I Came to Say Goodbye

by Caroline Overington

  There were dials and mirrors and spinning barrels on the walker, and Seth, although they say he’s blind, can see a bit. I’ve held up a balloon, I’ve moved it slowly across the room, and his eyes will follow it.

  He felt around and he made the barrel spin, and he flipped the mirror back and forward. You could see he was enjoying it.

  It isn’t the role of volunteers to ask too many questions, but of course we’re all very curious about why the different children are in the aged care centre, and of course, Seth had the sad story. He wasn’t born the way he is, something happened to him when he was a baby. The nurses told me his father shook him, but nobody could ever prove it.

  I thought, oh, poor Seth, you poor mite. I don’t deny that it made me love him even more.

  The nurse, she said, ‘They thought he’d be a vegetable’ but it was clear to me that he wasn’t a vegetable, not at all! Oh no, Seth knows what’s going on. He’s got real potential.

  From time to time, doctors come by and they try to get Seth to make sounds, or play some games – Hands on Shoulders, Hands on Heads, or Simon Says – and they mark their clipboards, saying he can’t do it, and that’s true, he hasn’t quite got the hang of it, but that’s not to say he doesn’t enjoy it. He enjoys it, and in fact there’s quite a lot that he enjoys. In my view, you’ve just got to be a little patient with him.

  For example, the hospital has got chickens in a coop in the grounds, and before I became Seth’s volunteer, he wasn’t allowed to be in the group of children who were wheeled down there to collect the eggs.

  I wondered why that was and the nurse didn’t seem to know so I wheeled him out there and put a warm egg in his hands, and he nodded and smiled, bobbing that big head of his, all the way back to the hospital kitchen, and he did not break that egg, which to me was quite amazing, because Seth doesn’t have much control over his limbs. He can jerk about quite a bit when he’s upset, but he did not break that egg.

  If I had to say why it was that others hadn’t tried a few new tricks with Seth, I’d say it’s because there’s no doubt the staff are run off their feet, but also, it’s true, Seth was crying a lot when I first met him. Some visits, he would cry the whole time, just cry and cry, and I’d have to rock him and pat him, and he’d make the most wretched noises and fight with me, and leave me with bruises but I didn’t give up on him.

  It was my daughter who had the idea to soothe him with music. Music soothes the savage beast! She donated a little iPod – the AldiPod we call it, because it’s not one of the expensive ones, it’s the Aldi one – and she put music onto it, and she bought soft earphones, and Seth can sit with that on, singing like a bird. Not words, nothing melodic, not in time to the music, but he will wave his hands about like he’s the conductor of a little orchestra, and he’ll make a sound like a penny whistle, long and sweet and high.

  As to feeding him, well, Seth doesn’t feed himself, but he’s not tube-fed either. Some of the children have the tube into the stomach, but Seth can take food orally and so, now he’s more content and used to me, I take his bottle – he’s got his own special mix – and hold it for him to drink, and sometimes – not every time, but sometimes – Seth will put his hand out, and feel around, and put his hand on the bottle while I’m feeding him.

  I have to say, I’ve long been of the view that given what he can do – as opposed to what he can’t do – Seth shouldn’t be in the nursing home. I always believed that he would just do so much better if he was at home with somebody, and part of a proper family.

  The problem, of course, was there was nowhere for him to go. His mother couldn’t take him, and of course, you can’t just adopt a child like Seth out, can you?

  I was genuinely starting to worry about how he’d fare as he got older, and started to understand more about where he was, when his mother, his poor mother, did what she did.

  I won’t say anything more about that. Like everybody, I read about it in the paper and we volunteers, we were told that Seth was the brother of the baby that had gone over The Gap, and it was almost too much for me. I held Seth that day. I held him under my chin, and rocked and patted him, thinking, ‘Haven’t you suffered enough?’ And then, of course, his mother got committed, and I guess that’s when I understood, she really isn’t going to be able to come back for him.

  Once she’d been committed, of course, the courts could revisit the problem of Seth. While she was alive and well, there was always a chance that he’d be restored to her care. Now that can’t happen, so they decided to see if they could try to place him with another family, and I was just on the verge of putting my own hand up, to say that with my daughters and the others, we could manage, and we’d be delighted, when his own family turned up.

  Can you imagine it? Out of the blue, there they were.

  Why they hadn’t visited before, I didn’t really understand, except that the grandpa – Med his name is, odd name for a man, I know – he told me that the family thought they were banned from seeing Seth. He told me that his daughter, Donna-Faye, was banned from all contact, and he assumed that the ban covered him too, and it was only recently that a lawyer told them, no, he could have applied to the court to see Seth, and probably, he would have been allowed to see Seth from the get-go.

  But courts and rules, not everybody understands them, do they?

  Then, of course, he got the letter from you, Judge Judd, saying an order was to be made, to make Seth a permanent ward of the State, and did he have any objection?

  Did he have any objection!

  Well, you know very well, he had an objection! I’ve seen what he wrote to you. He couldn’t be more honest.

  I want to tell you now about the first day Med came onto the ward, after he’d got permission to start rebuilding the bond that will make Seth part of his own family again.

  Seth and I, we weren’t actually on the ward. I’d taken him out to the trellis, where the jasmine grows, and we were sitting on the bench there, listening to birdsong.

  All morning, I’d been saying to him, ‘Well, Seth, today’s the day!’ because of course, I’d been given notice that they were coming, and perhaps it’s my faith in God, but I knew it would work out well for him

  I had Seth’s bottle, and I was preparing to take Seth onto my lap, to put his head back like a baby and give him a good feed, when I saw them. There were two young people – Ka’aren (I call her Kat, now) and her husband, David, and then Blue Paul and two children, Amy and Indiana.

  Then, too, there was another man, not as old as me, but not young. Bald on top with a big old beard, and kind of sad-looking.

  I thought, that must be grandpa. I was holding Seth on my lap, supporting his head. They walked over and I could see they were nervous as anything. They stood at some distance and I said, ‘Hello! Please, come and sit down’ and waved them forward, and made room for them on the bench.

  The grandpa, he was first to sit down. I tilted Seth forward a little, and said, ‘Here you are. This is Seth.’

  He said, ‘Hello, Seth.’

  Blue was crying, and then Kat, she started crying, too.

  The little ones didn’t seem to know what to make of it all. I noticed they were dressed in their best. They had shiny shoes and bobby socks and dresses, and they were niggling and shoving at each other, the way children do when they are trying so hard to be good.

  I smiled at Med, and encouraged him closer. I held up Seth’s bottle. I said, ‘Would you like to feed him?’

  He said, ‘Is that alright?’

  I said, ‘Of course it’s alright’ and I lifted Seth, who was bobbing about and smiling his big head off, and put him on Med’s lap, and showed Med how to support his head and to keep his legs from getting tangled over themselves. I gave him Seth’s bottle. I said, ‘Here’ and showed him how the teat went into Seth’s mouth, just like with a newborn baby, and I said, ‘Don’t worry about him, he’s a good eater.’

  And he was very good at it, the grandpa was. He held that child se
curely, and Seth, although he started off looking at him a little uncertainly, and looking over at me, and back at him, he started to slurp away, and better than that, do you know what he did? He started feeling his way around the bottle, feeling for the grandpa’s hand, and when he found it, he stopped, and he put his little hand over the grandpa’s hand, and he kept it there.

  The grandpa, his eyes just filled with tears.

  I said, ‘He likes you.’

  The grandpa, he said, ‘Do you think he does?’

  I looked at him. I said, ‘Of course he does. You’re his grandaddy.’

  He said, ‘Well, I like him too.’

  And that was the day that I truly knew what a good decision you’d made, Your Honour, because that was the day that I knew for certain, Seth was going home.

  Reading group questions

  Does Med know what he’s doing when he gives Kelly’s postcard to Pat? If so, why does he do it, and why does Pat agree to marry him? Does he know the marriage is doomed?

  Pat does not take the children when she leaves. What do you think of her decision? How hard would that have been in the 1970s? Would it be any easier today?

  What impact, if any, does Pat’s decision to leave have on Blue? On Kat? On Donna-Faye?

  What impact, if any, does the decision by the Atley family to bestow the nickname Fat have on Donna-Faye?

  When Blue asks his father to re-settle in Lightning Ridge with him, Med declines. Do you think there’s a part of Med that thinks Pat might still come back? What do you think became of Pat?

  Med has difficulties with the teenage Fat. Would it have been any different if Pat had been around?

  Who do you believe is responsible for the injuries suffered by Seth in the first half of the book? Why does the author never explain what really happened to him?

  What do you make of the welfare department’s decision to remove Seth from his mother’s care? What about the decision to remove her second child from her care, before she has had a chance to demonstrate her ability as a parent?

  In Australia, most child and family court proceedings are held in secret. Do you support this policy, or should the media be allowed to report on these matters, provided the identity of the parties is protected?

  How important is it for children to know something about their own culture if they are brought up by parents from another culture?

  Do you think the judge make the correct decision when he orders the child into the care of Fat’s sister, or should he have let Fat keep her baby?

  Why do you think Donna-Faye does what she does? Could it have been predicted? What action, or punishment, if any, do you think she should face?

  What hopes to do you have for the main characters in the book: Med, Kat, Donna-Faye, and Seth?

  The book takes the form of letters from various characters, to a family court judge. What did you think of this style? Why do you think the author chose to tell the story in this way?

  Caroline Overington is the author of two non-fiction books, Only in New York and Kickback, which won the Blake Dawson Prize for Business Literature. She has twice won a Walkley Award for Investigative Journalism, and has also won the Sir Keith Murdoch Award for Journalistic Excellence. In 2009 she published her first novel, Ghost Child, to great acclaim. She lives in Bondi with her husband and their young twins.

  ALSO BY CAROLINE OVERINGTON

  Chapter sample

  Prologue

  On 11 November 1982, Victorian police were called to a home on the Barrett housing estate, an hour west of Melbourne. In the lounge room of an otherwise ordinary brick-veneer home, they found a five-year-old boy lying still and silent on the carpet. His arms were by his sides, his palms flat.

  There were no obvious signs of trauma. The boy was neither bruised nor bleeding, but when paramedics turned him gently onto his side they found an almost imperceptible indentation in his skull, as broad as a man’s hand and as shallow as a soap dish.

  The boy’s mother told police her son had been walking through the schoolyard with one of his younger brothers when they were approached by a man who wanted the change in their pockets. The brothers refused to hand over the money so the man knocked the older boy to the ground and began to kick and punch him.

  The younger boy ran home to raise the alarm. Their mother carried the injured boy home in her arms. She called an ambulance, but nothing could be done.

  The story made the front page of The Sun newspaper in Melbourne and the TV news.

  Police made a public appeal for witnesses but, in truth, nobody really believed the mother’s version of events. The Barrett Estate was poor but no one was bashing children for loose change – not then. Ultimately, the mother and her boyfriend were called in for questioning. Police believed that one of them – possibly both – was involved in the boy’s death.

  There was a great deal of interest in the case, but when it finally came to court, the Chief Justice closed the hearing. The verdict would be released; so, too, would any sentence that was handed down. But the events leading up to the little boy’s death would remain a mystery.

  Few people were surprised to hear that the boy’s mother and her boyfriend went to prison for the crime. Police declared themselves satisfied with the result, saying there was no doubt justice had been done. And yet for years rumours swept the Barrett Estate, passing from neighbour to neighbour and clinging like cobwebs to the long-vacant house: there had been a cover-up. The real perpetrator, at least according to local gossip, was the boy’s six-year-old sister, Lauren.

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