Snake Dancing

by Roberta Sykes

  When I came out of hospital after the D & C, Mum could see how distressed I was and she reproached Skip about his attitude. I had the overwhelming feeling that I had to get away, to go anywhere, to disentangle myself from all the choking emotions that I seemed unable either to bear or to share. I told Mum I was going.

  ‘I’ll go to Aunty Glad’s,’ I said, ‘and then work it out from there.’ Mum agreed, but argued that I should leave Russel with her until I had straightened myself out, found a job and had somewhere of my own for him to live. Too exhausted to think, I acquiesced.

  As I sat once more on the Sunlander, I recalled that earlier trip on my way to Newcastle. Travelling alone, I slept lightly almost all the way, the discomfort of the seats and the proximity of the other passengers keeping deep sleep—and the demons—at bay.

  2

  On the train travelling south I knew that my marriage was over. How could it have been otherwise? A traumatised Black girl of eighteen married to an equally young and inexperienced white youth, both held down with their own problems, neither in a position to assist the other. Throughout our courtship and our marriage, we had spent less than thirty days in each other’s company.

  I had never overcome my abhorrence of the physical side of our marriage. To put this into context, though, many women ‘fake it’ some of the time, and some all of the time. My spectrum of responses didn’t extend to faking and instead I continued to use Mum’s suggestion, compiling grocery lists. But when I lost my concentration on the list, I experienced severe flashbacks and I would scream. Skip had tried to help me by holding his hand over my mouth while he continued with his activities, telling me that when I became used to body contact things would change for me and I’d begin to like it. I couldn’t see how I’d ever get past the barrier of my traumatised response, but his theory sounded reasonable and I tried to comply.

  Still, many pleasant and even humorous events stood out in my memories of our time together. I recalled walking on the Esplanade in Townsville one warm evening with Skip, my sister, Dellie, and a young man she was dating. We’d come downtown to look at a new fountain that had just been installed. Afterwards, we ran beneath the trees, with Dellie and her boyfriend, both tall, jumping high to try to touch the overhanging leaves. A police car pulled up, but we were laughing amongst ourselves and barely noticed it. Two officers got out and approached us. They separated us, one policeman questioning Dellie and me, while the other took the lads a fair distance away and spoke to them. Suddenly we saw the officer leave Skip and Dellie’s boyfriend and walk hastily back towards the car, calling to his colleague to join him.

  The guys, bent over with laughter, returned. The policeman, Skip informed us, had, after asking them for their names, warned them sternly about ‘hanging around with the darkies’, chiding them that they would end up with no good. Skip said he listened intently and politely to the lecture, at the end of which he told the officer that his advice was too late. ‘What do you mean, too late?’ ‘Well, it’s too late, mate. I’ve already married her,’ he replied, and the red-faced policeman had been forced to take his leave. We laughed about this for weeks.

  On another fine day Skip and I had taken a ferry to Magnetic Island, one of my favourite destinations, where we walked to an almost deserted beach. We clambered over rocks until we found the right one, large and smooth, and we spread our towels and laid there soaking up the sun. When it became too hot, we walked and splashed in the clear blue water, then we sauntered off to the nearest kiosk to fill up with sandwiches and cold drinks. The day had been so magic, so full of peace, that I’d cried from relief on the return ferry late in the afternoon. I had not had one ‘shock’ or flashback the whole day.

  There had also been some bad times, such as the Christmas Eve when Skip turned up at the house having gambled away every last penny of his pay. I had been expecting to be able to buy presents and enough food to last throughout the festive season. We had made arrangements to have Christmas lunch with Dessie and Reg Mills and their children, with Dessie providing the food and Skip and I supplying the drinks. I had been too distraught and embarrassed even to ring them to say we couldn’t go. When Mum came by in the late afternoon on her way home from work I had begged her to take Russel to her house for Christmas as we had nothing to eat at our place. Dessie saved us from an absolutely miserable Christmas Day by coming for us anyway, refusing to take no for an answer.

  Initially I had been very pleased to be married. I hadn’t welcomed the physical aspect, indeed dreaded the prospect, but I liked being called ‘Mrs’ and the superficial legitimacy I felt this cast over my son. I had told Skip about the rape, though not the horror details which I had not been able to think about, much less talk about. Also, I had to explain to him why Mum and I had to travel to Brisbane for the court hearings. On several occasions, I pressed him to agree that he would never turn Russel away, no matter what happened to us, to our marriage; that he would allow Russel to think that Skip was his father. However, even as he made the promise, my heart told me that I could place no weight on his agreement.

  Our relationship had been doomed from the start. I had not been aware of the depth of my mental anguish, and no one with whom I came into contact had any idea that professional counselling may have been required to help me find my way out of the maze.

  After I had left Skip and was staying at Aunty Glad’s, I realised that I needed a job, and I decided to follow my earlier career path and try to get back into nursing. I went to the Mater Hospital, only a short distance from Aunty Glad’s house, and was given four weeks work relieving a maternity clinic nurse while she was on holidays. The job gave me a month’s grace. Each morning I put on my uniform and my nurse’s serene face and went to the hospital. There I greeted pregnant women who came in for their regular clinic visits, tested their urine, recorded their temperature and blood pressure and helped them prepare for their examination by the clinic doctor.

  I wrote to my childhood friend Leila Laaksonen, who was working in Sydney at a private hospital at Turramurra, and asked her about the possibility of finding work as a nurse in New South Wales. She replied enthusiastically and encouraged me to come down as soon as my stint at the Mater Hospital was completed. I began to feel more secure; I had plans.

  On the last day of my four weeks at the hospital, the clinic sister posted the shift roster for the following week and my name was still on it. When I asked her about it, she said, ‘Oh, the patients love you and you’re a good worker. We’d be delighted to keep you. Hasn’t anybody said anything to you about this yet?’

  I was very reluctant to leave. The job was pleasant, my workmates were friendly, and I enjoyed seeing the women and feeling that I was assisting them all, new mothers-to-be and old timers, each with their different stories and attitudes. But I had written Leila that I’d be there within the week, she had replied with the offer of a place to stay in the flat she shared with other nurses at Coogee, and I felt committed to these plans. The opportunity to stay on at the Mater Hospital had come just a few days too late.

  By the time I’d paid Aunty Glad for my board and sent a few pounds to Mum to cover Russel’s needs, my store of cash looked slim and I was concerned that I wouldn’t have enough to tide me over in Sydney until I had found another job. Leila, I knew, was a poor money manager, and it would have been folly to rely on her for food as well as a bed. With this in mind, I decided to hitch a lift to Sydney to save cash, and went out with my suitcase to the highway on the edge of Brisbane where Aunty Glad had told me there was a truckies’ stop.

  I spoke to one of the women working at the truckies’ cafe about getting a lift to Sydney. She pointed out a driver who she said was a decent guy and would give me no trouble. The man was as good as his word, and by mid-morning next day we had arrived at the outskirts of Sydney. However, tired from the long haul he had missed the weigh-in station, a fact to which he was alerted by the sharp sound of a siren behind him. Pulling off to the side of the road, he quickly slid my
case across the floor of the cabin and, without even time to say thanks, I jumped out and tripped off down the road to nearby Hornsby station.

  One of Leila’s two flatmates arrived home to find me sitting on the stairs and she let me in. I could tell she was surprised to see me. Leila had told them that her ‘sister’ was coming to stay a while so they were expecting a white girl. When Leila came home that evening she immediately asked me for money towards the rent. I didn’t have a room, but I could sleep in an alcove between the lounge and kitchen. It held a narrow seat which doubled for a bed for someone as thin as I was, with a little space beside it in which to stow my suitcase. I’d soon find a job, she said, and then get my own place.

  The three women flatting together were all nurses and worked different shifts in different hospitals around the city. Most of the time there was no one at home. I checked out some of the private hospitals which Leila had suggested but found they were more interested in having me mop their floors than attend to their patients. It wasn’t hard to see they weren’t prepared to employ a Black in a nursing capacity.

  My experience so far had been in public hospitals, and they were usually more centrally located than the private ones, so I put my name down at Sydney Hospital in Macquarie Street in the city. Leila was blatantly envious when a letter arrived just a few days later asking me to come in for an interview. Still, despite her often odd behaviour in Townsville when we were children, I did not suspect anything.

  However, on the day of the interview, I found my references from Charters Towers and Brisbane Mater hospitals missing from my suitcase. I was alarmed—they were my passport to work! I had taken them with me to the private hospitals, now they had disappeared. No one else was at home, so I phoned Leila at work. She told me I was stupid, of course no one had taken them, and it was my own fault if I was unable to find them.

  Red-eyed, I went in to the interview anyway. The sister was pleased with the wide range of my experience, gained mostly at Charters Towers, and my obvious familiarity with nursing and maternity terminology. But without my papers she was unable to employ me. She came up with another suggestion: would I consider working as a waitress in the nurses’ dining room until I wrote away and got copies of my nursing references?

  The idea was unappealing but I agreed. I thought about how difficult it would be later to establish my status as a nurse amongst women who had grown used to me serving up their meals and taking away their dirty plates. However, I had very little money left, having given the bulk of my meagre savings to Leila for rent in advance. Most of all, I did not want to have to humble myself by going to a government agency. A job was a job, and the offer of a better position in the future had been attached to it.

  At the flat that afternoon I was feeling a little better about myself, tidying up after the others and preparing clothes for work early the next morning, when there was a knock on the door. Leila’s boyfriend, whom I had not previously met, had come to take her to a nearby hotel for a few drinks, but she wasn’t home yet. I let him wait in the lounge room, and heard him use the phone to call her workplace. Soon he came to the kitchen door where I was washing dishes to ask me to tell Leila to meet him down at the hotel.

  Another hour or so passed and he was back, asking if Leila had arrived. As she was still not home he said he’d go back to the hotel and if she did not join him within an hour, would I tell her that he’d gone home. I went back to my chores.

  The first notion I had that something was wrong was the sound of glass breaking in the lounge room. I ran out to see what it was. Leila was there, her face darkened with rage, a vase from the table in fragments on the other side of the room. Water and flowers completed the mess on the floor.

  ‘Slut!’ she began. I was startled and had no idea what she was raving about. Her anger spilled out as she swept everything from the table and mantelpiece onto the floor. ‘You slept with him.’

  ‘With who? What are you talking about?’ I asked, completely bewildered. I had not even given her the message yet.

  ‘Well, you can have him. You’ll make a fine pair. I don’t want a cripple anyway. Him and his withered little arm!’ I hadn’t looked at her visitor closely enough to notice anything unusual about him. I quickly told her he was waiting at the hotel and if she hurried she’d catch him before he went home.

  Instead, she dashed into the kitchen and came back with a large, shiny knife. She looked totally deranged and I quickly put the table between us. When she began circling it, making sweeping motions with the knife, so did I, then I tried to make a dash to the door.

  ‘I’ll kill you. You don’t deserve a child. It should be me with the baby, not you, you slut.’

  I realised now that she was crazy, something had happened that day which had made her snap, or she may have been drinking or taken some sort of drug. I sprinted towards the door and the knife sailed by me, clattering against the wall and falling onto the floor.

  Outside the house, down the stairs and into the street, my heart pounding. I ran until I reached a park nearby, where I climbed up into the stout branches of a tree. From there I could see the entrance to the duplex in which we lived. Eventually, since Leila did not emerge, my adrenalin level subsided and I started to wonder what next? Now what? Where do I go from here?

  Hours passed, houselights in the street began to go off, and still I crouched on my perch in the tree. At last, legs aching from their cramped position, I slid down the trunk. Stealthily, I crept back up the hill, around to the back of the block of flats. The kitchen door was unlocked and I tiptoed in. The door to Leila’s room was closed. I didn’t want to risk her perhaps hearing me, running out and starting up all over again, so I just picked up my shoulder bag and left the way I had come in. I didn’t know where I was going as I knew no one else in Sydney.

  The thought that I had a job to start at 6.30 next morning became my focus. I had enough small change to catch a bus into town—if they were still running. I hoped to find an all-night cafe in which to wait safely, then go to my workplace early, wash and change into the pastel uniform with which I’d been provided.

  I found a cafe not far from Central Railway Station. It catered to the odd assortment of characters who frequent such places late at night, some slightly crazy and talking to themselves, bent over their coffee cups. The couple who worked there also served travellers and those who had missed the last train and were forced by circumstances and poverty to hang around until the morning. The couple did not appear to think there was anything odd about a slight Black girl buying a cup of coffee and propping a tattered novel up on the sugar bowl. Compared to some of the unkempt, grubby and smelly men seated around me, snoring in their chairs with their heads against the wall, I probably looked downright ordinary.

  I wasn’t really reading but nor was I asleep when a thin young man about my own age and cleanly if plainly dressed slid into the bench on the other side of my table. He had a steaming cup of coffee in his hand and asked if I minded his sharing my table.

  We struck up a conversation and soon I was telling him of my most immediate woes. He was solicitous and told me he had a tiny room in a building on William Street, leading up to Kings Cross. It was very plain, he said, but preferable to sleeping in a cafe. It only had one single bed, but he had extra blankets and he was willing to sleep on the floor, no strings attached.

  His door opened directly onto the street and from inside the room I could hear the occasional sound of footfalls as people walked past on the footpath. There were no extra blankets but he piled up his clothes and slept on them, with a greatcoat spread over him to keep himself warm. Through cracks in the wall and around the door, street lighting lit the room even when the single light bulb was turned off. He wound his clock and set the alarm to wake me in three hours time, when I had to go to the hospital. Exhaustion knocked me out.

  On my first day I found that another Black woman also worked in the hospital dining room. She was from an island in the Pacific, some place I had never hea
rd of. We worked broken shifts—breakfast, lunch and tea. As soon as I’d established what my schedule was to be, I used the longest break to return to Leila’s flat and collect my suitcase. One of the other women was home and let me in. She and the other woman living in the flat were almost like strangers to me. I said nothing about what had transpired between Leila and myself, and the woman didn’t show any interest in my absence or my sudden departure.

  Leila had gone through my suitcase and removed everything she’d fancied, but there had been little of value to take as I owned virtually nothing. I was very annoyed that she’d stolen the photos of my son, but not angry enough to stay and confront her about it. Leila was a good four inches taller and several stone heavier than me; she could have picked me up by my scrawny neck and choked the life out of me if she felt so inclined. Flight seemed the smartest, if not the bravest, option.

  I was soon to discover that the poorest people have a greater sense of caring for strangers than anyone else I have ever met. Despite having so little themselves, they look out for and respond to need.

  Finishing up my last shift for the day, I found myself outside the hospital with my suitcase in my hand, a few coins in my pocket and nowhere to go. The Black woman told me that she had friends we’d run into on William Street who were bound to know what I should do. We also ran into the young man who had, with great chivalry, given up his bed for me the night before. With two shillings from here, another from there, and advice about where a clean room costing one pound seven and sixpence a week had recently been vacated, I was soon the proud occupant of a very tiny attic in Victoria Street, Kings Cross. The ceiling sloped sharply so that I could only stand upright on one side of the narrow room, but it had the luxury of the smallest refrigerator I had ever seen and I felt like a queen. The gift of a battered half-pint saucepan enabled me to heat water or cans of baked beans on a gas ring in the kitchenette one floor below, but the most precious present of all that I received at this time was the unquestioning friendship from the people I met.