For a Girl

  I had already moved out of my teacher and her husband’s house into an apartment with Lib. I didn’t tell them I wanted a break; I just did it, stopped calling, didn’t return calls. Eventually, my teacher’s husband, who had always been the one to drive the relationship, stopped calling me too. It was such a relief.

  Byron kindness

  THIS MORNING I SWAM THE bay and thought I might die. I might die in the water, taken by a shark. The sea is so strange. We are a separate creature and yet part of the whole creature. We fear death and become part of death. I am terrified in the sea, terrified that I will end and by turns exultant that I am endless. A kayaker stopped beside me. ‘Two dive boats are launching off the beach,’ he said.

  I looked and saw the dive boats. I couldn’t work out why the kayaker was telling me about them, why he’d stopped in the middle of nowhere. He stayed beside me and it took a few moments more for me to realise he was watching over me so that the dive boats didn’t run me over on their way out to sea.

  ‘I’m a bigger shape than you in the water,’ he said, smiling awkwardly.

  I found myself crying into my goggles, having trouble treading water as I cleared them of my tears. I don’t know what the kayaker thought of my crying. He remained with me, gazing out to sea, his paddle across his lap.

  The dive boats whizzed past. The kayaker told me to have a nice one and paddled off.

  ‘You too,’ I called after him. ‘You have a day of days.’

  Ordinary men

  WHEN DAVID AND I WERE first together, I would become frightened sometimes when we started having sex and I would ask him to stop. He always did and never seemed resentful. Once I asked him how he managed to stop when we were well on the way to intercourse. ‘I just do,’ he said, ‘same as you.’ But men can’t stop, I said. They get to a point where they can’t stop. This was before he knew anything about my teacher and her husband and what had happened. He laughed. ‘Who told you that?’ I didn’t answer. ‘That’s crap,’ he said. Then he looked at my face. I don’t know what he saw, but he softened. ‘I can always stop,’ he said. ‘It’s all right. If someone told you something different, they were lying.’

  After four years working at the college at Mount Gravatt, which by that time had joined Brisbane College of Advanced Education, I moved to the registrar’s office, where I had a job writing reports about new courses for committees. I loved the quality of the debate among the academics, and I was still surrounded by words and paper.

  I applied for a job running the council secretariat at the Queensland Institute of Technology down near Parliament House where I was still studying journalism. The job would involve writing minutes and correspondence for the governing council and its committees. It was a big promotion.

  I got the job, reporting directly to the registrar, Brian Waters. After I started, I found out that when I’d applied, my former boss at the college—not John Schmidt, another fellow—was a referee. The council was the institute’s governing body and important. He told Brian to get ready for some odd dress choices if he gave me the job. Brian told me this later. She might not be suitable for council, the other fellow had said. Brian said it had struck him as a strange thing to say and I’d interviewed so well and had such good references from the chairs of my academic committees that of course they were going to give me the job. I did have a pants suit that looked like pyjamas and baggy jeans way before they became fashionable; I’m sure Brian had noticed. But he didn’t care, as long as I could think and write.

  I worked closely with Brian and with the director of QIT, Dennis Gibson, a mathematician by training. He didn’t care what I wore either. When QIT was becoming a university, I worked with the deputy director, Tom Dixon, on the submission to the state government making our case. Tom had run the school of communications, had developed the journalism course I’d done. He wasn’t much interested in my clothes either.

  I know these are just reasonable expectations of ordinary men, that they might focus on what a person can do rather than what they look like or what they wear, but it made a key difference to my life in the years I was working at QIT. I had dressed like a boy when I was young, and I had missed those years as a late teen when I might have learned to dress up and enjoy how I looked. I had no idea how to dress up and enjoy how I looked.

  When university status was approved, Tom was acting director. I was the first person he came and told. ‘Congratulations,’ he said. ‘You just wrote your first successful submission.’

  I met David at QIT, where he was an internal auditor, working in the director’s office doing organisation reviews. His undergraduate degree is in politics and the chair of the audit committee, an external member of council and government department head, had been surprised when he asked if anyone on the committee had read Machiavelli’s The Prince and David had. The chairperson had hoped to bamboozle them with his knowledge of politics. The lowly administrator on the committee, who shouldn’t know much, wrecked it for him.

  When I wanted to review the institute’s records management system, which was in my department, Brian suggested David would be the person to help.

  While we were doing the project, I told David I knew all the words to Led Zeppelin’s songs. It was during a conversation about memory, how strange it is what we forget and what we remember. It impressed him, that a girl could be so familiar with the music he loved.

  On the corkboard in David’s office I noticed a photograph of a leaf, a new leaf on a lilly pilly, sharply contrasted against a background of blurred green. He took the photograph in Lamington National Park, he said. He liked to walk there. Binna Burra was a special place for me too, I told him. It was clear to both of us we had things in common. We went to a concert in Brisbane together and held hands while James Taylor sang ‘You’ve Got a Friend’.

  Soon after we got together and before David moved in with me, I told him what I’d done as a teenager: my teacher, her husband, the two pregnancies. I knew I couldn’t be in a relationship with someone unless they knew. I liked David, and even if it meant I would lose him, I had to tell him the truth.

  I got Mick to help me prepare. I asked David over and said I had to tell him about something I’d done that was terrible. I sat on the floor of my bedroom with him and I told him everything. I was flat in the telling, could not look at his face. I was still so ashamed of myself.

  ‘Is that all?’ he said when I’d finished.

  I nodded.

  ‘It wasn’t you that was terrible,’ he said.

  He held me for a long time. I was surprised by his kindness.

  It was several weeks before I realised he wasn’t going to leave me because of what I’d done. He didn’t even see it as something about me.

  Byron shark

  NIGHT IS SO QUIET HERE at the farm that sometimes I can hear the wilder ocean on the Tallow Beach side of the lighthouse, heard first by the hill on the other side of the dam and then relayed to me. This morning, though, I cannot hear the ocean.

  Last night I dreamed a man dressed in a rabbit suit came into our house in Brisbane and shot everyone but me. I don’t remember who was there but I’m sure it wasn’t David or Otis. They are still sleeping in the other room.

  I half woke at first, my back locking up, a winch running through me from my heart to my hand. I couldn’t breathe; the air would not go into my lungs. The man in the rabbit suit will kill me. That’s what he has come for.

  I had to wake myself up completely so I could breathe. I have been sitting on the veranda since then, waiting for the dawn.

  When I was in Canada on a writing residency some years back, I had a lunchtime conversation with one of my colleagues, a poet whose sister had been murdered years before. We were at the Banff Centre for the Arts and our dining room window looked out to the Rocky Mountains I had always wanted to see. I looked at those mountains as my poet colleague told her story.

  The poet was writing about her sister’s death. She was worried that when her book came out,
people would ask her questions she didn’t want to answer. You can tell them it’s fiction, I said—blithely, I realise now. For she could no more call her sister’s brutal murder fiction than I can call what happened in my life fiction. You don’t have to talk about the book, another colleague said. The fact you wrote it is enough.

  I left the lunch table, blithe still, wondering why on earth my poet colleague was writing about what happened to her and her family around her sister’s death. I thought she was too close to her experience, wouldn’t do it justice. The writing will be terrible, self-conscious, I said to myself, shaking my smug head. At least I’ve got the sense to stick to novels. She was a wonderful poet, spare and breathing. I wondered why she would do what she was doing.

  We all read from our work in progress in Banff. My poet colleague read a piece from her memoir. It remains for me the most powerful writing I have ever experienced. It was a piece about the city of Toronto, the map grid, and how the search for her sister’s body proceeded along the gridlines. It left me breathless, like I had been punched.

  When her book came out, my colleague sent me a copy. I had emailed her out of the blue to tell her what her reading had meant for me, how I’d been trying to write about my own experience but had struggled to find my voice. She sent me a quote from the American poet Louise Bogan. ‘No woman should be shamefaced about giving back to the world, through her art, a portion of its lost heart.’

  I do not know how my poet colleague managed interviews about her book. Her sister’s death could bring tears to her eyes over lunch, could bring tears to all our eyes when she read from her work. When she sent me a copy of her book, I wrote her saying what I’d thought that day after lunch, how hopeless her project seemed to me, and that when I heard her read I knew how I’d misjudged her power, how her writing was a gift to the world.

  I understand now my colleague’s fear and compulsion. This happened, this was done, she was saying in her work. I must honour my sister, honour myself.

  I sometimes wish my life had been another life, that I’d followed the trajectory that fierce ten-year-old girl at the pool was on. She might have looked at my teacher and her husband and screwed up her nose and laughed and run away. She might never have gone where I have been.

  I wonder too what my teacher and her husband will make of this story, if it finds them. Will they see what harm we did, what harm they did, or will they be furious, call me on the phone and say, How dare you, after all we did for you? Or dress up in a rabbit suit and come and shoot me.

  Fear

  A YEAR AFTER DAVID AND I moved in together, although I didn’t know it, my teacher and her husband came back to Brisbane from Melbourne to live. I’d had no contact with them. I hadn’t told them I was seeing a counsellor. They hadn’t met David. At least once before—after Katie Flannery’s funeral—they turned up in my life and I’d gone back to them.

  My teacher’s husband rang my friend Louise and said, ‘Let’s surprise Mary-Rose,’ and there they were at Louise’s house when David and I arrived for lunch one Sunday.

  Unless you’ve been through something like this, and I hope you haven’t, you can’t imagine how I felt when I saw my teacher and her husband at my friend Louise’s house. For the first time, I was facing what transpired between us: that a married couple I trusted like parents betrayed that trust. I was dreaming of monsters almost every night. Louise was someone outside the circle of betrayal, who remained my friend through my darkest years.

  I felt as if I was skinless.

  I was terrified of my teacher’s husband, terrified of both of them, the power they once had over me, the lack of self-regard I’d had in our relationship. I left soon after I arrived without saying anything to anyone about why. I walked out the door and David followed.

  When I arrived home, I fell apart, called Mick. He made a time to see me the next morning. He said I was frightened because this was a violation of my boundaries. We’ll draw a ring around you, he said. You’ll be safe. I didn’t feel safe, not for days. Louise had no idea what was wrong. I said I was sorry about ruining the lunch but I couldn’t see my teacher and her husband anymore and I didn’t want her to see them either. She went along with my request and didn’t question me about it. I will always be grateful she did this.

  The dreams became more frightening. It was weeks before my fear subsided. I was afraid my teacher and her husband would destroy me. They were bigger than Mick, although he was too stupid to know it, and they would overwhelm him and I would be trapped and they would destroy me for telling him what I had told him.

  A few months after my teacher and her husband turn up at the surprise lunch, I find out my teacher’s husband is studying on campus, because he starts leaving notes on my car.

  Saw your little car. It’s looking great. Regards.

  How are you going? I’m back at tech. Best.

  I ignore them. Work has helped me in these years, made me feel I can contribute something useful to the world. I love my job, the neatness of it, the way I can craft policy and make the world neater, more orderly, the high regard in which I am held at the institute—now a university, thanks to a submission I wrote. I am well paid. I work for important men and they are kind to me. They respect me and value my skills.

  And then, one night when I am working back, my teacher’s husband turns up in my office. It is late and I am frightened because I think I am the only person left in the building and I don’t know what he will do. He walks in and sits down.

  I realise he knows where I work, where my office is on the campus. I don’t know how he knows this as it is not publicly available information.

  My teacher’s husband is sitting across from me and talking to me as if there is nothing wrong between us and yet I am starting to name the unnameable things that have happened.

  He leans over and brushes a piece of lint from my jacket breast pocket and smiles and says, ‘There, that’s better.’

  I am terrified. I talk to him as if this feels normal but I am terrified.

  A face appears at the door. It is Brian, who is still in the corridor, working back, like me. Brian says, ‘Excuse me,’ to my teacher’s husband, says to me he has a quick question, asks the question, which I answer.

  Brian is still standing at the door, holding his glasses in his hand the way he does. He looks at me and then at my teacher’s husband. He comes into my office and sits down. I introduce them.

  They make small talk. My teacher’s husband laughs loudly at Brian’s jokes. They talk about the new building. My teacher’s husband talks about the army and how well they do things. Brian nods and smiles. He fiddles with his glasses in his lap and then sucks the arm and watches my teacher’s husband carefully.

  Brian doesn’t leave the room, despite the fact that he’s asked me what he came to ask me and has run out of small talk. He sits there, his arms crossed, implacable, smiling.

  Eventually, my teacher’s husband takes his leave, shakes Brian’s hand. ‘See you round,’ he says to me. I don’t respond.

  After he leaves, Brian says, ‘You looked like you could use company. Who was that guy?’

  ‘Someone I used to know.’

  I do not wish to bring my teacher and her husband here where I have found a home.

  ‘Are you sure you’re okay?’ Brian says then.

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Fine.’

  ‘All right. See you tomorrow.’

  After my teacher’s husband turns up at my office, Mick suggests we get them in for a chat. ‘They’re not leaving you alone,’ he says. ‘Maybe this is a good opportunity for us to work with them.’

  I can’t believe he can be so casual. ‘Don’t you know what they’re like?’ I say.

  He smiles, dictates a note to them to invite them to come to a therapy session to talk through what has happened between us. Surprising myself, I send the note.

  It is my teacher who rings me, not her husband. She says they will not come to see my therapist. They don’t like to dwell
on negative things that are now long past, she says. They think it is time to get on with life. They hope I’ll respect their confidence in the future as they’ve respected mine.

  I write them a letter, with help from Mick, telling them goodbye. I say that while I accept that their approach is not to dwell on negative things, I am finding that the negative things are interfering with my ability to live my life. I say that working through negative things and getting free of them is my approach to life and that this is an important point where our approaches differ.

  I say that keeping aspects of our relationship secret, including the sexual aspects, has been harmful, that while I have no wish to make them not okay, I will only respect their confidence to the extent it allows me to respect myself.

  I say I do not want to have anything further to do with either of them.

  When I finish the letter, Mick says he wants me to be sure I don’t want any contact with my teacher and her husband in the future before I cut off all ties. He says it is a severe response and it might be useful for me to have some contact with them so that, over time, they become less gods or monsters and more just people.

  I say I am very sure I don’t want anything to do with them. I want to be free of them.

  I say my final goodbye in that letter. It will be another two decades before I feel free of them.

  I have seen my teacher’s husband three times since then. The first time, he was coming out of the Village Twin Blue Cinema with a teenage girl. I told myself she was his niece and have hoped many times since that she was not another girl like me.

  The second time he was in the city at Bar Merlo with two or three men. This was many years later and I couldn’t believe how small he seemed. He was sitting down, so I had no point of comparison, but there’s something about tall men, they take up space. He looked as if he’d shrunk in the intervening years but perhaps, after all, I had grown.