Traumata

by Meera Atkinson

  One day I go down to the Federation homestead looking for Michelle. The Rutherfords’ door is always open and the rooms are bright and airy. I walk through the empty house, searching for signs of life but finding none. I reach Michelle’s bedroom, where I’m startled to see a tall, sandy-haired young man lying on her bed reading. It’s Jeremy, back from his latest adventure: Spain. We talk. We start spending time together. It feels like destiny. He’s not the handsome surfer I’ve imagined as The One, but I’m losing patience, and to my fifteen-year-old self he seems exotic and sophisticated. Most importantly he’s available, and for a girl in a hurry that’s everything.

  Jeremy’s not like anyone I’ve ever known. He’s only twenty-one, but he has the air of an old man, jaded and knowing. He is bookish and smart and he aspires to write, a combination that leads him to cast himself as Humbert Humbert to my Lolita. He smokes roll-your-owns, mumbles and shuffles around barefoot in second-hand suits. His hair is a wiry mess and he drinks vast amounts of cheap wine. He has round-the-clock stubble. I don’t know if I’m impressed by him or embarrassed by him. I already understand the currency of sex appeal, as I’ve spent years learning the sly art of manipulation, testing the ways being cute or sexy or childlike or flirtatious or suggestive or playful can get me what I want. But in my mind, I won’t be a woman till I’ve Done It.

  The topic of losing my virginity became a running theme in conversations with my mother and friends, until the day came when I confided to my mother that I’d decided to go all the way with Jeremy. She took me to a doctor who fitted me with a diaphragm. One night soon after, when my mother was out for the evening, Jeremy and I had sex on my single bed. I was expecting blood, but I don’t remember there being any. It hurt – I do remember that – and it was over quickly and the heavens did not open and nothing was revealed and afterwards I did not feel transformed. I felt a sense of satisfaction, though, swanning around in my short satiny dressing-gown the next morning. I suspect I imagined it meant that childhood, with its attendant dependence and sufferings, was over.

  If I had been honest with myself I would have admitted to disappointment, but to be fair to Jeremy I don’t know if any lover could have led me to revelations then. I was so entirely oriented to the notion that I existed to please men, and that my body was for their pleasure rather than mine, that I was not yet ready to explore its depths and delights in the presence of a man. Over time I learned to perform sex and fake it, which seemed to suit most men just fine. I was not willing, or able, to desire, to surrender control. I had only just discovered the power-by-proxy that came from being desired, and I was milking it for all it was worth. After years of gendered ‘normalised trauma’ and heteronormative Be Beautiful training, my focus was all wrong. There was no room for anyone else. It was all about me, and yet there was no room for me either. Sex was a facade, a function, an end of a means.

  Jeremy has already been north, and he tells me about the Top End. He speaks of Darwin as a Mecca. It’s not so much the place itself he waxes lyrical about; it’s the mindset, its experiential essence. He describes a roughed-up wonder-world populated by a loose-knit network of nomads who crisscross each other’s lives and days in a cosmic ballet of anti-establishment bonhomie. It’s less than five years since Cyclone Tracy flattened the community, but Jeremy makes it sound like the place to be, and I become enthralled. Jeremy is charmed by my precociousness and promises to take me away. London’s not yet on my radar – that’s a year off. I’m still only fifteen, freshly deflowered, and what I’m most in the mood for is an epic road trip.

  I’m not sure why I latched on to Jeremy’s Darwin, why going there became an all-consuming mission. Probably it was because it gave me a vision, and I needed a vision. It was the furthest, most unimaginable site within reach – an irresistible destination. I was floundering around, not sure who I was, what I wanted to do with my life, or what kind of people I liked. Jeremy, for his part, had strong preferences about who was, and who was not, good company. He scoffed at the earnest idealism of flower-power hippies, and was nonplussed by ‘punk’, which in any event seemed a tad redundant in post-near socialist, sunny Australia, where the living was relatively easy (so long as you were white). Jeremy and his friends were sardonic, relaxed, generous and anti-fashion. They tended to be literary-minded, to be hard drinkers, and to share contempt for wealth, the workaday world and materialism. The cardinal sin in Jeremy’s eyes was pretension. For his ilk, raised on The Catcher in the Rye, phoney was the worst thing you could be. Darwin became the symbol of their doctrine, the spiritual home of a tribe of outcasts. It was not a tropical paradise in which to find yourself. It was simply a place to be.

  In the Sydney autumn of ’79, it shimmered like a Shangri-La and I couldn’t wait to get there. Our departure was presented to my family as a fait accompli. I told my mother she had two choices: she could let me go, in which case I would stay in contact and let her know where I was, or else I would run away. My grandfather drove us up Parramatta Road to look at bombs in second-hand car yards. We bought a puce-pink EK Holden station wagon with orange nylon curtains for a few hundred dollars and threw a mattress in the back. Jeremy packed the car with boxes of books and I chucked in a bag of clothes. We hit the highway on a crisp autumn day.

  I look back now in disbelief. How the hell did we pull it off? My terms left my mother few options, and she was, predictably, hesitant and worried. My grandparents frowned upon my leaving home so young and objected in their muted way, though Glady seemed more distressed that I was abandoning my mother – or at least that’s the perception I’m left with. Jeremy’s mother also disapproved, but no one put up much of a fight and members of both his family and mine showed up cheerily to our goodbye party as if I were not a minor, about to leave town with a man six years my senior who was technically a criminal for having bedded me.

  As I write this, I feel conflicted. I want to climb into a time machine, walk back into the Rutherford homestead where that party is taking place, and take each one of those adults – who knew so much better than I did how vulnerable I was – to task. I want to thank them for letting me be the wild and wilful young thing I was, for letting me go. I want to ask, what were you thinking? I want to say, hey, it was the ’70s. It was a different world.

  The road trip begins sedately enough. Our relationship is new. Jeremy and I are still getting to know one another, or what little of ourselves we’ll allow the other, allow ourselves, to know. I sit in the passenger seat with my feet on the dashboard, watching the world go by, probing Jeremy for his fascinating thoughts and feelings about me, helping make the practical decisions – where we’ll stop, for how long and for what purpose. We amble through hippie country. Bellingen, Nimbin, Mullumbimby, sleeping in the wagon parked in secluded spots where I practise my fledgling sexual skills and sleep with my underpants drying over the elastic curtain cords.

  The car breaks down on a winding road deep in the hinterland of far northern New South Wales. The local mechanic takes pity on us and tows us to his garage, where we live in the wagon for days on end while waiting for a new engine. His wife delivers food on a tray every now and then, and we sit in the front seat with a view of her Hills hoist. We run out of things to say to each other. There are only so many times in one day I can get him to tell me I’m beautiful. I’m restless. I turn to the boxes of books and for the first time in my life I begin to read in earnest. Jeremy has varied taste but he tends towards braggart writers like J.P. Donleavy, Henry Miller and Charles Bukowski. I discover the modernist classics. Dorothy Parker and T.S. Eliot are my favourites. I learn Eliot’s ode to ageing – ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ – off by heart; the irony is lost on me. I don’t know it, but this move, this digging down into the boxes, is the beginning of who I will become, the beginning of the vocation and education that will shape my adult life. I’m discovering the salve that will see me through everything to come. The books and songs that will make this life bearab
le. More, that will make it profound.

  ‘Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember,’ says Joan Didion. I struggle to remember what that girl thought, what she felt sitting there in the front seat, feet up on the dashboard, Hills hoist ahead, reading. They’re gone, those memories, vanished now in the tincture of time. Memory conforming to what I think I remember: the slow awakening to the other worlds in the pages of a book, in the minutes of a song, other worlds one can travel to, worlds that not only provide an escape from this one but also help make sense of it, or revel in its impossible quandaries, or lay bare its tender absurdities. I read Eliot’s ‘Portrait of a Lady’ and I am captivated by the rhythm of a passage. I recite it to myself over and over, transported by its musicality, tapping out the beat. I’m especially fond of the line about youth being cruel and having no remorse and smiling at situations it cannot see, followed by the narrator’s confession of his smiling, youthful sipping of tea. That irony is not lost on me.

  When I’m not reading or listening to music I’m crippled by self-consciousness. Not shyness exactly, for I can be a gregarious creature in my ambivert way. It’s more a relentless awareness of my own presence, of the effect I have. I harbour an excessive concern about what others think of me, how they view me, how they judge me. I know I’m pretty and I have a nice body, but that’s not good enough. I want to be excruciatingly beautiful, impossibly smart, exceptionally talented, worldly, charismatic, famous and dazzlingly special. I soak everything up, re-imagining my identity with the books my hand is drawn to, with each person I encounter, with every mile we clock up. I gaze out the window, fantasising about my future. I know this journey is only the start, and that Jeremy is only the first. I like Jeremy, but what I like even more is the way I see myself reflected in his eyes.

  At first, Jeremy’s lust for me was fun, but now I tire of its demands. I try to work out how much I can withhold and how much I must concede to keep the balance of power exactly how I want it. What I do like about sex, what I’m drunk on, is the fact that once you hook someone with it, or with the suggestion of it, you can make them do just about anything.

  I focused on pleasing Jeremy because there was some satisfaction in that. Besides, it was strategic: I needed him. The further north we headed, the more I felt myself in uncharted territory. Each mile pushed the familiarity of my childhood further behind. The fact that I had no ground beneath me didn’t bother me. My only fear was going back, back to childhood, to entrapment, to powerlessness. Anything else – any hardship, deprivation, misgiving or humiliation – was tolerable, even preferable, so long as it did not send me back.

  I didn’t realise how unusual it was for a girl my age to be on the road. If I missed home and my family I did not allow myself to acknowledge it. I was perplexed most of the time but I willed myself to appear at ease. Always on the move, I couldn’t anchor myself or weigh myself down to steadiness, and this was the paradoxical attraction of the transient life. It was as if I believed I could outrun myself if I moved fast enough, could outwit the terror and grief if I kept one step ahead of it. Years later, in rehab, I would learn that this is deemed a ‘geographical’: a misguided attempt, commonplace among addicts, to escape an unhealthy inner world by changing one’s external location and circumstances. I passed the time and amused myself by playing mind games with Jeremy, who flattered me and stroked my endlessly needy ego while providing a baseline of security in our ever-changing landscape.

  We enter Queensland and pick up two hitchhikers, Frank and Danny, and their two small dogs. I’m already weary of play-acting at a proper relationship and I’m grateful for new blood. Frank’s Aboriginal, from the Riverland, on the rebound from a bitter break-up, and Danny’s a light-hearted larrikin.

  The four of us have longwinded singalongs as we barrel down the highway. Jeremy likes to sing sacred songs (his favourite is ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee’) and he’s fond of Bob Dylan. I follow the rise and fall of his voice as he belts out the hymns, and watch his carolling profile, his permanent bed-hair blowing in the breeze of the open window. We listen to a lot of Leonard Cohen. We smoke rollies and survive on a diet of flagon wine, middies of beer, fast food and soup-kitchen slops. It’s the late ’70s, the halcyon days of social security. We have no fixed address and simply transfer from town to town, picking up counter cheques as we go. I have no problem collecting welfare despite my age. On cheque days we spend our money readily and enjoy our most substantial meal: a pub counter lunch. Most of the time, we beg on the street, pick through the car ashtray for decent butts, and siphon petrol out of parked cars in the dead of night, which has the added bonus of a (headachy) high. Personal hygiene is maintained in service-station bathrooms in between occasional showers. (Have you registered the thought ‘where was her mother?’ yet? If so, have you then reflexively wondered why you didn’t ask ‘where was her father?’?)

  I feel a niggling sensation when asking strangers for money or plucking butts from the EK’s ashtray, but I’m not aware this feeling is called shame. I’m not aware that shame is so woven into me that I no longer feel it as notable. It is a way of being that is normal. I am oblivious to it. I’ve reversed it into a point of pride. I romanticise poverty and scavenging. So do my companions. Perversely, we feel it makes us better than everyone else. We watch the plebs shuffling to work and back in their waking sleep, living their dull, conformist lives, and we pity them.

  I had little knowledge of Australian history and even less about Australian politics, though I was aware my family were Labor voters. But you didn’t have to be a political brainiac to sense the conservative chill across the state border. Queensland was Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s turf back then. I was appalled by the lines up the middle of Brisbane’s footpaths: those walking one way filed down one side, those going the other way up the other. It felt trapped in the 1950s. Women in house dresses baking pumpkin scones and men in Akubra hats working outdoors. The further north we went in the Sunshine State, the surer the menace in the air. There were places we were unwelcome. Between Brisbane and Townsville we’d often sleep out on beaches, and evenings were passed in parks drinking with local Aboriginal people. Once the police descended on such a gathering. Jeremy, Frank, Danny and I were ordered to move on. We did as we were told. The next day we were told that two of the women we’d been drinking with were taken off to the cells and raped.

  We reach Townsville and ferry over to Magnetic Island. We park the wagon in the car park of the pub down by the wharf and spend the night drinking with a local man in shorts. I pass the evening in a blacked-out blur. The next morning I find myself lying on the ground of the car park. The man in shorts is poised above me with a pair of scissors: he has sliced my dress open with a clean cut up the middle. He runs off when I wake, and the others sit up, stunned and hung over.

  I am shaken to the core. For the first time I acknowledge the danger in what I’m doing. I allow myself to feel – for a split second at least – how young I am, how alien the people I’m meeting. I have the bone-chilling realisation that men can be as threatening in my shining new adult life as they were in my childhood, that the power I think I have over them can, in an instant, be turned on its head. As the heat of the day gathers, I stand in a phone booth by the beach, crying down the line to my mother as the waves lap the shore. I don’t say what has happened, or how scared and lonely I am. I tell her only that I miss her and love her. She begs me to come home, her voice pitched between pain and panic. I refuse. I long to go home – to my mother, to comfort, to familiarity – but I tell myself I cannot. I have not yet reached my goal, have not yet made it to Darwin. Going home would mean accepting defeat, admitting that I’m a child and can’t cut it in the world of adults. I won’t give up, whatever the risks on the road.

  Despite this disturbing introduction to the island, we stay on, exploring its sparkling nooks and sublime crannies, lolling around on idyllic beaches with crystalline water in the perfect heat of
a tropical winter.

  I was not particularly attracted to Frank but he fitted the critical criteria: he was there, so we began an affair. Danny turned a blind eye, but when Jeremy made the inevitable discovery our little foursome turned suddenly sour. When I think back to this time I can’t help but wonder why Jeremy took me seriously enough to be as affected as he was, given my obvious incapacity for emotional connection or loyalty. But of course, despite his grand persona and erudite ramblings, he wasn’t far from boyhood himself. Though the tension was thick, we continued as a quartet, careening out of Townsville for the trek north-west to Darwin with a furious, suicidally speeding Jeremy at the wheel, with only semis for company on the numbing highway, and passing the odd tin shed in the dirt with a cattle dog out front.

  We cut across the border between Queensland and the Northern Territory on an incessantly nondescript road, and nothing seemed to change, except it did. If Queensland felt oppressive and stuck in time, the Northern Territory felt exposed and forgotten by time. If in Queensland the heat of the law was your biggest threat, in the Territory it was being left to your own devices, cast into a state of lawlessness, that could do you the greatest harm.

  By the time we reached Darwin I was exhausted. I was tired of being dirty, tired of being hungry, tired of the wagon, and tired of Jeremy, Frank and Danny. I needed to recuperate. I checked into the local women’s refuge the way most people check into a hotel. I spun some ‘he done me wrong’ line to the well-meaning women workers to justify my abuse of their favours. With no awareness that my own story was justification enough – I was, after all, a fifteen-year-old girl, 4,000 kilometres from home, fleeing trauma in the company of adult men – I lied. By then, scamming had become habitual; I no longer knew which of my stories or needs were real, and which of them were manufactured.