‘G’day, mate!’
Only seeing them together in the flesh did it occur to me how outrageously old and worn down they were.
Mum was a textbook androgynous housewife. Liquor and cigarettes had exhausted her at a quicker than normal clip. Short grey hair and husky voice. Skinny limbs and swelling pot belly. I had no idea she didn’t fit the bill of femininity until it was suggested to me, repeatedly, by high school friends and enemies alike, who told me she looked like a man or, less insultingly, a lesbian.
Dad was an exaggeration of his own gender. He reeked of bar-room charisma. Face red with high cholesterol. Beer gut bloomed into obesity. His menace was like good real estate, appreciating with age. Fists the size of bricks dead-ending arms thicker than fire extinguishers. Legs dark and carved with muscle.
Both of them were burning with questions. They wanted to know every gritty particular of the crash.
‘It came out of nowhere,’ I said again and again and again.
‘Oh, Lech,’ said Mum, ‘those poor other parents. We’re so lucky. You wouldn’t have gotten in the boot, would you?’
‘I don’t know. Probably.’
Dad nearly spat his fake teeth onto the footpath. ‘Christ! Get off your high horse, Lenore. We used to drive around with half the town hanging out the car. We’ve put our own kids in the boot!’
Mum put her rough fingers where blood was flecked on the sleeve of my cashmere sweater. ‘Remind me to get this soaking as soon as we get home,’ she whispered sombrely.
We stepped inside the sliding doors. The waiting room was a patchwork of late-night mishap. Babies wailed due to inscrutable ailments. Their parents wished they were dead or at the very least asleep. Everyone avoided making eye contact with each other except for the unashamedly insane.
A speed freak with dreadlocks and no shirt kept publicising a graze bleeding from his shoulderblade to the unwavering uninterest of the female administrator behind the plexiglas.
‘I’m gonna lose my fucking arm!’ he screamed.
‘Please remain patient until you arrive at the front of the line,’ she said into a table-mounted megaphone, dull tone and dead eyes.
I told my parents to sit down while I waited in line but they insisted on staying posted at my hip.
‘We’re here for you, baby,’ said Mum.
Dad sighed for five minutes, eyeballing anyone who breathed in our direction, before pulling me forward by the elbow without warning.
‘My son was in the car crash at Highfields!’ he declared to a line brimming with legitimately sick and injured citizens.
He had a strong presentiment of the currency of tragic events. Every eyeball in the line zoomed in my direction. A pregnant woman held her breath. An elderly man with a purple island floating over his cheek stepped from the front of the queue and ushered me forward.
‘Lucky bugger,’ he said. ‘Lucky lucky lucky.’
The previously sedate receptionist was wide awake.
‘Hi,’ she said. ‘They told me you might be coming. I’ll let the doctors know you’re here. Step right in.’
How on earth did they know who I was?
The pressurised doors hissed and swung inward. The next hour was a whirlwind of medical professionals indemnifying themselves and pretending there might be something wrong with me.
The radiologist leaked tear streaks on my sweater before taking X-rays of my internal organs.
‘When I heard,’ she said, ‘all I could think about was my son. Bradley. Same age as you. You kids think you’re bulletproof …’
I was led back to a doctor’s office where Mum and Dad sat holding hands. For a horrifying second I thought they’d been about to kiss. The only time I’d ever seen them press their lips together was on their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. He opened his mouth over hers under intense pressure from Hannah and me.
After that were years of sighs and shouts followed by the tears and then silence of their separation.
Now they had something to celebrate again.
‘How’d ya go?’ asked Dad.
‘Great,’ I said.
The doctor was a tall man with a weak smile. He asked me the most mind-numbingly dumb questions: my full name, what day and month it was, who was the current prime minister of Australia.
‘Is all of this really necessary?’ I asked. ‘I feel fine.’
‘This is all just a precaution,’ he said. ‘We need to be extra careful with car crashes. Especially when there’s been a casualty.’
The room went silent.
Casualty.
What did he mean?
I knew what he meant, but I needed it spelt out for me.
‘Someone died?’
The doctor was stricken.
‘Um,’ he said.
‘Who?’
‘Ah,’ he said.
The doctor looked at my parents to save him, but they were even hungrier for an answer than me, so he reviewed the crash statistics on the clipboard in his glove-covered hands.
‘William,’ said the doctor. ‘He passed away on impact.’
Passed away.
I scrutinised the phrase for longer than I needed to, trying to find a loophole from the bleeding obvious.
‘He’s dead,’ I said.
‘Yes. I’m sorry. I thought you knew.’
The air sucked out of me. Silence drew attention to hospital clatter. Nothing mattered or made sense. I didn’t question how a person could be dead a metre away without me noticing. I wondered what was making the whirring sound down the hallway, fingers clicking like crickets, jingle of car keys and shrapnel in the pockets of passing patrons. My brain felt scraped out and put back in the wrong place. Everything so close and far away. The sensation of listening to voices underwater, in a different dialect, a distant century and tense. No line of thinking I could link with a distinct feeling.
*
I have the weakest recollection before leaving the hospital of hovering inside an emergency theatre leaking with light where Nick and Tim and Henry lay beside each other on metal beds, brains swelling against their skulls, breathing devices exploding from their throats, begged by their devastated parents to stay alive at least for the helicopter rides to Brisbane and the Gold Coast.
Will was dead. Hamish lay in a separate operating theatre. He passed away that morning. Henry died five days later in Brisbane. Nick came out of his induced coma within the next week, but he was never really the same. Tim stayed in a coma for months. He lost the ability to walk or talk without assistance. Dom spent the next two years in a state of legal and existential limbo. His legal team told him to hope for the best while expecting the worst: potentially five years in a prison cell. The jury found him not guilty.
I remained the same bystander from the beginning until the end, estranged from reality, present and completely apart, no physical or legal scars to verify my participation.
The bereaved families were amazingly gracious. They remained so throughout the tragedy, saying how glad they were I was okay, even if it came at the expense of their own flesh and blood.
What could I possibly say? I was a contortion of remorse. A mannequin reading from a script of bad clichés.
From that first night at the hospital, the least important details stick out in my memory. Ambulances at the end of the loading bay. The three a.m. shadow of agony around the eyes of the mums and dads.
For the life of me I can’t remember the faces of my friends or any final sentences I might’ve said to them.
This is trauma. It’s an antivirus program that deletes the most malicious content from your memory. The problem for some people is that the data resurfaces when they least expect it. My spyware was incredibly efficient. Trauma wiped my brain clean. The crash is a black hole expanding in the headlights, a fresh centre of gravity for the rest of my life to hang around indefinitely. There’s just blank space where my friends used to be. That doesn’t mean I’ll ever stop trying to see them. Missing content might be the
lesser of two evils, but living with experiences you can’t remember is no easy fix.
Why She Broke
Helen Garner
It happened in broad daylight, one April afternoon in 2015, while the citizens of an outer-western Melbourne suburb called Wyndham Vale were peaceably going about their business.
A chef, on her way to get a tattoo, was driving past Lake Gladman, a reedy, rock-edged suburban wetland, when the blue Toyota SUV in front of her suddenly pulled off the bitumen and stopped on the gravel. As the chef drove by, she caught a glimpse of an African woman sitting huddled over the steering wheel with her face in her hands. Kids behind her were rioting: a little one was thrashing in his booster, a bigger one dangling off the back of the driver’s seat. Minutes later a passing teacher saw the Toyota ‘drive full bolt, straight into the water’. A man who lived opposite saw it hit the water; he heard splashing and wheels spinning as the vehicle moved further into the lake. A young boy raced home on his bike: ‘Mum! There’s people in the water!’ Someone was screaming – a long, wordless wail.
A sales manager ran out of his house and waded into the lake. The water wasn’t deep enough to engulf the car. Its roof was still above the surface, but it was filling fast. The driver must have scrambled out through her window: she was standing beside it in the water. The frantic salesman tried to break one of the rear passenger windows with his fist and his elbow. It wouldn’t shatter. He yelled for a rock. A courier on the bank tore off his steel-toed boot and chucked it to him. He smashed the window and fought one child free of his harness. The hysterical teacher on the bank, crying out to triple-0, saw another kid on his back in the water, trying to keep his head above the surface, but sinking. Rescuers were shouting to the mother: Were there more children? How many were there? She stood silent beside the driver’s door, gazing straight ahead.
Her name was Akon Guode. She was a thirty-five-year-old South Sudanese refugee, a widow with seven children. Three of them drowned that afternoon: four-year-old twins Hanger and Madit, and their sixteen-month-old brother, Bol. Their five-year-old sister, Alual, escaped the car and survived.
What Guode said, when the police questioned her, was so vague, so random that the word ‘lie’ seemed hardly to apply. She denied everything. No, she had not been to the lake. She didn’t even know where the lake was. She was going to Coles to buy some milk. On the way to the supermarket she took the children to a park, to play. She meant to drive home, but she became dizzy. She missed the turn and went straight ahead. She didn’t know how she ended up in the water.
‘Dizzy’? Such a feeble word, so imprecise, so unconvincing. Her teenage daughter said it. The father of the dead children said it. People turned from their screens and looked at each other with round eyes. Hadn’t we heard this before? Was it a copycat thing? I asked a police investigator who worked on the long and gruelling murder trials of Robert Farquharson, the father of three boys drowned in a dam in 2005, whether he had been having flashbacks. ‘No flashbacks,’ said the detective calmly. ‘But a very strong sense of déjà vu at the scene.’
It would be hard to imagine anything that looked less like an accident. Not only were there eyewitnesses to the deed, but six houses along the shore of Lake Gladman are fitted with CCTV cameras. The police had been able to put together, with a few small gaps, a video recording of the fact that the mother had driven along the lake five times that day before she planted her foot and went into the water. But Guode pleaded not guilty to all four charges: one of attempted murder for the girl who survived, and three of murder for the twins and for the boy who was not yet two years old.
Like several of my women friends, I flinched from the story yet followed the media reports out of the corner of my eye. We emailed each other, we texted, about women we had known (or had been) – single mothers who slammed the door and ran away, or threw a screaming baby across a room, or crouched howling with one hand on the phone, too ashamed to call for help. The flashpoint was the glimpse that the chef had caught as she drove past the clumsily parked Toyota: the frantic mother hunched over the steering wheel, going off her head while in the back her children went berserk. ‘How many times have I been there?’ whispered my neighbour, a grandmother. ‘I have to know why she broke.’
I heard that at the committal hearing, in June 2016, Guode collapsed wailing in the dock. Her counsel had to get down on the floor with her to comfort her. The magistrate found the evidence against her sufficient to commit her to a trial by jury.
Then, at the turn of the year, I heard that the Crown had agreed to change the third murder charge, of the toddler, to one of infanticide. Once she was arraigned on this new charge, Guode pleaded guilty to all four counts. This meant that there would be no jury trial, but just a two-day plea hearing in the Supreme Court before Justice Lex Lasry, who in 2010 had heard Robert Farquharson’s excruciating second trial and given him three life sentences, with thirty-three years on the bottom.
*
The court documents tell Akon Guode’s story in broad strokes. She married in South Sudan as a teenager. By the time her husband, a soldier in the rebel army of South Sudan, was killed in the civil war she had two children. As a widow in a country where Christian and African traditional customs often blend, she could never remarry. She would remain a member – or perhaps one could say a possession – of her late husband’s family: she was given to one of his brothers. ‘This is customary once the husband dies,’ explained an ‘aunty’ of Guode’s at the committal, through an interpreter. ‘You don’t go out. You don’t go anywhere else. You stay with the same tribe because you got married for cows. As a dowry.’ Guode’s third child was fathered by a man we would think of as her brother-in-law.
With the three children in tow, she walked to Uganda in eighteen days, foraging for food along the way. When they got there, another of her late husband’s brothers, already living in Australia, offered to sponsor her and the children: she was granted a global special humanitarian visa. They arrived in Sydney in 2006 and stayed with the brother-in-law until 2008, then moved to Melbourne, where the cost of living was more manageable, and were given temporary shelter by her late husband’s cousin Joseph Manyang, his wife and their three children.
Manyang helped Guode settle in to a rented house of her own. Soon she and Manyang, unknown to his wife, began a relationship. In 2009 Guode gave birth to a girl, Alual – the only child who, five years later, would emerge alive from the car in the lake. The family name on the baby’s birth certificate was Chabiet, that of Guode’s late husband.
‘You had no idea you were the father,’ Joseph Manyang was asked at the committal, ‘until the child was one year old?’
‘I asked her about the father of the child,’ said Manyang. ‘She told me, “I can’t tell you.”’
It was confirmed by a DNA test, after the day of the lake, that the child was his.
The relationship continued. In 2010 Guode had twins, a boy and a girl. By now Manyang’s wife was no longer in ignorance. She felt it sorely; she raged. Later, in court, she would deny that she came to Guode’s house and beat on the door, shouting insults and threats while the family lay low inside. There was an unpleasant confrontation at a shopping centre. Manyang moved out of the marital home and set up on his own. He visited each woman and her set of his children once or twice a week. The community hummed with rumours. Guode’s link with Manyang, though it had been so fruitful of offspring, could never be officially recognised: she was obliged to remain forever a widow. Could she have gone on hoping that the relationship had meaning, and a future?
Guode was running her household on Centrelink payments and on Manyang’s sporadic contributions. In 2012 she worked for twelve months at a family day care centre. Like most refugees she was regularly sending back as much money as she could spare to her parents and her extended family in Africa. Then, in 2013, she became pregnant again. Shortly before the child was born, Centrelink, in a contretemps about an overpayment, suspended her benefits. A repayment
scheme was eventually put in place, but she was barely squeaking by from week to week.
Meanwhile, somehow, her six children were well cared for. Their education mattered to her: they went to school, they did their homework. Akoi Chabiet, her eldest child by the husband who had been killed in the war, was an assiduous helper in the house and a keen high school student. The girl had plans for a life. She wanted to go to university, and was prepared to work for it.
Guode went into labour on 21 December 2013. Because she already had more than five children, she was what is known in midwifery as a grand multi. The birth of a child that follows caesarean twins, as hers had been, is always high-risk, and the hospital was ready for it. But things did not go smoothly. After she had given birth she kept bleeding, and they could not stop it. A consent form for whatever life-saving treatment might be needed was brought to her. She signed it. By the time they got her to the holding bay outside theatre, where the doctors were waiting for her, her haemorrhage had reached emergency proportions. ‘I remember the linen underneath her,’ said the midwife at the committal, ‘being quite soaked with blood, and I remember her looking down and being aware of the blood loss herself.’
But in the holding bay she said no. She flatly refused to go through the door. They couldn’t understand it. Three doctors tried to explain to her what they might need to do. She would not give eye contact. She kept holding up her hand and turning her head away, saying, ‘No. No.’ She wouldn’t let them phone the man she referred to as her husband. Staff rang every number they could find. Many of them were incorrect or disconnected, or the calls were picked up by young children. They got through to a sister-in-law, who backed Guode in her refusal. Then, for some reason, Guode ran out of fight. She surrendered. They wheeled her in. She had lost half the blood in her body. As part of the full resuscitation they had to give her, to prevent her from going into shock, they inserted an intravenous cannula into the internal jugular vein in her neck. They managed to save her without surgical intervention.
The Best Australian Essays 2017 Page 29