Ghost Child

by Caroline Overington

  These days, it’s easy to find women who would happily admit to having nineteen lovers over their lifetime, and maybe they’re not yet done.

  I didn’t have sex with nineteen men over a lifetime. I had sex with nineteen men in a very short period of time: in the four years between the ages of thirteen and seventeen. Then, for ten years, I didn’t have any sex at all. It’s not that there was anything special about Number 19. Truth be told, I can’t remember Number 19’s name. I didn’t give up sex because I found the right man. I gave it up because I recognised – finally, and too late – that it wasn’t helping me get where I wanted to go, which was up and out of the Barrett Estate.

  Some people are puzzled as to why – not to mention how – a girl of thirteen might embark on a series of sexual relationships. Well, I had no parents: my mother was in prison for the murder of my younger brother; and my father – well, I’ll get to him, but let’s say he was mostly off the scene. When I was a little kid I lived with foster parents and they didn’t really instruct me about men and boys. What I learnt, I learnt from books. My first foster mum, Mrs Islington, used to tell me, ‘Nobody can be lonely if they’ve got a book in their life,’ which is true, but when you get life’s lessons from books – especially the books on Mrs Islington’s shelves – well, real life can be astonishing.

  Mrs Islington started me off with Cinderella, and then Snow White, and from there we got through The Secret Garden, What Katy Did and anything by Enid Blyton. As I got older, I moved on to Jane Eyre, to Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina and Lolita. You can imagine how my mind developed, with nothing but these books to guide me. I thought men and women had sex with each other only when they were in love. Therefore, every time I met a man who wanted to have sex with me – they were really boys, of course, none older than twenty, desperate for a bit of experience – I figured they were in love with me.

  Were they? What do you think?

  I’d meet a guy, agree to sex, and afterwards, the bloke would be up and out of there, before I had time to put on my pants.

  The first time, I was living in a unit in the caravan park outside Barrett. I was thirteen and I was living there alone. Now, that might sound strange, but let me tell you, lots of state wards live in caravan parks. I landed at the park when I was twelve, after yet another ‘long-term’ placement at somebody’s home had broken down and I’d been temporarily put in a motel. That had been the story of my life: one placement after another.

  My first foster placement had been with Mrs Islington. It ended when I was around ten. We’d all gone there – my siblings and I – while the courts sorted out the charges against my mother. After she went to prison, Hayley went to stay with a great-aunt, and about a year after that, when all the appeals had been exhausted, my brother, Harley, went to a new carer called Mrs Porter, in Exford.

  I went to a couple who had no children.

  I used to think of them as ‘the Childless’. I suppose they took me because they wanted a child and hadn’t had one of their own. Maybe they didn’t like to do what you have to do to have a child. Maybe they thought sex was rank. They were pretty clean people. Prim people. Anyway, it was probably for the best that they didn’t have a baby. I’m not sure a baby would have been welcome in their house. The Childless were house proud. They had doilies on the armrests of their chairs, and plastic running up the stairs so the carpet wouldn’t become worn down.

  I wasn’t a messy baby. I was almost ten years old. I suppose the placement made sense to the Department: ‘Neat, house-trained Lauren, meet the Childless. We’re sure you’ll be perfect together!’

  ‘How do you do, Lauren?’ That’s what Mrs Childless said to me, the first time we met. She spoke like nobody else I’d ever heard. Who says, ‘How do you do?’ Nobody, not any more, but she did. She also liked to use big words, obscure words – that’s one of them! – and then ask me if I knew what it meant, and if I didn’t, we’d have to look it up in the dictionary together.

  To really drive her mad, all you had to do was drop your Gs.

  I didn’t drop my Gs. Or maybe I did at first, but I certainly didn’t for long. I learnt a lot from the Childless. Not simply not to drop my Gs, but other things, too, like how to keep a house clean. It still didn’t work out, though. I only found this out later, but apparently I offended their cat. They had a Burmese with eyes like sapphires and a coat like mink. Mrs Childless told me it was a show cat. It wasn’t to play with; it was to be shown, or should have been, except there was some problem with its overbite, something that caused an enormous amount of grief to Mrs Childless.

  I do remember stalking the cat. I remember that it would try to hide under the patio. I would get down in the dirt. It would bare its teeth and hiss in protest. It had claws like needles; when I grabbed for it, it would scratch my chest and my forearms, leaving droplets of blood in long red lines.

  Mrs Childless would say, ‘Now, Lauren, Augustine doesn’t like to be handled.’ Augustine. They named the cat after a saint. Mrs Childless told me that Augustine had another name, too, a show name, but Augustine was what they called it – and picking up Augustine soon became the ambition of my life.

  ‘It isn’t working out,’ Mrs Childless told the Department after the last time she had to pull me, by the ankles, out from under the house, where I’d gone in search of the cat. ‘I’m sorry but there is something very strange about that child.’

  And then, I suppose, she went back to polishing the buffet.

  From Mr and Mrs Childless, I went to a couple who already had a child, a girl who was already a teenager. They were churchgoers so I called them The Christians. It occurred to me, after a time, that I was some kind of Christian project, too. Whenever they had guests – people from the church, or the pastor himself – I would be called from my room and be asked to stand under their plasterboard arch while they explained the latest developments in the life of The Girl They Had Fostered.

  ‘She came with nothing,’ the mother would whisper. ‘Her mother is in prison.’

  Mrs Christian was a hairdresser but she didn’t work in a salon. Clients would come to the house. The thing then was perms. She had a trolley with blue plastic rods that she strapped hair around; and a bottle of what she called ‘the perm solution’. The women came in with flattened hair; they left with springs upon their heads, like Steelo. Once, when Mrs Christian called me down to help with the solution – I was allowed to paint it on, while she held part of the hair around a curling rod – the client said, ‘Isn’t she one of the children from DeCastella Drive?’

  Nobody was supposed to know that; Mrs Christian wasn’t supposed to say, but I saw her open her eyes wide, and a faint smile of satisfaction came across her face and, when I turned my back toward the sink, she whispered, ‘Yes, she is.’

  After a while, I refused to come out of my room and participate in the salons. I sat on the floor and read. It must have troubled The Christians, because I was sent for what they called an ‘assessment’. I had to sit in a group of six other foster kids, with a large piece of poster board and crayons between us. We were told to go ahead and draw. I remember being terrified. Was something specific expected of me, and, if so, what was it? Did they expect me to sketch the house at DeCastella Drive, to draw stick figures representing my mother and my siblings? I wasn’t going to fall for that.

  I stayed with the Christians for about two years. I guess I knew it wasn’t really working out, but still, I was surprised when they came and sat on the edge of my bed one day to give me some ‘exciting news’. Mr Christian had been offered an ‘amazing opportunity’. They were going to live abroad. Mrs Christian said, ‘Lauren, we really have to take it.’

  I got the message. We did not include me.

  ‘They wouldn’t let us take you, anyway,’ Mrs Christian said. I heard the word ‘anyway’ much louder than the others.

  ‘You understand, don’t you, Lauren, that we’re your foster carers and that gives us some rights, but we can’t take you overse
as. We wouldn’t get permission to do that …’

  I could have finished the sentence for her: ‘even if we’d asked.’

  The Department told me the Christians would be leaving in ten weeks. I was eleven years old by then, going on twelve, and getting harder to place. A child is one thing; a girl on the cusp of adolescence, that’s another. A caseworker came to the house. She was the fifth or sixth I’d seen. She had to read through all her notes to figure out my history.

  ‘You’re getting older and it gets harder,’ she said.

  ‘Will I stay on Barrett?’ I asked.

  ‘That’s the goal,’ she said.

  I wish I could explain why I wanted to stay on Barrett. Maybe I couldn’t bear to leave the place where I’d lived with Jake, but that doesn’t sound completely right. More likely, I felt I didn’t deserve to be with Harley.

  When no home turned up in the next ten weeks, I went into ‘emergency care’, meaning I moved from one house to the next, with foster parents who took children on a Friday night, in an emergency, and kept them for a week or so, and then moved them on. It was like a merry-go-round, but as a foster child you soon get used to it. You start to see the same faces around, and you say to each other, ‘Where have they had you?’ I’d say, ‘I was last week at the Shellays, or the Coopers, or the Lindrums,’ and they would have been there, too, although not always at the same time. Some of these temporary places were awful: there was stuff stacked all over the house; no food in the refrigerator; no toilet paper in the loo; debris strewn across the yards. If they were clever, these respite carers didn’t let the Department near the front door. They’d stand out by the gate when the social workers would come, and they’d say, ‘Here she is.’ The social workers, being harried, would tick us off, and go on to check on the next house.

  After a few months of this, I ended up at the Barrett Motel. There were supervisors licensed to the Department who were supposed to keep an eye on me and the other kids who lived there. They worked in eight-hour rolling shifts. The woman who ran the motel told me that when she took over the business she could barely believe that her best customer was the Department of Family Services.

  ‘I cannot conceive,’ she said, ‘that this is the best we as a society can do.’ I heard her asking the Department one day, ‘Are you sure this is normal? One of these girls is only twelve.’ The caseworker sighed and said, ‘All the homes have closed down. What else can we do?’ It was supposed to be a state secret. The Department didn’t want people to know that adolescents were living in motels because there was nowhere else for them to go. I wasn’t supposed to talk about it. Secrecy compounds shame, of course, but nobody thought of that.

  Actually, it wasn’t that bad. I had my own room, with a TV and an ensuite. One afternoon, the woman who owned the motel came past my room and saw me sitting outside, my back to the wall. She was collecting sheets and towels. She said, ‘Do you want to come and help?’ My caseworker had disappeared, as usual, and who could blame her? Nothing was more boring than sitting in a motel out on Barrett all day. The lady said, ‘I’ll just be folding the towels.’ I could tell she felt sorry for me. I wanted to show her that I had manners, and I was capable of things. I said, ‘I can help.’ I followed her back to reception and marvelled at the set-up: there was a set of swinging doors behind the reception desk that led to the family’s lounge room. If a guest came in to register they could ring the brass bell on the desk, and the lady would come out from her lounge and assist them.

  I sat on the floor with the towels. The lady watched TV while folding the towels into a perfect square and putting a plastic-wrapped soap on top of each one. She then brought me a cup of luke-warm tea, heavily sugared, and some biscuits. She said, ‘How long have you been with the Department?’

  I dipped my shortbread and said, ‘Since I was seven.’

  ‘Where is your mum?’

  I said, ‘I don’t know.’

  Then, ‘Have you got a dad?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Even then, I wished I was as interesting as my circumstances. Always, it was, ‘What happened to the adults in your life, so that you could end up like this?’

  Anyway, the owner invited me to stay for ‘tea’ and I decided I would. Her husband was there. He put a bowl of what looked like puffy pink potato chips in front of me and said, ‘Have you had a prawn cracker before?’

  I said I had because I thought if I told them I hadn’t they might not let me have one.

  ‘I remember the first time I gave them to our kids,’ he said, ‘I said to them, “Put ’em on your tongue,” and you know what happened?’

  I didn’t know, but I said, ‘Yeah, I know. They taste funny.’

  He said, ‘Yes, but about how they snap you on the tongue?’

  Now I was alarmed, but I’d lied myself to the point of no return. I held the foamy pink cracker against my tongue, and felt it gripping.

  ‘Fun, isn’t it?’

  It was. It definitely was. I ate the bowl of prawn crackers and then all of dinner, too. Afterwards, there were chocolate sweets, called After Dinner Mints, served in slinky envelopes. It would never have occurred to me to leave, until finally the woman said, ‘Do you have a bedtime, Lauren?’

  A short time later, I moved from the motel. For years I thought it was because the man had given me prawn crackers; perhaps they were for consumption by adults, like alcohol and cigarettes? I can now see that’s ridiculous. I don’t know why I was moved; I moved a lot, often with no explanation, and while it might seem strange to some people that I ended up in a portable on the Barrett Caravan Park at the age of thirteen, it was no surprise to me or to other foster kids who lived similarly. As long as there were some books – and by now, I had a few of my own – I figured I’d be okay.

  The park was as you might imagine. There was a pool, open only in summer and freezing even then; and some playground equipment. Some people had their own kitchens, but most people used the barbecue in the covered forecourt, and washed their tin pans under the tap.

  Maybe because I was an older girl, I got a hut of my own. It didn’t have a bathroom so I had to shower in the communal lot. The social worker told me, ‘Wear rubber thongs in the shower. We can’t be responsible if you get a papilloma.’ It’s a disease of the feet. I had no rubber thongs so I went to the shower in my sneakers and pyjamas. Before I got through the doors, one of the other kids rode by on his BMX and shouted out, ‘Watch out for the peephole!’

  I put my toiletries down on the tiled floor and searched around the tap holes and the shower head for a hole. I couldn’t find one, but still I showered in my knickers and sneakers. After that, I mostly washed in the sink.

  I lost my virginity before the month was out. A group of young guys, apprentice chippies and sparkies, came onto the site. They weren’t permanent residents; they were working their way up the east coast, where the weather was warm, hoping to get jobs on building sites. I was walking to the showers when one of them called out to me, ‘Hey, spunky!’

  They’d made a fire in one of the half-drums that were left lying about. I hung by the edges of their campsite, listening as they talked about football, girls, surfing, cars, pretending to be doing something else, until one of them said, ‘You want a smoke?’

  My guess, on reflection, was that he was eighteen or nineteen. They had P-plates on their cars. He wore jeans and a T-shirt. My Prince Charming!

  ‘Do you live here?’ he said, cupping a hand around the flame of his lighter as I bent and inhaled.

  ‘Just for now,’ I said.

  ‘Where’s your folks?’

  ‘Asleep.’

  He said, ‘Your mum and your dad, or just your mum?’

  I said, ‘Just Mum.’

  He considered this for a moment, then said, ‘Like, near here?’

  I said, ‘No.’

  He thought a moment longer and must have concluded that I was worth the risk.

  ‘You must be cold,’ he said. ‘Why don’t yo
u come in the tent? I want to talk to you.’

  How can I explain how those words sounded to me? He’d said, ‘You must be cold,’ and it sounded like, ‘I care about you.’ He’d said, ‘I want to talk to you,’ and it sounded like, ‘Nobody else may have noticed this, but you’re a person worth having around.’

  I went into the tent. Straightaway he started kissing me. I kissed him back. The strength of the muscles in his arms intrigued me; the strength in his tongue surprised me.

  I said, ‘What’s your name, anyway?’ and he said, ‘Dicko.’

  Dicko. Romantic, no?

  He took one of my breasts in his hands. I remember feeling ashamed because my breasts were small and I assumed he would be repulsed. He made a move toward the zip on my jeans. I used my hands to push him away. I had a teenage girl’s shame about my body. I believed, as all girls do, that I was nowhere near as desirable as I should be; that I wasn’t sexy enough for sex.

  Also, resisting his advances seemed to be the thing to do. He got frustrated, though, and pushed away from me, saying, ‘Hey! You can’t do this to a guy.’ The change in his tone was immediate, and shocking. He had been affectionate, even loving; now he was angry.

  ‘You’re trying to give me blue balls,’ he said.

  I didn’t understand. ‘Blue balls, man,’ he said, moving rapidly to release his swollen penis from behind his zip. Stroking it, with a pained looked on his face, he said, ‘It’s an f’en condition, man, and it’s cock-teasers like you who give it to a guy. You’re in here pashing, and you’re turning me on, and you won’t let me go all the way, and that can make a guy sick.’