Again I lay in the darkness, my mind fretfully covering all the old ground and looking for pathways ahead. The ‘shocks’ had been coming on me more regularly now. When I wasn’t wondering if I was, in fact, going crazy, I panicked that my subconscious was harbouring traumatic memories from the night of the attack which lay deep below the surface. I could not see them, but they were erupting inside me. I was tired, very tired, and my problems seemed awesome.
The grandmother’s house was brick and built close to the ground. I heard a noise at the window and lay terrified in the dark. The window slipped up and Skip climbed in. He was familiar with how to get into and out of this room without disturbing the old lady.
Finger to his lips, he nimbly stepped around Russel’s makeshift crib on the floor and made his way to the bed where he lay down beside me. In a whisper he told me that he had spoken again with his father, and that his father remained adamant Skip would not marry ‘a dark girl’ with his consent. His father was now offering me money to go away.
Tears flowed down my face as Skip quietly talked, telling me that he loved me but he now thought it better if I took up his father’s offer. I could not speak and just lay there in silence. I remembered stories he had told me in Townsville about how his father had, through his connections, paid police not to proceed with a prosecution against Skip when he’d been caught in some youthful mischief a year or so earlier. But it shocked me that he would try to buy me off, thereby making a bastard of his own grandchild and leaving the child to its own fate.
When he had finished telling what his father had said, Skip left through the window as silently as he had arrived. After he had gone, I had no thoughts, only feelings. The weight of my world was upon me. One unasked for child lay sleeping on the floor beside me; one I was unable even to feed without subjecting myself to the interrogation of hostile strangers. Now, another child, equally unloved by its father and his family, was beginning to grow in my womb. If I relaxed one iota, I feared a ‘shock’ would come upon me, and whatever new memories arose might push me beyond help. Not one fragment of hope was found anywhere on my horizon.
For as long as I could I lay there supporting this weight, then I realised it was too heavy, even for me. I climbed off the bed and scrambled through my suitcase until I found the strong leather strap with which I’d secured the bloodied travel blanket to its side. On the back of the door was an old-fashioned sturdy metal coat hook, and I fashioned a loop and slid the strap around the hook. Standing on a small stool I pulled the loop tightly around my neck and stepped off, hopefully into oblivion.
For just a moment I hung there, suspended in the wave of spinning dizziness. I had become familiar with this sensation during my choking episodes throughout my pregnancy. Then I was suddenly and effortlessly speeding towards a very bright light. A feeling of joy flooded into me as I whisked through the air. As I came nearer the light, I saw silhouettes, in fact quite a crowd of people were waiting there. I knew they were waiting for me and that I was smiling. Radiance and warmth flooded through me. I could hear a sound that was not music but which was extremely pleasant. I was getting closer and closer to the crowd, which was growing nearer in my vision, but not clear enough for me to recognise anyone.
Inexplicably I was suddenly spinning and dropping away fast. It took only a fraction of a second before I heard a muffled thump. I was confused, bewildered. The wonderful joy I had experienced was somehow pouring out of me and the brilliant light had disappeared. I opened my eyes to see it again, to get my bearings, to resume my journey towards it, but instead I saw just a ray of electric light coming from a partly opened door in front of me. It was being pushed and shoved against my feet.
A deep voice spoke quietly from the other side of the door, and in that second I realised I was back on earth and that I had failed in my attempt to end my misery.
Skip’s uncle, a pastor in the Re-organised Church of Latter Day Saints, said he had been resting at home when he had been overcome with a feeling of great urgency that he had to go immediately to the old lady’s house. As he ran up the path towards the unlit house he had seen a light go on and had tapped on the front door. He and the old lady had heard a thud and had pushed my bedroom door open to investigate.
I was laying on the floor, blood seeping through my night clothes at the elbows and knees where they had flailed against the door panels when I entered the throes. The strap was still fastened tightly around my neck and the other end was around the hook, which had been wrenched from the door with the exertion of the thrashing of my strangulation.
Sheltering her from seeing me on the floor, Skip’s uncle sent the old lady away to make us all a cup of tea. Then, without so much as one word of reproach, he removed the strap and helped me up onto my shaking legs.
The uncle sat with me in the lounge room in silence, his head bowed. When she came in old lady’s eyes were red from crying. We sipped the sweet milky tea and sat quietly. Later the old lady brought a dampened washer for me to wipe my face and sponge the blood off my clothes. After an indeterminable length of time, the uncle said simply, ‘Let us pray.’ I was not familiar with the words of his prayer, which seemed to go for a while. Then he again helped me to my feet and directed me towards the bedroom. At the doorway he put his arm around my shoulder and said words I had been longing to hear for years, ‘Go to sleep now. Everything will be alright.’
Strangely, the noise of my body thrashing wildly against the door had failed to wake Russel, though the old lady, whose hearing was not so wonderful, had been awakened by it through two walls. Seeing Russel sleeping so quietly and peacefully flooded me with guilt. Only then was I able to shed my tears and fall asleep.
Next morning, as promised, I took the government food voucher and a list to the supermarket to replenish supplies which we had eaten in the old lady’s house and to buy other essentials. Skip’s uncle picked us up and drove us home. I was shocked to learn from the old lady that the police had been to the house asking for me during my absence. They hadn’t told her what they wanted and were coming back later in the afternoon.
I was surprised, on opening the door to their knock, to find two large policemen in dark uniforms with big guns strapped to their hips. In Queensland at that time police did not usually wear guns and I was intimidated at the sight of them. I had to attend yet another court hearing in Brisbane related to the rapists’ trials. Mum had redirected the orders and travel warrants to the Newcastle police station, and these officers had come to deliver them. I was to leave the next day. The police thumped their boots awkwardly down the flower-bordered path on the way back to their car.
When I told the old lady how shocked I was about New South Wales police wearing guns, she said that her neighbour had called the police when some children stole her child’s tricycle. When they turned up wearing guns to deal with such a minor incident involving kids, she had withdrawn her complaint and asked them to leave. I was relieved to hear I wasn’t the only person who had this reaction.
On my return from Brisbane a few days later Skip told me that he had arranged a court hearing to get permission to marry. We went together and he explained our circumstances and was given court permission. His uncle offered to perform the ceremony, and preparations were set in train. I wrote to tell Mum and she sent me a frock belonging to my sister, Dellie, that she felt was suitable to be married in as I had no money to buy anything new. For a gift she sent the bus fare for Skip, Russel and me to return to Townsville. She felt that as Skip had not found work in Newcastle, he would have a better chance of getting a job in the north where work for men was plentiful.
While waiting for the hasty wedding arrangements to be completed Skip’s grandmother took it upon herself to keep me company. She apologised profusely when, for one day, she had to leave me alone in order to visit her mother. I must admit when I first heard this I thought it may have been a ruse as this old lady herself was over eighty, but no, her mother was the oldest person in Newcastle, over one hundred years
of age. I was fascinated with the idea that someone could have lived so long and, on the old lady’s return, I asked how they had spent the day. ‘Oh,’ she replied, ‘we had a cup of tea and a chat. Then we had a little lie down. We made lunch together and then had another little lie down. We had another cup of tea before I caught the bus home.’ The thought of these two old women sipping tea and having a lie down together, mother and daughter, at their great age conjured up for me a serenity and a peace with the world which I realised I would probably never know.
On another day the old lady insisted we go to the pictures. I was surprised again when the film she was so keen to see turned out to be The Hustler. ‘Oh, I just love Paul Newman. I see him in everything,’ she told me on the bus on the way in. Watching a quite violent film about poolroom hustling and revenge was not how I thought old ladies filled their days.
Our wedding was a modest affair. It was organised by Skip’s family who appeared warm and friendly, and some of his relatives whom I had not met before attended. No one had made even the slightest reference to my attempt to kill myself. I think they knew in their hearts and minds that my actions were not manipulative—I had just reached the point of being unable to bear any more pain in my life.
Skip’s aunt told me before the ceremony that, following the wedding, I was to return with Skip to her house. However, Skip would continue to share the room with her two adolescent sons and Russel and I were to stay in the little sleep-out at the back of the house. The aunt explained that she did not want her boys becoming curious and asking questions about sex before she was ready to answer them.
So, apart from moving my suitcase from one house to another, there was no real difference in my life following my marriage. In the few days before we left for Queensland Skip’s aunt gave me many useful cooking hints. This was one area of my education that Mum had badly overlooked, favouring my youngest sister, Leonie, in the kitchen. When Skip’s aunt found out I had no idea even how to boil vegetables, she taught me that the density of a vegetable determined how long it would take to cook, and that to determine the density all I had to do was to squeeze each one gently, then place them in a pot of boiling water in order, for example, hard carrots first, with soft green vegetables last. I was really pleased to learn some basic culinary skills because Russel was becoming dissatisfied with bottled baby foods, preferring to munch on almost anything off my plate.
The bus trip home exhausted me, although Skip relieved me of the responsibility of holding my increasingly inquisitive and active child on my knee throughout the journey. When I’d arrived in Newcastle Russel had been crawling and hauling himself onto his feet, but during my brief stay at Skip’s aunt’s house he had one day launched himself across the room from his standing position and had taken more than half a dozen steps before abruptly falling down on his bottom. He had looked around in amazement at his own triumph and found that we’d all stopped what we were doing to watch him. Then, instead of crying with the fall, he had laughed his merry chuckle of delight and accomplishment. Of course, he wanted to walk all the time, and flailed his little arms and legs to get down from the lap of whoever might be holding him so that he could have another go at toddling. It was a feat to hold him still and keep him occupied throughout the trip.
On our arrival in Townsville we initially stayed at Mum’s house. Soon Skip got a job as a paymaster with Hornibrooks, a big company with a contract to build bridges under the railway line between Townsville and Mount Isa. He had to travel up and down the line, stopping at every camp and detailing the hours each man had worked and the wages he had earned. Skip badly needed major dental work and dentures, so I also hunted down a job waitressing at the Laguna Cafe.
For a few weeks this worked well, with Mum coming home from her job as laundress at the Central Hotel mid-afternoon and taking over Russel’s care while I hopped on her bicycle and cycled into town to work until the cafe closed at around midnight. I had no experience in waitressing but few women were interested in working such late hours. Mum, who had worked in dining rooms sometime in her life before she had me, gave me a crash course at home. As it turned out, learning to operate a cappuccino machine would later become a distinct advantage. The routine of working in the evenings suited me too, because I was plagued with morning sickness early in the day, and I was able to be with Russel during his waking hours. Most of the late-night customers were Mediterranean men who drank short black coffees, and some of them were very fresh. I was often afraid as I cycled home through the deserted streets all the way to Aitkenvale, but anything was better than having no income and being forced again to go through the shame of explaining myself to some government official.
Mum had divided the house she owned in Norris Street, Hermit Park, into two flats, and she encouraged us to move into one of them. With Skip settled into his job, and now living too far from Mum for her to babysit Russel, I gave up work and began to look forward to becoming a full-time housewife and mother.
My hopes were very short lived. Still suffering from trauma, I often burst into tears about trifling things, even when I was alone. I continued to have ‘shocks’, some of which left me unable to properly communicate with people for hours. Sometimes Mum came by after work and, seeing me so stressed, she would take Russel over to her house for the night. Early in the morning on her way to her six o’clock start, she’d bring him back and rebuke me. Russel, she told me, would wake up at her house screaming in the night from nightmares at precisely the same time as I screamed myself awake several miles distant. I was to ‘settle down’.
Skip was away with his job for ten days or more at a time, and when he came home I became uptight and distressed, apprehensive about his expectations. Often, too, he would have gambled away a lot of his wages before he even reached our house. Eventually Mum told me to move back in with her until the baby was born and then to try again. Although there was a great deal of tension between me and her boyfriend, Arthur, who lived with her, I complied.
Arthur was in and out of trouble with the police. A hairdresser, his barber shop was located in a Flinders Street billiards saloon. Crooks often offered their stolen goods to him, invitations he found hard to refuse. After one such transaction the manager of an electrical goods store just a few doors down the street from the barber shop came in for a haircut and, to his astonishment, found that radios and other small electrical appliances which had been stolen from his store overnight were now on display for sale at Arthur’s.
The police came to Mum’s house and went through the whole place, searching for anything stolen. My youngest sister, Leonie, was extremely upset because the police, while searching her room, had shaken out her packet of Modess. She was fourteen years old and had only just arrived at the stage of needing to use them. She cried for hours with embarrassment after the police had gone.
Mum resented anything that drew the attention of the police to our family in a negative manner, and Arthur’s drinking and bent habits often upset her. She packed his bags and locked him out of the house several times, but he always wormed his way back. He would sleep in the car she had bought for him, parked just around the corner, and we would see him, unshaven and unkempt for days. Then suddenly he’d be living in the house again. Mum said she needed him back to drive her to the Central Hotel in the mornings as she was getting too old to ride her bike so many miles before starting a full work day.
I was in bed in a verandah room at Mum’s house one night when I felt a rush of warmth between my thighs. For a moment I thought I had wet the bed, but when I looked I could see it was blood. I was seven months pregnant and thought the baby must be arriving early. Mum had Arthur drive me immediately to the hospital. Pains wracked my body for hours and I screamed, much to the annoyance of the other patients. But when I cried out for relief a nurse told me they were unable to give me anything because it would have been construed as ‘assisting an abortion’.
All night and throughout the next day the pains continued. Suddenly a warm mass pass
ed from me, and I called the nurse urgently. She came behind the screen which had been shielding me from the view of the other patients, and quickly bundled up the sheets and took them away. She came back to tell me, ‘That was your baby’, before rolling me from side to side to fit the bed out with fresh linen. When she had finished her work, she said a doctor would be coming to see me and to pronounce the baby dead. I tugged at the screen and saw an Asian doctor walk into the pan room. He then passed by on his way back towards the elevator. I called after him, ‘What was the baby?’ He didn’t stop walking but replied, ‘I didn’t bother to look.’ I picked up a small vase that was standing on top of my locker and hurled it towards him. It missed him and shattered on the wall. The nurse was just feet away from him and she ran back into the pan room. She came out and called from the other side of the ward, ‘It was a boy.’
Over the next twenty-four hours I slept in fits and starts, an exhausted rest, in between which various nurses came by to share fragments of information with me. Although I’d been seven months pregnant, even by their own records kept in the maternity clinic of the hospital, they had marked that the child had been only thirty weeks developed. This had been done, I was told, because from thirty-two weeks I would have been put to the expense of a funeral. I was devastated that such an action could have been taken without any discussion with me. I was in mourning for my lost infant and a funeral would have given me an opportunity to express my grief and my love for this prematurely born son. The next day I got up and signed myself out of the hospital, tight-lipped, refusing to back down on my decision to leave despite their sternest warnings.
Two days later I was back in hospital, having passed out in the street, and was given a dilation and curettage.
Mum had sent for Skip when the miscarriage was imminent, and he had returned by the earliest train. What thoughts were going through his head I have no idea, because although he came to see me in the hospital he was coldly formal towards me. When I’d signed myself out of hospital we had shared a bed for just one night before he had to go back to his job, and he had rebuked me. ‘That was my baby you just lost,’ he said and turned away to sleep with his face to the wall, as though the miscarriage was something I had planned.
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