Ghost Child

by Caroline Overington

  And I said, ‘Oh, Hayley, you could make life so much easier for yourself, if you just put away your claws.’

  She didn’t want to have an easy life, though. That was the problem. Hayley Cashman enjoyed the fact that she brought a world of chaos with her wherever she went. She was like a jack-in-the-box: we tried to keep the lid on, but she was wound tightly, under constant pressure, and always ready to pop.

  Ruby Porter, Foster Mum

  When people ask me how Harley Cashman came into our lives, I say, ‘He was delivered.’ I like the double meaning. Someone else delivered him into the world, but then he was delivered, as if by a stork, to me. Harley was four years old and he had been in Department care for about a year. He had two siblings, both sisters, one of whom was younger, and one older. The Department told me there had been an ‘incident’ in the family and Harley and his sisters had to move out. They told me his mother was in prison and was not likely to be released before Harley finished school. They warned me that Harley might have some problems ‘settling’ with me, as they called it. He might have night terrors or wet the bed. They gave me the number of a twenty-four-hour service and said I should call if he was too much to handle.

  They gave us a suitcase with some of his T-shirts in it, and said, ‘Okay. Good luck.’

  We put Harley in the back of the car. We intended to drive him back to our farm at Exford, out the back of Bacchus Marsh. We’re not a wealthy family and our car was ten years old. It was a hot day; the air-conditioning was really struggling. I said to my husband, ‘Open your window.’ I opened my window, and I opened the back windows, too, and that’s how we drove home, all the windows open, like we were in a wind tunnel.

  Halfway home, we stopped to get a closer look at him. My husband found a clearing, near the Melton weir, where we could park the car. I took Harley out of the back seat, stripped him down to his nappy, and let him toddle in the eddies, his feet as round as the stones in the river. Everything about him was perfect: he had a round head – the biggest smiling head I’d ever seen – and bow legs, with rolls of soft flesh padding his inner thighs, down to his knees. His hands were still fat across the back, like a baby’s hands. His palms had no creases.

  The first night I put him into bed, I stayed with him, reading by a Smiley night-light. I stroked his hair until I thought he was asleep, but when I tried to leave he reached up, as if in panic. I’m a big woman. I don’t move easily. He put his arms around my neck, pressed his face against my cheek and clung to me. I tried to draw myself away. I unhooked his hands from behind my neck, put his arms by his sides and tucked his blanket tightly around him. I backed out of the room, saying, ‘It’s okay, Harley. I’m just down the hall.’

  He didn’t say anything, but I could tell he was afraid. I closed the door gently behind me and tiptoed down the hall. I stood in the kitchen, my heart pounding. I was listening for his cry, but there was no sound at all. I went back into the hall. Harley had got out of bed and put his hands under the door. His fingers were coming out from underneath. They were blue and luminous, like starfish. When I opened the door – I was careful not to scrape the skin off the back of his hands – he looked up from where he lay on the floor with saucer-eyes and implored me, ‘I want to sleep with you.’ I put out my arms and he climbed into them. I carried him down the hall, in his singlet and his Kermit underpants. I put Harley down onto the middle of our mattress. He curled like a kitten into the hollow. Tony said to me, ‘It’s not allowed, Ruby.’

  I said, ‘We can’t let him sleep on the floor.’

  Tony replied, ‘You know what they said, Don’t get attached,’ and I said, ‘It’s too late.’

  The Department had told us that Harley would not be allowed to stay forever. He wasn’t available for adoption and, in any case, we weren’t eligible to adopt. The girl – that’s all she was, a young girl, barely a woman – who handled adoptions at the Department told me in a tone that all of them seem to use that ‘the Department has guidelines and unfortunately your application to adopt places you beyond those guidelines and therefore your application can’t be considered’.

  I said, ‘What does that mean?’

  She said, ‘It’s to do with the disability.’

  I do have a disability. I don’t shy from that. I have a congenital deformity, a condition known as spina bifida cystica (in Latin, that’s ‘split spine’). I was born with part of the spinal cord exposed. I had several operations when I was a child, to cover the bone and to straighten my back, but I still don’t stand completely upright. Nevertheless, that makes me comparatively lucky. Some people with spina bifida can’t walk at all; some use a wheelchair. I have some numbness in my lower body. I don’t walk in a particularly elegant way. My condition makes it difficult to exercise and the Department had told me that technically – that is their word, technically – I’m morbidly obese. In fact, although I’m a large woman, I’m fit. I work on the farm. I walk for an hour a day. I didn’t understand why any of this – my gait, my weight – precluded me from adopting a child.

  I said to the social worker, ‘Would you stop me from having a child of my own?’

  Of course, they wouldn’t have been able to do that. I could well have had a child of my own, and there would be nothing they could have done about that. Anybody can have their own child. Doesn’t matter if they are drug abusers or prostitutes or paedophiles, but when you want to adopt they put you through hoops, like infertility makes you less capable of being a parent.

  My other problem was my age. I didn’t meet Tony until I was thirty-eight years old. I had already been married. I wasn’t keen to marry again. My first marriage was abusive. I allowed my first husband to make negative statements about my appearance. I allowed him to control me. He did not want to have a child, and especially not with me. He said it would be a cripple. My self-esteem suffered. It took a long time to break free. I didn’t think I would get married again, but when I met Tony I knew it would be different. I told my mother that I would get married again and this time we would have a child. My mother’s Catholic. She said, ‘Ruby, what will be, will be.’

  I’m not Catholic, not any more. Obviously, I was raised Catholic, but these days, I’m more of a spiritual person. I’ve investigated many different religions and I’ve taken parts of all of them, for my own spiritual identity. I studied Buddhism. I suppose I’m more interested in ethical living than in structured religion. I’m a vegetarian, a feminist and a socialist. I believe in reincarnation, in positive thinking, and that human beings belong in tribes. I’ve long worked with women, in particular, for the rights of minority women: migrant women, lesbians and Indigenous women. I must have used a lofty tone when I told my mother about the career I intended to have after university, fighting for the rights of women, because she said, ‘Don’t you tell me about rights. I’ve been fighting for your rights all your life.’

  She has, too. She refused to put me in a special school. She told the Department of Education: ‘There’s nothing wrong with my daughter’s brain.’ She enrolled me in the local Catholic school. When she told them that I occasionally had to use a wheelchair, depending on whether or not I was recovering from an operation, they said, ‘But we don’t have a ramp.’ My mother said, ‘You’ll have to get one, won’t you?’

  When I told my mother that Tony and I planned to adopt a child, she said, ‘God will decide,’ but actually, it seems like the Department decides. I’d moved onto Tony’s property at Exford. I was completing a degree in women’s studies, and I was advocating for the rights of women and disabled people, using Equal Opportunity legislation and the Disability Act.

  Tony had a full-time job. He worked as a clerk. I thought we had much to offer a child who needed a home. But the Department told me it was impossible. I told them, ‘You’re not allowed to discriminate against me on the basis of my disability,’ and that’s quite right, but the girl told me, ‘Put aside the disability for a moment. The fact is there are very few babies available for adoption
.’

  She was right about that. In the 1970s, the Department had plenty of babies. There was no single mother’s pension and there was no childcare. It wasn’t easy to get an abortion, and certainly not a safe, cheap one. But by the time we started thinking about adoption in the 1980s, things had changed. Gough Whitlam – who is my hero, by the way – had brought in a single mother’s pension, and abortion had become less of a taboo. With the arrival of Bertram Wainer, the doctor who opened the first legal abortion clinic, you didn’t have to get a backyard abortion any more; you could just go to his place at East Melbourne and have it done with dignity, so there weren’t that many babies around.

  The Department told us, ‘Look at foster care. Plenty of kids need a temporary place to stay.’

  I wasn’t sure about it. I couldn’t accept that I would be given a child for a period of time and then have to give it back to the Department, who might place it with parents who were not in the best circumstances. Nevertheless, we filled out the forms, attended the meetings – we were very self-conscious because Tony, who is much smaller, could fit in the plastic school chair but I could not – and we stayed and watched the social workers giving the whiteboard a work-out in front of us. Eventually, we got ourselves approved for ‘respite care’, which meant the Department could send us a child with a disability, a child with Down syndrome or cerebral palsy, whose parents might need a break, and we could care for the child for a weekend and then send it back.

  I’ll be honest: it was harder than I thought it would be. We had to patch holes in the fence because the little kids, especially the Down kids, got through them like lightning. We had to move things onto the top shelves. One child got her fingers caught in a mousetrap in the kitchen. And then, out of the blue, we got Harley. He had no disabilities. He was entirely perfect. I couldn’t believe that I’d be allowed to take him home, but then I realised that some greater power had put him on earth for a reason, and until that reason revealed itself, I would be entrusted with him.

  We knew from the outset that Harley had sisters, and we were willing to care for them, but the Department said no, the younger sister had been placed with a family member, and the older one, Lauren, had ‘issues that need to be sorted out’. I was very curious to get the facts, but they would not say more.

  So, from the first day, it was Harley alone, and I suppose I did come to think of him as an only child … and as my child. I probably should have been afraid of creating too strong a bond. The Department reminded us every day, or so it seemed, that Harley had been placed with us temporarily, and that we would have to give him up once the case against his mother had been decided by the courts. I ignored their advice. I loved Harley passionately, on sight, and he loved me. Neither of us, I’m sure, could abide by the Department’s order not to love each other. How could I stop myself from loving the child that bolted across our fields in pursuit of rabbits; who leapt, startled, into my arms the first time he spotted a tawny frogmouth; who fell asleep on my lap, with his hands in his ice-cream bowl, three nights out of five?

  There were things about parenting that I had to learn on the go. Harley would turn on the taps in the bath if I did not keep an eye on him. I was worried that he’d scald himself and I would get into a panic, wondering what the Department would say, so I would sit on the toilet, with the lid closed, and watch him in the bath. He would fill up an ice-cream tub with water and pour it over his head. Sometimes he’d sit for an hour, playing with his little pecker, studying it like it was the most fascinating thing he’d ever seen.

  ‘That’s the start of a lifetime love affair,’ said Tony, when he observed him one day, and I shooed him out of there.

  I had a strong faith that the universe would sort things out … and I was right. After two years, when Harley was five, turning six, the Department told us he had moved onto the long-term list. Adoption was still out of the question, but I felt that we had a wink and a nod from the Department that Harley’s mother wasn’t coming for him any time soon. I don’t mean to sound awful when I say that, but I couldn’t bear the idea that I’d had him for a few years and might still lose him to who knows what kind of future.

  I’m biased, of course, but I believe Harley’s childhood, with Tony and me, was idyllic. I didn’t rely on toys or TV to keep Harley entertained. We had a mulberry bush that took over one whole corner near our house, and we were always saying we were going to cut it back, until it became clear how much Harley loved to pick the mulberries and squash them between his fat fingers. We had a dog – a succession of dogs, actually – and we had chooks. We tended the veggie patch. Sustainability is all the rage now. I’m reading in the newspapers all the time about a sustainable earth, but we had that idea twenty years ago. We were first on the bandwagon. Tony and I were trying to make ourselves self-sufficient, with our own water, a compost heap, horse manure on the garden, in the 1980s. We dug up potatoes and pulled up carrots, and Harley helped us with all of that. We had pea-shelling competitions. I’d take down two bowls and we’d sit on the verandah, each trying to fill the bowl before the other.

  Every six months, we had to take Harley to the Department for some kind of inspection. They called it a ‘progress report’, but I was never of the opinion that we were all on the same side. I can say this now because Harley is grown up: I never quite lost the fear that they would spirit him away at any moment, for no reason at all. It seemed to be so arbitrary. We heard horror stories from other foster parents of children being taken away and placed back with their parents. Some of them were then mistreated, and were placed with a new set of foster parents. I knew I couldn’t live if that happened to Harley.

  I warned Harley not to call me Mum when we were at the Department. I told him not to say he called me Mum at home, because that kind of thing could trigger them.

  When Harley was six, we enrolled him in the local public school, Exford Primary. It was a small school. It was one white wooden schoolroom with children from Year 1 to Year 6. Harley had blossomed, and with the older children around he soon turned into a confident child. He seemed so certain that everybody would love everything about him – and if they didn’t, I certainly did. Here’s one lovely memory: when Harley was in Year 2, he made a sculpture from Icy Pole sticks. He had to put it up for sale at the school art show; all the other kids’ sculptures were put up for sale, too. Harley implored me to get to the show early. He was fearful that someone else would buy his sculpture before me! It didn’t occur to him that they would want the sculpture made by their own child. And when I got to the show, Harley was standing very protectively in front of his Icy Pole sculpture, ensuring that no other parent bought it. When he saw me walking in, his face showed such relief and he said, ‘Mum, quick, it’s still for sale.’ I paid my five dollars and Harley said, ‘I really wanted you to have this because I know it’s the best one here.’ And it was. Truly, it was.

  By the age of seven, Harley was probably the most popular child in the school. He made friends incredibly easily … and often with the strangest characters. I remember once, when he was about ten, I went out to the letterbox and saw Harley standing with a small boy who seemed to be hiding behind a tree.

  I said, ‘What’s that boy doing, Harley?’

  He said, ‘That’s Dominic. I met him in Speight Street the other day.’

  They were using a slingshot to shoot cans off the letterbox. I watched for a while and then said, ‘Hello, Dominic. It’s very nice to have you come over.’ And he said, ‘I was run over by a car.’

  I was a bit startled. I asked him if he was okay, and he shrugged his shoulders, and off they went again, with the slingshot.

  So it was like that. Harley would bring home these strays, not just dogs, but kids, and he kept himself thoroughly occupied. Even as he got older, he was never one of those boys that wanted to stay inside. He wanted to be out and about, and he’d find other kids to go off with for hours, and I’d have to get used to the idea that it would be dusk, or dark, before I’d hear
his bike come down the gravel drive. Then he’d eat pretty much everything in the fridge – four or five pieces of bread, one on top of the other, vacuuming it down, no time to even put on butter. I’d say, ‘Harley, do you want me to butter that, make a cheese Toastie?’ And he’d say, ‘Nah, Mum, she’ll be right.’

  She’ll be right.

  Harley’s mother died in prison when he was an adolescent. There was a flurry of Departmental activity at that time – he had to go to counselling and he met with his siblings, who he hadn’t seen for years – and then life resumed, as normal. I searched for signs that he was unsettled, but there seemed to be none. Harley did what every other kid in the town did: got caught wagging school and didn’t do it again; got caught smoking and then took it up; he dropped out of the local high school at sixteen and got an apprenticeship as a roof tiler. At the age of eighteen, he started his own business and he was doing well … until the accident. Even then, when I had to stumble into casualty in the middle of the night, thinking to myself, ‘So, this is how it ends. This is how we lose him …’ I found him sat up in the hospital bed, covered in bandages and in blood, flirting with the nurses.

  And what did he say? He said, ‘Come on now, Mum. Enough with the waterworks. It’s no big deal. She’ll be right.’

  PART TWO

  Lauren Cameron

  I wonder if I might begin by asking an impertinent question: how many times have you had sex? I mean, with how many different men? You may not know the answer. Many women these days have no idea. They have to stop and think about it. I can tell you exactly. If you don’t count the last time, then I’ve had sex with nineteen different men. Does that sound like a lot? It depends, I think, on when you were born. If you were born in the 1930s, or even the 1940s, then nineteen lovers probably sounds like more than is decent. Working, as I’ve done, on an Old Timers’ Ward (it’s the Alzheimer’s ward but I can’t help thinking of them as the Old Timers), I’ve met plenty of women who assured me they met the love of their life at a dance hall when they were seventeen, and never again looked at another man. Who can say if they’re telling the truth? Maybe they had a fling when US troops came during the Second World War or something. I don’t know, but I do know this: the rules about women and sex changed around 1970. It was to do with Germaine Greer, apparently, and with the arrival of the Pill.