a good body and he happily agreed. I wasn’t really into him, but he was experienced at sex (well, he told everyone he was) and I had no idea what to do, so I thought some expertise on how to actually do it would be useful. We planned to go to his grandmother’s house; she was going to be out from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. on Sunday.
We didn’t need three hours. We didn’t even need three minutes. He started by kissing my mouth; it felt sloppy and I didn’t like it. Then he slipped off his T-shirt and Levi’s. I took off my clothes and lay between the sheets. I shook nervously as I lay there. He fumbled with the condom. He was embarrassed that he couldn’t figure it out, so he just got on top of me with his hips jutting into mine. I felt a pang of pain and heard a deep groan. I moaned too, pretending to enjoy it. Then he got off me. It was very mechanical. I didn’t feel aroused or like I’d just had a particularly sexy or special experience. While I dressed he smiled and held up the white sheet; he showed me the damp patches like he was holding up an Olympic medal.
That was sex? I felt like my friends were all liars, telling me how great it was. I only had two other sexual encounters before I turned eighteen, and those only occurred because I was drunk.
•
It was just after 9 p.m. when my shift ended, and I walked in the middle of the road along my usual route through the back streets. I was carrying a bag of chicken pieces and could still smell the chicken on my clothes. I heard a few fast footsteps behind me and then they got louder. Then someone grabbed me roughly. One arm wrapped around my body holding me firm and a hand closed over my mouth. The hand was wrapped in a thick white bandage, designed to muffle my screams, but I wasn’t screaming. I just stood there, shocked. Was this some kind of joke? Was this one of my friends mucking around?
My shoes scraped along the concrete as I was dragged backwards to the gutter and onto the footpath. Now fear took over; if this was a joke, it wasn’t funny. I dropped the chicken and began to struggle to free myself. My attacker’s grasp was so tight I could hardly move. Within seconds I had been pulled into an open garage.
A fluorescent light flickered above us. My attacker was behind me the entire time. As I was pulled to the ground I pleaded, ‘I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe!’ A male voice responded menacingly: ‘Shut up! I’m going to loosen my hand a little. Shut up or I’ll stab you.’ I felt his foul breath on the side of my face. Feigning subservience, I murmured ‘Okay.’
He slowly loosened his hand from my mouth. I immediately gave voice to a terrified scream and began to punch behind me, aiming for his head. I heard him moan, so I kept punching and punching. We wrestled on the ground and I felt my faux six-carat diamond ring scrape across his stubbly face. I kept screaming and punching, writhing to get free. A moment later he was off me—he stood up and fumbled with the bandage that was dangling from his hand. He began to wrap it around him again. I got to my feet and continued to scream.
The bandage fell to the ground as he ran out of the garage. My fear was quickly replaced by anger. Fuelled with adrenaline, I raced to the street and yelled at him as he ran away. ‘You fucker! How dare you touch me? You fucking arsehole! Come back here and I’ll kick your fucking arse!’
He was running away fast, but then he slowed and came to a standstill. He was under a lamp post, and in slow motion his prominent chin and almond-shaped eyes were revealed as he turned towards me. I looked around at all the houses in the street. Not one of them had switched on a light, nor had any person come outside to see what all the commotion was about. I gasped, turned and started to run away from him.
Don’t look back. Keep running, I silently shouted, as fear and adrenaline propelled me forward. Was he chasing me? Don’t stop, he won’t be able catch up. I ran faster than I ever had in my life until I reached our front door, and then began to bang my fists wildly against the security grille. Only one of the girls was home. She saw me through the bars and slowly walked towards me. I couldn’t speak. I just kept shaking the grille, hearing the metal bang and reverberate along the balcony. She looked confused, and then broke into a jog and fumbled with the keys to let me in. I was too petrified to look back. I just stood there desperately pulling back and forth on the gate, half expecting the man to grab me again at any moment. She opened the door and I signalled her to lock it and she feverishly did. I ran to the phone and dialled 000.
A woman asked me a series of questions, but I was out of breath and was in too much shock to speak, so I began to tap and scratch at the receiver. ‘Do you need help?’ she asked. I tapped the phone like Morse code. ‘We have your location, a car is on the way.’ I just kept tapping it, and then threw the phone to the ground and burst into tears.
My roommate hugged me until the police arrived. By then I had calmed down enough to explain what had happened. I went with the police—they had sniffer dogs with them—and I pointed to the garage door. The officer motioned for me to walk into the garage with him but my feet were super-glued to the cement. The two officers went in and one came out with an unravelled bandage draped over a pen. ‘You’re a lucky girl,’ he told me.
The police gave the bandage to the sniffer dogs and they went crazy. An officer took me back home. He told me that the perpetrator most likely knew my routine and that he would have been waiting at that specific point on the street for me. They advised me to not walk alone at night and to always vary my route.
My m
other came over the next day and said that I could move in with her. She had broken up with her boyfriend and he had gone back to New Zealand. She was now living on her own in a two-bedroom mobile home in a caravan park in Aspley. We had rebuilt our relationship through our frequent visits, but I didn’t want to move in with her, because I liked living with people my own age. I enjoyed my independence. But the attempted assault had shaken me so badly that I was too scared to go back to KFC, or to night school, or anywhere.
About two months later, flicking through the local newspaper, I saw a picture of the man with the prominent chin and almond eyes. He had been arrested and charged with a series of rapes in the area. My initial reaction was surprise, because he was quite handsome. As a young girl, I wondered why such a cute guy would need to go around raping lots of women. Later, as an adult, I came to realise that rape has little to do with the actual act of sex. The police didn’t ask me to identify the man—they had plenty of other witnesses who could give them a more detailed and accurate description than I could.
I needed to take control of my life again. To stop living in fear. It was time to move.
7
Life will never be the same again, age 18
I moved to a share house on the other side of town and re-enrolled at high school. Indooroopilly State High was considered an ‘alternative school’. We could wear whatever we liked and the teachers didn’t seem to mind us smoking, or they couldn’t be bothered to reprimand us. I managed to fail every subject (mostly due to being hung-over or still drunk) except for Art. I found it easy to paint or make things out of clay with a searing headache, and I got an A for the class.