For a Girl

  They came to my room, the two of them, after their parents had been called to come and get them. ‘Please,’ one of them said, ‘they’re going to expel us.’ They’d come from the country to the school and now they’d have to go home. They were like young gazelles caught in a leg trap and in a panic. I felt awful for them. I said I’d do what I could.

  I went to see the principal with whom I’d gone back and forth to the pastoral care course every week. ‘I just want you to know,’ I said to her, ‘that if you expel them, you will end their chances in life. You will harm them.’ It was all I could think of to say. There were no local schools that were as good as the school these girls were in. ‘They are just really good kids, really good kids, and they’ve done one wrong thing.’ They’d actually done many wrong things, but I didn’t want to emphasise that.

  The principal looked at me. I had spoken with considerable passion.

  ‘You know,’ she said, ‘before we did the course I would have been affronted at your saying that. I would have dressed you down, a girl of your age thinking you know something. But I can see this is really important to you, and I admire your wanting to help these girls. I really do.’ She looked at me kindly. ‘But I run a school for boarders. Their parents entrust me with their entire welfare. If girls leave the school, they are expelled. They all know this when they start. My hands are tied.’

  I watched the girls pack their bags. They were angrier with me than with the school because they’d hoped I would help them and I hadn’t.

  ‘All best,’ I said before they left the dorm. ‘It’s just another stage.’

  They didn’t believe me. I didn’t believe me either.

  A few months after the pastoral care course ended, my teacher and her husband turned up at a funeral. Sister Katie from the Brown Sisters had died of cancer.

  I’d been to visit Katie in her last weeks. She’d asked for me and one of the other nuns called me. She looked at me—Katie had eyes that saw right through you—and said I didn’t need to be forgiven. None of us did, she said.

  I couldn’t cope with her honesty or her dying. I left soon after, told her I’d see her again soon, knowing full well that I wouldn’t.

  My teacher and her husband didn’t know Katie, but they came to her funeral with my friend Jessica. There was a lone piper playing ‘Amazing Grace’. We sang ‘One Day at a Time’. Katie had asked her friend Father Brian to do the eulogy instead of the Archbishop. I don’t remember what Father Brian said, except that he knew her and loved her and you could tell that.

  Jessica left straight after the funeral, smiling sheepishly at me on her way out, but my teacher and her husband remained behind and we talked. My teacher suggested we go for ice-cream in New Farm Park and I said yes. Later, my teacher’s husband told me he knew I’d be at the funeral and he’d wanted to see me.

  I re-entered their lives. They re-entered mine. Just like that. There was no sex anymore, not ever again, but we acted like we were friends to one another. It was almost as if the things that had happened had never actually happened.

  Later that year, my teacher and her husband went to live in Melbourne, where he was posted and she had a job in the Catholic Education Office. We remained in contact. I kept the details of what had happened between us a secret. I kept the secret.

  People would ask me why on earth I left a cadetship as a journalist. I told them I left to travel. Where did you travel? Melbourne. I remember once someone laughing at me. They had expected me to say Europe, America, but all I’d done was go to Melbourne. These questions people asked about my past were excruciating for me. I had a secret. I hadn’t meant it to be a secret, but once it was a secret, I couldn’t tell it. And once I kept the secret for a little while, it sealed up behind me. It was impossible to go back.

  Before I knew it, the person I had been became part of the secret too.

  A lifeline

  I QUIT MY JOB AS a boarding supervisor not long after the two girls were expelled. I knew they’d broken the rules but I didn’t like what happened to them, and while being back in an institution had been strangely soothing, it was also unsettling.

  I wanted a different job but the recession was worsening and jobs were more scarce than ever. I liked working with words and paper so I wrote around to government departments, colleges and universities—I rang them first to check they had a stationery department, figuring if an organisation was big enough to have a stationery department, it must do plenty of writing—and sent my senior results, references and an offer to do any job at all.

  I got a response from the director of the External Studies Unit at Mount Gravatt Teachers’ College. His name was John Schmidt and he was one of a number of people who threw me a lifeline in the next few years. When he interviewed me, he laughed. He had the loudest laugh I’d ever heard. ‘You can hear him three offices away,’ his secretary told me.

  After I started work, John told me that my letter had been circulated to all the college’s departments by the personnel clerk. John had seen my senior results, which were good, and moved heaven and earth to create a job for me. That was what he was like. He thought clever people could do anything. He didn’t care that I’d left a cadetship in journalism either, something interviewers always asked me about. When he mentioned it and I stumbled, he just said people do odd things all the time and laughed his loud laugh.

  John thought someone as clever as me could run his records system, which was precious to him, but after a few minutes of watching me try he decided I might be better suited to more basic tasks. I had no administrative experience and cleverness doesn’t help in every situation. I sent his records system into catastrophic failure. They needed a computer person to fix it.

  We played bridge every lunch hour because, as John said, sweeping his straggly blond hair back from his forehead, bridge was more important than life. It was certainly more important than lunch. I became a reasonably good clerk and a competent bridge player in External Studies.

  After a month, I trained as a large-scale photocopier operator and it was here that I really found my metier. I could set daily copy targets and exceed them. I could spend all day reading the material the lecturers wrote for the distance education students. I was surrounded by words and paper, which I loved.

  I sold my car—the one my teacher’s husband helped me buy—to pay off credit card debts and bought a Datsun 1600 that had the motor of some other car. It felt like independence, which I badly needed, although the car had a number of problems.

  I had several crashes in the 1600, one of which damaged the back door so much I had to tie it shut. One night, when the police picked me up for speeding, they saw the back door and they saw the ignition which hung under the dashboard. They took the car off the road and I was ordered to make it roadworthy or sell it. I did the latter, borrowed money and bought another car, a Mazda 626, a good car I owned for years.

  The fact I could manage on my own to buy cars that worked was important to me. My teacher’s husband had known everything about cars. It felt like a step away from him when I could choose and buy a car without his help.

  I was still drinking to disappear. I left External Studies for a job as a computer operator. I enrolled in journalism at the Queensland Institute of Technology, converted to full-time study while still in a full-time job, got a part-time job to pay my debts. I did not want unstructured time, not ever. I filled every moment of every day with plans. I did not think of the past. I worked and worked and worked, and then I drank and disappeared.

  Louise was the first friend I told a little bit of the secret. We were up at Mount Coot-tha, looking over the city of Brisbane. I said, quite suddenly and before I could think not to, ‘Louise, the year before last, I had a baby and gave it away for adoption.’ I called baby Ruth ‘it’. I had never called her anything else.

  In Women Who Run with the Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola Estés tells old stories she then analyses from a Jungian perspective. One is a story about secrets and what they
do to us. A maid from a village is murdered by the woodcutter’s son who buries her body in the woods. Reeds grow up from the place where she is buried and shepherds pull up the reeds and make pipes from them. When they play them, the pipes sing of the murder and the woodcutter’s son is discovered. Estés says of secrets that they make us seal off parts of ourselves so that we can’t live our lives fully. We can’t live. Eventually, they come up out of the past like those reeds.

  Telling Louise the first part of the secret was like the first reed. But secrets have such shame attached to them. I expected Louise would be disappointed in me. I thought I might even lose her friendship. But Louise was not disappointed. Instead, she became dearer, more loyal. She asked me what I had—it took me a moment to realise she meant what kind of baby— and I told her it was a girl. She put her hand on mine and said nothing.

  I didn’t tell all the truth, the truth about my teacher and her husband. It was enough that I had told her this much and she had not shunned me.

  By this time, I’d moved out of home and was living in a flat with Ann, the young woman I’d met at the pastoral care course. She was working part-time as a counsellor, and I was working and studying.

  My teacher and her husband came home to visit that Christmas. My teacher’s husband had a fight with our landlord, who was a difficult person. I don’t remember the details of the fight—my teacher’s husband may never have told me all of them—but Ann arrived home one evening to find that we had been evicted. Ann knew nothing about my teacher and her husband. She didn’t even know I’d had a baby. Like everyone in my life, she thought they were older people who’d helped me. I was troubled, and they’d helped me.

  At the time, my teacher and her husband were staying with his parents. They’d started a renovation on their Brisbane house which was unfinished. They’d raised the house and put in a slab underneath. My teacher’s husband felt bad that he’d got us kicked out, he said. He said we could move into their house while they were in Melbourne for minimal rent. So we did.

  The house wasn’t easy to live in. Upstairs there were bedrooms and what used to be the lounge. Downstairs the floors were concrete. The kitchen was made up of old benches and makeshift shelves. It was a house that held memories for me, but I never noticed that.

  My teacher’s husband told me, on their visit to Brisbane the following year, that he could have finished the house and charged much more rent to someone, a family, but he wanted to help me after everything that had happened. He wanted to make up for what he’d done, he said.

  A year later, Louise and Lib and I went on a driving holiday to Adelaide. We were passing through Melbourne on the way and we stayed a couple of nights with my teacher and her husband. I was relieved I had my friends with me. I felt uncomfortable with my teacher and particularly with her husband, although I didn’t know why.

  I didn’t associate being back in Melbourne with the past. I didn’t think of the past. I didn’t think of the baby I had given away to strangers. It was as if the past me no longer existed.

  By this time, my teacher and her husband had had a baby themselves, a girl. The baby was there with them, but I don’t remember anything about her from that trip, just that my teacher was tired and in pyjamas all the time. They hadn’t told me they were expecting a baby until late in the pregnancy. I didn’t feel anything when they did tell me. I didn’t connect their daughter with what happened to me. I didn’t connect her with baby Ruth. I didn’t think about baby Ruth, not ever. I remained disconnected from the person I had been.

  I can tell you almost nothing about their daughter. She was a bright toddler, I think, although I’ve never met a dull one. I remember babysitting her when my teacher and her husband came to Brisbane to visit and taking her out to a friend’s place, where she wouldn’t settle to sleep. My friend said her mother would put rum in their bottles of milk with some sugar when they wouldn’t sleep so I said yes, let’s do that. I know I did this. I remember doing it. It confirmed something for me: that I was a bad person, an unfit person.

  Thinking back now to just how much I was in denial during that time in my life, I am only grateful I didn’t harm her more seriously. I was so disconnected from myself, I might have.

  After we got back from Melbourne, I met a boy I liked, Simon, a friend of Louise’s boyfriend Gerard. Simon’s father’s big sister had been a friend of my mother’s at school.

  Simon and I went out together as if we were normal young people. We went sailing, to concerts, bushwalking. Simon was studying. He used to come over to my place, my teacher and her husband’s house, to study while I was at work and then we’d eat dinner and go see a movie.

  Simon’s family had casual Sunday dinners with their kids and their kids’ friends. I didn’t fit in. I felt exposed, like they knew me, knew how bad I was underneath. They were much more involved in the Catholic religion than our family. They valued intellect and discussed current affairs. I started going to Mass which I hadn’t done for some years. Every Sunday morning, I read newspapers so I would know something about what was happening in the world in case I was asked questions on Sunday evening. I had no confidence. I was filled with shame.

  At some stage, Simon and I decided we wanted to have sex but even this was full of shame. For me, there was no question of whether to have the light on or off. It could never be on because then he would know, when he saw the marks on my belly and breasts, that I’d been pregnant, that I’d had a baby.

  I so much wanted to feel normal, like a girl who could choose to have sex. I went on the pill and I turned out the light and we had sex. But I was not there. I’d learned how to pretend to be there from television and movies, but I was not there.

  Simon met my teacher and her husband when they visited. He said he was nervous about meeting them, more nervous than when he met my parents, because my teacher and her husband had been so important to me. He liked them and they liked him.

  Eventually I told Simon I’d had a baby I’d given up for adoption. I didn’t tell him who the father was. He broke off with me not long after and married a girl who suited him better. I’m sure it was hard for him to understand me. Even I didn’t know what was happening. Sometimes I would drink until I couldn’t think. Sometimes I’d withdraw from whoever I was with, and long to disappear altogether. I was frightened myself of what was happening and I didn’t understand. How could someone else understand?

  My teacher sent me a letter after Simon and I broke up. It was like a letter from a mother or an older sister. Even if you and Simon love each other, she wrote, it is no guarantee you will make a good marriage together. I accepted her advice, thought it wise.

  Over time, the dark periods I experienced became more debilitating. I worked obsessively and drank, and worked obsessively and drank. I put on weight, took it off, took too much off, became a shadow, put it on again, became fat. I met the definition for anorexia, for bulimia, which I read about in a magazine. I didn’t care. I liked the idea that I could control my body, which felt so far away from who I was, that I could eat or not and determine my size. It was a matter of control for me and I very much wanted to be in control.

  Louise and Lib had no frame of reference to guide them on what was wrong with me, but they remained my friends. They waited out my dark periods, when I withdrew from them and the world, and then they came back to me. I didn’t know why they remained my friends through those years but they did and I am still thankful.

  One night, while drunk and on my own, I cut myself up both arms, narrow stripes I made with a blade I’d broken out of a disposable razor. At work I had to wear long sleeves for weeks until the cuts healed. It really frightened me that I did this. I was worried about my drinking, which was out of control, but once I’d done this, hurt myself on purpose, I knew I needed help. I’d never heard of self-harming, but I knew what I’d done was the start of something frightening.

  I found a counsellor, a social worker, through a youth worker friend who said he was great. His name was
Mick and he was a big bear of a man who smoked cigarettes and ate meat pies for breakfast. He didn’t care much about my drinking. He said he thought drinking was a way to deaden pain for me. He was more concerned about my working, he said. It was no wonder I needed to drink, given the pressure I put myself under. I worked long days, starting at 5 or 6 am and not finishing until after 7 pm. I was busy, always busy, always finding more things to do. I was studying full-time as well, trying to do as well as I could in a journalism degree.

  Mick became impatient when I didn’t make connections. I told him I’d had a baby and about the relationship with my teacher and her husband, but he concentrated on other things: on my family of origin, as he called it, on what Mum and Dad had done as parents, on my teacher and her husband as parents too, parents I’d given a special power to. That’s how he framed what happened: that I’d given them special power and I could take it back.

  I started having vivid dreams in which I was chased by a monster, knowing someone was in the house but unable to scream, trying to get away from someone who was catching up, catching up. I’d wake from these dreams sweating, my heart pounding, and remain awake through the dark hours. Some nights it took a long time for the panic to subside. Mick told me I was doing good work.

  A few months into my therapy, I decided to break from my teacher and her husband. It felt different this time. It wasn’t that I felt I was bad. I was starting to see that they were not helping me as I had believed. Although I had no idea yet what it had truly cost, I knew that our relationship hadn’t helped me.

  This was the first time I thought my teacher and her husband had done any harm at all. Until then, I believed I had done the harm to them. I am an otherwise intelligent woman, but I was unable to see something that other people have seen from the outset. Some people think I am unbelievably stupid. I am not.