by Deborah Kay
Yes, that hurt. Really, really hurt. Her mum and dad would have protected her. They would have, and they did. But what about mine? It could have been so easy to fall into self-sorrow then. Into that feeling of woe is me. It could have been so easy to show her my sobbing face and say, yes, yes, it is true, it is absolutely true, and have her feel sorry for me.
But I did not want that. If the day came that I eventually told her, told all my children, I wanted them to understand, I wanted them to be able to reason, I also wanted them to know I was a person in my own right now, that I was no longer that shy, hurt, guilty little girl they had to feel sorry for. I wanted them to know I could stand up on my own two feet – no matter what happened in the past.
That time of telling, that time of shattering illusions, would come. Yes, it would, I could see it in those moments. It is impossible to turn off the interrogative tap of an enquiring child. Especially one like Sarah.
What I did not want is the story of my growing up, of their family tree, so dark and black, to burgeon and explode on them through other means, other people – and then I would have lost control of my own story.
The only thing in my favour was that, as things stood, no one else in the family wanted to admit the past. No one. I could wait to release it.
48.
I know I should have loathed the sound of trains or maybe even trains themselves, but a whole couple of years later, I remember it distinctly, there we were sitting on a train going somewhere, and bored with looking out of the window into other people’s yards like others used to do to us, Sarah, a twelve-year-old now, started asking her questions again, trying to figure out her game of Family Cluedo, and she said to me more maturely than ever before: ‘Why didn’t they protect you, Mum? Why didn’t Grandy and Nana protect you from that awful man?’
My lips must have been quivering, the hooting sound of shunting trains rushing back to my head as I lay there with my legs sprawled open and my head back on a mattress, restless, because all I could do was look down at her, and then it was like she saw the light – or was it the darkness? And she said, ‘I know why, Mum. I know. Because it was them. Wasn’t it? It was Grandy and Nana who hurt you.’
I did not know whether to shake or nod or turn my head in shame. I wanted to cry. She knew, Sarah knew, she had worked it out in her own little head, and now she had effectively spilled the beans to my other two children who were listening to every word.
And still I could not say that word “yes”. Much less breathe the full statement of truth, ‘Yes, it was Grandy. Your grandfather. My father!’
It hurt, it hurt too much. I know I probably should not at that time have done this, but I left it in the air, the timing not yet comfortable for me, still managing to leave it dangling in that world of the illusory. Of rattling trains. Of passing cars. I neither confirmed nor denied, knowing inside me that my children were already seeing their grandparents in a different light. Would never feel as comfortable with them again. Were confused about the people they loved. The train rode on, my lips still quiet and fracturing.
Amazingly, it was not until Sarah was nearly fifteen – yes, nearly fifteen, that’s how long I managed to hold off – that I found I had to make a full and truthful confession. Sarah was just too insistent, she never let up, not over all those years; there was always, at some time, the questioning, the judgement, the knowing in her eyes. And all I wanted to do was keep up the façade and maintain that terrible secret which I thought made me such a dirty person. It was not even so much that I wanted to protect their love for their Grandy. It was that feeling of dirt written over my body.
And then finally it came out one day, bumbled like Snow White dressed in black and covered in blood from my lips. First to her and then to the others, telling them the truth, the absolute and God honest truth, well, as far as I could tell it without damaging my children as well.
In any event, no matter how I said it, no matter what I said, it tarnished them all. Grandad was no longer Grandad anymore. Grandy was over. Which was just what I knew would happen. But Sarah, Sarah the eldest and the most inquisitive, took it the hardest.
While the other two, in their way, were more forgiving at the time, more willing to let the darkness of the past reside in the past, Sarah immediately began to hate him, to hate her Grandy for what he did, and not only him but her Nana for doing nothing to protect me.
She hated them both from then on – and with a passion that never receded until the day her Grandy was buried. She hated them in a way that perhaps I should have hated them? But especially him, Grandad, her Grandy, she did not want to be anywhere near him again. The sun had faded from his tall, mythical head, and his strong, music-loving hands were no longer a joy to hold. They were cut and scarred with sin. He had blood – and flesh, my flesh – on his hands.
To this day, despite my counselling, despite what I felt was an ever-growing inner strength in me, I do not know why I hid the truth from my children for so long. Or maybe I do, the honest truth is I do know: it was because in some way I wanted us to be a normal family, a family perhaps with warts, a few warts and pimples here and there, but not with the massive corns and carbuncles and stab wounds that were the reality.
I wanted to keep up the damned Father Christmas and Tooth Fairy tales and hide my children from their real world. I suppose, in a sick, bizarre way, I still felt that irretrievable link – like a chain – to my abuser. To my children’s Grandy. It is the deceptive nature of that terrible venom. At the same time as we should be running away, it ties us. That – that is the true abuse. It is not something the next – safe – generation can ever begin to comprehend.
I recently heard in a court series on the ABC, the proposition that “a fear of abuse leads to a learned helplessness”. Maybe. I would say, in my humble opinion, not even a “learned helplessness”, but a kind of acceptance, a tolerance. A way of being. And in the end, as in my case, that fear, that so-called fear was not even fear at all, it was a deep sense of obligation to keep up appearances – the appearance of the “happy family”, the “normal family”.
But I am happy that, in the end, no matter how late, the truth of my family, of my family relations and history, at least came to my children through my lips. Even if they could not forgive, especially as in the case of Sarah, I am sure because of my telling her, and the way in which I told her, she did not have to feel sorry for me in a way that I was incurable, an invalid.
I could show her how eventually I fought back and stood up. That woe definitely was not me. And nor should it ever be on her or my other children.
The amazing thing, especially to her, is that, even on my father’s deathbed, each day I went to him, those afternoons I drove from Ipswich to the hospital in Brisbane where he was being treated for his cancer, I fed and comforted him...
49.
When I was told by the doctors that my father had terminal brain cancer, I cried. The tears just rolled. I could not hold them back. Although, in retrospect, when I think about it now, that he had brain cancer was maybe some divine justice, some poetically fair end to the brain that had diseased all those around him.
By the time he was flown back to Anondale, he was so weak, this once big strapping man, this wood of my life, this tough, hand-hardened man who as a boy ran the Olympic torch through Gladstone; now he had absolutely no control over his body.
Dad’s one regret was that he never got to see his father’s grave. Never got to see the tomb of the father who he grew up without, the father who served his country and died a hero but left everyone’s life inextricably changed behind him. The least I could do, on his deathbed, was to forgive him. It was an opportunity I would never be able to visit again.
Pressing all his strength to his cracked lips, his tongue flicking not against the gap between his front teeth in that old, menacing bird way, but flicking nervously right through almost invisible lips, he said to me one day, ‘I know, Deb, I know. I hurt you. I did some terrible things. I am sorry.’<
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It was like the court in his head had finally ruled against him. And he had accepted the judgement. I felt immense pity for him. Pity that in his life he had got it so wrong. Pity that he had turned other people’s lives upside down and did not even acknowledge his logic may have been arse about face.
I think in the end though, to be perfectly honest with myself, I felt pity for him because in his now dull, cancer-riddled eyes, much as I should have hated those eyes, much as I should have passionately resented the sick, white tongue that struggled to breathe to me now, I saw despite everything, despite the ever searing harm he had done, he only ever meant to love me. In his head that remained true.
Of course it upsets me, upsets me still, this strange love. But in my heart I know he loved me. He did! It was conditional. It was a sick love. I wanted to believe it, though. I wanted to. What little girl who grew up believing in the man that was the central wood-structure of her entire life, whose height was capable of reaching the sun, would not want to believe that?
He was no danger to anyone on earth now. The damage had been done. A pragmatist, forever the practical minded soul, I knew there was nothing I could do about it. It was a time for forgiveness and healing.
I know many may see this kind of pity, this softness of approach, as a weakness. But I do not. I see it as a strength. For all my lack of schooling, all my torrid, mixed-up experiences of growing up, that is my biggest lesson in life: Dad could die with his darkness and lies; but I had to let go. I had to continue to grow. What I demanded was honesty, and I think in the end, he at least gave something towards that.
When I think about it, rushing quickly over my life to those times, I see two hardworking people, my parents, Mum and Dad, so busy trying to eke out a living and a bit of enjoyment from life that they spent no time on the three things they needed to do most in life: educate, love and bring up a family properly.
Probably not unlike many other parents, everything was in effect experimental with them because they did not know what they were doing. And in a sense that is all I can say in their favour. They had a deep lack of knowledge, a lack of everyday familial know-how, and it did not make it easy for us.
I shiver when I think about it: Dad’s crazy, screwed up way of seeing things, the stubborn, heavy-handed axis he rotated on, so far removed from the modern universe that he was closer to Neanderthal man. Mum, washed out, bloated and overworked with chores, a woman who saw but did not want to see.
This is my siren-call, my human scream, because I know the truth. And the worst part of it is that to outsiders we looked – at least most of the time – like one big happy family, grandfathers, grandmothers, daughters, sons, sons-in-law, happy, happy grandchildren. But it was a façade. What a bloody façade.
I know from the inside now, we human beings put up that veneer, and as in the case of my family, when we should be wearing the truth on our foreheads like banners for all the world to see, we keep it hidden. Hidden like birds hide their hatchlings in a nest.
But the truth is this: if I had the choice all over, for all Dad’s so-called love and good intentions, I would never want to live through it again. Sometimes I am still not sure how I survived.
I sit in my Flinders View lounge room in Ipswich and take out a picture of their wedding day, of Mum and Dad’s great day of coming together as one, and look over it for the signs of love, for the signs of my beginnings...
On my father, standing there like a solid upright tree in his immaculate dark suit, I see a rebellious, James Dean smile. I see a man a little reticent yet confidently looking out of the photo.
He is tall, obviously young, dashing, standing straighter, with more bravado than a “switchy-stick”. Mum, beside him, is smiling more widely than he is, is in fact showing white straight teeth and a round, gushing face. She has a petite little body that is clothed in fairy tale white veils and virginal white dress.
I see the future for a moment: while I am left to fend for myself in the company of rum-sodden, music-thumping adults, she will blow up ten times her size and run around in a full-body plastic astronaut suit trying to lose weight.
I suppose it is not surprising, barely reaching up to Dad’s unbending shoulders, that she carries an uncertainty in her rosy cheeks and even in her well-known “c’mon lips” and beguiling brown eyes. I see the uncertainty especially in the bloated smile. It is like her lips and teeth are trapped; it is a smile she may never wear again.
In her daring eyes she wants to be optimistic, desperately wants life to work out. Wants to ride away, as in a fairy tale carriage, from the fights and drunkenness and broken pieces of her own upbringing.
In that moment of the photo is a belief that her parents’ ill fortune will not visit upon her or her children. They both look like that. Mum and Dad. Untouchable. Ready to love and reach out to the world.
What is really sick about the photo is that Dad has white gloves. Perhaps almost like a sign, one white glove is on and one is off. The one white-gloved hand is holding the other empty glove. A real gentleman. This, no country bumpkin. This, a man of honour. The camera cannot see the warnings, the duplicity, the hands behind the gloves.
Next to his naked, barely visible hand, I see Mum’s whiter than white dress and already it somehow looks soaked in the sanguine clots of the future. One day his hands will hold her like that dress. Strangling. One day he will hold us like that, the hands naked, the gloves given back to the hire shop or buried in the paddock. I see children in the linen of Mum’s dress, full of hope yet struggling to breathe. Mum wears us on that expansive tight dress and yet she has not even had children yet.
But it is those gloves, those white-white gloves of Dad, which really get to me. The perfect, perfect henchman to his lady. I see those gloves around my neck, pulling my spine down into all that is old and second-hand and dilapidated in our back paddock.
Old fashioned and dated now, the white gloves carry the promise of integrity, of valour, of decency, and yet they will strip me of mine. Already, just hanging at his sides, without lifting a finger, I can see – feel – the damage those hands will do. Yes, the gloves will come off as soon as the ceremony is over, and the giant hands that they hide will saw not only wood but children.
It is hard to believe a marriage that looks like this can really be made in a witch’s stew. It is Father Christmas, the Tooth Fairy illusion we all want to abide by. It is the innocence we wear on our rouged cheeks, the ceremony put on for the gifts.
Studying that picture, I see a kind of hopefulness sitting in Dad’s high-cut cheekbones, that they too have no idea what lies ahead. Behind this gentleman and his lady, behind Mum and Dad there are massively long-hanging curtains. They hang as in a grand theatre, partly open, as though eager yet unable to reveal what’s inside.
And now, back in the hospital... in the world of darkness, I see myself crying, hearing a voice full of cancer, eyes like Old Jack Frost, confessing, ‘I did some terrible things... I know. I know. I wish I could have done things better...’
There is no retort I can give to this, other than to brush my hand over his cold forehead and tell him to rest, that it is a time to be calm. The solid wood that stood at the centre of our universe – at the centre of my life – has been felled.
I forgive him with my eyes.
50.
Rather than twelve months, Dan Gallagher died exactly seven months after his diagnosis, at the eleventh hour on the eleventh day of the eleventh month – Remembrance Day – sorry he never saw his dad’s foreign grave and wishing he could have his life all over again.
My family could not believe the tears that flowed from my eyes. They saw it and did not want to see it, knowing my story, knowing their own story, but finally they came to terms with my unfathomable grief.
My own children – who did not have a dime of respect for their grandfather at the time of his death – all came to his funeral to be by my side. They wanted to show that great human dressing: our family concord. But more tha
n anything they did it to support me, to support me from the bloated watercourses wending down my eyes.
I think, seeing the monster’s body safely housed in that polished casket, there was a kind of forgiveness in them too.
Behind my own tears, I saw a practical woman. I saw a life – mine – that was yet beginning. Even as my father lay on his deathbed, struggling against his cancer, I had told him, ‘You know, Dad, you are going to die. You are not going to beat it.’ That was the least I could give him, honesty.
Today, I look at my children and see them as adults before me. Dean: tall, manly, easy-going and ambitious in his RAAF way, a young person following in the footprints of his father but with his own escapades to look forward to. Never ashamed to tell the world of his love for his family. Ruth: very attractive in an almost exotic way, with easily tanned skin and long, dark glossy hair, a person deeply loyal to those she cares about, also intensely religious, pious and honest with a good dash of stubbornness. And then there is Sarah: small, tight-boned and beautiful to look at, classically fair in that English maiden sort of way, witty and clever, and, yes, yes, perhaps a bit like me, a woman with attitude.
I also see in her, besides her compassion and empathy, a little of the judgemental and self-opinionated, but always there is reason. In her own words – she is a perfectionist. As she justly said to me on that day she was let out into the world to be a physiotherapist, ‘You know, Mum, I’m the first on both sides of the family – to go to university and graduate.’
And she had done it with A’s – and honours.
People often say to me what a wonderful job I have done with my children. And maybe I did impact, but what I always reply is that they took the steps themselves, weighed up the odds and made their own choices.