I Came to Say Goodbye

by Caroline Overington

  Lunchtime came around, and I went home. I poked my head in Fat’s room again and I went through the sheds on our property and still no Fat. I made myself a sandwich, and I ate it slowly, because in my head, I was thinking, act normal, and everything will be normal, but I kept looking out the window, and there was no bloody sign of her.

  I went back to the house and kind of busied myself, and then dusk came on, and I got the plastic torch, and I walked right up to where the highway starts, to what used to be the main road into Sydney, and I shone the beam up and down, and even in the ditches. No Fat. At 9 pm, I rang Forster police again and said, ‘It’s Med Atley here, I called this morning about my daughter, Donna-Faye’ and the duty officer said, ‘Yeah, I’ve got a note of that, Med. She still not back?’ I said no, and he offered to send a man around, and I said, ‘What I really need is a hand with the search’ and he said, ‘I’ve only got the one man. Let’s leave it another hour, and see how things go.’ I said, ‘Right, then’ and the duty officer said, ‘You’ve got to remember she’s a teenager now, Med. They grow up. We don’t like to think they do, but they do.’ I wasn’t inclined to believe him but what could I do? I couldn’t force him to come searching with me and, as it turned out, I didn’t have to, because at 10 o’clock, Fat walked in the door like she’d never been gone. No explanation, no apology, no hurry, just through the door.

  I said, ‘Where the hell have you been, Fat?’ She’d got the shock of her life, being that I jumped out at her like that. I said, ‘Where have you been?’ and she said, ‘Nowhere!’ and I said, ‘Don’t give me nowhere!’ and I went for her, to shake her, but she was too fast, she got past me, and took off down the hall to the bedroom.

  I was right behind her, saying, ‘Fat! Get back here, Fat’ but she was already in the room and she’d locked the door. I cursed Edna that day. It was Edna who had told me I should put a lock on the door, because Fat needed a lock because Fat was a ‘developing girl’ and girls needed their privacy.

  I was saying, ‘Open up!’ and she was shouting back, ‘Go away!’ and then, ‘You’re not the boss of me!’ and I was saying, ‘Too bloody right I’m the boss of you’ and ‘You open this door’ but she wouldn’t and after half an hour standing there, feeling like an idiot, talking to the closed door, I had to give up and go to bed. I lay there fuming, but also confused, because really, what was it all about?

  She was out of the house the next day before I got a chance to collar her, and when I phoned the school, they said she was there, and all was normal, and when I got home from work, she was back in her room with the door locked.

  I ask you, Your Honour, what does a man do in that situation? I didn’t have any experience with girls running off. Kat had never done it. I wasn’t about to kick the door in. I wasn’t about to belt her. I thought the best thing to do was to put that missing 24 hours behind us but a few weeks later she did it again – she slipped out, and didn’t come back and I had to call the police again and they made all the right noises but did nothing and I just waited until Fat came home of her own account. This time, I grounded her. I said, ‘Fat, that’s it. No netball, no going out with friends’ and I moved my TV chair to where I had a good view of the front door, so she couldn’t slip out without me seeing her go … and so she went out the window. Like I’ve said, we had an old house. It had sash windows, and some were practically painted shut, Fat’s included, and you could hear when someone was using the heel of their hand to get one of them up, and I heard it, and I got up, and went to her door and tried to open it but she’d locked it from the inside. I ran around to the front of the house, but I wasn’t quick enough. She was gone.

  I called the cops a third time. I said, ‘I’ve just seen her make a break for it. We’ve got time to catch her’ but this time, the duty officer, he surprised me, he said, ‘You’re not going to like this, Med, but I know where she’s going.’

  I said, ‘How do you know where she’s going?’ and he said, ‘I heard she’s seeing the Haines boy.’

  I said, ‘You are kidding me’ or maybe, ‘You better be kidding me.’ The cop, he said, ‘That’s what I heard, Med’ and well, I couldn’t believe it. He offered to go up to the Haines property and bring Fat home, but I said, ‘I think I can do that myself’ and he said, ‘Well, okay, but take it easy, Med.’

  I got straight in the car. I drove out to the Haines place, out on Haines Road. It wouldn’t have taken me more than 15 minutes to get there. There were no lights on. I knocked on the front door. Nothing. I waited a while and said, ‘Goddamn it’ and drove home, and there was Fat. Obviously, she’d heard me shouting after her, and she knew she’d been caught going out the window and she’d done a lap, and come home again, and was now trying to pretend she’d never been gone.

  Well, I said, ‘I know where you were headed’ and she said, ‘You don’t’ and I said, ‘You’ve been with that Haines boy’ and she said, ‘It’s not your business’. I said, ‘How is it not my business?’ and she said, ‘You don’t even know him.’ She was wrong about that, Your Honour. Know him personally, no, but I knew plenty about the Haines boy. I’d been living in the Shire for 40-odd years so there weren’t too many kids around the place I didn’t know, not unless they were new to town, and the Haines boy, he wasn’t new to me.

  Paul Haines was the youngest of four boys living out on Haines Road, so called because there had been a Haines out there for as long as anybody could remember. The first Haines I knew was old Mr Haines – that would be Paul’s grandfather – who had the brickworks, although the place looked more like a junkyard, with the main house and the two sheds and the Nissen hut that came on the back of an army truck one day and the hay bales and the caravan.

  When Grandpa Haines died, he left the place to his son, John Haines, who married a woman who spoke to nobody and kept up the Christmas lights all year round. They had four boys, three of them with J-names – Jack and John and Jethro – and then, 10 years after that, another child arrived, this one called Paul, and he was about the same age as my own Blue Paul, or maybe the same age as Kat, and there was a tragedy in the late 70s, when the main house that these boys lived in caught fire, and both the parents were killed, and people said it was the Christmas lights, but who knows? Anyway, the burnt shell stood for years before it fell down, and from what I could gather, the boys – they were grown up, obviously, except for Paul – they just moved into the other buildings that were on-site, including sheds. There were wrecks of cars and bits of motorbikes and bald tyres on the lawn, and people thought maybe the parents had left some money, because none of the J-boys had means of support, none had jobs, and no matter what time of the day or night you drove by, one of them would be out on the porch, poking at a fire in an old keg, or else under a car.

  I don’t know why the authorities allowed those boys to raise Paul but he was at school with my two for a while. He was the odd kid, the one that every school’s got, with no manners and no lunch, and he prowled the playground, chasing girls, trying to look up their skirts and one time, he took Blue’s marbles and when Pat went up to complain about it, he outright lied, even when confronted with the evidence. The teachers, they told Pat, ‘He’s uncontrollable’ and it’s true, there was barely a day when he didn’t end up in a chair outside the principal’s office. By age 10, he was skipping classes on a fairly regular basis. I’d see him down at Forster creek with a stick in hand, poking at carcasses of rabbits. More than once I heard the story that he was killing animals, that he took kittens from cats on his property and threw them off the railway bridge in a hessian bag, or else put them in Tupperware and sealed the lid and watched them get frantic and lie down and die.

  From memory, he dropped out of school at age 11 but the J-brothers must have kept him on the roll or else why wouldn’t the truant police have come? The mums were happy about him not being in the school but then he started roaming the neighbourhood, knocking down letterboxes and belting cars that were parked by the kerb. Then one day, when he was about 12
, he went up to the railway bridge with a boulder in both hands, and set it onto the tracks, and hid in the grass and waited for the night service to come through from Newcastle to see if he could derail the engine.

  The train didn’t come off the tracks but the driver had to make an effort to stop and the sound of the wheels on the steel was heard half a kilometre away. Then the cows that had been on board had to be offloaded onto the road and half the town came out to see it. Not one of us failed to notice the Haines boy there.

  Now, it’s my view that police should have given Paul Haines a walloping that night, because sometimes, that’s all that’s needed, somebody to show him that there’s rules, and they’re for everyone, and if not, there will be consequences, but nobody did wallop him and so he was allowed, in a sense, to carry on his merry way. And he did carry on, until one day, he nearly killed someone.

  The year was 1984, and the Haines boy would have been about 13, which means Donna-Faye would have been about two or three, so their paths hadn’t yet crossed. There was a kid in town whose name was Conan, who himself had problems, by which I mean he was a simple kid. It was a stinking hot day, and like every hot day, the kids from Forster and surrounds were up at the creek, trying to beat the heat. Now, the point of being at the creek for kids in those days was to jump off Big Rock into the water. It was totally banned, and had been ever since a kid had gone in off Big Rock, and come up with a submerged branch through his jaw, but in those days when things were banned, it just meant you weren’t really supposed to do them even when you did, and on really hot days, on 40-plus days, you just couldn’t stop kids from going down there, and no matter how many times I’d drive down, as Shire maintenance manager, and tell them to skedaddle, they’d wait for my back to be turned, and they’d be back, jumping in again. And so on hot days, I made it my business to go down there and get in the water and make sure nobody had tried to sink a car or something over winter, so when the kids jumped, they wouldn’t kill themselves.

  So I’d been down that morning, and I’d seen Conan at the creek, his pants hiked up to his armpits. Bigger boys were scrambling up Big Rock and bombing down but Conan wouldn’t have had the guts to do that. He was a little kid, and although not every light in the house was on, he knew enough not to try to copy them, so he’d get up to the top of Big Rock, still in his shoes, and he’d say, ‘I’m a gonna jump down!’ and the older boys would say, ‘Don’t do it, Conan!’ and he never would do it, because Conan couldn’t swim. I saw Paul Haines there, and as far as I could tell he was the only one really egging Conan on, saying, ‘Go on, Conan! Jump, Conan!’ but Conan wouldn’t jump. He’d get to the top of a rock, he’d stand there for a while, looking like a goose, and then he’d climb down, and sit on the water’s edge, grinning and putting his shoes in the water. I should have said to Haines, ‘Lay off him, you lout’ but I didn’t, and that’s stayed with me because maybe if I’d done that, what happened next would not have happened. Anyway, it was understood in those days that come six o’clock or thereabouts, with daylight fading and tummies rumbling, boys would get on their bikes and dink each other home in time for tea, and so I suppose it was around six o’clock, maybe seven o’clock, when Conan’s grandma – he lived with his grandma – noticed he was missing. According to what I heard, the grandma had asked some girls in the neighbourhood to go out looking for Conan, and they were walking along, saying, ‘Conan, Conan’ and they came across the Haines boy, running his stick along the palings of a fence, and they asked him, ‘Have you seen Conan?’ and he said, ‘Yeah, he’s in the creek’ and they said, ‘How do you know?’ and he said, ‘Because I pushed him in’ and the girls ran home and got Conan’s grandpa and he bolted over to the creek and Conan was exactly where the Haines boy had said he’d be, in the water. He was face up, thank God, but the grandfather had to drag him up onto the bank and push water out of his chest, and hold his head while he vomited on the grass, and then carry him home. They laid him down on the floor between two single beds in his bedroom, and waited while the ambulance came. The paramedics said, ‘He’s bloody lucky’ and it’s true, he could have drowned and it was a close enough call for Conan’s grandmother to say to police, ‘I want something done’ and what she wanted done was for police to go around to the Haines place and have a word to him, and to his brothers. And the police, they did that.

  They went around to the Haines place and the older brothers were there and the police said we need to speak to you about Paul and the brothers said he wasn’t there, and the police explained what had happened, and the brothers said ‘It weren’t Paul. Paul was home today’ and then carried on fixing their cars, or doing whatever they’d been doing.

  Now, my feeling is, if the brothers hadn’t said that, if the brothers had said, okay, we’ll give him a clip over the ears, the police might have let the thing go, but when the brothers wouldn’t even get off their butts and answer the charge that Paul had very nearly killed a kid, well, the grandmother said, ‘Alright then, I want charges laid.’ The cops explained to her that it wouldn’t be that easy, the Haines boy was only 12 or 13 years old, and you couldn’t charge a boy that age with attempted murder, not on the basis of a kid being pushed into a creek. But the grandmother, she was a feisty one, and she pushed and she pushed, and she said, ‘That Haines boy is a delinquent, and he ought to be in a home for delinquents.’

  Maybe the cops agreed, because they did try. They referred the matter to the bigwigs in the prosecutor’s office in Sydney to see whether there was enough evidence to charge the Haines boy with anything and the big wigs did agree to have a hearing, and it was held in Sydney, and the cops made sure the Haines boy turned up, by driving out to his property every day to pick him up and deposit him in a swivel chair in the centre of the room, while the story played out around him. I went along. I had to go along. I’d cleared the creek for jumping that day. I’d seen Conan on the rock, and I’d seen Haines, too. There was a chance they’d want to speak to me. What I saw, it amazed me. Paul Haines was chewing gum, and blowing bubbles, and then peeling exploded gum off his chin, and feeding it back into his mouth. Halfway through proceedings, they gave him a glass of Quik milk and he gulped that down and then spent half an hour trying to suck the glass up to his face, so it would stick there without him using his hands. That’s how seriously he was taking things.

  Other kids who’d been at Big Rock that day were gathered up and put in a room next door to the courtroom and they got a microphone, so we could hear what they were saying, and one of those kids told the magistrate that he met up with Conan on the street outside his grandmother’s house that morning and they had made their way to Big Rock, and there were kids jumping off the rocks, and Conan didn’t want to jump, and he said the Haines boy had picked Conan up ‘like this’ and then thrown him down ‘like this’ and Conan went ‘splash, into the water’.

  The prosecutor wanted to know whether Conan was kicking or struggling and the witness, who was about seven, he said, ‘Yep, he went like this, and he went like that’ and he waved his arms and legs around, like he was dancing in his chair.

  Now that was pretty damning stuff, but if you think the Haines boy was worried, you’d be wrong. He just sat there dangling a shoelace over his nose, trying to catch the ends of it in his mouth, like none of it had anything to do with him.

  Next up was one of the girls that Conan’s grandmother had sent out to look for Conan, the one who said she had seen the Haines boy in the street and said, ‘Do you know where Conan is?’ and Haines had said, ‘In the creek’ and she’d said, ‘How do you know?’ and he’d said, ‘I put him in there’ and she ran to get the grandpa, who had found him face up.

  The grandpa told the magistrate that Conan was ‘lying back like this’ – he put his own head back, eyes rolled towards the ceiling – but his body was straight, and his first thought was, ‘We’ve lost him’ but he dragged the boy out and thumped his chest and pumped on his stomach and water came out and the blokes from the ambulance had
told him, ‘You got lucky.’

  Legally speaking, Haines didn’t have to take the stand on account of his age, but his lawyer said he had nothing to hide, and anyway, he seemed to want to get up there and say his piece. He’d given up the story that he’d been at home all day, and hadn’t been at Big Rock. He said, ‘Nah, I wasn’t home. I was at Big Rock’ and he said he’d been pretending to be King Kong, hollering and banging his chest, and Conan had wanted to do the same – get on the rock and jump off – and the rock was slippery and Conan went over the edge and into the water.

  The magistrate said, ‘Did you go in after him?’ and Haines said, ‘I had to get home for my tea.’

  The magistrate said, ‘Did you see him come to the surface?’ and Haines said, ‘He come up on his own’ and with that, the hearing kind of ended. I mean, it just ended. There was no real result. Haines never faced a charge. There were a lot of people who didn’t understand that but the cops told me, ‘Med, we can’t put Conan on the stand, because he won’t go on the stand’ – he went pretty much mute whenever Haines was around – and the other witnesses, being so young, couldn’t be relied upon, and so we all filed out, and that was that, except for one thing – Haines started to change. I don’t mean physically. He was already half a head taller than me, which made him close to six foot, and maybe more – but he started gaining in confidence, too, like he understood that he’d dodged a bullet, and now he figured he was invincible.

  I’d see him in town, what my mother called ‘louching’ along – slouching along, I suppose she meant, but louching covered it better, since that’s like a louse – walking down the street, drinking from a Coke can, always in the same clothes: black vinyl tracksuit pants with press-studs down the legs, and a mullet haircut and a packet of Winnie Blues, and if the parents had left the boys any money, it must have been gone because the cops told me he stole his first bike at 14, and followed that up with stealing other stuff, like he stole the whole bubblegum ball machine from the milk bar and took it down to the school and tried to sell the balls to the other kids for five cents, instead of two cents, and at 15, he got caught down at Forster creek with a girl whose dress was torn and whose knees were knocking. The cops who interrupted them wanted to know what the hell was going on but the girl fled on foot, over a hill, through a valley and was gone.