For a Girl

  The men with him looked like middle-level managers in the council. He wasn’t in a suit, it was a button-up shirt and slacks, and he looked like a middle-level manager too.

  I watched him for a long time, unbeknownst to him. To me as a teenager, my teacher’s husband was larger than life, superhuman, but there in the mall he seemed so ordinary, so unremarkable, neither Superman nor one of Superman’s worthy opponents.

  The third time I saw my teacher’s husband was a few years ago. I was walking a mountain track with my friend Cass. He was with a group of men with black t-shirts. I was coming up the far slope when I passed them going the other way.

  I waited at the top for Cass and the group of men passed me again, this time on their way back down. We were alone in the bush, me and these twenty black-shirted men. I wasn’t sure it was him—I’m still not—but only because I wasn’t afraid. I looked him in the eye and held his gaze until he looked away. And I wasn’t afraid.

  I saw my teacher too, twice, without her husband: once in the city at a crossing in Adelaide Street, and the second time at the Mt Coot-tha Planetarium with her daughter, who looked about thirteen. They seemed close.

  I looked at my teacher but all I could see was the Russian doll I’d seen when she was first my teacher. Underneath that was nothing I understood.

  I have a photograph of a ten-year-old girl. She is there by the pool. She dives in. The water is cold on her skin, the sounds of the world are softened, and she swims and swims and swims.

  Writer Mary-Rose

  THIS MAY NOT BE A true story. As a young journalist, my mother was lucky enough to meet the famous children’s writer Enid Blyton, who stopped in Brisbane briefly. There was a press conference in a hangar out at the airport. Many important people were there—the Australian publisher, someone from the British High Commission, someone from the Australian prime minister’s office, along with reporters from Sydney. My mother was representing her paper, The Courier-Mail. I have seen a photograph of her in those days, in a broadbrimmed cream hat with cream gloves and catwoman glasses, excited to be there with the other journalists.

  Miss Blyton herself was surprisingly small, according to my mother, and dressed, as my mother would report faithfully in the next day’s edition, in an aqua twinset, hat and pearls, looking just like the Queen Elizabeth. We see her there, awkward Miss Enid Blyton, shimmering across the Brisbane tarmac, entering the hot tin hangar, fans whirring, everyone looking her way.

  The press conference started with an introduction from the Australian publisher and some words of welcome from the high commissioner. Miss Blyton was noticeable for her silence, my mother said, and then it was time for questions. Someone asked, ‘Miss Blyton, where do you get the ideas for the Noddy stories?’

  Miss Blyton cocked her head, looked at the questioner like he was a dog that had talked, opened her mouth, closed it, opened it again and said: ‘Why, Noddy tells me, of course.’ In my family, this was a story about mad old Enid Blyton who believed in Noddy. But she was not mad, Enid Blyton, not at all, and now I think I know what she was talking about. In fact, if I were to give advice to a young writer, which I’d never presume to do, but if I did, I’d tell the young writer to listen to Noddy.

  Gail Sher says writers write. It is one of her four noble truths about writing. I can never remember the other three. Writers write. It’s often comforting, that notion, that all I need to do is push this pen across this page in enough predawn or candlelight so that I will be able to read it later if I decide I want to. Writers write, and sometimes when they write, they hear Noddy.

  When I was a child, I was good at listening to Noddy, as children are. My brothers and I built Lincoln City in the dirt under our house. My oldest brother Ian was in charge. He’d build roads and infrastructure while Andrew, the brother closest to me, would fill the dam. I created stories for Lincoln City, mostly based on terrible events. I don’t remember individual citizens and the effect of my events on them. Character is so much harder than plot, and growing up on Superman and Batman comics with their strong narrative pull, I was never much enamoured of stories that don’t go anywhere.

  Our stories often ended with a flood. ‘The dam’s busted! Run for your lives!’ Andrew yelled, taking over whatever plot I was working up and ensuring the story wouldn’t suffer from ennui. With his arm he’d grade the dirt that plugged the spillway on the dam. Our day’s roads and buildings would be destroyed in the ensuing torrent.

  Raymond Chandler used to say that whenever his stories got boring, he’d have a man walk in with a gun. Andrew was our man with the gun.

  The next day, we’d rebuild Lincoln City.

  I have loved stories for as long as I can remember. At rest time in kindergarten, with nothing else to do but stare at the ceiling for those nine hours after lunch, I amused myself with stories. My bed was often shifted to an isolated place because my chatter would keep other kids awake.

  Later, I had teachers who saw in me a storytelling need and a strange connection with words. Miss Tyquin in year five gave me marvellous projects to do. Write an Aboriginal legend. How the budgerigar got its stripes. Mrs Thomson in year eight fed my creativity and also red-lined my purple prose. I remember when we had to rewrite the story of Beowulf and Grendel, she circled, His bones snapped like a Cadbury Crunchie bar, and wrote in red: You could do better. She recognised in me a love of words and stories and language, and she fed it with her own. I wrote poetry in later school years, mostly self-conscious and tortured but also innocent and beautiful. I wrote about my father, the rainforest, my feelings for my teacher.

  When I became a cadet journalist, I couldn’t believe I was going to be allowed to write stories all day and that this would be my job. I loved interviewing people, finding out what they thought and felt, what had happened to them, and writing about it. I loved playing with the words, working up a lead so that the reader would know everything they needed in that first paragraph. I loved the discipline that journalism demands, the economy I am no longer capable of.

  After I came home from Melbourne, I stopped writing altogether. I had nothing to say and no connection to the spiritual place where writing must come from for me. I had no connection with myself at all.

  It wasn’t until my late twenties, after I met David, that I started writing again. What had been easy in childhood had become more difficult than I could ever have imagined. It took time. It took years. It is still a struggle.

  To write, I discovered, you need to achieve egolessness, not easy when you have an ego the size of Mount Vesuvius. You need to be nothing but this moment and this pen scratching across this page. I cannot be thinking about how much I’ve lost, what a bad person I am, what a wonderful novel I am conjuring, what terrible things reviewers will write. I must be here, show up, bear witness, get out of the way. Writers write.

  Angels

  SOON AFTER MY TWENT Y-EIGHTH BIRTHDAY, David and I bought an apartment. We painted the white walls white, bought a couch, a refrigerator. We talked about travelling. We travelled. We went to Rome. We got married at the Australian embassy in Paris and blew the money my father gave us as a wedding present on a spectacular lunch in a very fine Parisian restaurant. Mum and Dad had divorced by this time, and Mum had gone to live in Perth, where my brother Andrew had settled.

  David let me be young, if that makes sense. He let me be. I was the happiest I’d been since I was a child. I left QUT to write full-time after my first novel, No Safe Place, was published. I was so sad to leave. I am terrible at goodbyes and, by then, I was Vice-Chancellor Dennis Gibson’s executive officer. QUT had given me a safe haven, and Dennis became a dear friend. His ideas were so elegant. Sometimes I would read a draft he’d handwritten late at night, and on the other side of the paper I’d see a bunch of equations—he did maths to relax. Often, I wouldn’t change a word of what he wrote. Every now and then it was poetry, although he had absolutely no awareness that it was.

  I often think of Dennis when I meet people who te
ll me they cannot write. He was probably the last person I made into one of my heroes, and although he didn’t know it, just by being an ordinary good man, he helped me to heal.

  No Safe Place is a novel about a sexual misconduct case in a university. My second novel is a love story couched in a mystery called Angels in the Architecture. I don’t know why I wrote such complicated plots in those days. Perhaps it was to hide that one sentence every novelist is supposed to hide in every novel. I piled plots on like mattresses in the hope the reader would and wouldn’t feel the pea.

  Angels in the Architecture is set in Brisbane and reflected the happiness I was experiencing in my life while I was writing. I was with David. I think I was always meant to be a happy person. I’d certainly rather be happy than normal now. In Angels in the Architecture, there is a dark secret, but it is a happy story, in which love redeems.

  The site for Angels in the Architecture is a hill not unlike Duncan’s Hill in Fortitude Valley in Brisbane—the site of All Hallows’—and the university campus of the novel used to be a girls’ school. The idea came to me when I attended my twenty-year reunion at All Hallows’. I had been messing about with an idea for a sequel to No Safe Place, had written two complete manuscripts, in fact, neither of which engaged me past about page three. I was starting to panic, having left a good job to be a writer and finding I had nothing worthwhile to write.

  I was asked back to All Hallows’ to speak to my peers on why I had been expelled (I was asked to leave, not expelled, I kept telling the organisers). I can’t remember what I said, but I remember seeing the Story Bridge drawn in lights out the window of the concert hall where the reunion was held, seeing the statues and icons that populated the stairwells, smelling that wood polish they’d been using at All Hallows’ when my grandmother was a girl, even seeing the bustling little nun who had been principal when I left, still bustling. It was suddenly so very precious. I wished I’d never left there.

  When I was working on the manuscript, I rang All Hallows’, at David’s urging, to see if I could spend time on the site to mull. I was hesitant about ringing; they’d thrown me out, one way or another, and would not welcome me back. ‘No one will even know who you are,’ David said. ‘They’ll have forgotten.’

  I was put through to the principal’s office. I said my name. ‘I remember you,’ the principal’s secretary said flatly. She’d been asked to mind our class when I was in year nine because her then boss, the deputy principal who was my class teacher, was called out urgently. The secretary had only been at the school a few weeks then. I don’t remember what I did, and she didn’t tell me. But my chances of being anonymous were destroyed. I didn’t hold much hope of being offered a corner to work in.

  To her credit, Sister Anne O’Farrell welcomed me back to the school and gave me a little room and desk to work on my manuscript. The school was much changed. There was a poster in the hall outside my room which read Care, Share and Dare. The students were bussed to a rally for reconciliation with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in King George Square. All Hallows’ was the only school to attend. The girls I met wrote fantastic material in our workshops. I did not think they would banish each other to the sports field to hide. At the launch of Killing Superman, my third novel, Sister Anne Hetherington, who was principal when I was thrown out of All Hallows’, and Sister Anne O’Farrell, the principal who welcomed me back twenty years later, were both in attendance. I acknowledged them in my speech, adding that both had made good decisions.

  I continued to work hard in those years. I worked on my writing like it was drill. David said my boss was the boss from hell, meaning me. My father’s legacy, I suppose: good enough, almost good enough, never quite good enough.

  I would say to people: I am not someone who has regrets. I am not someone who has regrets. I remember meeting up with my friend Kris Olsson, who was writing an article about adoption. Her mother lost a child. Complicated, she said, tragic. I gave up a baby, I told her. It’s not the wrong decision for everyone. I felt angry with her, as if she was talking about things she couldn’t possibly understand. I had made the right decision, I believed. What would she know? She nodded but I could see in her eyes she thought I was defensive. Later, much later, she reminded me I once said this, that it wasn’t the wrong decision for everyone. I wondered who I was trying to convince.

  I have that one letter from you, written when you were a girl. You told me the things you liked to do. You started by asking me why I gave you up. It was a fair question but I didn’t give you a fair answer. I gave you the answer I’d been given. I wanted the best for you, a home with two parents who could provide for you. My motives were never as noble as that. I did what would keep my teacher and her husband happy. That’s the truth. I didn’t even think of you.

  In my late twenties, I contacted my daughter’s other mother through the adoption agency because I wanted to tell her who my daughter’s father was. I wouldn’t tell her all the truth, about what happened between my teacher and her husband and me. I was too deeply ashamed to tell anyone about that, too frightened of what would happen to me if I did tell. I kept the secret. All the same, making sure my daughter knew where she came from was important to me. It was a start.

  I made contact through the agency. Jenny Fish had left by that time and I spoke with someone named Frankie who said there was a letter from my daughter’s other mother on their file, written when my daughter was six. Now my daughter was a teenager. I gave Frankie my address so she could send me the letter. She told me that if I wanted to write back, all I needed to do was put a letter in an envelope and send it to Frankie and Frankie would forward it on.

  I read that first letter from my daughter’s other mother which told me about my daughter’s life, what she liked to do—music and drama—but it was like she was a Martian talking about a Martian child. I don’t know what I expected, but I had no idea why she was telling me these things, no idea of who this child was to me.

  David and I went to Melbourne soon after this. We flew down for a long weekend. Before then, if I had to go to Melbourne for work, I told cab drivers to take a different route into the city so that we didn’t go past the hospital. Sometimes I still saw Grattan Street, because Melbourne is such a perfect grid that all the streets cross one another somewhere.

  David and I walked past the hospital where my daughter had been born. I didn’t feel anything and it made me confident I’d got over whatever it was I had to get over. We walked past 101 Grattan Street, and that’s when I found it didn’t exist. We even went to the Catholic Family Welfare Bureau in Carlton, but I was too nervous to talk to anyone.

  After I got home, I wrote a letter to my daughter’s other mother. I told her as much of the truth as I could. I said my daughter’s father was an officer in the army and was married when I met him. I said I didn’t want to keep secrets.

  My daughter’s other mother wrote back. She said her husband was uncomfortable about contact with me. She would write once or twice a year but would not share their name and address. And she sent pictures: in the beginning, a little girl with a littler girl, also adopted, my daughter’s younger sister, an adult cuddling both chopped off at the hips; another of the first girl, older or younger now, I wasn’t sure, with freckles, on a camping trip in a tie-dye shirt.

  Other pictures came too in the months that followed, a girl in a school uniform, a young teenager in a sweatshirt and jeans, an older teenager dressed for a school formal, older again with a boyfriend.

  I stared and stared at those pictures. They were pictures of a person who didn’t look like me, or maybe did, I couldn’t tell. I stared and stared at them. I couldn’t read them.

  With her first letter, my daughter’s other mother sent that letter from my daughter, the one asking me why I gave her up. It’s still a good question.

  In another letter, my daughter’s other mother asked questions about the father, the officer in the army who was the father. I had sent a photograph of him. My daug
hter looked like him, her other mother said, had his winning smile. Did I notice that? she said. Could I tell them more about him? My daughter was curious, her other mother said.

  I did my best, but I was terrified of my teacher’s husband at that time, for I had started to understand what great power he had wielded in my life, what that had meant for me. I told what truth I could, but I did not cope well with her questions. I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t even tell myself the truth, let alone someone else.

  After a year or so of writing to my daughter’s other mother, I decided I should move on from that stage of my life. I ticked a box somewhere in my head. If I thought about the past from then on, it was a tiredness I felt, a fatigue that made every muscle of my body weigh heavily. I continued to slip into these dark moods I didn’t understand. They were less debilitating—my first bout of therapy had left me functional, so I wasn’t drinking the way I once was—but no less frightening. Mick had said that these were moments of regression when I became a helpless child, perhaps an infant, facing life, terrified. I wasn’t so sure.

  It’s there in the first three novels, of course. No Safe Place is about sexual misconduct and betrayal. Angels in the Architecture is about trusting someone enough to love them. Killing Superman is about grief. They are not a trilogy, except in terms of how they tell the story I couldn’t tell. You just have to join the dots.

  Bridges

  IN MY THIRTIES I DEVELOPED a fear of bridges. I first experienced this fear on the Golden Gate Bridge that spans San Francisco Bay where it meets the Pacific Ocean.

  When I set out on foot at the Fort Point end of the bridge, I had no idea what was to come. As I became suspended by the bridge rather than the earth, the ground under my feet began to move, rather like when you stand too close to a lift shaft. Cars and trucks whizzed by at great speed on the left. The blue bay was moving far below on the right. The wind blew me this way then that. Quite suddenly, I became afraid.