by Anne Buist
48
Natalie had a bruise on her forehead, but otherwise she felt fine. Just a combination of skipping breakfast, dehydration and pregnancy. The court clerk found her a glass of water and stayed with her after everyone else had left, until she eventually convinced him to let her make her own way home.
Winona was still outside. She’d just ended a call. ‘Malik was ecstatic,’ she said. She glared at Natalie. ‘You’d better be right. I still think he’s a sleaze.’
Natalie’s head was already throbbing—this didn’t help. She looked around. ‘What happened to Jenna?’
‘She took off home. I’ve sent the police to stop her doing a runner with the kids. She was yelling that it wasn’t fair she had to pick between her kids and Luke. I could see them all taking off together.’
‘Are the police going to investigate?’ asked Natalie. ‘I mean as to who abused Chelsea?’
‘Luke? Yes. After that?’ Winona shrugged.
On the walk home, Natalie left phone messages for both Malik and Jenna. To Jenna she reiterated that she was sure Malik was safe…and Malik she told not to leave the children with anyone, not even male friends…or family. She hoped he would understand her concern, even if he didn’t share it. And she reminded him of Chelsea’s next appointment.
As soon as she put the phone down it rang—her rooms.
‘Natalie?’
‘Yes Bev?’
‘I know you aren’t looking at Twitter, but…’
Natalie’s stomach dropped.
‘Check out @lizar82.’
She still hadn’t replaced her phone. It was hard to even see the Twitter icon let alone the messages on the cracked screen. But she could see enough.
Man Under Fire @ManUnderFire: #PsychBitch tar us all with same brush
Liza R @lizar82: F*cking #PsychBitch just took my kids
Natalie rang Beverley back. ‘Can you look up Jenna Radford’s file for me? Give me her full name?’
Bingo. ‘Jenna Eliza Radford.’ Plus a birth year of ’82; plus that prim little asterisk—like the way Jenna always said ‘fricking’.
Did it matter? No; Declan was right. She was going to let it go. @KidsReallyMatter could be Lauren, could be a nurse. Could be Mr Boreman’s receptionist. If that was how they dealt with their anger it was probably better to pity them than be sucked in.
She checked Twitter one last time before deleting her account. It still read zero tweets. She had never hit the tweet button.
Liam turned up late after a no-show from his children. He looked like he’d lost weight, and there were grey bags under his eyes. Natalie didn’t have the heart to tell him to bugger off.
‘You need to see someone,’ said Natalie, giving him a whiskey, which he downed in one gulp. ‘Someone neutral who can help you…let you talk about this.’
‘I’m fine.’
Sure he was.
‘Just need a good night’s sleep. And my car needs a new paint job.’
Natalie winced. ‘Send me the bill.’
‘Bound to happen with the company I keep. I’m amazed it didn’t happen earlier, parking it here.’ He paused ‘I wish this wasn’t so hard on you. But as if the kids and Lauren aren’t stressful enough…’
Natalie turned around, looked at him. ‘What?’
Liam poured himself another whiskey. ‘Remember Michael?’
‘Your star witness, right? Going to nab your paedophile teacher.’
Liam nodded as he sat down and put his feet up on the table covered with papers. ‘Ex-star witness.’
‘Oh, Liam, I’m sorry. He won’t present at the commission?’
‘He started to yesterday. Gruelling. I can’t tell you… Well, I just don’t know how you deal with it. He kept breaking down in tears.’ Liam’s voice choked. He took a breath. ‘Didn’t turn up today. I just heard they found him. Hanged himself.’
‘Shit.’ Natalie felt dizzy again and sat down. The one-eyed teddy bear was back in her thoughts.
‘They gave me a copy of the note.’ Liam shook his head. ‘I just don’t get it.’
‘Why he killed himself?’ Natalie thought of her own moments of intense darkness when there appeared no end in sight, only the welcome idea of the absence of pain. Of anything other than the place you were in.
‘No, that I get.’ He threw a piece of paper on the table and Natalie picked it up. It was a photocopy of Michael’s last thoughts. Rambling, mostly incoherent. A set of regrets. But one line jumped out.
I can’t live with myself. I did it too. Tell the kid I’m real sorry.
‘Your abuse victim became an abuser,’ said Natalie softly.
Natalie thought of the borderline patients, treated as annoyances in the emergency department after yet another overdose, of the chaos of their childhood being acted out in drug use and criminal acts—and sometimes committing abuse themselves. When your emotions were a mess of impulses and drives you could neither understand or control, it could be reassuring to identify with the abuser rather than take the victim role. ‘We’re good at sympathising about their abuse; can try to imagine how horrific, how terrifying, how soul destroying it was. But when kids are abused it affects them at the core…and we aren’t so good at sympathising with those long-term effects.’
Liam nodded. He looked at her. ‘I’ve prosecuted these bastards. Willingly, gladly, thrown the fucking book at them. Lowest of the low. But this man…I knew him. Felt sorry for him. He did those things too…but Christ, he was a victim.’
Neither Malik nor Jenna returned her calls. Winona had answered her phone and given a curt report of the scene that had unfolded at the Balwyn home. Jenna had turned on her mother and blamed her, and had to be physically restrained. Ama and Malik had been there to collect the children, who had apparently been exposed to their mother’s hysterical rants and accusations.
And Katlego Okeke was on the attack in the Guardian. Headline: ‘Bad parenting comes in all colours’.
A month ago, Mark La Brooy published an ‘I was right’ article. Without any apparent review of the legal proceedings, and certainly without troubling himself to go to the Children’s Court to see the reality of the case for himself, he decided that a girl’s father was a child abuser and should be denied even supervised access. Not exactly La Brooy’s usual position, but the man was Muslim. Or apparently so—I guess all Egyptians are Muslims in his world. A few weeks later, the court agreed with him, based largely on an assessment of the child by a psychiatrist. No matter that La Brooy has demeaned this psychiatrist as ‘junior’ and ‘unstable’ and ‘female’. He’s happy to accept her judgment when it agrees with his own expert opinion.
I know about this article not because I follow La Brooy’s column, but because it incited a Twitter storm of abuse towards me. It’s not the first time my opinions have provoked this sort of reaction, but it’s always depressing to be confronted by people who see the world, literally, in black and white.
Life is more complicated than that and this case was no exception. It seems the psychiatrist was right about the abuse but wrong about the source. The mother had lied about another man in her life—one of the ‘de factos’ that La Brooy so often cites as the prime abusers.
So, Mark. Everything fits. Seems that it was the de facto. You’d have got it right if you hadn’t let racism get in the way.
Not for the first time, Natalie wished these columnists would look at the complexities rather than take one fact and run with it. The court—and psychiatrists—took time with evidence that was limited to start with—and very rarely, in fact, black and white. Okeke was right about that. But the imperfect system was all they had. Natalie felt exhausted just thinking about how La Brooy would respond. Let alone Twitter.
She wondered how Chelsea was holding up; hoped the strengths she had seen in the girl would offer some protection.
It helped that Malik brought the child in, on time, and that she was full of excitement about her new bedroom.
‘Thank you, Doctor
King,’ said Malik.
‘Thank me by keeping her safe,’ said Natalie softly, out of earshot of Chelsea. ‘We don’t know for sure that Jenna’s boyfriend did anything.’
‘I am sure.’ Malik’s voice was steely. ‘Chelsea tells me she hates this man. Before Jenna met me there were several boyfriends. Drug users. Dealers, I think. It was these I worried about when she went to work. I know now I must have the children. She is not fit.’
‘She’s still their mother, Malik.’
‘My mother can care for them.’ Malik’s dismissiveness was chilling. ‘See, Chelsea is doing well. I will care for her and Chris.’
Chelsea herself had no wish to talk about her mother, and throughout the session redirected the conversation to her toys. Staying on message—or, more precisely, off message. But it was her overbrightness that left Natalie worried; it was masking her true feelings. The ones that would cause her problems years later—as they had with Liam’s witness, Michael.
When she got home, Damian was sitting in his Camry waiting for her outside her warehouse. It’s best for the children to have their parents together. That’s what she’d wished her whole childhood.
‘Dinner,’ he said firmly. ‘No excuses.’
‘I’m still seeing O’Shea.’ Well, sort of. Being with her wasn’t working for Liam or his kids.
Damian didn’t look at her. ‘We need to talk.’
The new restaurant on Smith Street served bread and a shared platter; they both stuck to water.
‘I have some information for you,’ said Damian. Natalie felt a wave of relief—he meant work.
‘This is totally, and I mean totally off the record, you understand?’
‘Yes.’ Damian did things by the book. If he was breaking a rule it had to be something big. Something important.
‘That teacher you asked about?’
Ted Beahre. Shit. ‘Yes.’
‘Nothing on him.’
Natalie let her breath out. Brilliant.
‘But…’ There was a silence while Natalie wondered what the ‘but’ meant. ‘He was briefly working at the same school as one of the guys named by the Royal Commission.’ Damian cleared his throat. ‘And the business where he was reported?’
‘Yes.’
‘It involved a parent with whom he was or is friends. At his current school. Chelsea’s school.’
Matilda’s father. ‘And?’
‘That parent is facing charges of possession of pornography. Underage girls. His daughter may well have been abused.’
‘Poor Matilda.’
Damian frowned. ‘Her name…off the record…is not Matilda. It’s Amy.’
Natalie suddenly didn’t feel hungry. Just very tired. Chelsea spent lots of nights at Amy’s. She pulled out some money to cover half the tab.
‘I’ll pay,’ he said. ‘Consider it child support.’
Whatever. Natalie stood to leave, then paused. ‘Damian, tell me something. Why did you think this kid was yours? You did, didn’t you, right from the start?’
Damian leaned back in his chair. ‘From the start? No. What I told you was what the specialist told me.’
Natalie sensed there was more. Waited.
Damian sighed, shifted in his seat. ‘I went back, to talk to him.’
‘And?’
‘I hadn’t quite understood first time round. The one in a million? That was the chances of Caitlin and me having a baby together.’
Natalie stared at him, her mind racing over long-ago lessons from her medical course.
‘Apparently there was a problem with my sperm and her eggs, or the uterine environment or something. Different woman…different circumstances, different figures.’ He looked at her. ‘I’m sorry, Natalie.’
You don’t need contraception, I’m infertile. And she’d believed him. But then, so had he.
Damian stood up, put his hands on her shoulders. ‘When you finally realise O’Shea won’t stick around, I’m here for you.’
He’d look after his mistake. But that didn’t mean they were right for each other. Or that Liam didn’t want her, baby or no baby.
49
Mark La Brooy’s column was headed: ‘What about the Real Victims?’
The social justice warriors are out in force, he began, implying their influence was behind the court’s reckless indifference to child welfare.
The court couldn’t move fast enough to return access to the de facto—an Egyptian man and recent immigrant. I will say it again: my problem is not with the man’s religion (and certainly not his colour—Islam is not a race). It is with the court affording him privileged treatment because of it. More importantly, that privileged treatment is given priority over the children’s welfare.
Go back and read my articles on this case. You will see at the heart of them a concern for the welfare of children. Now go to the internet and trawl through the articles of identity politicians and the feminist left. You will see little or no concern for the children—just an obsession with racial and religious sensitivities.
Then a few paras of self-justification culminating in the usual pompous formula:
I make no apology for using the ‘wrong’ language or sharing an unpalatable fact. Better that than aiding and abetting those who would abuse our children.
Absolute refusal to take a step back and a lot of water-muddying. No interest in finding a cooperative way forward; bonus virtue signalling. Natalie decided she’d have to give up reading these columns too. They made her want to punch a wall. Or Mark La Brooy.
‘Twitter,’ Bev told her, ‘has released a shit storm.’ She showed Natalie the screen search for @SayItStraight68—La Brooy’s handle—but it was blank. ‘He’s been suspended,’ Bev explained. ‘For abuse. Some of his posts have been deleted but the one I saw had been retweeted thousands of times—he was very crude and personal about Okeke; called her a ho and used the word “ape”—didn’t actually call her that, but anyone could see…Wouldn’t be surprised if he gets the sack.’
Natalie doubted that anything in his article would cost him his job. But maybe, like her, he took to Twitter in the late evening—perhaps fuelled by a drink or two. It sounded like his tweets were less measured than his columns.
After her meeting with Ken Rankin, she and La Brooy might be lining up together for unemployment benefits.
Tonight was Natalie’s last gig; Gil’s partner Cassie was going to take over until the bean was born. Maybe for a lot longer. Natalie gave Tom a hug. She felt uncharacteristically nostalgic.
Tom put his sticks down and hugged her back. ‘You okay?’
Was she? Natalie tipped her head down, tied her hair into a knot and pulled on the blonde spiked wig that she used for the stage.
‘Can’t see you pushing a pram.’ Shaun was shaking his head. He wasn’t alone. Nappies. Mothers’ groups. Car seats and strollers. Jesus.
Singing made it easy to forget—she picked the hardest, sexiest and most edgy of their repertoire and lost herself in the music and words.
‘You’re on fire tonight,’ Liam was sitting waiting for her at the bar. Vince brought her a water.
‘Hope he’s going to make an honest woman of you.’ Vince glared at Liam.
Natalie laughed. ‘Vince, no one says that anymore.’
‘I do. I’m old school.’ Vince left to tend to other patrons as Liam took a call. His tension went up a notch; it only took a moment for Natalie to work out it was his ex-wife.
‘I know it is, Lauren,’ he said. ‘I tell you, he didn’t want me there…no…’
‘She’s playing you,’ said Natalie loud enough for him—and possibly Lauren—to hear.
Liam frowned, shook his head and left the pub, still talking on the phone.
Natalie watched him go. She would never ask him to choose between herself and his kids—but at some stage he was going to have to decide whether his loyalties lay with her or Lauren.
Tonight, Lauren won. As Liam was driving he sent a text: Family crisis, sorr
y.
She tried not to think about him. About the pending disciplinary hearing. About the future. Tried also to forget about Blake’s phone message. Don’t know if this is what you were after Nat, but looks like Youssef’s Mum’s going as well. To Egypt or wherever. There wasn’t anything she could do about it. Ama was entitled to go wherever she wanted—and she’d probably cancel now she had the children with her.
Unless she’d booked her trip when she got the children? Natalie felt her skin prickle. Damian wasn’t likely to stake out the airport to check for kids on false passports. She left a message on Li Yang’s phone. Maybe she would.
50
Natalie was not the only one to pick that La Brooy was on the back foot. Okeke’s column didn’t need to mention his name.
White supremacy has never gone away. It sits just below the surface, waiting to break through as soon as someone outside the club gets uppity.
Of course, it’s all about fear. And no one is more pathetic than those whose fear turns to bluster as they try to shut down conversation and dissent. White men have never had to grow up being called a black slag, being told their only worth was as a sexual object. This is not Islamic culture; it’s rife in western countries driven by white men. What they fear about change is that they just might not continue to get away with this frat boy behaviour and instead actually have to be responsible for themselves.
This didn’t make Natalie feel any better than La Brooy’s column. Anger in whatever form, justified or not, was draining. As she downed the dregs of her coffee and headed to work, she thought about the morning meditation she’d used when she was living on the coast. Vowed to replace the morning paper with it.
When Natalie arrived on her bike at her rooms, Jenna, who was waiting in the car park, jumped out of her car to chase her. Natalie waited outside the back entrance, ready to slam the door shut.
Jenna looked more upset than angry.