by Candice Fox
Nevertheless, Imogen took me on, and Imogen started nagging me to get help. So I started trudging with all the huffing melancholy of a teenager at church to a basement room of the Surry Hills police station every Sunday to sit under the fluorescent lights and listen to tales of horror and fear. It made Imogen happy. It made Anthony happy. I considered it my community service.
Somewhere, sometime, somebody set up a support group in a particular way and now all support groups are set up like that, whether you’re trying to get over being sexually assaulted in a public toilet or you’re addicted to crack. You’ve got the grey plastic fold-out tables pushed against one wall, the veneer pulling away from the corners and the top stained by the rims of coffee cups set down meaningfully, mid-conversation, to indicate concern. You’ve got the two large steel urns full of boiling water for coffee and tea, the ones that will, if you go anywhere near them, even so much as to fill in your name on the sign-in sheet, mercilessly burn some part of you. There’s no avoiding the coffee-urn burn. To this you add a collection of uncomfortable plastic fold-out chairs forming a circle just tight enough to inspire that quiet kind of social terror made of things like accidental knee-touching, airborne germs and unavoidable eye contact. And voilà! You’ve got a support group.
There were fifteen chairs set out on the industrial grey carpet and Anthony was sitting in one when I arrived. I responded to his presence with a wave of paralysing nausea. Getting over a painkiller and alcohol addiction makes you respond to everything with nausea. You get nausea in the middle of sex. It lasts for months.
I’d worked with the bald-headed, cleft-chinned Detective Charters and his partner for about two weeks when my former partner committed suicide and the bigwigs were trying to find me someone else as a playmate. I’d have liked to have stayed with him. He was inspiring – not in the cheesy internet quote way, but in a real way, a way that gets you out of bed. He was somehow still enthusiastic about justice and the rule of law and collaring crims like it was a calling, even though his own seventeen-year-old son was in prison for five years for accidentally leaving a mate with brain damage from a one-punch hit at a New Year’s Eve party. I figured if Anthony could get out of bed after that, I could get out of bed after Martina being killed (me allowing her to be killed) and Eden almost dying (me standing there doing nothing while Eden almost died). If Anthony could keep on keeping on after everything that had happened to him, maybe I could get over all the women I’d failed in my life, eventually. Maybe I could get over not doing anything about my father’s long, slow emotional abuse of my mother. Not saving Martina. Not saving Eden. Not being there when my ex-wife had a stillborn child.
Anthony had been as powerless to save his own son. And yet here he was, smiling at me as I came to sit by his side. Maybe being powerless was okay.
When I’d asked him, Anthony put his unshakeable spirit down to the support groups. He attended one for drug addiction, one for victims of crime and one for anxiety. I thought I’d give it a whirl. It would shut Imogen up.
‘Francis,’ he said. I cradled my coffee and licked my scalded pinky.
‘Anthony.’
‘How’s the comedown?’
‘I think I’m past the shakes.’ I held out my hand for him to see, flat in the air before us. My thumb was twitching slightly. ‘I’d still murder you for a scotch, though, old mate.’
‘I reckon scotch might be on your trigger words list, mate.’
‘Probably. It’s a big list.’
Some recovery groups don’t let you say particular words, ‘trigger words’, because some members are getting over a level of addiction so great that even the sound of the name of their drug of choice can send them into a relapse spiral. Even if you’re not an addict, but you’re in a support group parallel to addiction groups such as Victims of Crime or After Domestic Violence or Incest Survivors, you have to acknowledge that some members of the group might also be enrolled in addiction groups, so for their benefit you don’t say the words.
The first rule of Drug Recovery Group is that you do not talk about drugs at recovery group.
It sounded like a whole lot of bullshit to me. I wasn’t sure all the tiptoeing around really helped anyone. I’d tested my trigger-happiness, said ‘Endone’ loudly and slowly alone in my car, like a little kid whispering a swearword at the back of class. I had not gone and started popping pills. But I was a rule-follower by nature, so I didn’t say ‘Endone’ in or anywhere near the meetings I attended. I didn’t say ‘scotch’, or ‘bourbon’, or ‘cocaine’, or ‘ecstasy’, or ‘Valium’, or ‘oxy’, all guilty pleasures of mine at some time over the previous months. I mentioned that I had a variety of ‘drugs of choice’ at my first meeting when I introduced myself, but I hadn’t shared since.
In fact, I hadn’t said anything. Imogen had told me to ‘go’ to the meetings. She hadn’t told me to ‘participate’.
People stopped milling around the treacherous urns when the facilitator, a hard-edged little blonde woman named Megan, came into the room with her large folder of notes and handouts. About twenty-five of her photocopied handouts were in the bottom of my car, boot-printed and crumpled, hidden in the undergrowth of a forest of takeaway containers and paper bags. Their titles peer at me from beneath old newspapers and cardboard boxes. Six ways to beat negative thoughts. How to tell your friends you’re in danger of self-harm. When ‘no’ means ‘no’. Sometime after the first meeting, I lost my eight-step grief diary. I hadn’t even put my name on it. Diaries are for little girls.
When Megan was in place the people around me joined in the opening mantra in a badly timed monotone reminiscent of the obligatory and dispassionate ‘good morning’ we used to give Mrs Towers in the third grade.
‘I am on my way to a place beyond vengeance, a place beyond anger, a place beyond fear. I am on my way to a place of healing, and I take a new step every day.’
I didn’t say the Victims of Crime mantra. It was way too cuddly for me. I didn’t know what Megan’s story was, but if she’d made up the mantra herself it sounded to me like she was making a big deal of being bag-snatched or something. There is no place beyond anger. Everybody’s angry to some degree. Nuns are angry at sinners. Kindergarten teachers are angry at the government. When you’ve come up against violence, real violence – you get punched by your husband for the first time, or someone pulls a knife on you in the regular, sunny traffic of a Thursday morning commute – you realise there is no place beyond anger. It’s in there. In everyone. No matter what you put on top of it, no matter how long you starve it or lock it up or deny it. Anger is primal. It’s in our DNA.
‘We’ve got a couple of new members with us tonight,’ Megan said as Justin, the group kiss-ass, brought her a paper cup of green tea. Justin had been gay-bashed to within an inch of his life on Mardi Gras night when he was twenty-one. Victims of Crime was his life. ‘This is Aamir and Reema.’
The Muslim couple with their backs to the door nodded. Reema was looking deep into her empty paper cup like she’d found a window out of the room. I was jealous. She adjusted the shoulders of her dress nervously, and her husband sat forward in his seat, a big man, his hands clasped between his knees.
‘Hi, Aamir,’ everyone said. ‘Hi, Reema.’
‘Now you don’t have to share,’ Megan assured them. ‘No one has to share in these groups. Sometimes it can be healing just to listen to the stories from those around us and to recognise that the trauma we have experienced in the wake of serious crime is not unique, and neither is the journey to wellness. Sometimes we like to start the meeting with some “triumphs of the week” or with some readings. But it’s a pretty fluid structure here.’
‘We don’t mind sharing,’ Aamir said. He shrugged. The anger tight in his shoulders and jaw. I could see it. Anthony, beside me, could see it. You get to know the look of a man on the edge of punching someone when you’re a young cop wandering among groups of homeless in the Cross, Blacktown, Parramatta. Bopping around the clubs on G
eorge Street while groups of men hoot and holler at women from cars. It becomes like a flag.
‘Well, good.’ Megan smiled. ‘That’s great. Like I said, there’s no pressure. Some of our members have never shared.’ She glanced at me. I felt nauseated. ‘This is a supportive environment where we have attendee-centric mechanisms –’
‘I’ll share.’ Aamir stood up suddenly. He was even bigger standing. No one bothered telling the huge man that standing wasn’t part of the group dynamic, that in fact it intimidated some of the rape survivors. He rubbed his hands up and down the front of his polo shirt, leaving light sweat stains. ‘I’ll start by asking if anyone here in the group knows me? If you know my wife?’
I was confused. It was great. I hadn’t felt anything but nausea and boredom in all the sessions I’d attended, so this was a novel start to the night. The group members looked at each other. Looked at Aamir. Aamir shrugged again.
‘No? No? You don’t know me? You’ve never seen me before?’ Aamir’s stark black eyebrows were high on his sweating brow. He did a little half-turn, as though members might recognise his back, the little tendrils of black hair curling on the nape of his thick neck. His wife wiped her face with her hand. No one spoke. Anthony examined the man’s face.
‘I don’t think they underst–’ Megan chanced.
‘My son Ehan was abducted one hundred and forty-one days ago,’ Aamir said. He went to his chair and sat down. ‘One hundred and forty-one days ago two men in a blue car took my eight-year-old son from a bus stop on Prairie Vale Road, Wetherill Park. He has not been seen since.’
He paused. We all waited.
‘You don’t know me, or my wife, because there has been little or no coverage of this abduction in the media. We’ve had one nationally televised press conference and one newspaper feature article. That’s it.’
Aamir was a lion wrapped in a man. The woman across the circle from him, who’d been in a bank hold-up and now suffered panic attacks, was cowering in her seat, pulling at her ponytail. Megan opened her mouth to offer something, some condolence, some segue back into the normality of group sharing, but Aamir raged on, a spewing of well-practised words with which he had assaulted anyone who would listen since his son disappeared.
‘If Ehan was a little blond-haired white boy named Ian and we lived in Potts Point, we’d still be all over the national news.’
‘Oh, um.’ Megan looked at me for help.
‘We’d have a two hundred thousand dollar reward and Dick Smith flying a fucking banner from a fucking blimp somewhere. But we’ve had nothing. Two days the phone rang off the hook, and then silence. I forget sometimes that he’s gone. Every night at eight o’clock, no matter where I am, no matter what I’m doing, I think, It’s Ehan’s bedtime. I have to go say goodnight.’
Megan widened her eyes at me.
‘What are you looking at me for?’ I said. The sickness swirled in me.
‘Oh, I wasn’t.’ Megan snapped her head back to Aamir. ‘I wasn’t. Sorry, Frank, I was just thinking and you were in my line of sight and –’
‘Are you a journalist?’ Aamir turned on me. I didn’t know how I’d been brought into the exchange until Megan buried her face in her notebook. The same thing she’d done when I signed on to the group.
‘No,’ I said. I looked at Aamir. ‘No, I’m not a journalist. My girlfriend was murdered. I’m the only other person in the group who’s here for murder-victim support. That’s why she’s staring at me. She wants me to say something hopeful to you.’
‘Our son wasn’t murdered,’ Reema said.
‘Well, Megan sure seems to think he was.’
‘I never said that!’ Megan gasped.
‘Your girlfriend was murdered.’ Aamir sunk back down to his seat. He was so far on the edge of it I didn’t know how he was upright. He hovered, legs bent, inches from me. His huge black eyes were locked on mine. He knew his son was dead. And he was angry. White-hot-flame angry at everyone he laid eyes on.
‘She was murdered. Yes,’ I said.
‘What was her name?’
‘Martina.’
‘And what happened after she was murdered?’ Aamir asked.
‘What do you mean?’
‘What happened?’ he insisted. ‘What happened then?’
‘Nothing,’ I shrugged. Everyone was looking at me. I licked my lips. Shrugged again. ‘Nothing. She was murdered. She’s gone. There’s nothing … afterwards, if that’s what you mean.’
Aamir watched me. We could have been the only people in the room.
‘Nothing happens afterwards,’ I said. ‘There’s no … resolution. You go to work. You come home. You come to these groups and you –’ I gestured to the coffee machine. ‘You drink coffee. You say the mantra. There’s no afterwards.’
Everyone looked at Megan to deny or confirm my assessment. She opened her folder, shuffled the papers, collected her thoughts. One of the urns started reboiling itself in the taut seconds of silence and I heard the spitting of its droplets on the plastic table top.
‘Let’s look at some handouts,’ Megan said.
Anthony was waiting for me by the vending machine after the meeting. We walked up the stairs and onto the street.
‘That was a bit harsh,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘The whole “there’s no afterwards” thing.’
‘Reality is often harsh,’ I said. We paused to watch Aamir and Reema walking to their car. The big angry man glanced back at me as he opened the passenger door for his wife. His expression was unreadable. It was the first time that his expression had been unreadable since I had laid eyes on him an hour earlier. The rage was gone, replaced by something else. His shoulders were inches lower. I didn’t know what had taken over from the boiling hot fury that I saw in the meeting room, but whatever it was, it was cold.
‘Do you really believe that?’ Anthony asked me. ‘That it means nothing?’
‘Murder?’
‘Yes.’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I do. You don’t get over it. You don’t realise the mystical fucking meaning in it. You don’t accept that it, like everything, happens for a reason. Come on, Tone,’ I scoffed at him. He exhaled smoke from his cigarette.
‘Every night at eight o’clock that guy tries to say goodnight to his dead kid.’ I nodded at Aamir’s car as it pulled into the street. ‘And he’ll be doing it until the day he dies.’
She always felt better when night was falling. The darkness folded over her like a blanket, protective. Light had never been a friend to Tara. It seemed to fall on all of her at once, seemed to wriggle into her creases and folds and dance around her curves, to expose her every surface. Tara always had plenty of surface. She’d never been able to keep track of all there was of her, and Joanie was there to point out the parts she forgot, those bulges and bubbles and handles of flesh that slipped and slid from under hems and over belts.
Pull your shirt down, Tara. Pull your pants up, Tara. Pull your sleeves down, Tara. Jesus. Everyone can see you.
Everyone can see you.
At the dinner table Joanie would grab and pinch and twist a slab of flesh Tara didn’t know was exposed, a roll above her jeans or the tender white flesh on the backs of her arms. You couldn’t cover Tara with a tent, Joanie said. She could feed an African village. Getting downstairs to dinner became a journey she couldn’t take, so she began to take her meals up in her attic bedroom, staring at the park, the runners going round and round between the trees. Sometimes getting from the bed to the computer was too much. Tara simply lay between the sheets and dreamed about African people cutting her up and sharing her, carving down her thighs in neat slices like a Christmas ham until there was only bone – gorgeous, strong, light bone. Bone that shone, redemptive and clean. Tara lost herself dreaming.
The girls at school giggled at her bulges, the blue bruises that peppered them. Though decades had passed, their voices still bumped and butted around the attic room, red balloons of hate floating
.
Why do you call your mum ‘Joanie’, Tara?
Doesn’t she love you?
Tonight Tara stood by the windows looking over the park and watched the night falling, the bats rising, and remembered her mother. It was nine months since Tara had woken from her coma, nine months since Joanie had gone, but Tara could still hear her voice sometimes, hear her footsteps in the hall as she readied herself for some party or dinner or charity function, as she pulled on her silk-lined coat and checked herself in the hall mirror. Joanie with her elegant ash-blonde hair falling everywhere in filigree curls.
In time, all the light of the warm day dissipated, replaced by a wonderful darkness. Tara stood by the window and watched the runners on the paths in Centennial Park recede into shadows, only blinking lights indicating their jolting journeys as they continued, round and round, round and round. Then rolled away.
The Tara who watched them now was very different from the one who had watched them when her parents were still alive. Tara hugged herself in the little window, let her fingers wander over the new landscape of her body. Bumps and ridges and flaps of flesh as hard as stone, lines of scars running up her arms where the fatty flesh had been sucked dry, cut, pulled taut, stapled. Bones poked through the mess at her hips and ribs and collarbones. Her face was a mystery. She hadn’t looked at herself since that first glimpse as she was waking from the coma. She spent the first month in the hospital in silence, lying, feeling herself. Neurologists came and played with her, confirmed that she could, indeed, understand them. Then a nurse had emerged from the fog and quietly told her what she’d done to herself. Tara had looked at her new self in the mirror. Touched the glass, made sounds. To her it had been laughter, but to the nurse it had sounded like snarls.