I was talking – shouting, crying – at the police on the phone. I was saying, ‘How long has she been gone? Are you sure it was my sister?’ My mind was turning over the possibilities, shuffling through them like so many black Tarot cards. I forced those thoughts back. I thought, No, no, she’s fine, she’ll be at the apartment. She’s just gone and lost her mind again.
David was racing towards her apartment when the second report came over the radio, ‘Baby thrown from The Gap.’
Baby thrown from The Gap.
Baby thrown from The Gap.
Even now, when I close my eyes and I hear those words, it’s like an axe going through my heart.
Baby thrown from The Gap.
It was like the world exploded. Before we could think, before we could even go into shock, there were police around the car. How they got there, I cannot say. I do not know. Did they track us by our mobile? By our licence plate? David says we stopped dead in the middle of the road but I don’t remember that. All I know is that they were suddenly there, alongside us, roaring with us towards The Gap, all of us, thinking, No, no, no, no, no.
When I look back now, I can see the blue lights going. I don’t remember sirens but surely there were sirens. I was praying, no, no, no, and please, God, don’t let it be too late, but of course it was.
It was too late.
The CCTV at the hospital shows what happened. Donna-Faye walked through the front revolving door in her slippers and her robe. The time of her arrival can be seen at the bottom of the screen. It was four o’clock in the morning. She walked down the hall, past where the matron was playing Solitaire. She walked through the Joeys, into the Pandas, and lifted Savannah out of her cot, and put her in the shopping bag. She left the way she came, except with the bag now hanging heavily from her hand, and the stuffed giraffe sticking up, through the handles.
There isn’t much footage from the car park. We know that Donna-Faye put Savannah in the baby seat in the back of the Corolla and turned left onto Parramatta Road and it seems that she arrived at The Gap just as the day was dawning. There is a carpark near the main, wooden viewing platform. Donna-Faye stopped there, parked her car, and sat for a while.
There were two American tourists, cameras around their necks, and they saw her sitting, and they saw her get out of the car, unclip the capsule and walk out to the viewing platform. She didn’t say anything to anyone. She didn’t look upset. She simply stood for several minutes and then, before either of the Americans could say: ‘Don’t!’ or ‘No!’ or ‘Stop!’ she stepped forward, lifted the baby capsule over the barrier, and calmly dropped it over the edge.
Chapter 19
Med Atley
KAT HAS GIVEN YOU THE DETAILS of what happened to Savannah, Your Honour. I’m grateful to her for that. I wouldn’t have been able to do it.
I want to tell you what happened afterwards. Media were like flies around a carcass for a while, just all over the property. I was tempted, sometimes, to go out and fire the shotgun, just to clear the air.
What they wanted, I couldn’t tell you. To know what happened, I suppose, like I’m supposed to explain it? How could you explain it?
One woman, I won’t say which one, but a famous one, she came personally to the door. She put a note underneath, handwritten, so I’ve got her signature. She said she’d guarantee me privacy, she’d guarantee she’d get the rest of them off the lawn if I just agreed to talk to her. She’d make sure the rest of them went away.
She didn’t mention money, but money was implied. She said the deal we’d do, it would be between me and her personally. It would be sensitive. It would give the Atley family an opportunity to explain. I thought to myself, Explain what? That Donna-Faye put my granddaughter over the cliff?
I’m not stupid. I knew she didn’t actually want an explanation. She wanted ratings.
She wasn’t the only one who tried it on. Some reporters brought flowers, and left them on the porch with ‘Deepest Condolences from Channel Blah Blah’ and mobile numbers to call.
The cops who came to the property told me: you don’t have to say anything. They said, ‘If it’s any consolation, the Sudanese community up in Tamworth are being harassed to death as well.’ You wouldn’t have known it from the coverage but most of the refugees we get in Australia aren’t into the mutilation thing. They wouldn’t dream of doing to anyone what was done to Savannah, before Donna-Faye put her over The Gap. It’s not part of their culture. They had spokesmen out, trying to make that clear, that part of the reason they wanted their girls raised here was to get away from that kind of thing, but of course, the media – and some White Power, Neo-Nazi types – harassed them anyway.
Newspaper columnists were churning other stuff out, on family law, on courts, on welfare, on post-natal depression, on whether The Gap ought to be fenced. They dragged out people whose kids had jumped off The Gap, committed suicide, to say a fence was long overdue. They dragged out the mayor of Tamworth to say the meatworks wouldn’t operate if it weren’t for the Sudanese. They got a picture of Savannah off Kat’s Facebook, and showed it over and over again.
They talked about what could have been done to save Savannah, too. That was the most hurtful part. You can see from the footage how hard the cops tried. One guy was hanging from a helicopter, really hanging, face down in the water, being dunked like a tea bag, trying to get her.
I’ve seen the footage where, on the fifth or sixth attempt, he grasps the handle. You can hear a cheer go up, which shows how badly people wanted to put things right. But he shook his head and signalled no to the people up on top of the cliff. Savannah wasn’t in the capsule. The straps that were meant to hold her down had been torn away. Then somebody pointed further out and the camera zoomed in. You could see her little body, rising and falling on the waves.
So I felt pretty cross with the media that said the rescue crews could have done more, or been quicker or whatever.
The cops told me to ignore it all. They said there’d only be a couple of events where I’d have to endure being in the public eye, one of which was the funeral, but that was alright. I understood that people wanted to be at the funeral, and people who couldn’t get there would want to see it on the TV.
Blue and his wife, Claudette, and their new baby, Amy, and her daughter, Indiana, from before she met Blue, came down for it, and Kat and David drove out. The cemetery isn’t at Forster, it’s across the bridge, at Tuncurry. Through the window of the hire car, I saw that somebody had painted a sign that said, ‘So Inocent!’ A few of the shopkeepers had closed their doors, shut up shop, so they could walk with us from the gravel car park to the place where we buried Savannah.
David carried Savannah’s coffin in his arms.
There was no particular religion to the service. We didn’t bother with the Catholic mass. Some local schoolkids, in short shorts and college blazers, belted out a song on a drum kit, with electric guitars. It was a rock song that maybe meant something to them, and nothing to me, but that was alright. Young people need to grieve.
Most of the blokes from the Shire turned up, as did girls I hadn’t seen since primary school, now grown up with children of their own. There were girls who had been to school with Donna-Faye too. I couldn’t believe how many of them turned up, even though a lot of them would have felt sick about what Donna-Faye had done.
I hadn’t known to expect Malok and his family, but you could hardly miss it when they arrived. The media people, who had been standing back, and trying to be respectful, leapt forward, and the cameras, the flashes went nuts – click-click-click-click – and I thought for a moment that perhaps a celebrity was arriving. The Prime Minister, maybe. He’d been on the news, saying how tragic it all was. But it wasn’t him.
It was Malok, with eight or 10 of his family members, all of them absolutely grief-stricken, with tears pouring down their night-black faces. I stood up, and they came to me and one of the women – a real large woman, with coloured material knotted around her head – open
ed her arms, and I collapsed against her skin, and her breast heaved and wobbled against me.
That was the photograph that appeared in the newspaper the next day. The old bloke in the bad suit with the scruffy beard, and the enormous Sudanese lady, holding each other and crying. They put it under the headline, ‘United in Grief.’
I remember the Mayor – technically my boss, I suppose – said a few words. It was pretty hot. Sunscreen was dripping off his face. Towards the end of the service, the Salvation Army captain got up, and signalled to the little school children, in boater hats and bobby socks, to get up from the floor and come over, hand-in-hand, and fill Kat’s lap with paper butterflies.
The American couple from The Gap – the ones that had seen Fat and Savannah – came up afterwards and put yellow roses in Kat’s arms, too. They were from Texas, and I suppose that meant something to them. The man said, ‘I’m sorry for your loss’ and I said, ‘Well, that’s kind of you.’
We went back to the house after the funeral. Kat and David stayed the night, as did Blue, and the little ones. It was terrific to have them there. You could grab them when they passed by, and sort of breathe them in. Claudette was really good about the baby. She let people have a hold, let us pass her round like a parcel, and cry a bit on her. Only me and Kat couldn’t really do it.
Edna stayed with us, too. We pulled the mattresses off the beds – Blue’s mattress, and Kat’s that had become Donna-Faye’s – and put them on the lounge room floor, around the TV, and we slept like that, on the floor.
People brought food to the door. We let them leave it.
Then Edna went home, and Blue took the girls, and Kat and David left, too, and I was alone again.
I had bad nightmares for a while. I’d be thinking, No, no, no, no, not that, not Savannah, I’ve got to get to her, and then, of course, I’d wake up, and I’d be swamped by the knowledge it was too late.
It happened when I was wide awake, too. I’d be holding the kettle or putting a pot into the microwave or driving the car down to the mailbox and I’d remember, she’s gone, and I’d have to stop, and bow my head down, and then I’d have to cry.
Chapter 20
Med Atley
THE SECOND TIME WE HAD TO face the media was when Fat got committed to the mental hospital, which happened instead of her going to Silverwater, which is the jail.
Kat helped out with that. She was hurting a lot but she had her QC put up the argument, on the day that we lost Savannah, that Fat was obviously not of sound mind.
The QC found a bed at a clinic in Sydney, the kind of place that takes TV presenters and rugby players who need to pull themselves together in private. The QC said Fat should go there while the psychiatrists figured out whether she was well enough to face a trial.
From the street, the clinic looks like a big old Victorian mansion. It’s got the iron lace balcony and the lawns and the heavy gates.
I don’t know who tipped off the media but they were outside on the day Donna-Faye got taken in. They must have thought it was a big story. They had white vans with satellite dishes and make-up tents for the news anchors.
They got the ambulance driving through the gates. It parked on the gravel in front of the main entrance and the back doors swung open and Donna-Faye stepped out and walked the length of the car park in the pouring rain. If you watch that footage, you can see she does nothing to stop herself from getting wet. She doesn’t hold up an umbrella and nobody holds one over her. She doesn’t duck her head. She walks up the drive with police on either side of her, and her nightie gets drenched and sticks to her body and it’s practically at the point where it’s completely see-through when they finally get her onto the porch and through the front door.
We sent Edna in with her. Nobody knew Edna from Adam so she wasn’t likely to be harassed. I couldn’t go be cause they kept saying I was a witness. Kat couldn’t go because she might be a witness, too. So Edna went and Edna told me the whole staff was standing in the foyer, waiting for Donna-Faye.
A nurse opened the heavy front door and helped Donna-Faye through it, and it was the same nurse that saw that it wasn’t only rain that was making my girl so wet. Donna-Faye had wet her pants.
The nurse took her by the elbow and helped her over to a chair. Edna said it was one of those chairs with the padding on the arms and the carving on the back, where you’d never imagine seating somebody who had wet themselves, and who was soaked, besides, but the nurse didn’t make a move to protect the chair, she sat Donna-Faye down, and put a blanket over her knees and said, ‘We’ll get you dried off, don’t you worry.’
Edna told me that Donna-Faye wasn’t crying. She was standing there, bewildered, and then she was sitting down in her wet nightie, and her knees were white, and her hair was plastered down over her face, and Edna was thinking, She must be freezing, and they came with a blanket.
The registrar came out of his office. He strode towards the chair, and he looked into Donna-Faye’s face and he said, ‘Miss Atley?’ but Donna-Faye didn’t answer. She was still shivering. The registrar got down on his knees to bring himself eye to eye and he said, ‘Donna-Faye?’ and Donna-Faye looked up, and looked around, and she must have seen where she was sitting, on this chair that looked like a throne, in wet clothes, with wet hair, with a whole lot of people standing around, wearing white canvas pants and rubber-soled shoes.
There was a reception desk with a huge spray of flowers. There were signs telling people not to use their mobile phones. Donna-Faye seemed to be taking it all in and it seemed to dawn on her that she was in a hospital, and that’s when she spoke. She said something like, ‘That’s right’ or else, ‘Alright.’
Edna got down on her old knees, too, because it was the first time Fat had really said anything, and she said, ‘Fat? It’s Auntie Edna here. What did you say, love?’ and Donna-Faye, she said, ‘That’s right, I’m meant to be here’ which didn’t really make any sense, except of course, she was absolutely right. She’s absolutely where she’s meant to be, and maybe where she should have been all along.
Anyway, just as the whole mess started with a bang, it stopped. The media, I mean. They stopped coming. I was grateful. It gave me time to get my thoughts together.
The cops came by to tell me there was no chance that Fat would face charges. One of them said, ‘They’d have to be kidding’ and I’ve got to say, I’m no expert, but it does seem to me that Fat’s not all there anymore, so what would be the point?
And if she was all there, if she did know what she’d done, well, it’s not like anyone could punish her anymore than she’d punish herself.
About a week or so after Savannah’s funeral, after Fat went into the clinic, a nice woman from there came around to talk to me, and she stayed for about a week, sleeping on the couch, which was obviously well beyond the call of duty. I don’t know for sure if David paid for it, but I’d say David paid for it.
The lady told me I could talk to her about Savannah and about Fat, instead of talking to the media, which some people seem to do just so they can talk it out.
I told her straight. ‘This is my fault. I didn’t raise her right.’
I told her about Fat’s mum walking out – no sign of Pat through all this by the way. It was all over the news, all around the world, but not a word form Pat, which tells you all you need to know about her level of care – and I told her that I never made the fact that Pat walked too much of a big deal, and maybe I should have made a big deal of it, got the counsellor out or something, but people didn’t do that much then and Fat was only two at the time.
I told her how I sort of missed that Fat was growing up from girl to woman, and that the first signs of it – the Chinaman at the front door – scared me half to death.
I told her about that Haines idiot, and how I’d always believed that Haines grabbed Seth that night when Fat was at work and gave him a shake to shut him up, or flung him down to keep him quiet, and I was dead scared that if I talked to Fat about that, if I’d
really pinned her down and made her spit it out, well, I’d have had to do something about it, which would have meant confronting Haines and how I didn’t have the stomach for it, because I knew, back then, in a battle of wills between me and Haines, I’d lose Fat. She’d have sided with him.
That’s what girls do, when it comes down to Dad versus some loser boyfriend, and I didn’t want to lose her. I wanted to keep her close and maybe that’s because I thought my best chance to save her was to somehow stay in her life, and maybe it also means that I wouldn’t have been able to stand to lose Pat, and then to lose my little girl, too.
I talked about what Fat must have been thinking that day, up at The Gap. She wasn’t thinking straight, that’s for sure.
The lady said there’s no use turning that over in your mind. She wasn’t herself. I said you mean she was crazy and she nodded and said, ‘What she did was crazy’ and it was nice to finally hear somebody say that.
After she went back to her office, or her home, or wherever it was she normally worked, I was alone again, and some people might tell you that I started to drink and maybe I did drink more than I should have done.
For a while there, I drank every night. I smoked more than I do now, and I suppose that’s significant, too. Smoking killed my father, remember, and I remember thinking, I hope it kills me, too.
One night I got so drunk I set the bed on fire, and I was angry when I woke up in clouds of black smoke, the place stinking to high heaven. Not angry that I had a fair bit of cleaning to do. I was angry that the bed hadn’t taken the house up, with me in it.
My mindset, basically, was, ‘I can’t live with this’ and so it made sense. ‘Kill yourself, Med. Don’t do it in a way that’s going to traumatise the family, already torn to bits. Don’t leave a corpse hanging from the Hills Hoist for some poor bastard to cut down. Don’t blow your head off with a shotgun and probably miss and end up a vegetable. Do it in a slow, acceptable way, like men have done for a hundred years. Smoke and drink yourself to death.’
I Came to Say Goodbye Page 21